Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-01-31/In the media

Media throughout the world have written congratulatory articles about Wikipedia on the encyclopedia's 20th birthday. The Wikimedia Foundation has done a good job letting the press know that we're big, popular, appear in about 300 languages, and are frequently edited, mostly by volunteers. See, for example this list. But what else is new? A couple of dozen newspapers just focus on these numbers and add some seemingly random or local-interest facts. The more interesting stories take different angles, often telling as much about the author and their relationship with the encyclopedia, as about Wikipedia itself. Fair enough! No journalist can be expected to summarize Wikipedia in a single article.

United States Capitol protests/storming/riots/insurrection

• The Washington Post focuses on Wikipedia's ability to sort out misinformation and disinformation. The Post uses the article
  2021 storming of the United States Capitol as an example of how editors cooperate and contend to create articles on news events as they happen, quoting Molly White, Katherine Maher
  , and Anne Clin on several examples throughout the article. Other topics covered include the pandemic, the gender gap, hoaxes and vandalism and the reliability of Wikipedia.
• Time magazine also uses the "Storming the Capitol" article as a starting point, and then goes on to describe the generally self-healing nature of knowledge management in the Wikipedia community. More directly, they write "why does Wikipedia seem to have a general immunity to bullshit?" Anybody who disagrees might wish to take Time to
  ANI
  .
• The Guardian: "Wikipedia at 20: last gasp of an internet vision, or a beacon to a better future?" chronicles the building of the
  2021 storming of the United States capitol article from a one-editor effort by Another Believer
  to an in-depth community collaboration, as an indication of Wikipedia's growth since its early days to what it is today, potentially a "shining beacon lighting the way to a better future".
• Fast Company examines the insurrection story, again mentioning Another Believer, in "As a mob attacked the Capitol, Wikipedia struggled to find the right words".
• Connecticut Public Radio interviews administrator and former ArbCom member Molly White in "Wikipedia at 20: The Promises and Pitfalls of the 'Free Encyclopedia'". White, who was the second editor at the Capitol storming article (see further details in the Special report
  ), describes its development and wider issues of Wikipedia's relationship with its editors and readers including how to handle situations where there is no clear "accepted truth" and the "weaponization" of neutrality.

• The Economist solves the problem of how to fit everything into one article by publishing three separate pieces.
  • Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher. In its youth Wikipedia was the butt of many jokes, and even now "The Economist's fact-checkers frown on relying on it". But they consider us "the standard reference work for anyone with an internet connection, and quote WMF staffer Toby Negrin saying we are the "guardian of truth".
  • A rich-world Wikipeak - Wikipedia's future lies in poorer countries: "From 2010 to 2018 the number of active editors working in languages spoken in the richer half of countries in the world fell by 5%, but the corresponding figure for those spoken in the poorer half more than doubled."
  • In a 27 minute podcast The Economist asks Jimmy Wales "Is social media still a force for good?" One answer "perhaps the most surprising thing is how little Wikipedia has changed." For more on podcasts, as well as videos, on our birthday, see The Signpost article here.
• The BBC reduces the history of Wikipedia, with some help from long-time admin David Gerard, to five articles:
  Standard poodle
  , but that's just quibbling.
• Wikipedia is a monument of human cooperation and collaboration, according to
  Vice Motherboard's piece on the billionth edit – which also carries a pleasingly wonky analysis about the merit of the use of the term "billionth" from their source, Wikipedia editor The Cunctator
  .
• Wikpedia at 20: Did you know Will Ferrell was once not killed in a paragliding incident? in the
  Irish Times
  gives the most well-rounded and best-written overview of all these articles. "Its prose is flat, design rudimentary, but Wikipedia remains a triumph of human ingenuity."
• Deutsche Welle gets very serious. Topics include
  wikiwashing by politicians, hoaxes involving celebrities, and nationalistic spins on the same article topics in different language editions of Wikipedia, using as an example Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, which is also called Анексія, anéksija or "Annexation" in Ukrainian, but Присоединение, prisojedinénije which can also mean accession (see wikt:присоединение) in the corresponding Russian Wikipedia article
  . It goes on to give the reader ways to verify an article is credible including checking its spelling and grammar, whether it has a neutral tone, and whether its references check out.
• That's why Wikipedia is still the boys' arena (paywall, in Swedish) by Professor Nina Wormbs in Dagens Nyheter. She points out Wikipedia's success as a long-term non-commercial internet actor while embodying the original on-line values. Focus has been properly placed by Wikipedians on both the quantity of articles and accuracy. In reviewing the gender-gap, she concludes that a gender balance of biographical articles might indeed not be possible. An important point is that broader knowledge about Wikipedia and its limits would greatly enhance the usefulness of the encyclopedia. Wormbs invokes Yochai Benkler in saying that Wikipedia is a sign of successful collaboration outside of the market system. Benkler also suggests that we should learn from projects like Wikipedia when it comes to other non-market collaborations, e.g. the climate crises. Another Swedish article, "A social medium that brings out the best in us" (paywall) was published in Svenska Dagbladet.
• The most bizarre birthday article is from NDTV, "So Glad You Exist": Elon Musk's Birthday Wish For Wikipedia, focusing on a short tweet from the world's richest man. The Signpost returns Musk's compliment; we're glad that he exists as well, but we're not so sure about NDTV.
• WIRED thinks Wikipedia Is Basically a Massive RPG where "We will see the rise of a new paladin class—those who are not code sorcerers, and who are not writer warriors, but someone in-between—using powerful, pre-prepared spells to fight vandals and abusers, as well as to improve content overall" according to author's source Dariusz Jemielniak
  .
• Speaking of wonky, Mashable brings us "20-plus facts about the free encyclopedia that you never knew you never knew" to celebrate Wikipedia's 20th anniversary (though in truth this Signpost editor did know about half of them, and the real-life name of Giraffedata besides).

