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Montreal Skyline at Wikimania. John Lubbock/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.Closed governments hate open systems. Its so obvious, theres almost no point in saying it. Yet Wikipedias very obviousness, its ubiquitousness in the information ecosystem of modern Western societies is the very thing that seems to make it go unnoticed. It doesnt invade your life with its push notifications and little red update buttons that offer you a dopamine release in exchange for clicking them until they disappear. Its not about you and your personal brand, offering you a way to advertise in exchange for making you the product.

Wikipedia is now (in terms of hours of work), the largest collaborative human endeavour ever undertaken.

It wont hit you over the head with constant advertising, except for its own when it asks for donations. These donations go towards the server costs, the staff who support the website and update the MediaWiki software it all runs on, develop new projects, and support the community of Wikimedians around the world who volunteer millions of hours to create what is now (in terms of hours of work), the largest collaborative human endeavour ever undertaken. Yet unlike the pyramids announcing the greatness of some king or other, Wikipedia is a self-effacing humanist project, dedicated to creating "a world where every human being has access to the sum of all knowledge", in their own language, and for free.

This weekend the community of people who contribute to Wikipedia (and its sister projects) meets in Montreal for their annual conference, Wikimania. Hundreds of editors, developers, staff and other community members meet every year in a different location to talk about where our work is heading, and I find it wonderful that so many people care so much about creating free, open source information which can benefit the world in ways we have not even imagined yet.

Last week, our community learned of the murder of Bassell Khartabil, a Palestinian Wikimedian who was head of Creative Commons Syria and started a website to record Syrias cultural heritage before it was obliterated by the civil war. The news did not come as much of a surprise to those of us who had followed his case, but though we may never have met him, there was a feeling of losing a fellow traveller, and that our community was under attack.

In May, the Turkish government decided to blockthe entire Wikipedia domain.

In May, the Turkish government decided to block the entire Wikipedia domain, comprising all 298 language versions of Wikipedia, including Latin, Scottish Gaelic and a number of native American languages. All this because it objected to references in two articles to claims that Turkeys security services had been smuggling arms to extremist groups in Syria. Due to Wikipedias secure servers, individual pages cannot be blocked, so the only answer for an angry authoritarian is to block it all.

China did exactly the same thing in 2015, though in both of these countries, using a VPN or changing your DNS can usually get around the filtering. Turkish techies have also mirrored Wikipedia on numerous servers, and there is also the option to download a partial offline version of Wikipedia if you want to do so. Unlike some commercial companies, Wikimedia has no incentive to cave into authoritarian demands to self-censor. Part of the way the charity protects itself legally is by not controlling the content the community creates. Its not up to us to edit pages or remove content people dont like.

English Wikipedia has close to 5.5 million articles, and around 130,000 regular editors, meaning that it is constantly patrolled and peer-reviewed, helping it to stay free from vandalism and systemic bias. Dont be fooled by the lazy journalism that especially sports writers like to do about how X sports player had his page hacked; the offending content was probably removed about 5 minutes after they screenshot it.

Participants at the hackathon at Wikimania 2017 in Montreal. John Lubbock/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.This is not to say that the information is complete by a long way. There are still too many companies who go around inserting advertising copy into their Wikipedia articles, and there are still millions of people who do not have access to the internet. Global internet penetration has recently passed 50% with 66% of people now using mobiles globally. As billions of people connect to the internet in the coming decades, it is vital they have access to free, unbiased information.

Wikipedias biggest problem, of diversity, is also related to the way closed societies seek to control the information their citizens have access to. The answer to bad information is more information, and our biggest challenge is to get more information on Wikipedia about women and non-Western cultures. Surveys have shown that the big majority of Wikipedia editors are men from Europe and North America.

Wikipedias biggest problem, of diversity, is also related to the way closed societies seek to control the information their citizens have access to.

This systemic imbalance in the people who contribute to Wikipedia (and the other Wikimedia projects) creates a systemic bias which will take a lot of work to reduce. If you want information about Kurdish culture, or you want to study Basque or find sources in Arabic or Kiswahili, the available information on Wikipedia is only a fraction of that in English.

