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The French National Archives in Paris will be filled with the sound of typing on Saturday. The Editathon Art+Feminisman event designed to achieve greater gender balance on the free online encyclopedia, Wikipediasimultaneously kicks off in Paris, New York, Berlinand about 150 other cities around the world.

This year will be the fourth edition of theevent set up by various global arts bodies in conjunction with the encyclopedia. This years editathon highlights that only 12 percent of Wikipedias contributors identify as women, and that frequently, Wikipedia pages about women are nonexistent, inaccurate or incomplete. These events are a chance to change that. In the coming two days, people all around the world will try to flip the balance, writing sections for the forgotten pages.

Among all the cities taking part, Paris stands out. The French edition is organized by the Lafayette Foundation, and uses performances alongside editing sessions to encourage people to discuss as well as write about outstanding women on the platform. In addition to the editing sessions open to the public, the event will also showcase artists performances and panel discussions to discuss the central theme of the day. Six hundred people attended Pariss editathon last year and created 36 Wikipedia profiles and pages. Although Paris only joined one year into the project, in 2014, it has become the most popular spot internationally: Its curator, Flora Katz tells Newsweek that she believes this is because of the artists performance that take place throughout the weekend of editing, translating, linking to and improving Wikipedia pages.

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This years event centers on the topic of identity. Or rather, on disidentification, inspired by the works of Jose Esteban Munoz, who coined the term in his 1994 essay: Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Disidentification, according to Munoz, is what happens when members of a minority, ethnic or sexual, reject societal stereotypes.

Transgender artist Vaginal Davis put together "whimsical and ephemeral" shows in the 80's and 90's. She inspired Jose Esteban Munoz, a NYU teacher. Rick Castro

Katz discovered Munozs work two years ago, when she lived in New York, and wanted to reactivate his voice in the public eye and introduce his work to the French public. To do so, she has worked closely with two performers, Vaginal Davis, a performing artist and icon of the 80s contemporary arts scene in the U.S, and Los Angeles-based filmmaker and performer Wu Tsang. Both artists met Munoz during his lifetime, and he was an admirer and occasional patron of the pair. Davis is particularly central in his dialogue about disidentification: Munoz dedicated a whole chapter of his essay to her and her art. She met the professor, whom she describes as punk rock, during his tenure at NYU and captivated his attention until his passing in 2013.

Munoz documented several of Daviss works in the 90s, when the artist was, in her own words, more prone to whimsical and ephemeral performance than in keeping any sort of record. Reissues of Munozs work throughout the years introduced Davis to several generations of undergraduates. You know, I go out of vogue every seven to eight years, she jokes. Perhaps surprisingly for someone involved in the editathon project, tells me that she is no technophile: Im much more analog than digital.

At this years editathon, Davis will present a performative discussion with Wu Tsang that she describes as A thought-provoking, glamorous wrap on Dr Jose Esteban Munoz. It will be her first Parisian performance since 2009, where she took part in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo on black artistry and sensuality.

Katz believes that Wikipedia is the most fundamental tool to access knowledge in an ever more connected world, but says that some of the pages dedicated to black, Asian and transgender artists focus too much on the personal aspects of the artists lives, rather than on their actual work. She hopes that the editathon can change that, and reflect more on their achievements.

What does Davis think of her own Wikipedia page? She regrets some factual mix-ups but says its always good to have a bit of mythology around you and your work.

The French edition of the Editathon Art+Feminism takes place on Saturday and Sundayat the French National Archives in Paris.

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How a Paris Event Is Fighting Wikipedia's Gender Gap - Newsweek - Newsweek

Referee made a host of high-profile errors, including failing to send off Tyrone Mings and Zlatan Ibrahimovic for horrific acts of violence during the brawl at Old Trafford on Saturday

KEVIN FRIEND has been ruthlessly trolled on Twitter and even had his Wikipedia page edited after his shocking performance during Manchester United vs Bournemouth.

The referee endured a shambolic 90 minutes, making blunder after blunder, with a whole host of notable errors at the end of the first half.

PA:Press Association

With the opening 45 minutes winding down to a close, Friend had to be reminded by Zlatan Ibrahimovic that Andrew Surman had already been booked and therefore would need to be given his marching orders.

Keep up to date with ALL the Bournemouth and Manchester United news, gossip, transfers and goals on our club page plus fixtures, results and live match commentary.

After finally clicking, the Cherries midfielder was shown his first ever red yet Tyrone Mings and the Swede star himself stayed on the pitch.

Mings was seen to by accident or not stamp on Zlatans head, before Ibrahimovic threw a filthy elbow into the face of the Bournemouth defender moments later.

Getty Images

Sky Sports

Then, in the second half, United were given a simply ludicrous penalty - missed by Ibrahimovic - for a clear ball-to-hand moment.

