Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-02-10/In the media



On February 8 in Nashua, New Hampshire, US Presidential candidate Jeb Bush took a light-hearted swing at Wikipedia when he suspected the speaker introducing him at an event in New Hampshire of having read his Wikipedia biography:

Investigation shows that for three and a half years Wikipedia did indeed claim that Bush was an avid rock climber. The unsourced claim was introduced by an IP on 10 December 2008, and deleted on 27 July 2012 by an IP address belonging to Bush's Foundation for Florida's Future.

Many other questionable claims have been introduced to Bush's Wikipedia biography over the years; directly adjacent to the rock-climbing claim, for example, the article once briefly asserted that Bush "also, with his limited spare time, raises Wolf cubs and releases them into the wild." That passage lasted less than three hours, when deleted it as unsourced – while leaving the adjacent, equally unsourced claim in the article.

The incident was also mentioned in a Wall Street Journal piece.

Bush went on to come in fourth place in the New Hampshire Republican primary with 11 percent of the vote. In fairness to Jeb Bush, the likelihood that the insertion of the rock climbing claim was performed by a kid living in their parents' basement is > 0.

AK 

In brief

 * On the knowledge engine: The Register covers the recent fracas around the knowledge engine. (Feb. 12, Feb. 11) AK
 * Putting Wales online: Wales Online writes about the work of Jason Evans, Wikipedian-in-Residence at The National Library of Wales. (Feb. 9) AK
 * Longest-running hoax: The Business Insider  and the i100 website, owned by The Independent, write about Wikipedia's longest-running hoax, Jack Robichaux, a fictitious 19th-century serial rapist in New Orleans. (Feb. 5, Feb. 4) AK
 * Randomonium: In The Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Gene Weingarten shares his enjoyment of Wikipedia: "I've been playing a new solitaire-like Internet game involving the Wikipedia "Random articles" option. With each click, the online encyclopedia randomly sends you to one of its millions of pages. I conclude that Wiki random is genuinely random, because it seems to make no effort to be interesting: Roughly 20 percent of the pages I was sent to were about species of moths. The object of the game is to keep doing this, rapidly, until you find a subject that you already know about, which is when the game ends; 23 tries is said to be average. I am currently at 40, and still going, but I’m not bummed out. It has taken me several hours because I'm savoring each site and diverting sideways to promising links." (Feb. 4) AK
 * Scientific journal copies from Wikipedia: The Telegraph covers another example of an academic publication plagiarising Wikipedia and provides a round-up of earlier cases. (Feb. 2) AK
 * On Wikipedia's US presidential campaign coverage: The New York Times looks at Wikipedia's coverage of the US presidential campaign. (Feb. 1) AK
 * Black history: atlasobscura.com covers a black history edit-a-thon. (Jan. 30) AK
 * Natasha Zouves: Peter Reynosa in The Huffington Post describes how he wrote the Wikipedia page for San Francisco anchor Natasha Zouves. (Jan. 27) AK
 * Political photography: PetaPixel profiles the political photography of Gage Skidmore (Gage), whose high-quality Creative Commons images of politicians and other celebrities are ubiquitous on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Amazingly, PetaPixel omits all mention of Wikipedia or Wikimedia. (Jan. 26) G

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