Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-08-01/In the news

Consensus of Wikipedia authors questioned about Shakespeare authorship
Journalist Mark Anderson, writing this week for the news site IEEE Spectrum, has claimed that Wikipedia has been a bit too quick to dismiss those who doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the works popularly attributed to him. In an article "Wikipedia's Shakespeare Problem", Anderson writes that the consensus process has for a long time worked quite well on the article Shakespeare authorship question, with the Stratfordians (those who believe William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the plays attributed to him) and Oxfordians (those who believe that the works were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) creating an equilibrium that approximated the academic divide between the two camps.

Unfortunately, writes Anderson, more Stratfordians came along and pushed the article towards their point of view, and the mediation process (Signpost coverage) left the article biased towards the Stratfordian point of view. In this vein, Anderson claims that the push to get the article featured (already protested at the time by a blog dedicated to alternative theories, see previous Signpost coverage) succeeded only in putting on the main page a version that had "as much claim to evenhandedness as does an entry on Libya's history written by Muammar Gaddafi". This claim is fiercely contested; the Wikipedia article in question itself cites a sharply different judgment from a reliable source that described Wikipedia's coverage of the authorship controversy as putting "to shame anything that ever appeared in standard resources". The IEEE Spectrum article itself quotes John Broughton, the author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and WMF board member Ting Chen (User:Wing).

10 biggest edit-wars on Wikipedia
PC World, a global computer magazine, recently published an article on Wikipedia's 10 biggest edit-wars, documenting the confrontations that occur when Wikipedians disagree about the content of an article and repeatedly overwrite each other's contributions. According to PC World, the subjects of the 10 biggest edit-wars on Wikipedia were Nikola Tesla, Caesar salad, Death Star, Nintendo Wii, Street Fighter game characters Ryu and Ken, Yao Ming, The Eagles, Pluto, the Polar bear, and co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales.

In comparison with PC World's brief of documenting "the most heated, most bitterly contested, and most pointless confrontations over facts in Wikipedia's 10-year history", the English Wikipedia maintains its own list of the lamest edit-wars that have graced its articles. Since the page includes a number of those included by PC World, it is a possible source for the article, which one commentator decried as not having provided "enough verification" of its examples.

In brief

 * Imperica covers Wikimedia UK activity: Imperica, "a site which brings together a number of creative disciplines within digital media", recently presented two features covering the work of Wikimedia UK's GLAM efforts. "In the know" discussed GLAM outreach in the UK with User:Fæ; "Quiet realities" explored the use of QR codes by Derby Museums, with Terence Eden, who built QRpedia.
 * Competition to design a Wikipedia search engine: Personal search engine Greplin announced the launch of a Wikipedia "Search design contest". The contest is about redesigning Wikipedia's search experience "from the ground up", to make "using Google to search Wikipedia feel outdated". The competition is independent of the Wikimedia Foundation. The winning designer and runner-up will receive tickets and travel to a talk with Edward Tufte. (Reported in the Washington Post.)
 * How to destroy "the bane of the Internet": A blog posting on Webmasterformat.com described "How to destroy Wikipedia SERP (search engine results page) results". The author called Wikipedia "the bane of the Internet" for disrupting SEO marketers' efforts to promote their own pages for specific search keywords, because Google tends to rank Wikipedia pages higher. The "14 steps to overthrow a Wikipedia page" (in favor of one's own pages) include gradually removing wikilinks to it in other Wikipedia articles, and inserting wrong information, then e-mailing a screenshot of the vandalized revision to webmasters who link to the Wikipedia article ("Describe how important it is that their readers get reliable information and offer your authoritative page as an alternative").
 * Smithsonian Wikimedian profiled in Chronicle of Philanthropy: The Chronicle of Philanthropy has an article on the work being done by Sarah Stierch at the Smithsonian's Archive of American Art (cf. Signpost coverage: "First Wikipedian-in-Residence at Smithsonian Institution"). The benefits of the GLAM collaboration to both Wikipedia and the GLAM institution are discussed, and the article Jacques Seligmann & Company is mentioned as an example of the result of the collaboration's benefits.
 * Wikipedia a rare exception for Google cookies: A new study from U.C. Berkeley of user privacy and tracking reported that "Combined, Google has a presence on 97 of the top 100 websites. This includes popular government websites such as usps.com, irs.gov, and nih.gov. Only microsoft.com, ups.com, and wikipedia.org lacked some type of Google cookie." Wikipedia does not use the proprietary Google Analytics suite that uses cookies to track users between browsing sessions. Last year, a study by the Wall Street Journal found that Wikipedia was the only website in the top fifty (in the United States), by traffic, not to install any type of tracking device (Signpost coverage).
 * A girls night in: dinner, drinks, edit button?: A posting by Piper Klemm, published on the blogs of US feminist magazine Ms. ("Women, let’s claim Wikipedia!") and the Berkeley Science Review, a graduate student magazine at UC Berkeley ("WikiWomen: A new kind of party") described the author's reaction to the "very distressing" finding that only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are female (reported widely earlier this year, cf. Signpost coverage): "I believe that more women would be involved in editing Wikipedia if it were a social activity, rather than an insular one, so I hosted a WikiWomen party at my house to make the experience collaborative." The dinner followed by cocktails was attended by five female graduate students in chemistry, four of them complete newbies, who after "watching tutorials on YouTube and reading Wikipedia editing guidelines" felt "somewhat discouraged at first by the long list of rules", but eventually found the activity enjoyable, making the party a success: "It was fun to expose science and our research to others while relaxing with friends". Klemm is inviting women in the San Francisco Bay Area to get together more often for 'WikiWomen' editing events.