Archive for the ‘Wikipedia’ Category

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is waging a war on fake news – Mashable


Mashable
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is waging a war on fake news
Mashable
More than 16 years after founding Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, Jimmy Wales is determined to reform another critical source of information: the news. Conceptually similar to Wikipedia, the Wikitribune will be a collaborative effort between ...

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Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is waging a war on fake news - Mashable

Team India abused on Champions Trophy 2017 Wikipedia page – DunyaNews Pakistan

Last Updated On 18 May,201709:07 am

The Indian team was labeled with indecent and inappropriate names under the Group B matches

WEB DESK Something out of the ordinary happened when an anonymous person changed the data on the Wikipedia page of the ICC Champions Trophy 2017.

It is usual when a Wikipedia page is edited by some random person over the Internet while at the same time causing widespread anger and misconceptions or even laughter in some cases.

The Indian team is the current champion of ICC Champions Trophy and will fly to United Kingdom to defend the title soon after the ongoing IPL that is going to conclude on May 21.

However, things turned ugly for the team before the start of the Champions Trophy campaign when an anonymous person altered the data on the Wikipedia page of the mega event.

The Indian team was labeled with indecent and inappropriate names under the Group B matches schedule on the Wiki page.

The recent move caused an outage over the internet as diehards dubbed it as a cheap tactic to defame Team India.

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Team India abused on Champions Trophy 2017 Wikipedia page - DunyaNews Pakistan

Exeter City left-back Craig Woodman has Wikipedia page edited in humorous way – Devon Live

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Exeter City defender Craig Woodman has often made the headlines this season, arguably being one of the club's most important players, and his praise has lead to a slight change on his Wikipedia page.

Back in December, Grecians boss Paul Tisdale compared the 34-year-old to the German legend Franz Beckenbauer, which made headlines worldwide. Now, Woodman's name on Wikipedia has been amended to "Craig Beckenbauer Woodman".

As well as this name change, under his Exeter City career profile, a line reads "He fired a worldy against Scunthorpe at the end of the 2013-14 season to knock the Irons off their perch (even though they won League 2.)"

The comparison came after City's 3-1 win at Cheltenham just before Christmas. After the match, Tisdale said: "Craig Woodman is playing like Beckenbauer at the minute he's just unbelievable at the moment, I don't know what's happened, but I think he could play with a broken arm he's that good."

The left-back returned to action on Sunday night as he started City's 3-3 thrilling draw at Carlisle United, after suffering a broken arm back in March.

Tisdale admitted that the left-back is now a doubt for the second leg after sustaining a knock in the game.

He said: "Craig hasn't played a game for a while so he was challenged a fair bit physically and then he got a nasty knock just before he came off, so how that will affect him now going forward I don't know.

"We'll have to assess that on Monday and Tuesday."

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Exeter City left-back Craig Woodman has Wikipedia page edited in humorous way - Devon Live

Wikipedia Boss Jimmy Wales: We Have a Gender Imbalance Problem and I’m Editing Articles to Address It! – Heat Street

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has fessed up to editing articles on the online encyclopedia to reverse what he refers to as the sites gender imbalance problem.

Talking to the Media Matters podcast, Wales revealed that he constructed a bookmark that directed him to the categoryBritish women novelists and would edit articles until he changed web browsers and lost his bookmark.

Wales said: One of the things that Im aware of is that Wikipedia does have a gender imbalance problem and that gender imbalance problem is reflected in the content in various ways.

One of the specific ways is that if you look at novelists who have won important literary awards, and you look at the female novelists and the male novelists, the male novelists tend to have much longer biographies. Somebody did a study showing this.

I can tell youI know hundreds of Wikipedia editors. It is not because the male wikipedia editors think female novelists are not worth reading or are uselessits an unconscious bias.

People write about the books theyve read and turns out there is a gender imbalance in the quality novels. There is such a thing as literature that is written by women and more read by women than men. OK?

But that shouldnt be reflected as a bias in Wikipedia and I thought I should on a regular basis take a look at these articles and click the page and just say, Heres a short entry. Ill go and do 10 minutes of research and see if I can find some basic facts to add to the articles. Ive done things like that and I think thats an interesting thing to do.

