Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-03-09/In the media



Wikipedian is break-out star of International Women's Day
International Women's Day was celebrated on March 8. Art+Feminism organized a series of 125 worldwide editathons the weekend before to coincide with the event, its third annual commemoration. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported on the event in "Why women are missing from history on Wikipedia" (March 6) and discussed gender bias on Wikipedia. The ABC quoted Dr. Lauren Rosewarne of the University of Melbourne, who said "Having men produce the lion's share of content ... perpetuates men's voices dominating the public space and ... continuing to be the authority on issues." The ABC also listed seven Australian women missing from Wikipedia, four of whom now have Wikipedia articles.

Individual editathons received news coverage, including events at Indiana University, the University of Regina, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Colorado Boulder, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, St. Lawrence University, the Interference Archive, and the University of Oregon.

The break-out star of Wikipedia efforts at addressing the gender gap was Emily Temple-Wood, who was profiled in a March 8 post on the WMF blog, republished in this week's Signpost Blog feature. Her efforts are unpopular in some quarters, and Temple-Wood, who founded WikiProject Women Scientists in 2012, has vowed to create an article on a female scientist for every harassing email she receives. The blog post went viral, prompting stories in media outlets in multiple languages, including New York magazine, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Bustle, Quartz, The Scientist, Mic, Jezebel, Buzzfeed, and Glamour. G

Dinosaur art
Inverse.com features a profile (March 9) of French-born paleoartist Nobumichi Tamura, who has created around 1,500 Creative Commons-licensed drawings of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, many of them hosted on Wikimedia Commons.

As Tamura, who works at the Berkeley National Laboratory, recounts in the piece, when he first started to explore the topic in Wikipedia about a decade ago, he was struck by the absence of illustrations, and set to work.

It was not always plain sailing, partly due to the fact that paleontology has seen many advances over the past few decades that have fundamentally changed views of what these prehistoric animals looked like in life:

Due to other work commitments, Nobu Tamura stopped contributing to Wikipedia and Commons about five years ago – a fact that the inverse.com profile curiously omits to mention – but a good number of his illustrations continue to be in use.

A recent interview with Tamura is available on YouTube. AK

Wikipedia's new iOS app and its fight for market share
The Next Web is among many tech sites to report (March 10) on Wikipedia's new iOS app. Its article, which includes several screenshots and a WMF "Wikipedia Mobile 5.0 for iPhone and iPad" launch video, says the app experience is

TechCrunch agrees (March 10) with The Next Web on the quality of the app, describing it as "well-designed and highly polished, and worth the download", but is unsure how the update will affect "Wikipedia's traction on iOS", noting that while the app remains top-ranked in the "Reference" category on the App Store, it's dropped out of the top-30 of late and is

TechCrunch's comments highlight some of the challenges the Wikimedia Foundation is up against as users move to mobile and Wikimedia content is increasingly incorporated in other brands' products. AK 

In brief

 * Crowdsourced speech: Phys.org reports (March 10) on a Wikimedia Sweden project aimed at developing "the world's first crowdsourced speech synthesis platform". Engadget also covers the story, although without making clear that this is a Wikimedia Sweden rather than a Wikimedia Foundation project. Both articles only attribute the project to "Wikipedia" in their headlines. AK
 * Not dead, Wikipedia, very much alive in fact, thank you: The Times of India and The Hindu are among Indian outlets reporting (March 9) that Indian BJP politician Anju Bala was falsely declared dead by Wikipedia. Bala says she learnt of her premature demise when her secretary received a phone call enquiring whether a broadcast programme in which she had participated – clearly alive – had been held back for some reason. In addition, her Wikipedia biography at one point claimed she had been married twice; Bala considered this more offensive than being declared dead, describing it as "character assassination". AK
 * Wikipedia in court: Philippine news website Rappler reports (March 6) that the Court of Appeals of the Philippines has defended its use of Wikipedia and other online sources in its ruling on the Marcopper mining disaster. AK
 * Drumpf: Us Weekly comments (March 3) on the creation of the Donald Drumpf article on Wikipedia, which presently, after several debates, redirects to Donald Trump (Last Week Tonight). AK
 * Battles: The Telegraph and the BBC report (March 2) on a project by Dutch firm LAB1100, a world map showing the locations of historical battles based on data from Wikidata and DBpedia. Both reports include cautionary notes about the reliability of the underlying data, and the soundness of the algorithm used. AK
 * Commercial ecosystem: The Register, in an article titled "Wikidata makes Wikipedia a database. Let the fun begin", imagines (Feb. 25) "an ecology of very lucrative apps built atop Wikidata", noting that machines will for the first time be able to answer questions like "What are the ten largest cities with female mayors?" AK
 * Eva Longoria sewing: Boing Boing presented "20 Minutes of Eva Longoria Sewing, While Reading the Entire Wikipedia Entry on Sewing" (Feb. 25). AK
 * Tax decisions based on Wikipedia: AccountancyAge questioned (Feb. 19) HM Revenue and Customs' use of Wikipedia as the basis for a decision on the correct tax classification of a type of electromechanical switch. The manufacturer appealed, arguing that "it is very important that someone classifying electronic goods is not just reading some page on the internet but they have at least a minimal understanding of the electronic terms", and moreover pointed out that HMRC "had relied only on certain parts of the definition" provided by Wikipedia. The tribunal upheld the appeal. AK
 * Recent events round-up: The Knowledge Engine and Lila Tretikov's resignation from her post as Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director attracted widespread coverage, especially in the period from Feb. 12–15 and Feb. 25–29, much of it citing reports in The Signpost. For a fairly exhaustive listing of press and web reports, see this page on Meta. AK

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