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In the media

Putin, Jimbo, Musk and more

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By Bri, FormalDude, Ganesha811, Andreas Kolbe, Mhawk10, Lane Rasberry, and Smallbones

Guerrilla warfare against crypto-grifters

Wikipedia administrator Molly White, known here as GorillaWarfare, runs a blog (Web3 Is Going Great) cataloging misfortunes and scams in cryptocurrency. Today's Washington Post covers her in First she documented the alt-right. Now she’s coming for crypto (archive). Since 2021 White has been documenting ripoffs which she estimates cost cryptocurrency investors $10 billion. You can also find her on Twitter – S

Putin – "You can't just rely on Wikipedia"

Putin enlightens Znanie CEO Maxim Dreval (5 May 2022)

Short video with subtitles here. Full meeting transcript (in Russian).

The Moscow Times reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Russians to have alternatives to Wikipedia. "You can't just rely on Wikipedia," he says. So far he agrees with Jimmy Wales and most other Wikipedians. While Wikipedia is a wonderful place to start your research on a topic, it's not a good place to end it. A representative of Znanie [ru], a state sponsored non-profit which publishes lecture videos, was called on to agree with Putin on TV. They're ready to help.
See previous coverage in The Signpost about Putin's plans to replace Wikipedia with the Great Russian Encyclopedia here, here, and here. – S

Russia fines WMF $41,594

A "special military operation" is the name given by Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials to exchange of missiles, bombs, and bullets between Moscow's armed forces and Ukraine's which the Kremlin initiated on February 24. Western news sources and much of the rest of the world call it a "war" or an "invasion of Ukraine", as does the Russian-language version of Wikipedia. A new Russian law says that Russian publishers must only use the facts and terminology provided by officials of the Russian Federation when reporting military affairs. On April 26 a Moscow court levied a 3 million ruble fine ($41,594) on the Wikimedia Foundation for violating this law according to Reuters. The WMF has previously addressed this issue: "we will not back down in the face of efforts to censor and intimidate members of our movement. We stand by our mission to deliver free knowledge to the world." Don't expect them to pay the fine. – S

We're a battleground in a culture war. Is it genocide?

In The War Over Ukraine—On Wikipedia, Catarina Buchatskiy writes for Lawfare that the Kremlin is carrying out an "information war" on Wikipedia. She states "seemingly petty Wikipedia edit wars are actually an important battleground, and unfortunately, they are a battleground on which Russian narratives are much more successful compared to how Russian soldiers have fared on the ground in physical battle against the army of a nation Russians pretend does not exist." She states:

A debate is taking place about whether Russia is engaged in genocide within the meaning of the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as any of several types of atrocity when “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” ... consider for a moment that this activity is taking place concurrent with mass killings, deportations of children and the deliberate destruction of cities.

– FD, B, S

The Signpost and the "shadow war"

The Fake Accounts Whitewashing Oligarchs' Wikipedia Pages (subscription required): Omer Benjakob at Haaretz analyzes an article published here in March. He compares the recent Signpost investigation by Smallbones into "inauthentic behavior" around Russian oligarchs' biographies and related pages to past incidents and concludes that "Wikipedia is on Russia's radar" and that "a shadow war is playing out on Wikipedia between editors seeking to weed out for-profit editing and PR firms working for their clients". – B

A profile of Wikipedians and breaking news

Jason Moore at WikiConference North America 2016

CNN published an in-depth look at the Wikipedians who start and maintain breaking news entries. The article, Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it started focuses on the contributions of long-time Wikipedian Jason Moore and several others. Going deeper than many similar pieces, the article does a very adept job of explaining Wikipedia's policies and how these articles are shaped over time. Kudos to the reporter, Samantha Murphy Kelly![1] – G

A bit musky in here

The world's richest man is obsessed with how he is described on the free internet encyclopedia: in Slate, Stephen Harrison reviews the editing history of the Elon Musk article and notes that Musk has complained several times about aspects of his Wikipedia biography on Twitter. However, Harrison thinks Wikipedians had it right – and feels it is important that there is a place online "where billionaires cannot purchase their preferred version of events, nor own the means of conversation." – AK

Wales on Musk

Jimmy Wales comments on Elon Musk's buying Twitter. Speaking exclusively to LADbible, he said: "This is the point where I think it’s a huge risk for Twitter and Elon Musk, because if you go to [sic] far – or very far at all down that path from where Twitter is now - I think you start to lose market share. We have to remember, Twitter is not a monopoly, there’s loads of other platforms and places, we should be really focused on thinking about that competitive landscape. If you don’t like the moderation policies on one service, you can go somewhere else." Read the full interview here. – FD

Jimmy Wales interview: free speech and friendly society

Jimmy Wales in a different interview in 2018

In Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward interviews Jimmy Wales [1] (30:48). Reason leads with "Wikipedia continues to quietly grow in utility, trustworthiness, and comprehensiveness" and it "has maintained its reputation and functionality since its founding, even as the rest of the social internet seems hellbent on tearing itself apart".

