Salon.com > wikipedia

Wikipedia’s shame

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:04:00 +0000

Is Wikipedia sexist? Or is it merely an unreliable mess of angry, ax-wielding psychos engaged in agenda-driven editing? Or is it something much more complicated than that?

Last Wednesday, novelist Amanda Filipacchi published an Op-Ed in the New York Times recounting her discovery that Wikipedia editors were culling women authors from Wikipedia's list of "American Novelists" and relegating them into their own subcategory: "American Women Novelists."

"The intention appears to be to create a list of 'American Novelists' on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men," she wrote, noting that there was no "American Men Novelists" subcategory. (Although, amusingly, just such a category was created shortly after the Op-Ed appeared.)

In the furor that erupted on Wikipedia in response to Filipacchi's article, it was quickly determined that the bad behavior she noticed appeared to be the work of a single misguided Wikipedia editor. One could argue that, if true, this made the Times' headline "Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Female Novelists" unfair and inaccurate. All of Wikipedia was being tarred by the unthinking stupidity of one bad editor.

I was a political astroturfer

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:00:00 +0000

“There’s a movement building, and it’s spreading like wildfire,” announced Rafe Lieber of Citizens for Access to the Arts at a rally on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall early in January. With politicians, celebrities, a brass band and a screaming crowd, any passerby would conclude that some popular uprising was in the works.

Speaker after speaker, including City Council members and even Brooklyn-native actress Rosie Perez, gave impassioned speeches about the importance of providing access to art to young people, leading the crowds in chants of, “We’re not gonna stop!” “Fuel our dreams!” "We're coming for you!" and, most frequently, “Save Ovation!”

The participants were decrying the decision of Time Warner Cable to deny the arts network Ovation TV to poor and minority viewers. Cheering along with them, I suddenly heard a cell phone ring. The woman behind me, a fellow protester, answered, saying, “Can you call me back? I’m at work.”

While I had considered the rally more of a quick buck than work, her statement wasn’t technically wrong. Like me, many of the rally’s participants had arrived via the same November Craigslist ad for “TV Press Rally Extras.” A week before the rally, we received an email from Warren Cohn, an employee of the power lawyers David Schwartz and Bradley Gerstman’s lobbying firm Gotham Government Relations. In part, it read:

Wikipedia editors accuse professor of editing site with plagiarized text

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:53:00 +0000

Wikipedia editors are furious after a college professor assigned his students to edit the encyclopedia, riddling it with errors and alleged plagiarism.

Professor Steve Joordens of the University of Toronto assigned more than 1,700 students the task of editing and improving two different Wikipedia articles on topics pertaining to the lectures he'd given.

The students dug in and amended the articles, but something fishy caught a site editor’s attention: Of the 1,700 students who'd been handed the assignment, an estimated 85 percent had plagiarized their edits.

Don’t you dare delete Josh Barro, Wikipedia!

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:46:00 +0000

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It's not every day that you discover your "encyclopedic notability" is under attack. For some of us, it would be a triumph to get even that far. But for Josh Barro, an economic commentator who currently can be found most often in the pages of Bloomberg News, it's just another existentially confusing day in the life. Wikipedia is currently debating whether Barro's credentials make him worthy of his own page.

For background on the age-old war between "deletionists" and "inclusionists" on Wikipedia, I refer you to either the Wikipedia entry "Deletionism and Inclusionism in Wikipedia," or Nicholson Baker's fascinating account of his attempt to fight the deletion of the (not very famous) post-Beat poet Richard Denner. Suffice to say: Deletionism is a real thing. We don’t know why exactly Barro's worthiness has come under attack (a prank, a political vendetta?), but there may be no other reason than that Wikipedia is full of busybodies who believe certain standards must be upheld or barbarism and chaos will triumph in the virtual encyclopedic domain.

BP edited its own environmental record on Wikipedia

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:44:00 +0000

Updated, 2:27 p.m.: Comments from BP in response to the accusation have been included below.

Wikipedia editors have accused BP of editing its own page entry to whitewash its environmental impact in the public record. As CNET reported Thursday, "angry Wikipedia editors estimate that BP has rewritten 44 percent of the page about itself, especially about its environmental performance." Via CNET:

BP is not directly editing its page, but instead has apparently inserted a BP representative into the editing community who provides Wikipedia editors with text.

The text is then copied "as is" onto the page by Wikipedia editors, while readers are none the wiser that the sections pretending to be unbiased information are, in fact, vetted by higher-ups at BP before hitting the page.

... BP's image cleanup cleverly skirts Wikipedia's editorial rules, wherein Wikipedia editors are using text that BP posts on Wikipedia itself as the source (although the text is not published on BP's Web site).

This way, the significant involvement of BP in its own entry is completely hidden from Wikipedia readers -- while Wikipedia editors, as usual, argue and attack each other over editorial policy while BP's favorable PR editing continues.

Will Wikipedia replace the academic thesis?

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:22:00 +0000

KYIV, Ukraine — Click on a Wikipedia topic about optometry in the Polish language or Newtonian mechanics in Ukrainian and the article that pops up may well be a college student thesis.

That’s because universities in Poland and Ukraine are exploring new requirements. Instead of cribbing research from Wikipedia for papers that will probably only gather dust, advocates of the idea say students would be better off writing their own Wikipedia articles.

