Mediaboss Marketing

Fake news has been, well, in the news a lot lately. But for the world's largest crowdsourced encyclopedia, it's nothing new.

"Wikipedia has been dealing with fake news since it started 16 years ago," notes LiAnna Davis, deputy director of the Wiki Education Foundation.

To combat misinformation, Wikipedia has developed a robust corps of volunteer editors. Anyone can write new entries and scrutinize existing ones for adherence to Wikipedia's rules on sourcing and neutrality. While it's not free of errors or pranks, what results is a resource that 50 million people turn to daily on hundreds of thousands of topics in a few dozen languages.

Today, educators are among those more concerned than ever with standards of truth and evidence and with the lightning-fast spread of misinformation online. And the Wiki Education Foundation, a freestanding nonprofit, is sharing Wikipedia's methods with a growing number of college students, and striking a blow for digital literacy along the way.

The foundation gives professors the technical assistance they need to assign students, instead of writing a research paper, to write a brand-new Wikipedia entry, or expand an existing entry, on any topic in virtually any discipline.

This spring, 7,500 students are expected to participate. Among the many items past students written on are:

Since the program began six years ago, Davis says, students have collectively added more than 25 million words of content to Wikipedia.

Jennifer Malkowski, an assistant professor of film and media studies at Smith College, assigned her class on new media and participatory culture to write and contribute to Wikipedia entries this past fall.

"One of the things they really liked about it was the ability to share knowledge beyond the professor that audience of one," she says. While all Smith students are expected to use good research methods in their classes, knowing that their entries might be rejected outright if they didn't conform to Wikipedia's standards "felt like a higher stake than the difference between a B and an A-minus," she says.

Malkowski will be leading a workshop to help her colleagues, some of whom are less technically minded, learn how to make Wikipedia assignments in their own classes as well.

Davis says many professors report a greater level of effort from their students on Wikipedia assignments. "If you're writing something millions of people are going to read, it's a reason to do a really good job, to go into a library and get a deep understanding of the topic."

Some professors, like Tamar Carroll, an assistant professor of history at Rochester Institute of Technology, see Wikipedia as a way to make previously neglected areas of knowledge more visible. For Carroll, it's women's history. She says a former student recently emailed her to say that her Wikipedia entry on Mary Stafford Anthony, the suffragist and sister of Susan B. Anthony, was "the most meaningful assignment she had" as an undergraduate.

There's another learning opportunity too. Every Wikipedia entry has a "talk" page, where editors discuss changes, and a "view history" page that shows additions and deletions over time.

Peeking behind that curtain, says Malkowski, helps "expose how knowledge is collectively created and how different voices might come to consensus, or not, on a particular topic." Right now, she adds, "is an especially important time to be asking these epistemological questions."

According to the foundation's own survey, 87 percent of university faculty who participated in the program reported an increase in their students' media literacy. By grinding some Internet info-sausage themselves, essentially, they gained a better understanding of what goes into it.

It's an interesting turn of events for Wikipedia, which, as Davis acknowledges, has had a bad rap in academic circles as the lazy student's substitute for real research.

"When I first started going to academic conferences, people would hide and say, 'Don't let my department chair see me,' " talking to you, says Davis. She added that Wikipedia should only be a starting point for a university-level research paper, never a footnoted source.

View post:
What Students Can Learn By Writing For Wikipedia - WYPR

Image: Pixabay, edited by Kevin Rothrock

The idea behind the project, which belongs to the State Dumas Youth Parliament ( body created early in Vladimir Putins first presidency to elevate ambitious young people interested in government work), is that Wikipedia currently lacks good information about Russian history, Russian ancestors, and Russian leaders.

According to Maria Voropayeva, the Youth Parliaments deputy chairperson, young people in Russia need to be better educated about these subjects, in order to cultivate Russian patriotism. She also says she favors removing some content now found on Wikipedia, arguing that the website shouldnt publish quotes by extremists or militants.

For the last year or so, Voropayeva has headed another project by the Youth Parliament called I Take Pride in Russia Every Day, which has published a handful of videos on YouTube, some featuring short patriotic statements from young people in cities throughout the country. The videos were made in the same spirit as Virtual Front, encouraging Russians to fight back against a hostile world that misunderstands their country.

With every new day, theres more trash on the Internet, a woman tells the camera in the most popular video shared by I Take Pride in Russia Every Day. Russia is the aggressor. Were all invaders. Theyre threatening us! People, whats going on!

Why does someone have the right to laugh at our suffering? Or is nothing off limits in the race for money? another woman asks vaguely, apparently referring to Metrojet Flight 9268, the Russian plane that crashed in Egypt in October 2015.

He who comes to us with the sword will die by the sword, a young man says grimly.

Facing the threat of Internet trash, jokes about suffering, and swords, the Youth Parliament says it will respond with a campaign to add 10,000 articles to Russian Wikipedia.

After hearing about Virtual Front, Rustam Nuryev, one of the leaders of Wikimedia in Russia, asked on Facebook, Why so few articles?

In fact, there are more than 1.3 million articles on Russian Wikipedia today, and more than 2,000 have appeared naturally in the week since Virtual Front was announced.

