The Signpost

In the media

China bans, and is there intelligent life on this planet?

Microsoft dances with Frankenstein. Er, Megatron. Whatever.

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
video icon Wikipedia: The Fight for Facts, BBC Click, October 19, 2021, 9:45
video icon 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. – GS

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

New Shepard on the West Texas launchpad (not)

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

The article Merkel-Raute appears in 12 Wikis. This photograph appears in 17 Wikis. Live long and prosper.

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

Host Katie Puckrik doesn't like her photo on Wikipedia. Hint: just upload a freely licensed photo of yourself.

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

Of debatable goodness on a menu; never good in an encyclopedia
BuzzFeed did not recommend watching Tusk for Halloween, or really, ever.
  • 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.



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next month's edition in the Newsroom or leave a tip on the suggestions page.
+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.
  • About this question "who had the idea for Wikipedia" and "who came up with the name" ... a good few people are unaware that there are extant mailing list posts, still online today, that shed light on all of this:
    • Larry Sanger, 10 Jan 2001: Let's make a wiki – No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not. "Wiki," pronounced \wee'-kee\, derives from a Polynesian word, "wikiwiki," but what it means is a VERY open, VERY publicly-editable series of web pages. For example, I can start a page called EpistemicCircularity and write anything I want in it. Anyone else (yes, absolutely anyone else) can come along and make absolutely any changes to it that he wants to.
    • Larry Sanger, 11 Jan 2001: > Maybe we could install the wiki under a totally different brand name, and just let people who sign up for Nupedia aware that lots of Nupedians tend to hang out there. That'd be fine with me; I'm not sure how exactly it would be connected to Nupedia, though. We wouldn't call it "the Nupedia wiki" though that's what it would be. We might have a question on the "about" page: "Q. Do you have a place where I can simply write down ideas, post articles, etc., for public consumption? A. Yes. Use the _wikipedia_!" On the "wikipedia" we would say that this is a supplementary project to Nupedia which operates entirely independently. Larry
    • Jimmy Wales, 31 Oct 2001 (today, 20 years ago): Nupedia was started first, and is extremely high quality in the limited content that it does produce. After a year or so of working on Nupedia, Larry had the idea to use Wiki software for a separate project specifically for people like you (and me!) who are intimidated and bored (sorry, Nupedia!) with the tedium of the process.
  • See also History of Wikipedia. --Andreas JN466 21:40, 31 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Angela Merkel gave up her job as chancellor of Germany which she has held for 16 years." - No, as her article says, she's still there and will remain in place until a new governing coalition is formed after the recent elections. This may well take until Christmas, or beyond. Also, if you are going to mention the BBC's Click piece, you should mention the wildly inaccurate graphic and voice-over explaining how WP picks different administrators for America, Europe.... . Johnbod (talk) 00:07, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • I just checked out the BBC graphic to see how bad it is. Sure - to a Wikipedian it looks bad. They took a full 30 seconds (out of almost 10 minutes) to explain how our system of administrators work and all they could get across is that each country elects its own admins. Other than the flags on the graphic with some fairly meaningless arrows - the mistake would be corrected by saying "language version" instead of "country." I'd guess you don't spend a whole lot of time reading or viewing media stories about Wikipedia. They're almost all filled with much more serious mistakes than that.
    • As far as Merkel - yup, we made a mistake. She declared she'd be leaving a while ago (2 months perhaps?) Her party finished in 2nd place a month ago. I thought Germans were supposed to be efficient! How long do Germans usually take to change a departing Chancellor? (Another stereotype bites the dust!). Sorry. Smallbones(smalltalk) 01:04, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • Sorry to to crumple your stereotype, Smallbones. It's precisely their efficiency that makes them very careful about making decisions. Until the FRG in 1949 German political history had never been a role model for democracy - and it still wasn't complete until 1990. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:41, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • A) they showed continents not countries, and yes I do spend quite a lot of time doing that, & that's a pretty bad unforced error. I wonder if they checked the story with WMUK? B) Merkel first said (well ahead of time) she'd be leaving about 18 months ago. The Germans usually take 2-3 months to form a coalition, about the same as the Italians, but a lot faster than the Belgians. I'm not sure this is the year for Americans to crow about smooth transitions. Johnbod (talk) 04:34, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikivoyage also used to be blacklisted by Google. The reason was that Google originally considered it a mirror of Wikitravel, the project it split off from. Maybe the other search engines are doing this as well. Nosferattus (talk) 05:37, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • The bulletin "Wikipedia is so politicized and dishonest it's no longer worth reading: if you believe Tucker Carlson (Fox News)" should have been followed by one reading "Tucker Carlson (Fox News) is so politicized and dishonest he's no longer worth watching: if you believe Wikipedia". — Bilorv (talk) 14:56, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Did I black out and talk to a podcaster without remembering any of it or is there just a brief mention of my username in this dot com podcast? GorillaWarfare (she/her • talk) 05:01, 13 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • @GorillaWarfare: I can't rule out the scenario of you blacking out, but you don't speak in the first 30 minutes of the podcast. Perhaps a copy editor switched you and Larry S. in the paragraphs above. No, I figured out what happened - and of course it is my fault. You are mentioned at 27:41 of the podcast. Smallbones(smalltalk) 04:35, 17 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-10-31/In_the_media