Although critics warn that Wikipedia articles are no substitute for rigorous academic papers, supporters say more than simply putting more information at public disposal, erasing boundaries between the internet and academia will invigorate scholarship by enabling it to benefit everyone.

"Contributing to Wikipedia considerably increases students' motivation since their articles can be read by the whole world, not just their teachers or supervisors," argues Sergei Petrov, one of the Wikipedia project coordinators in the eastern city of Kharkiv, where the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute ran a test program during its last fall that produced 23 new or expanded articles on Wikipedia Ukraine.

Study: Google is making grandparents obsolete

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 23:43:00 +0000

Sad news about our modern age: Researchers have found that websites like Google, Wikipedia and YouTube have replaced grandparents as primary sources of wisdom and advice about how to live your life. Whether it's instructions on how to tie a tie or what it was like to live during the Dust Bowl, kids would rather turn to the Internet than ask their elders, the survey found.

Fewer than one in four grandparents reported being asked for advice on things like family recipes or the best way to mend a worn-out pair of jeans. Only a third said they had been asked what was it like when they were young. And -- this bit is really heartbreaking -- researchers found that a majority of those surveyed felt that their role as grandparents was becoming obsolete in modern family life.

"Grandparents believe they are being sidelined by Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and the huge resource of advice available on the internet," Susan Fermor, of cleaning specialist Dr. Beckmann, which commissioned the research on passing down domestic wisdom, told The Telegraph. "They are aware that their grandchildren -- already with their noses buried in a laptop, tablet computer or smartphone -- find it much easier to search the Internet for instant advice," she added.

How Paul Krugman broke a Wikipedia page on economics

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 22:24:00 +0000

There's a lockdown on the Wikipedia page for Austrian economics and wouldn't you know it, one or way or another, it all seems to be Paul Krugman's fault.

Broadly speaking, Austrian economics, for those who have not yet had the pleasure of being introduced, are characterized by an extreme distrust of state intervention in markets, a distaste for statistical modeling and a general confidence that markets, left to their own devices, will avoid booms and busts and nasty things like inflation. From a political perspective, Austrian economics tends to lurk to the right of even such conservative icons as Milton Friedman.

For more detail, you can go, of course, to the Wikipedia page for Austrian economics. But until at least Feb. 28, if you do so, you will find that the page "is currently protected from editing." An "edit war" has been raging behind the scenes. Two factions were repeatedly deleting and replacing a section of text that had to do with a description of a critique of Austrian economics made by economist Paul Krugman.

Wikipedia’s “Goan war” revealed to be a hoax

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:52:00 +0000

It went undetected for five years on Wikipedia, but now a cleverly crafted entry about a 17th century conflict between colonial Portugal and India’s Maratha empire has been outed as a hoax. Think of all of the plagiarized world history papers that may have been compromised by this information!

Added to the site in 2007, the so-called Bicholim Conflict of 1640-41 was a fictitious war between the Portuguese rulers of Goa and India's imperial Maratha empire. The fabricated entry was uncovered by another user in December. "After careful consideration and some research, I have come to the conclusion that this article is a hoax — a clever and elaborate hoax," wrote user "ShelfSkewed."

Top 10 Wikipedia pages of 2012

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 22:29:00 +0000

Johan Gunnarsson, a computer science student in Lund, Sweden, has assembled a list of the most viewed Wikipedia pages of 2012.

The Daily Dot speculates, probably correctly, that the top two answers, "Facebook" and "Wiki" owe their popularity more to clumsy computer users than genuine curiosity. The rest of the list, though, can be read as a guide to the things people want to know about that they don't want others to know they want to know about. Except maybe Google.

1) Facebook

2) Wiki

3) Deaths in 2012

4) "One Direction"

Can Wikipedia predict a box office hit?

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 15:54:00 +0000

Researchers at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics claim that activity on a not-yet-released movie's Wikipedia page may signal the future box office success of that movie. Physicist Taha Yasseri and his colleagues, Márton Mestyán and János Kertész, have built a mathematical model that analyzes the "activity level of editors and viewers" on a movie's Wikipedia page and, using data from a roster of 312 movies released in the U.S. in 2010, showed "that the popularity of a movie could be predicted" up to a month in advance.

The Daily Mail summed up their findings:

Is Wikipedia going commercial?

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:55:00 +0000

When it began 11 years ago, Wikipedia represented utopian ideals: power dispersed more evenly than any democracy, participation open to anyone and work done solely for the promotion of knowledge. But utopian ideals often become diluted when put into practice on a large scale and inevitably fail. Today, to the dismay of many die-hard Wikipedians — the tenacious, voluntary editors who are the site’s backbone — the site also attracts profit-seeking writers.

One such writer is Soraya Field Fiorio, a 27-year-old entertainment-relations consultant who has a sideline in writing commissioned Wikipedia articles for musicians and writers. “Just like when I write press releases, clients say, ‘I want this. I don’t want that.’ So it’s really part of a promotional package,” she said. She charges $30 an hour to edit an existing article, and will write a page from scratch for around $250. It’s not surprising that musicians, writers, artists or anyone else seeking a spot in the public eye will pay for the service: The website is often the No. 1 hit on Google, and the articles can function as the key component of a publicity strategy.