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Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism explain the story that because The New York Times and The Guardian newspapers wish to prevent major tech companies from web scraping their content, those newspapers are leading the effort and setting the precedent of blocking access to news for Internet Archive and Wikipedia. The general circumstance is that as a general nonprofit library and archiving service, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has since 2001 been making archival copies of newspaper articles. This has not previously been anyone's worry or concern. Wikipedia is a summary of what reliable, fact-checked sources say, and uses newspapers to fact-check its content, and for reasons including stability of access, Wikipedia's fact-checking links to Internet Archive's permanently secure and online archival copies of media. News is by nature ephemeral, and all newspapers have a tendency to put lower value on older news, and even to remove access to older articles. The major entity which cares about old newspaper articles is Wikipedia, and to preserve access to removed articles, the Internet Archive Bot backs up all sources cited in Wikipedia, with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine service, so that if Wikipedia fact-checking links go down, then the Internet Archive provides the backup copy that has become stale to the interests of the original host.
With the advent of artificial intelligence, tech companies are grabbing whatever media they can find anywhere, with intent to transform it, and provide it back to the commercial marketplace as their own product and service for sale. When AI takes human content and transforms this media, it does so without sharing profit or credit with the humans who labored to create it. Newspapers rightly are worried that whatever they publish can be captured by AI, which will then repeat the news they grab to their own audiences. AI agents thereby get all the benefits of having the news, without incurring any of the human costs in producing it.
In an effort to halt AI from grabbing news content, newspapers have taken notice that AI companies circumvent newspapers and grab the content from Internet Archive's nonprofit, community-oriented, archiving service. By stopping the Internet Archive's process for backing up the sources which Wikipedia uses for fact-checking, newspapers hope that they can maintain their relevance in the age of AI. The AI companies take what they want and do not honor requests to go away, but the Internet Archive, being a small nonprofit, is easier to disrupt than the commercial AI sector.
This is a complex situation. Anyone with opinions about this matter is invited to submit them for publication in The Signpost. As a general matter of Wikipedia values, everyone should have the right to Wikipedia, and everyone should have the right to edit Wikipedia. AI brings an existential threat to Wikipedia when it blocks Wikipedia's access to newspapers, archiving services, and human editorial processes for fact-checking. – BR
Using Mel Brooks' early life and education as an example, The American Prospect discussed the special treatment that some biographies of Jews receive[1]:
In general, Wikipedia listings don't identify the religions of most people, though they do often have brief references to ethnicity. But Jews get more detail. Wikipedia doesn't care whether a person is observant or whether they note Jewish identity in their own biographies. As in the Nuremberg laws, once a Jew, always a Jew. In some cases, Wikipedia even includes the Yiddish version of surnames, which seems to have no purpose except to underscore otherness.
– B
This section is very much under construction, and I would like to have input from other Signpost editors onto the development of this section. It covers areas related to the Israel-Palestine conflict and Zionism.
Honest Reporting recently released an article WIKI Rights, a Euro-Med HRM project, where it refers to the organisation as a "radical antisemetic NGO", and describes the impact this has on the information landscape. The article is critical of the program, especially about their training of of activists and university students how to edit Wikipedia and their focus on the Gaza war, decribing their aims as appeaing "strikingly nefarious" and claims the organisation is "deeply embedded in the international campaign to portray Israel as committing genocide and other atrocity crimes".
| “ | One of the most revealing aspects of Euro-Med’s activity in the information war surrounding the Israel–Hamas conflict is its WikiRights project, an initiative designed explicitly to influence how human rights issues are represented on Wikipedia. | ” |
| — Ben M. Freeman, Honest Reporting | ||
According to the Euro-Med website, the goals of WIKI Rights are to enrich and promote human rights content on Wikipedia, create new and update existing human rights content, create teams interested in participating in their goals on Wikipedia, and "Strengthening the narrative of victims of violations and highlighting them to the other side's story." – M
Wikipedia has been turned into a gacha style card collecting game, with articles turned into their card form. Boing Boing has reported that the game appears to be vibe coded (generated by AI), and uses ads as opposed to microtransactions. The game uses data from Wikirank.net, a site for "Quality and popularity assessment of Wikipedia" to determine the rarity of a card, and combines this with page views and article size for the attack and defense values.
The site has been covered by various other technology focused outlets, largely praising it for gamifying education, including Rock Paper Shotgun [2], PC Gamer [3], Nerdist, a Forbes contributor [4], and mandatory.com [5]. – M
SimWikiMap is a simulated Electronic flight bag moving map with Wikipedia articles of interest pertaining to virtual aircraft's virtual location for Microsoft Flight Simulator to give cultural/geographic context to the virtual flight experience over virtual terrain. At least it's a real encyclopedia (as real as online can be)... (via NewsBreak [6]) – B
After he left jail in 2009, Mr. Epstein hired a host of people to make him look better on Google, Wikipedia and many other places on the web...Many of the attempts to launder Mr. Epstein’s web presence, including changes to his Wikipedia page, often overstepped normally accepted lines. Team members created networks of fake Wikipedia editing accounts, sometimes known as sock puppets, to sneak changes past administrators, whose accounts they also tried to disrupt by hacking.
— "Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Push to Cleanse His Past Online, The New York Times
As part of the evidence of sockpuppetry and hacking, the Times story links to a 2020 "In focus" piece authored by Smallbones that was carried in The Signpost. – B
This page is a draft for the next issue of the Signpost. Below is some helpful code that will help you write and format a Signpost draft. If it's blank, you can fill out a template by copy-pasting this in and pressing 'publish changes': {{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Story-preload}}
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To put an image in your article, use the following template (link):  I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change
Placing (link) will instead create an inline image like below  The significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.
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If you keep the 'normal' preloaded draft and work from there, you will be using the two-column style. This is perfectly fine in most cases and you don't need to do anything. However, every time you have a However, you can also fine-tune which style is used at which point in an article. To switch from two-column → full width style midway in an article, insert where you want the switch to happen. To switch from full width → two-column style midway in an article, insert where you want the switch to happen. |
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