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This nondescript image of a lilac-flowered flower on Wikipedia has seemingly become a smash hit in India, but no one's quite sure why. Earlier this week, it was noticed that this single image was attracting a tidal wave of traffic 90 million hits per day to one of Wikipedias data centers.

Chris Albon, director of machine learning at Wikimedia, pointed out the curious case of the apparently desirable flower in a tweet on Monday, saying: Check out this actual, live ticket about an ongoing mystery. 20% of all requests to one of our data centers for media are for this image of a flower.

Nobody knows why, Albon added.

For those curious about this flowering plants botanical identity, its a species known as the New York aster (Symphyotrichum novi-belgii). While its certainly a pretty specimen, its an otherwise unremarkable flower that can be found in meadows in parts of North America. The Wikipedia page detailing the flower is equally insipid and unexceptional. So, whats the hype about?

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A post on Phabricator highlighted that the image was getting around 90 million hits per day from various Internet service providers in India.It became clear that the traffic was coming from a mobile app that was extremely popular in India.Many of the images featured on Wikipedia come from Wikimedia Commons, amedia repository from which images can be freely reused, reproduced, and re-hashed without charge, so it's likely that a popular app contains a hotlink to this free image.

These are very strange, as they come from wildly different IPs, follow a daily traffic pattern, so we are hypothesising there is some mobile app predominantly used in India that hotlinks the above image for e.g. a splash screen, the post said.

Some digging around revealed that the huge quantity of traffic was being driven to a server in Singapore, starting around July 2020. Before this time, the image was receiving a couple of hundreds of hits a day, but it suddenly saw a sharp rise in interest, jumping from hundreds to millions of hits per day. By August, it was consistently receiving around 75 million requests per day.

Wikimedia hasn't revealed the name of the app yet, but people have been sniffing out some clues that could lead to its identity.

Its noteworthy that the dramatic surge of popularity for the flower image occurred in June 2020, around the time India took the decision to totally ban TikTok in the name of national security. This has led some to speculate that the flower image may have been used by Indias new short video platform, HiPi, or a mirror of the original TikTok app for people wanting to access theplatform's content despite the ban. Some theorized the flower imagemay have had some connection to Indias COVID-19 track-and-trace app since the number of requests was so high.

The identity of the app remains unknown for now, but the Wikimedia server in Singapore is still receiving millions of requests for this humble image.

[H/T Motherboard]

The rest is here:
This Wikipedia Image Of A Flower Is Mysteriously Getting 90 Millions Hits A Day - IFLScience

Katherine Maher, the Wikimedia Foundation's CEO, will step down as of April 15, she tells Axios, leaving the nonprofit in a vastly stronger position than she found it when she joined in 2014.

Why it matters: Wikipedia is growing to become the most global and trusted source of knowledge in the world. Its base of active editors is rising, its number of women editors has increased by 30% just in the past year, and it has upgraded not only its website but also its app, which is now available for feature phones as well as smart phones.

Financially, the Wikimedia Foundation now has an endowment of more than $90 million, and has doubled its annual budget to an estimated $140 million in 2021.

Between the lines: One area that Wikimedia has been particularly successful is in garnering trust. That's also an area the news media could use some pointers.

What's next: The Wikimedia Foundation board has created a committee to search for Maher's successor. Maher tells Axios that she hopes the next leader will "come from the future of knowledge" by which she means Africa, the Indian subcontinent, or Latin America.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Wikimedia Foundation has an endowment of more than $90 million.

Read more:
Exclusive: The end of the Maher era at Wikipedia - Axios

The Michaelmas daisy is an innocuous purple flower that grows in fields in the American northeast, and for some reason, an image of it is suddenly getting millions of hits a day. A picture of this perfectly normal flower hosted on Wikipedia is currently responsible for 20 percent of the traffic on one of Wikiemdias data centers.

We've noticed today that we get about 90M hits per day from various ISPs in India, a post on PhabricatorWikimedias collaboration platformsaid. These are very strange, as they come from wildly different IPs, follow a daily traffic pattern, so we are hypothesizing there is some mobile app predominantly used in india that hotlinks the above image for e.g. a splash screen. We need to investigate this further as this kind of request constitutes about 20 percent of all requests we get in EQSIN for media.

