Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-06-28/In the media

Are Wikipedians silencing perspectives outside the community accepted point of view?
How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice, in Slate by Stephen Harrison examines the inner workings of knowledge production in English Wikipedia, using his usual combination of the analysis of talk page debates, policies, the evolution of articles, and editor interviews.

He describes the production process as "part collaboration and part combat", and focuses on deletion debates as an expression of practices and policies that discourage positive change. The deletion nominations of the Black Lives Matter Meta-Wiki page and the article Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman are closely examined, including the intervention of individual administrators who may have misapplied policy to prevent changes in controversial areas. He writes:

The Signpost notes that Articles for deletion/Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman was plagued by sockpuppets - starting with the nominator. Discounting the socks, the outcome of the deletion debate was 32 keep versus 4 delete !votes. One editor preferred redirection. –B

Ryan Merkley talks to the Lawfare Podcast for fifty-one minutes
This podcast episode is the third part of three discussing the influence of disinformation in what they describe as an often-unreliable internet. Myopically insisting that they "are a disinformation podcast" they suggest that Wikipedia is vulnerable to disinformation. Introduced as the Chief of Staff to the WMF Office of the Executive Director, Ryan Merkley handles himself well; explaining that volunteers, not WMF employees, control content on Wikipedia and that a combination of pending changes, bots, and human editors prevent untruths from spreading on Wikipedia. Merkely adroitly points out that the nature of the semantic wiki, the openness of talk pages and history tabs insulate Wikipedia.
 * The Lawfare Podcast: Ryan Merkley on Why Wikipedia Works Lawfare (blog)

He states that Wikipedia's appearance of reliability is "trust that community has earned" but points out that Wikipedia looks good in part because so much other media looks bad, saying "attacks on traditional journalism that have reduced trust in media, behaviors of media not in line with some of the traditional values of what media should do, like fact-checking" have eroded once reliable sources, causing second-order effects here because we need reliable sources, causing third-order effects because outlets like Google use Wikipedia in information they republish. Merkely admits that against a state-sanctioned disinformation campaign, Wikipedia, like any other social media outlet, would be helpless. The interviewer asks, with concern to the "homogeneity in the community of editors", how the WMF's upcoming universal code of conduct will tamp down harassment. Merkley agrees that some in the audience may have heard that Wikipedia is unfriendly to women and persons of color asserting that "parts of our communities have been hostile" but that he's "really proud" of the Board of Trustees' work on the Code of Conduct and that the code is meant to create a baseline of enforcement upon which communities can improve. –CT

Facebook's version of Knowledge Panel is being tested

 * Facebook tests Wikipedia-powered information panels, similar to Google, in its search results in TechCrunch.

Still in the testing phase, Facebook's new search product allows readers to stay on their platform while reading basic information from Wikipedia and other sources, similar to Google's Knowledge Panel. TechCrunch is not impressed, calling the product "fairly hit or miss". Their examples include a "hit" – searching for "joker" will call up information on the movie – but searching for "parasite" does not give information on the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 2019. In another example, searching for "Donald Trump" calls up useful information, but searching for members of his cabinet does not always work.

Social Media Today broke the story with Facebook Adds Wikipedia Knowledge Boxes in Search Results.

In brief

 * Join the Science Gallery in exploring the ‘erased voices’ of Wikipedia in Silicon Republic invites us to a June 11 "Wikithon" that was all about diversity. Moderated by Shubhangi Karmakar, the first disabled QTIPOC (queer, transgender and intersex people of colour) youth advisor at Science Gallery Dublin, the program hoped to document "notable yet overlooked BIPOC" (black, indigenous and people of colour) "in STEM and media."
 * 15 Wikipedia Pages About Historical Queer Actors, Writers, And Figures You'll Want To Read Right Now in BuzzFeed started by asking readers for their own lists. The final list included Marlene Dietrich, Josephine Baker, Colette, Tallulah Bankhead, Bayard Rustin, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and nine others.
 * Bayard Rustin was a key figure in the civil rights and gay rights movements published by The A.V. Club's Wiki Wormhole series.  Bayard, despite being openly gay, was a major figure in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. He pioneered the Freedom Riders protests starting in the 1940s.  He mentored Martin Luther King, Jr. on the fine points of nonviolent protests. He was the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, technically under the supervision of A. Phillip Randolph, where MLK gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.  Starting in the early 1980s, he campaigned for gay rights.
 * Wikipedia founder: 'This contact tracing app situation in the UK is the height of incompetence' in The Telegraph reports how Jimmy Wales has told the UK government that they have wasted millions of pounds writing a COVID-19 contact tracing app that would have invaded the privacy of the people it was supposed to have protected. The app could be written using off-the-shelf software to maintain privacy. Jimmy said that he'd do the job within two weeks "at zero cost to the taxpayers" if the government agreed.
 * 'A woman': Wikipedia page records trials and achievements of invisible women in France 24 shows how French headline writers discriminate against women. For the original French Wikipedia article, translated into English, see this month's Humour article.
 * Autonomous Zone in Seattle and on Wikipedia: Referring to CHAZ, Fast Company wrote Seattle's 'Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone' already has a Wikipedia page, but it might not last on June 10. Articles in the mainstream press and a presidential tweet effectively derailed the deletion debate. As of June 27, the zone appears to be in the process of closing down, but several hundred protestors remain according to The Wall Street Journal (paywalled).
 * Saskatchewan doctor keeps COVID-19 Wikipedia info accurate with encyclopedic dedication from the CBC. Doc James is from Saskatchewan and practices medicine in British Columbia.
 * "Salacious and false rumors from unreliable sources": that is a lawyer for Zion Williamson talking about Wikipedia, according to the News & Observer.
 * Wikipedia finally designates Taiwan as 'country' according to Taiwan News in Taiwan. Tribun News in Indonesia and Masato Kajimoto, a journalism academic affiliated with the University of Hong Kong and Stony Brook University, also noted the change.

Odd bits

 * CBC radio has a weekly program on Saturdays, which started June 15 about an on-air Newfoundland-Labrador editathon, supported by Memorial University, a Wikipage and dashboard.
 * The Mattoon (Illinois) Journal-Gazette Times-Courier gives the The 24 most unusual town names in Illinois. They documented 15 of the names with Wikipedia articles:Goofy Ridge, Normal, Birds, Oblong, Beardstown, Muddy, Sandwich, Ransom, Cairo (pronounced care-o, not kay-ro), Wyoming, Golf, Mechanicsburg, Benld, Bone Gap, and Mineral. Nine were not documented by Wikipedia articles: Standard, Boody, Hometown, Time, Royal, Equality, Industry, Joy, and Lost Nation. Somehow the newspaper missed Chicken Bristle which is just 30 miles north of Mattoon via Tuscola.

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