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Mobile phone users in Iraq overwhelmingly lack the means to pay for expensive data plans, but a new partnership will give millions of them free access to Wikipedia.

Wikimedias not just the editorial muscle behind the worlds largest crowdsourced encyclopedia if todays announcement is any indication, its quite the philanthropic enterprise. On Tuesday, Wikipedia members in Iraq, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, and Asiacell, one of Iraqs largest mobile operators, announced a partnership thatwill see access to Wikipedia provided free of charge to Asiacells 11 million Iraqi customers.

Its part of Wikimedias ongoing Zero effort, which seeks to provide Wikipedia free of charge on mobile phones. The program, which was launched in 2013, waives fees for subscribers of participating mobile operators so that they may read and edit Wikipedia without using any of their mobile data. Its been deployed in Malaysia, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Jordan, Kosovo, Nepal, Nigeria, Ghana, Myanmar, Angola, and Algeria, and collectively spans 68 mobile operators in 52 countries.

More: The visually impaired may soon have an audio version of Wikipedia

Its aimed at addressing what the Wikipedia Foundation claims is one of the greatest barriers to internet access globally: Affordability. An estimated 57 percent of the world cant afford a 500MB monthly data plan at current prices. Ina recent Wikipedia Foundation survey, a majority of participants in Iraq reported that mobile data costs limited their use of the internet.

The Asiacell effort was spearheaded by Sarmad Al Taie, an Asiacell employee and Iraqi volunteer Wikipedia editor. In 2015, Sarmad and his wife, Ravan Al Taie, organized workshops in Erbil, the capital city of Iraqi Kurdistan, to teach people in Iraq how to edit Wikipedia. Later that year, the burgeoning community launched Iraqi Wikimedians user group, the first Wikimedia affiliate group recognized by Wikipedias broader global community of editors.

Worldwide, Wikipedia is recognized as an important learning resource, but it also offers a platform toshare knowledge with the world, a company spokesperson said. Edits from any country contribute to the worlds common knowledge repository, seen by hundreds of millions of people every month [] With this partnership, Asiacell customers will be able to edit Wikipedia without mobile data charges adding to and improving articles in their preferred language and sharing knowledge of Iraqs rich cultural history, heritage, and its people with the rest of the world

More: Beneath every presidential candidates Wikipedia page lies a vicious tug-of-war

News of Wikipedia Zeros expansion comes on the heels of the Wikimedia Foundations accessibility efforts. In May 2016, the nonprofit embarked on a joint project with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden that adds text-to-speech synthesis for certain parts of article entries, allowing them to be read aloud. Its slated to be off the ground by 2017, at which time English, Swedish, and Arabic speakers will be able to hear as well as read Wikipedia posts.

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Asiacell Grants 11M Iraqi Subscribers Access to Wikipedia | Digital ... - Digital Trends

The youth component of Russias parliament has come up with a new initiative to improve Russias image online by submittingthousands of articles to Wikipedia that carry full and truthful information about the achievements and exploits of the Russian people. The Youth Parliament of the Russian Federation State Assembly announced the Virtual Front campaignbecause Wikipedia carriesdestructive and falsified information about Russia.

The chairman of the Youth Parliament, State Duma deputy Natalia Kuvshinova said at a recentpress conferencein Moscow thatthe campaign was not only meant to produce10,000 articles, but to also raise Russians awareness about unreliable information on the internet and social networks.

The project would help clean dirt from the media, saidDeputy General Viktor Vodolatsky.

The Youth Parliament was created to promote legislative regulation of the rights and interests of Russian youth in the State Duma, and has organized other patriotic campaigns in the past.

The coordinator of the initiative Kseniya Selezneva, told Vocativ that they want to highlight Russian achievements in history and write about heroes of the Great Patriotic War [Russians term for World War II]. According to their Vkontakte page, they want to write not only about historybut also about modernRussian heroes. She said the project was being carried out by volunteers and their enthusiasm.

According to Wikipedia statistics, there are currently over 1.3 million in the Russian language compared to some 5.3 million in English.

This isnt the first Russian project aimed at improving Russias online image. Last week, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Ministry of ForeignAffairs saidthe Ministry would begin collecting fake news of leading western media. Her comments were followed by remarks fromDefense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who recentlysaidRussia has created an information warfare directorate within the defense ministry toengage in counterpropaganda.

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Russians Want To Make Wikipedia More 'Truthful' And Patriotic - Vocativ

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The University of Colorado, Boulder is hosting a feminist Wikipedia edit-a-thon to fix what it sees as a gender gap in Wikipedias articles and to resist the Trump administration.

The five-hour event at UC Boulder is part of an international effort called Art+Feminism by New Yorks Museum of Modern Art to improve the representation of women on Wikipedia, as reported byArtNews. As of 2011, women comprised less than 15 percent, approximately, of the sites editors, according toThe New York Times.

Its a mix of people, but they usually come with the goal of righting a wrong, said Stacey Allan, who hosted an edit-a-thon last year, according to The Frame. They will come with someone in mind that they were shocked to find didnt already exist on Wikipedia, and they want to make sure they correct that today.

Wikipedia is something that belongs to all of us. Its not a privately held resource, its content isnt motivated by the whims of any owners, said Art+Feminisms organizers. When you have a government actively pushing alternative facts, improving the reliability and completeness of Wikipedia is an important act of everyday resistance.

