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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-08-29/In the media

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In the media

Vive la différence!

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By Smallbones and Staff

We hope Father Will forgives us, but we just couldn't keep this column concise this month. Even the stories in the "in brief" section are not brief. Despite all the horrific general news stories lately, stories related to Wikipedia have mostly been interesting and different. No, we couldn't totally ignore some of the usual, more somber, stories. So pick and choose your stories and enjoy the difference!

Learning to trust the internet again

Jimmy Wales in Al Jazeera reminds us how the internet used to be. According to Jimmy there was little or no disinformation in healthcare or elections, and people could generally agree on the facts. Despite this double dose of nostalgia, Jimmy has a point and a program to make things better. The disinformation situation has gotten much worse. The program looks like Wikipedia, "the cornerstone of the free web.... It is the blueprint for restoring public trust in the web again."

Wales draws three conclusions from the success of Wikipedia:

  • We must all take responsibility for the truth of information on the web. "As we discover more about how influential a dozen people can be in spreading disinformation far and wide, Wikipedia highlights the role we each can play in providing good information."
  • "purveyors of news and information, including large technology companies, must create a common agreement about the need for information to be factual, reliable, and up to date." And
  • "Transparency in online spaces will empower internet users to have open, civil debates where we can embrace our differences and be clear about our own personal biases. This creates more productive conversations and will build communities instead of promoting conflict."

Sounds pretty easy, doesn't it? We've got one request however. Jimmy, next time, please let corporations and their paid editors know that we don't want their disinformation, AKA hidden advertisements in our encyclopedia. And please let them know that our minimum requirement is that they must declare each paid edit, along with the names of the client, employer, and other affiliated parties. If we can't see these hidden adverts, we can't correct them. If you or the Wikimedia Foundation won't let people know about these requirements, who will? – S

Olympic victories

How to Use Wikipedia When You're Watching the Olympics, Stephen Harrison of Slate set the stage for the Olympics by describing how to use Wikipedia as your second screen while watching the Tokyo games. The most popular athletes score high on Wikipedia pageviews, Google Knowledge panels and Alexa report the information from Wikipedia. You can even read about the oddities that only Wikipedia ever covers such as List of Olympic medalists in art competitions.

Editors at WikiProject Olympics report that good photos of the Olympians are hard to get because broadcasters and national sports federations control the copyrights. Are the articles biased? Inclusion of articles about athletes should not be biased against women because of easy notability requirements for all Olympic athletes, but the article coverage may be less for athletes from some countries. A gymnastics writer says that there are no obvious misstatements in Wikipedia articles about the gymnasts she covers, but that controversies are sometimes avoided.

Why Basketball 3×3 Star Stefanie Dolson, Others Fact Check Their Wiki Pages NBC Channel 4 New York asked five USA Olympians to review the Wikipedia articles about themselves on video and suggest any needed corrections. Four of the five loved the articles.

  • Stefanie Dolson – Despite a few quibbles – like not including a "Q" on "LGBT" – she concludes "I'm impressed Wikipedia. You got basically all the information correct. More information than I would have even known about myself. Very well done." The U.S. women's 3-on-3 basketball team took home gold medals, another job well done.
  • Carlin Isles – Taking his assignment very seriously, Isles finds several mistakes, e.g. he says he was born in Akron, Ohio rather than in nearby Massillon. But he concludes "Hey Wik, I must say, you wasn't too shabby. You didn't leave out a lot of details. I'm very proud [of Wikipedia's performance]." The United States men's rugby sevens placed sixth – not too shabby for American rugby.
  • Mattie Rogers – a woman weightlifter, starts out with "whoever did this was very professional" and barely quibbles the rest of the way through the article. She finished sixth in the 87 kg weight class.
  • Ginny Fuchs – a woman flyweight boxer. She notes two important missing facts:
    • Wikipedia missed that she qualified for the Tokyo Olympics (whoops!).
    • She is a spokesperson for mental health, due to her struggles with OCD, and has spoken on the topic on the Oprah Winfrey Show (double whoops!!). Sorry about that!
In the round of 16 she lost to Stoyka Krasteva, who later won the gold metal.
  • Kyle Snyder – Snyder is a long time fan of Wikipedia. "Wikipedia, you guys are doing a good job." He won the 97 kg freestyle 2016 Olympic gold. He defeated Abdulrashid Sadulaev in 2017 to win the 97 kg freestyle world championship, one of only two losses in Sadulaev's career. This year Snyder suffered his third career loss to Sadulaev in the 97 kg final, taking the silver medal.

