Mediaboss Marketing

Wikipedias parent company has announced it is to begin charging major technology companies to access the online encyclopaedias vast trove of knowledge.

The Wikipedia Enterprise initiative will launch later this year and could see the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon paying fees to access content theyve been using without traditional compensation for years.

Until now, the burden has been on benevolent Wikipedia users to keep the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation via donations of which the aforementioned firms are often among but now the balance will be redressed by tech giants and, eventually, smaller companies.

Wikimedia Enterprise is a new product from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, the foundation says. Wikimedia Enterprise provides paid developer tools and services that make it easier for companies and organisations to consume and re-use Wikimedia data.

Related: Best VPN

The new initiative was announced on Tuesday and came to light via a Wired report, which revealed conversations are ongoing between Wikimedia and a number of tech giants whore already in discussions over an agreement.

This is the first time the foundation has recognised that commercial users are users of our service, says Wikimedia Foundation senior director Lane Becker in an interview. Weve known they are there, but we never really treated them as a user base.

Apple, for example, leverages Wikipedia for Siris knowledge bank, but currently doesnt officially pay for that content. It does match employee donations to Wikipedia though.

Amazon uses the tech for Alexa and donated $1 million in 2018. Google, who heavily leverages results from Wikipedia in Search while using excepts in its knowledge boxes, donated $2 million in 2019. Facebook also chucked in a million in 2018. Its not clear how regular those donations have been since.

Do you think its time Big Tech started footing the bill for Wikipedia? Will it help to secure the non-profit companys future? Let us know @trustedreviews on Twitter.

Chris Smith is a freelance technology journalist for a host of UK tech publications, includingTrusted Reviews. He's based in South Florida, USA.

Read the original:
Big Tech firms are facing a big bill from Wikipedia heres why - TrustedReviews

Id never thought much about Wikipedia until its pages started appearing high up in Google searchesand not just Google. If you ask Siri or Alexa a question, chances are the source of your answer will be Wikipedia too. Hundreds of AI platforms use Wikipedia data; machine learning trains on it. So if women are missing there, they will be missing elsewhere as well.

Women in science went missing long before Wiki, of coursein press coverage, top billing at meetings, appearance on panels. They werent much on my radar either when I first started writing about science decades ago and showed up for the March meeting of the American Physical Society. The March meeting is nerd mecca: Close to 10,000 physicists gather to present findings in condensed matter, which is everything from quantum computers to lasers to smart materials. AI and nano everything.

A friendly Black woman noticed my obvious confusion and helped guide me through the maze of talks, panels, sessions. She was Shirley Ann Jackson, who I later learned was the first Black woman to get a doctorate in theoretical physics from MIT (where, she said, she was mistaken for a maid). She took me to the reception for women in physics. I was seriously wowed. A lot more physicists were women (and vice versa) than I ever imagined. Where had they been? Where had I been?

Decades later, I had a similar wake-up call at an exclusive meeting in Aspen of top physicists in what was then known as string theorytackling the most fundamental questions of space, time, energy, stuff. I expected that a lot of the material would be exotic and unfamiliar. What really seemed exotic and unfamiliar were the three Black men among the small elite group.

For most people, the description theoretical physicist doesnt immediately conjure an image of a Black person. (Neil de Grasse Tyson is great, but one example doesnt count, and hes not a part of this particular tribe anyway.) After the Aspen meeting, my ground truth shifted. I could picture Black men as theoretical physicists no problem because Id met them, interviewed them, hung out.

Then it struck me: Just about every female physicist I know, and every Black physicist I know, are people I met in person. I hadnt even noticed their absence until their presence hit me in face.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Update newsletter, providing the latest insights on the pandemic, vaccine rollouts, and more.

My portals arent so diverse. Which is why Wikipedia in the age of corona had me worried.

A lot of people say they use Wikipedia only as a starting point, a first reference. After all, everyone knows that its crowdsourced. Its proudly non-expert. A community of editors ultimately arbitrates whats in, whats out, what matters, whats true. Because there are so many of them (250,000 edits a day, according to one source), the idea is truth will out.

Yet Wikipedias top ranking on Google gives it credibility and authority that misrepresents what it isa community consensus. This is a problem, according to Atilus, a leading digital marketing company. During an audit for a client using prime SEO software, Atilus found Wikipedia at or near the top over and over again, frequently with a prominent sidebar. On its blog, Atilus posed a not-always-hypothetical question to illustrate the problem: Would you rather trust a doctor whos undergone rigorous training or people who spend time in health-related chatrooms or an intern who blogs about heart health? Thats a big oversimplification, given that Wiki entries are supposed to be double-sourced and edited. But even when that works, its not even close to ground truth.

Granted, Wikipedia isnt the only source of content thats creeps into everything, ubiquitous and unavoidable. It could be your mom or The New York Times. What gives Wikipedia a central place in data heaven is that popular algorithms that lead us around by the nose go to the site to learn. AI reinforces whatever biases are put in front of them. Big data processes codify the past, writes Cathy ONeil in her book Weapons of Math Destruction.

The rest is here:
The Shaky Ground Truths of Wikipedia - WIRED

The Donald Trump era might have come and gone, but the age of disinformation is here to stay. What was already a humming misinformation machine before 2016 has, over the past five years, developed into a world-building juggernaut capable of reshaping economies, politics and social structures. Paired with the constant downsizing and shuttering of local, regional and even national media, this evolution has put a premium on trustworthy and easily accessible information.