Authoritarian governments like Kazakhstan, Syria or Zimbabwe are afraid of a fast, unmonitored internet infrastructure which offers access to this kind of information, so if they cant control the information, they will probably block the IP address on the network. But governments change, and access to better information will always be a part of that change.

Some people I talk to still dont realise that they can edit Wikipedia themselves. We often get people phoning our office to ask us to remove something from the site that they find objectionable (including, once, their own date of birth). This is another aspect of the fact that Wikipedia is not-for-profit and doesnt spend any money on advertising itself, despite the fact that English Wikipedia alone receives 7.3 billion pageviews a month.

In emerging economies, understanding and knowledge of Wikipedia and how it works is even more limited, with over 75% of people in Nigeria and India saying they have never heard of Wikipedia. Then theres the very many people who think that Wikileaks is part of the same organisation. Wikileaks is not even based on a Wiki software that allows anyone to edit pages.

In the UK, we are trying to encourage our diaspora and minority language communities to get involved with editing Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia is already very good, and if we are to realise the goal of giving everyone in the world access to the sum of all knowledge, we need to encourage more people to contribute to smaller Wikipedias, like Kurdish or Scottish Gaelic, both of which have just a fraction of the articles that exist on the English Wikipedia.

With the Kurdish community in particular, we are trying to encourage people to look at the reconstruction and development of the Kurdish regions in the long term, and to show them how important a free, open encyclopaedia will be to the future development of the education sector in Kurdistan.

You have to chip away at oppression and prejudice over decades, and small acts of defiance build up like a hill.

Open Access technology is a prerequisite to a more open society. If you want to contribute to reducing global inequalities, improving a minority language Wikipedia is one of the best ways you can do it, short of giving away all your possessions or dedicating your life to building schools in sub-Saharan Africa. You probably wont receive any recognition for your work, but in 100 years, many millions of people may have read your words, never knowing that it was you who wrote them. You may have helped a doctor save a life, or helped someone to get a job, but you will never be aware of it. That is not something you can put a value on, but there is a kind of beauty to it.

Authoritarian regimes are never toppled in a day. You have to chip away at oppression and prejudice over decades, and small acts of defiance build up like a hill that you climb every day,depositing a small amount of dirt until the hill becomes a mountain that cant be ignored. We always say that Wikipedia is a work in progress; its not perfect, but its pretty amazing, and nobody needs anybodys permission to help improve it.

Ive no idea what humanity will look like in 100 years, but as long as we are still here, we hope that Wikipedia will be here too, educating millions of people and providing transparent, free and neutral information that will be used in ways we cannot anticipate yet. One thing I think is certain is that todays dictators will be long dead, and it is unlikely that history, or their Wikipedia pages, will look favourably on their crimes.

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Authoritarian governments hate Wikipedia, which is why you should get involved - Open Democracy

Call it Siri fooled by vandals on Wikipedia. If you ask Siri, a virtual assistant inside the Apple iPhone, iPad and Mac, "what is an Indian", the answer that comes from the "smart" assistant might offend you. And for right reasons. Siri in its reply says that "they are a little brown and they smell like curry and they eat it".

--

Update: Siri's weird answer to term Indian was due to vandalism on Wikipedia and Apple seems to have made additional changes to its virtual assistant to ensure that it doesn't pick up incorrect Wikipedia answers anymore. Now, if you ask Siri "what is an Indian" it is giving an appropriate and regular answer.

--

Smart assistant, did you say? This is a rather dumb answer, or some sick joke played by a college student. For its answer, Siri says that the source is Wikipedia. But then it is also an answer that some college kid somewhere found funny and decided to put up on the Internet, from where Siri picked it up.

The interesting bit here is that although Siri is at fault here, and its answer is making Indians on the web rather furious, it is accurate in saying that its source for this "brown and curry" definition is Wikipedia. A Buzzfeed report mentions that what Siri is doing here is that it is pulling the definition from Wikipedia. However, instead of pulling it from the live page, which is there right now, it is pulling in information from a Wikipedia edit made on that page on June 8, 2017. On that day someone had put in the information that Siri is using on the Indian page of Wikipedia. Although the changes were quickly rolled back -- this is how Wikipedia works -- for some reason Siri is still using the cached version of the page for its definition.

