| 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 2021, sorted chronologically.
David Collier, a former Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley, on Thursday published an extensive report accusing Wikipedia of fomenting anti-Semitism.
In 2013, photographer Kyle Cassidy uploaded one of his images to Wikimedia Commons and released it into the public domain. ... Nearly seven years later, the photo was at the center of a bizarre scam involving affiliate links, a fake copyright enforcement company, and a Wikipedia user improbably named 'Aldwin Sturdivant.'
Changes proposed by the Wikimedia Foundation to diversify its community of editors raise existential questions for the online encyclopedia.
This is Jess Wade, an experimental physicist at Imperial College London. For years, her relationship to Wikipedia was a casual one. ... Until she realized that this website, which is edited by millions of volunteers, sees 300 billion page views every day on average, has the power to influence the direction of scientific research.
But Wikipedia—written by amateurs, freely available to all—stands as the great exception. It is the dream that worked.
On January 15th Wikipedia—'the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit'—will celebrate its 20th anniversary. It will do so as the biggest and most-read reference work ever. Wikipedia hosts more than 55m articles in hundreds of languages, each written by volunteers. Its 6.2m English-language articles alone would fill some 2,800 volumes in print. Alexa Internet, a web-analysis firm, ranks Wikipedia as the 13th-most-popular site on the internet, ahead of Reddit, Netflix and Instagram.
The site's volunteer workforce has plateaued in the West, but is surging in Asia and Africa.
There is some artificial intelligence involved in keeping Wikipedia going, but it remains an ongoing triumph of human ingenuity. And in more profound ways, 2020 was a very good year for Wikipedia. Quietly so. Based in part on what it didn't do.
Wikipedia's guidelines to its editors include 'Assume Good Faith' and 'Please Do Not Bite the Newcomers.' Perhaps this is more than the naughty world deserves.
Jangid felt that the purpose behind becoming an editor and content curator is for making it easier for Hindi-speaking people to find what they are looking for in the website.
A small but active group of volunteers spend their free time updating Wikipedia – the free online encyclopaedia which turns 20 this week – to ensure information it carries about the country and its culture is always up to date.
A new study ... uses Wikipedia browsing as a method for describing curiosity styles. Using a branch of mathematics known as graph theory, their analysis of curiosity opens doors for using it as a tool to improve learning and life satisfaction.
22-year-old Raju Jangid from Rajasthan, a school drop out and a carpenter by profession, ... wrote 1,800 articles and edited 57,000 pages on Wikipedia using a Samsung s5610 and went on to become Wikipedia's Hindi Editor.
With the benefit of hindsight, it may seem inevitable that someone, at some point, would have invented a platform like Wikipedia. But in truth, the creation of this online marvel was not predestined.
CALL IT a love for his mother tongue 'Hindi' or his passion to invent something new that a school drop out, a carpenter by profession, turned into a Wikipedia editor and wrote 1,800 articles for its pages using his humble old vanilla plain mobile's keypad.
Wikipedia has become a bit like the internet itself for people — something you take for granted and use often, but perhaps seldom take the time to think about.
But let's be honest with ourselves: when an intellectual needs to get primary information on a topic unknown to him, over these twenty years it has become habitual to open Wikipedia first, only later referring to professional encyclopaedias, textbooks and articles.
'Storming'? 'Insurrection'? 'Riot'? 'Attempted coup'? On Wikipedia, where neutrality is prized above all, volunteers are still searching for the words.
On the 20th anniversary, OneZero asked the individuals who made Wikipedia what it is today how it all started.
We need journalism that reveals how the act of collecting knowledge—and even the concept of knowledge itself—is complex.
For example, entries about Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in March 2014, differ depending on the language. DW's fact-check team analyzed the German, Russian and Ukrainian entries.
If the choices are between volunteering a few minutes' time to make Wikipedia better or else passively consuming more social media, the active option is superior.
Comparing Wikipedia to a role-playing game is useful, as it helps people understand why Wikipedians are so reluctant to recognize external expertise.
If there's a lesson to be learned from Wikipedia's continued success, it's this: build people the tools to effectively call out bullshit, and, like baseball-playing ghosts emerging from an Iowa cornfield, they will come.
Amid heightened concerns about the spread of disinformation and misinformation, Wikipedia's pages on controversial topics—such as QAnon and the Proud Boys—can be a balm.
The free, open-source encyclopedia is a monument of human cooperation and collaboration.
