| Wikipedia in the press |
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Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has garnered substantial media attention. The following is a list of the project's press coverage received in 2022, sorted chronologically. Per WP:PRESS, this page excludes coverage exclusively on a single WP-article, coverage of (some aspect of) the project overall is wanted.
The project aims to enrich the Saudi, Arab and Islamic content in Wikipedia, through creation, development, and translation, by referencing literature and documented information, highlighting the history and civilization of the Kingdom and the Arab and Islamic worlds, and working to bridge the gap between Saudi Internet users and digital content.
Emirates Literature Foundation's (ELF) initiative, Kateb Maktub, has spearheaded the drive to increase the number of Arab author pages on Wikipedia in both Arabic and English, and reports a 516 per cent growth in the short span of one year. The initiative was launched in late 2020 with the goal to make information about Arab authors and literature easily available online.
While most of us are probably acquainted with Wikipedia as a quick hack that totally saves our asses when we have a looming assignment, Rauwerda's relationship with the online resource is rooted in one of its more offbeat aspects: Wikiracing.
While the authenticity of its content has been questioned time and again, one cannot deny the contributions Wikipedia has made in the field of science and research.
The Wiki admin team told the Facebook group: "Reliable sources are required so that information can be verified...Metro and the Daily Mail are not reliable. Due to the extremely serious nature of the subject, it's essential that only high-quality sources are used, not tabloids or gossip rags.
National MP Harete Hipango says she "regrets" asking a staff member to edit her Wikipedia page. The 'controversies' section of Hipango's online page was edited this week by a user who identified themselves in an editing note as a member of the MP's staff. "She's stated that much of the information in the "Controversies" section is false, and is causing a lot of distress to her family," the note said. The section included mention of her presence at two separate anti-vaccination protests - in early November and again early this month - and allegations of inappropriate spending, all of which was widely reported by media. The section was removed four times by the user between 1pm on Tuesday and 1pm Wednesday, then reinstated by Wikipedia editors each time.
So without further ado, allow us to bless your eyeballs with the worst photos of the greatest golfers on Wikipedia. Viewer discretion most definitely advised.
Michael Gove's 'levelling-up' plan is facing mockery after it emerged that parts of it appeared to have been copied from Wikipedia.
The practice of Wikisports vandalism has become so prevalent it would be easier to identify athletes and teams who haven't been hacked. It seems that while most fans still come to Wikipedia for sports stats and reference, more and more fans, especially while being kept apart during the pandemic, are exploiting Wikipedia's trusting nature and philanthropic mission.
Figures whose Wikipedia entries will soon be freshly accompanied by portraits include: William Greaves, a New York City documentary filmmaker who explored Black political and cultural life in his films; Marian Ewurama Addy, a Ghanaian biochemist who researched the biochemistry of traditional medical herbal medicine; and May Miller, a widely published female playwright and poet of the Harlem Renaissance.
Both within the Wikipedia authorship and in court, the question of what may, must or should appear in a Wikipedia entry will probably continue to be the subject of difficult negotiations in the future. This is also shown by the very different judgments from Koblenz. [Translation with Google translate]
Where people are paid to edit Wikipedia by outside parties, it warps the incentive to contribute into one that's very different from (and sometimes at odds with) the incentives for most community members, and is often a very negative thing.
The Australian Music Centre and the Australia Council for the Arts are calling on music lovers to change that. On Friday 18 February, the AMC will host an online edit-a-thon, titled 'The Record – Australian Music on Wikipedia', with the goal of creating new Wikipedia pages for Australian artists and expanding those in need of an update.
A reporter who infiltrated Éric Zemmour's presidential election team has claimed he witnessed a culture of casual racism and a covert online campaign involving a 'shadow Facebook army' and repeated rewrites of the far-right polemicist's Wikipedia page, the most viewed in France.
The AfroCuration series is organized by WikiAfrica Education, a project of the Moleskine Foundation, an Italy-based nonprofit. It partners with local cultural institutions to hold the workshops, and the cultural institutions call out for volunteers.
I think we are very sympathetic to policy makers and regulators worried about things we are seeing in the society," [Maryana Iskander] said. But she also wants to make sure that laws are carefully worded "so that Wikipedia doesn't suffer at the hands of regulations not intended for our model.
One way to fathom which topics might be controversial is to use data from Wikipedia on which articles have been edited the most. The nerds who care about Wikipedia's bold, brave and inevitably imperfect task of curating a single view of the world's knowledge pay a great deal of attention to "Edit Wars".
Right now, the number of people reading about Ukraine on Wikipedia is at an unprecedented high—spiking to more than 22 million English page views in the past month versus roughly 290,000 in February 2021.
