Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-09-25/In the media

Fox News: Wikipedia abandons efforts to purge porn from online encyclopedia
Fox News writer Perry Chiaramonte published an article detailing Wikipedia's alleged abandonment of its fight to remove pornography. The article features comments from Wikipediocracy co-founders and banned Wikipedians Gregory Kohs and Eric Barbour; the latter asserted that most Wikipedia administrators are "young males who don’t write any content ... and love to fight among themselves", adding that to them, Wikipedia is "a giant video game, not an 'encyclopedia'". They also noted that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia user page) deleted hundreds of images several years ago, only to have them undeleted and re-added. Fox News noted that the Wikimedia Foundation board did begin to try to solve the problem, but efforts were dropped after a consensus was not reached.

Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh conceded that the board currently is not taking any steps to remove pornographic images, saying "This was a major discussion within our community. Thousands [about 24,000] of users contributed to the process. Ultimately, our board declared that the results of this referendum were inconclusive, and that no single system would be effective, nor was there consensus about the need for the system."

The article concludes with Walsh noting that Wikimedia Commons sees hundreds of images added and deleted on a minute-by-minute basis, and that inappropriate images&mdash;be they copyright violations or potentially illegal&mdash;are removed by volunteers quickly, sometimes instantaneously, calling it part of the “normal, daily process on our project."

In brief

 * South Africans launch effort to expand Wikipedia coverage : Concerned with missing or inaccurate information about its country, Lead SA has gathered a diverse group of contributors in hopes of improving the coverage of South Africa.  The Daily Maverick lamented the poor coverage of South Africa-related topics like monkey gland sauce and berg wind.  On a more serious note, several sources pointed out the fact that the English language Wikipedia is dominated by North American and European viewpoints. Business Day interviewed two people who stated that this bias hurts the coverage of South Africa and tends to portray the nation, and even the African continent, in a negative light.
 * Plastic surgery advocated through Wikipedia: The Daily Dot highlighted accusations against plastic surgeons who use Wikipedia and associated projects to advertise for their services.
 * Wikipedia article competition: The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) announced its 2013 competition to improve the quality of existing Wikipedia articles related to computational biology. Full details can be found at the related Wikipedia page.