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There have been any number of illicit Wikipedia edits in recent years, mostly to the pages of celebrities like Taylor Swift and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But the latest Wikipedia war centers on medical science, specifically the efficacy of acupuncture.

Currently theWikipedia page for this form of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)in which thin needles are inserted into the body contains the sentence TCM theory and practice are not based upon scientific knowledgeand acupuncture is a pseudoscience.

Wikipedia further defines pseudoscience as claims, beliefs, or practices presented as being plausible scientifically, but which are not justifiable by the scientific method and lists astrology, alchemy and creationism as examples of said beliefs.

Physicians around the world are outraged that Wikipedias editors have grouped acupuncture with these disciplines. Li Jingxin, vice president of the Chinese Association of Acupuncture, told the website ChinaQWthat acupuncture is widely practiced and accepted, andjust because Western medicine is scientific is no reason to call Chinese medicineunscientific.'

A commenter on the Chinese blogging site Weibo was more blunt:Why isnt the research into the unknown by that fuckingHawking and his gang of scientists labelled pseudoscience?

But the main issue most people have with acupunctures classification is that it seemingly violates Wikipedias policy on neutral point of view, which reads that writers and editors should gatherfairly, proportionately and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.

According to the articles edit history, the battle over the neutrality of acupuncture has been going on for at least two months. Some of the choice comments include:

The Acupuncture Now Foundation, an advocacy group, is so passionate about this issue that it started a Change.org petition to combat the Wikibias. The online appeal, which has almost 3,600 signatures (its goal is 5,000), accuses Wikipedia of denialism and censorship, linking to message board posts from annoyed editors. It then asks co-founder Jimmy Wales to clean up the administration of the article.

Admittedly acupuncture is not a cure-allChinese actressXu Tingdied of cancer last year after choosing alternativetherapies like acupuncture over chemotherapy.

But as the petition points out in a direct plea to Wales, cases like this are in the minority and dont represent the general acupuncture experience.

Wikipedia is not remotely covering acupuncture appropriately, by your or any reasonable definition, the letter reads.

See original here:
There's a Major War Brewing Over the Acupuncture Wikipedia Page - Observer

WASHINGTON The Wikipedia biography of Sen. Roy Blunt, who has been receiving high volumes of social media protests over his plan to vote for Donald Trumps education secretary nominee, was temporarily changed to cast Blunts support for that nominee in a negative light.

The Missouri Republican has said he will vote for Betsy DeVos, the former Michigan Republican Party chair, whose views on charter schools and public education have drawn intense opposition from some educators and teachers unions. The vote is expected sometime Tuesday in the Senate and could be very close.

Two Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have said they will oppose DeVos. That means that the best-case scenario for Trump to get his nominee through would come on a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence.

Democrats have been trying to put pressure on one Republican to flip. On Monday, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on the Senate floor urged opponents to "keep making your voices heard" and said Senate Democrats would "double down" to try to get one more Republican to vote with them.

On Friday, two passages were added to Blunts biography on Wikipedia, an open-content, online encyclopedia. Wikipedia requires registration to begin an entry but not to edit one. The same unidentified user apparently added both lines, according to Wikipedia logs.

In a session about Blunts early life and pre-Washington career, one that mentioned his presidency of Southwest Baptist University, this line was added:

Mr. Blunt so despised his tenure in education that he supported the 2017 nomination of Betsy DeVos.

Later, a new section titled, Controversy, the following language was added:

In 2017, Senator Blunt faced backlash for his support of Betsy DeVos' nomination as Secretary of Education. DeVos and her organization All Children Matter contributed a total of at least $234,352.33 to the Senator and his causes. Despite her unpopularity and lack of experience in educational roles, Blunt declared his intention to support her candidacy. This resulted in thousands of constituents submitting their written and verbal disagreements.

About an hour after a story on the edits appeared in the Post-Dispatch, those passages were removed.

The source given for the amount of money was from an anti-Blunt blog post by a former teacherand journalist, and actually said that Blunt had received about $38,000 from DeVos or members of her family over multiple elections. The bulk of the larger figure was from a DeVos-supported activist group reported spending against Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., when McCaskill ran for governor against Roy Blunt's son, Matt, in 2004

Matt Blunt won that election by about 3 percentage points.