There are 11,656 athletes at the Olympics. Guy Fraser wanted them all on Wikipedia: The Guardian covers the work of one dedicated Wikipedian, who has been filling in the blank spaces in our coverage of the 2020 games. See Community view for further coverage. – S

Wikimania in Phnom Penh

Père Guillaume Conquer ran what must be the most unusual version of Wikimania this year, perhaps ever, in the Coconut Club in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as he documented in a local paper. With 15 participants, including a dozen Cambodians, young and old, a Korean businessman, and an Australian cultural-events organizer, the event was almost as large as the congregation of Conquer's church in the tiny village of Chom Lak. Father Will, as he's usually called, has been a Roman Catholic missionary in Cambodia for two years for the Missions Etrangères de Paris. It's his first assignment since being ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of Monaco. He told AsiaNews "Wikipedia is not the right tool for proselytising. Its success lies in its neutral point of view. It's a space for knowledge, not preaching."

Father Will bought the first drink for Wikipedia editors registered before the event. He's been a Wikipedian since 2008 making 3,432 edits across all projects. His goal for the Khmer Wikipedia is to double its 8,000 articles over the next year. Thanks for all you do, Father. And keep the faith. – S

Why not a single Wikipedia article for controversial topics?

Wikipedia Has a Language Problem. Here’s How To Fix It by Yumiko Sato in Undark Magazine (reprinted in Fast Company). Following an earlier article in Slate where she explains in detail how the Japanese Wikipedia has whitewashed much of Japan's World War II history, Sato notes that the Croatian Wikipedia has had similar problems for almost a decade. (See prior coverage in The Signpost Disinformation report (2021) and Opinion (2019).) Al Jazeera piles on the Croatian editors with Are Croat nationalists pushing a political agenda on Wikipedia? on how Croat nationalists affected the Croatian Wikipedia, but concentrates on how they affect the Bosnian Wikipedia.

Wikipedia certainly has had language versions that produce seriously biased articles resulting from poor governance. While Sato recognizes that there will be technical difficulties, she proposes that there be a single language version of Wikipedia (presumably English) so that poor governance on a smaller version doesn't affect article quality. Political problems would prevent the implementation of this solution, even more so than technical problems. Different cultures want to be able to determine their own "truths" in their own languages.

But could a single "All-Wikipedia" article even be possible for even one of the most controversial articles? Likely, that would involve a set of about five translations from a single main article. Edits to the translations would have to be translated to the other versions. Debate on talk pages might need several translations as well. The thought of a multi-language edit war boggles the mind. It's an interesting idea, but it's unlikely to be implemented any time soon. – S

On deleting articles about women

Francesca Tripodi's recent paper, Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia continues to make news this month. Dr. Tripodi, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, reports that biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than similar male biographies.

