China bans, and is there intelligent life on this planet?
Some months it just pours. There was a lot of Wikipedia news this month, from the serious (WMF's ban on some Chinese Wikipedia contributors) to the silly (the "Depths of Wikipedia" Instagram account). Dig in!
BBC's Click covers Wikipedia conflicts in China
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Wikipedia: The Fight for Facts, BBC Click, October 19, 2021, 9:45 | |
| Has China 'Hacked' Wikipedia?, BBC Click, October 16, 2019, 8:43 |
The long-running BBC program Click reports, for the second time in as many years, on editing conflicts on the Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia). The most recent report focuses on the WMF office action that banned 7 editors and desysoped 12 admins. The Click program was expanded slightly in a recent print article.
As background, a screenshot (at 3:25) of a chat site run by a group of pro-Beijing editors is translated as "The idea sounds ok, dox their ID and report it to National Security Police". The "physical harm" cited by the WMF to justify the bans is only briefly implied by "threatening edits" (3:35).
The report, about 10 minutes long, features four interviews: two from pseudonymous 'pro-democracy' editors, another from Enming Yan, a now-banned admin on zh.wikipedia from the 'pro-Beijing camp', closing with Jimmy Wales's views.
The two pro-democracy editors state that pro-Beijing editors have become much more aggressive. The first diagnoses an "overflow of patriotism in China", but does not believe that the pro-Beijing editors are paid to edit. The second emphasized their difficulties editing with pro-Beijing editors, and their inability to have their complaints heard. Yan states that mainland Chinese users are simply providing their perspective, and that Wikipedia's neutrality has been harmed by the office action. He states that the editing balance now favors anti-Beijing forces.
The central question is "are Wikipedia's open-knowledge goals compatible with a world in which different countries have different views?" Wales states that Wikipedia is a global, not localized, project. He defends the office action and redirects the focus back to the root of the problem, the "biggest thing preventing mainland Chinese people" from editing is the Chinese government, Jimmy says.
For previous Signpost coverage on this topic, see July, Special report; September, Opinion; News and notes "Wikimedia users 'physically harmed'; WMF bans or desysops nineteen"; and In the media "China: Infiltration, physical harm, and bans"; and this month's Community view. – G – S
Another big story on the China bans from Slate
Stephen Harrison, reporting in Slate, may have the final word in the case of the banned Chinese editors. Setting the stage with the contentious relationship between China and Wikipedia in 2015 and 2019, he moves right to the heart of the matter: the bans as explained by Maggie Dennis, WMF's Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability, who stresses the importance of combating harassment, "including in some cases physically harming others." Heather Ford, an associate professor of digital and social media at the University of Technology Sydney, explains why China – and other countries – may care about their coverage in Wikipedia.
Harrison talks with people on all sides of the issue and lets mainlanders explain why they care about Wikipedia rather than the larger encyclopedia Baidu Baike, which "publishes a lot of garbage." The conclusions are much the same as the BBC's report. But, given the limits of video versus print, the details and even the logical flow are more complete.
There's no intelligent life on this planet
Ninety-year-old William Shatner, aka Captain Kirk, took a 10-minute suborbital joyride on Blue Origin's New Shepard flight 18 to the edge of space on October 13, compliments of an enterprising young man named Jeff Bezos. Kirk reportedly took the shuttlecraft because the transporter beam was out of order.
Two paying passengers, Chris Boshuizen, cofounder of Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, cofounder of Medidata Solutions, went along for the ride. According to CBS, neither paying passenger "has an entry in Wikipedia and both seem content to keep personal details personal". What's this? Klingons attempting a double reverse Streisand? The Klingons deny the accusation.
Blue Origin Vice President Audrey Powers was also on the flight. But she had to wait three days before she got an article. "Beam me up, Scotty", a misquote purportedly from Captain Kirk, has had an article for 16 years, as well as a disambiguation page. "It's borderline on the simulator, captain. I cannae guarantee that she'll hold up!". We can only wonder how it all ends. – S
Do you have any idea who you are dealing with?!
