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Wikipedias full embrace of HTTPS in 2015 had a surprising effect on censorship around the globe. S is for secure, after all.

Look at the top of your browser, on the left of the URL bar. What do you see? It should begin with https, probably in green.

What does this stand for? Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, the latter word being the key difference between its HTTP precursor.

What does it mean? It means added encryption and, as the name implies, more security. So much more security, in fact, that it has helped beat state censorship in some parts, as evidenced by Wikipedia in recent years.

It began in 2011 when Wikipedia added support for HTTPS, as well as the tried and not-so-trusted HTTP. So, if HTTP didnt work in some countries, the HTTPS version still would.

Now, following a shift to entirely HTTPS in 2015, the effect has proved a bit more profound, according to new research in the US.

A report from the Berkman KleinCenter for Internet and Society at Harvard claims that censorship of Wikipedia is lower now than it was prior to the shift.

It is believed that this is, in large part, down to how HTTPS shields certain activity from being monitored.

HTTPS prevents censors from seeing which page a user is viewing, which means censors must choose between blocking the entire site and allowing access to all articles, reads the paper.

Essentially, users in, say, China, could be foundto be accessing Wikipedia. However, the page they are viewingis not known, so things such as the Tiananmen Square protests from 1989, largely thought to be blocked in China, could actually be being accessed.

The study was an arduous one, with the researchers combining search traffic from various years, trying to spot any changes following the HTTPS shift. This was largely down to the assumption that the move could lead to further censorship, in that Wikipedia, in general, would just be blocked.

When the study ended with data up to June 2016 China, Thailand and Uzbekistan were still likely interfering intermittently with specific language projects of Wikipedia.

However, on the whole, the global trends were pointing towards less censorship, not more.

This finding suggests that the shift to HTTPS has been a good one in terms of ensuring accessibility to knowledge.

Wikipedia. Image: Ink Drop/Shutterstock

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Who doubted HTTPS? Wikipedia switch thwarts state censorship - Siliconrepublic.com

If youre the strategist behind a multibillion dollar scam that rips off hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, one of the key challenges you face is managing your online reputation. How do you prevent defrauded clients from warning others about their appalling experiences?

This is the quandary faced by fraudsters in the binary options industry, which operates on the assumption that at some point potential clients will do a search for Is binary options a good investment? or Is XYZ Binary Options Brand a reputable company? To prevent the truth from getting out, the fraudulent firms need to comprehensively control what potential investor-victims see online.

The Times of Israel, in a series of articles, has exposed the largely fraudulent Israel-based industry that has been stealing billions of dollars from hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide for the past decade. Duplicitous binary options companies ostensibly offer customers a potentially profitable short-term investment, but in reality through rigged trading platforms, refusal to pay out and other ruses these companies fleece the vast majority of customers of most or all of their money. (The industry has been denounced by Israels securities regulator and by the Prime Ministers Office, and a government-drafted, opposition-backed bill to ban it was sent in February to the Knesset, where it currently languishes.)

A screenshot of the February 2017 Signpost article detailing Wikipedia editors battle with Banc de Binary.

For a normal business or industry it would be difficult to keep secret a track record of vast global theft. But the binary options industry is unrelenting in its ambition to control the flow of information about itself. Several months ago, an article appeared on Signpost, the internal publication of Wikipedia editors, showing the extreme lengths the boosters of just one binary options firm went to in order to bury information about the companys troubles with regulators.

Entitled Wolves nip at Wikipedias heels: A perspective on the cost of paid editing, the article describes the exhausting battle waged by volunteer Wikipedia editors against apparent flacks for Banc De Binary, an Israeli binary options firm which, until it closed its doors several months ago, was considered a flagship of this industry.

In its aims and founding philosophy, Wikipedia is the antithesis of the fraudulent binary options industry mindset. Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, the online encyclopedia grew out of the American open-source software movement, which rests on the assumption that people will collaborate on a project without being paid to do so, out of an altruistic desire to produce something of value that benefits all. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and much of its success relies on strangers around the world upholding the communitys trust.

