Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-08-31/In the media

Hunter Biden again
Events are events, and reporting is reporting. Some sources are biased in what they choose to cover, some are openly partisan, and some make suggestive innuendo to imply more than they can prove. Indeed, some sources do so with such fervor that they are not considered reliable for general use on Wikipedia.

But things that happened happened, and things that didn't didn't, and sometimes there really is a wolf, and sometimes businessmen really do sleazy stuff on Wikipedia.

In "Emails Show Hunter Biden Hired Specialists to Quietly Airbrush Wikipedia", investigative journalist Lee Fang asserts that reputation management consultants for Hunter Biden have edited the Wikipedia biography. The Federalist's staff writer Jordan Boyd says that the "the company's [sic] host of left-leaning administrators" are effectively in cahoots, or at least turning a blind eye. Maybe more helpfully, Boyd points out the "effectively unenforceable" policies like Conflict of interest that are supposed to prevent just this scenario, or at least keep it from going unnoticed for years.

But were the edits justified?
The Federalist also links to a copy of the email correspondence between Hunter Biden, his confidant Eric Schwerin, and Ryan Toohey of FTI Consulting, as uploaded to DocumentCloud by Lee Fang. These show the passages Hunter objected to, and his and Schwerin's comments. For example, the Career section of his article began with an unsourced sentence that read: According to Fang's email document, Schwerin commented:

The sentence was duly removed. The relevant edits were performed by the user AmeliaChevalier in May 2014: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

The first and third of these edits removed large chunks of content about Burisma, a holding company of Ukrainian energy business Hunter has had associations with in the past.

Some of the other changes look, prima facie, like good-faith corrections of factual errors. Toohey comments in one of the emails:

There is another notable deletion. According to the email document, Hunter commented as follows on a sentence claiming that he co-founded the "PARADIGM Global Advisors" fund (along with James Biden and disgraced financier Allen Stanford):

While the Wikipedia sentence (added in 2013 by EllenCT, citing a 2007 Bloomberg source whose pre-2014 status is not available in the Internet Archive) does appear to have been incorrect as far as the co-founding is concerned, Biden's assertion that "Stanford had nothing to do with the fund" is also contradicted by sources. A 2009 Wall Street Journal report (archive), for example, says: Other quality sources commenting on these alleged links include a 2009 Reuters report titled "Stanford had links to fund run by Bidens" and a 2019 Financial Times article (archive). The sentence about Stanford was duly removed. According to WikiBlame, this removal was never reversed, and there is no mention of links between Biden and Stanford in the article today. – AK, B, JG

Edit not, lest ye be edited
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Newsweek report on Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley (User:Rlgbjd)'s recent defense of editing her own Wikipedia page, in which she claimed she needed to correct "distorted" information and made several changes to her biography, leading editors on the site to reprimand her. She only made five edits, all to this page; two of them were pretty straightforward. The other three (this one, this one, and this one) touched on a controversial subject: her article's coverage of comments she made in 2020 about COVID-19 lockdown orders. The sentence in the article was cited to this Star Tribune article, and said that she "compared the stay-at-home orders to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II". She amended this to include the full quote from her concurring opinion:

Anyway, you are not supposed to do this with your own article, regardless of whether it is justified; she received a WP:COI warning template and got reverted a couple times.

Later, regarding the scandal, she said: "On my Wikipedia page, I added excerpts from actual opinions and removed dishonest information about my background[...] Clearly, the media has made no effort to report honestly so public officials have no choice but to correct the record for them".

Now we will write a Signpost article about the Newsweek article about the judge writing about her own Wikipedia article about a Star Tribune article about a judicial opinion.

Since then, her article's revision history has become something of a gong show, with people going back and forth on including the Wikipedia incident (featuring cameo appearances from the likes of Wugapodes and Tamzin, as well as a BLP extended-confirmed protection from Courcelles ).

ChatGPT and Wikipedia
Stephen Harrison reports in Slate that "rumors of Wikipedia’s death at the hands of ChatGPT are greatly exaggerated", saying that... you know what, to hell with it.

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 * Editor's note: I would rather drink molten lead than say the phrase "leveraging AI" with a straight face, but apart from that, sure.

– JG, CA2

There is life after Wikimedia for Katherine Maher
The New York Times reports on Katherine Maher's recent marriage to lawyer Ashutosh Upreti. Since her departure in 2021 (see previous Signpost coverage), the former Wikimedia CEO appears to have taken some time off:

The Signpost wishes the happy couple all the best. – AK

Toilet nomenclature is priority number one, and people write a lot of number two about it online
AsiaOne and SCMP report that some people were making some posts on the darn computer — ain't that the way it always goes?

This time it was because the organizers of Wikimania 2023, getting cozy at the Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre, had posted a sign designating one of the banks of restrooms as "gender-neutral toilets". A whopping eight social media posters are quoted as commenting on this, expressing a variety of political opinions.

Was it a radical act of progressive inclusion? Was it performative woke virtue signaling? Was it good? Was it bad? More importantly, can somebody reach over and hand me a couple social media posts? The holder in my stall is empty! – JG

In brief

 * Mugged: Wikipedia Users Fight Over Donald Trump's Mug Shot Getting Its Own Page, by Matt Novak for Forbes Sites (regarding Mug shot of Donald Trump and its deletion discussion)
 * The Wiki Piggy Bank: Wikimedia grows rich as Wikipedia donations are used for political causes, by Bryan Lunduke
 * Wikivoyage: Eine unblutige Revolte und eine Familienzusammenführung (A bloodless revolt and a family reunion: How the courageous content fork became a Wikipedia sister project), by Stefan Mey for Golem.de
 * Joie de Vivek: This was reported on in May, but is back in the spotlight again after Vivek's knockout performance at the debates. Ramaswamy Paid Wikipedia Editor to Delete Reference to Harvard Vaccine Scientist (National Review), Vivek Ramaswamy Paid to Have His Soros Fellowship and Covid-Era Role Scrubbed from Wikipedia Page (Mediaite), Vivek Ramaswamy paid Wikipedia editor to scrub info from his history (Yahoo! News)
 * More on the WMF Endowment: "Wikipedia should focus on content creation – not social justice campaigns", says Andrew Orlowski in The Daily Telegraph.
 * "Journey to prominence" and/or PR: This article showcases the "Journey to prominence" of a paid editor who "Leverages Wiki and PR Services for Enhanced Notability, Growth, and Fundraising Success" (Z News Service, via MSN ).

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