Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-08-29/In the media

We hope Father Will forgives us, but we just couldn't keep this column concise this month. Even the stories in the "in brief" section are not brief. Despite all the horrific general news stories lately, stories related to Wikipedia have mostly been interesting and different. No, we couldn't totally ignore some of the usual, more somber, stories. So pick and choose your stories and enjoy the difference!

Learning to trust the internet again
Jimmy Wales in Al Jazeera reminds us how the internet used to be. According to Jimmy there was little or no disinformation in healthcare or elections, and people could generally agree on the facts. Despite this double dose of nostalgia, Jimmy has a point and a program to make things better. The disinformation situation has gotten much worse. The program looks like Wikipedia, "the cornerstone of the free web.... It is the blueprint for restoring public trust in the web again."

Wales draws three conclusions from the success of Wikipedia:
 * We must all take responsibility for the truth of information on the web. "As we discover more about how influential a dozen people can be in spreading disinformation far and wide, Wikipedia highlights the role we each can play in providing good information."
 * "purveyors of news and information, including large technology companies, must create a common agreement about the need for information to be factual, reliable, and up to date." And
 * "Transparency in online spaces will empower internet users to have open, civil debates where we can embrace our differences and be clear about our own personal biases. This creates more productive conversations and will build communities instead of promoting conflict."

Sounds pretty easy, doesn't it? We've got one request however. Jimmy, next time, please let corporations and their paid editors know that we don't want their disinformation, AKA hidden advertisements in our encyclopedia. And please let them know that our minimum requirement is that they must declare each paid edit, along with the names of the client, employer, and other affiliated parties. If we can't see these hidden adverts, we can't correct them. If you or the Wikimedia Foundation won't let people know about these requirements, who will? – S

Olympic victories
How to Use Wikipedia When You're Watching the Olympics, Stephen Harrison of Slate set the stage for the Olympics by describing how to use Wikipedia as your second screen while watching the Tokyo games. The most popular athletes score high on Wikipedia pageviews, Google Knowledge panels and Alexa report the information from Wikipedia. You can even read about the oddities that only Wikipedia ever covers such as List of Olympic medalists in art competitions.

Editors at WikiProject Olympics report that good photos of the Olympians are hard to get because broadcasters and national sports federations control the copyrights. Are the articles biased? Inclusion of articles about athletes should not be biased against women because of easy notability requirements for all Olympic athletes, but the article coverage may be less for athletes from some countries. A gymnastics writer says that there are no obvious misstatements in Wikipedia articles about the gymnasts she covers, but that controversies are sometimes avoided.

Why Basketball 3×3 Star Stefanie Dolson, Others Fact Check Their Wiki Pages NBC Channel 4 New York asked five USA Olympians to review the Wikipedia articles about themselves on video and suggest any needed corrections. Four of the five loved the articles.
 * Stefanie Dolson – Despite a few quibbles – like not including a "Q" on "LGBT" – she concludes "I'm impressed Wikipedia. You got basically all the information correct. More information than I would have even known about myself. Very well done." The U.S. women's 3-on-3 basketball team took home gold medals, another job well done.
 * Carlin Isles – Taking his assignment very seriously, Isles finds several mistakes, e.g. he says he was born in Akron, Ohio rather than in nearby Massillon. But he concludes "Hey Wik, I must say, you wasn't too shabby. You didn't leave out a lot of details. I'm very proud [of Wikipedia's performance]." The United States men's rugby sevens placed sixth – not too shabby for American rugby.
 * Mattie Rogers – a woman weightlifter, starts out with "whoever did this was very professional" and barely quibbles the rest of the way through the article. She finished sixth in the 87 kg weight class.
 * Ginny Fuchs – a woman flyweight boxer. She notes two important missing facts:
 * Wikipedia missed that she qualified for the Tokyo Olympics (whoops!).
 * She is a spokesperson for mental health, due to her struggles with OCD, and has spoken on the topic on the Oprah Winfrey Show (double whoops!!). Sorry about that!
 * In the round of 16 she lost to Stoyka Krasteva, who later won the gold metal.


 * Kyle Snyder – Snyder is a long time fan of Wikipedia. "Wikipedia, you guys are doing a good job." He won the 97 kg freestyle 2016 Olympic gold. He defeated Abdulrashid Sadulaev in 2017 to win the 97 kg freestyle world championship, one of only two losses in Sadulaev's career. This year Snyder suffered his third career loss to Sadulaev in the 97 kg final, taking the silver medal.

'''[https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/01/olympics-wikipedia-guy-fraser-tokyo There are 11,656 athletes at the Olympics. Guy Fraser wanted them all on Wikipedia]': The Guardian'' covers the work of one dedicated Wikipedian, who has been filling in the blank spaces in our coverage of the 2020 games. See Community view for further coverage. – S

Wikimania in Phnom Penh
Père Guillaume Conquer ran what must be the most unusual version of Wikimania this year, perhaps ever, in the Coconut Club in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as he documented in a local paper. With 15 participants, including a dozen Cambodians, young and old, a Korean businessman, and an Australian cultural-events organizer, the event was almost as large as the congregation of Conquer's church in the tiny village of Chom Lak. Father Will, as he's usually called, has been a Roman Catholic missionary in Cambodia for two years for the Missions Etrangères de Paris. It's his first assignment since being ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of Monaco. He told AsiaNews "Wikipedia is not the right tool for proselytising. Its success lies in its neutral point of view. It's a space for knowledge, not preaching."

