Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-10-04/In the news

Spanish police investigates BLP vandalism
The Spanish police are investigating four Internet users for edits made in the months up to July 2009 to the Spanish Wikipedia's article about politician Javier Arenas of the center-right People's Party (PP). As reported by news agency EFE on September 25, a resident of Albacete and one of a village in the Levante were recently summoned to testify at their local courts, joining as suspects two other Internet users that had come under scrutiny some months ago. According to the PP, whose complaint led to the investigation, the offending edits included "insults and coarse language" against Arenas and his family, and false information that was subsequently used by a government member to insinuate that Arenas had needed a long time to complete his law degree.

Jimbo Wales on censorship, Wikileaks (again), Wikipedia and other topics
Various media reported on comments made by Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales on a recent visit to Malaysia. AFP ("Wikipedia founder says Malaysia should ditch censorship") quoted him as saying that "a very open flow of information" was important in "making sure that the people have the information they need" and that "I want to write that information (on sites like user-generated Wikipedia) so that my fellow citizens have the knowledge they need so they can't be oppressed."

On the other hand, Wales repeated earlier criticism of Wikileaks (see Signpost coverage: "Difficult relationship between WikiLeaks and Wikipedia"), a website set up to publish leaked information: As reported by Associated Press, Wales said that the site has committed an "irresponsible" act by knowingly releasing the contents of classified military information, and that it could potentially "put innocent lives at risk". In related news, Wales recently explained on Wikipedia why the domains wikileaks.com, wikileaks.net, wikileaks.us, wikileaks.biz, and wikileaks.mobi appear still to be registered to Wales' company Wikia, even though Wikia does not serve any of the sites. The CNAME records in DNS direct the traffic to www.wikileaks.org.

The domain names were legally transferred to Wikileaks a long time ago, but for unknown reasons, Wikileaks never completed the technical aspects of the transfer. Wikia has made multiple requests to them to do so, with no result yet. Mr. Assange has indicated that he is very busy right now, which seems likely to be true, given recent news events.

Malaysian tabloid The Star quoted Wales on various other topics, e.g. his education, negative media coverage by Fox News related to his deletions of sexual images on Commons earlier this year ("That controversy, says Wales, is all over, too. 'Fox News basically ran some outrageous, inflammatory stories that were absolutely not true'), the dispute over whether Larry Sanger should be called a co-founder of Wikipedia ("this so-called controversy has overshadowed his contribution not as co-founder but as a very important employee and a very important part of the early community"), a 2009 Wall Street Journal article about Wikipedia having lost 57,000 editors within a year ("I said, ‘Well, I found them – in my refrigerator’. It was just a badly done study") and many other topics.

Yet another interview with Wales was published a few days later in the Financial Times Magazine—a list of personal questions titled The Inventory. Asked for his "mentor", Wales said that one is Larry Lessig ("He was one of the first people who realised what I was doing at Wikipedia"). To the question "What ambitions do you still have?", Wales replied: "My goal for the next 10 to 20 years is to build Wikipedia in the languages of the developing world."

In brief

 * Editing advice for experts: In an article published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, academics from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge provide "Ten simple rules for editing Wikipedia". The article explains core Wikipedia policies and guidelines such as Verifiability or Conflict of interest—although there is no mention of the Manual of Style—and focused on how these rules apply to editing by experts. One of the co-authors is longtime Wikipedian and MediaWiki programmer Magnus Manske.
 * Editing advice for spammers: The SEO blog GAMBLING CA$H COW has published advice for Link Building on Wikipedia. The "tips for proceeding with a Wikipedia campaign" include building a good reputation within the community (e.g. obtaining barnstars for one's user page), directing the "flow of link juice" within Wikipedia, "making friends within the community" which can give support in an AfD, and avoiding anonymous editing to prevent Wikiscanner-like embarrassments.
 * Band calls song "Wikipedia": The debut single of 1980s-style pop band "Ambassadors of Morocco", to be released on November 15, is called "Wikipedia", according to an announcement on British music web site Glasswerk. Apart from the title and the frequent exclamation of "Wikipedia, Wikipedia!" in the lyrics, the song and video clip do not contain obvious references to Wikipedia.