Wikipedian is break-out star of International Women's Day; dinosaur art; Wikipedia's new iOS app and its fight for market share
Wikipedian is break-out star of International Women's Day
International Women's Day was celebrated on March 8. Art+Feminism organized a series of 125 worldwide editathons the weekend before to coincide with the event, its third annual commemoration. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported on the event in "Why women are missing from history on Wikipedia" (March 6) and discussed gender bias on Wikipedia. The ABC quoted Dr. Lauren Rosewarne of the University of Melbourne, who said "Having men produce the lion's share of content ... perpetuates men's voices dominating the public space and ... continuing to be the authority on issues." The ABC also listed seven Australian women missing from Wikipedia, four of whom now have Wikipedia articles.
Individual editathons received news coverage, including events at Indiana University, the University of Regina, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Colorado Boulder, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, St. Lawrence University, the Interference Archive, and the University of Oregon.
The break-out star of Wikipedia efforts at addressing the gender gap was Emily Temple-Wood (Keilana), who was profiled in a March 8 post on the WMF blog, republished in this week's Signpost Blog feature. Her efforts are unpopular in some quarters, and Temple-Wood, who founded WikiProject Women Scientists in 2012, has vowed to create an article on a female scientist for every harassing email she receives. The blog post went viral, prompting stories in media outlets in multiple languages, including New York magazine, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Bustle, Quartz, The Scientist, Mic, Jezebel, Buzzfeed, and Glamour. G
Dinosaur art
Inverse.com features a profile (March 9) of French-born paleoartist Nobumichi Tamura (NobuTamura), who has created around 1,500 Creative Commons-licensed drawings of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, many of them hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
As Tamura, who works at the Berkeley National Laboratory, recounts in the piece, when he first started to explore the topic in Wikipedia about a decade ago, he was struck by the absence of illustrations, and set to work.
It was not always plain sailing, partly due to the fact that paleontology has seen many advances over the past few decades that have fundamentally changed views of what these prehistoric animals looked like in life:
| “ | "The first drawings were not really successful, because I just drew the dinosaurs like I saw them when I was a kid," says Tamura. "They weren't quite accurate." They were imprecise enough that his early drawings were rejected by Wikipedia editors and removed from the site.
Rather than giving up or finding a new hobby, Tamura just worked harder and smarter, soliciting feedback from Wikipedia editors on how he could better render extinct reptiles. He looked up the latest scientific articles describing the species he was working on [and] started sketching. He got better. To date, Tamura has illustrated 1,500 dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. That’s an impressive rate of one drawing almost every other day – he estimates that each one takes three or four hours on average. Most are available on his website, where they are licensed under Creative Commons. |
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Due to other work commitments, Nobu Tamura stopped contributing to Wikipedia and Commons about five years ago – a fact that the inverse.com profile curiously omits to mention – but a good number of his illustrations continue to be in use.
A recent interview with Tamura is available on YouTube. AK
Wikipedia's new iOS app and its fight for market share
The Next Web is among many tech sites to report (March 10) on Wikipedia's new iOS app. Its article, which includes several screenshots and a WMF "Wikipedia Mobile 5.0 for iPhone and iPad" launch video, says the app experience is
| “ | now much easier to use than the mobile browser, featuring snappier navigation and gestures with 3D Touch. It probably wins the award for the most creative 3D "peek" gesture, offering users the ability to select an article completely at random with a simple long press. The app also takes advantage of Spotlight search, so your phone’s native search bar can feel more complete and informative. ...
The new look not only feels closer to the pared-down look the platform is known for, but the content feels like it matches that idea as well. ... For the ability to enhance Spotlight search alone, the redesigned Wikipedia is a helpful tool. But if you’re a trivia nut who loves fact-checking your friends, then the ease of use is really helpful. |
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TechCrunch agrees (March 10) with The Next Web on the quality of the app, describing it as "well-designed and highly polished, and worth the download", but is unsure how the update will affect "Wikipedia's traction on iOS", noting that while the app remains top-ranked in the "Reference" category on the App Store, it's dropped out of the top-30 of late and is
| “ | certainly not one of the most popular "Overall" apps on the iPhone, despite its brand-name awareness.
