Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/In the media



The Orangemoody paid-editing case, covered in detail in this week's Special Report, caused a predictable and still ongoing avalanche of media coverage. Recode.net was first off the mark, publishing the same day (August 31), followed on Tuesday and Wednesday by –


 * Fusion
 * PC World
 * Gizmodo
 * The Next Web
 * Softpedia
 * PC Mag
 * Venture Beat
 * Wired
 * Mashable
 * Ars Technica
 * TechCrunch
 * The Washington Post
 * The Independent
 * BBC
 * The Daily Express
 * The Telegraph
 * Daily Mail
 * The Guardian
 * The Times
 * Die Zeit (Germany)
 * Le Temps (Switzerland)
 * and many others.

Many of these articles are largely summaries of the August 31 Wikimedia blog post that preceded them (co-authored by former Signpost editor-in-chief, ), demonstrating an advantage for the WMF in proactively publicising "things gone wrong": it retains a certain amount of control over the narrative.

The situation was very different when the Wiki-PR paid-editing story hit the news in 2013. Wide-ranging coverage sparked by Simon Owens' investigative piece in The Daily Dot (October 8, 2013) seemed to put the Foundation on the back foot. It took almost two weeks for then-executive director Sue Gardner to release a statement (eventually added to Owens' Daily Dot piece on October 21, 2013).

Of course, much has happened since 2013. The Foundation's terms of use now clearly forbid paid contributions without disclosure (a fact duly mentioned in the present media reports). Equally noteworthy is that Foundation staff took an active part in the Orangemoody investigation, unlike the 2013 Wiki-PR case. The Wiki-PR investigation had been proceeding for months before Owens' piece, and was merely "monitored" by the Foundation. By not getting more actively involved in the 2013 case – believing, perhaps, that the public would never learn of it – the Foundation could have been criticised for neglecting its responsibilities, failing to support its volunteers, and missing an opportunity to set the tone of the ensuing debate. (Indeed, Vice for example expressed surprise at the Foundation's lack of involvement.)

The difference between then and now is substantial, and on the whole encouraging: quite apart from the public-relations advantages, publicising the Orangemoody case might be seen to have been the right thing to do; being open about problems affecting a public good is what transparent organisations do.

One media outlet that did more than simply rework the Wikimedia blog post was The Independent, whose journalists contacted and interviewed several British article subjects affected – among them holiday company Quality Villas, online toy shop Little Citizens Boutique, stunt double Amanda Foster, Britain's Got Talent contestant Paul Manners, and jewellery designer Rachel Entwistle, whose spokesman told The Independent the scam had been "really disconcerting ... a whole world I’ve never heard of".

The article, titled "Wikipedia rocked by blackmail scandal", made the front page of The Independent's paper edition (September 2).

Later reports by UK mainstream media outlets have generally referenced the piece in The Independent. The BBC, like The Independent, spoke to Dan Thompson, Quality Villas' general manager. He told them that he had tried to create a page for his business in June:

The Golden Raspberry goes to the The Daily Express, which reported (archive link) that Wikipedia "employs 250,000 people to monitor its content, but it is still open to abuse." Apart from the fact that active editors in the English Wikipedia number only up to about 35,000 per month, one might have thought journalists at a national daily had by now become aware that Wikipedia's content is written and checked by volunteers – members of the general public – and that the Wikimedia Foundation has 277 employees, of whom not a single one is paid to monitor Wikipedia content.

The Orangemoody case is unlikely to be the last of its kind. AK



In brief

 * How tall is Ja Rule?: On a particularly slow news day, numerous music and news media outlets reported on rapper Ja Rule's complaint via Twitter about his Wikipedia article. He wrote "Wikipedia is the most inaccurate shit ever lol how are they still in business??? Anyway somebody fix my shit I'm 5'9 not 5'6 ..."  This complaint prompted a flurry of edits inserting his height at 5'9" and constant vandalism inserting inaccurate heights or disparaging the rapper.  All of the news reports took Ja Rule's claim at face value, but a search of the article history via WikiBlame does not find any indication of information about his height appearing in the article prior to the Twitter complaint.  However, Ja Rule's height is listed at 5'6" in Google's Knowledge Graph.  In the Knowledge Graph, birthdate and height are listed immediately below a biographical snippet from Wikipedia which ends with an attribution to the encyclopedia, which may lead people to think that the information below the attribution is taken from Wikipedia as well.  (Sept. 2) G
 * Wikimedia UK vs. Shapps: The Spectator, in a piece titled "Revealed: Wikipedia’s panic over Shapps fiasco", reports on the ongoing spat between Wikimedia UK and UK politician Grant Shapps. (See last month's Signpost coverage.) (Aug. 28) AK
 * QR Wikipedia: Hank Green of the VlogBrothers ponders the question of whether or not you can fit "ALL of Wikipedia in One QR Code?" The QR Code would need to be 17 square kilometers to fit all 24 terabytes of the English Wikipedia.  To scan the QR code, it would need to be on the surface of the Moon and would require significant advancements in sensor technology and use the James Webb Space Telescope.   (Aug. 28) G
 * Animated Wikipedia: The Takeaway highlights the Twitter account GIFs of Wikipedia, which posts animated GIFs found on various Wikipedias and Wikimedia Commons. (Aug. 28) G
 * Political Jimbo: Jimmy Wales participated in an Aug. 25 Reddit AMA with possible US Presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig, who is contemplating a quixotic campaign focusing on election reform.  Wales chairs Lessig's Exploratory Committee.  Yahoo! News reported that Wales tweeted on Aug. 26 that Labour Party MP Jeremy Corbyn was "completely bonkers".  Wales also tweeted a link to an editorial in The Telegraph which declared that "His rabidly anti-American and pro-Putin world view is alarming and makes him unfit to be Labour leader."  G

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