User:Enimust

Hi, I'm Eni Mustafaraj. I'm a computer science college professor and researcher. I study sociotechnical systems such as Google, Twitter, and recently, Wikipedia. Among others, I'm interested in the interaction between such systems, because they provide value for one-another. For example, Wikipedia snippets play an important role in Google Search results, featuring prominently in the Knowledge Panel section. In turn, users of Google Search rely on such snippets to learn about different entities, for example, news sources.

I recently co-authored a paper, Investigating the Effects of Google's Search Engine Result Page in Evaluating the Credibility of Online News Sources, in which we discovered that a large number of newspapers published in the United States, do not have a Wikipedia article. Thus, when users search about such newspapers on Google, they cannot see a Knowledge Panel on the right side. This might contribute in users being more doubtful of the legitimacy of news sources. This is true even for newspapers that have a Knowledge Panel which is populated sparsely.

I am currently participating in a project initiated by user:Michaelacaulfield to improve the coverage of historic local newspapers in Wikipedia. One of the best ways to help readers sort out whether a newspaper is real or fake is to check Wikipedia to see if it has an article (and what that article says). Having newspapers documented is also crucial to Wikipedia internally, since many historical claims are sourced to local papers, and editors require context on the nature of the publication the material appears in. This project, Local Historical Newspapers on Wikipedia (LHNOW) will help to improve the quality and reliability of local news sources, particularly historic newspapers.