Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-09/In the media



Digital Trends reports (Dec. 10) on political editing in the context of the presidential primaries in the United States.

The article, written by Brad Jones and titled "Beneath every presidential candidate's Wikipedia page lies a vicious tug-of-war", discusses editing at the Bernie Sanders article and features comments from, one of many editors to have contributed to that Wikipedia biography.

Jones says he got in touch with Calidum because of a particular edit to the Sanders biography made by an account named, since indefinitely blocked as a sockpuppet of.

Jones then moves on to the question of what oversight there is on Wikipedia, quoting, manager of Trust & Safety at the Wikimedia Foundation, and , the Foundation's Senior Communications Manager.

Juliet adds that Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee is there to handle conflicts between editors and that undisclosed paid advocacy is another issue—though one that seems to have become less prevalent in party politics:



In brief

 * Predictable results: The National, which recently branded Scottish LibDem politician Alistair Carmichael a "liar" on its front page, gleefully reports (Dec. 11) on a Wikipedia edit that changed the description of Carmichael's interests to "lying, lying, lying, lying, lying, lying, lying, lying, & lying." Although the edit was automatically tagged as "Possible vandalism, repeating characters", it lasted three hours before being reverted. The article has since been put under Pending Changes protection.
 * Rush fan: CBC News is intrigued (Dec. 11) that there is apparently a Rush fan in the Canadian government, based on IP edits reported by a Twitter bot.
 * Don't fall for Wiki-denial: An article by Elizabeth Farrelly in the The Sydney Morning Herald argues (Dec. 9) that "there's nothing wrong with using Wikipedia. After 15 years and some 37 million articles it's time to admit that we all use Wikipedia, and it's good [...] as an exercise in the leaderless, collaborative and largely anonymous pursuit of scholarly excellence, Wikipedia also possesses an astonishing beauty."
 * Wikipedia—giving Deepak Chopra a rough deal? The Huffington Post features an article (Dec. 8) by Ryan Castle on editing at the Deepak Chopra biography, claiming—as did an earlier article by the same writer—that tendentious editors are unduly biasing the biography against Chopra: "Since the first article was published about Wikipedia's dishonest biography on Deepak Chopra and the online harassment that surrounds it, three major developments have occurred. First the Wikipedia editors involved dramatically increased their condemnation of Dr. Chopra, and secondly they harassed the writer of the article across Wikipedia and the internet. Given that this was precisely the behavior they were being critiqued for, these consequences were predictable." Castle lists and links five common talk page arguments at Talk:Deepak Chopra which he feels are "misleading and/or biased", along with his counterarguments. Castle is founder of the Integrative Studies Historical Archive & Repository, an initiative of the Chopra Foundation.
 * Wikimedia fundraising: Nonprofit Quarterly reports (Dec. 7) on the ongoing Wikimedia fundraising drive in an article titled "Fundraising at Wikipedia: Enormously Effective, But ..." The International Business Times, too, has an article on the matter (Dec. 5), titled "Wikipedia fundraising drive: Should you donate money to the Wikimedia Foundation?"
 * Where are Wikipedia's Latinos? El Tecolote reports (Dec. 3) on the comparative lack of Latinos in the Wikipedia community in an article also republished (Dec. 7) in Latina Lista. "There is a scarcity of American Latinos who write and edit for English Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute and participate. How serious a problem this is, it's difficult to say precisely; the Wikimedia Foundation does take semi-annual surveys of its editors and administrators [Ed. note: The author is mistaken on this point—no general editor surveys have been run since 2012.], but it does not collect statistics related to their ethnicity. [...] When Wikipedia did its first survey in 2011 of people who write and edit its articles, an angry storm ensued when it was revealed that only 9 percent of Wikipedians were women. But there was no such outcry over the lack of other underrepresented groups."

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