Paid editing service announced; Commercial exploitation of free images; Wikipedia as a crystal ball; Librarians to counter systemic bias
Reputation management firm announces Wikipedia editing service
A reputation management and search engine optimisation firm has announced a professional service for creating, altering, monitoring, updating, and translating Wikipedia pages and has launched a corresponding Internet portal. In its communications, the firm assures potential clients that ownership of a Wikipedia article is a prominent asset, enhancing their online reputation.
The press release contains a contact name, a city, a phone number, and an email address identifying an employer (whose web page also includes a photograph of the contact, along with details of other staff members). All of this is "personal information" as defined in WP:Outing. AK / PF
The Signpost aspires to provide readers with sufficient information to evaluate the news we report and the opinions our op-ed writers express. However, English Wikipedia policy prevents us from doing so in some routine cases. We withheld significant information in this story to comply with our interpretation of Wikipedia’s policies.
Photographer sues Getty for appropriation of donated images
Beginning in 1988, photographer Carol M. Highsmith donated thousands of images to the Library of Congress for free use by the general public, only to see Getty Images, a stock photo company, appropriate them, in some cases without attribution, add their own watermark, and then accuse Highsmith of copyright infringement. Hyperallergic reports that Highsmith sued Getty and another stock photo business, Alamy, for copyright infringement, asking for $1 billion in damages, including compensation for over 18,755 images Getty appropriated as well as punitive damages because the company had been previously liable for the same violation against another photographer within the past three years. She learned that both agencies had been charging fees to customers for use of her images and sending threat letters to others who had used her free images. The complaint states, “The defendants have apparently misappropriated Ms. Highsmith’s generous gift to the American people ... not only unlawfully charging licensing fees ... but are falsely and fraudulently holding themselves out as the exclusive copyright owner.” Inspired by the example of Dorothea Lange, Highsmith wanted to document all 50 states, and these images now form the Carol M. Highsmith Collection at the LOC. (July 27) MTbw
Wikipedia as a crystal ball
The Atlantic studied trends in the number of edits to Wikipedia articles about potential vice-presidential picks, noting a 2008 Washington Post story on an upsurge in Wikipedia article edits prior to the VP selection of Sarah Palin. This year, The Atlantic noted increased editing activity each time various hopefuls such as Tom Vilsack and Elizabeth Warren were paraded into public view. Based on this metric, a dramatic upsurge in editing of Tim Kaine's article prior to Hillary Clinton's July 22 announcement shows that Wikipedia accurately foreshadowed the selection of the Democratic VP nominee. The story was also covered by New York Magazine and Bloomberg Politics. (July 22) MTbw
Librarians to counter systemic bias
Pacific Standard reports on a $250,000 Knight Foundation grant for a project called "Amplify libraries and communities through Wikipedia". The article draws particular attention to the dearth of women and people of colour in Wikipedia's volunteer base ...
As James Hare, president of Wikimedia DC, told the New York Times in 2015:
“The stereotype of a Wikipedia editor is a 30-year-old white man, and so most of the articles written are about stuff that interests 30-year-old white men. So a lot of black history is left out.”
... as well as the hostile reception new editors may receive. In the words of Merrilee Proffitt, one of the project leads, Wikipedia ...
can be a challenging environment. The thing that someone said to me that resonates is, “Wikipedians are very nice in person, but can be mean online.” You don’t get subtleties in online communication. These are all volunteers, they’re doing it on their spare time, they’re not getting paid, they’re very protective of that. They’re a little suspicious of new editors and what might be motivating them.”
It’s a lot to expect all librarians to get on board with this project. But if they did, you’d be talking about essentially closing Wikipedia’s gender gap in one fell swoop.
Librarians' racial bias, on the other hand, is much the same as in Wikipedia, so addressing racial bias “may be a bit trickier”:
“It’s safe to say that librarians are also disproportionately white, but the communities we serve are incredibly diverse,” Proffitt says. “What librarians can do by becoming Wikipedians is bring this out to their people. Public libraries are in every corner, and serve such a variety of audiences.”
