| Wikipedia in the press |
|---|
Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has been garnered substantial media attention. The following is a list of the project's press coverage received in 2024, 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.
It's not surprising that Oxman wouldn't credit Wikipedia in her doctoral dissertation: While Wikipedia is generally accurate, anyone can edit it, so teachers regularly tell their students that they should not cite the website as an authority.
In one case, key details were removed about the Iranian regime's mass executions. The fact that current senior officials in the regime were involved in the 1988 death commissions, in which thousands of political prisoners were killed, was also deleted.
Is this plagiarism?" Mr Ackman asked on X. "Let's assume that in writing her dissertation Neri used Wikipedia as a dictionary for these terms and it is deemed to be plagiarism, does it any way affect the quality and originality of the research in her dissertation? I think that's worth an important discussion among the experts.
Collaboration is not a safeguard of quality per se, however. Rather, the quality of Wikipedia articles rises with the number of editors per article as well as a greater diversity among them. Here, we address a not yet documented potential threat to those preconditions: self-selection of Wikipedia editors to articles.
At the top of each page on the Arabic-language version of Wikipedia is a black banner showing the Wikipedia globe logo enveloped with a Palestinian flag and a keffiyeh. Next to the icon is a note accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. This banner appears on every page on Arabic Wikipedia, even today's featured article, one for the prehistoric reptile deinosuchus.
These rather blatant pro-Palestinian pages appear to stand in contrast to Wikipedia's own declared standards of covering events from a "neutral point of view," which emphasizes "representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views" on a topic.
Russia has said it was not yet planning to block Wikipedia - one of the few surviving independent sources of information in Russia since a state crackdown on online content intensified after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian courts, however, have handed the online encyclopaedia a series of fines over Ukraine-related content since.
It appears the 'wiki' part of its name lives up to its promise, as users usually track down the information they're searching for within a few clicks, despite the website having more than 62million articles in more than 300 languages.
Furthermore, the "Electronic Academy" department`s direct involvement and initiative resulted in the generation of 471 articles on Wikipedia, including 258 in Azerbaijani, 69 in English, 72 in Turkish, 53 in Russian, 8 in Persian, 10 in German, and 1 in Uzbek.
The scenario of Iran's regime utilizing Wikipedia as a battleground for narrative control highlights the necessity for individuals to approach online information, particularly on sensitive topics like Iranian politics, with a discerning mindset. Navigating the vast sea of data demands meticulous fact-checking, logical analysis, and an appreciation of historical contexts.
Within the academy, it's considered a bit lazy for a scholar to cite any encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, which are considered to be indirect, tertiary sources rather than direct sources of information. "An academic probably shouldn't be citing Encyclopedia Britannica either," said Blum.
The problem extends beyond Iranian politics. Similar occurrences involving China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia infiltrating Wikipedia have been documented.
The articles, some of which have versions in English as well, are written in a manner that in no way can be considered unbiased, with some presenting unconfirmed reports or even blatant lies as facts.
A government campaign to replace Wikipedia Russia with a more pliant alternative seems near completion.
The current Russian-language Wikipedia has about 12,000 regular editors, and many of them live outside of Russia and tend towards having opposition views. Russia's register of banned sites already includes more than 120 Wikipedia articles, mostly to do with the war in Ukraine. If Ruwiki or another pro-Kremlin project can prove its worth, we can expect the original Wikipedia to be banned.
So these are officially the UK unis that are the most popular, according to Wikipedia views:
But the challenge lies in the constant upkeep of Wikipedia articles. They require regular updates, clarifications, and error corrections. In Russian Wikipedia alone, around 700,000 corrections are made to 330,000 articles each month, with approximately 7,000 new articles created monthly. It's a substantial undertaking.
Many people in Iran and abroad read Persian Wikipedia, and many from different countries refer to English Wikipedia. Few understand how much of what they read, all of which has the illusion of verifiability, is biased or fake.
Dr. Butz assigned students to contribute to "Wiki Project Women Scientists" or "Underrepresentation of Science and Women in Africa", two projects that aim to correct the gender bias on Wikipedia. The requirement was to write an article about a woman scientist who does not have a Wiki page.
I'm not sure there is an answer to life, the universe and everything. But when someone figures it out, I'll know where to find it — and you can bet there'll be footnotes.
It is impossible to know whether these were done by MSPs or their staff, which could breach a Wikipedia ban on people or employees editing pages about themselves.
According to the presidential aide, 99% of the articles on Wikipedia are "absolutely neutral and even interesting," hence they could be used for a Russian analog. ... Medinsky called the remaining 1% of articles "enemy slander," which are "severely moderated." "You'll never get a word of truth in there," he added.
The problem here is that with millions of articles on any given topic, the majority of people are likely to read smaller articles as fact regardless of any increased bias or lack of impartiality.