Disputes over capitalization, André the Giant's height, and myriad other minor matters may not be consequential to most. But for some Wiki editors, it's a big deal.
It is where everyone from students, to politicians to yes, journalists, turn for a quick briefing on any subject, although even Wikipedia says it should not be used as a primary source.
Scott says that South African Wikipedia needs more content written in South African languages other than English. 'This is where one person could make a huge positive difference. One person who really cares about their language,' he says.
But 20 years on, it is difficult to deny that Wikipedia has proved the naysayers wrong. Whether it is the last gasp of a vision of the internet that has all but died out, or a shining beacon lighting the way to a better future, remains to be seen.
Unlike traditional encyclopedias, contributions by non-experts are welcome, which has driven innumerable debates about its content and have led to restrictions on updating certain entries.
Bermula dengan memasukkan maklumat tulisan Jawi bagi perkataan 'teks', Taufik Rosman, 22, yang juga penyunting Wikipedia Malaysia sudah menterjemah kira-kira 1,000 rencana dalam Bahasa Inggeris kepada Bahasa Melayu.
But despite being the seventh most-visited site in the world in 2020, Wikipedia still seems different. It is the only not-for-profit in the top 10, with no adverts, no data collection and no billionaire CEO. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers maintain and create pages for free, correcting one another and upholding an impressive veracity.
The Karavali Wikimedians User Group, having those who write mainly for the Kannada, the Tulu, and the Konkani editions of Wikipedia, on Saturday appealed to doctors to contribute India-specific articles on medical sector.
After extensive communication on the matter, Wikipedia has been finally served with the notice to remove the sacrilegious content to avoid any legal action. In case the platforms remain non-compliant, PTA shall be constrained to initiate further action under Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 (#PECA) and Rules 2020.
A team of fiercely dedicated women Wikipedians is working around the clock and around the globe to write themselves into the pages of history, one edit at a time.
A stable and functional community creates the Czech Wikipedia entries. That makes it all the more startling when an obvious trap for Czech readers is discovered lying in wait.
I had been indefinitely blocked as a Wikipedia editor...As far as Dark Emu is concerned, it seems to me that Wikipedia is just another cog in a vast ideological racket dedicated to making sure that Bruce Pascoe is never held to account for his manifest deceptions. Indeed, despite its claims to honesty and any inclination to bias, Wikipedia has once again demontrated the truth of O'Sullivan's Law, which states 'all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.'
At the time, I thought that was one of the dumbest ideas I had ever heard. 'Anyone' in theory means 'everyone' and while I don't know everyone, I know quite a few people who should not be editing an encyclopedia.
Want an example of how Wikipedia is another social media giant now busy censoring conservatives - and the truth? Bruce Pascoe's error-riddled book Dark Emu gets rave coverage in an entry in Wikipedia...But here are just some of the responses from Wikipedia editors to requests from to Dark Emu Exposed, O'Brien and other readers to balance their Dark Emu entry by at least mentioning the criticisms of it and the controversy it has caused.
These images include some of the library's most important photographic collections, and contribute to the single largest batch of uploads ever contributed to Wikimedia Commons.
'At the risk of becoming tedious, I wonder if I might again take readers to the People's Republic of Wikipedia, where, with apologies to Martin Luther king, my book Bitter Harvest was judged not on the character of its content but by the colour of its author'.
The solution to systemic biases that plague the web remains unclear. But libraries, museums, individual editors and the Wikimedia Foundation itself continue to make efforts to improve gender representation on sites such as Wikipedia.
The foundation that operates Wikipedia will launch its first global code of conduct, seeking to address criticism that it has failed to combat harassment and suffers from a lack of diversity.
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.
With the new code, the foundation wants to create a global set of community standards for addressing negative behaviour on the site by laying out a set of guidelines of expected and unacceptable behaviour.
The code bans all the usual suspects: insults, sexual harassment, threats, doxxing and trolling - as well as abuse of power and content vandalism.
What Wikipedia illustrates is that the problems with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms aren't that they are social or that they're populated by user-generated content. It's their business models.
Katherine Maher, the Wikimedia Foundation's CEO, will step down as of April 15, leaving the nonprofit in a vastly stronger position than when she joined in 2014.
So you see, Turkish government, there's not some CIA backed conspiracy to discredit you using Wikipedia, it's just Ed, the millionaires guy from North London who, like any good Wikipedia editor, simply recorded what other journalists had already published about the president's son on his Wikipedia page.
We asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell us which fascinating yet disturbing Wikipedia pages completely engrossed them.
Therefore, the articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are very different in English, Hebrew and Arabic. For example, while almost all Wikipedias use the term the 'West Bank,' Hebrew Wikipedia has for years opted for 'Judea and Samaria.' Moreover, while all content on all Wikipedias must be neutral and based on respected sources, the editorial practices of each language community is different, enforcing certain views of what is considered neutral at the expense of other outlooks.
The two main pages for 'Socialism' and 'Communism' span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved. 'The omission of large-scale mass murder, slave labor, and man-made famines is negligent and deeply misleading,' economics professor Bryan Caplan, who has studied the history of communism, told Fox News.
NetBlocks also informed that internet services in the country had been blacked out for the past six days.
Wikipedia pages related to socialism and communism contain show how the website has 'become merely left-wing advocacy essays,' according to Fox News.
Black Lunch Table recently partnered with four Minneapolis art institutions for a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, a volunteer event focused on writing Wikipedia biographies for Black artists across the country, during the first weekend of February.
I spent a year working on adding more accurate information on political science. Here's what I learned.
On International Women's Day, Cornellians are joining a global effort to raise the visibility of women artists, writers, and performers on Wikipedia.
Perhaps more fascinating than the pandemic's central article are the 31,889 pages that link to it.
We propose that the citation rate on Wikipedia, next to the traditionalcitation index, may be a good indicator of the work's impact in the field of psychology.
An analysis of 223 million edits to Wikipedia between 2018 and 2020 shows a 20 per cent increase in the number of changes made to pages on the English-language version between January and September 2020.
To those outside the Wikipedia community, it might seem rather strange that Wikipedians are so passionate about the issue of governance by and for their decentralized group of volunteers. But that's what arguably makes Wikipedia so special compared with other sites.
Our aim is not just to get more women journalists onto Wikipedia; it is to get more women journalists into the magazine articles, business reviews, profiles and records of our lives.
The Met is one of 57 institutions around the world holding an Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon for Women's History Month.
With the COVID-19 pandemic's outbreak at the beginning of 2020, millions across the world flocked to Wikipedia to read about the virus. Our study offers an in-depth analysis of the scientific backbone supporting Wikipedia's COVID-19 articles
On Wikipedia, it is generally accepted that birth names needn't be mentioned when the subject becomes notable under a different name. When a subject isn't a household name, their wish for privacy is meant to be taken into account, a practice outlined at Wikipedia in a policy called 'Biographies of living people: Privacy of names.'
With the WikiAfrica Education Programn now working with schools across the continent to get Wikipedia skills into school curriculums, Sanneh has time to turn his attention to other projects.
Like everything the Left infiltrates, subverts and conquers, Wikipedia has been made not merely useless as a reliable source but intentionally and grossly misleading.
To be notable, your work has to be noted. Who's doing the noticing can make a real difference, especially when content is crowdsourced.
While social media sites have been criticized for helping spread COVID misinformation and conspiracy theories, Wikipedia strives to be accurate and to actively fight misinformation.
Now Wikipedia is seeking to rebalance its relationships with Google and other big tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, whose platforms and virtual assistants lean on Wikipedia as a cost-free virtual crib sheet.
Fascinated by her work, we asked Annie to compile and break down what she believes might just be the 10 weirdest things from the depths of Wikipedia. Find enlightenment below.
But Wikipedia exists in 302 languages—thus more than one page for each subject exists across the globe. The statement by Maher itself reveals a false assumption: Yes, the English Wikipedia is viewed by 'people across the globe.' But other language versions, such as Japanese, are primarily viewed and edited by people of a particular nation.
Ever wondered who's working behind the scenes to keep New Zealand information on Wikipedia accurate and up to date? You'll find 20 of them in Hokitika this weekend for New Zealand's first ever Wikipedia conference.
everything our species has learned and experienced, written, digitized and catalogued in easily digestible records. And it is all a few screen taps away. If only things were that simple.
The Edit-a-thon is aimed at editing Wikipedia articles on women artists, particularly those related to the University at Albany Fine Art Collections and the University Art Museum's current and past exhibitions.
'They think we were presenting inaccurate information, because it did not match the official history narrative of the government,' said Ramzy. 'The weird thing is, it was only Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia they were campaigning to boycott, not Wikipedia English, where they could clearly see that the story [there] is more antigovernment than ours.'