Russian authorities have threatened to block Wikipedia's Russian-language site over an article that mentions deaths among Ukrainian civilians as well as the Russian forces that have entered Ukraine, Russian Wikipedia said on Tuesday.
As Input notes, Russian authorities have sent a number of complaints about Wikipedia pages in the past. The government outright blocked the site in 2015 over a cannabis-related article, but the blackout was short-lived. However, the current threat is part of a larger online crackdown around the invasion — one that's seen Russia block Twitter and Facebook in an effort to control the narrative around the war.
The online encyclopedia, once controversial and untrusted, now helps to anchor our shared reality
Wade and other editors receive a lot of negative attention alongside the positive; some fellow contributors are skeptical about the biographies they choose to write. In a backroom conversation on David Eppstein's user talk page several years ago, one editor posted, "From my perspective, if there are more biographies of women being AfD'd, it's because there are more biographies of non-notable women being created."
Fighting disinformation doesn't mean the Russian volunteers do not have their own political opinions. "Part supports Russia, part Ukraine, part distanced themselves from the war for various reasons," said a Russian Wikipedia volunteer, who called himself Stepan. Expressing those opinions anywhere online can be dangerous. "We live in a state where a repost or even a like in the social network can be blamed for treason with all the ensuing consequences." How long can Russian Wikipedia walk the tightrope of neutrality in this difficult atmosphere?
In the photo itself, Bernstein is accused of "distributing fake anti-Russian information." The channel has since been made private. Zerkalo also reports that Berstein had been accused of editing Wikipedia articles about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. However, none of the information in the Telegram channels clearly specifies exactly what, if anything, Bernstein has officially been charged with.
"Everybody knows they go to Wikipedia first when you're doing research," librarian Adair Harper told CBC's On the Coast last month. "So it's really important to improve coverage there." Edwards says attendees at Saturday's event can learn how to research, create a user account, and publish a Wikipedia page.
The reliance on sources with inbuilt fact-checking systems makes Wikipedia a reliable news source, but also distorts its coverage. Heavily reported events are covered in molecular detail at the expense of, for example, biographies of living researchers, authors, and artists, especially if they are women of colour.
In this study, we define the term "first appearance of the scholarly reference" as the oldest scholarly reference added to Wikipedia articles by which a certain paper is uniquely identifiable.
However, while social media has been awash in disinformation from both sides, Wikipedia in English, Ukrainian and even Russian seems to have managed to stay factual.
According to the Wikimedia Foundation recent study on readers' interaction with images, images are engaging for our readers. We found that, on English Wikipedia, users click on images 1 out of 30 times that they read an article. This might not seem like a huge figure, until it is put into perspective. On English Wikipedia, citations are clicked on only 1 out of 350 times, whilst external links are clicked only for 1 in 110 pageviews.
It may be far from ideal that an online encyclopedia carries ever-changing, contested and kaleidoscopic versions of reality in different language editions. But, as we are seeing now, the disputes may just reflect reality. On some subjects, at least, truth is messy.
Everyone with a basic knowledge of Kashmiri and an accessible internet connection can edit Wikipedia. Even the registration on Kashmiri Wikipedia is optional. There are currently 8900 registered users, out of which with 30 users are active. All the users who contribute to Wikipedia do it on a volunteer basis.
We see this big piece of information that we can add in. And there's no one telling us not to do it," Englehardt said. "We are respected on (Wikipedia), regardless of age, and there's no authority saying, 'Hey, you can't do that.' Except for some site-wide rules, you're free to do what you want to do.
Candace Imison, Associate Director of Evidence and Dissemination at the NIHR, also said the spread of misinformation about Covid and vaccines during the pandemic has highlighted the importance of trustworthy sources of information. "Our collaboration with Wikimedia UK, through the new Wikimedian in residence role, provides the NIHR with a great opportunity to promote the evidence from health and social care research to a mass audience," she said.
Data suggests that after the threats of censorship, Russians started torrenting Wikipedia in droves. Currently, Russia is the country with the most Wikipedia downloads—by a landslide.
The name "Julius Pringles" — which Kellogg's claims as officially trademarked, though a search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office site for "Julius Pringles" returned no immediate results — looks not to have come from a marketing team, or some long-forgotten Pringles founder. Rather, the name stems from two Wikipedia savvy, hoax-loving college students snacking away on Sour Cream & Onion Pringles in their dorm room back in 2006.
Fan began her project as a computer science student at the Université de Lorraine in Inria, France. She said she was inspired by seeing women underrepresented in books during her childhood.
In the case of Wikipedia, while efforts by such groups as the Wikimedia Foundation, WikiProject Women, and Women in Red – a Wikipedia editor community – have focused on de-biasing existing content, they haven't addressed systemic challenges around the initial gathering of content and the factors that introduce bias in the first place, Fan said.