(July 27) AK
In brief
- PETA appeals in monkey selfie case: Firstpost reports that animal rights organisation PETA has filed an appeal to the US Court of Appeals in the monkey selfie copyright case. PETA wants the monkey to be declared the image's copyright owner. The Wikimedia Foundation has previously argued that the image is in the public domain, while nature photographer David J. Slater has argued that the image's copyright is rightfully his, as despite the fact that the monkey pressed the shutter release of his camera, he travelled to Indonesia at his own expense, befriended the monkeys over a period of days to create the situation in which the shot could occur, and set up the camera and tripod for the shot. (August 3) AK
- Pokemon Go vs the Bible: Gizmodo notes that Wikipedia's article on Pokémon Go has a lot more footnotes than its article on the Bible. “The Bible, the most widely circulated book of all time, a text assembled and scrutinized and debated over the course of millennia, has 113 endnotes. There are 78 fewer points of citation on Wikipedia’s page about the Bible than there are on its page about Pokémon Go.” And the Bible didn't seem alone in being comparatively under-researched: “Baseball, America’s previous pastime, has 188 citations at the moment. It was tied with Pokémon Go this morning but has now fallen behind.” Gizmodo went on to list “some other Wikipedia entries that have fewer endnotes than Pokémon Go”: Tuberculosis (166), Imperialism (103), Charity (practice) (25), Masturbation (141), Space Invaders (132) and Pokémon (114). (August 1) AK
- Dulquer Salmaan: Indian actor Dulquer Salmaan told a radio channel that his Wikipedia article makes him younger than he is, reports Indiaglitz. (July 29) AK
- Liberal history edit-a-thon: The Liberal Democrat Voice announces that an edit-a-thon on UK Liberal history will take place at the National Liberal Club on August 24. (July 29) AK
- Updated Android app for Wikipedia: VentureBeat, Android Authority and many others have reported the launch of the new Android app. (July 28) AK
- Constitutional Amendments need attention on Wikipedia: The National Law Journal (US) announced the July 29 edit-a-thon hosted by the Law Library and the National Archives in collaboration with Wikimedia DC. (July 27) AK
- Taylor Swift: Digital Spy and many others ran reports on the recent vandalism to the biography of American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. (July 20) AK
Discuss this story
I'm not convinced number of citations is a good marker of amount of research. A few scholarly overview texts might be appropriate for a large overview article like Bible - which splits off into thousands of sub-articles. Meanwhile, a more recent topic like Pokémon Go might have to have its research assembled from a large number of quite short citations - newspapers and such, and is more likely to have been edited cumulatively as more evidence came in, encouraging people to always be looking for newer, more recent citations. That doesn't mean that the Pokémon Go article is better; in a way, the large amount of citations can indicate a very messy article creation process. Adam Cuerden (talk) 23:46, 4 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
On the Highsmith lawsuit: As a professional photographer, I am appalled that stock agencies would so blatantly steal work in this manner. I'm more surprised at Alamy than at Getty; I have images on the former, and had considered them to be a respectable company. I'm seriously considering pulling my images off of their service now. Funcrunch (talk) 00:42, 5 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The extraordinary prescience of Wikipedia editors for "names which will be in the news tomorrow" is explicable only once we accept that it is not only commercial paid editors which exist.
"Silly season" articles exist for many nations each year, and I rather think a researcher who notes the wondrous "accidental timing" of such articles will also note that each such article may well have a "dominant editor" who, in my exceedingly unenlightened opinion, may not appear by pure coincidence.
I suggest that such articles be closely examined, and that we establish some means of weighing likelihood of "partisan creation" rather than accept that some Wikipedians are simply extremely lucky. And I do consider the effect to be quite as pernicious as the effect of "paid editors" on commercial articles. Collect (talk) 15:08, 5 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Highsmith case dismissed