Where we go from here?

• Wikipedia is twenty. It’s time to start covering it better Stephen Harrison and Omer Benjakob, in the Columbia Journalism Review address their fellow journalists using many of the same examples as they use to address academics in their chapter in Wikipedia @ 20 and to address Wikipedia editors in this issue's In focus. They conclude that "journalism should help readers better understand Wikipedia’s policies and inner workings." Since "Wikipedia’s diverse and often divergent community is the secret to its success," journalists should report on the community with more nuance than writing as if all editors have a single point of view or engage in a constant free-for-all.
• Wikipedia's Biggest Challenge Awaits in 2021 in Wired by the dean of Wiki-journalists Noam Cohen, starts with a retelling of Wikipedia's many achievements but then moves to the Universal code of conduct and why it is sorely needed. The changes proposed by the WMF and many others to diversify the editing community raise existential questions for the online encyclopedia. He uses the examples of the articles Mythology of Benjamin Banneker and Der Giftpilz, a Nazi children's book. The mythology article is not really about Banneker, an accomplished African-American, but a strong critique of stories made up about him. Why don't we have similar articles about the mythology of George Washington or Albert Einstein? The Nazi children's book article included a link to the book's contents and might promote the book in other ways. Both articles will make editing Wikipedia a harrowing experience for some editors. "This is the gnawing challenge for Wikipedia. After a period of wild, unrestrained growth, it needs some civilizing laws. The equivalent of a fair housing act and safety inspections to ensure it won’t exclude certain groups from its pages and allow hateful material to grow and fester."

In brief

• Curious and curiouser: A University of Pennsylvania press release titled Hunters and busybodies summarizes a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour by a team led by Danielle Bassett. The type of curiosity volunteers exhibited was measured using their Wikipedia browsing behavior as either "hunters" or "busybodies".
• One Page At A Time, Jess Wade Is Changing Wikipedia: Jess Wade on NPR on a 13 minute Short Wave (podcast).
• Monument against Genocide wins ticket to compete in Wikimedia contest: Genocide monument in Rwanda.
• Meet Raju Jangid: From Carpenter to Wikipedia Editor Who Got Gifted Laptop and Free Internet in Yahoo! India. According to the India Times, he has edited 57,000 pages on a mobile device. See also Zee News in Hindi
• Arrest follows creation of Wikipedia article: BIGLOBE News reports that a Japanese man, Junya Okuno [ja]^[a] – who caused the emergency landing of a flight between Hokkaido and Honshu in December for refusing to wear a mask and injuring a flight attendant in September, and then appeared on Japanese television and social media as early as December 2020 to discuss his skepticism of masks to contain coronavirus – was arrested on January 19, the day after a Wikipedia article about him was created. The Japanese Wikipedia page had 280,272 views in four days since its creation. Fox News covered the story in English but without the Wikipedia connection.
• Lincoln compared to a Wikipedia list: An advisor to The Lincoln Project compares his actions to the compilation of a Wikipedia list. But Lincoln's efforts are labeled a "blacklist" by the editorial page writers at The Wall Street Journal.
• Long – or is that nagai? – pages: Yahoo! Japan discusses the content of the three longest articles on Japanese Wikipedia. First place, concerning Trails series in the video game The Legend of Heroes, is 440,000-character article Legends of Heroes Characters in the Trails Series on Japanese Wikipedia. By way of comparison this would be number eleven on the English Wikipedia long pages list.
• Twitter Birdwatch compared to Wikipedia peer moderation model by Associated Press, El Diario, NBC
  , and more...
• "The Women of Wikipedia Are Writing Themselves into History": "A team of fiercely dedicated women Wikipedians is working around the clock and around the globe to write themselves into the pages of history, one edit at a time," writes Jenny Singer in Glamour.

Notes