Despite a host of further decisions going in favour of the hosts, United failed to capitalise and were held at 1-1 - to remain sixth in the Premier League.

However, the game will be most remembered for one thing... The atrocious performance of ref Friend.

Here's some of the best reactions from the world of Twitter...

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Kevin Friend ruthlessly trolled on Twitter and even has his Wikipedia page edited after shocking performance during ... - The Sun

For many it is no more than the first port of call when a niggling question raises its head. Found on its pages are answers to mysteries from the fate of male anglerfish, the joys of dorodango, and the improbable death of Aeschylus.

But beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies a murky world of enduring conflict. A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years.

Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply bots, that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks.

In the early days, the bots were so rare they worked in isolation. But over time, the number deployed on the encyclopedia exploded with unexpected consequences. The more the bots came into contact with one another, the more they became locked in combat, undoing each others edits and changing the links they had added to other pages. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action.

The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people, said Taha Yasseri, who worked on the study at the Oxford Internet Institute. Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years.

The findings emerged from a study that looked at bot-on-bot conflict in the first ten years of Wikipedias existence. The researchers at Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute in London examined the editing histories of pages in 13 different language editions and recorded when bots undid other bots changes.

They did not expect to find much. The bots are simple computer programs that are written to make the encyclopedia better. They are not intended to work against each other. We had very low expectations to see anything interesting. When you think about them they are very boring, said Yasseri. The very fact that we saw a lot of conflict among bots was a big surprise to us. They are good bots, they are based on good intentions, and they are based on same open source technology.

While some conflicts mirrored those found in society, such as the best names to use for contested territories, others were more intriguing. Describing their research in a paper entitled Even Good Bots Fight in the journal Plos One, the scientists reveal that among the most contested articles were pages on former president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, the Arabic language, Niels Bohr and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

One of the most intense battles played out between Xqbot and Darknessbot which fought over 3,629 different articles between 2009 and 2010. Over the period, Xqbot undid more than 2,000 edits made by Darknessbot, with Darknessbot retaliating by undoing more than 1,700 of Xqbots changes. The two clashed over pages on all sorts of topics, from Alexander of Greece and Banqiao district in Taiwan to Aston Villa football club.

Another bot named after Tachikoma, the artificial intelligence in the Japanese science fiction series Ghost in the Shell, had a two year running battle with Russbot. The two undid more than a thousand edits by the other on more than 3,000 articles ranging from Hillary Clinton s 2008 presidential campaign to the demography of the UK.

The study found striking differences in the bot wars that played out on the various language editions of Wikipedia. German editions had the fewest bot fights, with bots undoing others edits on average only 24 times in a decade. But the story was different on the Portuguese Wikipedia, where bots undid the work of other bots on average 185 times in ten years. The English version saw bots meddling with each others changes on average 105 times a decade.

The findings show that even simple algorithms that are let loose on the internet can interact in unpredictable ways. In many cases, the bots came into conflict because they followed slightly different rules to one another.

Yasseri believes the work serves as an early warning to companies developing bots and more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools. An AI that works well in the lab might behave unpredictably in the wild. Take self-driving cars. A very simple thing thats often overlooked is that these will be used in different cultures and environments, said Yasseri. An automated car will behave differently on the German autobahn to how it will on the roads in Italy. The regulations are different, the laws are different, and the driving culture is very different, he said.

As more decisions, options and services come to depend on bots working properly together, harmonious cooperation will become increasingly important. As the authors note in their latest study: We know very little about the life and evolution of our digital minions.

Earlier this month, researchers at Googles DeepMind set AIs against one another to see if they would cooperate or fight. When the AIs were released on an apple-collecting game, the scientists found that the AIs cooperated while apples were plentiful, but as soon as supplies got short, they turned nasty. It is not the first time that AIs have run into trouble. In 2011, scientists in the US recorded a conversation between two chatbots. They bickered from the start and ended up arguing about God.

2017 Guardian Web under contract with NewsEdge/Acquire Media. All rights reserved.

Continued here:
Study: Bot-on-Bot Editing Wars Raging on Wikipedia's pages - Sci-Tech Today

The dominance of Wikipedia can no longer be denied. A local expression of a national initiative to address some of the online encyclopedia's biases takes place this week.

Once upon a time (not that long ago, actually), students were warned against even reading Wikipedia. The issue is that Wikipedia was open-source and editable, by anyone, anonymously. Information can be purposefully edited to be misleading, or missing something, or biased in some way.

One well-documented bias is gender. The flood of young men in the computer sciences means that the large body of information on Wikipedia skews toward the interests of that demographic.

Wikipedia is huge, with more than five million articles in English. Its also free. Warning people against using it really isn't an option anymore. So in an attempt to offset the bias, many museums, universities and science organizations all over the globe have organized edit-a-thons, events bringing together experts and interested people to edit and improve specific entries.