Due in large part to this optimistic view of human nature holding true, Wikipedia has been a success to the point where it is now the fifth-most visited website in the world. But this success has attracted many actors who seek not to enhance human understanding but to promote themselves, sometimes for illegitimate ends.

Wikipedia logo

For instance, in a much-publicized 2013 incident, accounts allegedly belonging to employees of a company called Wiki-PR, which wrote Wikipedia articles and edited pages on behalf of large corporate clients, were blocked and removed from the site.

It looks like a number of user accounts perhaps as many as several hundred may have been paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organizations or products, and have been violating numerous site policies and guidelines, including prohibitions against sockpuppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest, Wikimedia Foundation director Sue Gardner said in a statement on October 21, 2013.

But as the recent Signpost article makes clear, the problem of paid editing has not gone away. And some of the worst violators are retail forex and binary options companies, Smallbones, the author of the Signpost article and an editor at Wikipedia for the past 11 years, told The Times of Israel in a telephone interview. (The Times of Israel knows the identity of Smallbones, a retired professor of finance living in the United States, but he requested that his real name not be used here in an effort to minimize the harassment, both online and off, that he has experienced as a result of writing about the issue of paid editing.)

We very commonly get people trying to insert advertisements into articles, the Wikipedia editor said. But this Banc De Binary article is by far the worst case I have ever seen.

A screenshot from a 2013 promotional video for Banc de Binary, since removed from the internet (Youtube)

Banc de Binarys website first appeared online in about 2010. In the same year, a man by the name of Oren Shabat registered the Israeli firm E.T. Binary Options Ltd., an Israeli company that operated a call center and managed Banc de Binary. The company, which later changed its name to E.T.B.O. Services, is owned by Oren, his father Hezi and his brother Lior Shabat, according to Israels corporate registry. A smaller portion of the companys shares are held in trust for Yossi Almaliach, Ronen Tubul, Ohad Tzori and Yoram Menachem.

Banc De Binarys Wikipedia article was posted in 2012. At the time, the company billed itself as a group of private options bankers and claimed to be located at 40 Wall Street in New York City. (The company reportedly had a virtual office there. This address, known as the Trump Building, has been used by other binary options-associated firms like the SEC-sanctioned EZTrader and the e-wallet service Neteller).

By 2013, the article had been deleted twice by Wikipedia administrators for being purely promotional and thus violating Wikipedias policy against advertisements, Smallbones said, but the article kept reappearing and would become a focus of frenzied editing. Wikipedia editors also conducted an investigation that led to the banning of the articles original creators as sockpuppets, an internet term for users who assume multiple identities for purposes of deception.

Initially, Banc De Binary claimed to have an office at 40 Wall Street (Youtube screenshot)

In addition, a biography of Banc de Binarys founder Oren Shabat (who has adopted the name of Oren Laurent) was deleted by other editors three times in 2013 due to perceived promotional content or because the articles subject was considered not notable.

Smallbones explained that it is common practice for editors to propose deleting Wikipedia articles that seem to have been created for purposes of self-promotion or advertising and that lack objective information from a reliable news source.

The terms of use for Wikipedia and for almost all the websites run by Wikipedias parent, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, contain a simple provision regarding paid editing, he said. All paid editors must declare that they are paid and who is paying them, thus allowing volunteers to monitor and change any paid edits. Undeclared paid editors are not allowed to contribute to any of these sites. Advertising, marketing, and public relations text is prohibited by Wikipedia policy.

In addition, editors with a conflict of interest (for instance, individuals editing their own Wikipedia pages) are strongly discouraged from working on those articles where they cannot be objective. However, they are permitted to make suggestions on the talk page.

The Banc de Binary Tower in Ramat Gan in 2014 (CC BY-SA BDBJack, Wikipedia)

According to Smallbones, the flurry of activity surrounding the Banc De Binary article began when the US government filed civil charges against the company in June 2013, accusing it of illegally offering US investors binary options without being registered.

