Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-06/In the media

U.K. Shadow Chancellor accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia in her new book
The Financial Times, in "New book from UK shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves lifts from Wikipedia", accuses Rachel Reeves of wholesale plagiarizing from Wikipedia in The Women Who Made Modern Economics. There were lesser amounts of unattributed copying from The Guardian and several other sources. The Guardian reported that

Reeves told the BBC that some sentences "were not properly referenced", but would be corrected in future reprints. She also told the BBC:

Both The Guardian and the Financial Times highlighted the irony "that one of the themes of the book was the failure to properly acknowledge the work of female economists."

Other media covering the story include The Telegraph, The Independent, The Times, and i. – S, H

Rich guy and Wikipedia: Who is offended by what?

 * See also: this issue's Opinion.

A tweet, from the world's richest man and leading tweeter, said that Wikipedia should change its name to "Dickipedia," offering Wikipedia a billion dollars to do so, "in the interests of accuracy". The tweet mockingly referred to a screenshot of a Wikipedia fundraising banner ("Wikipedia is not for sale. A personal appeal from Jimmy Wales"). Perhaps this check was slated to be cut right after his cage match with Zuckerberg.

An explosion of press articles followed:
 * The Guardian opines that Wikipedia's very existence offends him and compares the "good internet" (Wikipedia) to the "bad internet" (Facebook and X, née Twitter).
 * Rolling Stone writes that the rich man "Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia", referring to how he paid $44 billion for Twitter a year ago and renamed it X, which is now valued at about $19 billion. Wikipedian Annie Rauwerda is quoted at length, saying for example "Frankly, I have been sick of thinking about [the rich man] for years and I do not think his tweets about Wikipedia are all that novel. I mean, 'Dickipedia' isn't even the first disparaging nickname for Wikipedia he's touted this year." Rolling Stone also mentions Stephen Harrison's May 2022 article in Slate, about how the article about the rich man had become controversial and difficult to edit.
 * In a new article for Slate, Wikipedia Is Covering the War in Israel and Gaza Better Than X, Harrison focuses on how people are spreading misinformation about the war on X (née Twitter) and how his changes have made matters worse. The rich man has been focusing more on criticism from Wales and "trolling" him rather than addressing his specific points.
 * Noam Cohen is the dean of the small group of journalists who specialize in covering Wikipedia. His opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Elon Musk's hate for Wikipedia reveals his true views on free speech focuses on the weaknesses of the rich man's arguments against Wikipedia's accuracy. His main tool is ridicule. Wikipedia's main tool is good-faith collaboration. Wikipedia is now on his "roster of A-list enemies".
 * The Hill added context by describing a back-and-forth Tweet-fest between the rich man, Jimmy Wales and others. It highlights how a tweet where the rich man questioned Wikipedia's fundraising propriety ("Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn't needed to operate Wikipedia [...]") was augmented by X's own "Community Notes", initially undercutting his arguments by providing facts about Wikipedia's large usage numbers.

Wikipedians can be grateful for the support of all these journalists when we are getting roasted by the world's richest man (who, less than three years ago, had expressed a very different opinion on occasion of Wikipedia's 20th anniversary: "Happy birthday Wikipedia! So glad you exist"). They all, in their own way, attest to the quality of our website and the power of collaborative editing. The number and strength of their responses also reflect on him.

In fact, the "Wikipedia is not for sale" fundraising banner that the rich man mocked in his tweet had itself already been inspired by an earlier richest-man-related Twitter controversy and the observation that it had generated a lot of public support for Wikipedia. As detailed by Jimmy Wales when he proposed using the "not for sale" wording in fundraising appeals back in December 2022:

In the aftermath of the posts, outlets such as Vice have (contrariwise vis-a-vis the rich man) claimed that the Wikimedia Foundation is "obviously spending money on servers to keep things stable". In this case, it should be noted that the Wikimedia Foundation's spending, and its funding priorities, have been criticized sharply by Wikipedians themselves for many years, and indeed criticized in the pages of this very publication. Indeed, we would be remiss to let our readers go away thinking that some rich guy from online invented criticizing the Wikimedia Foundation in 2022 — Wikimedians invented that the same day they invented the WMF!

Other news outlets that have covered this story include NDTV, PC Magazine, Livemint, Bloomberg, euro.news and Yahoo!.