Sen. Roy Blunts Facebook page has lit up with opposition to the nomination, with many of the nearly 2,000 comments on a recent thread referring to opposition to either DeVos or Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Others opposing DeVos have been calling his Senate offices. And protesters against Trump's policies and nominees have gathered near Blunt's offices in the state.

Our offices, and all congressional offices, are seeing large call volumes that oppose the current administration on several issues, Blunt's communications director, Brian Hart, said. We have also seen increased efforts by support groups to call in as well.

Hart told the Post-Dispatch that the new material on Wikipedia breaks the rules of the site because it does not provide sources for the first claim, and that it is not objective in that it appears to copy an anti-Blunt blog post in the second.

Hart predicted the two recently added passages will likely be challenged and removed because of that lack of sourcing.

He said he and other members of Blunts Senate office are prohibited, by Wikipedia rules, from removing the material he considers incorrect. Otherwise we would help on a host of things that are posted incorrectly, Hart said.

Last week, Blunt, who chairs a Senate Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Department of Education, issued this statement when he announced he would support DeVos:

I believe Betsy DeVos understands that decisions about education need to be made much closer to where kids are. I look forward to working with her to find ways to get those decisions back to local school boards, and moms and dads.

All Senate Democrats and independents, including Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.; and Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; are expected to vote against DeVos.

In an email to supporters and potential donors last week, McCaskill wrote: Betsy DeVos never attended a public school. Shes never worked at a public school. She likes to talk about siphoning resources away from public schools so families have a choice but in rural Missouri, good public schools are often the only choice families have. Our small towns dont have the kinds of options available in urban centers.

Teachers opposed to DeVos were picketing outside Blunts Columbia office on Monday, during lunchtime on a professional development day.

I have colleagues who have never even called their representative or sent a letter suddenly every single teacher at my lunch table has done those things, MacKenzie Everett-Kennedy, an English teacher at Columbia's Hickman High School, said while protesting outside Blunts office there.

Everett-Kennedy said she and her fellow teachers watched DeVos confirmation hearing and that she was rankled that DeVos, who did not attend public school, seemed unfamiliar with testing standards or federal laws on educating people with disabilities. During her hearing, DeVos also said the federal government should let districts decide whether to allow guns in schools, for instance to protect from potential grizzlies.

I teach high school where I have the six-foot-tall football players who can overpower me. I dont want a gun in my classroom but she thinks bears are a concern, Everett-Kennedy said, adding that Blunts support for DeVos in spite of educators concerns is deeply insulting for the teachers in this state, especially considering he himself was a teacher.

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Blunt's Wikipedia page briefly changed to attack his support of DeVos as education secretary - STLtoday.com

Women-related articles are generally shorter, more prone to deletion, and more likely to be peripheral pieces under male-centric articles.

I was beginning an introduction session at a college in Vijayawada. While my audience (mostly female students) was giggling, I wrote down a simple question on the whiteboard:

I see more men than women in _____

The response was some more shy giggling until some students slowly raised their hands. Sports! Technology companies! Conferences! In governments! When I am in my class. There is no denying that we all observe the underrepresentation of women at some points and occasions in our lives. However, it is much harder to imagine and notice that Wikipedia, the most used online encyclopaedia and the 7th most visited website worldwide, also poses a problematic imbalance in its content and editor demographics.

In 2011, a survey carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation found that only 8.5 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. Since then, the awareness has risen; many have found the editor demographic imbalance is a strong reflection of what the encyclopaedia does or does not cover, how the written language and discourse were constructed on the pages, and how discussion flows on article talk pages[1].

For example, scholars discovered that women-related articles are generally shorter, more prone to deletion, and more likely to be peripheral pieces under male-centric articles. To elaborate, in the network structure of Wikipedia articles, womens pages lack centrality as they often provide links and mention related male figures in their writing but not the other way around. A glass ceiling also exists for the notability criteria. The threshold for a woman to be notable enough (from the perspective of a male-dominant community) to deserve a Wikipedia page is higher than that of male figures. Thus, the lack of women editors and an already male-centric structure pose a threat not only to the diversity of content but also to the very definition of knowledge.