– B

In brief

  • 7 Notable African Women Activists Who Deserve Wikipedia Pages are named by Global Citizen, who also provide a couple of paragraphs of good information about each woman. Ok, they could have provided links to other reliable sources, but sometimes these things all work out in the end. The women are Madame Cissé Hadja Mariama Sow, Nebila Abdulmelik, Jeannine Mukanirwa, Mercy Akuot, Kagendo Murungi, Bibata Ouédraogo, and Beatrice Mukansinga. All news sources are encouraged to publish similarly informative articles on African women – and please tell us about it on the Suggestions page. Thanks to Abishe, Victuallers and Indy beetle for creating the Wikipedia articles!
  • A deep dive under the bonnet: Feast examines the engine behind Wikipedia articles on the top-ten UK automobile brands in BMW becomes Wikipedia’s most edited car brand page. Do you want to know which brands have the most total article edits – linking to graphs breaking it down by month? You'll find it right before the most prolific editors for each article. Pageviews and the pageviews-to-edits ratio are also mentioned. Most of the stats are readily available: the innovation in this article is collecting them all in a single place for one important market. Vertu Motors, the UK's fifth largest automobile dealership published the original report, which is no longer available online.
  • The creator of Lsjbot is arguably the most prolific author in the world according to The Guardian. The creator, Sverker Johansson, is a Wikipedian who began his career as a particle physicist, and now writes books about the origins of language for his day job. The bot has created at least 80 percent of the Cebuano Wikipedia.
  • Kansas City Public Library Hires A Dedicated 'Wikipedian-In-Residence': NPR member KCUR interviews Miranda Pratt. The Kansas City Public Library states that Miranda is "the first Wikipedian-In-Residence appointed by a public library in the United States."
  • Input and CNET's stories both covered a classic example of vandalism. A vandal waited to become autoconfirmed, and then defaced a widely-used template with a Nazi flag, affecting more than 50,000 pages. While reverted in just a few minutes, the high-profile pages affected (such as Joe Biden) meant that the press took notice.
  • Decentralized blockchain project launches contest to build next Wikipedia – once more, a Wikipedia-killer is about to be proposed. This one, sponsored by a cryptocurrency organization, doesn't have a product yet – just a contest to produce ideas for one. Their more detailed objectives, suggest that their beef with Wikipedia is that we limit their free advertising for cryptocurrency. "One example are blockchain/cryptocurrency-related topics on English Wikipedia, strictly controlled by Wikipedia old-timers and cryptocurrency haters like David Gerard. Such people have large support groups that allow them to push their agenda using particular pages." Gerard tells The Signpost that proposed cybercurrency-controlled encyclopedias, such as Lunyr and Everipedia, are nothing new. He says "I refer the honourable gentlemen to my previous written response."



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  • @JimmyWales must remember a different internet than I do. The internet has always been a great source of disinformation. That's what makes it such a wonderful marketplace for the good and bad. If it weren't for crap, you couldn't recognize quality. Not Wilkins (talk) 14:29, 31 August 2021 (UTC)NotWilkins[reply]
    • @Not Wilkins: Almost everybody chooses to remember the past wearing rose-colored glasses. Jimmy certainly did in that story. Or perhaps he did it simply as a rhetorical device - he can say it, but nobody was really expected to believe it. In either case, it brings up the question of how the disinformation now differs from the disinformation then. I'd say that back then it was more disorganized or chaotic. Now it looks more organized, or at least concentrated into a few groups. Another way to look at it is that now the disinformation is more politicized and commercialized. It always was - just more so now. Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:08, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Some lovely articles here. I enjoyed "Why Basketball 3×3 Star Stefanie Dolson, Others Fact Check Their Wiki Pages", "There are 11,656 athletes at the Olympics. Guy Fraser wanted them all on Wikipedia" and "7 Notable African Women Activists Who Deserve Wikipedia Pages". All have issues (I'm reminded of a Signpost report I can't find summarising research that found that the media, wrongly, presents us as static, uniform-quality and mostly complete) but they report on Wikipedia well enough. The crypto nonsense is less lovely; apparently some bros who want to invent the biggest scam since pyramid schemes say that Wikipedia lacks "an advanced consensus mechanism" (we have many of these) and "a scalable and fast blockchain with smart contracts that implement any operating logic" (well... I suppose this we do lack). I see no reason to trust that they can introduce a system for paying editors that won't be gamed to oblivion and the ungrateful bastards don't get that our "uneven coverage" is the result of millions of hours of hard work that they simply will never get people to donate. — Bilorv (talk) 20:57, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