John Berry, a senior lawyer for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said in a May 2016 interview with BBC radio that not only had Banc De Binary sold ostensible financial products to investors without being licensed to do so, but it had deceived those investors as well:

We presented evidence to the court that Banc De Binary was telling US-based investors that Banc De Binary was actually based on Wall Street, and we had evidence of online chat discussions where a Banc De Binary broker would tell a US investor, Hey, I live, you know, right down the street from Wall Street, Ive got a Wall Street address, I work there, and so they had repeatedly lied to US-based customers about being in the United States and being based in the United States with a US address on Wall Street and a New York-based phone number.

In March 2016, the company was ordered by a US court to pay over $11 million in restitution and penalties for illegally soliciting US customers.

Regulators in Australia, New Zealand and Canada have issued warnings against Banc De Binary for illegal activity. Another brand that appears to be associated with Banc De Binary, Option.fm, has been blacklisted by financial regulators in Ontario, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Banc De Binary was also fined 350,000 ($370,500) by CySEC (the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission) in January 2016.

Two days after the US claim against Banc De Binary in 2013, the information about it went up on Banc De Binarys Wikipedia page. Over the next 11 months, over 500 edits would be made to the article, an unusually high number. According to the Signpost article, over 20 separate sockpuppets were banned from Wikipedia after editing this article.

Smallbones said that the edit wars surrounding the Banc De Binary article mainly involved certain editors removing information about the CFTC claim or moving it to the bottom of the article, while other editors would move the information back to the top. The first two sentences of any Wikipedia article are of paramount importance because they appear prominently in what is known as a knowledge box on the right-hand side of a Google search results page.

A screenshot of the Banc De Binary Wikipedia page as it appeared on May 23, 2017

As of this writing, the box reads Banc De Binary was an Israeli financial firm with a history of regulatory issues on three continents. On January 9, 2017, the company announced that it would be closing because of negative press coverage and its tarnished reputation.

But Smallbones says a long and exhausting battle was waged over several years to get the page to its present state. If youre getting sued by the SEC and CFTC you cant leave that out, and thats the only thing the suspected sockpuppets wanted to do once those lawsuits came in. The main thing they were trying to do was take the information out or put it down at the bottom of the article where no one would read it. Our editors on Wikipedia said no, this is very important.

Smallbones recalled an argument with a suspected sockpuppet who made the claim that the information should be removed because the CFTC is not a reliable source whereas Finance Magnates a trade publication for the binary options and forex industries is.

An IP editor (traceable to Israel), claiming to be BDB CEO Oren Shabat Laurent, made five identical edits in the same day, all of which were reverted, to include highlights of Laurents biography, and lists of products and countries served. He also reduced the coverage of the regulators lawsuits and buried it at the bottom of the article, Smallbones detailed in the Signpost article.

Oren Shabat Laurent (center) and his wife Sivan Laurent sponsor Israels 2020 Olympic hopefuls (Courtesy Olympic Committee of Israel)

Smallbones recalled that the back-and-forth disputes around the article were exhausting.

There were discussions on the Wikipedia discussion pages with 30 different people writing all at once, all on the same topic. It was totally impossible to figure out what everybody wanted. There were some people who would identify themselves as Banc De Binary and others who didnt identify themselves but were obviously very biased in favor of Banc De Binary.

Smallbones said it is hard for volunteer editors to compete with paid promoters.

Its extremely frustrating when people who are obviously paid are trying to distort information and were almost all volunteers. When someone can put five people on an article its very difficult for us to stop them at least in the short term.

In June 2014, a Wikipedia editor mentioned on a talk page that he had witnessed a new record in how much money someone had been offered to do crisis management for a Wikipedia page.

The editor described a recent contract to edit a single Wikipedia article, where the winning editor won the contract after charging something in the five digit range.

The Wikipedia page in question was the Banc De Binary page and the five-figure sum was offered on a freelancer site to anyone who could rewrite the article in a way that removed the negative coverage, Smallbones told The Times of Israel.

Banc De Binary is hilarious, another editor wrote in response to the first editors revelation. The Banc De Binary Wikipedia page was written by a paid editor (since banned) as a whitewash, and then Wikipedia editors got hold of it and converted it to a truthful article about what is clearly a very dodgy company. At that point, socks en masse descended to try to fix it for the company, and when that didnt work, more adverts to delete or revert the content appeared.