For years, the foundation and local communities have tried to discover the reasons behind the gender gap and solutions to it. Former Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner posted on her blog nine reasons that are off-putting for women when they edit Wikipedia.

In India and other parts of the world, various reasons can also contribute to the problem. Awareness, for example, is the first barrier to betackled. Many women did not know that Wikipedia is editable or that there are Indian language versions that they can contribute to. Internet access and facilities are a couple more reasons. In case someone does not have a personal computer, a woman is usually more cautious and skeptical when using a public internet caf and staying out late. Similarly, families of young women editors can be more concerned about their daughters participation in men-organised/male-dominant communities, especially when there are offline (on-site) activities. The roots of the issue are not merely at the community level, but also sociopolitical and cultural.

Many events and initiatives have been carried out from local to global community levels. Women in Red (WiR), for example, is a global initiative to bring more women-related articles online. It encourages editors to turn red links (non-existing pages) into blue links (existing Wikipedia page). The project has helped increase female biographies from 15 percent (November 2014) of total biographies on English Wikipedia to 16.75 percent (November 2016)[2]. In March, Wikipedia communities around the globe also celebrate Womens History Month, when edit-a-thons (marathons for Wikipedia editing) are held to help create more womens articles online as well as to recruit more female volunteers and spread awareness. However, is this enough?

As we are raising more awareness, integrating gender gap issues into the communitys strategy plans and coming up with more intervention ideas to reach more potential women editors, it is time to revisit the meaning behind the work. In my early research time, I was to believe that retention rate (whether female participants will stay active after an event), number of articles created, and the event continuation potentials are the key factors in determining whether an event can be called successful. But the ideas have slowly changed as I have got to reach more female participants.

As a matter of fact, Wikipedia is about voluntary contribution and negotiating for consensus in quality knowledge creation as well as maintaining a friendly and open environment for all. In other words, we can nudge people into Wikipedia editing but we should not (and need not to) push them to do it. Especially in the situation of a wide gender gap, we should not make women feel like they are tokenised in the process that we are targeting them due to their gender and that they should contribute more because they are female, the minority. When asked about the existing problems in the current gender gap interventions, an active Wikipedian once explained to me:

Say if you are writing the biography of someone then you should be familiar with and interested in that persons work. Thats why sometimes those gender-specific edit workshops backfire... If you are creating a bio just because this person is a woman, then I think it is missing the whole point of Wikipedia.

In my opinion and through discussions with several female Wikipedians, I have realised that there should be a new debate and investigation on how intervention goals should be set and what these actions long-term results would be. While focusing on the retention rate of a new Wikipedian after an intervention, we limit ourselves in the frame of time and numbers. We should, instead, understand more about new members experiences and feedback to pinpoint the good motivations and expected barriers for them. With this information, we should help establish the motivation in event follow-ups and to minimise their barriers as much as the community can. Secondly, article quality should be stressed upon even if it takes more time to publish her/his first article, it is a much more fruitful learning experience to understand the responsibility of a Wikipedian. After all, low-quality articles not only do not contribute to Wikipedia content but also lead to more deletion, which can be a discouraging experience for those who are new.

For event continuation, we should guide the participants to community engagement and support them to carry out more event ideas that can suit their interests and goals. In short, it is about creating involvement, discussion, and a sense of community instead of continuously pushing events on our end and have the women be passive participants. When asked about how one can define a successful gender gap-bridging event, one of the active organisers told me:

For me, it is when conversations are happening. It is when we have both men and women, and that we can openly have a discussion about the issue and the difficulties and how we want to see changes.

To put it simply, I believe that we should look at experiences more than numbers, focus on quality more than quantity, and try to reach people (both men and women) to stimulate discussion more than being fixated on the contents needed to balance out the asymmetry.

How to fix the Wikipedia gender gap is never an easy question to ask, but what I am sure about is that Wikipedia and its communities should be empowering rather than result-oriented and that our learning still has a long way to go.

[1] A talk page is attached to each Wikipedia article (found on the top-left corner of an article), where editors can hold discussions and debates or leave comments during the editing process.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red

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Only 8.5pc of Wikipedia editors are women. How do we fix the ... - YourStory.com

Update 8:05p.m. EST: The test was right. ItsNeil Gorsuch.

