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"All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up," observes French theorist Guy Debord in his 1989 book Panegyric. Unbound by print, Wikipedia's infinite pages might be the perfect medium to record thatboundless history.The ubiquitous, free online encyclopaedia was born of the information revolution, and has transformed our access to knowledge. But its launch in 2001 also coincides with the heightened era of global terrorism since 9/11. Consequently Wikipedia operates amid competing forces: the desire to free knowledge versus a culture of mass surveillance.

In 2013 those forces collided. Edward Snowden's bombshell revelations that the US government's National Security Agency indiscriminately tracks and records the metadata of millions of innocent citizen's phone calls, emails and web searches sent a shockwave around the world.

It had a direct effect on what people were searching on Wikipedia. A study published by the Berkeley Technology Law Journal found traffic to Wikipedia articles related to terrorism fell by nearly 30 per cent after Snowden's whistleblowing.

This isn't necessarily a good thing. As Snowden himself warns in the 2015 Academy Award-winning documentary Citizenfour: "[When people] are careful about what they type into search engines because they know it's being recorded that limits the boundaries of their intellectual exploration."

Wikipedia agrees. "The right to information and right to freedom of expression are fundamental human rights and we'll stand by and defend those values," says Katherine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation that operates Wikipedia. "Knowledge is so fundamental to allowing us to make decisions that empower and fulfil us as individuals."

In March 2015, the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation filed a lawsuit challenging the NSA's"dragnet surveillance", along with other defendants. In October 2015, the lawsuit was dismissed, but appealed in December 2016 and awaits a ruling.

For many years this democratic ideal of free-knowledge-for-all was the driving force behind the internet. Not anymore, says Maher, who is a keynote speaker at Melbourne Knowledge Week discussing the future and importance of free knowledge.

"The internet is increasingly a highly commercialised place where privacy is illusory, where platforms and information tend to be highly concentrated, where information is algorithmically presented to you with tremendous bias based on what it is you looked at last. The internet is no longer a free and open space."

Wikipedia, however, resists advertising and relies totally on some 2.5 million global donors to survive.

"Wikipedia is one of the remaining free and open spaces on the internet," says Maher, who has a background in IT and advocacy with international development organisations UNICEF, The World Bank and Access Now. "What we stand for is not just Wikipedia, but the open ecosystem of free information across the world. The need for us to create information. The need for inquiry. The need for sharing. The need for transparency and accountability. The need for presentation and celebration of languages and cultures. That's not the internet."

But what about threats to free speech from other governments? Don't countries like Russia and China censor Wikipedia or block access to it? "It's less common than you might imagine," says Maher. "If governments try to get us to take information down, we don't. We have very strong encryption technology that means that if you choose to block Wikimedia [sites] you block 'all of it' or 'none of it'. We found most places in the world choose 'none'."

Established in 2003 the non-profit Wikimedia foundation has a staff of 277 that operates the technology behind the Wikimedia sites, including the Wikicommons with 35 million free images, Wikinews and Wikipedia.

Typically, criticismof Wikipedia is over how totrust a free site that relies on editors and volunteers around the world to supply its information.But it's trust and transparency that Maher perceives as its strongest selling point. Indeed, a visitor to the site can pore over past edits and explore updates, changes and misinformation.

Since Wikipedia's inception, the scribes documenting world history in a neutral, apolitical style have been correcting errors and contending with trolls, pranksters and hoaxers. Fake news isn't new, says Maher. Disinformation, propaganda and yellow journalism are fake news by another name, she says.

Critics argue that unlike venerable encyclopaedias such as Britannica, Wikipedia articles lack consistent depth. Maher says they are rectifying this, particularly the content's white male bias.

"We realised a few years back that of all the biographies on English Wikipedia, only 16 per cent were about women. That's out of more than 1.3 million biographies. So that in and of itself is an opportunity to think about how we write in the remaining 34 per cent [of the female population]."

Increasing its international language versions is also a priority.

To a cosy First World audience, Maher's refrain that "knowledge is power"can sound like a shop-worn Enlightenment slogan. Maher cautions against such cynicism.

"The biggest threat to free information is ourselves," she declares. "We forget how valuable knowledge is to the development and furthering of our society. Accuracy of information, continued inquiry, this has always propelled us forward. If we lose value and appreciation for that, then some of the other structures start to crumble."

Meanwhile, in remote Utah, the NSA has built a new $2 billion data storage facility that records another more personal history. As Wired writer James Bamford describes, "Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches." It offers a dark spectre to Wikipedia's ambitions. Surveillance history does not fill up either. If we allow it.

Democratisation of Knowledge with Katherine Maher, Melbourne Knowledge Week, May 1, 7.30pm-9pm. A live stream is available: https://www.facebook.com/KnowledgeMelbourne/

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Wikipedia's Katherine Maher on free knowledge in the age of mass surveillance - The Sydney Morning Herald

Jimmy Wales, founder of the user-edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia, pauses during an interview with Reuters at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem October 21, 2009. Ronen Zvulun / Reuters

The initial goal is to raise sufficient funds to hire 10 professional journalists. The website is set up to encourage supporters to give $10 a month, but the amount and frequency of gifts can easily be modified.

The online proliferation of fake news, some of it generated for profit and some for political ends, became a major topic of angst and debate in many developed countries during last year's U.S. presidential election.

