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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-09-29/In the media

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In the media

This edition's roundup of media coverage

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By Lane Rasberry, Pete Forsyth, and Milowent

In brief

  • Science fiction anticipated Wikipedia: Contemporary commenters have noted that science fiction author H. G. Wells anticipated the coming of Wikipedia in his 1938 essay collection World Brain. Popular science magazine Scientific American continues this recognition in a video review of Wells' work, in which point five at 1:20 states, "H. G. Wells invented Wikipedia". (Sept. 8). Previously, in 2012, Tor.com credited Isaac Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica as foreshadowing Wikipedia.
  • Brazilian court rules that Wikipedia may republish publicly available information: The Wikimedia Foundation won a case brought by Brazilian Rosanah Fienngo, in which she objected to the Portuguese Wikipedia's publication of personal information she had provided to a gossip web site. Tech writer Glyn Moody covered the ruling for TechDirt. (Sept. 19)
  • Interaction among Wikipedia bots researched: A paper, "Even Good Bots Fight", has been submitted to the journal Science Advances, and was covered in the MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, the Register, and elsewhere. The paper, which has not yet completed academic peer review, considers bots on multiple online platforms, but emphasizes Wikipedia, as a controlled environment where bots' "benevolence" is assessed and managed. It identified bots that edited inter-language links—now obsolete, because of the emergence of Wikidata—between 2001 and 2010 as reverting one another more frequently than other bots. (Sept. 20)
  • Let us beat term papers into articles: The Los Angeles Times reports that college students are editing Wikipedia "to rewrite the wrongs of Internet science"—as a part of their college assignments. The article discusses the efforts of the Wiki Education Foundation to train professors to improve Wikipedia content. (Sept. 20)
  • Notable death or memorial page?: Israeli English media reported widely on the deletion of an article about Dafna Meir from the Hebrew Wikipedia on the basis of being a memorial page. On the English Wikipedia, deaths like Meir's and others are compiled at List of violent incidents in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, January–June 2016 (Meir under January 17). Meir's case has also been discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Israel#Dafna Meir. (Sept. 16)
  • Wicked Girl: Actress Lena Dunham was pleased and amused to see her Wikipedia article incorrectly claim she was briefly married to crooner Chris Isaak. The vandalism was in the article for about 12 hours from addition, becoming social media share-bait, and removal. (Sept. 15)



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Term papers into articles

  • I'm glad to see the coverage in the LA Times about Alicejmichel's work on geobiology; we presumably have the WEF to thank for that reportage. It remains to be seen if Wikipedia can start learning to affect long-term editor recruiting and retention along these lines. Chris Troutman (talk) 16:22, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Chris, thanks for the comment. I noted that the article we cited has been republished in other papers, which is also good. These initiatives strike me as important and bold -- instead of sitting around and hoping content improves over time, the project is actually leveraging knowledgeable people to improve scientific articles, which may be painstaking but of real value.--Milowent • hasspoken 13:05, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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