Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-01/In the media

''The stories you are about to read are true, or at least they have been reported in sources we generally consider to be reliable. But on some of them you might think we are pulling your legs, or that we just made them up out of whole cloth. Is the WMF really climbing in bed with Google and Facebook? Do Russian troops in Ukraine really train by reading Wikipedia? Can you really announce your divorce in a Wikipedia article? Does Elon Musk really think that anybody will believe a word he tweets? Does a single Wikipedia article get 250 million pageviews each month? No, we didn't make these stories up. But please use your own better judgement in evaluating whether what the media writes about us is true.''

Odd bedfellows, journalists, and the WMF
The proposed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was defeated with the help of a dormitory-full of odd bedfellows including Alphabet (formerly Google), Meta (Facebook), the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Wikimedia Foundation. Editor & Publisher reported the defeat of the bill, which was not included in the final omnibus bill of the 117th US Congress.

The proposed act would have given news organizations the right to collectively bargain with social media organizations – by creating a four-year antitrust exemption – to get a share of the social media's advertising revenue for news posted on the platform (similar to the News Media Bargaining Code implemented in Australia). Meta responded that, rather than being forced to pay for news content that it did not post on their own platform, they would "consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations," according to CNN.

CNN and The National Review highlighted the WMF's participation. – Sb

Damned if you do, damned if you don't
Rebecca MacKinnon, WMF's Vice President, Global Advocacy, and Phil Bradley-Schmieg, WMF Lead Counsel, point out in the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA):

One may be forgiven for predicting that this is not a simple task, and probably not possible; accordingly, the authors urge the UK to reconsider the proposed bill. – Sb

Untrained Russian troops learn from Wikipedia how to use their guns
According to an hour-long read in The New York Times on the way the combat in Ukraine is being managed, "Russian soldiers go into battle with little food, a few bullets and instructions grabbed from Wikipedia for weapons they barely know how to use." A printout of the Wikipedia article VSK-94 (probably from the Russian Wikipedia) was in the possession of a soldier named Ruslan, who "seemed to be learning to use his weapon on the fly" and "had little else besides the printouts" in his pack, which Ukrainian soldiers recovered with what they believed to be his body in September. The rifle next to him suggested he was a sniper. But while snipers in modern military units often go through weeks of additional special training, "Ruslan's teacher appeared to be the internet."

A banner article on banners
Prolific Wikipedia reporter Stephen Harrison turned his attention to Wikipedia's fundraising banners (covered in last month's issue) in his latest column for Slate, headlined "The Huge Fight Behind Those Pop-Up Fundraising Banners on Wikipedia".

Though "many people see the banner ads on Wikipedia as something like the site's version of a PBS fundraising drive – a bit annoying because they distract you from your regularly scheduled wiki browsing, but not particularly painful," for others, "many of Wikipedia's most dedicated contributors, this year's proposed banner ads presented something like a moral crisis," he writes. "The Wikipedia editing community recently held a poll rejecting the proposed banner ads, pressuring the foundation that supports the site into drafting alternative ads with softer language."

Harrison discusses the aforementioned RfC and the foundation's response, quoting extensively from well-known Wikipedians including Lane Rasberry, Jim Heaphy, and Ryan McGrady.

Harrison explains to readers the difference between the foundation and the community, the latter of which CEO tells him produces "healthy democratic noise." He also traces the foundation's growth from its early days operating on a "shoestring budget" to its current status as a large, well-funded nonprofit.

On the question of whether or not those with means should donate, Harrison writes, "It depends. In my view, people who volunteer a lot of time improving Wikipedia's content have already made their 'gift' and should feel no obligation. For everyone else, the calculus is personal."

He concludes: "Clearly, Wikipedians are right to engage in vigorous discussion about how donations are solicited from visitors, and to oversee how those funds are actually spent." – Sdkb

How to get divorced on Wikipedia
"Hi ! Thanks for letting us know that your last name contains two q's and a z rather than two z's and a q. But can you prove it with a reference to a reliable source? " This sort of interaction may be part of our daily grind, but the outside world still finds it more than a little perplexing.

Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel recently had this experience trying to get the article on her updated to reflect her divorce earlier this year. An unidentified IP, presumably Mandel, made a COI edit request for the update at the article talk page, surpassing the vast majority of COI requests by including a source in the form of a court record number. But it was declined, with the comment, "The requested edit violates Wikipedia policy as expressed in WP:NOR and more specifically in WP:BLPPRIMARY: 'Do not use trial transcripts and other court records, or other public documents, to support assertions about a living person.' Basically, Wikipedia should not be the place of first publication of any information that has not already been published elsewhere, particularly in WP:BLP articles. If this information is sufficiently public and important enough to be reported by reliable third-party sources, then it may be updated here."

Mandel then took to Twitter, tweeting, "Friends, did you know that if you have a Wikipedia page and you get a divorce, the only way to update your Wikipedia is to say you're divorced in an interview?"

She continued, "It sounds crazy, but wikipedia runs on citations! So anyway all I want for Christmas is for a journalist writing a story for publication (online-only is fine!) to ask me if I'm still married. Also if you're reading this and you're one of my girlfriend's friends, she's not actually dating a married woman, it's just that my wikipedia page is a time capsule."

Wikipedian Hayden Schiff replied to her that, per WP:ABOUTSELF, her tweet should be sufficient. But Mandel had been (mis-)informed by "a guy who's been a Wikipedia editor for a very long time" that nothing short of media coverage would do.

