Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-01-17/In the media



In brief

 * Seeking sandwich history: A Gizmodo advertorial for the Hormel meat company asked about the invention of the BLT: What Hero Invented the BLT?  The author quoted the Wikipedia article and looked for further information about the history of the sandwich.  Our BLT article was first created in September 2002.  Despite the article's having achieved the good article status in 2011, no one has uncovered such a "heroic" inventor.  Lucikly, Hormel has not attempted to claim inventorship to date.  Though not mentioned by Gizmodo, there was a period of time where our article on S'mores claimed they were invented by "Loretta Scott Crew", a falsehood which still gets repeated from time to time. (December 16)


 * From popular music to popular editing: Billboard, best known for its "Billboard Hot 100" ranking of popular music, covered English Wikipedia's most frequently edited articles of 2016 in Death, Donald Trump and Kanye West Had Year's Most Edited Wikipedia Articles. (It was only the "Hot 20," though.) You can see Wikipedian EpochFail's methodology here. (December 23)


 * More creative use confirms that the King has left the building: Two reporters at Buzzfeed recently decided to use not just Wikipedia but Wikidata to see how 2016 stacked up against all other years since 1900 in regards to significant celebrity deaths (the verdict was that 1977, which as the authors admit anyone who was alive that year will indeed remember as the year we lost Elvis at 42, among others, was as bad as 2016 if not worse). Their twin metric involves:
 * number of backlinks from within enwiki, as reported in Wikidata, and,
 * total number of articles in different-language Wikipedias. (December 30)


 * Top ten Wikipedia stories of 2016: Wikipedian WWB presented his picks for the top stories of last year. A worthy complement to our own rundown; he caught some good ones that we missed, as well as covering many of the same stories. (January 3)


 * Students heard that Google was trustworthy and Wikipedia was not: That's the message Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd heard in researching her book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. She wrote up the issue in Did Media Literacy Backfire?, a post for the Data & Society Points blog. (January 5)


 * Comrades mourn red-linking: Canada Free Press wrote up an unsuccessful campaign to save an article about satire website The People's Cube (archive) article from deletion (AfD discussion). The People's Cube website also celebrated the demise of the article with various graphics and commentary: The People's Cube Article has just been Deleted from Wikipedia (article and commentary).  The article was deleted for lack of notability. (January 10)


 * Beyond the locker room: When a Miami Dolphins quarterback took a hard hit during a football game, editors got busy vandalizing the Matt Moore article to report him as "deceased". The edits and Twitter reaction were noted by sportswriters at all22.com and the Palm Beach Post. The Post article also noted a trend in such edits relating to sports events. (January 9)


 * Viewing stats make beautiful music: In a story about past "Best New Artist" Grammy winners, the Tucson Sun covered the entertainment data project PrettyFamous. Using Wikipedia article view statistics as part of an algorithm to assign a "Musician Score", the project determined artist popularity and interest. (January 13)


 * Whither wiki wiki? Mental Floss published an overview of wiki inventor Ward Cunningham's vision for the evolution of collaborative software. A Brief History of the Wiki—and Where It Might Be Going Next recaps Cunningham's descriptions of the Smallest Federated Wiki since 2012, and speculates about how it could address Wikipedia's challenges around bias and diversity. (January 15)


 * 404 no more: The Internet Archive, the non-profit maintainers of the Wayback Machine, announced a new extension for Google's Chrome browser, that helps the user navigate to an archived copy of "dead" web pages. Bleeping Computer published an overview of the extension, which may help Wikipedia editors and readers access archived materials. (January 15)


 * Academia and Wikipedia: compatible after all? FOSS advocate Don Watkins interviewed LiAnna Davis of the Wiki Education Foundation, for opensource.com: Can academic faculty members teach with Wikipedia? (January 16)


 * Recapping the blemishes: Former Signpost editor in chief Andreas Kolbe covered "sixteen of Wikipedia's biggest cock-ups" in the Register, to mark the site's 16th birthday.

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