Reason and its editor, Mangu-Ward, advocate for some controversial positions, so this interview has some interesting sparring, but never breaks out in open debate. Discussion points include:

  • Is the Wikipedia model generalizable?
  • friendly societies versus insurance companies,
  • public spaces for heterodoxy,
  • the libertarian response to online harassment,
  • ejecting trolls in a bible study group should never be illegal,
  • Wales' WT.social social media site, which like Wikipedia eschews ads, is "not a great business model, it's not lucrative at all, we're not making money",
  • and creating meaningful content versus merely controversial content.

– B, S

Other video interviews

In brief

  • Councillor edits own Wikipedia page to "repair misinformation": The Otago Daily Times reports that a member of the City Council in Dunedin, New Zealand edited his own Wikipedia biography. The edit was made under an account bearing his name; readers can come to their own conclusions as to the merits or demerits of the changes made. Both the Otago Daily Times article and the Wikipedia article claim that the changes were reverted; a perusal of the edit history shows, however, that a number of them were subsequently incorporated.
  • The many fake lives of a pro cyclist: Cycling Tips reports that the owner of a Virginia bicycle shop built a completely fake history of himself as a professional cyclist. "Until 2020, the first page of results for 'Nick Clark cyclist' brought up a Wikipedia page corroborating details of his path into the sport and his racing career, the events he said he rode at and teams he said he rode for." For a while, he was "credited on Wikipedia as the winner of the U23 Australian Time Trial Championship in 1999 and 2000 – when he would have been 23 and 24 years old, again in years that the category didn’t exist." See the 2020 AFD.
  • The saints of Wikipedia: High praise for those who "have done a good job of collecting" Space Force insignia (Gizmodo).
One of many Space Force unit badges found on Wikimedia Commons
  • How academic institutions can help bridge Wikipedia's gender-gap: This column in Nature provides possible solutions to addressing the encyclopedia's bias that favors male achievements.
Is Kathy Barnette notable yet?
  • U.S. Senate candidate deletion: [2] Christian Post runs down deletion criteria pretty soundly but still disagreed with the May 9 deletion of the biography article for candidate Kathy Barnette, then 2% behind the front runner in the Pennsylvania Republican primary for U.S. Senate. She finished third with 24% of the vote according to Ballotpedia; vote counting is under way for a two-way tie between the front runners (heavily covered in U.S. media as of writing deadline). The article Kathy Barnette was re-created and re-nominated for deletion on May 19 for the third time in 45 days. The latest discussion was closed with consensus to keep.
Tajh Taylor, Wikimedia Foundation VP of data science and engineering
  • How I Got Here: A pivot from music to computer science paved Tajh Taylor's path to Wikimedia VP: in Technical.ly documents how Tajh Taylor, the VP of data science and engineering at the WMF, switched from applying for university programs in music to computer science degrees from Morehouse College and UC Berkeley. Thank his mother! He is now the highest-ranking Black staff member at the WMF.
  • #KnowWithWiki is a social media campaign in India that the WMF is using to introduce Indians to Wikipedia via social media influencers. Exchange4media interviews Khanyi Mpumlwana, the WMF's Creative Director, and she tells readers about the WMF, how Wikipedia works, and about the campaign. The one message that she wants Indians to understand is "Whatever you want to know, you can know it with Wiki!"
  • Bollywood vs Wikipedia: Karma Cola with more fizz than substance?: There's controversy over the Wiki article characterizing the film The Kashmir Files as fiction.
  • Wikipedia Italia e l'invasione dell'Ucraina: la storia di una bozza lunga 19 giorni: (subscription required) in Italian about Mark Bernstein in la Repubblica.
  • British historian Paul Kennedy writes book with 80+ citations to Wikipedia: "Many university professors would mark down a student paper that included uncorroborated Wikipedia citations", according to the New York Times book review of Victory at Sea published by Yale University Press. But Kennedy breaks from the pack in this book about World War II, with an unprecedented 80+ citations to Wikipedia.
Trichromia phaeocrota, accessed by 3 people in 2021



