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I love Wikipedia. In the last decade-or-so Ive made thousands of edits to Wikipedia one some extremely niche subjects that are important to me. Well, there are few subjects more important to me than Hispanic diversity in American newsrooms. Thats why I started listing Latinas employed in mainstream U.S. newsrooms in the sandbox of a couple of collaborative Wikipedia accounts so that multiple users could add names as they came in from the various newsrooms.

That draft (or sandbox) has been removed from two accounts. Why?

Our list of Latinas in U.S. newsrooms wasnt even published yet. We were keeping it in whats called the Sandbox of a couple of Wikipedia accounts. The Sandbox is where you can work on draft Wikipedia pages, or so we thought...

Now, why is this important?

I suspect Latinas are the least-represented major workforce segment in U.S. American newsrooms...but to Wikipedia, thats beside the point. Wikipedia is not activism. That much is very clear in the rules of Wikipedia, which are clear about little else.

The problem here is Wikipedias double-standard. The editors have not only deleted our extensive list of U.S. Latinas working in mainstream newsrooms but theyve disabled the accounts where the lists were being compiled. Why? Whats different about listing Latinas working in newsrooms as opposed to other groups?

Weve tweeted at Wikipedia founder Jimmy Jimbo Wales and hope we can get this resolved. Like I said, I love Wikipedia, but this is pretty messed up. We want our list back, even if Wikipedia doesnt believe theres a place for it on their platform.

Let us know, Jimbo. Thank you, sir. Here are the latest posts in this series, for reference:

Start your workday the right way with the news that matters most.

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Wikipedia Deletes Index Of Latinas In Mainstream U.S. Newsrooms - HuffPost

These are certainly not the best of times for singer Dammy Krane who is still being held in a US prison after he was arrested on grounds of grand theft, credit card fraud and impersonation.

The development has somewhat forced a change his Wikipedia profile page which is now updated with his latest travails and arrest on the free digital encyclopaedia.

A quick check on the singers Wikepedia profile shows that a section tagged Arrest has been added to his main page which reads thus; On Friday 2nd June 2017, the Nigerian news circuit was set ablaze with surprising news that Dammy Krane had been arrested in the US for Grand Theft, Credit Card & Identity Fraud.

In the days that followed more details revealed that the talented Nigerian musician had used a stolen credit card to book a private jet from a company Tap Jets while on holiday in Miami.

Read also: Dammy Krane slammed with 9-count charge, spends weekend in jail

The company had detected the artistes fraud due to discrepancies in the credit card information he had provided. In the days leading to his arrest, the artist had shared a number of photos on Instagram which showed a lavish lifestyle and openly seemed to display wealth, the impute on the arrest section read in full.

Meanwhile, incoming reports suggests that Dammy Krane may spend close to 40-years in prison if convicted of the charges levelled against him especially with the fact that Tapjets, the company that owns the jet which was allegedly booked by the singer using the stolen credit cards, has vowed to press charges against the jailed singer whose bail is set at $22,500.

Anyone who uses someone elses personal identifying information to obtain property or anything of value worth more than $5,000 commits a second-degree felony according to the Florida State Credit Card Crime Act.

And anyone found guilty or convicted of a felony identity theft crime in Florida faces anywhere from a year to 40 years or more in prison according to the law.

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Wikipedia makes incriminating entry on Dammy Krane's profile page - Ripples Nigeria

Wikimedia FoundationInternet providers should be able to experiment with giving subscribers free stuff, such as access to Wikipedia and other public information and services on their smartphones. Unfortunately, confusion about whether today's net neutrality regulations allow U.S. providers to make content available without it counting against your data plana practice called "zero-rating"has discouraged many companies from doing so, even though zero-rating experiments are presumptively legal under today's net neutrality regulations.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already taken steps to clear away the discouragement of such experiments. After Ajit Pai took over as FCC chairman in January, he moved to end the investigations, begun under his predecessor, into companies that have tried to go down that path. And of course Chairman Pai also opened a rulemaking proceeding in April aimed at rolling back those rules, which invited and allowed the FCC's Wireline Bureau to start those investigations. But these steps alone haven't sent the kind of staunch, affirmative encouragement that's really needed.