Reports have tentatively identified the rich man as a South African businessman and investor named "Elon Musk". – S, H, J

Websites are music
The New Yorker cartoonist Triana Muñoz draws websites (here) as if they were musical styles and gives the styles names in the captions. Not to ruin your viewing pleasure, we list the websites and give music to fit the captions.
 * Google
 * Rotten Tomatoes
 * Yahoo
 * Buzzfeed
 * Weather Channel
 * Wikipedia
 * Miscellaneous sites
 * Neither X nor Twitter made the cut – No cartoon, no caption – bonus track – S

Does Wikipedia's Gaza coverage show an anti-Israel bias?
The Spectator Australia, a conservative magazine, criticizes the English Wikipedia's coverage of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war as biased. The (paywalled) article examines two existing articles that recently were thrust into the news limelight by the conflict, focusing in particular on the neutrality of their lead sections ("when read time is primarily the first two to three paragraphs on any page, those paragraphs need to include a variety of sources"):

(It may seem reasonable to ask whether this Wikipedia article – as it looked like around the Spectator article's publication time – creates a misleading impression for readers without any background knowledge about Hamas. However, the author does not seem to be aware of Wikipedia's general guidelines discouraging the use of terms like "terrorist", and also doesn't mention that the article about Hamas itself contains ample mention of it being described as a terrorist organization by various entities.)

The author's second "timely example of Wikipedia distortion" is the article about Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi (which has had Good Article status since 2019):

The author, who identifies as "an advocate for the 'Deleting their Lies' campaign – a group dedicated to tracking and reporting hate speech on social media", concludes: "With growing anti-Semitism worldwide, Wikipedia has become an increasingly risky source on these topics as readers cannot exercise critical thinking with the limited information presented. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one such area highlighting this. Currently, it is unwise to blindly trust the Wiki crowd and it should be paramount for Wikipedia editors, new and old, to note all sides of the debate [...]."

The article also contains some general remarks about Wikipedia's importance and alleged ideological bias. As evidence for the latter, it cites two somewhat dated studies by Greenstein and Zhu (see our previous coverage in Recent research: 2015, 2012), Wikipedia's own article Ideological bias on Wikipedia, and criticism by Larry Sanger that had attained media attention in 2021 ("Sanger highlighted the Covid vaccine and the Hunter Biden scandal as examples of topics with left-leaning bias and little debate", see also our own coverage at the time: "Larry Sanger on bias in Wikipedia – with opinion orthodoxy, truth becomes more elusive"). – H

In brief

 * Who is Mike Johnson?: Johnson (R-LA) is the newly elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Not just another candidate for the post, but the actually elected Speaker, second in the line of succession for the presidency. Politico asked European and Canadian politicos, who they diplomatically granted anonymity, who he is. They were at an embarrassing loss for words until an Irish government advisor was found. He had looked up Johnson on Wikipedia.
 * Maher steps up: Al Jazeera reports that former WMF CEO Katherine Maher replaced Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave, who had spoken too much about the Israeli-Gaza conflict, according to some of the conference's corporate sponsors. "In recent weeks Web Summit has been at the centre of the conversation, rather than the host. Its purpose was overshadowed by the personal comments of the event's founder and former CEO, Paddy Cosgrave," according to Maher.
 * Alleged antisemitism on Wikipedia: In February, Dr. Shira Klein will present a lecture on this subject at the USC Shoah Foundation (Shoah is Hebrew for The Holocaust). Earlier this year, Klein, together with Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski, published an academic paper titled "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust", causing a significant amount of media coverage and on-wiki controversy, and prompting a re-opening of the long running arbitration case on "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland". See previous Signpost coverage in In the media (February 20, March 9, April 26, May 22), Recent research (March 9) and Arbitration report (May 22).


 * Wikipedia pages can be used to deliver malware via Slack: Security Week describes a new "Wiki-Slack attack" that exploits a formatting glitch in Slack as "essentially a numbers game, meaning that the attacker needs to modify as many Wikipedia pages as they can and register domains for them, to ensure they can eventually infect a target of interest." TechRadar said that "sharing a Wikipedia link on Slack could be a serious security no-no". The reports are based on findings by security firm eSentire, who published a blog post with further details, including a "sample of organic occurrences of Slack's mishandling of Wikipedia links." For example, in the article South African insolvency law, the end of the first paragraph and the beginning of the second paragraph read:


 * When previewing the link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_insolvency_law, Slack will mangle this text so that it contains a link to the website respects.in.

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 * Sport records are "only interesting for Wikipedia"... says race team CEO: Mercedes' Formula One team boss Toto Wolff said team records are "only interesting for Wikipedia, which nobody reads anyway". Three-time Formula One world champion driver Max Verstappen (not driving for Mercedes) had other opinions. (ESPN)