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  • The Kennedy citing trend should be seen as a bad thing for us. Unless you are citing Wikipedia to talk about Wikipedia, this only muddles our ability to produce quality content; WP:CITOGENESIS. I don't see why a publisher wouldn't have told their author to spend another week checking the sources Wikipedia uses, rather than citing us directly. -Indy beetle (talk) 07:50, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. As an academic, you are expected to put in the extra effort to find more reliable sources. X-Editor (talk) 23:57, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
But is it a "trend"? From the NYT review, it sounds like an exceptional oversight at Yale University Press. czar 04:23, 1 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I hope it was merely an oversight, if an embarrassing one. I'd much more concerned if Yale cognizantly signed off on it! -Indy beetle (talk) 10:27, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not even so worried about feeling the need to preserve one version of an article, I am just generally uncomfortable that Kennedy cited Wikipedia instead of the sources WP uses that he presumably, hopefully, checked first. WP is getting better, but please don't cite us! Especially not in your academic book! Unless it's literally there to cite "For X years, Wikipedia has said Y on the subject..." before going into a mainstream perception argument. Kingsif (talk) 01:29, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'd be interested to see the citations. Is it a bare URL or a permalink? And what facts are cited? In all likelihood this is indicative of a serious lack of source reliability analysis skills by the historian in question. — Bilorv (talk) 15:03, 4 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • The bit about low traffic for some moth articles made me think of a thought attributed to J. B. S. Haldane: when he was asked if there were anything that could be concluded about God from the study of natural history, he replied, "an inordinate fondness for beetles", because of the vast profusion of species and morphologies thereof. Somewhere in this line of thought is a disjunction: God can afford to pay lots of attention to all the many many kinds of beetles, but humans apparently cannot afford time to pay significant attention to all the many many kinds of moths. Of course, perhaps arthropod biodiversity could be a matter of a thousand monkeys and not of any deities' proclivities anyway. Regardless, the data exhaust of Wikipedia, in all its countless forms—including what Wikipedia is and is not, and what Wikipedia could be but is not yet and perhaps may never be but we can't yet be sure, and how Wikipedia is developed over time and how it is not developed, and who reads Wikipedia articles (or not) and which ones they read (or not), and so on—lays bare realities about the nature of human cognition and the human condition. Quercus solaris (talk) 03:45, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I appreciate Morris' characterization of set index articles as "disambiguation pages except not, because reasons". Haven't quite figured out the crucial difference either :p --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 07:34, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I like that succinct characterization, too. Regarding what the difference is, or was meant to be but perhaps no longer is: An interesting topic. I am pretty sure that the differentiation originally grew out of a legitimate recurring problem of how to adequately handle (ie, not mishandle) semantic relations and ontology components of a hyponymous/hypernymyous character whereby various concepts in life have a hypernymous parent level about which not a whole lot needs to be said, beyond 1 sentence or 1 paragraph laying out the definition, but (in contrast) each of the various hyponymous instantiations of the parent theme is "a whole thing" that warrants a whole encyclopedia article (even if only a short one, nonetheless still an entire one, rather than none). I believe that the concept of a set index article was originally supposed to provide for a way to allow Wikipedia to duly acknowledge and (briefly yet adequately) explain/cover/represent the existence of the parent concept/theme that by itself does not warrant an encyclopedia article but nonetheless is necessary to recognize ontologically, as a node in one's mental schemas, cognitive models, and ontologies. Otherwise Wikipedia's rules/practices, at least as understood and enforced by some Wikipedians if not all, inadvertently contain a misguided problem whereby a parent concept exists and needs to be recognized but Wikipedia artifactually is inadvertently "not allowed to say that it exists," in a way that can actually feel stupidly/maddeningly insane or Kafkaesque to those people who even realize/can perceive that it even exists. For such people, one of the heartaches has been that many others do not realize or perceive thus, in a way that can seem somewhat unaccountable or counterintuitive to those who do. It is the argument between person A who puts a blurb at the top of a DAB page explaining the chief parent concepts and person B who deletes that blurb and says that DAB pages can only start with the contextless and mindless line, "X may refer to:". Quercus solaris (talk) 17:55, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I appreciate how the Christian Post quoted extensively from our notability policies to balance out Barnette's claims of being cancelled. I should find it laughable that she characterises the crowdsourced Wikipedia as a monolithic repressive entity to be opposed through people power. “They don’t like giving up power. They forget that the true power is with the people, though.” (Not laughing, though.) I wonder about us telling people they are "non-notable". We understand that the term has a special definition here, but others don't. Would it be better if we said not "famous" or "well-known" enough? Those also send a wrong message. Is there a better term? ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 08:37, 12 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]


Moths

Strikes me that Special:WhatLinksHere/Trichromia_phaeocrota might explain a lot: If an article is under a hard-to-spell scientific name, and the only link in (besides this article and the list of least viewed articles) is from a page that looks like this - a lengthy list of links to articles with one sentence at the top - the discoverability of the article is incredibly low. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.9% of all FPs 18:03, 12 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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  1. ^ Conflict of interest disclosure: The subject of the article contributed a minor correction to this section. He authorized linking to his user page here, along with his real name.
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