The Yoruba Wikimedians User Group has also collaborated with Mr. Macaroni, a multi-award-winning Nigerian comic skit maker and actor with millions of followers on various social media, to produce a short comic skit to promote the Yoruba language on Wikipedia. The skit was viewed by millions of Nigerians. These efforts, among others, have helped to increase the traffic and readership level of Yoruba Wikipedia.
"I'm happy when I can take a look at a piece of history and find out someone has praised the entry or even added something. That's what makes me happy," Kadnerova said. "A friend of mine once told me I wasn't doing enough for mankind. So I finally am," she added.
From 2015 to February 2024, BTS has dominated at #1 with 90.5 million views as the most-viewed group and K-pop act overall, while Kim Taehyung, aka V, ranks as the most popular solo artist at #3 with 42.5 million views.
While Wikipedia's traffic didn't shift significantly during ChatGPT's meteoric rise, the site has seen a general decline in visitors over the last decade as a result of Google's ongoing search updates and generational changes in online behavior.
Martin Wilson, head of content at T&F, added: "Wikipedia is the first port of call for so many of us when we want to find out about a new topic and Wikipedia editors do an amazing job helping to keep it as accurate and up to date as possible. We hope this extended partnership with The Wikipedia Library will make Taylor & Francis Online an even more useful resource for supporting that work."
Wikipedia's source guidelines now provide this striking table that sums up the site's view on CNET: that it was reliable until it was acquired by Red Ventures, unreliable for the period it was caught using AI, and that since 2020 it's suffered a "deterioration in editorial standards."
As of this writing, Wikipedia's Perennial Sources list currently features three entries for CNET broken into three time periods:
Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean you can write whatever you want. For one, a subject has to be notable. Your grandma's "famous" cookie recipe can't have an article unless it's actually famous. The site isn't a place for personal opinions, either.
Considering that CNET has been in the business since 1994 and maintained a top-tier reputation on Wikipedia up until late 2020, this change came after lots of debate between Wikipedia's editors and has drawn the attention of many in the media, including some CNET staff members.
The banner, which is featured on every Arabic-language Wikipedia page, reads: "In solidarity with the right of the Palestinian people, no to genocide in Gaza, no to killing civilians. No to targeting hospitals and schools. No to deception and double standards. Stop the war and spread a just and comprehensive peace."
A UK academic who has completed a project creating a Wikipedia page for a woman in every country in the world is calling for more women to contribute to the world's largest encyclopedia.
The article provides a detailed view of the gender gap on Wikipedia and it stresses the importance of addressing this problem to guarantee a more equal and diverse platform.
A recent paper from Oxford Internet Institution researchers specified that while incumbents' Wikipedia pages are more likely to receive higher traffic volumes during an election, pageviews for challengers are significantly more predictive of success — especially for candidates that voters perceive as "viable."
In response to the historic underrepresentation of women in Wikipedia articles, the Stanley Museum of Art will host a virtual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon throughout March.
Since 2021, India has seen a steady growth rate of 13 per cent in content related to women on Wikimedia projects because of the efforts of individual contributors as well as collective initiatives.
As women have been left out of historical narratives and traditional sources of knowledge, the issue is further reflected on Wikipedia, where women remain significantly underrepresented.
"We, therefore, urge everyone to join us and play their parts in ensuring that we begin to see more women in the world's largest encyclopedia," added Olushola Olaniyan, President, Wikimedia Nigeria User Group.
Wikipedia depends on the availability of existing published sources to verify the facts in its articles. But in many places around the world, women have been left out of historical narratives and traditional sources of knowledge.
The dictionary definition of heroism does not usually extend to people who work away anonymously, and for no money, for the reputational benefit of others. But this is what growing numbers of largely female researchers have been doing, in an attempt to rebalance the historical record on Wikipedia in favour of women.
"It is inspiring to see the progress made across the African continent to improve gender equity on Wikipedia and beyond," said Masana Mulaudzi, Senior Manager of Campaign Organizing at the Wikimedia Foundation.
The source of the conflict lies in a debate over the "deadnames" – or morinoms in French – of trans people. Should these names that are no longer in use, such as birthnames, be mentioned on Wikipedia? If so, in which cases and under what conditions?
Who is the party leader? This was one of the most confusing questions to answer for contributors to Wikipedia's page.
Wikimedia Nigeria is organising the WikiGap Nigeria Online Challenge, which is open to the public, to create new articles for notable women and improve existing articles about women on Wikipedia, with a focus on English, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Tyap Wikipedias.
Romany Craig, professional librarian at the university, shared how she got the idea to hold this workshop by reading about the Wikipedia edit-a-thon which involved individuals coming together to edit around a theme making information more accurate.
All it takes is a free account. You can also contribute anonymously. Write about anything, including important women of Southern Africa and their world contributions.
The articles biased against Israel are mostly closed to editing, and it is impossible for an individual to change them without having made 500 edits, which leaves many Israelis unable to edit articles about which they have great knowledge.