Attendees will be encouraged to use their new skills to create or edit a Wikipedia page. A list of artists who do not have Wikipedia pages or whose pages need edits will be provided.
the lack of diversity [amongst editors] trickles to the content on the site, because it's volunteer-based, so editors will work on pages that they are interested in. [...] if you have information gaps in Wikipedia ... it echoes across the internet
The usage of the title 'Wikipedia' in JN articles is very interesting. It demonstrates that Wikipedia is indeed commonly known.
The Anti-Defamation League has paused a project in which its staff members edited Wikipedia using pseudonyms after coming under fire from Wikipedia editors for potentially violating the online encyolpedia's rules regarding conflicts of interest.
Through Project Rewrite, re-launched to mark Women's History Month this year, the foundation seeks to call on journalists, writers, and thought leaders from around the world to tell women's stories and address the gender gaps that exist in the knowledge ecosystem.
This one's not as ha-ha funny, but it shows how Wikipedia can become a battleground. From 2004 until 2019, Wikipedia used dry, academic language to tell readers about the horrors of Konzentrationslager Warschau, where the Nazis exterminated over 200,000 Poles during their occupation of Warsaw.
'It's a pretty hostile environment, just like any online environment can be for women,' she said. 'There's a whole group of people that say we're pushing an agenda. It's too feminist, that sort of stuff.'
Using Wikipedia, marketers can identify potential content topics in a fashion similar to broken link building, according to Nate Shivar, an internet publisher.
Pretty much every AI company, including the organizations I manage or advise, is using Wikipedia in one way or another. It is used in full or in part by most of the major AI systems employing natural language processing (NLP) techniques and advanced transformer neural networks.
Atayal and Seediq, two endangered languages in Taiwan, were added to Wikipedia today as language options, as part of the government's plan to preserve Indigenous languages and culture.
Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited site on earth, but in an interview, Adama Sanneh, co-founder and CEO of the Moleskine Foundation, explained that there are more entries about the City of Paris than about the entire African continent. To address this problem, Wikipedia has worked with Sanneh, the Moleskine Foundation and thousands of young people across the continent to add more information about the dozens of countries and cultures across Africa.
Wikipedia is an example that tells us that a human powered, tech enabled not for profit success is not a Utopia. We can say cheers to that!
The Taiwanese government has launched development of Wikipedia entries in the Indigenous languages, with the most recent developments including articles in Seediq and Atayal.
Despite the craziness you might find on there, Wikipedia has a lot of interesting and useful information, but can you really believe what you read on Wikipedia? The main concern is that anyone can edit Wikipedia, thus resulting in vandalism and complete nonsense. However, that's not exactly true.
I use Wikipedia a lot, and I am always impressed by its astonishing depth and insanely narrow focus. I have given them money, and that prompted a recent e-mail that asked for something a bit startling. They want me to put them in my will.
I asked the question could I bake in accessibility options to the new design that would break down these barriers and make Wikipedia more accessible to people.
Launched in 2003, Arabic Wikipedia has seen growth accelerate in recent years, with the number of articles more than doubling since 2015 thanks to enthusiastic volunteers across the Arab world.
The WMF's financial independence is clearly not at any risk. So what is going on? The official answer is that the WMF thinks you can never have too much money put aside for a rainy day. The WMF also has high-flying, global plans to 'become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge' by 2030.
Where that money is going is increasingly an issue for conservatives. But to understand how the money flows, we need to remember that we're talking about two things. There's the website, Wikipedia.org – and then there's the registered non-profit charity, the Wikimedia Foundation, which collects fundraising cash.
Palestinian photographer Osama Silwadi, who judged the competition, told The National that he was primarily looking for pictures that showed the cultural and civilisational aspect of food preparation and table arrangement.
Wikipedia is this crazy internet utopia that's somehow escaped the claw of capitalism, and I never want to take it for granted. It's what the internet was supposed to be— collaborative and constructive and democratic and untouched by ads.
Among the 54 new entries are Brooke Prentis, Indigenous Christian leader and CEO of Common Grace; Cecilia Dowling, a devout Christian and Temperance activist at the turn of the 20th Century.
In my book I (Amy Bruckman) argue that the content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created. ... On the other hand, a less popular Wikipedia page might not be reliable at all.
One of the evolutions that have definitely occurred is references at the end of each entry ... If it's not cited properly, if there is no citation, it tells you that the evidence is weak.