And while Wikipedia's systems, both formal and informal, do generally work to expel low-effort vandalism, falsehoods can stick around if they start to interact with the world outside the site. Almost a decade ago, the webcomic XKCD coined the phrase "citogenesis" to describe the process whereby a fake fact on Wikipedia is copied by a rushed journalist into an article, which is itself used as a source to "prove" the truth of the fact.
In the latest episode of Fox Nation's "Tucker Carlson Today," Larry Sanger spoke out about the evolution of Wikipedia, echoing critics who say that the database has largely become a collection of left-wing advocacy essays.
In my courses, students write papers about minoritized languages, also known as pidgins and creoles. In many cases, very little academic research is available to the public about these languages. However, as the students have access to this information through UBC's library, they can add these references to the Wikipedia articles, improving them immensely so that they become more reliable sources for other users.
The Instagram account [@depthsofwikipedia] shares bizarre and surprising snippets from the vast, crowdsourced online encyclopedia, including amusing images (a chicken literally crossing a road) and minor moments in history (Mitt Romney driving several hours with his dog atop his car). Some posts are wholesome — such as Hatsuyume, the Japanese word for one's first dream of the year — while others are not safe for work (say, panda pornography).
Roskomnadzor said on Thursday it is fining Wikipedia up to 4 million rubles (some $49,000), for refusing to delete information about the Ukraine war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24. In a press release, the agency said it was issuing the fine due to Wikipedia's 'failure to delete illegal information.'
It is not clear what specific details the regulator is looking to have removed, but Newsweek reports that it said on Monday that the Russian-language version of the page contained "inaccurate information about the special military operation to protect the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics for the de-militarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine," including the use of the words war, aggression and invasion.
As a platform, Wikipedia promotes itself as a place where "anyone can edit," according to a report. However, its pages on socialism and communism demonstrate the Left's growing bias over the website, the report noted.
Russia is far from the only country that's tried to censor Wikipedia, but the Kremlin's threats have provided a compelling use case for blockchain boosters. The backers claim a web3 Wikipedia could provide provenance of facts, protection from authoritarian control, and financial compensation for contributors.
They discussed a game in which audience members guess which article is longer: "List of fictional worms" or "List of sexually active popes." The answer was worms. Kavner suggested offering bonus points to anyone who could name a fictional worm or a sexually active pope.
April 26 (Reuters) - A Moscow court on Tuesday fined Wikipedia owner Wikimedia Foundation for the first time for not deleting articles that Russia says contain inaccurate information about what it calls its special military operation in Ukraine, the Interfax news agency reported.
Conservatives don't have as much time to tweet or argue on the web. Leftists do. And they love doing it. This helps them take over the media, universities, and now, Wikipedia.
Disease-related English, German, and Russian Wikipedia articles cannot be recommended as patient education materials because a major fraction is difficult or very difficult to read. The authors of Wikipedia pages should carefully revise existing text materials for readers with a specific interest in a disease or its associated symptoms.
The decision to shun crypto won't have a major impact on the donation-led organization, as only 0.08% of its revenue last year—or $130,100—came in that form. In recent years, only 347 donors used that option, mostly giving Bitcoin. The Wikimedia Foundation doesn't hold crypto reserves; when it received crypto donations, it converted them straight into dollars.
The parent of the popular website Wikipedia has changed course, and said it will stop accepting cryptos.
The decision has been taken after receiving the responses from Wikipedia volunteers and donor community in a three-month long debate on receiving cryptocurrency donations.
Putin's attack comes after Wikipedia didn't delete information on the war from its Russian edition that strays from the Kremlin's approved narrative, including estimates from the Ukrainian government on the death toll among Russian troops and Ukrainian civilians.
Putin's remarks come amid growing concern that Wikipedia will join the list of platforms that have been banned by Russian authorities since it sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, as it presents information about the war that clashes with the Kremlin's narrative. Russia's state communications regulator Roskomnadzor on Tuesday issued a warning to Wikipedia asking the platform to delete "unreliable information" about the "special operation in Ukraine."
The site is deliberately plain looking — after all, it's meant to be a source for education, not entertainment. But if you want to give your eyes a rest while falling down a Wikipedia hole, you've got a few choices.
On Wikipedia, sock puppets are fake accounts operated by one person; a sock farm is a collection of fake accounts working together. The Signpost found a "pattern of editing" involving no less than "50 now-blocked sockpuppets or paid editors" working via such farms.
Protais Uwayezu was on Friday May 13, announced as the third winner of Wiki Project Afrocine/Months of African Cinema, a contest that aims to bridge a huge gap of African cinema content on the world's largest encyclopaedia, Wikipedia.