Banc De Binary logo

But Smallbones said the reality wasnt funny at all.

First of all, he estimated that about 300 people visited the articles different language versions per day, and he wonders how many of those, seeing positive statements, went on to trade with the company and lost money.

Second, he wonders how many hours of unpaid labor Wikipedia editors spent on cleaning up the article.

Their paid editors probably put in well over 100 hours on the article. And we had to put in as much time as they did, even more, because if we want to correct something, often we correct it two or three different times because there are a few editors with different points of view.

Ill see something I dont like and I will correct it and someone will correct me and someone will say thats not quite right and correct them and then Banc De Binary will come along and put in something else. Its very labor intensive.

On May 17, The Times of Israel reached out to Banc De Binarys founder Oren Shabat Laurent for a response to the allegations in this article but did not hear back from him.

Banc De Binary is not alone. Smallbones said that paid editing on Wikipedia is rampant in the binary options and retail forex industries. Many Wikipedia articles for such websites get deleted soon after they are put up, he said, because Wikipedia administrators strongly suspect they are created by paid editors for advertising purposes.

In a post from September 2016, a Wikipedia editor recommended several binary options and forex company pages for deletion (only an administrator, a Wikipedia editor with special privileges, can perform the actual deletion), because the editor believed the entries had been created by sockpuppets or suspected paid editors. These included entries for binary and forex firms Spotware Systems Ltd., XM.com, AnyOption, IQ Option, and JustForex.

All the articles named above have been badly polluted by promotional editors and need a checkup, the editor wrote. One thing I noticed across the multiple articles is a heavy tendency to cite how well regulated the various companies and exchanges are.

All the entries mentioned above were subsequently deleted.

Wikipedia is just one of many forums where some binary options and forex companies go to great lengths to create fake news.

Fraudulent binary options firms also employ an army of SEO (search engine optimization) specialists, who ensure that the warnings of government regulators or negative press are buried far down in Google search results. (Last year, after The Times of Israel published several articles describing the widespread fraudulent in the binary options industry, one employee wrote to us complaining that you are ruining the keyword binary options.)

But beyond that, some in the industry create fake news sites with an ostensibly large readership, featuring ostensible news reports that appear in Google News about the purported advantages of binary options trading.

Slide from a lecture by Google to the binary options and forex industry at the IFX Expo, May 2016 (Hunter Stuart/Times of Israel)

The industry also spends a fortune advertising on Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Some firms pay for sponsored content on mainstream news sites, hire expensive lobbyists and PR firms, cozy up to politicians and donate money to charities. Some companies have managed to get their own executives to appear as talking heads on mainstream television financial programs.

Some binary options companies have been known to make threats combined with offers (known as throffers) to individuals who post negative information about them, offering to refund part of their investment money if they take down their negative review, or if not, suggesting menacingly that we know where you live. Still other companies simply disappear from the internet as soon as the number of complaints mounts, only to pop up again under a different name and website.

If some of these efforts sound reminiscent of the recent outbreak of fraudulent and polluted content stemming from Russia, among other actors, this may be because the binary options industry has a significant Russian component.

Beyond the Israeli call centers and marketers who commit binary options fraud, many of the investors or ultimate beneficiary owners of binary options companies are Russian. Several of the banks where investors money goes after their credit cards are processed are Russian-owned, including but not limited to the Russian Commercial Bank in Cyprus, Sberbank, and VTB Bank in Georgia. Several Russian-owned forex companies, like Forex Club and Master Forex, have partnered with the Israeli platform provider SpotOption to create their own binary options brands, such as option4trade and mfxoptions.

A number of Russian-linked binary options firms, like option4trade and IQ Option, are hosted by the Russian-owned web hosting company Webzilla. Webzilla, whose owner Alexey Gubarev recently sued Buzzfeed for publishing his name in the unverified Trump dossier, has made no secret that forex companies are among its major clients. A number of these clients have been placed on government regulator warning lists.

IQ Option has been placed on an investor warning blacklist by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Forex Club was the subject of a regulator warning from Belgiums Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) in 2015.