So I also read about a movie's production, reception, and, if I'm lucky, associated controversies—all of which basically makes me an insider, regardless of whether I actually finish the thing. And, I mean, isn't that pretty much why God invented Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia?
'I have a new appreciation for Wikipedia editors and Wikipedia itself,' said Katherine Shaffer, who took both courses featuring the Wikipedia projects. 'A lot of work goes into making those articles and it's pretty amazing that such a wealth of information is available to the public for free. However, after learning how to properly critique Wikipedia articles I have seen many that have unreliable sources or unsupported information, so I make sure to double check information now.'
While Wikipedia may not technically be a monopoly, it is clear that the groupthink-driven website has a vise grip on the dissemination of knowledge.
On Wikipedia, disruptive 'edit wars' have broken out. Users have been caught operating multiple accounts and pushing their own point of view. And while editors have held back the most spurious claims through much of 2020, a different atmosphere has descended over the debate in 2021. The community is divided, and some fear the endless discussions could tear a hole in the encyclopedia's ironclad guidelines.
In my new book, We'll Tell You What to Think: Wikipedia, Propaganda and the Making of Liberal Consensus, I expose who funds Wikipedia, what their intentions are, and how they seek to shape narratives favorable to neoliberal capitalism and the US empire.
Sex bias on Wikipedia is alarming for many reasons. First, it's the textbook definition of a traditionally male-dominated workplace. Second, there's a disturbing dearth of information about women's history and related page topics on Wikipedia. Therefore, a male-centric narrative of history has spread on the internet like wildfire.
After an extended discussion process, the Wikipedia editing community decided that the Daily Mail was a 'generally unreliable' source that should not be used on Wikipedia.
A total of 96 teachers enrolled in the pilot scheme in Morocco and the training materials that were used (in a progressive three module layout, culminating in a certificate) are accessible for free on Wikimedia Commons. The Teacher's guide was localized and translated from English into Spanish, Arabic, and Tagalog.
Now there are threats that the keyboard warriors may soon face real-life consequences: their mainland counterparts have threatened to report Hongkongers who are working to preserve information and narratives on Wikipedia to the city's national security police hotline.
Women who meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion are just more likely to be considered non-notable and less worthy for inclusion than men.
Abbad Diraneyya, the chief coordinator of Wikimedia Levant, has been part of the Wikipedia community since 2009. 'As a home-schooled student, I always had the passion for researching topics I like,' Diraneyya told The Jordan Times.
An administrator and long-time editor of Wikipedia's Cantonese and English editions Deryck Chan said he encourages Hong Kong users to use a unique identity on Wikipedia and apply for VPN exemptions.
'Can you trust it to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,' said Mr Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 alongside Jimmy Wales.
Sanger said that plenty of Republicans use Wikipedia and would be eager to go into articles and make editors to bring a semblance of balance to the stories. But the site won't allow it, he claims.
'Please take Wikipedia out of your life, it's a joke,' Nadia said on Morning at Home. Actor Imran Abbas, who was a guest on the show, shared his Wikipedia woes too, saying that 80% of the information about him on the site is misleading.
'Wikipedia is known, now, by everyone to have a lot of influence in the world … so there is a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the articles say what somebody wants them to say,' Sanger said, adding the site has a liberal bias.
Now, he insisted, conservative voices are 'sternly warned if not kicked out' if they try to add a different take on establishment views — which Sanger deemed 'propaganda.'
Larry Sanger, an American philosopher who co-founded the website in 2001, said the online reference bible seemed to assume 'that there is only one legitimate defensible version of the truth on any controversial question'.
However, as Wikipedia expands in readership and influence, it seems to be following the trend set by traditional academia. The contention that any forum for free exchange of opinion on socio-political issues cannot survive expansion in scale and reputation may sound pessimistic.
What the United States needs if it hopes to combat misinformation is a better system for communicating with the public—a system that keeps up with continuous changes in scientific knowledge; ... Fortunately, the internet has produced a model for this approach: Wikipedia.
Every Wikipedia page that deals with the history of Jews or Israel – is tainted. The website spreads 'fake news' and provides legitimacy to antisemitic arguments.
Larry Sanger joined 'Tucker Carlson Tonight,' and said that because Wikipedia allows anonymous contribution, it has been taken advantage of by governments, corporations, criminal entities and other agents who 'play the Wikipedia game' to create the desired 'factual' result on a particular webpage.