break

  • TRIPODI: From above: "Dr. Tropodi, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, reports that biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than similar male biographies." - not true at all. Tripodi's paper neither tested this proposition, not made any such conclusion. What Tripodi's paper was actually about was well reported in the last issue, with an excellent analysis of the statistical flaws in her conclusions. Johnbod (talk) 14:52, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • @HaeB:'s review of the paper in the last issue, was indeed very good and I'll ask him to let me know if I've made a mistake here. Probably the most confusing part of Tripodi's paper was that it wasn't about discriminatory deletions of women's articles, it was about discriminatory nominations for deletion of women's biographies. She tried to show that there was a surplus of non-justified deletion nominations for women. *Not getting deleted* here is considered evidence of bias! HaeB pointed that out very well. But how to determine that there was a surplus of nominations for deletion? Just compare these nominations to similar nominations. She couldn't compare it to something totally dissimilar, e.g. AfD nominations of geography articles. So she picked something similar, men's bios. Perhaps I misstated when I wrote "similar male biographies" instead of "similar AfDs of male biographies". As pointed out very well by HaeB, it turns out the males bios really aren't that similar, e.g. different ages of the bio articles, and different ages of the subjects. Again HaeB addressed that very well. I'm sorry if leaving out 2 short words caused any confusion. BTW, I'm sure there must be a joke in here about Seemingly unrelated regressions vs. Totally unrelated regressions, but I'll let others take that risk.

Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:46, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

      • This is what Tripodi says: "I tested the following hypotheses:
H1. The proportion of biographies about cis-gender women (she/her/hers) nominated for deletion each month will be greater than the proportion of available biographies about cis-gender women (she/her/hers) on Wikipedia during the same time period.
H2. Articles about cis-gender women (she/her/hers) are more likely to be misclassified as non-notable (i.e. “kept”) than articles about cis-gender men (he/him/his).

- I'm not seeing anything about "biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than similar male biographies". As I suspect Tripodi knows, there is other recent research more relevant to the the male/female ratios, which I won't attempt to summarize here. Johnbod (talk) 16:53, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

H1 is clearly a typo in the original. It literally says H1: A > A. Not a promising hypothesis. The 2nd "cis-gender women (she/her/hers)" should be changed to "cis-gender men (he/him/his)" or H2:A>B. This just says that "biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than ,,, male biographies". ("similar" not included here)

"H2. Articles about cis-gender women (she/her/hers) are more likely to be misclassified as non-notable (i.e. “kept”) than articles about cis-gender men (he/him/his)" can clearly be restated as:

H2. Articles about cis-gender men (he/him/his) are less likely to be misclassified as non-notable (i.e. “kept”) than articles about cis-gender women (she/her/hers)", i.e. similarly nominated men's bios are less likely to be kept than women's nominations. She's trying to compare similar things, AfD nominations of men to AfD nominations of women.

Hope that helps. Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:52, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Actually H1 could be correct as written. It is comparing the proportions of women's bios at AfD to their prevalence in all bios. In other words, if 15% of all biographies are about women, then an equitable proportion would be 15% of the biographies nominated for deletion are about women. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:23, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Possible with an emphasis on "available" but seeing as she's talking about proportions i,e #W/(#W + #M) it comes down to the same thing - comparing the number of women's articles nominated to number of men's articles nominated. Smallbones(smalltalk) 18:53, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Your first change is also completely wrong. The whole point of her research was that she was comparing, in proportion terms, nominated female biographies against "available" (ie all existing) female biographies, not against male ones. A rather dubious excercise, as pointed out last issue, but that is what she did! From her final section:

"My dataset revealed that the proportion of women nominated for deletion each month (out of all biographies nominated for deletion) was greater than the proportion of available biographies about women on English-language Wikipedia more generally." Johnbod (talk) 02:40, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Somebody is missing something here

@Johnbod: It could be me - but as I understand what you're saying is that Tripodi did not compare AfDs for men and women. Is that what you are saying? It is quite obvious that she did. Quoting from her paper:

