Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-09-20/In the news

Talk show host fails to heed own warnings not to rely on Wikipedia
An article in The New York Times, "Limbaugh taken in: the judge was not loaded for bear", reports that conservative US talk show host Rush Limbaugh relied on erroneous information from the Wikipedia article about federal judge Roger Vinson when he told listeners that Vinson is an avid hunter and hobby taxidermist who, in 2003, hung the stuffed heads of three bears killed by himself over a courtroom door, to "instill the fear of God" into the accused. Limbaugh insinuated that this might improve the chances of the court case against President Obama's health-care act which Vinson is currently hearing.

The hoax information had been added by a new user on September 13 (UTC), who removed it the next day. Denying that the statement was based on Wikipedia, a spokesman said it came from an article on the website of the Pensacola News Journal – coincidentally the offline reference cited in the Wikipedia article (but with a non-existent date: "June 31, 2003"). However, its managing editor denied it had ever published such an article – a point also made in its own coverage of the affair (Rush Limbaugh falls for wacky hoax about Judge Roger Vinson).

Less than a year ago, Limbaugh criticized journalists who rely on Wikipedia without fact-checking as "literal professional scum", after false quotes attributed to him in Wikiquote made it into the media (see Signpost coverage). In 2005, he criticized Wikipedia as biased and announced he would insert the word "afristocracy" into Wikipedia to "spread" it (see Signpost coverage and deletion discussion).

Student newspapers cover Wikimedia's Public Policy Initiative
After extensive articles about the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative had appeared in Inside Higher Ed and USA Today (see last week's In the news), two student newspapers covered it from a local perspective:

An article in George Washington University's GW Hatchet (Wikipedia recruits GW students to edit website's content) quoted Dr Joseph Cordes, associate director of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, who had supported the three-day workshop at the school to train Wikimedia's "Campus ambassadors" (Signpost coverage), and Dr Donna Infeld, whose graduate course on public policy earlier this year had been the first at the university to offer Wikipedia assignments. One of her students was quoted regarding his experiences contributing to the article Don't ask, don't tell as part of that course.

At Georgetown University, The Hoya interviewed Professor Rochelle Davis (Wikipedia: a class tool), whose "Introduction to the study of the Arab world" course participates in the Wikipedia initiative. Correcting earlier media reports that she had assigned students to read Wikipedia, she said "some of the interviews seemed to have missed that. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. I wouldn't assign my students to read it, just like I wouldn't assign them Britannica."

Also last week, Indiana University announced that a seminar at its School of Public and Environmental Affairs program would be producing public policy articles for Wikipedia, proudly describing the School as "one of five leading public-policy programs where the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, is debuting its Public Policy Initiative".

See other Signpost coverage of the Public Policy Initiative: "Introducing the Public Policy Initiative", "Public policy initiative announces advisory board, starts training campus ambassadors", "Public policy initiative announces participating classes", and "Experiments with article assessment".

Briefly

 * Spoilers: Following earlier media reports about the controversy over Wikipedia's revealing of the murderer in the Agatha Christie play The Mousetrap (see "In the news" for August 30), The New York Times published an article by Noam Cohen ("Spoiler Alert: Whodunit? Wikipedia will tell you") that quoted authors and producers of other works whose plot details are described in Wikipedia articles, as well as the managing editor of the Internet Movie Database. On Wikipedia itself, the earlier media coverage has prompted extensive discussion at Talk:The Mousetrap, including a proposal to insert JavaScript code into the article to hide the contested passage by default, which was rejected by most commenters.Y4IT12.jpg
 * Wikimedia Philippines: An article on Philippine news website GMANews.tv on Friday entitled Wikimedia launches Philippine arm reported Wikimedia Philippines' first project. It actually became an official Wikimedia chapter six months ago, but made its official debut at the "Philippine Youth Congress in Information Technology" in Quezon City last week. The chapter posted numerous photos of the event on Facebook and on Commons.  They reported that their talk about Wikipedia was "flooded with interested participants". Its participation at the congress was supported by a grant from Wikimedia Foundation.
 * Wikipedia instantized: The US launch of Google's Instant search on September 8 (a modification of Google's Web search, displaying results as the user types) prompted a flurry of similar search services for specific sites (on September 12, the new article YouTube Instant survived a speedy deletion request), including, of course, Wikipedia. Wikipedia Lightning and Wikipedia Instant ("Just another instant search tool") display an instant list of search results with excerpts from each article, while The Instant Wiki ("Search Wikipedia as you type!") and WikInstant.com ("Search Wikipedia Instantly") just load an entire article from en.wikipedia.org as a suggestion below the search box.
 * Nature cites Wikipedia: A two-page article by theoretical physicist Jan Zaanen that appeared last month in the "News & views" section of the most highly ranked academic journal in the world, Nature ("High-temperature superconductivity: the benefit of fractal dirt", 10.1038/466825a) gave "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory" as the reference for the statement that "dynamical-systems theory [is] a subject offering insights into fractal phenomena as diverse as the shapes of fern leaves, the 'fat tails' of option pricing in the financial markets and the Gutenberg-Richter earthquake law". According to WP:Wikipedia as an academic source, Nature has cited Wikipedia at least once before, in a 2005 paper that made reference to the article 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
 * Eco on small language Wikipedias: Umberto Eco (who was interviewed by the Italian Wikinews a few months ago, see Signpost coverage) published an opinion article (partial Google translation) in L'espresso on September 17, where he examined articles about scholarly topics (such as Aristotle) in several Wikipedias in what he calls Italian dialects, e.g. Piedmontese, questioning how well they lend themselves to writing about such academic topics. The article prompted a thread on Foundation-l, where Eco's concerns were framed as a lack of higher registers in such small languages.