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I have long been a defender of Wikipedia. The fact that it allows for instant correction makes it far more reliable than many Pulitzer Award winning books, which sometimes have errors on their first page.

And the way it has maintained balance in the midst of national socio-political debates has been remarkable.

But if that applies to the big stories, I have good reasons to know that Wikipedia can also be a tool for political bullies to target their personal enemies.

For many years now my own Wikipedia site has been controlled by competing trolls who seem to have different agendas. I am told by people in the publishing industry that it has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions.

Even when I get a contract I have to send links to publishers to show the accurate information.

Recently, a new Wiki editor has become involved and seems to be trying to clean up the site, for example, he (or she) has finally corrected my name, and this leads me to have hope that someone at Wikipedia will try to correct other mistakes that have been ongoing for years and, additionally, bring some balance to this article.

Here are some of the issues:

My humble thanks to anyone who has any advice or knowledge of any legal help available to address these issues.

I have no ill will toward Wikipedia and continue to defend it to teachers and educators, because of its quick chance to correct mistakes.

But sadly, my own personal experience has been disappointing.

If this site is not important enough to warrant supervision and rescue from persons who have a personal agenda why dont they take it down?

If it has to exist, then why should it be controlled by people who dont even know my name or my birthdate and who only see it as a utility to hurt someone they imagine to be their political enemy?

If any of you have any similar experiences let me know.

Doug Wead is a presidential historian who served as a senior adviser to the Ron Paul presidential campaign. He is a New York Times best-selling author, philanthropist, and adviser to two presidents, including President George H.W. Bush. He is the author of "Game of Thorns: Inside the Clinton-Trump Campaign of 2016," which is due to be released on Feb. 28, 2017. Read more reports from Doug Wead Click Here Now.

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Wikipedia Must Up Its Professionalism Game - Newsmax

The event celebrates women and art through editing Wikipedia pages

Mimmo Bonanni helps an editor during the Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Hayden Library on ASU's Tempe campus on Friday, March 31, 2017.

ASU held its second annual Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon last Friday at Hayden Library to help improve pages about women artists and encourage female editorship.

According to the organization,Art + Feminism, only 10 percent of Wikipedia editorsidentify as female.

Mimmo Bonanni, a social sciences librarian at the University, helped plan the event.

Bonanni said he likes the idea of teaching editing and information skills to students. He saidthat with these skills,they can practicefuture research and continue editing Wikipedia content.

Because the edit-a-thon is so hands-on, you learn how to evaluate information and sources critically, cite sources, and actually do these things in Wikipedia, and contribute back to Wikipedia, Bonanni said.

Bonanni also said he enjoyed that this event took place duringOpen Education Week at ASUbecause Wikipedia is an open educational resource.

Meredith Drum, an assistant professor inASU's School of Art, said this event is important to her because she is a feminist and an artist.

Drum first heard about the edit-a-thon in the New YorkTimes and agreed to bring the program toASU after Michael Mandiberg,one of the founders of Art + Feminism, reached out to her and the University's School of Art.

Knowing how the encyclopedia works and learning how to contribute to it is important, Drum said. Even more important is teaching university students about Wikipedia's gender gap, and showing them how they can close this gap by contributing to pages about women's accomplishments.

Anali Perry,an ASU librarian specializing in scholarly communication, said that Wikipedia is probably one of the best know examples of a freely available and modifiable educational resource.

Perry also helped organize the edit-a-thon event and ended up editing the page on Chinese artist,Ying Miao.

I dont know a lot about art, but I find it really interesting to read about artists inspirations, and the message they hope to convey through their preferred medium, she said. Miao was a fascinating topic.

Perry said she thinks this event is important to increase the number of women editors on Wikipedia and improve the information provided on women artists.

Articles about women, in any field, on Wikipedia are extremely scarce. she said.

Reach the reporter atjctower@asu.edu or follow@tower_joon Twitter.

LikeThe State Press on Facebook and follow@statepress on Twitter.

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ASU holds its second annual Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon - The State Press

Wikipedia articles on plane crashes show what we remember -- or forget Science Daily Wikipedia is an ideal space to study collective memory since article viewership statistics have been shown to mirror other internet user activity patterns, including Google searches. Here, Ruth Garca-Gavilanes and colleagues modeled the attention that ...

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Wikipedia articles on plane crashes show what we remember -- or forget - Science Daily

How long will we remember the Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared back in 2014? About 45 years, say scientists who used Wikipedia page views to develop a new way of studying our collective memory (the memory we share as a society).

For a study published today in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed Wikipedia page views to monitor how frequently people visit topic pages after a news event. In this specific study, the team collected page views of airplane crashes from 2008 to 2016 and labeled these current events. Then, they collected the same information on all plane crashes from before 2008 and labeled them past events. Analyzing the relationship between the two sets of data shows how different topics are related to each other. The researchers found that terrible current events can help keep past events alive, because people reading about the current event follow links to learn about something from years ago.