Medical and other professional schools should seek to include tasks such as writing Wikipedia articles in their curricula. Educational assignments that integrate academic work, student identity development and direct community benefit can have a long-term beneficial impact on learners and society.
After Jason Moore, from Portland, Oregon, saw headlines from national news sources on Google News about the Buffalo shooting at a local supermarket on Saturday afternoon, he did a quick search for the incident on Wikipedia. When no results appeared, he drafted a single sentence: "On May 14, 2022, 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York."
In 2018, only 17.7% of Wikipedia biographies written in English were about women — four years later, the number has increased to 19.2%. This is essential progress, but incremental.
"I know I have been told that Wikipedia isn't a credible source and we shouldn't use it, but I also know it's a website many of my classmates go to for a last-minute check," she says. "So, I thought if so many of us are using it anyway, why not try to make it as good as it possibly can be." She notes that Wikipedia is also used by patients and other dentists, making it even more important that everyone is accessing the same accurate information.
The three-year undertaking, Wikipedia and the nation's story: Towards equity in knowledge production, has been awarded more than $400,000 by the Australian Research Council.
This ability to offer "reliable information", especially in critical times, is for Raju Narisetti, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the "significant opportunity" for Wikipedia in countries like India.
The Wikipedia project comes with a stubborn confidence that facts can guide us through the darkness. In Wikipedia's 20-year history, this belief has never been asked to do more.
Wikipedia is the only platform in the world that currently operates in about 300 languages.
With a Wikipedia page, you may become a target of random trolls, ex-spouses, former business associates or disgruntled employees. Just because you could, doesn't mean you should.
Here's Morris's list of the 500 least-viewed Wikipedia articles in 2021. Here are the bottom ten. None of the articles had more than 5 views in 2021:
People, however, have decided to have a field day with Wikipedia's humble request and a slew of memes have come out of it. Some people were not immune to the "emotional" appeal and caved in. Others felt they owed it to Wikipedia, considering all the school project help the site so selflessly doles out.
A Moscow court fined the Wikimedia Foundation 5 million roubles ($88,000) for refusing to remove what it termed disinformation from Russian-language Wikipedia articles on the war including "The Russian Invasion of Ukraine", "War Crimes during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine" and "Massacre in Bucha".
Wikipedia has helped us get out of sticky situations - who else stayed up all night looking up history facts on the internet while finishing school work? Now, the encyclopedia is in need of our help too - they are asking its readers for funds.
Tamzin's RfA page stands at about 65,000 words, making it roughly 40 percent longer than the text of The Great Gatsby, and that's not counting the side discussions that sprang up in several anti-Wikipedia sites.
'Chinese Wikipedia entries that are more detailed than English Wikipedia and even Russian Wikipedia are all over the place,' Yifan wrote on Zhihu, a Quora-like Q&A platform. 'Characters that don't exist in the English-Russian Wiki appear in the Chinese Wiki, and these characters are mixed together with real historical figures so that there's no telling the real from the fake. Even a lengthy Moscow-Tver war revolves around the non-existent Kashin silver mine.'
For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as 'Zhemao' created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of late Medieval Russia on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words about entirely made-up political figures, massive (and fake) silver mines, and pivotal battles that never actually happened. She even went so far as to concoct details about things like currency and eating utensils.
Wikipedia's appearance gives it airs of authority and joylessness, like a county hospital administration wing. It doesn't have the inviting daycare-blue interface of Twitter. But there's a colorful world behind the chilly aesthetic, as users post content, craft profile pages, navigate moderation policies, push opinion disguised as fact, and fight, fight, fight.
The hoax started with an innocuous intention. Unable to comprehend scholarly articles in their original language, she pieced sentences together with a translation tool and filled in the blanks with her own imagination.
Wikipedia has long established itself as one of the most accessible, widely read and trusted sources for information on subjects ranging from the mundane to the highly controversial. The sharper partisan rifts around the world grow, the more valuable that becomes.
While Wikipedia may ultimately prove successful at undermining research about topics related to human intelligence, it also may undermine its own reputation in the process.
Writing on Telegram, vice chair of the Russian parliament's committee on information policy Anton Gorelkin said that links to Wikipedia would be accompanied by a disclaimer warning users about legal violations by Wikimedia Foundation.
Russia's Kremlin-friendly Safe Internet League said this week it has uncovered 16.6 million messages spreading "fakes" about Russia's invasion of Ukraine on platforms including Wikipedia. "This happens on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Wikipedia," said the nonprofit's head, Yekaterina Mizulina, daughter of prominent conservative Russian senator Yelena Mizulina.
"What you may not know is that Wikipedia is actually being used anytime you say 'Hey, Google?' 'Hey, Alexa?' Almost always that answer comes back with according to Wikipedia," Lih noted. The same result happens to iPhone users when they ask Siri a question.