The WJC report recommended corrective measures to re-establish the neutrality of Wikipedia, authored by Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Lir, Ph.D., senior fellow researcher at Bar Ilan University and the University of Haifa.
Types of bias the report identifies include delegitimizing terminology, lack of context, omission of significant details, one-sided sources, emphasizing negative examples and linking to pages like "genocide."
The report claims that English Wikipedia has an anti-Israel bias that spreads disinformation and perpetuates negative stereotypes of Jews and Israelis.
"By the internet's standards, it's a very high-quality source of text and sources of facts about the world," he said, adding that it's the reason researchers give "extra weight" to data from Wikipedia when training language models even though the website makes up a small part of the internet.
"Recently a Tulu article of mine related to Karnataka coastal belt's Siri Aradhane (Siri cult of worship) went to English from where it travelled to the German language," Badikana pointed out. He has written 113 articles for both Tulu and Kannada Wikipedia from December 1, 2023 alone in addition to a number of articles written earlier.
Wikipedia catalogs the edits made to every page. Supervisors running for election, including Connie Chan, Preston and Aaron Peskin — who is contemplating a run for mayor — have seen an uptick in the number and scale of edits made to their pages in recent months.
Wikimedia communities in Africa, and particularly sub-Saharan Africa, are some of the fastest-growing around the world. Although people living in Africa remain underrepresented among Wikimedia contributors, a 2020 report found that new contributors to Wikimedia projects are three times more likely to come from Africa than other regions.
"We learned that a lot depends on the teacher. If teachers trust Wikipedia and tell students about its dangers and shortcomings, it reflects in the students' activities," Remmik pointed out.
"If you know how to navigate the site, Wikipedia is a uniquely transparent knowledge-sharing platform," Perkins said. "So students get to see how the articles are developed in ways that are typically black-boxed in academia's peer-review process or in what happens in the office of news media organizations.
Most often, the Ruwiki pages are substantially shorter than their Wikipedia counterparts; the sexual and plagiarism scandals of Russian representatives, for instance, are often excised.
By the end of the event, the MDI ultimately championed feminist rage as a tool for activism and achieved its goal of closing gender gaps by recruiting 25 new Wikipedia editors.
The article quotes an expert on Wikipedia who says some of them may have never wanted an entry to be made but someone did and now they have to try to get control of the message.
But as is the case in Israeli politics, nothing is that simple in Wikipedia's politics, certainly not in Hebrew Wikipedia when it comes to Netanyahu.
Multiple on-campus organizations and undergraduate students put their heads together to expand accessible knowledge on Wikipedia of six underrepresented Black artists last Friday.
Much of the free information available on Wikipedia has succumbed to such sensationalist news and recentism. More and more editors take on particular causes that they proudly display on their user pages using current events and sources to promote that cause.
Although Wikipedia may have gone woke, it is probably not in the pocket of intelligence agencies. Still, it would be naive to imagine that the bosses at the Wikimedia Foundation aren't at least trying to use Wikipedia as a tool to propagate their social-justice agenda.
Last week, the Minister of Digital Development, Maksut Shadaev, said that Russia does not yet intend to block Wikipedia. But that the calls for a shutdown have increased, while a lot of investment is being made in the Russian copy. - Ruwiki filters Wikipedia articles from lies. It is important that we create our own resources where our citizens can obtain objective information cleaned of propaganda, says Gorelkin on Telegram.
Beyond its internal mechanisms, Wikipedia fosters a culture of fact-checking among its volunteer editors and patrollers.
For now, Ruwiki exists alongside Wikipedia's Russian-language version, which continues after Wikimedia RU's closure, although it's anyone's guess as to how long that will stay true. Wikipedia is a regular target of attacks by the Russian government, and although the state said it had no plans to block the website in April last year, that was before Ruwiki got off the ground.
I am a professional writer and editor, and so it may seem odd that I now spend time putting Catholic sisters' biographies on Wikipedia instead of, say, into standard Oxford University Press reference works, but I do it because of the impact.
But should we not seek the truth? Yes, of course. Nonetheless, as Maher said, like the volunteer writers of Wikipedia, we also must focus on "the best of what we can know right now." That is a statement of intellectual humility, not of relativism. Complex topics and problems do not lend themselves to easy assessments of truth in real time. Through broad sourcing, the Wikipedia model in theory moves us to closer approximations of what is true.
And with generative artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT scraping Wikipedia for copyright-free material to use as grist for their responses, Sancinito says it is more important than ever that the site be trustworthy. "I would rather AI be scraping Wikipedia than someone's conspiracy theory, but it means we have to make sure what we're putting out there is reliable," she says.
The analysis indicates that 11% of all references linked on Wikipedia are no longer accessible. On about 2% of source pages containing reference links, every link on the page was broken or otherwise inaccessible, while another 53% of pages contained at least one broken link.
At least one of the headlines flashing in the video appears to be text that is copied verbatim from a Wikipedia entry on World War I: "German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich."