In the latest addition to the long series of Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia incidents, The Wall Street Journal has written an article showing how a public relations firm has operated for years "cleaning" articles for paying clients. We have covered this WSJ article briefly at In the media, and examine their claims more closely in a Special report provided by Newslinger.
The community has faced this issue before, as documented in the article Wiki-PR editing of Wikipedia. Several community discussions about paid editing were held, including the 2014 Terms of Service change which required paid editors to declare their status for proper community oversight of their contributions.
Wiki-PR and its successor companies are community banned. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) sent them a cease-and-desist letter in 2013,[1] yet the activity of Status Labs on English Wikipedia has continued; can we now consider those avenues to be ineffective? What is the WMF's next step?
This issue also has more reports of the use of Wiki pages as a battlefield for political viewpoints between UK newspapers. Other credible reports in the media this month are related to the biography for a US presidential candidate by one or more possibly connected people. Some of these details have been suppressed from our In the media report while under development, and we can't provide our readers as much information as we would have preferred. We wonder if the seemingly accelerating pace of these incidents will merit more changes in the future, by the community, the WMF, government regulators, or all three in concert.
In addition to the above, we have regular coverage of new content, readers' interests, on-Wiki discussions and debate, tech and research – as well as a touch of whimsy for a lighter side of the community. We hope you enjoy all of it and look forward to hearing back from you in the reader comments.
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This December, for the first time since the list was established in its current form in 2014, the tally of active administrators has been under 500 for the entire month.[2] It does not appear likely to rise above 500 again, unless there is a major change in trend.
WereSpielChequers sent us this commentary on the request for adminship process:
| “ | I see two trends here, a very longstanding one that those who pass usually do so uncontentiously, and a newish one that unanimous RFAs are now rare. The community is rarely ambiguous at RFA, this year two out of twenty two successful RFAs were so close as to involve cratchats, whilst 12 ended with fewer than 10 opposes. RFA is almost like an inverted bell curve, with most results being very clear rejections or very clear passes and very few being borderline. That's why the lowering of the discretionary band has had little effect, there just aren't many RFAs where the community is undecided or close to being undecided. The newer trend is that unanimous passes are now a thing of the past. There have been none in the last two years and only three in the previous three years. By contrast in 2014 nearly half (10 of 22) of all the successful RFAs were unanimous passes. I'm pretty sure that the older trend, that those who pass usually do so with little or no opposition, is partly down to RFA's reputation, most successful candidates don't run until many months or years after they were first ready to be admins. The end of unanimity I believe to be down to a small number of individuals with particular non standard criteria such as "must have an FA or GA". RFA is a dynamic process, it doesn't have agreed criteria such as we have for Rollback, account creator or other individual tools. Sometimes an RFA !voter will come along with a new criterion such as "must not be a self nomination", "must have created new articles" or "must have a certain percentage of manual edits"; over a series of RFAs the new test usually fades away, sometimes after a phase as part of our default expectation, sometimes as a test that never attracts more than one or two adherents. So the odd thing about the last few years is that we no longer have unanimous RFAs, not that most successful RFAs are almost unanimous. | ” |
Just before we went to press, the Constitutional Court of Turkey ruled the block of Wikipedia in Turkey invalid. We will have to cover the full implications of this in more detail in a future issue. Suffice to say that we (Wikipedians) think that it is important for people to be able to access our content, and the fact that a national court agreed is significant. To our knowledge, this is the first time any court has found there exists a constitutional right to read Wikipedia specifically.
Five and a half years have passed since the Wikimedia Foundation changed its terms of use to prohibit undisclosed paid editing on Wikipedia and most of its sister projects – a measure enacted in response to the infamous Wiki-PR's alleged use of 300+ sockpuppets to "directly edit your page" for a starting price of $500 to $1,000. Recently, The Wall Street Journal ran into Wiki-PR's successor, a Texas firm known as Status Labs.
Wiki-PR duo bulldoze a piñata store; Wifione arbitration case; French parliamentary plagiarism
1 April 2015
With paid advocacy in its sights, the Wikimedia Foundation amends their terms of use
18 June 2014
WMF bites the bullet on affiliation and FDC funding, elevates Wikimedia user groups
12 February 2014
Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions
29 January 2014
Foundation to Wiki-PR: cease and desist; Arbitration Committee elections starting
20 November 2013
The decline of Wikipedia; Sue Gardner releases statement on Wiki-PR; Australian minister relies on Wikipedia
23 October 2013
Vice on Wiki-PR's paid advocacy; Featured list elections begin
16 October 2013
Wiki-PR's extensive network of clandestine paid advocacy exposed
9 October 2013
Wiki-PR managed to keep itself out of the public eye after being banned by the English Wikipedia community in 2013 and being involved in a bizarre piñata store demolition in 2015. That changed on 13 December 2019, when The Wall Street Journal published a report titled "How the 1% Scrubs Its Image Online". The story implicated several notable figures, including U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and billionaire financier Kenneth C. Griffin, as well as the fraudulent blood testing company Theranos.
Former employees of Status Labs, a reputation management firm closely connected to Wiki-PR, shared their insight into the companies' operations with The Wall Street Journal. After establishing Wiki-PR in 2010, two of the co-founders launched Status Labs in 2012 with a third partner. These executives of Status Labs became embroiled in controversy in the company's home city of Austin, Texas: in 2015, they demolished the family-run Jumpolin piñata store – including all of the inventory inside – to the consternation of the local Hispanic community, inflaming tensions related to gentrification. The CEO was subsequently ejected from the company, which led to a round of legal infighting. Despite the conflicts, Wiki-PR and Status Labs continued to operate without attracting the attention of Wikipedia editors; the most recent investigation of the Wiki-PR sockpuppet ring is dated 20 July 2013, but both firms have continued to offer services online for the past six years.
Individual clients and specific tactics are mentioned in The Wall Street Journal's story. Status Labs has a broader scope than Wiki-PR: in addition to whitewashing Wikipedia articles, Status Labs uses search engine poisoning to conceal negative news coverage of their clients. When financier Jacob Gottlieb wanted to hide his connections to Visium Asset Management LP, a hedge fund that was destroyed by an insider trading scandal, Status Labs created a network of fake news websites – including "Medical Daily Times" – to flood search engines with press releases of Gottlieb that were disguised as news articles. When Betsy DeVos wanted to distance herself from Blackwater (now Academi), the military contractor founded by her brother whose employees shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, Status Labs constructed blogs like "Enable Diversity" to bury negative coverage of DeVos under a mountain of puff pieces in search engine results pages.
Status Labs charges substantially higher rates than Wiki-PR, with Gottlieb paying $4,000 to $5,000 monthly. In comparison, Wiki-PR demanded less than $1,000 per month for article "management" in 2013.
Today, we take a deep dive into the editing history of one of the articles mentioned in the Journal's latest report: Theranos.
Theranos was a healthcare company that sold blood tests that it claimed would need only a fraction of the blood volume that was needed in existing lab tests. Following a 2015 Journal exposé which revealed that Theranos' in-house technology simply didn't work, the company faced heavy media scrutiny. Thrust into a crisis, Theranos scrambled to defend its image: the company threatened to sue the Journal's sources, and issued a statement labeling them as "inexperienced and disgruntled former employees and industry incumbents". As part of Theranos' public relations strategy, Status Labs was contracted to alter the Wikipedia article on Theranos; 26 edits were performed by Jppcap, an account operated by Status Labs.
Jppcap's first edit to the Theranos article appeared six months after the Journal story and one month after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that it would revoke Theranos' lab certification. The edit notes that the company established a medical advisory board.
| Time (UTC) | 20:40, 15 April 2016 |
| Edit summary | upd w/ fortune |
While two physicians have subsequently been named to the board, and published reference has been made to a "deep medical advisory group,"[1] as of January 2016, no scientific or medical advisory board information appears in the company's public information. In April 2016, Theranos announced its medical advisory board which included past presidents or board members of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry.[2]
The account rested for a month before making a series of six edits that scrubbed a pair of mentions of COO Ramesh Balwani from the article. At the time, Balwani was in a personal relationship with founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, which was not initially known to the company's investors. According to the Journal, the couple "enforced a corporate culture of secrecy and fear".
| Time (UTC) | 19:20, 17 May 2016 |
| Edit summary | ct kp& other non mos, founder 2x |
Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani (left the company in May 2016)[1] |
| Time (UTC) | 19:21, 17 May 2016 |
| Edit summary | rmv 2x, mentioned in hist. |
Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani left Theranos in May 2016.[1]
The May 2016 edits also added Theranos' then-current board of directors, and removed a sentence that described the company's operations as "secretive".
| Time (UTC) | 19:28, 17 May 2016 |
| Edit summary | 1st pass cu of gov (edited with ProveIt) +1 |
As of May 2016, the Theranos board of directors are:[1]
| Time (UTC) | 19:29, 17 May 2016 |
| Edit summary | ct pov/spec. intro |
While other aspects of its operations remain secretive,[1] Theranos corporate governance has been the subject of various press disclosures and subsequent news reports.
Jppcap then reorganized the article, moving the "Controversies" subsection into the "Governance" section, which was further down the article. "Controversies" was previously inside the "History" section.
| Time (UTC) | 19:30, 17 May 2016 |
| Edit summary | mv gov from contro |
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
The remaining 19 edits were performed five months after the previous batch. These edits constitute the most blatant neutrality violations, and the sheer volume of removed content speaks for itself. Jppcap tended to use innocuous edit summaries, thinning out embarrassing facts by labeling them as "dupes" and "quotefarms".
Jppcap began by reducing coverage of the Walgreens pharmacy chain's discontinuation of Theranos' blood test offerings. Walgreens was Theranos' most significant business partner.
| Time (UTC) | 14:38, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | rmv dupes |
On June 12, 2016, Walgreens announced it would no longer offer Theranos services at any of its stores and would sever its relationship with Theranos.[1]
[...]
Subsequently, a key metric of Theranos valuation was notably called into question when Walgreens suspended further expansion of Theranos Wellness Centers.[2]
| Time (UTC) | 15:55, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | mv walgreens susp. (edited with ProveIt) |
Walgreens suspended its plans to add Theranos' testing services in its stores, and later removed Theranos' testing from all existing locations.[1][2]
[...]
Walgreens suspended plans to expand blood-testing centers in their stores following the report.[3][4] At that time, the Cleveland Clinic announced that it would work to verify Theranos technology.[5]
[...]
Three days later, Walgreens, which had partnered with Theranos to provide its blood testing services in stores, ceased all testing at a Palo Alto location, and ordered the company to process all of its other tests from Walgreens locations at its Arizona laboratory instead of the California lab.[6]
During the fallout of the Journal story, Theranos was forced to cancel its test for the Zika virus, the pathogen responsible for an international fever epidemic in 2015–16. Jppcap strongly de-emphasized the Zika test cancellation and removed board member James Mattis's conflict of interest, while reinterpreting mandatory Food and Drug Administration restrictions as "voluntary". The Status Labs editor described the deleted content as a "pov" (point of view).
| Time (UTC) | 15:33, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | rd pov (edited with ProveIt) |
On October 28, 2015, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also reported major shortcomings in the company's practices and ordered Theranos to stop using its Edison device, which it had neither tested for accuracy nor approved, contrary to the company's previous claims.[1] The Arizona Department of Health Services reported issues in the company's other laboratory.[2] Several clinical pathologists and other medical experts also expressed skepticism about Theranos's technology. A week later, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stated that the company's miniature blood containers were unapproved for any test other than the herpes test. Subsequently, Theranos was ordered to limit the use of its proprietary technology to only one of the 200 tests offered by the company.[3][4]
The Food and Drug Administration received a formal inquiry to look at Theranos blood test devices by the Department of Defense in 2012 before the devices were commercially available and did not require FDA approval.[5] FDA inspection reports from 2014 and 2015 stated that its containers for blood collection were "not validated under actual or simulated use conditions" and "were not reviewed and not approved by designated individual(s) prior to issuance."[6] After the inspection, Theranos announced that it would voluntarily suspended its tests apart from the FDA approved herpes simplex virus (HSV-1) test.[7]
Additionally, after an FDA inspection, Theranos reported it had voluntarily suspended use of its flagship micro or low volume blood testing technique except for Herpes virus testing.[8]
Subsequent articles have called into question previous statements by Theranos regarding the nature and source of its income.[9] Though Theranos has often claimed to have FDA approval for its laboratory tests, FDA inspection reports from 2014 and 2015 suggest that the government has noted significant concerns.[10] On August 31, 2016, Theranos withdrew its Zika virus test due to a finding by federal inspectors of a lack of essential safeguards during the testing process.[11]
[...]
On December 2, 2015, The Washington Post reported that the exploration of a partnership with the US military had led to issues being found with the Edison device and a request that the FDA investigate. This request was denied by United States Marine Corps General James Mattis after Holmes's intervention. After retiring, Mattis joined the board of directors of Theranos.[5]
| Time (UTC) | 15:34, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | rmv dupe |
On August 31, 2016, Theranos withdrew its Zika virus test due to a finding by federal inspectors of a lack of essential safeguards during the testing process.[1]
| Time (UTC) | 17:02, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | rmv dupe &ce |
In August Theranos announced, and then later withdrew its request, for emergency clearance of a new Zika-virus blood test. The Wall Street Journal reported that according to unnamed sources, federal regulators had found that the company didn’t follow proper patient safeguards in a study for the test. Theranos’s vice president of regulatory, quality and clinical affairs Dave Wurtz stated: “We hope that our decision to withdraw the Zika submission voluntarily is further evidence of our commitment to engage positively with the agency.” [1]
[...]
On August 25, 2016, Theranos announced its plans to appeal the decision by regulators to revoke its license to operate a lab in California, among and other penalties sanctions, because of unsafe practices.[2] On August 31, 2016, Theranos The company withdrew its request for emergency clearance of a Zika virus blood test due to a finding by federal inspectors of after a lack of essential safeguards during the testing process was found by federal inspectors in August 2016.[3][1] On October 5, 2016, Theranos announced that it would close its laboratory operations, shutter its wellness centers and lay off around about 40 percent of its work force, while henceforth focusing on an initiative to create to work on miniature medical testing machines in October 2016.[4][5]
Theranos eventually became the poster child of "Silicon Valley excess", and the company's notoriety damaged the prospects of female CEOs in the startup sector for years to come. Status Labs decided to remove some financial details from the article, which had the effect of smoothing out the contrast between Theranos at its zenith and its nadir.
| Time (UTC) | 15:39, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | rmv spec. pov & mv forbes |
[...]
Wired asserted that the company may have succumbed to Silicon Valley pressures of trying to "spin hype into startup gold" and promising more than they could deliver.[1] Theranos has claimed to have partnerships with GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, which both companies have denied.[2] Theranos also claimed the successful venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson had invested in them, but company principal Steve Jurvetson clarified that it had provided the company's first $500,000 seed investment and nothing more.[3]
Although Theranos was valued at $9 billion by some of its investors, which would have valued Holmes's stake at $4.6 billion, The Economist noted that startups of this nature can wind up being valued as a "fantasy" rather than based upon present reality.[4] [...]
The Journal report was too significant for Jppcap to remove at this point, but that did not prevent the editor from massaging the language of the coverage to redirect blame away from Theranos.
| Time (UTC) | 15:46, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | ce & pull rev. 745827142 in prop. place |
On In October 16, 2015, The Wall Street Journal, quoting many unnamed current and former employees, reported that Theranos was using traditional blood testing machines, such as Siemens, to run its tests and that Theranos's flagship the company's Edison testing device machines might provide inaccurate results.[1] The alleged discrepancies in Theranos' proficiency testing and reporting to regulators led to a formal complaint filed with the New York State Department of Health that was forwarded to the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).[1] Moreover, the bulk of the blood tests being performed by Theranos were reported to be conducted on traditional machines of competitors' companies, such as Siemens, rather than its own Edison machines.[2] Theranos attacked the Journal, but did not refute any of the allegations. Theranos claimed that the allegations were "factually and scientifically erroneous and grounded in baseless assertions by inexperienced and disgruntled former employees and industry incumbents."[3][4]
Theranos also embarked on an extensive legal campaign that affected former employees, generating a conflict of interest when the company positioned its new general counsel, David Boies, on its board of directors. The legal maneuvers were unpalatable enough for Jppcap to prefer restoring a mention of the Walgreens discontinuation, on balance. In one of the edit summaries, the word "sythn" is presumably a misspelling of "synth", which is an abbreviation for improper "synthesis" of sources.
| Time (UTC) | 16:04, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | rmv sythn |
Famed litigator David Boies was hired by Theranos after it failed a federal laboratory inspection.[1] The company’s general counsel is a former partner at Boies Schiller and Theranos had hired Boies in the past.[1] Theranos attracted controversy however, by also granting Boies a seat on the board of directors.[1] While the 2013 adopted high-vote stock structure gives Holmes total control of the company, business ethics insiders, reporting to the New York Times, argued that, while it has been done before, having Boies serve both on the board and as the company’s attorney would be difficult as he would have to represent both the Company (as lawyer) and the Investors (as a Director), and that this could in some circumstances result in making a choice between the two.[1]
| Time (UTC) | 16:39, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | +lab susp. &withdraw, rmv nn suits (edited with ProveIt) |
Walgreens and Capital BlueCross announced a suspension of Theranos blood tests from the Newark laboratory.[1] In May 2016, Theranos announced that it had withdrawn all blood test results run on its Edison machine from 2014 and 2015.[2]
[...]
In 2007, Theranos filed suit in Santa Clara, California, accusing former employees of breaching company secrecy.[3] In 2011 the company filed suit against Fuisz Pharma LLC, accusing them of stealing Theranos' patent files from McDermott Will & Emery. The suit was settled in 2014.[4] Another case, in Washington, D.C. against McDermott Will & Emery itself, was dismissed in August 2013.[5][6]
[...]
Theranos is facing class-action complaints alleging misrepresentation of its testing services.[7]
The word "quotefarm" is a dubious term for the article's coverage on Theranos' failed regulatory inspections. Jppcap removed the auditor's description of the company's questionable operating practices, replacing it with language that incorrectly limited the scope of the failure to a test related to the warfarin anticoagulant. The cited article from The Verge does not mention warfarin.
| Time (UTC) | 16:12, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | rd quotefarm+intro letter |
The Arizona Department of Health Services reported issues with the company's Scottsdale, Arizona laboratory meeting regulations in October 2015.[1]
A report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released in 2016 detailed a number of deficiencies with Theranos procedures and testing results.[2] The inspection report indicates that 29% of the quality control checks performed on the Edison devices produced results outside an acceptable range.[3] In addition, federal inspectors also cited Theranos for "doing tests with unqualified personnel, for long delays in notifying patients of flawed test results and for storing blood samples at the wrong temperatures."[3]
On In January 25, 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent a strongly-worded letter to Theranos following based on an inspection of the company's its Newark, California laboratory, conducted in November in the fall of 2015. "[I]t was determined that the deficient practices of the laboratory pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety," the letter noted.[4] CMS gave Theranos a deadline of 10 business days to prove that the laboratory was complying with hematology-related and other lab requirements. The inspection found that the facility did not "comply with certificate requirements and performance standards" and caused an "immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety" due to a test to determine the correct dose of the blood-thinning drug warfarin.[5]
Jppcap's most significant edit affected the lead section of the article, serving as a smoking gun for the entire whitewashing operation. Virtual assistants such as Alexa quote extensively from the lead section of Wikipedia articles, and the first couple of sentences have an outsized impact on our audience's perception of any given subject. Thus, it is unsurprising to see Status Labs remove the criminal investigation from the beginning of the article.
The editor also sharply reduced coverage of a U.S. House of Representatives committee investigation and removed a lawsuit from a corporate investor, describing the deletions as a "reorg". As a finishing touch, Jppcap included an opinion column from the San Francisco Chronicle that attempts to explain away Theranos' fraudulent operations by pointing the finger at other startups.
| Time (UTC) | 16:50, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | reorg gov. investigations &ce lede (edited with ProveIt) |
Theranos is an American privately held consumer health-technology health technology company based in Palo Alto, California.[1] It is under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission.[2]
Theranos developed a blood-testing device named Edison. The company said the device uses a few drops of blood obtained via a finger-stick, rather than vials of blood obtained via traditional venipuncture,[3] utilizing microfluidics technology.[4] The company has been recognized for its fingerstick and microfluidics technology. It was founded in 2003 by Elizabeth Holmes at the age of 19.[3] By the summer of 2014, its founders Theranos had raised over more than $400 million from investors, valuing the company at in funding with an estimated value of $9 billion.[5][6]
[...]
It was reported on July 1, 2016, that a U.S. House of Representatives committee investigation was being undertaken into Theranos' past practices. The Committee on Energy and Commerce requested information on what Theranos was doing to correct its testing inaccuracies and adherence to federal guidelines. In the letter sent to founder Elizabeth Holmes, a response was requested by July 14.[7] Theranos said in a statement that it looked forward to responding to the inquiry with an explanation of its improvements, including “new operational leadership, best practices in our laboratories, continuing and constructive engagement with our regulators and ongoing communications with physicians and our patients.”[8]
Theranos is currently under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission.[2]
Theranos is under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly misleading investors and government officials about its technology.[2] The case is considered "extremely unusual" by a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Justice Department.[9] The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce requested information on what Theranos was doing to correct its testing inaccuracies and adherence to federal guidelines.[7][8]
On August 25, 2016, the company said it plans to appeal the decision by regulators to revoke its license to operate a lab in California, among other penalties, because of unsafe practices. [10]
A suit accusing Theranos of securities fraud was filed in October, 2016 by Partner Fund Management, which invested $96.1 million in the company in February 2014. The suit demands return of investment and damages. The company released a statement asserting "The suit is without merit, the assertions are baseless, and the plaintiff is engaging in revisionist history."[11]
Theranos withheld its apology from the article. Sorry, not sorry.
| Time (UTC) | 16:55, 23 October 2016 |
| Edit summary | rmv company response |
In July 2016, Theranos announced that it had received notice from the CMS regarding the revocation of had revoked its CLIA certificate. Sanctions include a prohibition of the as well as sanctions prohibiting its owners and operators from owning or operating a lab for two years, suspension of approval to receive Medicare and Medicaid payments, and a civil monetary penalty. Theranos' CEO Elizabeth Holmes responded in a statement: “We accept full responsibility for the issues at our laboratory in Newark, California, and have already worked to undertake comprehensive remedial actions. Those actions include shutting down and subsequently rebuilding the Newark lab from the ground up, rebuilding quality systems, adding highly experienced leadership, personnel and experts, and implementing enhanced quality and training procedures. While we are disappointed by CMS’ decision, we take these matters very seriously and are committed to fully resolving all outstanding issues with CMS and to demonstrating our dedication to the highest standards of quality and compliance.” Theranos announced it was discontinuing The company discontinued testing at its Newark location while attempting to resolve the issues identified.[1]
Unfortunately for Theranos, attempting to rewrite history did not compensate for the fundamental deficiencies in the company's product. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigated Theranos in late 2015; the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission followed in 2016. Theranos began laying off employees in late 2016, and was liquidated in late 2018.
The author of the 2015 Journal exposé, John Carreyrou, later documented Theranos' collapse in a book titled Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Forbes named Holmes as the wealthiest self-made woman in America with a net worth of $4.5 billion in 2015; that figure was revised to $0 in 2016. Holmes and Balwani were indicted for fraud later that year.
The Journal's latest report referenced other articles that were affected by paid editing:
Further details are listed in a conflict of interest noticeboard discussion.
Our investigation covered only 26 of Jppcap's 3,000+ edits. The edit counter reveals that the Theranos article received the sixth-highest number of edits from the Status Labs associate. The top five articles edited by Jppcap are:
To the reader, if you ever encounter undisclosed paid editing – including but not limited to operations associated with Wiki-PR and Status Labs, please report the incident on the conflict of interest noticeboard. Happy editing!
Olga Tokarczuk, 2018 Nobel laureate in literature, gave her Nobel Lecture, The Tender Narrator, on December 7, 2019 . Her references to Wikipedia, both to the promise of Wikipedia and the "disappointing" fulfillment of that promise, are close to the heart of the lecture's message. Extracts of the passages are given below. Wikilinks added.
John Amos Comenius, the great seventeenth-century pedagogue, coined the term “pansophism,” by which he meant the idea of potential omniscience, universal knowledge that would contain within it all possible cognition. This was also, and above all, a dream of information available to everyone. ... Will not knowledge within easy reach mean that people will become sensible ... ?
When the Internet first came about, it seemed that this notion would finally be realized in a total way. Wikipedia, which I admire and support, might have seemed to Comenius ... the fulfillment of the dream of humanity — now we can create and receive an enormous store of facts being ceaselessly supplemented and updated that is democratically accessible to just about every place on Earth.
A dream fulfilled is often disappointing. It has turned out that we are not capable of bearing this enormity of information, which instead of uniting, generalizing and freeing, has differentiated, divided, enclosed in individual little bubbles...
–S
The Wall Street Journal published a 2,000 word article by Rachael Levy on December 13 titled "How the 1% scrubs its image online" (paywall) detailing efforts of Status Labs to control media and Wikipedia coverage of its clients. The subtitle was "Prominent figures from Jacob Gottlieb to Betsy DeVos got help from a reputation management firm that can bury image-sensitive Google results by placing flattering content on websites that masquerade as news outlets". The article named specific Wikipedia editor or editors.
According to The Wall Street Journal, articles edited by Status Labs operatives included bank executive Omeed Malik,[1][2] biomedical company Theranos,[3] and hedge fund Citadel LLC.[4]
An account named in the WSJ report as a related operative, Jppcap is now indefinitely blocked for "advertising or self-promoting in violation of the conflict of interest and notability guidelines". The publishing of this article by the Journal also led to the opening of a discussion on the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard. –B
Business Insider has reported on a less nefarious instance of editing on behalf of a wealthy and powerful individual, namely technology businessman Elon Musk. After perusing the Wikipedia article about himself "for 1st time in years", Musk took to Twitter to suggest some edits, including the removal of the label "investor" from the short description, since he insisted "I do basically zero investing." Musk also apparently jokingly supported the replacement of the word with the term "business magnet"—as opposed to business magnate. User:TechnologicalScribe subsequently altered the short description accordingly and added in the edit summary that the changes were made "as requested by Elon Musk". The phrase "business magnet" has since been removed from the short description.
The Signpost story occupying this space cited The Washington Post which linked to another reliable source. We were essentially accused of outing for linking to The Washington Post and thus threatened with censorship by some oversighters. Rather than put our existence at risk, we have withdrawn the story and will pursue the matter via ArbCom in the New Year –S
Mother Jones lists Heroes and Monsters of the 2010s including Wikipedia – but only as a hero.
| “ | This was the decade we learned to hate the internet, to decry its impact on our brains and society and to detest the amoral organizations that dominate it. Facebook steals ... Amazon is ... like the Death Star but successful. Instagram is for ... Reddit is for ... Twitter verifies ... Amid this horror show, there is Wikipedia, criminally under-appreciated, a nonprofit compendium of human knowledge maintained by everyone. There is no more useful website... while the internet mostly got worse, it kept getting better, reminding us that the web can be a good thing, a place where we have instant access to endless information, a true project of the commons at a political moment when the very idea of the mutual good is under assault. | ” |
| — Mother Jones | ||
Perhaps the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature can explain this choice. –S
BBC Radio interviewed British physicist Jess Wade on her efforts to create more articles on women experts in science, math, and technology, with specific focus on the sudden, recent tagging of many articles she has edited for notability concerns by an IP address editor (the portion of the broadcast relevant to Wikipedia begins at 9:30). Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Katherine Maher was also reached for comment. She expressed concern about the gender imbalance in Wikipedia's content and editing community, but praised the community response to the taggings, including the blocking of the IP editor. More details at this issue's Op-Ed by Wade. –Ib
Reported by virtually all major media including BBC, Reuters, The New York Times, Le Monde, etc. – just before we went to press, the Constitutional Court of Turkey ruled the block of Wikipedia in Turkey to be unconstitutional. –B
Several discussions have transpired (or are underway) regarding the integrity of information presented by Wikipedia as well as the processes and people who ensure it remains trustworthy.
Requests for comment were open during October–November concerning possible resysop criteria for administrators and a proposed binding desysop procedure. Results are visible at those pages and summarized below:
An RfC at Meta proposes serious actions on the Croatian Wikipedia. The RfC was begun by GregorB (talk · contribs) in October. Gregor also wrote The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia last August for The Signpost. Activity on the case has continued, up to within a few days of Christmas. A proposal to close has been made, but is not expected to be adopted soon.
PR whitewashing by operatives linked to Wiki-PR is under discussion at the conflict of interest noticeboard (permanent link) (also see this issue's "In the media" section and the "Special report").
Discussion of how to notify the community about mainstream media reporting on identified Wikipedia editors is ongoing at venues including the oversight mail list, the village pump and Wikipedia talk:Harassment. Suppression has been invoked on The Signpost in connection with this issue, and this is part of the discussion.
Other notable discussions included:
Results of ArbCom election at Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee_Elections_December_2019#Results - 8 2-year terms, 3 1-year terms. –S
The Portals case was accepted unanimously[1] by the Arbitration Committee on November 26. –B
Administrator TonyBallioni requested a new case concerning administrator RHaworth on 19 December 2019. As of writing deadline, it is on course for being taken up by the Arbitration Committee, with six accept votes to zero opposed or abstaining.
There are over 40 uninvolved editors commenting on the request as of writing deadline. Probably due to the case involving review of controversial deletions, only visible to administrators, many of the comments are from other administrators.
Frequency analysis of the words used involved in the case shows these uncommon words appeared most frequently: "deletion", 49 times; "checkuser" 47 times; "speedy" 42 times; "csd" 40 times. –B
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The Disney+ show that led for the past two weeks has been ousted by a release in the bigger streaming service, as Netflix got Martin Scorsese's latest crime epic The Irishman, and the historical figures there also get entries, including the top one. Netflix also brought in recent history from across the pond, with all the views for British royal family members who come along with The Crown. Movies in actual theaters also have royals (Anna and Elsa of Arendelle in #5) and re-enactments of real events (#6, #9). Thanksgiving (#10) and wrestling (#8) close off the list.
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | About |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jimmy Hoffa | 
|
2,238,665 |  |
Martin Scorsese makes yet another Mafia epic, only this time with a limited theatrical release before it hit Netflix. The movie itself is sandwiched between two of the main characters, the famed labor union leader who mysteriously vanished, Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino), and the protagonist, a truck driver turned hitman, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro, who was a guarantee in a Scorsese movie in the old days). |
| 2 | The Irishman (2019 film) | 
|
2,139,328 |  | |
| 3 | Frank Sheeran |
|
1,658,531 |  | |
| 4 | The Mandalorian |
|
1,550,932 |  |
The Star Wars streaming sensation, making all of us foreigners who can't get Disney+ the more jealous that is not possible to legally watch it yet. |
| 5 | Frozen II[1] |
|
1,353,343 |  |
You only see what your eyes want to see / How can life be what you want it to be... Sorry. It's not like I can discuss Elsa and Anna's return, my country only gets this movie in January! |
| 6 | Richard Jewell | 
|
1,151,435 |  |
The film about how the hero of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing was then vilified by the media only comes out in December, but had its festival premiere and good reviews. |
| 7 | Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon |
|
1,071,519 | .jpg) |
The Crown is back, and so are a lot of British royals to our report. The biggest views aren't for the show's main star, but her deceased younger sister. |
| 8 | Survivor Series (2019) |
|
1,040,807 |  |
From crowns to belts, as the latest WWE pantomime was held and had the main card won by Shayna Baszler. |
| 9 | Elizabeth II | 
|
905,531 |  |
Back to the monarchs with the Queen of the United Kingdom (and many more places), now played in The Crown by Oscar winner Olivia Colman. |
| 10 | Thanksgiving |
|
855,382 |  |
The annual holiday that reunites families for feasting. Hopefully there are very few cases of turkeys thrown out windows. |
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I believe I can see the future, 'cause I repeat the same routine. Or at least readers do, given half the subjects of last week have returned, including the whole top 4 and most of the top 10, including two entries that had been #13 and #16 in the extended list. The only thing that is brand new is an Asian multisport events (#5), showing the sizeable amount of English-speaking Filipinos can push an entry here.
I can't remember how this got started, but I can tell you exactly how it will end.
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | About |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jimmy Hoffa |
|
2,289,492 | .jpg) |
The top three spots this week are dominated by one film, and the two main characters in that film; played by Al Pacino and Robert de Niro respectively. Notable for using CGI technology to both age and de-age the two leads to portray them at different times in their lives, it's also notable for being based almost entirely on the questionable account of one of those two individuals. The one that didn't famously disappear, obviously. |
| 2 | The Irishman (2019 film) |
|
1,835,586 | | |
| 3 | Frank Sheeran |
|
1,752,309 | | |
| 4 | The Mandalorian |
|
1,406,893 | .jpg) |
The first ever live-action Star Wars TV series has received mixed reviews so far, but it's a bold experiment and probably the only good reason to sign up for yet another streaming subscription, since it's exclusive to Disney+. Featuring Pedro Pascal in the title role, alongside an eclectic cast that includes Werner Herzog and Carl Weathers, it's now up to episode five with three more to come. |
| 5 | 2019 Southeast Asian Games |
|
877,811 |  |
The 30th Southeast Asian Games took place from the 30th November to 11th December, in the Philippines, which took over as host last minute (well, in 2015) after Brunei withdrew from the role. |
| 6 | Richard Jewell |
|
804,072 |  |
This entry's story is one that will make you both sad and angry. A genuine hero whose actions at the Centennial Olympic Park bombing saved lives, he was then hounded by press and law enforcement and treated as a suspect on the flimsiest evidence. What brings him back into the public consciousness this week is the release, on 13th December, of Richard Jewell the film about his story. |
| 7 | Elizabeth II |
|
747,579 |  |
Like the other royals on this list, it's a little hard to tell how much of the UK Head of State's appearance in Wikipedia's searches is down to her reappearance in Netflix's The Crown (this time played by Olivia Colman), how much is down to the amusing moment when she appeared to tell off her daughter for refusing to meet Donald Trump, and how much is down to her position as mother of the man now best known for coming up with some of the world's least convincing alibis. |
| 8 | Deaths in 2019 | 
|
726,230 | .jpg) |
It'll never stop being interesting, will it. And, with only a handful more weeks for late additions to this article, perhaps it's more interesting than ever. |
| 9 | Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon |
|
721,341 |  |
Another The Crown-based appearance on the list. Princess Margaret, recast for season 3 along with the rest of the cast, was portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter. And at least we can be sure she's mainly here due to the popular Netflix show and not for how she dealt with either Donald Trump or Jeffrey Epstein. |
| 10 | Knives Out (film) |
|
633,007 | _(cropped).jpg) |
After a dark sci-fi actioner and the bleakest Star Wars ever, Rian Johnson went for a lighter route with Knives Out, a comedic murder mystery starring Ana de Armas (pictured) as the caretaker of the victim, Christopher Plummer, among stars such as Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis and Toni Collette. Following much critical praise to the writing and acting, Knives Out is also keeping itself strong at the box office, with two straight weeks as runner-up to a certain Disney behemoth. |
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The year is ending, and in some good news the topics here are renewing. Even if the ever-present death list (#10) is responsible for the top entry with a dead rapper. There is also a TV event (#3), a British election (#5), a beauty pageant (#9), and people finding a way to escape religious persecution (#7) to counter the return of a biopic subject (#2), a streaming series (#4) and film (#6, #8).
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | About |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Juice Wrld |
|
3,659,287 |  |
Jarad Anthony Higgins, aka Juice WRLD, who last year broke out with "Lucid Dreams", tragically had a fatal seizure at just 21 due to a pill overdose. |
| 2 | Richard Jewell |
|
1,879,643 | .jpg) |
Clint Eastwood (pictured) is approaching 90, and doesn't seem ready to stop making movies. This time it was a biopic of this security guard who tried to contain the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, which has gathered some criticism for simplification of the events and controversial portrayal of a reporter, and opened at 4th place in the box office (behind two sequels and Knives Out). |
| 3 | Crisis on Infinite Earths (Arrowverse) |
|
1,679,639 |  |
Every year, those DC Comics shows on The CW do a massive crossover. And 2019 had one inspired by the first DC event comic, bringing all heroes together to prevent the destruction of the multiverse. The event also had the return of two Supermen, Brandon Routh and Tom Welling (pictured). |
| 4 | The Mandalorian |
|
1,093,421 |  |
The first live-action Star Wars TV series, exclusive to Disney+ and thus widely pirated, if only to see where that adorable Baby Yoda came from. |
| 5 | 2019 United Kingdom general election |
|
1,019,906 |  |
The lack of a Brexit withdrawal agreement led to a snap election, where the Conservative Party again got the majority of Parliament seats. |
| 6 | Jimmy Hoffa |
|
952,929 | |
A labor union leader who famously disappeared in 1975, Hoffa had already been the subject of an eponymous biopic starring Jack Nicholson, and now has been portrayed by another acting legend, Al Pacino, in our #8. |
| 7 | Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 | 
|
873,457 |  |
India has now made it easier for persecuted religious minorities from the neighboring Muslim majority countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to get naturalized, with over 30,000 migrants expected to be immediate beneficiaries. The Act is controversial for its exclusion of Muslims, with the UN describing it as "fundamentally discriminatory", some states refusing to implement it, and protests leading to several deaths, thousands detained, and internet access cut off in several regions. |
| 8 | The Irishman[2] |
|
839,331 | |
Film award season has started to recognize Martin Scorsese's crime epic, so viewer interest remains high. |
| 9 | Miss Universe 2019 |
|
814,087 |  |
Even if some people question the relevance of beauty pageants in this day and age, they still gather attention. The winner was South African Zozibini Tunzi, leading to many congratulatory chants of "Wakanda Forever!" (to the disapproval of some). |
| 10 | Deaths in 2019 |
|
802,040 | .jpg) |
Cracked eggs, dead birds Scream as they fight for life I can feel death Can see its beady eyes... |
Bots that have been approved for operations after a successful BRFA will be listed here for informational purposes. No other approval action is required for these bots. Recently approved requests can be found here (edit), while old requests can be found in the archives.
| Bot Name | Status | Created | Last editor | Date/Time | Last BAG editor | Date/Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PearBOT 6 (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2019-12-20, 02:03:18 | Trialpears | 2019-12-20, 02:58:40 | Never edited by BAG | n/a |
| Seppi333Bot 2 (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2019-12-19, 22:51:02 | Seppi333 | 2019-12-24, 18:45:51 | Xaosflux | 2019-12-20, 00:38:42 |
| MilHistBot 6 (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2019-12-18, 01:54:19 | Hawkeye7 | 2019-12-18, 01:56:30 | Never edited by BAG | n/a |
| ST47ProxyBot (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2019-12-01, 07:33:44 | ST47 | 2019-12-01, 22:36:16 | SQL | 2019-12-01, 22:10:27 |
| Seppi333Bot (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2019-11-06, 18:00:30 | Seppi333 | 2019-12-25, 05:15:03 | Primefac | 2019-12-08, 15:33:23 |
| SteveBot 8 (T|C|B|F) | Open | 2019-08-18, 23:05:38 | Trialpears | 2019-12-18, 13:39:09 | Primefac | 2019-09-14, 12:51:59 |
| DannyS712 bot III 63 (T|C|B|F) | In trial | 2019-11-20, 05:25:22 | DannyS712 | 2019-12-27, 10:35:31 | TheSandDoctor | 2019-12-27, 10:22:00 |
| DannyS712 bot IV 65 (T|C|B|F) | Trial complete: BAG assistance requested! | 2019-12-01, 06:20:55 | DannyS712 | 2019-12-26, 10:24:16 | Primefac | 2019-12-03, 21:30:24 |
| PearBOT 5 (T|C|B|F) | Trial complete | 2019-11-04, 10:26:11 | Trialpears | 2019-12-16, 21:49:23 | Primefac | 2019-12-08, 15:50:48 |
| MajavahBot (T|C|B|F) | Trial complete | 2019-11-23, 09:02:04 | Enterprisey | 2019-12-19, 06:47:05 | Enterprisey | 2019-12-19, 06:47:05 |
| Creffbot (T|C|B|F) | Trial complete | 2019-11-14, 01:45:00 | Primefac | 2019-12-08, 19:52:03 | Primefac | 2019-12-08, 19:52:03 |
| Qbugbot 4 (T|C|B|F) | Trial complete: BAG assistance requested! | 2019-09-24, 21:26:29 | Edibobb | 2019-12-21, 04:34:26 | Headbomb | 2019-12-14, 04:56:24 |
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2019 #49, #50, & #51. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
There is a new dataset you can use. It shows the number of editors per country per month for a number of countries. You can read the documentation and download the dataset. There will be a new schema for XML dumps. Scripts and apps that use them will need to be updated. If they are not updated they will no longer work. [3] The 
{{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work in the content namespaces. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it returns "" (empty string). When you read a page it returns "-" (dash). In the future this will also affect other namespaces. The next ones are file and category namespaces. [4]
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 4:00–5:00 p.m. UTC. See how to join here.Have you forgotten to send your holiday wishes to all your friends on Wikipedia? Feel free to borrow these cards sent to you by the staff of The Signpost.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
This online presentation hosted by the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America[1] discusses Wiki4YearOfSound2020 (at meta-wiki), co-sponsored by Acoustical Society of America, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and others. The Year of Sound is an attempt "to make content in acoustics one of the better-developed areas within Wikipedia". The presentation lauded Wikipedia's scope and reach, comparing NIOSH's 150,000 web pages and 8 million visits per year to English Wikipedia's 5.5 million articles and 260 million views per day. The presentation referenced the results of an engagement for World Hearing Day 2019 in which hearing-related topics garnered tens to hundreds of thousands of views, with the article tinnitus receiving over 340,000 views. It also discusses NIOSH's many other engagements with Wiki Ed since 2015 in which students expanded occupational safety and health content.
The fifth annual "Wiki Workshop", a section of The Web Conference, was held in San Francisco in May this year. Wiki Workshop 2020 will take place in Taipei, Taiwan in April. The call for papers closes on January 17.
Papers presented at Wiki Workshop 2019 included:
From the abstract:[2]
"The Thanks feature on Wikipedia [...] is a tool with which editors can quickly and easily send one other positive feedback [....] We study the motivational impacts of “Thanks” because maintaining editor engagement is a central problem for crowdsourced repositories of knowledge such as Wikimedia. Our main findings are that most editors have not been exposed to the Thanks feature (meaning they have never given nor received a thank), thanks are typically sent upwards (from less experienced to more experienced editors), and receiving a thank is correlated with having high levels of editor engagement. [...] We empirically demonstrate that receiving a thank has a strong positive effect on short-term editor activity across the board and provide preliminary evidence that thanks could compound to have long-term effects as well."
See also research project page on Meta-wiki
From the paper:[3]
"we retrieved about 40,000 deletion discussion content from Wikipedia web pages, cleaned and stored the content of 39,177 discussions into a structured discussion database. With this cleaned and structured dataset, the automatic processing and analysis of the discussion content becomes more manageable to the researchers. With this database, we developed interactive visualizations that offer insights on how the outcomes of the articles are related to different aspects of the discussions, including the types of votes, the mentioned policies, and the categories of the articles (e.g., art, people, sport, etc.). [...]
According to Wikipedia's AfD policy, the decision regarding a proposed article should be based on the participants' rationales in their votes, as opposed to simply following the majority vote based on the total number of different opinions in the discussion. Curious to find out whether the actual decision-making of AfD discussions follows this policy, we visualized the AfD discussion outcomes and the number of keep/delete opinions in the discussions through an interactive heat map. [...] This interactive visualization is accessible at http://www.mandanemedia.com/afd/view/diagram1.php . [... The resulting figure] indicates that the outcome of an AfD decision is in general consistent with the majority vote rule: the more keep votes than delete votes a discussion has, the more likely its outcome is to keep the article. [... However, part of the diagram] illustrates that the decision is not made simply by majority vote in the discussion. [...]
To better understand the distribution of the AfD discussions according to the number of keep and delete votes, we developed another interactive heat map that paints the color of the cell according to the total number of the discussions in the cell (http://www.mandanemedia.com/afd/view/diagram2.php ). [...]
We developed an interactive visualization to offer an overall understanding about the policies that the participants mentioned during the AfD discussion (http://www.mandanemedia.com/afd/view/diagram3.php ). Specifically, we used a sunburst diagram to represent the policies mentioned in the discussion content and their relative frequencies. [...]
Interested in the distribution of various categories in the proposed articles, we developed another sunburst diagram that shows the categories of the articles proposed for delete (http://www.mandanemedia.com/afd/view/diagram4.php ) [...]
We developed an interactive visualization to offer an overall mapping between the articles' categories and the policies mentioned in their AfD discussions (http://www.mandanemedia.com/afd/view/diagram5.php )."
See also video of a related presentation by one of the authors at the July 2019 Wikimedia Research showcase
From the abstract:[4]
"Understanding how various external campaigns or events affect readership on Wikipedia is important to efforts aimed at improving awareness and access to its content. In this paper, we consider how to build time-series models aimed at predicting page views on Wikipedia with the goal of detecting whether there are significant changes to the existing trends. We test these models on two different events: a video campaign aimed at increasing awareness of Hindi Wikipedia in India and the page preview feature roll-out—a means of accessing Wikipedia content without actually visiting the pages—on English and German Wikipedia. Our models effectively estimate the impact of page preview roll-out [as independently determined via A/B tests], but do not detect a significant change following the video campaign in India."
From the abstract:[5]
"Whether political bias affects journalism standards appears to be a debated topic with no clear consensus. Meanwhile, labels such as “far-left” or “alt-right” are highly contested and may become cause for prolonged edit wars on the Wikipedia pages of some news sources. In this paper, we try to shine a light into this phenomenon and its extent, in order to start a conversation within the Wikipedia community about transparent processes for assigning political orientation and journalistic reliability labels to news sources, especially to unfamiliar ones, which users would be more likely to verify by looking them up."
See also our coverage of a related recent paper involving one of the authors: "The Importance of Wikipedia in Assessing News Source Credibility"
From the abstract:[6]
"While [Wikipedia is] a scientific treasure, the large size of the dataset hinders pre-processing and may be a challenging obstacle for potential new studies. This issue is particularly acute in scientific domains where researchers may not be technically and data processing savvy. On one hand, the size of Wikipedia dumps is large. It makes the parsing and extraction of relevant information cumbersome. On the other hand, the API is straightforward to use but restricted to a relatively small number of requests. The middle ground is at the mesoscopic scale, when researchers need a subset of Wikipedia ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages but there exists no efficient solution at this scale.
In this work, we propose an efficient data structure to make requests and access subnetworks of Wikipedia pages and categories. We provide convenient tools for accessing and filtering viewership statistics or “pagecounts” of Wikipedia web pages. [...] The dataset and deployment guidelines are available on the LTS2 website https://lts2.epfl.ch/Datasets/Wikipedia/ "
See also coverage of an earlier paper by the same authors
From the abstract:[7]
"News agencies produce thousands of multimedia stories describing events happening in the world that are either scheduled such as sports competitions, political summits and elections, or breaking events such as military conflicts, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, etc. When writing up those stories, journalists refer to contextual background and to compare with past similar events. However, searching for precise facts described in stories is hard. In this paper, we propose a general method that leverages the Wikidata knowledge base to produce semantic annotations of news articles."
This paper[8] presents a method to automatically identify online articles (e.g. in news media) that report negatively about a brand, by starting from the dataset of citations in the "Criticism" section of the Wikipedia article about that brand (e.g. Uber#Criticism). The stated purpose is to use "an online user’s history of viewed articles" (which, as the authors observe, is typically accessible to "online advertising platforms [which are] in partnerships with media companies") to target ads to those users who have been exposed to negative sentiment about the brand.
From the abstract:[9]
"Given a piece of text, [an entity disambiguation and linking system (EDL)] links words and phrases to entities in a knowledge base, where each entity defines a specific concept. Although extracted entities are informative, they are often too specific to be used directly by many applications. These applications usually require text content to be represented with a smaller set of predefined concepts or topics, belonging to a topical taxonomy, that matches their exact needs. In this study, we aim to build a system that maps Wikidata entities to such predefined topics. [...] we propose an ensemble system that effectively combines individual methods and yields much better performance, comparable with human annotators."
The resulting tool is part of a "system for information extraction from noisy user generated text such as that available on social media" by the company Lithium Technologies (now Khoros), the authors' employer at the time the research was done.
From the abstract:[10]
"... we evaluate and compare the quality of medicine-related articles in the English and Portuguese Wikipedia. For that we use metrics such as authority, completeness, complexity, informativeness, consistency, currency and volatility, and domain-specific measurements [...]. We were able to conclude that the English articles score better across most metrics than the Portuguese articles."
From the abstract:[11]
"... we are interested in extracting specific Wikipedia entities associated with hospitality and travel along with relevant metadata. [...] For a hotel, that would mean, we extract the parent company, say ‘Wyndham’, and then the list of establishments owned by the parent such as ‘Days Inn’, ‘La Quinta’, ‘Ramada’, ‘Super 8’ and ‘Wyndham Grand’. For each of these, we extract their tier of service such as ‘upscale’, ‘mid scale’, ‘boutique’, and ‘economy’. [...] We start with the Wikipedia page: ‘List of lists of lists’, which points to several other lists. [...] In addition to the lists, we also used the Category pages such as ‘Category:Vehicle rental companies’ [sic] and ‘Category:Travel and tourism templates’ as secondary starting points [...]. These pages yield the company names and the brand names. Next, we derive info such as the tier of service and the locations, where appropriate, using the sections, info boxes and subcategories within the pages for each of the brands we extracted. [...] Remarkably, the travel activities annotated using Wikipedia extractions agreed with [human] editorial review over 65% of the time."
From the abstract:[12]
"we present a proof-of-concept of a visual navigation tool for a personalized “sandbox” of Wiki pages. The navigation tool considers multiple groups of algorithmic parameters and adapts to user activity via graphical user interfaces. The output is a 2D map of a subset of [the] Wikipedia pages network which provides a different and broader visual representation – a map – in the neighborhood (according to some metric) of the pages around the page currently displayed in a browser."
See also previous coverage of other papers from Wiki Workshop 2019:
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
From the "Conclusion" section:[13]
"This article has found that the Wikipedia entries on the war between China and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s differ substantially from the narratives in traditional technologies of memory, such as museums, in that they do not focus to the same extent on particular experiences or episodes. In this sense, Wikipedia shows greater conciliatory potential as it apparently fulfils the first of the two steps necessary for reconciliation, namely that the two sides remember more or less the same events and episodes."
From the abstract:[14]
"... for a plurality of Wikipedias, almost fifty, Romeo and Juliet is number one in pageviews, while in many, but fewer others, it is Hamlet. In seven Wikipedias, on the other hand, Macbeth is number one, while Julius Caesar is first in still several others. Othello, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Antony and Cleopatra are the only other rare leaders in specific Wikipedias. In short, this article will present the basic popular global reception information about all of Shakespeare’s works, filling a lacuna in critical research ..."
From the "Highlights" section:[15]
"We analyze how scientific knowledge is established in the field of the Humanities. ...
The citation average to Humanities articles in Wikipedia is lower than the general. ... Of the 25 most cited journals on Wikipedia, none is open access."
Freely available version
Freely available version
Freely available version
Freely accessible version
Freely available version
Freely available version
Freely accessible version
Freely available version
Freely accessible version
A recent interview has shed new light on the 2002 fork of the Spanish Wikipedia and the influence it may have had on the development of Wikipedia as a whole, and ignited a controversy between Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales about the stance on advertising in the early phase of the project.
Edgar Enyedy, an early activist on the Spanish Wikipedia who describes himself as "some sort of unofficial leader together with Javier de la Cueva" of the fork Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español, was interviewed by Nathaniel Tkacz of the "Critical Point of View" (CPOV) Wikipedia research initiative, on whose blog the interview was first published on January 15 ("'Good luck with your WikiPAIDia': Reflections on the 2002 Fork of the Spanish Wikipedia". See also the recent Signpost interview with Tkacz and fellow CPOV member Johanna Niesyto).
Concerns about possible plans to use advertising on Wikipedia are often named as the main reason for the fork. Enyedy confirmed that remarks about ads in a February 2002 announcement by Larry Sanger triggered the exodus of the Spanish Wikipedians ("Bomis might well start selling ads on Wikipedia sometime within the next few months, and revenue from those ads might make it possible for me to come back to my old job"), but insisted that several other issues played an important role, including concerns about the insufficiently international nature of Wikipedia – an "American shadow [that] marked the first point of contention between myself and Sanger and Wales." As examples, he named the fact that "the basic pages ('what Wikipedia is not', 'be bold', 'how to start', 'sandbox', etc.) were all in English; we had the American logo in English and so on", but also referred to issues that are in some form still relevant today, such as the internationalization of the interface: "The software, for example, was not translated at all and it cast an English (language) shadow over the entire project", and cultural differences between Europe and the US regarding sexual images ("Former AOL users used to remind me that explicit biology images are widely accepted among us, but would be considered inappropriate on the American version"). The Spanish Wikipedians also differed from their English counterpart by introducing a stylebook, and an index based on the Universal Decimal Classification.
A main reason for the fork was objections to the leadership of Wikipedia's chief organizer Larry Sanger:
| “ | Larry Sanger acted as a Big Brother. He was an employee, a Bomis-Wales wage-earning worker. ...
The American Wikipedia might have seen him as a "facilitator", but we regarded Sanger more like an obstacle. At that time he was not an open-minded person. I have to admit that he brought some good ideas to us, but the American Wikipedia was too caught up in the interests of Bomis Inc. I engaged in head-on confrontations, open clashes, with Sanger. We were all working on a basis of collective creation, with peer-to-peer review. It was an open project, free in both senses. We were all equals, a horizontal network creating knowledge through individual effort – this is the most important thing to keep in mind. But Sanger turned out to be vertically minded. His very status as a paid employee led him to watch us from above, just waiting for the right moment to participate in active discussions in the (mis)belief his words would be more important than ours. |
” |
Also contributing to the decision to fork was a distrust of Jimmy Wales' intentions, who to Enyedy seemed reluctant to steer Wikipedia into a non-profit direction.
| “ | All Wikipedia domains (.com, .org, .net) were owned by Wales. I asked myself ‘why are we working for a dot-com?’ I asked for Wikipedia to be changed to a dot-org. ... I didn’t trust Wales’ intentions. Not at all. We were all working for free in a dot-com with no access to the servers, no mirrors, no software updates, no downloadable database, and no way to set up the wiki itself. We were basically working for Bomis Inc., and asked in a gentle way to translate from the main Wikipedia. | ” |
Asked by Tkacz how the right to fork (granted in principle by the Wikipedia's free license) looked in detail in this case, Enyedy said that the activists had to download and transfer the articles one by one. (The accessibility of timely Wikipedia dumps continues to be a point of debate today.)
Enyedy said that the Enciclopedia Libre, while still active today, "was not intended to last. It was merely a form of pressure. Some of the goals were achieved, not all of them, but it was worth the cost", and emphasized its continuing influence:
| “ | as it is known today, the international Wikipedia that you all know and have come to take for granted, might have been impossible without the Spanish fork. Wales was worried that other foreign communities would follow our fork. He learnt from us what to do and what not to do. The guidelines were clear: update the database; make the software easily available on Sourceforge; no advertising at all; set up a foundation with a dot-org domain and workers chosen from the community; no more Sanger-like figures, as well as some minor things [...], such as free (non proprietary) formats for images. | ” |
According to Tkacz, Enyedy said "that he has been approached several times a year since 2002, but has never shared his story because the people contacting him were either mainstream journalists or people from wikimedia and he wasn't convinced they would let him tell his version of the story".
The abstract of a talk about the fork given at Wikimania 2005 also mentions issues that led to its creation.
On January 20, Wired UK published an abbreviated version of the interview ("The Spanish Fork: Wikipedia's ad-fuelled mutiny"), which included reactions by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
Sanger objected sharply to Enyedy's statements, saying that "the only sort of person who could seriously describe my role as an Orwellian "Big Brother" is a radical anarchist, for whom even the slightest possible exercise of authority is outrageous oppression. To be sure, Wikipedia had quite a few of such vocal characters in its early days. The story has not yet been fully told just how they essentially took over with the blessing of Jimmy Wales". But Sanger agreed that the fork "might well have been the straw that finally tipped the scales in favor of a 100% ad-free Wikipedia."
Jimmy Wales issued a much shorter statement:
| “ | Sanger was absolutely adamant that Wikipedia must have ads, and it was my refusal to do so that led to Wikipedia being as it is today. The Spanish fork did not provoke any changes of any kind. We stayed the course. I didn't want to have advertising, and I found ways to avoid it – the Spanish fork was an important event in the history of Wikipedia, but not in the sense of "provoking change". | ” |
Sanger objected even more sharply to Wales' statement, questioning the veracity of the first sentence, first on Twitter ("He was long in favor; I long opposed. Apologize, pls!"), then on his personal blog, recalling or citing various statements by Wales about ads from 2000 to 2002 ("From the beginning, Wales let me know in no uncertain terms that, once it garnered enough traffic, Nupedia would become ad-supported"). Sanger said that in December 2001 (when all other Bomis employees had to be laid off and his own position appeared to hinge on possible advertising revenue), he "was still uncomfortable with the idea of ads being run to support me, even in a non-profit context". The discussion then continued on Jimmy Wales' user talk page, where Wales said that "I don't see what the discrepancy is supposed to be", and Sanger accused him of lying.
There are many opportunities to discuss bad news, problems, and concerns in the Wikiverse, and I think that having candid discussions about these issues is often important. Many days I spend more time thinking about problems than about what is going well. However, also I think that acknowledging the good side and taking a moment to be appreciative can be valuable.
The content of this Signpost piece is adapted from email threads titled "What's making you happy this week?" that are sent to Wikimedia-l.
I encourage you to add your comments about what's making you happy this month to the talk page of this Signpost piece.
There was no regular content for this week. There was a discussion on Wikimedia-l regarding the design of WMYHTW emails that took place during the last week of November.
In the light of recent suggestions that these emails become shorter (see the discussion from the last week of November 2019 in the Wikimedia-l archives), this
week I will share only two comments of my own.
I recently visited the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The museum opened a new building this year. Although I wish that the exhibits were larger, I enjoyed seeing the museum staff at work and talking with them.
Also, I happened to see a piece of art that I liked, called Early Autumn on English Wikipedia. The piece was made in the 13th century by 钱选 (on English Wikipedia: Qian Xuan).
For those who celebrate these occasions, I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.
I am happy to learn about holidays from diverse origins, and I would welcome people sharing information about holidays that they celebrate.
Wikimedia Commons hosts several audio recordings of Christmas carols that have Polish or German associations. Here are a few selections. Any corrections to English translations would be appreciated.
I'm happy with the generally positive effect that I think that WMYHTW emails have in Wikimedia-l and that "On the bright side" has in The Signpost. I would like these publications to continue. As we approach the new calendar year, and mindful that the Lunar new year starts on the 25th of January, I respectfully request that someone replace me as the main writer for these pieces. Maybe more than one person would like to volunteer. I can continue to contribute periodically while someone else has the lead writer role. So, colleagues and friends, please consider volunteering to replace me as the lead writer for WMYHTW emails and for "On the bright side". (I intend to continue with two other initiatives, NavWiki and the Wikimedia Café.) If you would like to volunteer for WMYHTW and "On the bright side", then please leave a message at The Signpost's newsroom talk page.
Skillful translations of the sentence "What's making you happy this week?" would be very much appreciated. If you see any inaccuracies in the translations in this article then please {{ping}} User:Pine in the discussion section of this page, or boldly make the correction to the text of the article. Thank you to everyone who has helped with translations so far.
What's making you happy this month? You are welcome to write a comment on the talk page of this Signpost piece.
The weekend after Thanksgiving (November 30, 2019) I headed over to my Wikipedia Watchlist, excited to check out my unread notifications. I've been editing Wikipedia for almost two years, creating articles everyday about women scientists and engineers. Usually my notifications are to alert me about the latest activity over on WikiProject Women in Red, or to let me know a page has been nominated for Did You Know, or to make suggestions about people who need biographies. But this time the notification was different – an anonymous editor, using only their IP address, had tagged 50 of my recent articles as not meeting Wikipedia's notability guidelines. The user had, at a rate exceeding 1 biography per minute, deemed this group of professors, award-winning journalists, best-selling authors and well-respected policy makers as not notable.
The notability criteria for academics to be worthy of a Wikipedia page are pretty self-explanatory – and if you've written a biography before, they won't be new to you. Researchers who have had a big impact on their academic discipline, hold a prestigious academic award, are an elected Fellow of a prestigious learned society, hold a named chair, serve as Editor-In-Chief of an important journal or have contributed to the world in their academic capacity are all deemed worthy of a spot on the site. Of course; thanks to academia's own built-in bias (white Western men are more likely to be interviewed and quoted by the press, more frequently cited in academic literature and more often awarded important fellowships or prizes), these notability criteria contribute to Wikipedia's gender gap. But even when women fulfil them, it's hard to substantiate with independent reliable sources – often the only place that writes about them is their employer. When Professor Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize she didn't have a Wikipedia page – not because she hadn't been notable before winning, but because the only place that wrote about her being President of the Optical Society of America was the Optical Society of America, and that was deemed as not an impartial enough reference to prove she had held this position.
I made the mistake of tweeting a screenshot of the tagged pages, and for a week or so, Twitter was a frenzy of animated discussion, spurred by Wikipedia's apparent sexism. Whilst several misinterpreted the problem (after all, we all know that Wikipedia content is created and deleted by a network of volunteers, and that other than training and supporting new editors, the Wikimedia Foundation are not involved), plenty replied to say this was why they had given up. To the untrained editor, interactions like the ones I found in my notifications the weekend after Thanksgiving can sting. To beginners from underrepresented groups, the encyclopaedia can feel less like a team effort and more like an elitist members club, where those with experience throw their weight around – their opinions and power dictating what stays online and what doesn't.
We should all be doing more to tackle Wikipedia's gender and knowledge gaps. We should all be more active in editing, training and supporting new editors. We should all be encouraging journalists to cover more stories from and about those from minority groups, helping awarding bodies to recognise the outstanding work of scientists and engineers who are traditionally underrepresented and unearthing the stories of those who are all too often overlooked. We should all make more effort to edit and improve articles rather than deem them not notable. Wikipedia's a gift to the world – the whole world – and the information on here should reflect the diverse communities who benefit from it.
Wikiproject Tree of Life has been active since the early days of Wikipedia while working on articles related to biology. They recently began a newsletter that goes out to members of the WikiProject which highlights accomplishments, goals, and general WikiProject news. To highlight their work, we interviewed five members of the WikiProject: Enwebb, AddWittyNameHere, Plantdrew, Starsandwhales, and FunkMonk. Here are their answers to our questions.
We asked these same questions eight years ago to a different group. You can view their answers here. To join Wikiproject Tree of Life, click here and add your name to the list.