As for Smallbones himself, he is a retired professor of finance and a former foreign currencies trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange who lived and taught in Russia and Hungary during the 1990s and 2000s.The retail forex industry, as well as its many fraudulent players, first came to his attention then.

I remember being in a little town in the Urals where all the factories had been closed. Posters were advertising forex trading with a $5 minimum deposit. The poor people who answered those ads had no chance of making any money, Smallbones said, but were likely going to be suckered into losing hundreds that they couldnt afford.

There were similar scams in Moscow in the 1990s, only with more money involved.

As for how the binary options scam started, Smallbones waxed philosophical.

Securities scams go back forever. The original Ponzi scheme was in the 1920s and it involved international postal coupons. Then in the 1960s people were scamming with warehouse receipts for salad oil. Anything that can be changed into money, there is a scam associated with it. People just look at forex and see all the tools needed are there to create a scam.

Smallbones is drawn to edit Wikipedia articles about financial fraud because the topic interests him. But he regrets that it took at least three years to get the Banc De Binary article to a place where he feels it is accurate and fair.

If thats how much work was required to correct one small instance of fake news, Smallbones was asked, how can companies like Google or Facebook, which rely heavily on algorithms as opposed to humans, keep the fraudsters at bay?

Smallbones replied, Yes, well, most Wikipedia editors would probably agree that they cant.

He was more optimistic about the ability of Wikipedia to root out lies and paid spin.

The scammers can make trouble and make us work a long time, he said, but in the long run, and this was a very long run, were going to prevail.

Banc De Binary CEO Oren Laurent in an interview posted on YouTube in August 2016 (YouTube screenshot)

More:
Wikipedia vs. Banc De Binary: A 3-year battle against binary options 'fake news' - The Times of Israel

A federal appeals court on Tuesday revived a Wikipedia lawsuit that challenges a U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) program of mass online surveillance, and claims that the government unconstitutionally invades people's privacy rights.

By a 3-0 vote, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, said the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, had a legal right to challenge the government's Upstream surveillance program.

The decision could make it easier for people to learn whether authorities have spied on them through Upstream, which involves bulk searches of international communications within the internet's backbone of cables, switches and routers.

Upstream's existence was revealed in leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

Lawyers for the Wikipedia publisher and eight other plaintiffs including Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch, with more than 1 trillion international communications annually, argued that the surveillance violated their rights to privacy, free expression and association.

The U.S. Department of Justice countered that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had authorized Upstream's review of communications between Americans and foreign "targets."

In October 2015, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Baltimore dismissed the lawsuit, finding a lack of evidence that the NSA, headquartered in Maryland, was conducting surveillance "at full throttle."

Writing for the appeals court panel, however, Circuit Judge Albert Diaz found "nothing speculative" about the Wikimedia Foundation's claims.

Diaz said the NSA interception and copying of communications showed "an invasion of a legally protected interest - the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures."

The foundation could also pursue its First Amendment claim because it had "self-censored" some communications in response to the Upstream surveillance, Diaz said.

By a 2-1 vote, the same panel also ruled the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the NSA's alleged "dragnet" to intercept "substantially all" text-based communications to and from the United States while conducting Upstream surveillance.

Justice Department spokesman Mark Abueg declined to comment.

Patrick Toomey, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said the ruling means Upstream "will finally face badly needed scrutiny" in the courts.

"This is an important victory for the rule of law," he said in a statement. "Our government shouldn't be searching the private communications of innocent people in bulk."

Some Democratic and Republican lawmakers are working on legislation to curtail parts of Upstream. A section of FISA that authorizes the program expires at year end.

The case is Wikimedia Foundation et al v National Security Agency et al, 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 15-2560.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Dustin Volz in Washington; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Phil Berlowitz)

WASHINGTON Former CIA Director John Brennan said on Tuesday it became clear last summer that Russia was attempting to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, and that he warned the head of Russia's FSB security service that such interference would hurt U.S. ties.

MANILA Hackers linked with Vietnam's government are likely targeting Philippine state agencies to gather intelligence related to the maritime dispute in the South China Sea, cybersecurity company FireEye said on Thursday.