On balance, Wikipedia is a great resource to have on hand throughout the Tokyo Games, so long as the users are aware of its imperfections.
He gives as an example the fact that alternative medicines, such as homeopathy, are defined as pseudoscience and 'proven ineffective'. This, he says, is not treating the subject truly neutrally.
When Fraser told his friends what he was working on, several were amused. His girlfriend is puzzled by the exercise, which ate up hours of his summer, but that doesn't faze him. 'At least I'm being quiet,' he says. 'It's as harmless a hobby as you get.'
I've never trusted tricky dicky Wikipedia, with its unidentified editors, crowdsourced information and shifting footnote sands. It turns out not even its creators trust it.
A recent probe by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reveals major historical revisionism by far-right forces in its Croatian and Serbian versions. But it also exposes the dangerous overlap between nationalism and disinformation online.
Wikimedia's report cited an 'organised disinformation campaign', saying that across the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language spectrum was a 'systematic distortion of facts' about war criminals convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia.
The most robust online user-generated encyclopedia, largely edited by white male editors, tends to leave out African topics and issues, or perpetuate negative images about the African continent.
In a Twitter thread blaming 'Hindu right' for inciting 'violence against Muslims in India', the verified handle of Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) which claims to be the largest advocacy organization of Indian Muslims in the United States, put out a graphic card claiming that in 2020, 53 Muslims were killed by Hindutva mobs in Delhi. As per Wikipedia page on the riots, a total of 53 people lost their lives during the unfortunate aftermath of CAA protests between February 23, 2o20 and February 29, 2020.
But Wikipedia exists in more than 300 languages, half of which have fewer than ten active contributors. These non-English versions of Wikipedia can be especially vulnerable to being manipulated by ideologically motivated networks.
Wales added that at this point it was time for him to move on to some of his other interests as soon as he looked up one more thing.
With a target of 20 new Wikipedia articles, in the first two months Lisa and her Edit-a-thon volunteers have created 62 new articles including Kila Kokonut Krew, Oamaru Opera House, choreographer Jack Gray, costume designer Kate Hawley and director Sara Brodie.
An active contributor since 2014, this year's Wikimedian has been responsible for nearly 500,000 edits across Wikimedia. He is both an administrator and an editor of Arabic Wikipedia, the 10th most-viewed language in the online encyclopedia, and has contributed to more than 170,000 edits to the site, most of which focus on medical and health subjects.
The changes, which were only in place for a few minutes before the pages reverted to their usual contents, removed all the text and images from the pages and replaced them with a bright red background and large Swastika image, which is also the German Nazi Party's flag.
According to the Wikimedia spokesperson, the vandalism featuring the Nazi flag 'was reverted by Wikipedia volunteers within five minutes' and volunteer administrators added additional protections to the template within 15 minutes.
Instead of targeting the content on any particular Wikipedia page, the vandal behind this blitz targeted a particular article template used by more than 50,000 different Wikipedia pages, including those for Jennifer Lopez, Joe Biden, and Discworld author Terry Pratchett.
'So there's already this first layer of difficulty when it comes to adding women, because there's just less material out there in the world that is required in order to establish notability on Wikipedia,' she said.
Wikipedia is also the last remaining relic of the ideals of the early internet. And as we worry about a future without reliable information that we can all agree upon, Wikipedia is not just an exception. It is the blueprint for restoring public trust in the web again.
Choose a category, skip around, or read them all: The exact nature of your journey into the Wikipedia rabbit hole is totally up to you.
a new initiative that could theoretically unify the information presented by all of the other Wikipedias, a proposed language-independent encyclopedia that has been generating buzz and prompting a lot of questions within the free content movement.
The glorifying language, Coffman thinks, is a clear sign that this is historical fan fiction. It elides the horrors of war. If editors want such details to stay on the page, at a minimum they should use a better source than Axis History, a blog whose motto is 'Information not shared is lost.'
The early-2000s decision to define Wikipedia by what it is not—not a memorial site, not a social networking service, not a blog or a breaking news site—helped Wikipedia retain its identity as an encyclopedia.
The volunteers who documented the attacks on the fledgling site were also laying a foundation for its future.
Some Wikipedia users were 'physically harmed as a result of such infiltration,' Dennis said, without elaborating. 'With this confirmed, we have no choice but to act swiftly and appropriately in response.'
The majority of Wikipedia's language editions have only a handful of editors, while fewer than 20% of editors identify as women and its readers are overwhelming male.
