Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-04-08/In the media

60 Minutes profiles Wikipedia
A segment called "Wikimania" on the April 5th episode of the venerable CBS news program 60 Minutes profiled Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community. The segment attempted to answer for viewers unfamiliar with Wikipedia or Wikipedia editors the questions "Who are they? And how does it all work?" Correspondent Morley Safer interviewed Jimmy Wales and former and current Wikimedia Foundation executive directors Sue Gardner and Lila Tretikov and visited Wikimania 2014 in London.

Much of the segment was focused on the personalities of Wikipedia editors, with numerous crowd shots from Wikimania. Safer focused on their eccentricities, at one point describing them by saying "Some are buttoned-down. Some are rock and roll." He asked Gardner about who edited Wikipedia:

The segment also focused on two individual editors. Amanda Levendowski, a lawyer and a vice-president of Wikimedia NYC, told Safer that the "reward" for editing Wikipedia was that "You have the satisfaction of feeling like you've participated in some thing, but for Wikipedia in particular there's another whole benefit because you have the opportunity to help other people find information about stuff you're into." 60 Minutes also spoke with Dumisani Ndubane, former President of Wikimedia South Africa, and discussed his work editing articles on South African history and his efforts to encouraged students to translate Wikipedia articles into native African languages.

60 Minutes also visited the San Francisco headquarters of the Wikimedia Foundation, with Safer describing it as a "typically laid-back techie style" workplace. Safer delved into Wales' background, even showing the infamous photo of Wales and a pair of Bomis models, and expressed surprise that Wales wasn't an "Internet zillionaire". He told Wales "You created one of the most successful websites in the world and yet you chose to make it the least profitable." Wales replied:

Other Wikipedia issues were briefly mentioned, such as fact-checking and vandalism. Wales brought up the controversy over the article Wedding dress of Kate Middleton while discussing gender bias on Wikipedia. He also noted

Wikipedians would quibble about some vague quantitative claims or the description of Gardner as Wales' "lieutenant", but the overall depiction of the movement was positive. On the Wikimedia-l mailing list, Wikimedia Foundation employees suggested sending messages of thanks to CBS, Safer, and producer Jonathan Schienberg.

Alternative medicine author seeks $67K for anti-Wikipedia book
At ScienceBlogs, David Gorski discussed what he called a "Quack Attack on Wikipedia" (April 7). Gorksi highlights a campaign on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter by Mike Bundrant, co-founder of the iNLP Center, a training center for practitioners of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Bundrant is seeking $67,100 to publish a book called Unbiased: The Truth about the Healing Arts on Wikipedia, to be created by Bundrant and a paid "PhD level research team".

According to Bundrant, "Wikipedia is on a misinformation campaign against alternative health and the healing arts...Natural health deserves fair representation." Bundrant highlights a number of Wikipedia articles he claims contain "flagrant bias and academic errors or omissions", such as the articles for homeopathy, naturopathy, and NLP, all of which are identified as pseudosciences. Alternative medicine advocates have long complained about how Wikipedia represents such topics, complaining that it violates the neutral point of view policy. Community editing practices involving these topics conform with the 2006 Pseudoscience arbitration case, which found that NPOV "requires fair representation of significant alternatives to scientific orthodoxy. Significant alternatives, in this case, refers to legitimate scientific disagreement, as opposed to pseudoscience." Many alternative medicine practices are deemed to fall in the latter category, such as NLP. Gorski writes "The last 40 years have taught us...that NLP is pseudoscience that has failed every test of its core precepts."

In March 2014, Jimmy Wales responded to a petition from alternative medicine advocates by writing

Academics on Wikipedia in the classroom
The Harvard Crimson examines (April 2) changing attitudes among Harvard University faculty concerning Wikipedia. Professor Sean Gilsdorf said "My attitude has turned into one [of], rather than complaining about it, why don’t we try to do good things with it." For his course "Charlemagne: Histories, Stories, Myths", he has students edit Wikipedia articles "on some theme, place, or individual critical to Carolingian society", such as Emma of Normandy, Adeliza of Louvain, and Pepin the Hunchback. In The Conversation, College of the Holy Cross Professor Ellis Jones discusses (April 3) his use of Wikipedia in the classroom by having his students "adopt a Wikipedia page" of a notable sociological theorist, such as Max Horkheimer.

Another victim of notability?
On his blog, journalist Glenn Fleishman wrote that he was "Not Notable Enough For Wikipedia" (April 7). Fleishman, a veteran journalist who wrote a 2013 article for The Economist about the encyclopedia, had a Wikipedia article since June 2005. Fleishman's article was deleted on April 5 following a deletion discussion. Another blogger, Andy Baio, tweeted "I guess publishing a magazine, writing 20+ books, and winning Jeopardy twice doesn't make you 'notable'." At the time of its deletion, Fleishman's article had about 200 words and ten references, though only one was to a third-party secondary source. Fleishman wrote:

He did note in the comments that "A couple of Wikipedians who I don't really know are annoyed enough that I was deleted that they are going to re-source and get me restored. The system works!"

Fleishman, a critic of Gamergate, claimed on Twitter that "my article was targeted for deletion b/c of my outspokenness on online harassment", linking to a March 22 thread on the Reddit forum r/WikiInAction, a pro-Gamergate forum about "the corruption and issues with Wikipedia". The thread claimed that Fleishman had created and edited his own Wikipedia article. That same day, a Wikipedia editor active on the Gamergate article submitted the article for deletion.

In brief

 * Conflict of interest department: BuzzFeed reports (April 7) that IP addresses belonging to CBS have been editing articles on topics related to CBS and its employees.
 * Meet our editors: Haaretz profiles (April 5) Wikipedia editor Abraham Amir, a 73-year old lawyer in Afula. Israel who has been contributing to the Hebrew Wikipedia since 2003.
 * Hoaxing Wikipedia: Stephen Hutcheon, technology editor for the Sydney Morning Herald, appeared on the April 1 episode of Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio to discuss the Jar’edo Wens hoax (See previous Signpost coverage).  Hutcheon had previously written about the hoax for the Herald.
 * "Death Awaits": The Week reports that the article on Action Park, with colorful descriptions of the amusement park's hazardous rides, "may be the most hilarious article on Wikipedia" (April 1). The Week quotes numerous hilarious and hair-raising anecdotes about the rides. On the waterslide, for example, the article notes that it had "a complete vertical loop of the kind more commonly associated with roller coasters. Employees have reported they were offered hundred-dollar bills to test it. Tom Fergus, who described himself as 'one of the idiots' who took the offer, said '$100 did not buy enough booze to drown out that memory.'"