If the text itself is influenced, as this experiment shows, by anonymously sourced internet content, that's a problem.
Each name featured on the map was determined using a baseline of information scraped from Wikipedia and Wikidata for use in a recent study published in Nature that tried to calculate a person's notability based on several rules:
So if it's so difficult to get an entry, why do so many SEOs only focus on getting a Wikipedia page as their way into the Knowledge Graph? Well, the answer is that once you have a Wikipedia page, it's almost a guaranteed entry. However, this is a mindset we need to break, because by now, we should all know that there are no guarantees in SEO. Sure you can definitely pursue a Wikipedia page for your own brand, but just make sure to diversify your tactics and don't just focus on that as your sole strategy.
But if angry disputes and temporary suspension of editing are so common, why don't we remember them? Because they always settle down. We know this because social scientists, fascinated by Wikipedia's belief that we can successfully crowd-source even the most abstruse or technical knowledge, have spent years studying how the site is edited.
The site has not been without its problems over the years — pages get hacked sometimes, and squabbles break out among volunteers. But as the Columbia Journalism Review noted last year, Wikipedia is "better poised to offer fact-checking than mainstream and social media."
So how does Wikipedia spend its money? According to MakeUseOf.com, that hinges heavily on the app's "programmatic Ratio." The outlet states: "The bulk of [Wikipedia's] expenditure goes towards what Wikimedia refers to as programmatic ratio. This includes all aspects of the platform's development such as technical infrastructure, platform evolution, and brand awareness."
The researchers who carried out the study say that, given that judges and other legal experts are likely to continue using Wikipedia, it may be necessary for the legal profession to put some effort into policing the quality of articles posted to Wikipedia.
By proving this about judges, and scientists as well, the papers' authors are helping demystify those priestly classes. They live in our world and use the same resources we do. "I think that we in academia are front of that line in terms of, you know, feeling two different ways about Wikipedia in sort of what we're saying and what we're doing," Thompson said.
This isn't the first time viral screenshots have caused trouble for Wikipedia. ... Screenshots of vandalized Wikipedia articles, even when reverted within minutes, often have a much longer afterlife in news reports and on social media, creating the public impression that the platform is more vulnerable to abuse than it actually is.
HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE CITOGENESIS? — The story is just one example of circular editing — where a person puts false information on Wikipedia with no citation. A journalist then uses that information in an article, and a later Wikipedia editor uses the article as a citation for the original unsourced statement.
Neechalkaran's "Neechal Bot", which can undertake page creation, editing and statistics collection activities, has created more than 22,500 articles with community consensus – it would have taken 22 humans over three years to create so many Wikipedia pages manually, according to a conservative estimate. The bot can also automatically perform a lot of housekeeping activities on Tamil, Bhojpuri, Hindi Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia projects. It collects periodical stats in these languages and can update them on corresponding Wikipedia pages.
While even Wikipedia doesn't recommend people cite the platform as a primary source, the online encyclopedia has risen in legitimacy since its inception. Some research shows Wikipedia's accuracy is north of 80%, with many entries performing better.
To that point, the authors of the new paper conclude that legal professionals should dedicate sustained attention to Wikipedia, developing initiatives to buttress and confirm that Wikipedia content about legal cases is monitored by people with legal training. In the meantime, I keep returning to the remarks from one Wikipedia editor in a discussion page on the site. "For the people of Ireland, this shows their judges are relying on Wikipedia. For the people of Wikipedia, it shows the same thing," the user wrote. "What we write here can change the world. It's paramount we get it right."
Meta AI (that's the AI research and development research lab for the social media giant) has developed what it claims is the first machine learning model able to automatically scan hundreds of thousands of citations at once to check if they support the corresponding claims. While this would be far from the first bot Wikipedia uses, it could be among the most impressive — although it's still currently in the research phase, and not in use on actual Wikipedia.
Some judges privately expressed concern about the accuracy of the findings, with at least one judge contacting researchers for information on the methodology used.
That the AI is being developed by Meta, which is widely known to censor conservative content, while promoting anti-conservative content on its platform, has raised eyebrows.
The project was announced a few days ago, although data from the site indicates that the first articles were published as early as June. "Wikipedia" is not yet blocked in Russia, but dozens of its pages are inaccessible because of the war in Ukraine. The authorities have threatened with such a step several times in recent months. "Wikipedia", meanwhile, refused to take down texts about the war, against which Russia protested.
In an exclusive conversation with our diplomatic correspondent Sidhant Sibal, Wales pointed to the increase in the use of Indic languages on the free online encyclopedia explaining, "Of the Indic language Wikipedias, Hindi Wikipedia is the most visited language Wikipedia, in addition to English. Over the last year, Hindi Wikipedia has received nearly a billion pageviews".