President Donald Trump is delivering his Supreme Court nomination in his typical showman fashion, summoning histop choices to Washington D.C. Tuesday night ahead of the scheduled announcement. While his team intends to keep the country standing by to see who gets the nod, Vocativ decided to do some digging.

A pretty good predictor of future news events, it turns out, is Wikipedia.As we found back in July when Hillary Clinton announced her running mate, Tim Kaine thanks to a little trick uncovered by theWashington Post found back in 2008 edit histories on the encyclopedia site can be a propitious tell.

The theory here is that Washington insiders working for sources in the know double down on any Wikipedia cleanup or additions necessary before a relatively unknown name splashed across the headlines sends the public looking for more information.

If that method proves to work once again in the case of the next SCOTUS nomination, it would seem that Neil Gorsuch, a 49-year-old judge out of Colorado, is your next nominee.

Of course,its tough to say just how reliable this approach in this case, especially considering that a great deal of the most recent edits made to Gorsuchs page came from thethe same IP addressediting the page for Thomas Hardiman, the other potential choice. Plus, its always possible that given Trumps penchant for erratic, last-minute decision making both judges pages are undergoing a lot of scrutiny, since both will be in the news after the announcement.

Edits to both candidates entriesmade within the past week were pretty major, delving into the two candidates personal lives, notable rulings, stances on issueslike immigration, abortion rights, free speech, and religious freedom, and providing a general cleanup.

Gorsuchs Wikipedia page, which now has 4.7 times as many words as it did Jan. 12, 2016, no longer features his book on euthanasia (which he does not support) as prominently. It now focuses much more on full scope of his professional accomplishments.

Gorsuch currently serves on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, where hemade his namesupporting an exception to the contraception mandate within the Affordable Care Act in the now-famous Hobby Lobby case. In many ways, his political viewpoints on other hot-button issuesand approach to interpreting the Constitution as it was understood when it was written are similar to that of the late Antonin Scalia, whose seat he could fill.

Hardiman, 51, who currently serves in Philadelphia on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (the same court where Trumps sister currently serves as a senior judge), is seen as more centrist than Gorsuch.

Still, his Wikipedia page now notes that throughout the course of his career, he has worked against Department of Housing and Urban Development to reduce the number of low income homes in a Pittsburgh suburb,fought against the separation of church and state in the form of a courthouse plaque bearing the Ten Commandments, and sided with an anti-abortion protestor who refused to leave his post while violating a permit. Earlier on in the month, a much shorter version of Hardimans Wikipedia page featured only brief descriptions of notable cases and included now-missing details of his biography, like his work in private practice and his involvement with Big Brother Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh.

Read more:
Wikipedia Test Works: Gorsuch Is Supreme Court Nominee - Vocativ

Fake news may have played a role in the 2016 US presidential election, experts say.

If open collaboration worked for Wikipedia, it could work for combating fake news.

This is the suggestion of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales in a guest column Friday in The Guardian. He suggests the human element is crucial to discerning false from factual stories -- enhanced formulas for social networks and other aggregator sites to weed out fake news aren't enough.

And the way to get there, said Wales, requires people committed to sharing facts in open dialog and in open online spaces.

Sound familiar? It should. It's a similar structure to Wikipedia's free online, open-source encyclopedia.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and other networks have been cracking down on fake news after coming under fire for helping spread it. Fake news became such a hot topic in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election that then-President Barack Obama warned of fake news' power to destroy democracy.

"Social media feeds, doctored videos and instant messaging" are the biggest culprits in spreading deliberately incorrect and misleading information, Wales wrote about the rash of stories posing as legitimate news that don't actually meet journalistic fact-checking standards.

"We need this visibility," Wales added, "Because it sheds light on the process and origins of information and creates a structure for accountability." You can find Wales' column here.

Read next: Here's how to avoid falling into the fake news trap

CNET Magazine: Check out a sample of the stories you'll find in CNET's newsstand edition.

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How do you beat fake news? Transparency, says Wikipedia co-founder - CNET