Once it goes live in March, Virtual Front wont be a horizontal social movement, and taking part means submitting draft Wikipedia articles to a coordinating board staffed by dozens of teachers and fact-checkers across the country. Once theyve approved your article, its then reviewed again by a core group in Moscow.

Ksenia Selezeneva, Virtual Front's coordinator, in the State Duma. Photo: Instagram

Why all the gatekeepers in a campaign that could likely deliver more, if the Youth Parliament instead simply encouraged openly and without bureaucracy Russias proud citizens to write more on Wikipedia?

The short answer appears to be quality control, but the real reason is politics, judging by the hour-long press conference on Feb. 17, when organizers unveiled Virtual Front.

At that event, a young woman stood up and asked how the campaign plans to handle the different liberal movements, such as The Fifth Column, which disinform people on social media.

This was Duma deputy and Cossack chieftain Viktor Vodolatskiys moment to shine:

, . , . , , . .

If people have gotten used to drinking from a barrel of filthy, muddy water, then they wont want to switch to a barrel of crystal spring water. Theyre already used to it, and theyve adapted to the dirty water. So the fifth column has its community, which reads what they write. Our task now is to wash away all this filth with crystal spring water.

According to the opposition website Rublacklist.net, Wikipedia editors in Russia havent expressed much interest in Virtual Front, commenting that initiatives to create more articles are generally welcome, but anything written with political bias will be rooted out by moderators enforcing the websites standards on objectivity and citations.

However clumsy the Youth Parliaments approach to Wikipedia may be, its still an improvement on a government order issued by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last August, when he established a working group to study the creation of an all new Russian-engineered Wikipedia clone.

Medvedevs effort later stalled, and Virtual Front could represent the new, slightly less ridiculous direction of Russias government-driven patriotism in the world of online encyclopedias.

Excerpt from:
Russian Government Youth Group Wants to Make Wikipedia More Patriotic - Global Voices Online

Wikipedia is not always easy to navigate. These sites and apps make it easier to use.

When the clock ticked over into the 21st century, the web was just a toddler. It was walking, but it wasn't ready to write research papers...until Wikipedia arrived.

The site exploded in 2001, going from 600 articles in January to 3,900 by May. As of this writing, the Wikipedia: Size Comparisons page says the service is home to 5,336,928 articles in Englisha number that is in constant flux. In total, there are over 40 million pages in 293 languages.

Wikipedia is a phenomenon that helps casual web surfers and students alike. It's had its share of controversy but raises millions of dollars to keep the servers running (by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which also operates services like Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons).

That's not to say Wikipedia doesn't have issues ahead. As BoingBoing notes, certain entries face deletion due to what it calls "bureaucratic calcification" and an impending extinction event. And its pages, useful as they may be, are ugly.

Still, Wikipedia is not going anywhere; half a billion people use it every month, and more and more of them are doing so from mobile devices. Hopefully that will draw a new generation of editors to the site. Until then, there are ways to fix Wikipedia's woes. Read on for a few suggestions.

Let's start with what I think of as the Wikipedia KISS: Keep it Simple, Stupid. A little-known feature called Simple English Wikipedia shows a simplified version of an articlein reality, an entirely different article on the same topic, but written for the layman.

They actually exist as a separate Wikipedia (much like other languages do). You can access it at simple.wikipedia.org, but when you find a difficult-to-parse page on Wikipedia, the better trick is to look at the URL and replace the "en" between slashes with the word "simple." If a corresponding page exists on the Simple English version, you get it instantly. Try it with topics like Archaeology or Quantum mechanics. (The same trick works with any supported language; just replace the EN with the 2-letter code.)

Aesthetically, Wikipedia needs the most help. Its pages are designed to convey information in the most academic way, but it's not always pleasing to the eye. (That said, Wikipedia works on almost any Web browser, so keep that in mind.) Arguably, the best tool to fix that scholarly ugliness is the service Wikiwand. Install the extensions it offers for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari and you'll always default to the improved Wikiwand look whenever you search for or link to a Wikipedia page. It's all the same data, just presented in a more eye-pleasing manner. You can even customize the colors, fonts, and layout. The quick preview option lets you hover over article links and see what you may get next before you click.

Wikiwand offers an app for iOS, and you can get an early invite for the still-to-be-released Android version. The Simple English trick also works when you look at articles through Wikiwand. Or just select Simple English in the Language drop-down menu. You will see the occasional ad amidst the articles, but Wikiwand donates 30 percent of what it makes to the Wikimedia Foundation.

There are other browser extensions that improve the look of Wikipedia:

What Wikipedia access when you don't have internet? The Xowa open-source wiki application for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android will let you download the entirety of Wikipedia in any language you pick, or other Wikimedia sites like Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and more, all to your hard drive. Make sure it's a big drive; just the text of the full English Wikipedia will take up 30GB. It's a more than double that80GBwith the images. But put it on a flash drive and you can take it anywhere. Put it on your Android device and it's a veritable Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Or, you know, connect those devices to the web.)

