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In what one TechCrunch writer called "one of those rare internet-stopping days I've seen during my time as a security reporter", the PHP2Shell security flaw caused reactions almost everywhere.
Some media – Mashable, for example – reported that Wikipedia was taken offline for a short period after discovery of a critical PHP software vulnerability on October 20 (Pacific Time). The vulnerability is discussed in detail elsewhere in this issue, and the effort to deal with it was acknowledged by Wikimedia Foundation as having resulted in "outages for our wikis " in an update to a Diff post. BBC said some readers were "unable to access parts of Wikipedia". A later Mashable story said that Wikimedia "supporting tools" had been taken offline.
One of the support sites for Wikipedia, Toolforge, was taken down by its operators for security remediation. Since many of the registered, authorized bots run here, a drastic decrease in page edits was noted at that time. One of the important anti-Wikipedia-vandalism bots, ClueBot NG, was down for over two days. – B
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Danish-British comedian and presenter Sandi Toksvig is working with the University of Cambridge on the so-called Mappa Mundi project, which aims to supplement Wikipedia and other encyclopedic portals with more information about notable women. As reported by The Telegraph and The Guardian, though, her recent statements seem to profile Mappa Mundi as yet another rival of Wikipedia, rather than an ally, in their common mission of equal gender representation.
Mostly known as the host of The News Quiz (on BBC Radio 4), The Great British Bake Off and QI (on BBC Two), Toksvig has been an advocate for women's rights for a long time, as testified by her experience with the now-dissolved Women’s Equality Party, and has been supporting Mappa Mundi for at least five years. The project's official page describes it a collaboration between Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Faculty of Education, which are also working with global NGOs like the Women of the World Foundation. The project is currently raising funds for pilot studies to document women's experiences in the UK and Afghanistan.
On October 10, Toksvig presented Mappa Mundi while appearing at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, defining it as "an interactive digital atlas where we can find a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted". As reported by The Daily Telegraph, she quickly pivoted to explaining the reasons why her project could serve a better role in representing women than Wikipedia, comparing the site to a 1911 book she found, which provided some questionable information for women, including "the best way to decorate a church", or "wash gloves", or "why women should not be dentists". She then elaborated on the comparison, saying quote:
You may be aware that since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has grown to be the largest collection of knowledge in humanity's history. These days, if anyone wants to find one source for everything, we know most people will say that it's Wikipedia. It is astonishing that it is such a collection of knowledge, but what is remarkable when you drill down into it, Wikipedia has pretty much the same patronising attitude to women as that book.
This online encyclopaedia is crowd-sourced, which means that anyone in the world that has the time and the access to technology can access the database and expand it. It sounds an incredibly egalitarian concept, except the practical upshot of this is that it is mostly white, middle-aged, European men who have both the time and the technology, and we now have a collection of knowledge which, for the English-speaking world, is 85 per cent by and about white men.
You might say there are fewer women in it because women do less in the public sphere but, when you analyse it – and I really have spent a lot of time on this – you find that women are held to a completely different standard.
They are much more likely to be subject to what is called a 'drive-by deletion'. So, say, somebody inputs a biography of somebody they think should be in Wikipedia, somebody else will probably delete it almost immediately, because it is determined that woman is not notable enough for inclusion.
Toksvig specifically referred to the past controversy about Canadian physicist Donna Strickland, whose Wikipedia page had been repeatedly rejected until the day she won the Nobel Prize in Physics. She also worried about AI scraping amplifying the existing bias on Wikipedia, fearing that it would "set down the sum knowledge of information, leaving out 50 per cent of the world's population."
The comedian already addressed the same subject in the past, as reported on this column following a 2019 article featured in The Times, and discussed on the talk page for Women in Red, a project founded in 2015 precisely to tackle the gender gap in biographies on Wikipedia. And she does have a point: The Guardian reported that, by the Wikimedia Foundation's own estimate, only 13% of editors openly identify as women and only 19% of Wikipedia biographies concern women – although they hit the 20% milestone for a brief period last year, while the gender gap might even have reversed in some academic areas. On the other hand, she has been questioned for having got some of the platform's standards and data on biographies wrong, as well as seemingly trying to criticize Wikipedia just to promote her own project, as pointed out by Finn McRedmond in her Opinion column for The Irish Times:
Toksvig's war on the misogyny of Wikipedia is wrong for two reasons. It’s burdened by an ahistoricism that would not pass the editorial standards of Wikipedia itself. But it has also taken one of the best parts of the internet – that free, sprawling, considered, fair, democratic resource – and used it for navel-gazing and self-satisfied point scoring.
Oh, and then there's English Conservative commentator Toby Young, who made the whole situation about himself on a paywalled opinion article hosted on The Spectator, but let's make it a story for another day. Meanwhile, perhaps we can all agree with The Guardian that Toksvig's Mappa Mundi project has better intentions than Grokipedia: "If nothing else, hopefully it will update Wikipedia's list of people who died on the toilet to include more women." – O and S
"Wikipedians Believed AI Would Come and Go. They Were Wrong" long-form story in Wired, excerpt from new book by Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia. The author also wrote about an appreciation of wabi-sabi and the community of sometimes pedantic, sometimes neurodivergent people who created Wikipedia in The Guardian.
The book title is taken from an essay the author wrote in 2020 for Wired (see Previous Signpost coverage).
You can find book reviews in The New York Times (paywalled) and The New Yorker. – B
Laura June Kirsch, a New York City photographer and artist, writes in Hyperallergic about how she learned that a short Wikipedia article had been written about her, and then [[ Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Laura June Kirsch|nominated for deletion]]. She got to see how strangers could dissect her life and decide on her notability. Later she received "an email from a stranger who runs a digital marketing company with a website that churns out what the kids would call 'AI slop.'" She sent him a more complete biography, but decided not to pay him any money.
She told The Signpost that "I will always wonder and never know who made the original (now removed) Wikipedia page about me (or how a scammer found it), I am glad I was able to share this bizarre story with Hyperallergic. The joy of making art is connecting with people authentically, which is exactly why I refused to pay an internet stranger to put my short-lived Wikipedia page back up."
The situation reminds this reporter of a scam warning that more people should read.
– S
Wired does not mention the scam angle, even though author Duncan Fyfe "reached out to hundreds of people" who had an article about them nominated for deletion. The article's many Wikipedia biography subjects had a wide range of experiences and emotions. A few didn't know that there was an article about them, some felt harassed, many felt disappointed.
What do you need to know—need to know—about Xavier Trudeau? The eldest son of former Canadian prime minister Justin, the teenage Trudeau has recently begun performing R&B under the mononym Xav. But, with all due respect to Xav, do those facts make him a person of note? Should you expect to be able to read about him on Wikipedia? What about Evanescence guitarist Tim McCord, or 2012 Yachtmaster of the Year Rainer Holtorff?
All three have had a biography on Wikipedia; all three of those biographies were considered for deletion this year on the grounds that the subjects were not notable enough to warrant a biography at all.
– AK
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