Art+Feminism is a national organization that began organizing Wikipedia Edit-A-Thons in 2014 to address the bias created by the lack of women editors. (Fewer than 10% of contributors to Wikipedia identify as female, according to the organization.)

The Carnegie Museum of Art hosts one such edit-a-thon this Saturday (just in time for Womens History Month). No prior Wikipedia editing knowledge is necessary. The museum will offer tutorials for beginner Wikipedians at 10:45 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., as well as reference materials and expert support. Bring your own laptop if you can, as the museums supply is limited.

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Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon at on Saturday at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art - PGH City Paper (blog)

afroCROWD Wikipedia Edit-a-thon photo by Lilith Dorsey. All rights reserved.

Last weekend I had the honor of attending the #afroCROWD Black History month event, Wikipedia edit-a-thon. The organization provided a wealth of information about Wikipedia editing. Everything was helpful for those just beginning, or veterans of the process. As many of you know Wikipedia has become the top source of information on the internet. Because it is crowdsourced that leaves a lot to be desired in the way of quality and quantity of content.

In this day and time of alternative facts the presentation of truth becomes even more important. Those of us who exist in marginalized or underrepresented realms are constantly presented with the difficulty of getting our stories heard. One of the ways we can do this is by becoming pro-active, and doing wikipedia editing for ourselves. This is vital for pagan activists, black activists, LGBTQ activists, and anyone trying to make a real difference in a world that doesnt, or cant hear our voices.

Recently feminists and other groups have taken up this challenge. In a recent article called Editing for Equality by Catch News they explain we write in reaction to all thats wrong and how were misrepresented, but another way to make the world see this is to be the primary source. If women, and people from other disenfranchised, marginalized and often forgotten social groups were made visible for who they are and what they have achieved, that would be the first step to actual emancipation.

Wikipedia edit-a-thon photo by Lilith Dorsey. All rights reserved.

So what is the best way to start ? First, if at all possible, I urge you to attend a Wikipedia edit-a-thon. These events are popping up all over the world. Even if one isnt present in your area, you may be able to video conference in to an event.

However, what if that isnt possible, and in that case there are several resources available to get you started. I highly recommend the informational video series on Wikipedia editing by Art and Feminism.

Art + Feminism Beginner Training

The first thing you are going to have to do is set up a Wikipedia user account, if you dont have one already. AfroCROWD recommends using a different name than your own. This will protect your identity and also possibly lend to the objectivity of your edits.

All your Wikipedia editing will also need to be sourced. What is considered a reliable source is a relatively short list. Books and established newspapers are the best sources to cite, but Wikipedia does make determinations on a case by case basis. One thing you cant do is use yourself as a source. This is troublesome for writers like myself. You also cant use another Wikipedia article as a source. Spend some time looking at the approved sources for citations to get an idea what is acceptable.

Before I went to the edit-a-thon one of my friends asked me to find out why many Wikipedia edits get removed. There are a few answers to this question. First everything has to be properly sourced, which I just mentioned. Then there is the problem of conflict of interest. Wikipedia takes great care to insure edits are not created by people looking for self-promotion. If you do have a connection to the material you are editing, make sure you mention this on the talk page for the entry you are editing. You can find the tab in the top left of the article. While at the afroCROWD event I found one edit I really wanted to make. Regular readers of this blog know I am a member of the Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans. When I looked I realized that the address for the temple on its Wikipedia page was incorrect (the temple relocated after suffering a fire last year.) In order to make this edit I disclosed my connection to the temple on the talk page, and then sourced the edit from a site that didnt belong to me or the temple. While these steps may seem like a bit of extra trouble, they will hopefully insure that your edits get approved.

Obviously there is much more to understand about this subject, but hopefully this will get you started. If possible get involved with the AfroCROWD organization (Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia.) It is a new initiative which seeks to increase the number of people of African Descent who actively partake in the Wikimedia and free knowledge, culture and software movements. Since its launch during Black Wiki History Month in 2015, Afrocrowd has sensitized thousands in its target audience about free culture crowdsourcing and the need to close the multicultural and gender gaps in Wikipedia. Afrocrowd has also held monthly multilingual editathons in partnership with cultural institutions such as the Brooklyn Public Library, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MOMA, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute and Haiti Cultural Exchange. Afrocrowd has also trained future trainers in the target community.

Wikipedia editing can be a valuable tool for pagan activism, black activism, and the furthering of knowledge for many underrepresented groups. I wish you the best of luck in your edits. Hopefully someday someone will make a Wikipedia page for me and my writing and films, hint hint. Until then you can follow my edits on my user page under LilithAuthor, and if you appreciate what you read here please remember to share.

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Wikipedia Editing : Essential Tips for Activists - Patheos - Patheos (blog)