This is the faltering information ecosystem into which Wikimedia Foundation CEO and executive director Katherine Maher stepped in June 2016. Wikimedia, which oversees Wikipedia along with Wiktionary, Wikiquote and other projects, is the collective name for a global movement that aims to harness the collaborative power of the internet by creating and sharing free knowledge in a variety of forms.

Maher, who will leave her post this spring, has spent the last five years shepherding Wikipedia and its non-profit organization through these turbulent contexts. During that time, Wikipedias readership has shot up 30 per cent, and the foundation has doubled its annual budget. The organization also introduced a universal code of conduct for participation in Wiki projects and increased its number of monthly active editors. During a time of media austerity, these are not small feats.

To top it off, despite hosting one of the worlds most popular websites, Wikimedia maintains a miniscule carbon footprint by keeping its focus on text rather than images. Wikipedias climate change articles remain some of the sites most deeply sourced and extensively cited works.

But how much vigilance is required now to sustain an enormous digital resource hub that anyone can edit? How has Wikipedia the global go-to reference that relies on volunteer editorial contributions dealt with an increasingly resourceful disinformation movement?

A newsletter for people who care about the climate

Join Maher as she discusses these things and more with Canadas National Observer founder and editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood for a Conversations event on March 18 at 7 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. PT. Reserve your spot here, and send potential questions ahead of the event to [emailprotected].

Maher has had a front-row seat to the global fight against disinformation, but its hardly her first rodeo. Prior to her station with Wikimedia, she worked with various NGOs and non-profits to advocate for better information economies, free and open governance, and civic engagement. Alongside Wikimedia, her resume includes UNICEF, the World Bank and the National Democratic Institute.

With her Wikimedia tenure coming to an end in April, this Conversations event promises a relevant retrospective on the state of public media and disinformation since 2016.

See the original post:
Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher on how Wikipedia fights disinformation - National Observer

Why Global Citizens Should Care

Wikipedia is many peoples go-to source for quick information, but looking up something on the site doesnt always yield the most unbiased results.

Only 20% of the 1.7 million biographies on what is considered to be the largest online user-generated encyclopedia are about women.

There are also four times as many articles about men as there are about women out of Wikipedias 50 million articles.

In an effort to promote gender equality online, people around the world will add more content to Wikipedia about women who are influential figures, experts, and role models in different fields to celebrate International Womens Day on Monday. The edit-a-thon initiative is part of the fourth annual global #WikiGap supported by Wikimedia Sweden, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

The campaign is crowdsourcing the names of women who are missing from Wikipedia on social media.

What happens online is not separated from what happens offline, Eric Luth, involvement and advocacy project manager at Wikimedia Sweden, told Global Citizen via email. Inequalities in a digital sphere will build upon and feed inequalities in the physical world.

The gap in information about men and women on Wikipedia seems to be in direct correlation with the lack of representation among its authors 90% of the sites contributors are men. These discrepancies lead to less knowledge about women and a lack of womens perspectives to learn from.

Limited resources about women on Wikipedia can trickle down to the media and the information consumed by the public. Already, only 1 in 5 experts interviewed in the media are women, and when journalists conduct research they often reference Wikipedia, according to Wikimedia, but they do not have gender-equal sources to choose from.

The Wikimedia movement has acknowledged its responsibility, and a campaign such as WikiGap is important for breaking the vicious circle and giving visibility to, and agency for, women also in the offline world, Luth said.

Related Stories March 8, 2015 Global Poverty Project The Inspiring History Of International Womens Day

The first WikiGap event was launched by Wikimedia Sweden and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs in 2018, and almost 60 countries worldwide have participated. Through this effort, more than 5,000 editors have added more than 50,000 new or improved articles about prominent women to Wikipedia.

As women around the world continue to be hit the hardest by the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is essential that their stories arent forgotten, Luth noted. Many women who are frontline workers remain unknown.

When traditional media and knowledge actors fail to tell these stories, to gather this information, the Wikimedia movement with its hundreds of thousands of volunteers can play a pivotal role, Luth said.It means to give space to those who have been left out, or to highlight deeds that have not been told enough. Also,impressive women from history that can act as role models are important to bring forward.

Go here to read the rest:
Only 20% of Wikipedia's Biographies Are About Women #WikiGap Wants to Change That - Global Citizen

Microsoft has made some important announcements on its Edge Insider blog this morning. First of all, the company is expanding Immersive Reader support in its Edge browser to the Wikipedia website. This update is now available in preview in the Canary and Dev channels, and it also brings some optimizations to the built-in tool for Edge Insiders.

Weve been working to bring Immersive Reader to more and more pages across the web and today were excited to announce that Microsoft Edge just made more than 55 million web pages more accessible. You can now open all Wikipedia webpages in Immersive Reader by clicking Immersive Reader (book and speaker) icon in the address bar, the Edge Insider team explained.

The first of the improvements being made currently to the Immersive Reader view is the addition of the Table of Contents. The firm says that it should make it easier for users to navigate through Wikipedia pages while using Immersive Reader in the browser. Users can now click on the icon on the Wikipedia page and then select any label to view additional details.

The firm has also added an option for users to expand or collapse data tables that might not be relevant for them. Users will need to click the Show more button in order to see the hidden rows in the table. This change should help the readers to quickly scroll through the content on a webpage in Immersive Reader.

Microsoft urges Edge Insiders to try out these features and provide feedback. The team notes that these updates are rolling out in phases, so not everyone will get them immediately. Have you received the new Wikipedia support in Edge on the Dev or Canary channels? Sound off in the comments section below.

Visit link:
Microsoft Edge expands Immersive Reader support to Wikipedia - OnMSFT