Charlie Beckett, media professor at the London School of Economics, welcomed Wikitribune as an attempt to tackle a lack of public trust in mainstream media, but questioned whether it would have the scale and reach to stem the flow of fake news.

"The kind of people who will pay attention to Wikitribune and contribute to it are people who are already pretty media-literate," he told Reuters.

Wales argued in his video that because Internet users expected news to be free, news sites were reliant on advertising money, which incentivised them to produce "clickbait" rather than quality output.

He also said social media networks, where an ever-increasing number of people get their news, were designed to show users what they wanted to see, confirming their biases.

The Wikitribune website said articles would be authored, fact-checked and verified by journalists and volunteers working together, while users would be able to flag up issues and submit fixes for review.

Beckett said journalists could benefit from tapping into expertise or information held by readers, but said this was already being done by many mainstream media. He also said it was not a miracle remedy against inaccuracy.

"There's nothing magical about being a citizen. As a citizen you have your own bias and prejudice and experience as well," he said.

Excerpt from:
Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Launches Project to 'Fix the News' - NBCNews.com

The Hindu

AIADMK feud spills over to Wikipedia The Hindu The Wikipedia page of the AIADMK was blocked from further editing on Thursday after a spurt in activity on the page with the section on office-bearers edited multiple times during the day, particularly with reference to V.K. Sasikala and O. Panneerselvam. AIADMK feud spills onto Wikipedia, names of gen secy, leader changedDeccan Chronicle Too many edits on AIADMK page, Wikipedia blocks further editsOneindia all 23 news articles »

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AIADMK feud spills over to Wikipedia - The Hindu

While sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have been plagued with bogus political storiescreated by Moldovan teenagers and Pizzagate conspiracy theorists, Wikipedia, the webs de facto encyclopedia, has remained notably fake news free. As co-founder Jimmy Wales put it in recently in an interview with VICE News, the phenomenon of fake news has had almost no impact on Wikipedia.

Wales would be first to tell you why: Wikipedias thousands of volunteer editors and the sites high sourcing standards, he says, are remarkably effective at keeping even contested entries clean.

Now Wales, 50, wants to apply whats worked at Wikipedia to the actual business of news. Its called Wikitribune, which like Wikipedia will depend on its community of readers for funding and real-time fact checking, alongside a paid staff of journalists who report, write and fact check stories. The projects tagline: Evidence-based journalism.

To raise money forthe launch, Wales is running a 29-day fundraising campaign that bears more than a passing resemblance to Wales infamous annual pleas for Wikipedias funding drives. The site will be supported by monthly contributors, rather than ad revenue.

The number of people who have been willing to pay for subscriptions has really skyrocketed, Wales said in a CNN interview on Tuesday, which leads him to believe the public is really ready to say we want quality journalism.

Wales has been thinking about this idea for some time now. In an interview in January, he flicked at a couple of ideas that are now a part of the Wikitribune project. Rather than focus on partnerships with sites like what Facebook is doing with Politifact, which Wales characterized as a top-down approach, Wikitribune will allow its readers to verify journalists sources in real-time.

Wales gives Facebook a lot of credit for attacking the problem of fake news. It is great that Facebook is turning to outside third parties like Politifact and Snopes.com, Wales said in an email, although hes skeptical of whether Facebooks approach will ultimately work.

I dont think anybody who is trying to think about being a good citizen online is comfortable with saying, well, Facebook should decide what [news] were looking at, he said.

Traditional journalism has also been top-down, but Wales said that wont be the approach at Wikitribune. And I do not agree that hiring journalists to work side by side as equals with community members is top down, he said. That is old-school thinking that journalists are by default above the community.

He also said that advertising was a factor in propagating fake news on social media, and that readers can reasonably wonder if the New York Times [and other news publications] is being influenced inappropriately by advertisers.

On Wikipedia, reliable sources are the standard to which citations are held, meaning that editors can and frequently do yank things that arent properly sourced. With some exceptions, academic studies have consistently maintained that Wikipedia, on the whole, is accurate and competitive with non-community sourced rivals like Encyclopedia Britannica.

However, the system is imperfect. A 2011 survey found that only 9 percent of Wikipedia editors identified as female, and a 2012 paper in American Behavioral Scientist, a peer-reviewed academic journal, found that the number of active Wikipedia editors dropped from around 50,000 in 2006 to about 35,000 in 2011, resulting in a substantial decrease in the quality of Wikipedia articles.

Still, Wikitribune is not Wikipedia, and it will not a be news site written by Wikipedia editors. Presumably, Wikitribune articles will be shared on Facebook and other social networks. And Facebook, where 44 percent of Americans get news (at least occasionally), is where a huge part of the problem lies. Facebook is meant to be a platform where people share photos and things with their friends, he said.

Though Wikitribunes citizen-professional collaboration model is untested, it will just be one publication among many whose articles get passed around on Facebook, and Wales knows this. He said over email that because Wikitribune relies in part on the broader community, it will be able to do more to point out fake stories.

Community participation means scale, Wales said. How much time does the New York Times spend debunking fake news? Not a lot.

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Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks you'll pay for crowdsourced journalism that's free of fake news - VICE News

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Wikipedia founder tackles fake news with Wikitribune - Tribune-Review