Noam Cohen, a longtime reporter on all things Wikipedia, has a new article: "VIPs expect special treatment. At Wikipedia, don't even ask." Appearing in The Washington Post, the article shows how big shots are sometimes treated on Wikipedia. Just to drop a few names: John C. Eastman, Jimmy Wales, Mark Dice, Richard Dawkins, Amy Fisher, Andrew Yang (allegedly), the United States Congress, the Vatican, and the Gupta family of South Africa. Keep up the good work, folks!
Cohen does note a few BLP mix-ups or other failings: Edward Kosner, articles that include the real names of porn stars, deadnaming, and the subject of this month's opinion article.
Cohen concludes "But with the big platforms choosing to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted ... there is one corner of the Internet that turns a skeptical eye toward everyone, even VIPs." Another example of modern mainstream journalism treating Wikipedia as "the good cop" of the internet, as previously described in this book chapter from Wikipedia@20.
Rhombus of power
Angela Merkel will soon give up her job as chancellor of Germany which she has held for 16 years. AFP and The Statesman find power in the Merkel rhombus, aka Merkel-Raute in German. They note "It has its own Wikipedia page and its own emoticon." "<>" – S
English speakers don't have a corner on the irrationality market
Reflecting cultural biases, German Wikipedia described homeopathy as simply eine alternativmedizinische Behandlungsmethode, "a form of alternative medical treatment", but English Wikipedia says it is "pseudoscience" (The Local, Germany's long-standing love affair with homeopathy [in English]). Maybe someone read the article – German Wikipedia was edited to add "pseudoscience" to the lede on 14 October.
To be fair, we note that distinguishing science from pseudoscience, the demarcation problem, is an application of epistemology and that – according to Wikipedia – the appearance of the word epistemology in English was predated by the German term Wissenschaftslehre (literally, theory of science), which was introduced by philosophers Johann Fichte (German) and Bernard Bolzano (Bohemian) in the late 18th century. – B
Don't bite the newbies
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A stylish, well-written, new podcast dot com dedicates its first six episodes to Wikipedia.
- First episode – "Don't Bite The Newbies" (48:00) surveys the Wikipedia community, somehow leaving out the newbies, but does manage to have interesting discussions with Ser Amantio di Nicolao, Giraffedata and his brother, laodah, Another Believer and Sandiooses, married couple LoriLee and Dominic, GorillaWarfare and Sandister. Others, including Larry Sanger and Rosiestep, are mentioned or make brief appearances.
- Second episode – "Hello World" (43:24) – Covering the beginnings of Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is featured and all is well until the show moves on to Larry Sanger, the "co-founder" of Wikipedia. Larry was unavailable for awhile, but Dominic, who went to college with Larry, says some very interesting things. Larry was eventually contacted and says that he "got the idea on January second" 2001 for a Wiki-encyclopedia. Wales later replied that he thought of a Wiki-encyclopedia the previous December. It gets a bit complicated and "juicy" from there. Larry will be back in a future episode.
The series runs for another four weeks. A different series on another web project will be coming in January.
In brief
- WMF fought the law, and the law won: Appeals Court Says State Secrets Privilege Means NSA Can Avoid Wikimedia Foundation’s Unlawful Surveillance Allegations Given the U.S. government's Cold War attitude we can now only respond with music.
- For better or worse: the Dallas Morning News tells us "Why Facebook makes us worse but Wikipedia makes us better". The Facebook part is the same old stuff: long and disgusting. The Wikipedia part is short and sweet.
- "Credible sources such as Wikipedia root out election disinformation" (Business Day). According to Bobby Shabangu, of Wikimedia South Africa, Wikipedia is needed to help sort out disinformation in South African elections.
- Wikipedia is so politicized and dishonest it's no longer worth reading: if you believe Tucker Carlson (Fox News).