The problem is that many people don't think of Wikipedia as a place they want to explore, but rather a place to look something up. And the fact that its web content has been surfaced through Apple's Spotlight Search since iOS 8 likely satisfies most in need of a quick fact check. Wikipedia is still trying to find the sweet spot in terms of making its iOS app something that would be more regularly launched, but it’s not a certainty that simply rolling out a better "explore" feed will do the trick. |
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TechCrunch's comments highlight some of the challenges the Wikimedia Foundation is up against as users move to mobile and Wikimedia content is increasingly incorporated in other brands' products. AK
In brief
- Crowdsourced speech: Phys.org reports (March 10) on a Wikimedia Sweden project aimed at developing "the world's first crowdsourced speech synthesis platform". Engadget also covers the story, although without making clear that this is a Wikimedia Sweden rather than a Wikimedia Foundation project. Both articles only attribute the project to "Wikipedia" in their headlines. AK
- Not dead, Wikipedia, very much alive in fact, thank you: The Times of India and The Hindu are among Indian outlets reporting (March 9) that Indian BJP politician Anju Bala was falsely declared dead by Wikipedia. Bala says she learnt of her premature demise when her secretary received a phone call enquiring whether a broadcast programme in which she had participated – clearly alive – had been held back for some reason. In addition, her Wikipedia biography at one point claimed she had been married twice; Bala considered this more offensive than being declared dead, describing it as "character assassination". AK
- Wikipedia in court: Philippine news website Rappler reports (March 6) that the Court of Appeals of the Philippines has defended its use of Wikipedia and other online sources in its ruling on the Marcopper mining disaster. AK
- Drumpf: Us Weekly comments (March 3) on the creation of the Donald Drumpf article on Wikipedia, which presently, after several debates, redirects to Donald Trump (Last Week Tonight). AK
- Battles: The Telegraph and the BBC report (March 2) on a project by Dutch firm LAB1100, a world map showing the locations of historical battles based on data from Wikidata and DBpedia. Both reports include cautionary notes about the reliability of the underlying data, and the soundness of the algorithm used. AK
- Commercial ecosystem: The Register, in an article titled "Wikidata makes Wikipedia a database. Let the fun begin", imagines (Feb. 25) "an ecology of very lucrative apps built atop Wikidata", noting that machines will for the first time be able to answer questions like "What are the ten largest cities with female mayors?" AK
- Eva Longoria sewing: Boing Boing presented "20 Minutes of Eva Longoria Sewing, While Reading the Entire Wikipedia Entry on Sewing" (Feb. 25). AK
- Tax decisions based on Wikipedia: AccountancyAge questioned (Feb. 19) HM Revenue and Customs' use of Wikipedia as the basis for a decision on the correct tax classification of a type of electromechanical switch. The manufacturer appealed, arguing that "it is very important that someone classifying electronic goods is not just reading some page on the internet but they have at least a minimal understanding of the electronic terms", and moreover pointed out that HMRC "had relied only on certain parts of the definition" provided by Wikipedia. The tribunal upheld the appeal. AK
- Recent events round-up: The Knowledge Engine and Lila Tretikov's resignation from her post as Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director attracted widespread coverage, especially in the period from Feb. 12–15 and Feb. 25–29, much of it citing reports in The Signpost. For a fairly exhaustive listing of press and web reports, see this page on Meta. AK
Discuss this story
Actually there is surprisingly little about the ED's resignation in the link AK provided. Nothing in-depth (in English, I don't read German), nothing in the last 11 days.
AK's tabloid style op-ed on the matter a couple of weeks ago was pretty low IMHO, but making up extensive news coverage is beyond the pale. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:41, 13 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Where's Rob and Hunter Stetz, he's his little sister Maddie. --violetnese 22:59, 13 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It is great that User:Keilana has found a way to combat harassment that works for her and applaud her bravery and contributions. I worry that such stories are not good for addressing systematic bias in general though. Most people do not want to suffer harassment and to an extent this story just reinforces a lazy narrative that harassment of minority editors is to be expected and something they have to deal with. We should be working harder for solutions to harassment that ensure a welcoming atmosphere and comprehensive dispute resolution across the project if we are to address problems with systematic exclusion and bias in an effective manner. AlasdairEdits (talk) 19:46, 14 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]