For Apple, the incident is not only embarrassing but also shows the challenge it faces in making its virtual assistant more useful and accurate. For a lot of Siri answers, the company relies on third-party sources like Wikipedia and the data that these sources have is not always accurate.

Google, which too has its virtual assistant called Google Assistant, is somewhat ahead in the "smart" game. Not only the Google Assistant understands the accent of users better, it also has access to far more data compared to Siri, which helps it provide better information to users. For example, in this instance when asked "what is an Indian", here is the information Google Assistant provides:

Also Read: Our Wi-Fi at Indian railway stations is better than San Francisco, London Wi-Fi: Google

For more news from India Today, follow us on Twitter @IndiaTodayTech and on Facebook at facebook.com/indiatodaytech For news and videos in Hindi, go to AajTak.in. . .

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Vandalism on Wikipedia made Apple Siri give racist Indian answer - India Today

Google software engineer James Damore's controversial manifesto, "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," has been public for less than a week, but already several Wikipedia articles that Damore referenced have become the subject of intense debate on the site.

Several of these pages have undergone significant edits. On one page, a paragraph about neuroticism in women versus men is currently being contestedundergoing edits, reversions, and then edits again. The talk pages, where Wikipedians discuss the rationale behind edits, have devolved into flamewars.

"The public is starting to smell the bullshit you're covering up. Own up to it. Delete it again and Wikipedia wil [sic] be exposed in the same fashion Google was, I guarantee it. And I won't even be involved," one person wrote in the space where Wikipedians are encouraged to explain their edits.

The existence of Damore's memo was first reported by Motherboard, and the full text of the document was later published by Gizmodo. On Monday, Motherboard obtained and published the most comprehensive version of the manifesto, including two charts, footnotes, and hyperlinks that indicate Damore's sources.

Damore cited several Wikipedia pages about topics like neuroticism, sex differences in psychology, and empathizing-systemizing theory, which is used to classify people into "empathizing" or "systemizing" buckets, and has been applied to predict people's affinity for STEM subjects. Damore wielded these sources in an attempt to strike down the belief that women are sometimes professionally harmed by gender biases.

"I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership," Damore wrote in a version of the document (Because Damore allowed Google staff to suggest edits to the memo, it's possible that the version Motherboard published has since changed.)

After major news events, a flurry of edits to Wikipedia pages pertaining to those events usually follows. Sometimes, discussions on those pages can get so heated, the page has to be "protected," meaning the page can only be modified by certain users. But, in this case, because Damore used Wikipedia as his source in many cases, those pages have been subjected to similar editing battles.

Wikipedia allows anyone to make changes to an article, but erroneous markups are usually quickly reverted by other editors. In 2015, for example, several editors were banned by Wikipedia's arbitration committee for vandalizing information about Gamergate and feminism.

So far, only the page on neuroticism has received edits that are clearly related to Damore's manifesto and subsequent firing. According to Wikipedia, the article has received more than six times the amount of pageviews as it does on averagetopping out at 15,574 pageviews yesterday. Between yesterday and now, the page has been revised 27 times, compared to its average of 4.2 edits per month.

A section that once stated "that, on average, women score moderately higher than men on neuroticism," was removed by an editor on Tuesday for relying on a single source, and "Poor use of neutral voice." The crux of the study, a theory called the "Big Five personality traits," has been both widely embraced and criticized across the scientific community.

Just minutes later, this revision was revertedplacing the paragraph back into the original article. Then, soon after, another editor expanded the section, adding additional sourcing to the line: "Personality studies find that women score moderately higher than men on neuroticism, by approximately half of a standard deviation."

The matter of sourcing was eventually raised on the article's Talk Page, where users can discuss an article's governance and edits. Some of the page's sources, one editor claimed, were outdated, and not enough secondary sources were included to contextualize primary materials.

"There is a bunch of fairly loaded content sourced to very old, primary refs. We use recent (less than 5 years old) reviews in good quality journals and textbooks," one editor wrote.

One contested source, "The Evolution of Culturally-Variable Sex Differences: Men and Women Are Not Always Different, but When They AreIt Appears Not to Result from Patriarchy or Sex Role Socialization," comes from a 2014 textbook edition called The Evolution of Sexuality. Another, "Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings," is from the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, but was published in 2001.