The lack of clarity about zero-rating could change overnight, however, and it wouldn't require any new laws, any new regulations, any new quasi-formal inquiries from the commissionersor even the Pai's proposed rollback of the 2015 regulatory order. All it would take would be for Pai to call openly (in speeches or interviews, say, or other public appearances) and frequently for internet providers to experiment with adding zero-rated public information to their offerings.

Zero-rating experiments can be a win-win-win: Customers get access to more useful content for the same price; companies have more options for attracting users and expanding their business; and society at large benefits when greater numbers of people are exposed to valuable resources such as Wikipedia, public-health information, and other non-commercial apps and websites.

But the big fear among some net neutrality activists is that commercial zero-rating will favor well-heeled incumbents over lean new innovators. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) put it in 2016, "The most dangerous of these plans, such as the AT&T and Verizon offerings, only offer their users zero-rated data from content providers who pay the carriers money to do so. Such 'pay for play' arrangements favor big content providers who can afford to pay for access to users' eyeballs, and marginalize those who can't, such as nonprofits, startups, and fellow users." Even non-commercial zero-rated offerings may a problem, EFF argued. These include the risk of "distorting" content consumption in favor of already-popular non-subscription services (think Google's search engine or Facebook) or the "walled garden effect"i.e., that some price-sensitive customers may choose never to venture outside of the zero-rated services sponsored by the internet provider.

But what evidence we do have suggests that zero rating enables net new traffic, because people visit destinations that they would not otherwise. Roslyn Layton of Aalborg University has shown that at least 10 million people in developing countries use free data to access pregnancy and AIDS information.

The fact is, information sources like Wikipedia regularly drive traffic to the larger internet. A zero-rated, stripped-down, low-bandwidth version of the free online encyclopedia, called Wikipedia Zero, is already offered in dozens of developing countries around the world, which actually makes it easier to find relevant information and services on the non-zero-rated web. For instance, the Wikipedia entry for "Wikipedia Zero" includes links pointing users to both nonprofit sites and for-profit, advertising-supported sitesincluding many sources that are themselves critical of the Wikipedia Zero platform for being "inconsistent" with certain conceptions of network neutrality.

As I've written here before, I favor both net neutrality as a general principle, understood as an evolution of the common-carriage rules that have long governed telephone service and traditional mail as well as an evolution of the internet's history as an open platform that anybody can provide new content or services for. But I've also written in favor of a zero-rating as a tool (though hardly the only one) that I believe could help bring the rest of the world online in my lifetime.

I can hold both positions because I reject the prevalent view that "net neutrality" means internet providers have to treat different types of web content absolutely identicallyespecially if it stops someone from giving free but limited web access to those who wouldn't otherwise have internet access at alland who could learn about the larger internet through the external links embedded in free, open resources like Wikipedia.

The digital divide isn't just a global problem. It's also an issue much closer to home: Pew Research Center data indicate that Americans who rely on their mobile devices for their sole or primary source of internet access are disproportionately from the lowest income groups. Pew identifies a broad group of Americans (about 15 percent) as "smartphone dependent," and concluded in a comprehensive 2015 paper that "even as a substantial minority of Americans indicate that their phone plays a central role in their ability to access digital services and online content, for many users this access is often intermittent due to a combination of financial stresses and technical constraints."

Editing or otherwise contributing to Wikipedia may crowd your data cap, because if you write or edit an entry, you typically have to reload (and maybe keep reloading) it to see how the changes look. This can require two or more orders of magnitude more bandwidth than just consulting Wikipedia does. But Wikipedia as an informational resource depends on ongoing contributions from everyonenot just users who can afford to pay for "unlimited" data.

The best-case scenario is a world in which every American is motivated to take advantage of the internet, in which we all have access to the whole internet, and in which internet providers can afford to offer that level of service to everyone. The best way to get to that point in a hurry, though, is to get more people online and sampling what the web has to offer. Encouraging non-commercial services like Wikipedia Zero and Facebook's Free Basics can help make that happen.

Pai and, ideally, other commissioners should come out strongly and expresslyvia speeches and other non-regulatory forums, including responses to press inquiriesin favor of internet providers offering zero-rated services, especially those that aren't pay-for-play. Repeatedly sending the right message can do as much as deregulation to encourage innovation of this sort.