DUBAI Qatar got into a war of words with some Gulf Arab allies on Wednesday after it said hackers had posted fake remarks by its emir against U.S. foreign policy, but their state-run media reported the comments anyway.

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Wikipedia can pursue NSA surveillance lawsuit: US appeals court - Reuters

With all that time on his hands after he retired as Microsoft CEO [not to mention all that money], Steve Ballmer began casting about for something new to do. He bought the L.A. Clippers a few years back, but hes a numbers guy, a tech guy and a business guy. What to do with those three interests? He created USAFacts.org, which put economists, data experts and designers to work assembling all the numbers they can find about government getting and spending.

There are trillions of dollars out there, most of them already published somewhere. But USAFacts is working to put them all together on an easy-to-use website and to organize them so they make sense a veritable Wikipedia of government money, useful, in time, for classroom curricula and for civic enlightenment. Because government isnt a business, profits arent a yardstick of effectiveness, but outcomes could be, and thats one thing Ballmer hopes USAFacts can offer. Whether theyre good or bad outcomes, he says thats up to citizens.

In short, its about values, not judgments.

Click here for the full archive of "Patt Morrison Asks" podcasts

What was the genesis of this, apart from the 800 on your math SATs?

I only had 790; just the facts!

I was talking to my wife about three years ago, when I first retired from Microsoft, about our nonprofit work, and she focused in on issues of child welfare and the like. She was saying, OK, you spent enough time doing this other job now its time to help me in our philanthropic stuff.

I dont know if it was some combination of being tired, or wanting time off, but, come on when it comes to taking care of the less fortunate, particularly kids in need, the government does that. It helps the poor, the sick, the disabled, and all we should do is pay our taxes and support the government.

And her response was, Not good enough. And of course she was right. On the other hand, it made me want to say, Hmm, I wonder if the government does do a good job of this? And I went searching for information. I had a hard time finding what I was looking for. I thought it would be nice to find something like you can about a public company. Couldnt find one.

I said, How do we get that amount of data about how government takes in its money, where it spends it, and perhaps most importantly, what kind of outcome? Because theres no profit outcome the government is maximizing against; certainly theres no way for any of us to say something has absolutely succeeded or absolutely failed because it depends upon your value set and the way you make trade-offs.

Even something like crime there are aspects of crime where reasonable people can disagree over whether a drop in incarceration statistics is a good thing or a bad thing, if its related to certain offenses that people see in different lights. So what we chose to do wasnt to say whats right or wrong, but rather show the measures on which government reports, and then let people come to their own points of view about good and bad.

Take, for example, are Social Security and Medicare working? Well, you would evaluate that presumably on what the quality of life looks like for seniors over 65. And you have to put together a bunch of government data to be able to paint that picture because without that picture, Im not sure how anyone would assess the efficacy of Social Security and Medicare.

Theres of course a whole other thing we havent even touched, which is, with whom specifically does government spend its money? Not what does it spend it on, but who are the contractors and the like? A number of websites have tried to do a good job on [this], and some seem to have made some progress.

If you go to USAFacts, what can you find? And what do you want it to look like in a year, two years, five years time?

What you can find today is a longitudinal view of how much the government raises in taxes and from whom, by family type and by income quintile, what the government spends its money on, again longitudinally. You go back, in most of these areas, as far as 1980. In some areas, the data is less available.

What does government spend its money on, by what Ill call constitutional charter? The preamble of the Constitution lays out some distinct missions for government, and we just took those to be the definition: establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, etc.

If you make them confront [their differences] in numbers as opposed to adjectives, people sometimes find theyre closer together than they thought.

Steve Ballmer

Well show you where the money got spent and then, where possible, well show you follow-on data on specifics of how the moneys being used, or outcomes.

What is happening to CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions? Whats happening in terms of the number of crimes that people report, the number of arrests, the number of people who wind up in prison, how long they stay there?

What really is the quality of life for people pre- and post-income transfers coming from the government, like Medicaid or food stamps or some of the other social programs?

In most cases, we will show you things pre- and post-inflation adjustment, as a percentage of all spending. Thats the kind of thing you can find in USAFacts. Youll find that written up in a linear narrative in something we call the annual report, a document thats like a corporate 10-K.

