US elections

Media recognized Wikipedia's role in providing neutrally sourced information to citizens preparing for the U.S. November elections. In particular, Wikipedia's community-based model (versus the top-down control of other social media platforms) was shown as an effective way to forestall potential problems by adding extra protection to elections-related topics. It wasn't all positive, though, with some sources pointing out continuing issues around women's biographies, and potentially politically-motivated vandalism. – B

• "How Wikipedia is preparing for Election Day", in Vox compares Twitter's and Facebook's election preparations to those of the Wikipedia community. Interviewing GorillaWarfare they find that at least one Wikipedian is hard nosed, committed to our rules, and taking it all in stride. Of course we are better prepared than those other websites – it's the community enforcing the rules that we made.
• "Wikipedia's disinformation task force braces for a high-stakes election" on CNET reports a similar story on Wikipedia's preparations but interviews WMF Chief of Staff Ryan Merkley and comes to similar conclusions. Merkley said he isn't privy to the secrets of the big tech companies, but was confident in Wikipedia's preparations.
• "The Senate Race That Could be Pivotal for America—and Wikipedia" in Wired. There was no article about Iowa's Democratic Senatorial candidate Theresa Greenfield on Wikipedia until a few weeks before the election. Our rules on notability "according to some of the more powerful editors on the site" didn't allow Greenfield to "make the cut." If this really was a test of Wikipedia's preparedness for the election, then Wikipedia failed. Greenfield's vote total was well below her opponent's, 45% to 52%. "Wikipedia is a community that teems with its own authorities and cognoscenti, with all the high-handedness, Byzantine bylaws, and amour propre of any cultural institution on Fifth Avenue," according to Wired.
• Savage disinformation: Michael Savage claims that spikes in Wikipedia pageviews on election day for some politicians and their relatives "shows the potential electoral impact of Wikipedia’s left-wing bias".
• The answer is yes, it does: Does Loser.com Redirect to Trump's Wikipedia Page? (Snopes.com, confirmed by The Independent and confirmed by Evening Standard in the UK; confirmed by The Hill, The Washington Post [1] and Time [2] in the U.S.)

Wikipedia@20

Reviews and extracts of Wikipedia@20, a thick book of essays about Wikipedia's first twenty years, have started coming out. The essays are written by academics and by Wikipedians and are aimed at the same groups.

• The book column in The New Yorker, titled "Wikipedia, 'Jeopardy!', and the Fate of the Fact" explores Wikipedia's history and intellectual foundations with reference to the book, especially to the chapter by Yochai Benkler. The author, Louis Menand, is a colleague of Benkler's at Harvard. Menand pulls out an amazing range of facts and examples – from Hegel and Hayek to Dick van Dyke and Duck à l'orange by way of Siri, copyleft and Pierre, South Dakota. You should avoid the detour to Jeopardy! unless you are an Alex Trebek fan. The use of all the cute facts almost seems to be the point of the piece, but the author does squeeze in a lot of information about Wikipedia in between them. More likely Menand is illustrating his thesis – at the same time he is making fun of himself and of Wikipedia – "There is no longer a distinction between things that everyone knows, or could readily know, and things that only experts know" because of Wikipedia and the internet.
• How 9/11 Shaped Wikipedia, by Brian Keegan in Slate is an updated version of his Wikipedia@20 chapter about how news stories are covered on Wikipedia.

The creation, rejection, and disappearance of the Sept. 11 memorial wiki’s content remains an underappreciated cautionary tale about the presumed durability of peer-produced knowledge: This content only persists when it remains integrated with the larger common project rather than being relegated to a smaller and more specialized project. Wikipedia’s peer production model is not immune from "rich get richer" mechanisms.

• Science (paywalled) reviews Wikipedia@20 in "The ascent of Wikipedia". "Anyone interested in the history, current constitution, and possible future development of a singular contemporary global phenomenon will be stimulated by this anniversary collection." – S

Don't mess with a Canadian border officer armed with Wikipedia

Meng Wanzhou, Chief Financial Officer of Huawei was detained at the Vancouver airport on December 1, 2018 with the help of a Canada Border Services Agency officer who prepared for an interview with her with an "open-source query" – reading Wikipedia for 5 or 10 minutes. Meng is facing possible extradition to the U.S. and her detention soon became a major international incident. In "Wikipedia was source of security concern questions for Meng: Border officer", The Canadian Press reported on the in-court testimony of Sanjit Dhillon, a CBSA supervisor at Vancouver International Airport.