Wikipedia's longtime struggle to diversify the army of volunteer moderators who edit the site isn't lost on the incoming CEO of its parent organization. In fact, Maryana Iskander...said equity is a topic near and dear to her heart—and to the principles of Wikimedia, which runs Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has suffered an 'infiltration' that sought to advance the aims of China, the US non-profit organisation that owns the volunteer-edited encyclopaedia has said. The Wikimedia Foundation told BBC News the infiltration had threatened the 'very foundations of Wikipedia'. The foundation banned seven editors linked to a mainland China group.
Wikipedia has banned seven editors after an 'infiltration' designed to promote 'the aims of China', according to the group behind the site.
An insider of the volunteer-led group, who requested to be anonymous, told the Global Times on Thursday that the 'office action' of the foundation has 'significantly changed' the 'political landscape' of Chinese language Wikipedia, and 'hugely impaired' the neutrality of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that is edited by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Now, just as a new chief executive takes over, a bitter dispute has erupted between volunteer editors of the online encyclopedia's Chinese language edition over how events in Hong Kong are portrayed.
The foundation is battling against 'capture' by a group that seeks to edit Wikipedia to advance a particular viewpoint, she wrote, adding: 'Controlling content was an aim.'
How can someone be so persistent in doing something like this voluntarily, without any remuneration? 'This might be a free, voluntary, even thankless job. But the amount of knowledge I've gained, the number of people I've encountered, and the number of platforms I've been to - I don't think it can be bought for any amount of money. Only the passionate hearts will understand this quest,' this was Subrata's response to the question.
Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation, the group that oversees Wikipedia, announced that Maryana Iskander, a social entrepreneur in South Africa who has worked for years in nonprofits tackling youth unemployment and women's rights, will become its chief executive in January.
The infiltration concerns surrounding doxxing and threats within the Chinese Wikipedia community escalated after the "edit war" between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese editors on entries related to the 2019 Hong Kong protests was picked up by a number of media outlets in Hong Kong.
The event is organised by the group Women in Red, a volunteer organisation within Wikipedia whose aim is to reduce the "gender gap": the disportionate number of biographies in the online encyclopedia devoted to men.
Sanger criticized Wikipedia, suggesting that it has recently moved to "follow the news media." "More recently, they've gotten rid of almost all conservative news sources as sources for their articles," he explained. "And so as the news media has shifted, and as the establishment, frankly, has shifted more to the left or to the left, the content of Wikipedia has followed suit."
Over the next four weeks, the foundation will release online multimedia content built by the local creatives who will highlight a variety of topics, from popular culture and social politics to the evolution of African cinema.
Speaking to OpIndia last November, [Larry] Sanger said that Wikipedia is among one of the most highly trafficked websites run by anonymous people with no accountability who push partisan politics.
Elturk noted that at present, users of the Wikipedia community in Azerbaijan continue to create pages about martyrs in the online encyclopedia.
Meet Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) electrical and electronics engineering alumnus Dody Ismoyo, one of the world's top 200 most active English-language Wikipedia editors.
Tune in to this live program as we introduce you to inspiring women in STEM, talk about the importance of representation online, and check in on the progress of the edit-a-thon as as the Wikipedians add information to the online encyclopedia.
What started as a quarantine project is now a beloved corner of the internet that teaches followers invaluable wacky trivia on the regular. I called Rauwerda to chat about her longtime love of Wikipedia, which of her posts get the most traction, and her favorite niche places on the internet.
While Wikipedia is the world's 13th-most-visited website, it suffers from a dearth of information about Africa.
So far, media coverage of the bans has differed wildly between pro-Beijing and Western sources. According to the Global Times, a daily tabloid newspaper controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, the incident amounted to a "well-calculated suppression" of mainland Chinese editors. Meanwhile, the BBC noted in an article that the threat of capture by the CCP was a risk that "threatened the very foundations of Wikipedia."
There are technology models rooted in the public good that can help to overcome this problem. One such model is offered by Wikipedia, the world's largest free encyclopedia, which has been a resource for many South Africans as they seek to learn more about the local government elections, politicians and political parties, and decide who gets their vote.
While some famous people have advertised a personal connection to the article they edit by choosing user names like AmyFisher and RichardDawkins, others have tried to whitewash articles about themselves or their employers under the cover of anonymous editing, which Wikipedia allows. There's a catch, however.