Randburg Library's senior librarian, Matete Lesele, (31) and librarian Njabulo Mdunge (29) recently flew the City's flag high when they were awarded certificates for their contribution during the African Librarians Week: Wikipedia Campaign in May.
Now, obviously, Wikipedia may not always be ~factually correct~, but that doesn't stop it from being interesting... So, we want to know, what's a REALLY good, surprising, or fascinating celebrity Wikipedia page that made you say, "OMG!"? Tell us in the comments below for a chance to be featured in a BuzzFeed Community post!
While definitions for terms like "recession" require a consensus of experts, definitions detailed on Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, can be edited or changed by nearly anyone, according to its About page. For example, after key sports victories athletes' Wikipedia pages sometimes list them as "owning" another team.
It's hard to imagine today what we did before we had Wikipedia. The sheer amount of free information available on every topic is mind-boggling. If there is one barrier to this crucial resource, it's probably language.
One of the best ways to improve your brand's credibility online is to have a Wikipedia page for your business or organization. Often, when people Google search for a company, Wikipedia is the first place they'll go for information. So creating a Wikipedia page can also give you control over the narrative represented to the viewer.
The Ministry of Electronics & IT today summoned executives from Wikipedia to explain how fake information on cricketer Arshdeep Singh's page linking him to the separatist Khalistani movement was published on the website, several reports say.
Who exactly can edit Wikipedia pages, and can all editors access all pages? How does Wikipedia protect itself against misinformation? Is there a mechanism to penalise those who vandalise a page?
Bernstein's arrest and the threats to individual Wikipedia editors are part of a broader campaign to stifle the platform as the Russian government pushes a pro-war propaganda drive, including banning Western social media platforms and cracking down on independent reporting.
Therefore, can the Wikimedia Foundation be held responsible for the content that Wikipedia hosts? There is no settled position on this. ... Under most laws regulating online content, intermediaries are endowed with immunity from the user generated content they host, provided they maintain some due diligence over their platforms.
At the beginning of 2020 I received an email from the sort of person I had no idea still existed – an encyclopaedia salesman. Stranger still, this salesman was a woman. Like all in her trade, she wanted money. A few years earlier I'd given her organisation a downpayment on its vast trove of knowledge, and I thought that would be the end of it, but now she wanted more, and there was no limit to how much more would make her happy.
When a celebrity dies, who edits their Wikipedia article so quickly? The answer seems to be: a highly diverse set of people, often anonymous, and surprisingly often from their smartphone.
However, editors didn't limit their work to the Queen's Wikipedia page. A six-membered task force deemed "WikiProject London Bridge" appeared and began to create and maintain new articles, "Death of Elizabeth II" and "Reactions to the death of Elizabeth II."
The news had reverberations across Wikipedia as a whole: it appeared to double the total traffic per second on the entire website. And as the internet turned its eyes to Wikipedia, editors kicked it into gear — for free, maybe even for fun.
Johanna Janhonen, 47, is Finland's leading commercial Wikipedian, i.e. Wikipedia author, who edits the encyclopedia on behalf of, for example, companies and public figures. She has written for Wikipedia as an entrepreneur for 12 years. ... Other (enwiki) Wikipedia users permanently banned her from writing and editing articles.
There's no reason to expect Wikipedia to be accurate. As my high school teacher liked to remind me, it can be edited by anyone! It could easily look like the back page of a high school notebook – covered in graffiti, anatomy drawings and expletives. It should be prone to indulging conspiracy theories. It should be … awful. And yet it isn't. Somehow a group of anonymous amateurs has created something that is more than the sum of its parts. How?
In her report, Eto Buziashvili wrote that Runiversalis is no Wikipedia. "Wikipedia has transparent editing policies and editorial oversight. Runiversalis, in contrast, is a propaganda website masquerading as a wiki, using the stylistic trappings of Wikipedia to give it a veneer of credibility."
As Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have become consumed by controversy over moderation, governance, and the definition of free speech, Wikipedia quietly continues to grow in utility, trustworthiness, and comprehensiveness.
In a literal sense, she may be right. Wikipedia may have become more trustworthy without being very trustworthy. On issues like sports and other areas where there is not much political controversy, Wikipedia is great.
Yep, there is a Twitter page, appropriately called Wikipedia, But I Made Them Up, that "vandalizes" Wikipedia articles using a very harmless browser tool to make it look like it's the real thing, then takes a screencap of it and then everyone laughs at the pure absurdity of it all.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, last month asked the nation's highest court to hear arguments on its lawsuit over the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of Americans' international phone and email communications. The organization, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, has been fighting the NSA in court over such "upstream surveillance" for the past seven years.