EQSIN is the name of a Wikimedia data cluster in Singapore. For more than six months, 20 percent of the traffic to that server were requests to look at the daisy. Wikimedias data is public and a chart showing daily requests to access the picture of the flower show a clear trend. Before June 8, the flower had pretty low numbers. On average, the flower gets a few hundred views. On June 9, the number jumps to 2,154. On June 10, it hit 15,037. By June 30, it had more than 15 million daily hits.

Chris Albon, director of Machine Learning at Wikimedia, pointed out that weird trend on Twitter. One reply pointed out that the huge upsurge in requests to see the flower coincided with India banning TikTok and several other Chinese apps. India banned TikTok on June 29, 2020. The flower was already getting more views than normal before then, but it did experience a huge surge in popularity after the ban.

After the TikTok ban, clones of the app flourished in India and some of the people investigating the mystery are speculating that one of these new apps is accessing the flower picture. It is most likely an app, given the header information above and also based on some other connection attributes, one investigator said. The question is which app though as some of us have gone through the popular apps in India but haven't been able to identify which app it is. It is also possible that the code was embedded in some app and that it requests the image but does not display it.

After several days of investigation, the Wikimedia team tracked down the app and confirmed that it was, indeed, a mobile app. I just wanted to share that we have identified the app and will update this task tomorrow, an investigator said. And yes, it was a mobile app.

Wikimedia hasnt yet revealed the name of the app and, according to its data reports, EQSIN is still getting hammered for requests to see the pretty purple daisy.

Wikimedia did not immediately respond to Motherboards request for comment.

Original post:
Why Is This Flower on Wikipedia Suddenly Getting 90 Million Hits Per Day? - VICE

Wikipedia now has its own Universal Code of Conduct, a first-of-its-kind document that will create a global set of community standards for addressing negative behaviour on the site.

The code is the result of recommendations that were made as part of 2018 global consultation with Wikipedia communities called the 2030 Movement Strategy, Amanda Keton, General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation told indianexpress.com over an email query. The global consultation included 200-plus salons, which are community-organised regional gatherings, spread across 50 countries with over 2,000 Wikipedia community members being involved.

Before this new universal code, there was no consistent way of addressing harassment on the platform and the incidents were addressed on a case by case basis, and varied project by project, she pointed out.

Keep in mind that Wikimedia is made up of more than 300 language Wikipedias and other related projects such as Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, the new code will apply a standard protocol and consistent framework to deal with harassment across all of these projects and Wikipedias, according to the company.

While some of the projects like English Wikipedia followed more established standards for harassment, others were not as far along in their journey, according to Keton. The universal code will try and solve this challenge.

Wikimedia also felt that given how various tactics are used to spread misinformation in the current internet era, it was important to enhance our mechanisms and establish new measures for dealing with deliberate attempts to add false information on the site, she said.

Our new universal code of conduct creates binding standards to elevate conduct on the Wikimedia projects, and empower our communities to address harassment and negative behaviour across the Wikimedia movement. Through this effort, we can create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for contributors and readers, and a more representative source of knowledge for the world, Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement.

Wikimedia says the new code is transparent, only 1600 words long, and not opaque as community standards tend to be with other tech companies. The goal of this code is to define harassment and unacceptable behaviour.

The codes distinguishing standards include delinating harassment on and off the projects for all Wikipedia participants, preventing the abuse of power and influence to intimidate others, combating deliberate introduction of false or inaccurate content and provide consistent enforcement process and shared responsibility between the Foundation and volunteer communities.

The code also explains the reasons why it was adopted, stating that it defines a minimum set of guidelines of expected and unacceptable behaviour. Further, this code will apply to everyone who interacts and contributes to online and offline Wikimedia projects and spaces, including new and experienced contributors, functionaries within the projects, event organisers and participants, employees and board members of affiliates and employees and board members of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedias universal code also expands on what will constitute harassment on the platform. For instance, around insults the code explains that these may refer to perceived characteristics like intelligence, appearance, ethnicity, race, religion (or lack thereof), culture, caste, sexual orientation, gender, sex, disability, age, nationality, political affiliation, or other characteristics.

Even repeated mockery, sarcasm, or aggression constitute insults collectively, according to the code.

It further adds that trolling which is defined as deliberately disrupting conversations or posting in bad-faith to intentionally provoke, will come under harassment.

Further, doxxing or disclosure of personal information, sexual harassment of any kind, threats be it physical or those which call for unfair and unjustified reputational harm, or intimidation by suggesting gratuitous legal action to win an argument or force someone to behave the way you want, are all defined as harassment. It notes that hounding someone over their work in the projects will also be considered harassment.