Seemingly unrelated to anything Damore referenced, editors are now also debating the categorization of "neuroticism" as a medical disorder, and, consequently, the use of allegedly non-medically reliable sourcing.

"Mental health is part of health. Content about epidemiology, risk factors, etc need MEDRS sourcing," one user wrote.

"Guys, I am trying to edit constructively and in good faith, all you're doing is ripping things out wantonly. It is getting to be very annoying," another user responded.

"All of this stinks of political overtones regarding timing of edits and the edits themselves," yet another user wrote.

"Indeed I myself came to this article after reading about the Google memo, which links to this wikipedia page directly. I added several sources to reflect the typical literature claim that the usual sex difference is 'moderate' at around half of SD --- did you intend to remove those cites also," the editor replied.

Meanwhile, a dedicated page for Damore's memo was created on Monday, and its Talk Page reveals that editors are already hard at work.

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An Edit War Is Brewing on the 'Neuroticism' Wikipedia Page After Being Cited in Google Employee's Memo - Motherboard

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When we asked who you wanted to see on Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction? this man was the most requested artist. We love to give you what you want, so heres legendary drummer Joey Jordison proving and disproving whats written about him on Wikipedia!

Nothing was off limits for Jordison, so we spoke about his childhood, his time with Slipknot, his current musical endeavors and more! Joey disproved some Wikipedia stuff right away, correcting his middle name and the nicknames hes been given (or not given) over the years.

Jordison grew up in a family that was in the funeral parlor business. Though Wikipedia notes that his mother started a single funeral home, Jordison expands on the fact, sharing that his family had five funeral parlors. My stepfather passed away hes the one that owned all the funeral homes once my mom remarried. We had five funeral homes and yes, I would occasionally help with the duties that encompass owning businesses like that. My whole family did That was a big part of my life at the time.

The drummer even talked about recording with Slipknot in the famous Houdini Mansion and a ghostly encounter he had while living in the house, only it didnt happen in the basement like Wikipedia says. Around 4AM, 5AM every night, Id hear my door would close, Jordison recalls. I love it, because Vol. 3, thats where I lived making that record and it was awesome. Id love to revisit it someday soon. Id really love to go back there and hang out and kind of revisit those memories.

Check out the Joey Jordison episode of Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction? above and get ready for VIMIC to release Open Your Omen in the near future. VIMIC also have some exciting tour dates coming up, so keep your eyes open for that news coming soon.

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Joey Jordison Plays 'Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction?' - Loudwire

Id estimate that I visit 10 different Wikipedia pages on an average night. Sometimes Im looking for specific facts (how many games has Andorras soccer team won? What is the Oort cloud? Were there four guys and three girls in S Club 7, or were there three guys and four girls?), and sometimes Im looking for general knowledge (what are the tenets of existentialism? What happened in the Battle of El Alamein? What was the plot of Spice World?). Almost always, somebody has lovingly produced the information Im seeking. (Wikipedia doesnt have an explanation for why I regularly search for info on 1990s Britpop.) The internet can often feel like it brings out the worst in people; that its impossible to escape the racists and trolls. Yet Wikipedia gave total power to the people, and instead of developing into a minefield of hate, people came together to create the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the history of the planet.

And its free to use, and created for free. Part of that freeness means that Wikipedia does not pay for licensed photographs, which for the most part works out fine. Want to know what a finch looks like? Here. Someone took beautiful pictures of finches, and a Wikipedia user uploaded them so people could use them as a resource. Want to know what humans look like? Here; all humans look like those two people. Between user shots and images in the public domain, Wikipedia offers great pictures of almost everything, from Mount Kilimanjaro to quartz, Michelangelos Piet to Ja Rule.

One subject it doesnt offer great photos of is basketball players. Given the pace at which the sport is played, taking non-blurry shots usually requires photographers to be close to the action and to have expensive cameras. As such, most of the best basketball photos are licensed by services like Getty Images. There are some high-level photographers who take incredible shots of players and upload them for freecheck out the pages of LeBron James, Steph Curry, Carmelo Anthony, Markieff Morris, and Mike Miller but not many. (All five player pictures linked to above were taken by the same man: Keith Allison, a freelance photographer who lives in Baltimore and uploads his best shots to Flickr. If you see a professional-looking image on an NBA players Wiki page, there is a good chance its Allisons work. On a whim, I checked the Chicago Bulls roster; four of the 12 players under contract have Wikipedia pictures taken by Allison.)