Matters came to a head in September when Wikipedia's governing body banned seven active pro-Beijing editors and removed the administrative powers of a further 12.
In the future, we hope first-year university students enter our classrooms already understanding the value of Wikipedia. This will mean a widespread cultural shift has taken place in Australian primary and secondary schools. In a time of climate change and pandemics, everyone needs to be able to separate fact from fiction. Wikipedia can be part of the remedy.
Richard Desmond, the billionaire former owner of adult television channels and top-shelf magazines, has spent years having his Wikipedia edited in a failed attempt to remove any suggestion he is a "pornographer".
I'm not saying replacing Twitter and/or Instagram with Wikipedia is going to transform your life. But I can definitely vouch for spending some time following your curiosity, instead of an algorithm.
Award-winning journalist and author Caroline Overington shared a Walkley award for exposing a literary hoax involving author Norma Khouri while US correspondent for this masthead. That much we know from Overington's Wikipedia page, which faithfully lists The Australian literary editor's 13 books and numerous awards. Of more interest is what the page doesn't reveal. Specifically, several paragraphs from the entry have mysteriously gone walkabout amid signs that the website has been "rinsed" of some unflattering content. It has to be said that CBD has no evidence Overington herself has anything to do with the deletions.
The tool is used today to create a new article every three minutes and although not all of the content it creates is perfect, fewer articles are deleted than are made.
The 20-year-old encyclopedia -- which even has an article devoted to its own controversies -- has received positive accolades in recent years for its fact-checking capacities. Though it's a sprawling platform, the site does not seek to make money and so avoids the profit-over-safety criticism that has battered Facebook, for example.
Kolbe said he'd like to see the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that owns and operates Wikipedia, assign paid staff to verifying police-sourced photos that appear on the site. "These are photos of real people," he said. "This case shows that, given Wikipedia's reach and quasi-online monopoly, a mistake can cause real suffering."
Several foreign-language Wikipedia pages seen by BBC News are promoting conspiracy theories and making misleading claims about climate change.
The charity that maintains Wikipedia has developed AI that can spot contradictory claims in articles and alert the human editors who write and edit the collective encyclopedia.
Today, it feels as though large groups of people on the internet eventually succumb to partisanship and anger. Indeed, it's in this precise climate that Wikipedia is a particular beacon of hope for collaboration.
Out of the 77 individuals included in the Black Archives project, 54% already had their own Wikipedia articles and 45% did not. But even the ones who did have articles may be lacking information.
To have a good Wikipedia page, I recommend to have several registered users contribute to it. Pages with no editing history are more likely to be flagged for deletion in my experience. You may be able to avoid this by having multiple users make edits to the page routinely. ... If you're writing the article yourself, you may want to seek advice from professional Wikipedia writers. (Disclosure: My company provides this service.)
We want to normalize having a disability in the workforce and really reiterate that we're everywhere; we're all around you and you just don't know it. So when you go to read that book or look up this famous person, that you can see that in addition to having all of the success they've had, they also have a disability.
The idea is to train volunteers to edit or create new Wikipedia articles about the domestic music scene to increase its visibility worldwide.
It's hard not getting stuck reading a bunch of Wikipedia pages...especially when they're CREEPY Wiki pages. And here are some of the creepiest ones people came across in 2021:
The Wikimedia Foundation is my first choice for giving. I use Wikipedia, which was born 20 years ago, just about every day. I hugely admire the hundreds of thousands of people who write and edit its pages.
While "Wikipedia is not a democracy," one of its precepts says, it may be the closest thing we have to a digital one. And as the internet moves in the other direction, increasingly fragmented and authoritarian, polarized and misinformed, fueled by for-profit scams and sectarian politics, keeping this democratic system will mean fighting for it.
It has been fascinating to watch the WMF professionalise over the past decade, and begin to mirror some of the grotesque behaviour that discredits the NGO and charity sectors. The WMF has ballooned from a half a dozen staff to over 500, with many on six-figure salaries.
We've pulled together the most-read English-language Wikipedia page for every day of 2021 excluding the Main Page and the Search page, which often occupy the top spot. This article will be updated daily until the end of the year. Let's take a look:
Wikipedia has for so long been plagued by climate change denial. But a group of dedicated volunteers around the world is working tirelessly to keep the deniers at bay
A native of Indonesia and with a master's degree from Australia, Dody Ismoyo might seem to be an unlikely candidate for the role of founder and president of the Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia.
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