Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-12-04/In the media

Edit wars over real-life war in Gaza
Israeli journalist Omer Benjakob reports in Haaretz (paywalled in both Hebrew and English) that Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu and his "hate cabinet" are trying to avoid responsibility, playing a "blame game", leaving military leaders to take the hit for the Israeli Intelligence failure that allowed the surprise attack led by Hamas on 7 October.

Hebrew Wikipedia has had its own battles and edit wars in this conflict. Benjakob cites the prolonged dispute between user Ya’akov and other Wikipedians on the Hebrew-language article about Yoram Cohen, who served as the Director of national internal security service Shin Bet from 2011 to 2016.

Ya’akov is one of the editors accused of "pushing conservative political views," by "promoting the view of Netanyahu and his entourage", that Israeli security chiefs are the only ones to blame for the IDF’s failure to prevent the 7 October attack. Hebrew Wikipedia editor David Shai, who created the article about Hamas's attack within an hour of its start, says "there’s enough blame and turpitude to go around."

On a side note, Benjakob has already written about Wikipedia for Haaretz and other media before, and his articles and essays have been frequently covered in the Signpost throughout the years.

– S and O

The Wikis of Jacob
It’s no surprise that The Books of Jacob, first published in 2014 by Olga Tokarczuk, has helped make the story of Polish Jewish religious leader Jacob Frank popular, while also helping the Polish writer and activist win both a Nike Award (in 2015) and a Nobel Prize in Literature (in 2018). However, the book might also have played an important role in expanding Wikipedia, as revealed in an interview (in Italian) with online newspaper Il Post.

In the interview, which had been arranged via e-mail by Ludovica Lugli, Tokarczuk cited the article about Frank on Polish Wikipedia as an example of how much the tales of the self-proclaimed messiah had been ignored in Poland before the book’s release, remembering how the page used to be just "an article limited to a single phrase" ( a slightly incorrect statement, actually). According to the writer, none of the three religious groups involved – Orthodox Jews, Catholic Christians and the direct descendants of Frank’s disciples – had any interest in keeping the leader’s memory alive, to the point she discovered his story by pure chance, back in 2007, and it took her years to connect all the dots: "I didn’t expect to do such an enormous job", she stated.

Tokarczuk is also a familiar face within the Polish Wiki-community itself, having already collaborated with Wikimedia Polska in 2020 for an edit-a-thon focused on the articles of Nobel Prize-winning writers and artists on pl.wiki; even in this context, her statements against anti-semitism and homophobia can’t go unnoticed, considering the threats she has received by members of the Polish far-right in recent years, as well as the hugely controversial case involving World War II and the history of Jews in Poland, which the Signpost has broken down in previous issues. We also covered Tokarczuk's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which you can see here. – O

Changing "is" to "was" followed by grave dancing?
Vice, Daily Dot, and the Administrators' noticeboard cover the first edit marking Henry Kissinger's death on Wednesday, November 29. The edit was made by, twelve minutes after Kissinger Associates announced the death via a press release. Soon Asticky's user page was filled with congratulations and a few barnstars. Administrators on their noticeboard questioned the taste of some of those posts, and in general discouraged "grave dancing".

Two days later, when CNBC announced the death of retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor at 9:57 am Eastern Time, four edits were made by anonymous IP editors in the subsequent five minutes. The first IP editor made two edits in that minute. The second IP editor appears to have been a congressional staffer who made their second edit after another two minutes. The Signpost predicts that the mainstream press will soon report this edit race as well. – S

In brief

 * "The Bhutanese nuns editing Wikipedia to share their culture": Bunty Avieson, writing in The Saturday Paper, profiles a group of Buddhist nuns and describes how they learned to edit both the English Wikipedia and the Dzongkha Wikipedia. (Dzongkha is the national language of Bhutan, and the Dzongkha Wikipedia contains less than 240 articles as of November 26.) –R


 * Famous toilets: Hindustan Times celebrates "World Toilet Day (November 19): The artists and their artsy toilets" with some photos from Commons.
 * More on Napoleon (the movie): Annie Rauwerda.
 * Derby Days: Italian sports magazine Rivista Undici encouraged their readers to look up the Wikipedia page about the story of El Clásico Peruano, the soccer derby between Alianza Lima and Universitario, in a recent article (in Italian) reporting about the latest edition of this clash, which saw Universitario win the national league title at their fierce rivals’ home stadium in great fashion… and controversy. If you would like to know why, you should go read the derby's page, too!
 * Apple Pay donations: The Wikimedia Foundation added Apple Pay to its options during the latest round of fundraising via Wikipedia banners. (9 to 5 Mac)
 * George Santos biography, and thirteen other falsehoods: Were there only six lies from George Santos that are more important than the one he apparently posted on a user page? After his expulsion from U.S. Congress, The Guardian compiled Santos's top 14 debunked claims ranking his apparent user page delusions at number 7. They wrote "Politico noted that if Santos's Wikipedia entry, which contained the Hannah Montana claim, was not written by Santos – who was then posing as Anthony Devolder – it would mean it was written by someone posing as Santos. Santos's communications director, Naysa Woomer, refused to respond." (see prior Signpost coverage).
 * Wikipedia is not a valid vehicle registration: El Litoral and El Libertador report that two individuals were arrested in Esquina, Corrientes while in possession of a stolen car. According to the reports, police pulled over the car after it matched a description of a vehicle that had recently been stolen, and they were presented with documentation that was inconsistent with the vehicle identification numbers that were stamped into the vehicle. After realizing this, per the reports, the officers scanned a barcode on the document. The barcode provided the officers with a link to Wikipedia, and the two occupants of the vehicles were swiftly arrested. –R
 * Lerner's first attempt at fiction?: Lit Hub may have taken Ben Lerner's quote from his recent short story in Harper's too literally. "All of these examples are fake, but can stand for the ones I made, the bedbugs I released into the linguistic furniture. It was my first attempt at writing fiction," Lerner wrote about his self-confessed Wikipedia edits. See this issue's Disinformation report for further coverage.

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