  • "this article demonstrates that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more frequently considered non-notable and nominated for deletion compared to men’s biographies." (abstract)
  • "Specifically, my data indicate that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more likely to be considered non-notable than men’s." (intro)
  • "I analyzed nominations by month for the entire year of 2017, 2018, and 2019 and the first two months of 2020 (totaling 22,174 biographical entries around a she or he gender binary)." (i.e. dataset examined includes bios classified as male or female. (Data and methods)
  • "If no gender bias exists, the percentage of miscategorized biographies should not vary by gender." (Data and methods)
  • Figure 1. is a direct comparisons of men and women bios. "Men" and "Women" are labeled. (Findings)
  • "My data indicate that women’s biographies are more frequently miscategorized as non-notable than men’s (see Figure 2)." (Findings)

So men's and women's nomination are directly compared. What am I missing about your complaint? If she didn't mean these statement, according to your view, what do you think she meant? If I can figure out what you mean and consider it to be correct, then I will issue a correction. Until then. I have to ask that you not try to correct Signpost articles. That is a matter for staff of The Signpost and ultimately the editor-in-chief, me. Signpost articles are signed by the contributors, changing them is equivalent to changing somebody's comment on a talk page. Smallbones(smalltalk) 14:24, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

And I have to ask that you don't attempt to just rewrite what you think a (presumably peer-reviewed) paper ought to have said, when it clearly doesn't, as you did above (previous section). The analysis in your last issue was spot on; it's pity you didn't leave it at that. Many people including me have corrected various things in Signpost articles in the past, & I don't accept we can't. It's a bit rich saying that when you had just claimed the Tripodi paper must have meant something different to what it actually says! Johnbod (talk) 03:48, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
"Dr. Tripodi, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, reports that biographies of women are more likely to be nominated for deletion than similar male biographies," appears to be correct, as illustrated by the bullet points above. The analysis in Recent research presented in our last issue is indeed very impressive and readers and anybody who has any questions about the paper should consult it. I believe the statement above is entirely consistent with what the original paper says, as well as what HaeB's analysis says. No correction is needed.
As far as readers - or anybody else who is not on the staff of The Signpost - making post-publication "corrections" to the content of an article, that is inconsistent with the project's rules and 16 years of The Signpost's practice. We are an independent newspaper that presents the news truthfully to the best of our ability as well as our contributor's opinions. We do not necessarily represent - or claim to represent - the views of the WMF, its affiliates, ArbCom, admins, or even non-staffers who are part of our very diverse community. I believe that our readers would not want it otherwise. That means that The Signpost has the final say on our content. Please do not ever change our published content in opposition to the views of our staff. Of course the overall rules of enWiki apply here. The applicable rules are those that apply to WikiProjects and talk page content, e.g. do not change the content of another user's signed content. You may make a request at WP:MfD or even ArbCom if you disagree. Smallbones(smalltalk) 13:31, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia's "language problem"

  • The "one Wikipedia" proposal is naive and vague, and can be dangerous if actually put into action. Forcing all Wikipedia language versions to present one monopolized version of the truth, which will inevitably be Anglophone-centered, would be a disaster that would completely infuriate the non-English Wikipedia communities, who tend to see the English Wikipedia as one of the most problematic language editions with its incomprehensible bureaucracy and often belligerent users. They would perceive this as intrusive digital colonialism and an outright invasion (see also Wikipedia:Ignore Meta). Also, imagine the level of cross-wiki vandalism and edit wars that would exponentially increase as a result.
While written with good intentions, the "language problem" article is clearly written by someone who does not know the details of why it is necessary to have separate projects with separate policies and content. Notability, copyright (especially regarding local fair-use laws), real-life inherent cultural differences, and many other aspects of wiki projects all need to be different, and none of these topics are addressed by the article.
Having original content in different language versions has benefits far outweighing the downsides. At most, we can use WikiLambda or something similar to import basic statistical facts into Wikipedia articles in different language versions, but this should not be extended to complex prose prone to POV problems. — Sagotreespirit (talk) 05:43, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It's your Signpost. You can help us.
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