Father Will bought the first drink for Wikipedia editors registered before the event. He's been a Wikipedian since 2008 making 3,432 edits across all projects. His goal for the Khmer Wikipedia is to double its 8,000 articles over the next year. Thanks for all you do, Father. And keep the faith. – S

Why not a single Wikipedia article for controversial topics?
[https://undark.org/2021/08/12/wikipedia-has-a-language-problem-heres-how-to-fix-it/ 'Wikipedia Has a Language Problem. Here’s How To Fix It'] by Yumiko Sato in Undark Magazine (reprinted in Fast Company). Following an earlier article in Slate where she explains in detail how the Japanese Wikipedia has whitewashed much of Japan's World War II history, Sato notes that the Croatian Wikipedia has had similar problems for almost a decade. (See prior coverage in The Signpost Disinformation report (2021) and Opinion (2019).) Al Jazeera piles on the Croatian editors with Are Croat nationalists pushing a political agenda on Wikipedia? on how Croat nationalists affected the Croatian Wikipedia, but concentrates on how they affect the Bosnian Wikipedia.

Wikipedia certainly has had language versions that produce seriously biased articles resulting from poor governance. While Sato recognizes that there will be technical difficulties, she proposes that there be a single language version of Wikipedia (presumably English) so that poor governance on a smaller version doesn't affect article quality. Political problems would prevent the implementation of this solution, even more so than technical problems. Different cultures want to be able to determine their own "truths" in their own languages.

But could a single "All-Wikipedia" article even be possible for even one of the most controversial articles? Likely, that would involve a set of about five translations from a single main article. Edits to the translations would have to be translated to the other versions. Debate on talk pages might need several translations as well. The thought of a multi-language edit war boggles the mind. It's an interesting idea, but it's unlikely to be implemented any time soon. – S

On deleting articles about women
Francesca Tripodi's recent paper, Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia continues to make news this month. Dr. Tripodi, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, reports that biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than similar male biographies. – B
 * Utah Public Radio's UnDisciplined podcast interviews Tripodi in the episode. Women And Wikipedia.
 * Marketplace Tech: Why it’s so hard for biographies about women to stay on Wikipedia quotes Tropdi saying, "The default to erase notable women rather than simply fix their page is the broader problem that we’re trying to look at here."
 * Tripodi appeared on CBC Radio (Canada's national broadcaster) in a piece titled Canadian Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias, study finds. The case mentioned in the radio show but not spoken by name was Articles for deletion/Elicia Maine, the AfD for a woman who holds a named chair at a well-known Canadian university. See previous Signpost coverage of gender issues at Recent research.

In brief
''Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next month's edition in the Newsroom or leave a tip on the suggestions page.''
 * 7 Notable African Women Activists Who Deserve Wikipedia Pages are named by Global Citizen, who also provide a couple of paragraphs of good information about each woman. Ok, they could have provided links to other reliable sources, but sometimes these things all work out in the end. The women are Madame Cissé Hadja Mariama Sow, Nebila Abdulmelik, Jeannine Mukanirwa, Mercy Akuot, Kagendo Murungi, Bibata Ouédraogo, and Beatrice Mukansinga. All news sources are encouraged to publish similarly informative articles on African women – and please tell us about it on the Suggestions page. Thanks to for creating the Wikipedia articles!
 * A deep dive under the bonnet: Feast examines the engine behind Wikipedia articles on the top-ten UK automobile brands in BMW becomes Wikipedia’s most edited car brand page. Do you want to know which brands have the most total article edits – linking to graphs breaking it down by month? You'll find it right before the most prolific editors for each article. Pageviews and the pageviews-to-edits ratio are also mentioned. Most of the stats are readily available: the innovation in this article is collecting them all in a single place for one important market. Vertu Motors, the UK's fifth largest automobile dealership published the original report, which is no longer available online.
 * The creator of Lsjbot is arguably the most prolific author in the world according to The Guardian. The creator, Sverker Johansson, is a Wikipedian who began his career as a particle physicist, and now writes books about the origins of language for his day job. The bot has created at least 80 percent of the Cebuano Wikipedia.
 * Kansas City Public Library Hires A Dedicated 'Wikipedian-In-Residence': NPR member KCUR interviews Miranda Pratt. The Kansas City Public Library states that Miranda is "the first Wikipedian-In-Residence appointed by a public library in the United States."
 * Input and CNET's stories both covered a classic example of vandalism. A vandal waited to become autoconfirmed, and then defaced a widely-used template with a Nazi flag, affecting more than 50,000 pages. While reverted in just a few minutes, the high-profile pages affected (such as Joe Biden) meant that the press took notice.
 * Decentralized blockchain project launches contest to build next Wikipedia – once more, a Wikipedia-killer is about to be proposed. This one, sponsored by a cryptocurrency organization, doesn't have a product yet – just a contest to produce ideas for one. Their more detailed objectives, suggest that their beef with Wikipedia is that we limit their free advertising for cryptocurrency. "One example are blockchain/cryptocurrency-related topics on English Wikipedia, strictly controlled by Wikipedia old-timers and cryptocurrency haters like David Gerard. Such people have large support groups that allow them to push their agenda using particular pages." Gerard tells The Signpost that proposed cybercurrency-controlled encyclopedias, such as Lunyr and Everipedia, are nothing new. He says "I refer the honourable gentlemen to my previous written response."