For example, when the Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down while flying over Ukraine, there were more page views for a similar event in the 1980s, when an Iranian airline was shot by down by the US Navy in the Persian Gulf. Not many people today know about that crash, according to study co-author Taha Yasseri, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. But because the two events were categorized similarly in Wikipedia, people who were originally reading about the Malaysia Airlines crash could click through and read about a past event they wouldnt know about otherwise.

Similarly, there was more traffic to the Wiki page for a 2001 American Airlines crash right after the 2015 Germanwings crash, even though the two pages arent directly connected by a hyperlink. The researchers arent exactly sure how the two got connected, but the association means that the memory patterns are not just an artifact of how articles are linked on Wikipedia but shows something more fundamental, says Yasseri.

The data also provide some insight into which events are more likely to be remembered. Huge events, of course, are intrinsically more memorable: whenever theres a plane crash, people tend to look at the 9/11 Wikipedia page more. Crashes where either a lot of people or none died, more recent crashes, and crashes operated by Western airlines also receive more traffic. On the other hand, the geographical location didnt seem to matter much.

The research found that airplane crashes more than 45 years old do not get many page views even when there when a new crash occurs, suggesting that these incidents are lost to memory. This could be explained by the fact that people who remember things from 50 to 60 years ago might not be the typical Wikipedia users, says Yasseri.

A lot of research on collective memory online focuses on the people doing the writing, according to Michela Ferron, a digital communication researcher who was not involved in the study. Todays paper offers a novel perspective because it doesnt focus just on people who are actively writing and editing the pages, but captures the behavior of people on the web.

The internet shapes our memory in paradoxical ways. Because of the online news cycle, our attention spans are rather short, says Yasseri, and interest in any given airplane crash quickly disappears. But on the other hand, the news event plus Wikipedia provides more opportunity to educate ourselves about the past. Our attention span might have been shortened by tech and by online environments, but then at the same time long-term memory has become more persistent and things from the past are more accessible, he says.

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Traffic to Wikipedia articles shows how we remember plane crashes ... - The Verge

Abigail Wise, left, and Kassondra Cloos organized group to edit and add Wikipedia entries to make sure more women in the outdoor industry are represented in the online encyclopedia. (Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer)

Visitors to Wikipedia in the coming weeks will for the first time be able to find facts on Claire Marie Hodges, the country's first female national park ranger. They'll also be able to read about American freeskier Elyse Saugstad, who survived the infamous 2012 Tunnel Creek Avalanche, or Shannon Galpin, the 2013 National Geographic Adventurer of the Year.

This information is available thanks to a pair of Boulder women whose efforts to highlight influential females in the outdoor recreation industry are part of a nationwide push to edit the pages of history with an eye on gender inclusivity.

"If you're looking for information on the outdoor industry, women are not well-represented," said Kassondra Cloos, an assistant editor at Boulder-based industry publication SNEWS. "We need to fix that."

It was a search for information that led Cloos to spearhead change. Researching a story about Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario, Cloos realized the executive's only presence on Wikipedia was a mention in the entry for her company.

"She works for basically the most powerful company in the outdoor industry," Cloos said. "For her not to be on Wikipedia seemed wrong."

Around that time, another Boulder outdoor media professional, Abigail Wise, shared a tweet about a New York event, hosted by Her Girl Friday, to edit and add pages to the online, user-generated encyclopedia to include more women. Cloos saw the tweet and contacted Wise with an idea: Why not host their own event and focus on women in the outdoors industry?

"We decided to look at who was missing," Wise said. "It was a lot. And the pages that were there were very small."

In a recent survey of 2,100 women conducted by retailer REI, 63 percent of respondents could not name even one female mentor in the outdoor industry. Those who did name role models picked athletes like Serena Williams or public figures such as Michele Obama who, while associated with being active and healthy, are not part of the outdoor recreation world.

"It's important, especially for young girls, to have powerful female role models, so that they can aspire to get outdoors and find their own level of adventure," Cloos said. "The fact that these women aren't on Wikipedia is indicative of a bigger problem; they're not well-known enough to be seen as universally important."

Wise and Cloos came up with a list of 13 individuals and organizations who merited new or longer articles. A small group of mostly outdoor media professionals spent a full day adding new entries and extending others, with some help from Wikipedia volunteers.

The work is still ongoing both women have continued editing in their spare time on nights and weekends. Some pages have yet to go live, and the idea of a follow-up event is still being tossed around.

"Our goal was not only to add pages and expand on pages, it was more to teach people these tools and pique people's interest so this can be an ongoing things in their lives," Wise said.

That might mean extending efforts beyond the outdoor world. Wise has already been contacted by someone interested in doing the same thing for the tech industry.

"We really have the power here to make a difference," Cloos said. "We are literally writing history, and in some cases rewriting it, to make sure women are part of the record and that their contributions have been recognized."

Shay Castle: 303-473-1626, castles@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/shayshinecastle

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Women in Boulder's outdoors industry work for better gender ... - Boulder Daily Camera