I'd also want the commissioners to urge U.S. internet providers to share their data about whether zero-rated services improve internet adoption, both among smartphone-only users and in general. With more information, the FCC can make more informed decisions going forward about what kinds of open-internet regulations to adoptor to remove.

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Everyone Should Be Getting Wikipedia for Free - Reason.com - Reason (blog)

Katherine Maher, executive director of Wikimedia: "Access to information is a human right."

Katherine Maher thinks knowledge is formed like a beautiful diamond.

A tremendous amount of pressure creates a really crystalline thing, says the director of the foundation responsible for Wikipedia, the worlds largest encyclopaedia.

As fake news proliferates and the public tires from information overload, Maher sees crowd-sourced knowledge where readers discuss, debate and edit Wikipedias articles to reach a consensus as the antidote to alternative facts.

The more people you have debating the intricacies and nuances of a particular adjective or turn of phrase, the more likely you are going to get to a place where everyone can agree what constitutes a neutral perspective on an issue.

Founded in 2001 by US entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia comprises more than 400 million articles edited by more than 200,000 volunteer Wikimedians around the world. Ninety per cent of its budget comes from very small donations. In 2003 the Wikimedia Foundation was created to steward the encyclopaedia, and now employs 300 people based in San Francisco.

Maher joined the foundation as chief communications officer in 2014, after working in technology and advocacy at the World Bank, UNICEF and the National Democratic Institute.

She was appointed executive director in 2016 after her predecessor unexpectedly resigned over leaked documents showing Wikipedia was set to build a search engine. This outraged Wikimedians, who believed it wasnt part of the organisations scope.

Its no surprise then, considering the lofty ideals of the Wikipedia community and Mahers background in advocacy, that she sees her role as resisting the domination of tech giants such as Google, Apple or Facebook, and championing global free knowledge.

Global, but not everywhere. Since April, Wikipedia has been blocked in Turkey because of two articles alleging links between the Turkish government and Islamist militant groups. Maher said such blocks are rare, primarily in places where the internet is restricted such as North Korea and China. Access to information is a human right, she says. Neutral, unbiased, verifiable knowledge is important.

However, Maher says they are not in the business of adjudicating disputes, and admits Wikipedias open-platform model where anyone can edit isnt perfect.

There is a lot of back-and-forth about controversial issues such as politics, but that doesnt mean the Wikipedia community doesnt have a sense of humour. Notable hoaxes include fictitious presidents of the World Bank, non-existent senate candidates and bogus Natalia Imbruglia albums.

The US Congress was temporarily blocked when it was discovered several vandal edits were coming from the government. They were saying all sorts of nasty things about all sorts of people. We can only assume it was the interns calling politicians aliens and wizards, she says.

Maher is in the midst of figuring out whats next for the foundation. Wales is taking on fake news by launching his own media outlet, Wikitribune, but Maher sees technology and diversity as the focus for Wikipedia. Only 16 per cent of its biographies are about women and the English-language edition dominates.

Maher hints at having one eye on the future of the internet as technology advances, and evolving Wikipedias search queries.

It shouldnt be just about reading information or consuming information, it should be about creating information.

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Wikimedia executive director Katherine Maher explains how to trump fake news - The Australian Financial Review

Digital While the Odia Wikipedia community has made great strides, translating it to a digital language of knowledge will require solving technical challenges and enlisting a more diverse set of contributors and editors.

A screenshot of the Odia Wikipedia page. Credit: Wikipedia.

TheOdia-language Wikipediajust celebrated its 15th birthday on Saturday, June 3, 2017. It was created in 2002, just a year after the official English Wikipedia, which was the first-ever Wikipedia that went live. Odia, as a language, has yet to find itself on Google Translate. However, as one of the three oldest languages of the Indian sub-continent, it has the oldest Indian-language Wikipedia.

June 3, 2002 marked thefirst ever edit in the Odia language by an anonymous editor. Along with Odia, the Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedias were also born later that the same year. Today, there exist 23 Wikipedias, the latest entrant to the family beingTulu, in 23 different Indian languages.

The Odia Wikipedia is a compendium of 12,619 encyclopaedic articles written by only a handful of volunteer editors, also known as uikialis (Odia for Wikipedian or Wikipedia editor). Though the project is 15 years old, it was dormant for about nine years until a couple of editors started actively contributing and building a community around it in 2011. Slowly these editors spread out, reached out to more people, and the content sprawled to more subject areas when subject experts started contributing related to their domain expertise.