"It's important for university students (and academics in general) to edit Wikipedia pages, as they possess important domain knowledge that can vastly improve Wikipedia's coverage of their subject of interest. They also should have some vested interest in ensuring that Wikipedia articles describing their subject of interest are accurate and up to date," Kilpatrick said.
Wikipedia contributors had just spent nearly two months locked in a heated debate over whether Fox News' website should be permitted as a reference for the encyclopedia's political and scientific content. More than 150 users weighed in, leading to a thread more than 82,000 words long, roughly the length of an average novel.
And yes, anyone can edit Wikipedia – that's why we're told not to rely on it too much for university assignments or whatever. But the people doing so are generally diligent and accurate, updating and creating pages out of the kindness of their hearts. Without them, you'd still be quietly seething after not being able to prove you were right about whatever sparked your last pub debate. Wikipedia, what a wonderful world.
But what does Wikipedia sound like? The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation recently announced that it is, in effect, looking for an answer to that question, issuing an open call for submissions for a "sound logo" that will identify content from Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia Foundation projects) "when visual logos are not an option—for example, when virtual voice assistants answer queries."
Several of her entries were deleted by other Wikimedians, as the most influential contributors and editors are called. She told TODAY.com that they said a handful of the women she wrote up were not all that well-known. Wade said that's right, that's the problem: they should be better known.
The NGO world of which the Wikimedia Foundation is now part uncannily follows Marx's prediction that the middle class would devise an infinite number of ways of enriching themselves, while ensuring the proletariat, the volunteers at the Wiki-face, don't share the riches.
We expect the whole of the French-speaking Wikipedia to take real measures so that no pre-transition photos and no deadnames are used in public articles without the consent of the trans or intersex person concerned. [Translated with google translate]
Since 2017, Wade has written more than 1,750 Wikipedia pages for women and minority scientists and engineers whose accomplishments were not documented on the site. Wade said there's still much work to be done.
For the case study, the English-language Wikipedia page for the Russo-Ukrainian war was chosen, where accounts that edited the page and have subsequently been blocked from editing were examined.
Some researchers believe that Wikipedia could be an overlooked venue for information warfare, and they have been developing technologies and methods similar to the ones used on Facebook and Twitter to uncover it.
As you probably know, anybody can edit an article on Wikipedia. However, that doesn't mean that the information on the website isn't protected. Wikipedia has built up a complex apparatus for moderation over the years, and the organization behind the website—the Wikimedia Foundation—routinely works to improve its process and protect the quality of the information on its thousands of pages. However, that doesn't mean that bad actors don't occasionally slip through.
It remains to be seen how Wikimedia responds, but as far as we — my lawyers and I — are concerned, this is a fight against the Western deep state. Wikimedia's recent malafide acts of omission and commission, whether it was my profile or any other, was agenda-driven. The objective of this fight is very clear — Wikipedia, like other intermediaries, has to respect Indian laws and conduct itself impartially as it influences perceptions, both personal and political.
But even though Wikipedia may seem to have everything, it has its limits. In a situation shrouded in speculation and plagued by a dearth of credible information, the encyclopedia can't get into the mind of Putin. It can just keep a tally.
Asked why she spends her time writing articles for free, Annie's response was frank: "Because I can. Would I be knitting? How would I fill my time?" And at 68 years of age, she has no plans to slow.
Wikipedia is an attractive target for governments seeking to influence large numbers of people. Social networks are crowded public squares where nations can openly or surreptitiously promote their own agendas. But due to its system of checks and balances arbitrated by dedicated volunteer editors who monitor every change to Wikipedia entries, coordinated state interference is often a complex endeavor.
That it has survived, basically unscathed, across increasingly incendiary 'truth wars' indicates that Wikipedia's foundations lie deeper than any ideology of knowledge. That doesn't make it perfect, but does make it important.
Wikipedia was first launched in 2001 in English. The Arabic version of Wikipedia started two years later in July 2003. Part of the work of the Wikimedia UAE User Group, and others in the region, is to increase the number of readers and editors on Arabic Wikipedia.
Vladimir Medeiko, director of Moscow-based Wikimedia RU, said the ruling would be appealed, adding that "no one will remove" the articles. "I don't think Wikimedia Foundation will pay the fine," he told AFP.
People don't only use Wikipedia for education or work-driven scrolling. People can often fall into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, following terms across dozens of articles, starting at the Cuban Missile Crisis and ending at a summary of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This pastime is an excellent way to accrue knowledge across many different fields, almost like spending a day in a library without having to leave the house.
According to the Harvard Business Review, it's women's lack of confidence in their knowledge that keeps them from using the platform. Many are hesitant to edit due to the fear of criticism from men and the uncomfortable feeling while interfering with other people's work. This hesitancy has lead a digital divide of content.