Thus, two hours after her tweet, Slate ran the article, "A Totally Normal Interview With Author Emily St. John Mandel," in which Dan Kois asked her, "So, are you married these days?"

"My Wikipedia entry was essentially a time capsule," Mandel told him. "It bothered me that it was no longer accurate, but also it was kind of awkward for my girlfriend. I didn't love that if her friends looked me up, they'd think she was dating a married woman."

The BBC, which had gotten scooped, ran their own article a few days later, which referenced a similar incident in 2012 with author Philip Roth. Business Insider also ran coverage, choosing to contact a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson rather than learn to read a talk page. Upworthy arrived late to the party the next day with a GIF-filled article that nevertheless ran with "scoop" in the URL.

Back on Wikipedia, discussion has moved to whether we ought to modify WP:BLP (consensus is leaning no as of press time) and whether we ought to mention the incident in Mandel's bio (consensus is leaning yes). – Sdkb

Twitter files, tweet, tweet, delete, no keep, and Wikipedia is not for sale
A remarkable spat started on December 2 when Elon Musk promised an "awesome" announcement and then the Twitter files were released via a series of tweets, followed by a series of similar stories in cooperation with Musk, all critical of Musk's newly purchased Twitter platform and its reaction to a news story about Hunter Biden's laptop.

A Wikipedia article on the Twitter files was soon started and quickly nominated for deletion. An AfD participant called the story a "nothing burger". Musk was tweeted and he called the proposed deletion evidence of Wikipedia's "non-trivial left-wing bias" tweaking Jimmy Wales in the process. Another tweeter asked Musk if he was considering buying Wikipedia. Wales said that Wikipedia was not for sale.

Fox News, Metro (UK), Vice, Gizmodo and others noticed the Twitter spat between Elon Musk and Jimmy Wales involving the supposed offer from the former to buy Wikipedia. Fox characterized it as a "slam" against Wikipedia for considering deleting the article Twitter Files. Vice countered with the label "conspiracy theory" for reading left/right content inclusion intent into the deletion debate. Gizmodo, puzzlingly, says in a headline that Wales "Indirectly Tells Elon Musk the Site 'Is Not for Sale'" emphasis ours, but in the same article states that he's "going head-to-head with" the billionaire.

The deletion request was snow closed as "Keep".

In the meantime
 * Inc. opined that Jack Dorsey Wanted Elon Musk to Turn Twitter Into Wikipedia. Here's Why That Failed.
 * Musk surveyed Twitterers on the question of whether he should let somebody else run Twitter, promising to abide by their decision.
 * When 17.5 million (57%) responded that somebody else should run Twitter, Musk replied "I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams."

Jimmy Wales, who has serious experience running a social media platform, is not likely to be foolish enough to apply. Neither would any other qualified applicant. So was this whole episode a charade or a publicity stunt right from the beginning? – B, Sb

In brief

 * Fascist-free: "How the far-right is keeping Giorgia Meloni's Wikipedia page free of any ties to fascism" (The Daily Dot).
 * I Don't Wanna Dance with Somebody's Wikipedia Page: IndieWire reviewed I Wanna Dance with Somebody calling it Whitney Houston's "Wikipedia page set to song", panning the "abject laziness of the film's construction". Apparently, the standards for a good screenplay don't follow WP:BLP, who knew? This is not the first time such criticism has been leveled at a film (see The New York Times' critique of Solo: A Star Wars Story in prior Signpost coverage).  points out a couple more which were discussed at WP:Film:
 * Contains nothing you couldn't get from Wikipedia or YouTube: Netflix's Pelé reviewed (The Spectator),
 * The Big Bull Review: This Harshad Mehta Story Feels Like a Wikipedia Entry Made More Dull by Abhishek Bachchan (Arre). – B
 * Official state Wiki-words?: crossword-solver.io has a list of the "most uniquely popular words" for the Wikipedia article on each U.S. state and the countries of the world; we found out from KX Television in North Dakota about the Roughrider State's special word: "oil".
 * Running out of grammatical, fluent English: Social media gobbledygook isn't good enough for machine learning (model training for natural language processing), but Wikipedia is (VentureBeat).
 * You say potato, I say potāto: Inside Wikipedia's great macron war (The Spinoff).


 * Filthy e-waste: Agbogbloshie is no longer the filthiest as Wikipedia has it. Agbogbloshie, a slum near Accra, Ghana is "the worlds's largest e-waste dump" according to a video from the World Economic Forum. Accra Regional Minister Henry Quartey disagrees and blames Wikipedia for saying so. Surprisingly, a music video by Placebo may give an even more detailed view of the situation.
 * Wikipedians collab with Smithsonian Institution: Kelly Doyle and Andrew Lih collaborate on new children's book We Are Here (Smithsonian magazine  blog).
 * Dueling Hong Kong anthems: The Hong Kong government has told Google to change their search results for "Hong Kong national anthem".


 * The official Hong Kong anthem is March of the Volunteers – Mainland China's anthem. An alternative that has been used by protesters is Glory to Hong Kong.


 * See "Hong Kong demands Google bury protest song in online anthem search results", from The Washington Post via MSN.


 * French cookie monster: SFgate shows that an article in the French Wikipedia is getting over 250 million pageviews per month. The Signpost has confirmed that Cookie (informatique) tops Pages populaires, by a factor of over 120× the pageviews of the #2 article, Coupe du monde de football 2022.

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