Some NBA Wikipedia photos are as distant, grainy, and ugly as something I could take on my iPhone. Some come from the instances when fans run into players off the court and snap shots then. (Here is Darius Miles, and here is the uncropped photo of Darius Miles with a guy giving two thumbs up that will represent Miles for the foreseeable future.) This Wiki photo problem is an issue for a handful of current NBA playerssuch as Taj Gibson, Wilson Chandler, and Dahntay Jones but the most doomed players are those who retired a short time ago, after it became feasible for people to bring cameras to games and upload pictures online, but before Wikipedia users recognized the need for high-quality photos on each page.

Until March 2016, this was the main picture on the Wikipedia page for onetime All-Star Shareef Abdur-Rahim:

This is a literal profile picturea picture that captures only Abdur-Rahims profile. His ear looks like some sort of weird mollusk; we see about 2 inches of his neck before an unidentified object juts in. The photo is of such poor quality that Abdur-Rahim looks like those cliffs that old prospectors decided vaguely resembled a human face. This shot was cropped from a larger image hosted on Flickr:

Can you see Shareef? Surely you see Ron Artestbefore he was known as Metta World Peace. Theres Ronnie Price near the basket, and Jason Hart taking a jumper. Still cant find our guy? Look at the man in the unbuttoned jacket who dominates the frame. Now look directly above his head.

There is the sliver of Abdur-Rahims head that a Wikipedia user saw, leading them to think, "Finally! A picture of Shareef Abdur-Rahim!" Ninety percent of his body is obscuredyou may identify the unbuttoned jacket mans hair as the unidentified object in the original thumbnail. If you took this photo as an attempt to capture a picture of Abdur-Rahim, youd likely delete it and try again. But on July 10, 2015, nine years after it was uploaded to Flickr, this shot became the webs defining image of Abdur-Rahim.

Sadly, this picture is now gone. Less than a year after it was uploaded to Wikipedia, another user removed it, offering the simple explanation, "This picture just diminishes the quality of the article." But I found it strangely endearing. While its hard to argue that such a legitimately horrendous image improved the quality of the site, it represented someones attempt to add to the worlds collective database of knowledge. That persons failure is noble, and hilarious, and beautiful. Another user was randomly motivated to enhance the Wikipedia profile of Steve Francis, and searched the public domain for a legally usable photo. That person ended up with this.

Over the years, Ive become obsessed with finding the most inexplicable NBA photos on Wikipedia, to the point that I starting saving my favorites. Now, Id like to present my findings and chronicle the best worst NBA Wikipedia pictures for all of posterity.

I always thought Graham was a solid defender. That was his reputation when he played at Oklahoma State, and later with the Raptors, Nuggets, and Cavaliers. If his Wikipedia profile picture is any indication, Graham also frequently tried to swallow food without chewing it while on the court.

Its tough to derive any emotion from the few pixels that make up his facetheres no real evidence that Graham has a mouth, and it appears that theres a wormhole to another galaxy located below his nose. But he somehow looks upset, even if I cant fully explain why.

Anderson was a youngster when he helped the late 1990s Jazz reach the NBA Finals and a veteran when he helped the 200506 Heat win the title. Consistent throughout his career was his unstoppable butt. Thats why his Wikipedia picture completely ignores the front side of his body.

There are blurrier photos used on NBA player pages, but this one takes the cake for having the least amount of face visible. We get an ear, a cheekbone, a nose, and negative space that implies a mouth and an eye socket. We cant, however, see Andersons mouth or eyes.

Doleac wasnt the most important figure in the Heats 200506 NBA title run; he was the teams third-string center behind Shaquille ONeal and Alonzo Mourning. Given his lack of prominence and his height, he stood in the back of the teams White House photo. When that picture was cropped, we got just his shoulders and head. Well about three-quarters of his head.