Wales has previously been exposed as having edited a wiki page on another website he co-founded to remove references to its porn coverage.

Among Wales most recent gender-based edits have been removing a referenceon the Wikipedia page of the novelist Marisha Pessl to her being included in an 11 of the Hottest Female Writers in the World listicle and editing the entry of scientist Dr. Kiki Sanford to add in the first sentence of her entry that she is a neurophysiologist in addition to being a science communicator. (Wales wrote, I was just comparing how we write about male vs female scientists in the public eye, stating that female scientists should have their professional qualifications in their first sentence of their entry as is the common practice with their male counterparts.)

Wales concluded on the Media Matters podcast: The gender imbalance is important and its something we are trying to focus more on but its a tough problem.

Especially when you lose your bookmark

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Wikipedia Boss Jimmy Wales: We Have a Gender Imbalance Problem and I'm Editing Articles to Address It! - Heat Street

Turkey Can’t Block This Copy of Wikipedia – Observer

Turkish courts upheld the state ordered ban of Wikipediaon Friday, according to Voice of America. The crowdsourced encyclopedia has been inaccessible in Turkey since the end of April, asThe Washington Post reported, since the administration of Recep Tayyip Erdoandeclared it a threat to national security.

In response, hacktivists have made a copy of Turkish Wikipedia and posted it online using a new way of addressing web content called the InterPlanetary File System, or IPFS. The Turkish government cant block this copy of Wikipedia because the format uses a slew of open source technology to change the way our browsers retrieve data. Its a decentralized system, which allows the same set of data to live in multiple places while still enabling browsers to find any one of them with only a single address.

Turkey was able to block Wikipedia because the site has an address that goes to a real place (that place is a server), so if they block the wires that lead to that place, they can block the site. IPFS doesnt address data with a location, it addresses it by identifying the content itself. The system goes out and finds the nearest copy of that content. Block access to one copy, and it will just find another copy.

In a talk at TEDxSan Francisco, Juan Benet, the originator of IPFS, explains the shortcomings of the current way we address content on the web using the example of a physical library.

Imagine we could only reference books by the physical location of one copy, he says. So, in other words, you want to readTo Kill a Mockingbird. You go to look it up and the file catalog tells you that the only place you can find the book is in one library, in one room, against one wall and at the end of one shelf. When you go there and its not there, youre out of luck.

Of course, you didnt care about reading that exact copy ofTo Kill a Mockingbird.Youd be happy to read any copy. Thats what the IPFS does online. It encourages copies to live on lots of servers, and the internet works better when data doesnt have to retrieved from far away. It also knows how to verify that each copy is exactly the same, that not one bit of data has been changed.

We previously reported on a recent Spotify acquisition, Mediachain, that used similar technology to track the attribution of online content.

Pages change online all the time, but thats fine too. IPFS also knows how to keep track of versions of a file. It can show you the latest updateof a page, but it can also find prior versions. Version control is a critical aspect of how Wikipedia works as well, and it was key when we dug into the whitewashing of the entry concerning a noted 80s banking crook.

It isnt just state actors that can block our access to content. The current addressing system is vulnerable to large scale denial-of-service attacks. Even though most of these attacks arent able to take down sites or cant do it for long, they still end up costing service providers money, costs that they then forward on to us.

In a decentralized system, it would be very complicated to pull off a DDoS attack against every copy of a site, and even if an attacker found every copy, the publisher could just make more. It gives the good guys a way to go on the offensive.

The internet is the planets most important technology, Benet says in his talk, and he believes it can work better. This demonstration with a cached copy of a recent version of Turkish Wikipedia is a good early test.

Find the first copy the IPFS teamposted here. If updated versions are saved, the latest copy can always be found here. There are lots of other ways to find these files right now, though most of the others require some help from technical friends, but software to enhance the systems usability should be in the field very soon.

Moving forward, the IPFS developers hope to create a read/write version of Wikipedia, so the encyclopedia can function on IPFS the same way it does on HTTP now, permitting anyone who finds it to edit its content.

Which would also mean that no one could stop users from editing the site either, making its information nearly impossible to hide.

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Turkey Can't Block This Copy of Wikipedia - Observer