The type of articles that are currently part of this Wikipedia are reflective both of existing type of editors and a sign of the type of contributors that are yet to get online or participate in Wikipedias edit process.

For instance, while there are over 350 articles on topics related to medicine, there are only two articles related to feminism. The reason behind that is both simple and tragic. A Wikipedian often contributes to areas that they are either interested in or an expert on. Therefore, while a veteran doctor and assistant professor of a medical school translated hundreds of medicine-related articles, there are not many editors to do the same for the articles about feminism or other gender-related issues. This is an issue that needs to be rectified as the Odia Wikipedia continues its journey.

After all, not all editors are subject experts themselves. Many Wikipedians like Pritiranjan Tripathy, who has contributed the largest number of biographical articles, and Sangram Kesari Senapati, who has written several articles on Indian movies, actually contribute for articles that they are personally interested in.

The Odia contributor community has also worked in bringing two other Wikimedia projects: the Odia Wikisource, an online library of freely-licensed books, and Odia Wiktionary, a dictionary with the meanings of native words that are equivalent of foreign language vocabulary. Though the community is small, there is a wide mixture of people of all professions, most importantly open source software developers.

This has helped the community build many tools that they themselves and the larger society is using. One of them is a converter that helps anyone convert text typed in legacy encoding systems intoUnicode, a universal and contemporary alphabet encoding standard. There are hundreds and thousands of text in multiple non-standard legacy encodings that has been typed in the recent past, and are being typed currently by writers, publications, journalists and media houses. Because of the use of such diverse encoding systems, the content is never searchable on the Internet nor reproducible.

This converter has transformed the state of the language on the web. This and many other software that have been developed by the community have beenreleased under open licenses along with the source code. Many of the software are also built in collaboration with the global and other Indian-language open source contributors.

Credit: Wikipedia Commons.

When the total number ofOdia Wikipedia editors has crossed 40 in March this year, the average for last year and this year has been a little over 27. By March this year, the project had more than342,546 viewsa month. When the number of active editors has increased, the total number of visitors from altogether from desktop, mobile app and mobile site has reduced from 674,100 in June last year (this was an exceptionally high peak though) to about 292,700 this year. This could be something to consider as a parameter while promoting the project. The community is already collaborating with media houses for both content development and promotion, and more such effort might increase the visibility of the project.

When all of these contributions are helping grow Odia language a lot on the Internet, there is a lot more to be done to make the language a language of governance, knowledge and scientific research and not just a language of literature. Srujanika, a collective of people working for science and other research have been working on building a science dictionary, and digitise many early publications including the scientific ones. Their work needs to be supported and should be made accessible so that others can build more resources on the top of existing scientific literature. There exists no solid consensus on transliteration (which exists in many other languages) of loan words like scientific and technical terminology in general and individual science domains like medicine in particular. There exists some groundbreaking work in creating a style guide for standardising terminology by the FUEL project but this needs wider consensus.

Globally, there are 285 active Wikipedias in diverse world languages and each of these Wikipedias are looked up by millions of viewers every single moment. In India, Wikimedia India chapter, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) at the Centre for Internet and Society, Punjabi Wikimedians, West Bengal Wikimedians User Group, and Karavali Wikimedians are designated as movement affiliates that operate with some institutional framework managed by either/both volunteers and paid professionals.

But outside these collectives, there exist a few thousand volunteers that have been constantly driving the open movement in their native languages.Just like any other Wikipedia, Odia Wikipedia will never be complete, but will continue to mature. Heres to the next 15 years.

Subhashish Panigrahi is a Bangalore-based educator, communications, partnership and community strategist, and a long time Free/Libre and Open Source advocate and contributor. He has worked over six years in global nonprofits like Mozilla, the Centre for Internet and Society.

Categories: Digital, Featured, Heritage

Tagged as: development, digital Indian languages, editor community, English Wikipedia, feminism, Indian-language Wikipedia, Indic languages, medicine, Odia Wikipedia, Uikalis, Wikipedia

Read more:
There Exist 23 Indian-Language Wikipedias. The Oldest Just Turned 15 - The Wire