Will this become a kind of Wikipedia of government figures?

Thats a reasonable way to think about it, as a Wikipedia of government figures. Theres a lot more information that wed like to get in here. Wed like to show outcome data, down to the state, maybe even the county, city, maybe even school district level.

We hope to package the information so that as things become topical in the news, you can see an amalgamated set of relevant data on important topics of the day. And we can tweet that out and otherwise make that available through social means.

Were there any pieces of data that you thought were important that you wanted to include, but couldnt find?

There were in a number of areas. Take the supplemental poverty measure I think that one only goes back about 12 years.

If you really want to measure the outcome of the healthcare industry, to understand how many procedures of what form happen every year and then be able to detail the cost for each procedure or each disease type, we have to look harder. Or maybe that doesnt exist.

Healthcare has emerged as the single largest spend-point in the U.S. economy, and the government heavily regulates healthcare. It pays for healthcare, and sometimes the whole structure of the industry is dependent on what government does. Having a complete understanding of the industry is important to understanding governments role.

The number of guns in the United States thats not a statistic thats captured, and yet we think it would be of interest. Whatever side of the gun issue you are on, its an interesting issue for people to understand how many people own guns, how many total guns are there out there, how many guns get sold every year. Some of that data is available. Some of it is not.

Is there a difference between how government keeps its books and how business does, given that each of them has a different goal?

Businesses use something called generally accepted accounting principles; government does not. Actually, thats not true some parts of government do and other parts do not, in some very important ways. When you build a new bridge, do you show all of the costs in one year? Or do you show all of the cash going out in one year, but then the cost is borne as the bridge gets used? This is a way it would be done in the private sector.

So there are ways in which I think it would be useful, if nothing else for comprehension, because more people understand business accounting than government accounting. On the other hand, most of the outcome measures of government theres just no equivalent properly represented in the business world. Something like an arrest rate or the number of people in jail should you show the number of people in jail? Should you show the number of people in jail on one day? Should you show the total number of people who go through the system? Because youre not measuring profit on these outcome measures. You have to decide whats really important.

This is a nonpartisan site thats all about information. But putting that out there supposes that what underlies some of the national rancor is a lack of information. Do you think thats right?

Well, I might not say it exactly that way. My experience has been that people can get themselves very worked up about their differences, and yet if you make them confront [their differences] in numbers as opposed to adjectives, people sometimes find theyre closer together than they thought. Whether that will solve the differences or not, I dont know, but it really cant hurt to have both sides work with the same data set.

Youre a mathematician, youre an economist , youre a business guy, so you know the Disraeli line about lies, damned lies and statistics.

We really worked hard to provide context, historical context, context of other numbers the government is also doing. If you spend $10 billion on something, is that large or small? It depends on your perspective. So we will show you what thats like as a percentage of government spend. People know what $10 billion means to them.

Now, can the numbers support differing points of view? Absolutely, they can. Ill give you one example:

The number of household fires and the damage done is down quite dramatically over the last 37 years. Most people might say oh, thats great, nobody can disagree with that. Ill bet you can find people who will say, Hey, look: Its because weve put such onerous restrictions on people in terms of product safety, the price of these products has gone crazy and the value in terms of reduced fires is not justified relative to the increased cost of products. Its not an argument I would make or not make Im silent as to the point but even on something that seems so genuinely good, and everybody can agree on it, Im sure you see differences just because people make different trade-offs.

As youve been looking at the data your team has been collecting, what findings surprised you?

Im not saying any one of them is good or bad. Im just going to say they surprised me:

Im thinking of a day when you have a candidates debate or something on the floor of Congress, and someone a candidate, a member will say, well according to USAFacts

Id love it. But you know what theyre really saying: according to the numbers published by the government of the United States. Theres not a number in there that wasnt published by government, or a mathematical computation from numbers published by government. Id be pleased for them to quote USAFacts. Id be even more pleased if they used USAFacts to find the numbers and then they quoted the official government source that provides the information.

The reason why numbers are so good is that theyre not liberal and theyre not conservative, theyre not Democrat and theyre not Republican.