White House visits make for great team photos. For thumbnail-size photos of individuals, thats not always the case. But pictures taken by federal employees as part of their official duties are part of the public domain, so many NBA players have White House shots on their Wikipedia profiles. The Bulls visited the White House in 2009 to meet longtime fan Barack Obama, and it produced one picture that has been cropped to be the main image on a whopping seven Wiki pages: Lindsey Hunter, Anthony Roberson, Del Harris, Bernie Bickerstaff, John Paxson, Mike Wilhelm, and Bob Ociepka.

Doleacs photo stands out, though. Most White House pictures feature players smiling. Theyre happy to be champions, or to see the president, and theyre aware a photo is being taken. In this original image, the Heat are laughing with President George W. Bush: Pat Riley is smiling, Shaq is smiling, Mourning is smiling, Udonis Haslem is smiling, Dorell Wright is smiling, Jason Kapono is smilingand somehow Doleac is making that face. I like to think hes licking his lips like a cartoon character because he just smelled a freshly baked pie on a windowsill and doesnt yet realize the pie is part of a trap laid by his cartoon nemesis.

This photo of Mardy Collins is so bad that it isnt a photo of Mardy Collins. The person pictured looks like Walker Russell Jr., the son of a Knicks scout who got a training camp invite before the 200708 season. Russell doesnt look much like Collins, but nobody has felt compelled to change the picture since it was uploaded to Collinss page in June 2013. I think the faraway, indistinct nature of the photo is why. Im in the intensely small subset of NBA fans who could recognize Collins, and even I looked at the image for a while before thinking, "Hey, wait a second!"

Interestingly, Collins is in the uncropped photohes the player all the way on the right of the shot, two players over from his not-quite-doppelgnger who has represented him on Wikipedia for four years.

I doubt that Knight wore this gold three-piece suit a lot during his 15-year NBA career. I doubt he wears it a lot now, as a color commentator for the Grizzlies. And yet here he is, showcased on the internets most-used database not as someone who played basketball, but as someone who once sat near a game wearing a metallic disaster. The lack of clarity on Knights face makes this look like a wanted poster put out by the fashion police.

Lets look at the uncropped picture.

See Knight? Even in his shiny outfit, its still hard to notice him sitting aaaaaallll the way at the end of the bench. That didnt stop somebody from cropping out everyone but Knight and making him the star of the picture.

The original shot is the work of a Flickr user named Jeramey Jannene, who uploaded many photos from Bucks games in the mid-2000s. Somehow, Jannenes collection has become the source of a treasure trove of Wikipedia images of players sitting on benches. Let us begin a compendium of Jannenes greatest work:

This image comes from a picture Jannene took of Mo Williams shooting a free throw. As with Knight in his Wiki thumbnail, Taylor is sitting all the way at the end of the bench in the original.

This comes from the same image of Mo Williams shooting a free throw. One picture, two unsuspecting guys on the bench cropped and exhibited to the world.

This one comes from the picture of Shandon Andersons back.

Jannene probably didnt intend for this to happen. It seems like he was just a kid with good seats and a not-so-good camera who took pictures and put them online. Jannene might not even know that his age-old pictures have been repurposed for Wikipedia glory, a process that happened years after he uploaded them. The shot of Knight was taken on February 11, 2006. It wasnt cropped and uploaded to Knights page until July 8, 2011. The shot of Butler and Taylor was taken on March 4, 2006; it didnt make Butlers page until January 16, 2012, and it didnt show up on Taylors until March 25, 2014. (The user who uploaded it noted it was a "better photo"and to be honest, it actually is better than the last picture on Taylors Wiki page.)

Regardless, Jannene is the the King of Wikipedia Photos of NBA Players Sitting On Benches. Without him, countless players would remain undocumented.

Poor Kenny Thomas. Its not just that the quality of this picture is absolutely awfulthe lighting is terrible, Thomas is wildly out of focus, and theres no clear indication where his head turns into his neck. Its also the situation in which the photo was taken.

This shot is from 2006, at a fan appreciation event for the Kings. Thomas probably met the fans, had some fun, and at one point was asked to serve ice cream. It may have been slightly humiliating, but whatever. For a few minutes, how bad could it be?

