Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-04-22/In the media

UK political editing
Wikipedia appears to have been drawn into the drama of the upcoming (May 7), hotly contested UK general election.

On April 21, The Guardian, a centrist, liberal newspaper, reported that British Conservative Party co-chairman Grant Shapps had been "accused of editing Wikipedia pages of Tory rivals", using Wikipedia account :

The story was soon picked up by the Daily Mail, channel4.com and many others. The following day (April 22) the Liberal Democrats' Nick Clegg was reported in The Guardian to have made political capital of Shapps' embarrassment:

Hours later though, conservative The Daily Telegraph shot back, alleging that the administrator who had accused the Tory co-chairman of deceptive Wikipedia editing and blocked the account—Wikimedia UK employee and former Wikipedia arbitrator, Richard Symonds—is a committed Liberal Democrat activist, as indeed are several of his Wikimedia UK colleagues. (Symonds denied the personal accusation in a subsequent Guardian interview.)

On Wikipedia itself, had requested an arbitration case by that time. Within less than a day, this request reached ten accepts and one recuse, making an arbitration case inevitable. The arbitration case request was the subject of a report in the International Business Times on April 22. The case has now been opened. It will be held entirely in camera, with email evidence submissions accepted until 7 May (the date of the UK election). of The Christian Science Monitor, commenting on the story from the other side of the Atlantic, looked at the bigger picture (April 22), focusing on Wikipedia's susceptibility to spin from all sides in an article titled "Did leading UK politician edit his Wikipedia page? Possibly, but the problem goes deeper."

Shapps has forcefully denied the claims that he or someone authorised by him was behind the account's edits, telling the BBC on April 22 that the allegations were "categorically false and defamatory. It is the most bonkers story I've seen in this election campaign so far."

Shapps's past (acknowledged) Wikipedia editing had previously attracted The Guardian's attention in 2012 (see previous Signpost coverage). Media interest in the story shows no sign of abating, with the Daily Mail and The Times publishing articles in the small hours of April 23: "Wikipedia official who accused Shapps is a Lib Dem: Online administrator once described himself as 'Liberal Democrat to the last'", "Lib Dem behind Wikipedia meddling claims". City A.M. then reported that the "Lib Dems deny involvement in Grant Shapps Wikipedia case" and The Conversation followed a few hours later with a piece by Dr. Taha Yasseri, who identified himself on Chase me's talk page as a former Wikipedia administrator and checkuser, writing that "Wikipedia sockpuppetry is a problem, but baseless accusations are no better". A.K.

Wikipedia hoaxes
The Washington Post and The Daily Telegraph both ran stories on Wikipedia hoaxes last week. The Telegraph's Jamie Bartlett asked, "How much should we trust Wikipedia?" (April 16), noting that a hoax made up by a friend about the origin of the butterfly swimming stroke had recently come to be quoted in a reputable newspaper (the Guardian, as pointed out in the discussion on Jimmy Wales' talk page). The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey provided another in-depth write-up of the Jar'Edo Wens hoax (April 15, see previous Signpost coverage) along with coverage of a recent breaching experiment by Gregory Kohs of Wikipediocracy and MyWikiBiz. Dewey thinks there is a numbers problem at the core of Wikipedia:

For more Signpost coverage on hoaxes see our Hoaxes series.

Wikimedia: violating net neutrality?
IBNLive wonders about "Wikipedia Zero: Is Wikimedia violating net neutrality in 59 countries?" (April 17).

This discussion comes in the context of a major Indian net neutrality campaign that has seen Mark Zuckerberg embattled in India, and which has led to widespread condemnation of zero-rated services such as Airtel Zero and Facebook's Internet.org. Internet.org generally includes free Wikipedia access—although not under the official Wikipedia Zero umbrella.

Even so, Wikipedia Zero has had its share of mentions in the context of this debate. DNA India for example listed Wikipedia Zero among services flouting net neutrality in its piece "Net Neutrality: Whose internet is it anyway?" (April 19):

The Indian Express, too, criticised Wikipedia Zero when it commented that "Not just Airtel Zero: Facebook to WhatsApp, everyone has violated Net Neutrality in India" (April 14):

Cory Doctorow covered the wider net neutrality debate currently raging in India for BoingBoing, titling his piece "Internet.org: delivering poor Internet to poor people" (April 19), a riff on the even more provocative title of Mahesh Murthy's Scroll piece "Poor internet for poor people: why Facebook's Internet.org amounts to economic racism" (April 18). Doctorow quoted Murthy at length in his own article:

India's savetheinternet campaign for net neutrality had by April 20 resulted in close to one million emails from Indian citizens to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

The campaign was galvanised by a YouTube video made by Indian stand-up comics collective AIB. The video, which encourages viewers to write to TRAI demanding strict adherence to the net neutrality principle, has to date received over 2.5 million views. A.K.

In brief
Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.
 * Fight over monkey image continues: Amateur Photographer reports (April 21) that David Slater, whose photography project in Sulawesi resulted in the famous "monkey selfie" that made headlines last year, will initially focus on pursuing infringers in the UK, having been warned that court action in the United States could be prohibitively expensive. Slater was quoted as saying, "Trust me, I am trying my best to pursue this matter, if not for me then for the benefit of the photographic community. One thing seems certain—photographers will have their online images stolen often in the coming years. If they fail to serve justice, high-profile cases like mine will only promote even more theft, especially from the US." There was no comment from the Wikimedia Foundation on the matter. A.K.
 * Big Think: In a "Big Think" video (uploaded April 10), Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain talks about "Why Wikipedia Works Really Well in Practice, Just Not in Theory", and discusses an idea to deal with Wikipedia's shortage of good-faith editors: significantly expanding Wikipedia's population of student editors. A.K.