Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-09-29/In the media



In brief

 * Science fiction anticipated Wikipedia: Contemporary commenters have noted that science fiction author H. G. Wells anticipated the coming of Wikipedia in his 1938 essay collection World Brain. Popular science magazine Scientific American continues this recognition in a video review of Wells' work, in which point five at 1:20 states, "H. G. Wells invented Wikipedia". (Sept. 8). Previously, in 2012, Tor.com credited Isaac Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica as foreshadowing Wikipedia.
 * Brazilian court rules that Wikipedia may republish publicly available information: The Wikimedia Foundation won a case brought by Brazilian Rosanah Fienngo, in which she objected to the Portuguese Wikipedia's publication of personal information she had provided to a gossip web site. Tech writer Glyn Moody covered the ruling for TechDirt. (Sept. 19)
 * Interaction among Wikipedia bots researched: A paper, "Even Good Bots Fight", has been submitted to the journal Science Advances, and was covered in the MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, the Register, and elsewhere. The paper, which has not yet completed academic peer review, considers bots on multiple online platforms, but emphasizes Wikipedia, as a controlled environment where bots' "benevolence" is assessed and managed. It identified bots that edited inter-language links—now obsolete, because of the emergence of Wikidata—between 2001 and 2010 as reverting one another more frequently than other bots. (Sept. 20)
 * Let us beat term papers into articles: The Los Angeles Times reports that college students are editing Wikipedia "to rewrite the wrongs of Internet science"—as a part of their college assignments.  The article discusses the efforts of the Wiki Education Foundation to train professors to improve Wikipedia content. (Sept. 20)
 * Notable death or memorial page?: Israeli English media reported widely on the deletion of an article about Dafna Meir from the Hebrew Wikipedia on the basis of being a memorial page. On the English Wikipedia, deaths like Meir's and others are compiled at List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, January–June 2016 (Meir under January 17).  Meir's case has also been discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Israel. (Sept. 16)
 * Wicked Girl: Actress Lena Dunham was pleased and amused to see her Wikipedia article incorrectly claim she was briefly married to crooner Chris Isaak.  The vandalism was in the article for about 12 hours from addition, becoming social media share-bait, and removal. (Sept. 15)

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