If you were grading how government keeps track of its numbers, how efficient it is insofar as you can tell about using its money? Is there a grade you would assign it?

In terms of how good it is about its numbers, Id give it a B-plus or A-minus, for the amount of data that it collects. Id give it a C-minus or less for its ability to put the numbers in a digestible and usable form that gives it real perspective and context.

The second question you ask is a little different: Does government use its money efficiently? I cant tell you whether the screwdriver that gets used to build the warship is too expensive or not too expensive.

I will say, though, that when you look to the bulk of spending, I dont sit there and say, Wow, most of this money is probably wasted. If you look at the people who work for government, most of the jobs are teachers, policemen, people who work in government hospitals its hard to think of those as, quote, bureaucrats.

Thats a big part of the cost base. The second big part of the cost base comes from transfer payment. Theres one thing thats true about Social Security and Medicare: Theyre very efficient. If youre trying to transfer money to a human being, they do it very, very effectively, very efficiently.

Some people will say, you shouldnt be transferring the money, but thats not an efficiency question. Thats an effectiveness and value judgment.

As far as the Clippers go, this one question: Youve heard that people sit down at a slot machine, they play, they play, they play, they win nothing. They walk away. The next person comes along, sits down, one spin wins the jackpot.

So here are Clippers fans in Los Angeles whove heard a question about whether the Clippers are going to move, and they feel like that: Theyve invested and invested and invested, and just when things are looking good are the Clippers leaving?

Oh, no. Thats I wont say its a silly question, but its a silly question. I did notice it was a little bit out in the Tweetosphere recently, and I dont really understand where it comes from.

Ive been black and white, crystal clear: The Clips arent leaving L.A. If I wanted to take a team that I paid $2 billion for, cut the value by maybe as much as 50%, Id move it out of L.A. because teams in L.A. are valued more. Theres just no chance well leave Los Angeles.

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How Clippers' owner Steve Ballmer is trying to create the Wikipedia of government figures - Los Angeles Times

Students at SHS DPT program in Manhattan edited medical Wikipedia entries with Wikiproject Medicine.

There are roughly 32,000 medical entries on Wikipedia, according to NPR, and the health pages had 4.9 billion views in 2013. The entries validity have long been a source of controversy as NPR reported in November, and to remedy incorrect information, Wikipedia launched Wikiproject Medicine, a collaborative effort to improve medical accuracy on the site. For the second year in a row, students at Touro College School of Health Sciences (SHS) Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) program in Manhattan were a part of the effort.

In April, students in Dr. Shira Weiners class on healthcare education spent a day correcting Wikipedia entries, referencing high level studies as sources. The class teaches students how to effectively communicate with patients using proper medical terminology. Wikipedia entries, with their mix of scientific jargon and colloquial language, were the perfect exercise for the students. The students were led by Lane Rasberry, the Wikipedian in Residence at Consumer Reports. Using an algorithm, Rasberry pointed to entries on the site that experience both high volume web traffic, but have low quality information.

My students are healthcare providers and Wikipedia is one of the most visible and visited sites for health-related information, explained Dr. Weiner. Theres a lot of incorrect information out there and our students have a responsibility to share their knowledge so people can use that information to improve their lives.

Students edited a bevy of articles on chronic pain, joint pain, physical therapy education, doctor-patient confidentiality, spinal disease and sports injuries. This year, Dr. Weiner noted, due to the high-profile nature of the entries, students engaged in a back-and-forth dialog with other Wikipedia editors from around the world.

"Contributing to the physical therapy literature was an extremely worthwhile experience, said student Tamara Levy. Knowing that we have taken part in perpetuating scientific information has given me a greater appreciation for the importance of making sure the public receives accurate information.

I never realized how much effort goes into making a Wikipedia page, added student Nicole Edi. There are so many people out there who are constantly checking and updating the information using reliable sources. This was a great opportunity for us to learn about the importance of educating others on topics that we are learning about.

The pages that Touro students edited have been viewed 156,000 times since the event.

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Making the World Safer One Wikipedia Entry at a Time - Touro College News