Before Meng's plane landed, Dhillon said she was flagged in an internal database for an outstanding warrant in her name.
Anticipating her arrival, Dhillon testified he found a Wikipedia page about Huawei that said the company doesn't operate in the United States because of security concerns and that Huawei was suspected of violating U.S. economic sanctions with Iran. [...]
Dhillon asked Meng what she did. She said she was the chief financial officer of a global telecommunications company, he told the court.
He asked where the company did business. When she listed countries without including the United States he asked her why.
"She said we don't sell our products in the United States," Dhillon said.
He asked if there was a reason why and Meng responded she didn't know. Dhillon said he then reframed the question.
"Since she's the chief financial officer of this telecommunications company, I would assume that she would know why her company isn't able to sell its products in one of the most lucrative markets in the world," Dhillon said.
"She was quiet. She didn't respond right away. And eventually she said there was a security concern with the product the U.S. government had."
He testified Meng didn't say what those concerns were.
Dhillon said his questions were based on his own online search and he was not directed by anyone to ask her questions.

The South China Morning Post reported the story similarly, adding the detail that "Dhillon said he spent five to 10 minutes reviewing the Wikipedia article."

Business in Vancouver added that Wikipedia was the only source he used!

The Signpost can confirm that on December 1, 2018 the Huawei article contained a large section about Iran, espionage, and security concerns in the US, consistent with Dhillon's testimony. – S

Lockdown 1.0 – following Wikipedia?

BBC Two reportedly had an excellent hour-long documentary "Lockdown 1.0 - Following the Science?" airing on November 19 about the UK government's handling of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately those of us outside the UK cannot view the online version due to licensing restrictions.

The Guardian provided a detailed review of the documentary, giving it 4 stars, and surveying the many facts presented, including one about Wikipedia:

"The public may be surprised to hear we were using data from Wikipedia very early on – but it really was the only data publicly available." — Dr. Ian Hall of Manchester University, deputy chair of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling

Several UK tabloids have featured this quote in their reporting on the documentary. – B, S

In brief

• On Wikipedia, Israel Is Losing the Battle Against the Word 'Apartheid' (Haaretz)
• The World According to Wikipedia, a new podcast from Ireland, posted its first two episodes on November 18 Welcome to the World of Wikipedia, with an interview with Andrew Lih and a discussion of the Scots language Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's Women in Red, interviewing Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. It's a high quality podcast without the usual giggles and oh-wows that many "serious" podcasts suffer from.
• A vicious culture war is tearing through Wikipedia, says Wired: "'Every article on Wikipedia is against the ruling party, and whitewashes the Indian National Congress'" [3]
• "Wikipedia probe finds illicit editing of WE Charity pages" in The Globe and Mail discusses the Special report in September's issue of The Signpost. It followed Simona Weinglass's "Wikipedia probe exposes an Israeli stealth PR firm that worked for scammers" in The Times of Israel.
• We all want good brand management: The Public Relations Society of America, Maryland Chapter published "Wikipedia for PR" with the helpful advice "outdated Wikipedia articles or articles overtaken by a controversy section drive traffic away from a brand. This is what we all want to avoid." Do we all want to avoid controversy? Do we? How about neutrally covering the facts instead?
• "Scotched Efforts" by AmaryllisGardener in Harper's Magazine is composed of extracts from AG's misguided efforts to edit the Scots Wikipedia. Its hard to tell whether Harper's is trying to mock AG or is entranced by the seemingly poetic lilt of his encyclopedia entries. In either case they miss the point: sometimes Wikipedians despite their best efforts have taken on tasks that are beyond their abilities.
• Erudition, so what?: A book review in The Spectator suggests that mere erudition is not enough to move the reader, since the ability to connect surprising facts has been so thoroughly democratized through Wikipedia that it "might not even be literary at all".
• Anarchisch und chaotisch: "How a woman from Stuttgart fought against her Wikipedia entry" (Stuttgarter Zeitung, in German, original title Wie eine Stuttgarterin gegen ihren Wikipedia-Eintrag kämpfte)
• Nature on how to switch scientific specialties: In How to shift into COVID-19 research notes that French researcher Amadine Gamble, who switched from disease ecology to COVID-19 research "knew that she couldn’t change direction successfully without reviewing the basics of cell biology. She consulted a range of sources, from scientific papers to Wikipedia."
• 'Crazy accurate A.I.' was trained on Wikipedia: Congratulations, you are now the proud parents of GPT-3. (The New York Times) (also see the Wikipedia-based demo starting at 3:10)
• Nigerian newspaper finds Wikipedia credible: Wikipedia lists killing of protesters among Nigerian Army's engagements (The Punch)