- Annie Rauwerda, the queen of the Wikipedia rabbit hole: Interviewed by Mashable. Rauwerda started Wikiracing during middle-school. In April 2020 she started a project to entertain a few friends by posting odd Wikipedia articles on her Instagram account @depthsofwikipedia. After a few months her followers were growing by up to 5% per week. She now has about 370,000 followers on Instagram, 90,000 on TikTok, and some more at another Instagram account @depthsofcraigslist.
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- But I don't like spam!: Google Doesn't Use The Wikipedia WikiProject Spam Reports For Search Spam (Search Engine Roundtable). Refers to Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam/LinkReports.
- Meet the man who wrote 2,200 Wikipedia articles: The Star (Malaysia) featured Dody Ismoyo. He began editing as an undergraduate in Malaysia, continued editing as a master's student in Australia. As of early October he created over 2,200 Wikipedia articles, uploaded over 2,400 photos to Commons and made more than 200,000 edits in 11 years of editing and is the 180th most active English-language Wikipedian.
- He reads Wikipedia every night, and is only the #3 earner on Jeopardy: [1] (Voice of America News). The question is "Who is Matt Amodio?" He won 38 consecutive appearances on Jeopardy, number 2 of all-time, earning $1,417,401, number 3 following James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings. If you missed seeing him this year, just wait for the Tournament of Champions.
- Even registered Wikipedians embody the banality of evil: [2] Policy Options/Options Politiques, Institute for Research on Public Policy
- Radio New Zealand reported on a 24-hour editathon to highlight women in science and engineering on Ada Lovelace Day
- New AI goes a little Frankenstein: The Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model – an NVidia/Microsoft project trained on Wikipedia and other sources called The Pile, plus Common Crawl's web snapshot – eclipsed GPT-3 [3] (Singularity Hub). ZDNet says the model "suffers from bias" in a piece mentioning AIs behaving like Nazis.
- Spoiler alert: Wikipedia contains spoilers: Sorry to break the news to you, Yahoo! Lifestyle, but Home and Away spoilers are a regular day at the office here.
- Adopted, but not enough for Wikipedia: The city of Waltham, Massachusetts has "adopted" a Red Sox player from Ohio, whose name has intermittently appeared in the city's Wikipedia entry (WCVB, Boston and NBC Sports).
- Support for African languages: According to South African Independent Online, WikiAfrican Foundation will sponsor "AfroCuration events" for native speakers of isiZulu, Sesotho, Tshivenda, and Afrikaans. The article notes that no African language's Wikipedia edition has yet broken the 100,000 article mark.[4] More information can be found at meta:AfroCuration campaign.
- I remember long ago another starry night like this ... but what year was it?: According to OutInPerth, ABBA band member Bjorn Ulvaeus had to look up the band's history on Wikipedia to recall when they first recorded "Just a Notion", a song that will appear for the first time on their album Voyager that came out a few days ago. (The answer was 1978.)[5]
- Squidly: The Wolfram Research blog confirmed what we already knew from our own Top25 report: a lot of people came to Wikipedia to read about Squid Game. It held the #1 spot here for four weeks runnning.
- Little plot of horrors: BuzzFeed asks "What's A Horror Movie Plot So Messed Up, You Wish You Never Even Read Its Wikipedia Page?"
- California: love it or leave it, but check Wikipedia first: Inc. recommends company executives in California read List of U.S. state budgets before deciding whether to freeze (in place) fight (budget policies), or flee (the state).
- Swarming a truthy solution: Daniel Nagy says in a Bitcoinist interview that his Ethereum storage layer, Swarm, may support a proliferation of forks to avoid the "one official truth" problem of Wikipedia, and other projects like OpenStreetMap and Project Gutenberg. The author says it is an "impossible dilemma"; given there are over 8,000 pages at Category:Wikipedia pages under discretionary sanctions (that's about 0.125% of all articles here) we wonder why he's got so much trouble with the "one official truth".
- Wikivoyage not indexed by search engines? Blogger gaganpreet documents their observation that queries in the search engines DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Bing omit links to Wikivoyage. This blogger speculates that Bing has blacklisted Wikivoyage for some reason, and consequently those other two sites have copied that Microsoft site.
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