Eleven years later, this is the moment that has been chosen to encapsulate Thomass 11-year NBA career, in which he also played stints for the Rockets and 76ers. He scored 5,876 points, grabbed 4,341 rebounds, and scooped maybe 10 to 20 scoops of ice cream. And yet here we are, admiring Kenny Thomas, professional ice cream scooper.

Brown has coached 2,703 games: 2,002 in the NBA, 365 in college, and 336 in the ABA. How is this the best picture the public domain had to offer?

Brown wears glasses, typically with thick rims, and has done so for decades. Heres an AP shot of him at Kansas in 1983. Heres an AP shot of him at SMU in 2016. You probably thought you saw those glasses on this Wiki image because youre so used to seeing Brown wear them. But I dont think theres a single pixel here that suggests the presence of eyewear. Maybe theres a slight trace near his right eye?

Of course, the main way to avoid a blurry picture is by staying still. Unfortunately, Brown switched jobs almost every year for 30 years.

Wesley averaged a double-digit point total every season from 199596 to 200405, and barely missed the mark by averaging 9.9 points in 200506. Then he spent 200607, the final season of his career, as a benchwarmer for young LeBrons Cavaliers. Sadly, thats the Wesley captured on his Wikipedia page. Hes not dribbling or shooting. Instead, hes seemingly celebrating a play made by Boobie Gibson, Damon Jones, or one of the other forgettable players on that team who got minutes ahead of him.

I have no idea what this celebration is. Maybe Wesley was demonstrating the size of a fish he caught, or launching into an absurdly big clap, or maybe hed forgotten what sport was being played and he was preparing to signal TOUCHDOWN. No matter what the explanation is, its clear why he fell off this seasonhe must have lost most of his shooting touch when his right hand became permanently blurry, losing all form and boundaries.

This shot genuinely resembles the Mr. Krabs meme, with the character off-balance, one hand positioned slightly higher than the other, and everything out of focus except the face and upper body. And yet go to Mr. Krabss Wikipedia page; he looks perfectly normal. A shame.

This picture of Fortson looks like an artifact from the period before humans figured out how to create images incorporating three-dimensional perspective. It would fit on an Egyptian cave wall, or stitched onto the Bayeux Tapestry. Some ancient king probably demanded his finest artisan capture the essence of a presaged power forward who would one day average 11.2 points per game for the 200102 Warriors. The artist tried his best, but quickly came to the conclusion: "Dammit, I dont know how to do faces. Ill just have Fortson look to the side. And wait, how do arms go?"

Making this photo even stranger, it was cropped from a shot apparently taken from a space shuttle:

Honestly, its cool to see a satellite image of an NBA game. Ive never seen anything like it, since games are normally played in arenas with roofs.

Here, at long last, is never-before-seen evidence that Sasquatch is realand that he wears teal.

This is an URBOan Unidentified Ryan Bowenlike Object. If Im interpreting this photo correctly, Bowen left an NBA game with a basketball and his warm-ups, robbed a 7-Eleven, and soon became one of the most elusive backup power forwards turned bandits this country has ever seen. His Wikipedia page shows an image of him that security cameras must have captured, and police want you to keep an eye out for any suspicious-looking 6-foot-7 men clad in turquoise jumpsuits.

Here, I Photoshopped Bowen into the famous pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat.

Bowens photo has to be the worst NBA player image that exists on Wikipedia. It reveals no distinctive facial features that indicate what Bowen actually looks like. (I think I see an ear!) In the original picture, taken roughly 3.2 nautical miles away, Sean Marks is blocking Bowens legs.

Wikipedia would be fine without this photograph of Bowenor, for that matter, any photograph of Bowen. Hell, I could just Google Bowens name if I really needed to know what he looks like. But some anonymous internet hero scoured the web, found this long-lost image with a splotch of color that might be Bowen, and uploaded it to his page. That effortthat valiant, failed attempt to share knowledge with the worldis so much more meaningful than a clear image of Bowen could ever be.

When I look at this picture, I dont see Ryan Bowenmainly because the packet of pixels on the screen doesnt resemble Ryan Bowen in any way, shape, or form. I see love.

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Wikipedia's Best Worst NBA Photos Are Modern Art - The Ringer (blog)