Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-28/In the media



The world's Wikipedia gaps
GOOD magazine reports (Oct. 27) on the inferior quality and much smaller contributor pool of other language versions of Wikipedia. The article's author, Mark Hay, begins his discussion with an article from the Zulu Wikipedia that was highlighted on Reddit some weeks ago:

A decade ago, Nkandla was the setting of an award-winning documentary, The Orphans of Nkandla, which resulted in the creation of The Africa Project. It is a matter of record that AIDS and poverty have ravaged many children's lives in KwaZulu-Natal. But Hay's observation about minor language versions of Wikipedia remains broadly correct. Indeed, a slide shown at Wikimania 2014 indicated that of Wikipedia's then-284 (today: 291) language versions,
 * 12 were dead (locked);
 * 53 were "zombies" (open, no editors);
 * 94 were struggling (open, fewer than 5 editors);
 * 125 were "in good or excellent health" (presumably, judging by the definitions of the previous three categories, this number included all Wikipedias that had 5 or more editors).

The implications for quality are obvious.

Deploring Wikipedia's "cumbersome self-created bureaucracy and inter-editor sniping", Hay suggests that these global imbalances are unlikely to right themselves: while it may be tempting to think that the more established Wikipedias are bigger and more developed merely because they had several years' head start on smaller language versions, the smaller language versions show no sign of replicating the extraordinary boom the English Wikipedia underwent in its early years. In fact, Hay argues, the global volunteer base shrank by a third between 2007 and 2013.

Hay then proceeds to place his hopes in auto-translation apps, and reviews two multilingual projects:
 * 1) Omnipedia, a project being developed by researchers at Northwestern University, "capable of culling, comparing, and automatically translating data from 25 different Wikipedia language editions simultaneously, presenting them in simplified form", and
 * 2) Manypedia, an Italian project, online today, that "can automatically translate two Wikipedia articles side by side and point out incongruous information between them – or just translate an existing article into a different language".

Hay suggests that "complementary data from across all the world's Wikipedias" could be mined and translated "back to your native language site, thus attaining the online encyclopedia's egalitarian ideal". This is an overly optimistic view, given the present day's appalling, practically unreadable quality of many machine translations, which would leave prospective readers of Wikipedias stocked with machine translations profoundly frustrated – a point that can be verified by looking at some of Manypedia's article translations.

The English translation of the Persian article on "Third World" for example (enter  http://www.manypedia.com/#!|en|Third_World|fa  as the URL and click "Translate" in the right-hand panel) includes gems like

Imagine a Zulu reader trying to learn about physics or chemistry from a text that is as proficiently authored in Zulu as the above passage is clear and concise English.

There is little reason to argue with Hay's conclusion, however:

AK

Google and Wikipedia accused of tying Ben Carson to NAMBLA
Breitbart accuses (Oct. 27) Wikipedia and Google of having prominently linked the name of Ben Carson, an acclaimed pediatric neurosurgeon and a Republican candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 presidential election, to a pedophile advocacy group, the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

As evidence Breitbart shows a screenshot of a Google search results page, which lists Carson's Wikipedia biography as the top result (below the sponsored link and the "In the news" section), with "North American Man-Boy Love", "Seventh-day Adventist Church" and "Craniopagus twins" highlighted as hyperlinked key points in blue.

A Carson campaign spokesperson told Breitbart,

The spokesman blamed "pranksters" for the inappropriate highlight.

NAMBLA is mentioned in Wikipedia's biography of Carson because the term occurs in a 2013 comment of Carson's that is quoted verbatim in the article, and in which Carson said, "Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are. They don’t get to change the definition." (Carson subsequently apologized for the remark.) The acronym NAMBLA in the quotation has from time to time been hyperlinked in the Wikipedia article.

While the Carson team's frustration with the Google entry is understandable, it seems speculative to suggest that the hyperlink must have been placed so as to increase the term's chances of appearing in the Google snippet, or that Google staff specifically selected the term to appear in its snippet from the many available.

It bears mention though that according to Wikipedia's manual of style, quotations should generally remain free of hyperlinks. At the time of writing, the Google snippet no longer references NAMBLA. AK 

In brief

 * EFF comments on NSA lawsuit: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a critical comment (Oct. 29) on the recent dismissal of the Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA lawsuit (see previous Signpost coverage). AK
 * Follow-up to the Atlantic story: Women’s fashion and lifestyle website Verily covers (Oct. 28) last week's story in The Atlantic on "Wikipedia's hostility to women" (see coverage in the previous Signpost issue and the related, much-discussed Signpost editorial). Going beyond a mere summary of the Atlantic article, the piece argues that "Not only does anonymity give some Internet users the evil courage to spew vitriol, but it can sometimes lead to victim blaming as well." A Korean site also picked up the story. AK
 * Why the arts need to fix Wikipedia: ArtsHub discusses (Oct. 28) Wikipedia's Art+Feminism initiative along with the work museums are doing to fill content gaps in Wikipedia. AK
 * Debunking Wikipedia conspiracy theories: In the September/October issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Susan Gerbic, co-founder of Guerrilla Skep​ticism on Wikipedia, writes (Oct. 28) "Is Wikipedia a Conspiracy? Common Myths Explained", where she discusses common misconceptions in the skeptical community about Wikipedia. G
 * Lack of media attention to Wikipedia: VentureBeat (Oct. 26) and The Next Web (Oct. 27) pick up on a recent Signpost editorial by Signpost editor-in-chief that was republished in a slightly edited version on the Wikimedia blog, arguing that Wikipedia receives remarkably little press attention compared to other top-ten sites. Both The Next Web and VentureBeat agree that the post raised a valid point; The Next Web suggests that the "all-too-silent Wikimedia Foundation is partly to blame". Gamaliel clarified in a reader comment at The Next Web that he would like to see more investigative journalism in the media's Wikipedia coverage, as opposed to a reliance on Wikimedia press releases. AK
 * Wikipedia Monument celebrates first anniversary: Inverse.com marks (Oct. 22) the first anniversary of the world’s first and only monument in tribute to Wikipedia in Słubice, Poland. The bronze sculpture cost $14,000. Krzysztof Wojciechowski, a Polish professor, felt deep gratitude for the contributions of Wikipedia and its editors to shared knowledge, leading him to suggest the monument to the town's administration. L

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