While Wikimedia has announced the Universal code, it still needs to evaluate how local and regional Wikipedia projects will enforce the new standards. This will be part of the next phase of the codes implementation, explained the spokesperson.

Read this article:
Wikipedia has a new Universal Code of Conduct to deal with harassment, misinformation - The Indian Express

ANKARA, TURKEY - JANUARY 15: (BILD ZEITUNG OUT) In this photo illustration, The logo of Wikipedia is ... [+] seen on the screen of a laptop with a magnifying glass on January 15, 2021 in Ankara, Turkey. (Photo by Altan Gocher/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)

A major social network announced a new set of rules for its members Tuesday, and by itself that might not rate as news.

But Wikipedia isnt just any social network, and its new rulebook stands apart from the terms of service handed down by commercial social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The Universal Code of Conduct announced Tuesday by the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and related projects, isnt a top-down product. Instead, Wikipedians collaborated to write it, much as almost 356,000 of them regularly create or edit entries in that online encyclopedia.

More than 1,500 Wikipedia volunteers from 19 different Wikipedia projects representing five continents and 30 languages participated in the creation of the universal code of conduct, Wikimedias announcement notes.

That goes well beyond earlier moves by commercial social platforms to borrow the collective wisdom of their crowds. See, for example, Twitter, adopting the foundational features of @ mentions and hashtags from its early users, or Facebook letting users vote on new terms of service before scrapping that experiment in 2012 after too few people bothered to cast virtual ballots.

At Wikimedia, the collective drafting of the new code began with input from around the world about the need for revisions to its earlier terms and involved months of collaboration.

Theyre an alternative model to the private social experience that exists almost everywhere else, said Alex Howard, director of the Demand Progress Education Funds Digital Democracy Project.

The results also differ from many other codes of conduct by virtue of being unusually shortunder 1,700 words, or less than 1,300 if you subtract the introductory paragraphs.

The operative text starts not on a thou-shalt-not note, but with a you-should list of expected behavior of any user: Practice empathy; Assume good faith, and engage in constructive edits; Respect the way that contributors name and describe themselves; Recognize and credit the work done by contributors, among others.

The organization is saying, here are our values, Howard said. Theyre giving people scaffolding to interact with each other.

An Unacceptable behavior list follows, including a broadly constructed ban on harassment. This covers the usual categoriesfor instance, insults targeting personal characteristics, threats, and doxingbut also covers the broader category of being a jerk.

Thats both necessary, because people who punch down a little in public often do more often in private, and tricky because these lesser fouls arent as obvious.

People at times assume that its unintentional, said Caroline Sinders, founder of Convocation Design + Research and an expert in online harassment research whos worked with the Ford Foundation, Amnesty International and others (including an earlier stint at Wikimedia itself).

Or, she added, the offense will go unrecorded and then forgotten without a ladder of accountability that recognizes how unchecked minor abuses can lead to more toxic behavior.

These provisions also cover behavior outside Wikimedia projects. For example, the doxing clause notes that sharing other contributors private information, such as name, place of employment, physical or email address without their explicit consent is out of line either on the Wikimedia projects or elsewhere.

Theres a complicating factor here in Wikimedias understandable lack of a real-names policyenforcing one would endanger marginalized communities, and in particular those living under abusive governments. Wikipedia doesnt even require an email address to create a contributor account.

Wikimedia Foundation communications lead Chantal De Soto noted this issue in an email: enforcing any breaches of conduct that happen on other platforms is often very difficultverifying connections between Wikimedia accounts, and, for example, a Twitter account, is often not straightforward.

But its important that Wikimedia communities make that effort, considering all the evidence now available of how online radicalization can erupt in the physical world.

All we have to do is look at January 6 to get a sense of what happens when that goes too far, Howard said of the riots that took place at the U.S. Capitol.

The next chapter in Wikimedias effort will involve more collaboration on enforcement policies and mechanisms. This may be the most difficult part, since it will involve setting up structures that can work at scale and across cultures.

A community needs to think about how theyre going to document these cases, who has access to them, how are they keeping track of things, how are they going to respond to harassment, said Sinders.

Done right, this may require hiring more dedicated trust-and-safety professionals.

In open-source communities, a lot of this arduous labor is falling to volunteers, Sinders warned. And that leads to community burnout.

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Wikipedias New Code Of Conduct Gets One Thing Right; Another Will Be A Struggle - Forbes