Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-10-28/In the media

Wikipedia "bans" Breitbart

Photograph of Andrew Breitbart shrugging while speaking at an event

Fake news?

Vice, PC Magazine, American Libraries magazine, The David Pakman Show, and others covered the English Wikipedia community's decision not to allow Breitbart News sourcing. On October 3, Breitbart called themselves "blacklisted" but of course we can't link the article for The Signpost because... well, the site is on the blacklist. — B

Wikipedia's celebrity

Steven Pruitt (Ser Amantio di Nicolao) is currently Wikipedia's top editor, with over 2.7 million edits. He has fairly consistently attracted media coverage, including being named one of the top 25 most influential people on the internet in 2017, by Time. Pruitt was recently flung into the limelight yet again, with a series of prominent newspapers reprinting a piece originating with The Washington Post. — E

Jimbo Wales lays off his journalists

John Enoch, reporting for The Times (paywall) tells of Jimbo Wales firing the reporters of his WikiTribune, the place for "news by the people and for the people", after only one year of publication.

Nine million broken links, fixed

An article in TechCrunch reports on the collaboration of volunteers from the Internet Archive succeeding in repairing 9 million broken links. Maximilian Doerr and Stephen Balbach created software tools, including IAbot, to automate correction of 6 million links. Other Wikipedia volunteers fixed 3 million more by manually linking to Internet Archive.

In brief

Screenshot of the main page with red graffiti reading "wiki vANdAL" superimposed over it along with a red spraypaint canister in the bottom-right

Clip art icon of a clapperboard with a vampire smiley on it

Don't watch this – read about it!

Vandalism: Marcus Gilmer of Mashable lists a selection of "[t]he most unforgettable Wikipedia vandalism trolls of all time".
Women: A two-day edit-a-thon on the Isle of Skye adds 13 biographies of women. "It was wonderful to see so many new articles created, and people leave with the skills to continue to edit and update Wikipedia entries".
Sexism: More on the Strickland affair in Quartz – "Sexism at Wikipedia feeds off the sexism in the media", while WMF executive director Katherine Maher writing in the Los Angeles Times acknowledges that "Wikipedia's shortcomings are absolutely real."
Movies: Apparently, some people like reading plot spoilers on Wikipedia so that they can avoid being scared by watching horror films, according to Katie McDonough in The Muse – with an interesting illustration by Angelica Alzona.
Bias on Wikipeda: John Lubbock writing in New Statesman America discusses "Wikipedia's resilience to biased editing" and government interference.

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28 October 2018 (all comments)

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Regarding Jimmy Wales and WikiTribune, he and cofounder Orit Kopel wrote recently that "We are looking to hire new journalists – our old staff was great, but we are now focusing much more on community support, and so we are looking for journalists with extensive wiki experience, and journalists with fact checking passion." It remains to be seen exactly how that will play out, but he clearly hasn't given up on the idea of a mix of paid staff and volunteers for creating content. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:54, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]