Want some fun ways to get access to interesting things on Wikipedia? Enjoy the schadenfreude that comes with reading [Citation Needed], a Tumblr blog that promises "The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing"; the title is a riff on the famous line you'll find in any Wikipedia article where editors decry opinion creep.

If you're interested in some nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes Wikipedia info, subscribe to the Weeklypedia, a newsletter listing the most edited articles and most active discussions on the site every week. And The Wiki Game is a game that lets you try to connect Wikipedia articles by clicking on the links therein to see how long it takes to get from article A to article B.

For a bit of humor that doesn't really have much to do with Wikipedia directly, go to Uncyclopedia, which is to Wikipedia what The Onion is to news. Then visit the Twitter account of TL;DR Wikipedia, a source of condensed articles reduced to their pithy best.

There is a parade of apps that make Wikipedia access on a mobile device a breeze, starting with Wikipedia's own app for iOS, Android, and Windows. An update to the iOS app last year simplified the navigation and improved the search, plus provided an "Explore feed" for people to get personalized content that always updates.

Other free options for mobile downloads include the aforementioned Wikiwand, plus Wikipanion, Articles, and Wikiamo, all for iOS. If you want to take Wikipedia entirely offline on mobile, Kiwixmade by the Swiss chapter of Wikimediais on iOS and Android. There are Android-only Kiwix versions for the Wikivoyage travel guide and Medical Wikipedia as well. And Endless is a unique iOS-only app that will bring you a random Wikipedia article whenever you open it.

If you eschew apps for mobile browser, then bookmark the mobile version of Wikipedia at en.m.wikipedia.org. It looks pretty great on a desktop, too.

Eric narrowly averted a career in food service when he began in tech publishing at Ziff-Davis over 20 years ago. He was on the founding staff of Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine (all defunct, and it's not his fault). He's the author of two novels, BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale"--Publishers' Weekly) and KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. He works from his home in Ithaca, NY. More

View post:
The Best Tools to Improve Your Wikipedia Experience - PC Magazine

Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years, said a researcher. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action. Photograph: Nicole Wilder/Syfy/NBCU/Getty Images

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 Clintons 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.

See the rest here:
Study reveals bot-on-bot editing wars raging on Wikipedia's pages - The Guardian

By Logan Stanley, Staff Writer February 23, 2017 Filed under News

Share on Facebook

Share via Email

On Feb. 15, EWU Libraries hosted a Wikipedia editing event that tasked students, faculty and staff with the assignment of constructing an entry about the EWU fires into the websites database.

Referred to as an edit-a-thon, it is the second rendition of the event and is organized by EWUs Education Librarian, James Rosenzweig.

Its a chance for us to choose something about Easterns history that isnt covered on Wikipedia and to use the resources we have in the library, in our archives, special collections to add material to Wikipedia, Rosenzweig said, who has been an administrator at Wikipedia since August 2003.

This years selection was the Eastern fires that occurred in 1891, 1912 and 1977. Wikipedia has no articles on their site about the fires. Last year, the editing event produced an article on EWUs Red Reese, the coach who has won the most games in the history of EWU.

Those who chose to participate in editing were armed with laptops and supplemented with stacks of papers. Tables were designated for each fire. Scattered across the tables were printed newspaper articles sourced from microfilm: traditional scans of old newspapers, a few books written about EWU, maps of Cheney and State Normal School (EWUs former name) and meeting minutes from the Board of Trustees.

In all, Rosenzweig said we probably got 60-70 different unique resources.

With their laptops and newspaper articles, those editing scoured and poured over the information to add to each specific entry. Dates, times and locations were all checked to ensure accuracy of the new passage being put into Wikipedia.

The first fire that happened in 1891 burned down the entire university which consisted of one building and was then referred to as the State Normal School. The fire was reportedly caused when a leaking hydrant soaked a pile of lime next to the building.

The school was finally rebuilt, but then a portion, a main classroom and an office building, subsequently burned down in 1912. The cause is allegedly unknown but was speculated to be faulty wiring.

Rosenzweig said that after the first two fires, the state of Washington was unsure if they wanted to pay to rebuild the school. Quite literally, EWU came very close to ceasing to exist. Ultimately, the school was rebuilt.

The most recent fire, which happened in 1977, burned down the entire Old Fieldhouse. Rosenzweig said there was already a three sentence article on the 1977 fire, so their intentions were to add onto the existing material. As of now, all three fires have Wikipedia entries.

The turnout was stronger than last year, with more students already showing up in the first few hours of the event than the totality of the previous year, Rosenzweig said.

One of the participants was EWU graduate student Angel Rios, who has attended both editing events.

It was kind of fun to be in a room doing something Im so passionate about with people who arent necessarily studying history the same way I do, but theyre very interested in what is taking place in the history of the institution, Rios said.

Rios who is also the treasurer of Phi Alpha Theta, EWUs history club was encouraged to come to the event as an aspiring historian. She said she was sure there were more than two fires and wanted to find out for herself.

Looking ahead, the plan is to put on the edit-a-thon again next year, but the topic remains undecided, Rosenzweig said.

See original here:
Eastern Fires: A Wikipedia Editing - The Easterner