The Museum of Modern Arts edit-a-thon will also host Kimberly Drew, its social media manager, to talk about fake news and the process of finding reliable sources.

Despite its wide reach, Wikipedia suffers from a gender gap, says the UC Boulder page. And its content is skewed by the lack of womens voices.

Were gathering women and allies together to celebrate womens cultural achievements and edit Wikipedia articles about women in the arts.

The event welcomes Wikipedia editors of any skill level and especially encourages black women and women with varying gender identities to participate. While New Yorks Museum of Modern Art will be hosting a central edit-a-thon, others will be hosted at locations worldwide, such as Ontario and Washington, D.C.

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Feminists Plan Mass-Editing Party To 'Correct' Wikipedia - Daily Caller

Until a few days ago, the Wikipedia page, Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2008 listedBarack Obamaas the winner ofthe popular vote in the 2008 Democratic primary. However, Obama lost the popular vote in the primary, but won the nomination by garnering moredelegates. Images below show snapshots from the Internet Archive, theWayback Machine.

In the world of fake news, why would one of our go-to fact checking resources be intentionally manipulated in such an innocuous way?

In 2016,Hillary Clinton won both the Democratic primarys popular and delegatevote counts. Whether or not you are of the opinion that the party colluded against Bernie Sanders, the delegate and popular vote counts supported her legitimacy as the nominee.

More importantly, skip forward to 2017 and both Sandersand Clinton are targeting the unfairness of the Electoral College as the reason Donald Trump got elected whereHillary Clinton received 3 million more votes nationwide.

The problem presented inthis narrative is that Democrats are almost universally in agreement that they like Barack Obama who received LESS votes than Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Primary.

So how did he win? Simple. He won the Democratic Partys version of the Electoral College the delegate count!

Hard to peddle a narrative thatwe need to embrace the popular vote when your private political party has chosen not to follow the popular vote, right?

So, for a period of three weeks, someone tried to cover this narrative by creating alternative facts on Wikipedia. Fortunately, realitys watchdog has since reverted the information back to correct the record.

Regardless, next time a member of the Democratic Party says to get rid of the Electoral College ask them when the Democratic Party is getting rid of their delegate process.

Photo Credit: IB Photography / shutterstock.com

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Wikipedia Manipulated to Suggest Obama Won '08 Democratic Primary Popular Vote - IVN News

Wikipedia, the fifth most popular website on the internet according to Wikipedia has amassed an amazing 40 million entries since its launch in 2001, but underneath all that free information, a cold cyber war has been waging.

A new analysis of the first 10 years of Wikipedia has found that huge numbers of automated software 'bots' editing algorithms powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are embroiled in epic, ongoing disputes over articles, continually reverting each others' edits in a desperate bid to have the last word.

"The fights between bots can be far more persistent than the ones we see between people," researcher Taha Yasseri from the University of Oxford in the UK told The Guardian.

"Humans usually cool down after a few days, but the bots might continue for years."

In their study, Yasseri and fellow researchers tracked edits on Wikipedia in between 2001 and 2010.

While the amount of bot activity in the website's early years was low, it skyrocketed as the platform and bot technology matured, with bots responsible for about 15 percent of all edits across all language editions of the encyclopaedia in 2014 even though these algorithms only make up about 0.1 percent of Wikipedia editors.

Editing bots perform a number of roles on the site to do with modifying Wikipedia content, including undoing vandalism, enforcing bans, checking spelling, creating links, and importing new content automatically.

These bots are designed to be benevolent, supporting human Wikipedia users and cooperating with them but that benevolence doesn't always respond to their own kind.

Two bots in particular, Xqbot and Darknessbot, clashed on over 3,600 articles on a range of topics, from Alexander of Greece to Aston Villa football club.

Between 2009 and 2010, Xqbot reverted more than 2,000 of Darknessbot's edits with Darknessbot returning the favour with some 1,700 of its own changes to Xqbot's edits.

Another epic clash, between bots called Tachikoma and Russbot, saw each undo more than 1,000 edits made by the other.

These kind of stoushes came as a shock to the researchers, given the bots aren't intended to conflict with one another but were accidentally caught in loops where their programming made editorial combat inevitable.

"We had very low expectations to see anything interesting. When you think about them they are very boring," Yasseri told Ian Sample at The Guardian.

"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."

Another surprise for the researchers was how bot conflict played out differently over the range of foreign language versions of the site.

The German edition of Wikipedia had the fewest bot conflicts with 24 reversions per bot on average over the 10-year study period. The Portuguese Wikipedia had the most clashes an average of 185 reversions per bot while the English language page fell in the middle, with bots altering each other's edits 105 times on average in 10 years.

"We find that bots behave differently in different cultural environments and their conflicts are also very different to the ones between human editors," explains one of the team, Milena Tsvetkova, in a press release.

"This has implications not only for how we design artificial agents but also for how we study them. We need more research into the sociology of bots."

As automated AI becomes increasingly prevalent and more powerful, considering the cultural (and potentially combative) dispositions of their programming is something we'll have to pay a lot more attention too.

Otherwise, the future is going to end up looking way too much like this:

The findings are reported in PLOS ONE.

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Investigation Reveals That Wikipedia's Bots Are in a Silent, Never-Ending War With Each Other - ScienceAlert