At the event, organizer Kelly Dennis explained the concept of information activism. While information about lesser-known creators may be available on databases, it is not always free and accessible. By adding to online resources like Wikipedia, the general public can have access to a greater and more diverse library of information.
In her free time, Wade scours the internet to collect information, then she gets to work writing Wikipedia pages. She's written more than 1,700 so far. She said it is always shocking to her when someone notable doesn't have a page – but a few stand out.
To ensure the credibility and equality of knowledge presentation, Wikipedia should consider strategies and guidelines to cite scholarly publications independent of the gender and country of authors.
The Wikipedia Library and Taylor & Francis have had a partnership since 2015 but the process of granting access to qualifying editors has just gotten easier.
Azzam is part of a growing trend of professors who incorporate Wikipedia-editing assignments into their classes. In the process, these instructors are rendering old arguments against the crowdsourced website moot, enhancing their students' digital literacy skills and broadening their educator roles from the classroom to society.
More importantly, no one speaks the truth about Wikipedia: entries are not reviewed, they are unsigned or unattributed; there is not fact-checking or vetting. That is what invalidates the use of Wikipedia for any reputable or legitimate purpose, academic or more general.
Rather than emailing bolded pleas for money, Wales could ask for help. Wikipedians with expertise in Egyptology freely enhance the content of "Canopic Jar". Much of the knowledge that Wikipedia needs to expand its reach is technical.
When I started editing, representation of women on Wikipedia was about 17 percent. So I had a long way to go when I started. Now it's up to about 19 percent. That just shows you the sheer scale of the challenge because as I and others write pages about women, other people write pages about men.
A few of Wade's early entries, however, had to be taken down by Wikimedians, resident Wikipedia editors. "When I started writing, I was a little naïve and thought that everyone who was cool should have a Wikipedia page. [But] there is a notability test that has to be fulfilled," said Wade referring to the Wikipedia policy of having a team of editors decide whether or not a person or subject merits its own entry.
For all the fear and doubt spread by the conspiracy theorists on Twitter, the story about DHS-Wikipedia collusion does not hold up. There were no secret back-channel talks, no requests for changing content. The truth is much more mundane: The feds reached out to tech organizations to share intelligence that bad actors were interested in disrupting their platforms; the participants told the world about it. By misrepresenting reality to suggest that there was secret pressure, the conspiracy theorists behind "DHSLeaks" are taking a page from Moscow's playbook.
In many ways, Wales and Musk are both in control of two very different beasts. Whereas tweets are individual thoughts from individuals that stay as part of history, Wikipedia intends to remain the authoritative source for history itself by changing with the times.
Clearly, Wikipedians are right to engage in vigorous discussion about how donations are solicited from visitors and to oversee how those funds are actually spent. For me, there's also the small matter of the external environment. In recent years, Wikipedia has been attacked by authoritarian regimes and powerful billionaires—people who do not necessarily benefit from the free flow of neutral information. If $3 helps hold them off, then that's coffee money well spent.
Researchers have found that Wikipedia has a slight Democratic bias on issues of US politics because many of Wikipedia's editors are international, and the average country has views that are to the left of the incredibly centrist Democratic party on issues such as healthcare, climate change, corporate power, capitalism, etc.
Guerrero stressed that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't collect as much user data as many other websites do in order to protect visitors' privacy but that this commitment to privacy can make it difficult for the organization to track how Wikipedia is being used. However, the Wikimedia Foundation is prepared for major increases in traffic, like those caused by a celebrity death or major news event, Guerrero said.
A key issue is protecting children. Unlike commercial services, Wikipedia does not target people of any age with paid advertisements or profile them in order to amplify personalized content. But the UK proposal for mandatory age verification or assurance — "age-gating" — would force platforms including Wikipedia to know a reader's age, exposing both adults and children alike to new security and privacy risks.
So, for a long time, using macrons on words of Māori origin in the English-language Wikipedia was a non-issue: they weren't being used all that much in the real world, so they shouldn't be on Wikipedia. But then the real world started to change.
In the field of entertainment, the celebrities who drove maximum attention throughout the year are actors Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, bringing in 19,544,593 and 19,067,943 page views on Wikipedia, respectively.
Yet the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit which hosts Wikipedia) soon hit back, updating a message appealing for donations to take aim at the new Twitter owner. It reads: "Wikipedia is not for sale … We are the non-profit that hosts Wikipedia and 12 other free knowledge projects. Being a non-profit means there is no danger that someone will buy Wikipedia and turn it into their personal playground." Ouch.
Fuelled by the popularity of the Netflix series starring Evan Peters, the Wikipedia page of American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer received 52,650,755 pageviews in 2022, making it the most-read article on English Wikipedia.