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The U-T Watchdog story on the removal of certain misconduct references from the San Diego Police Department's Wikipedia page has sparked a lot of discussion.

After we published the story on Tuesday, it made its way to the front page of the social sharing website Reddit.

Readers on our website and on Reddit posted hundreds of comments, many of them insightful and probing.

While the police department has said that it never directed employees to edit its Wikipedia page, U-T Watchdog confirmed that Internet addresses registered to the department were used to make anonymous changes. And a police dispatcher confirmed for us that he'd deleted some of the police misconduct summaries with his own Wikipedia username. He said the edits were for accuracy, and because it was unfair to brand the whole department with the actions of a few.

Below, we've curated certain provocative and interesting commentary from Reddit, with some profanity deleted. You can read the full, unedited conversation here.

justaasking: They may think it's within their right to edit. It's against Wikipedia's etiquette to provide first-hand information (let's imagine they consider their edits to be more truthful, which is probably a stretch) but they may not want to obey that etiquette.

CitizenPremier: It is within their rights, legally.

theth1rdchild: Somehow I don't think it should be legal for them to walk into a library and rip out pages of a book on how bad they are. But that's just me.

CitizenPremier: It really isn't the same. Wikipedia's policies allow anyone to edit til they get banned. If they were banned and were working to circumvent a ban, that might be different.

theth1rdchild: If anything, what they're doing here is morally worse. Wikipedia is community run, and an attempt at keeping the facts straight as opposed to decided upon by a publisher. They're not silencing an author or publisher, they're attempting to silence the community as a whole. I know there's no legal or even wiki-policy related wording stopping them, I'm just saying there should be.

Here is the original post:
Readers react to SDPD Wikipedia edits

Illustration by Matt Daley

Where are the women of Wikipedia?

THERE ARE OBJECTIVE TRUTHS in the universe, but they are few and far between. For everything else, we have Wikipedia.[1]

Wikipedia has become the de facto source for information. Stephen Colbert riffed on this idea for years with his Truthiness bit.[2] It was funny because it was true. We used to look to Encyclopedia Britannica and back issues of National Geographic to write grade-school essays on Mt. Vesuvius or the human circulatory system, but now we get all the information we need from Wikipedia, and we can reasonably assume that its the truth.

The promise of the future is finally realized! Except theres a problem: women dont contribute to Wikipedia. They make up less than 15 percent of contributors and as little as 8.5 percent of editors. History might be written by the winner, but truth, it seems, is mostly written by men.

So how does gender disparity manifest inside the worlds largest encyclopedia? After all, isnt truth absolute?[3]

As a general rule, there are fewer articles about women and the articles that do exist are, on average, much shorter. Topics that might be of more interest to women are also less extensively covered. A few years ago an editor tried to clean up the sites list of American novelists by removing all the women and relegating them to a new list called American women novelists.[4] On Wikipedia, as in so many other places, the default is straight and white and very, very male.

To combat gender disparity on the site, Wikipedia created a Gender Gap Task Force, with the goal of getting female participation up to 25 percent. One of its tactics is to hold edit-a-thons encouraging women to get involved. These have had limited success since Wikipedia is notoriously difficult for (and even hostile to) newcomers. After a dispute related to the Task Force last year, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committeea volunteer group thats basically the sites highest court[5]banned a prolific female editor after she was accused of promoting an anti-male agenda. The men she was arguing with were also sanctioned: they were told they couldnt use abusive language anymore.

In the wake of last years Gamergate controversythe most modern of culture wars and, no matter what its supporters say, a debate thats explicitly vitriolic toward womenWikipedia became a battleground with people on both sides working to create ostensibly objective articles while fundamentally disagreeing on what the objective facts were. This is known as an edit war and they happen all the time,[6] usually resulting in an article lockdown or sanctions against specific contributors/editors. In this case, it was five feminists and Gamergate critics who were banned from making further edits, leaving the pro-Gamergaters free to enshrine their version of events as truth on Wikipedias pages.

It would be laughably ironic if it werent so ironically tragic.

See the original post:
Wiki gap

Wikipedias Khmer language coverage is patchy at best, and almost non-existent when it comes to profiling the countrys most important women. This weekend, online activists are joining forces to flood the site with new entries

Browsing the Khmer-language version of Wikipedia, knowledge seekers can find entries for many prominent Cambodians. Prime Minister Hun Sen, opposition leader Sam Rainsy and architect Vann Molyvann all feature. Even the late National Police Commissioner Hok Lundy has an extensive biography. But almost all the entries are for men.

While Mu Sochua, arguably Cambodias most influential female opposition lawmaker, has a 713 word article on English Wikipedia, she doesnt have an entry at all on the Khmer site. Nor does Bun Rany, wife of Prime Minister Hun Sen, nor Somaly Mam, the disgraced celebrity human rights activist. The late 1960s and 1970s singer Ros Sereysothea is one of only a handful of female profiles on the site.

Blogger Kounila Keo. ALEXANDER CROOK

I think womens voices are underrepresented there are many issues that are strongly concerned with women, and they lack the opportunity to raise their voice, said Oum Vannarith, public relations director at Zaman University and prolific Wikipedia editor.

Vannarith said he had no specific data on the number of women on the sites Khmer edition, but it was much less than the 55 entries on English Wikipedias Khmer women category page.

To mark International Womens Day tomorrow, Vannarith is planning to host a gathering of Wikipedia editors at the 5D Lab Cambodia community centre to add new entries about Cambodian women to the Khmer language version of the site. About 10 Cambodians in other parts of the world are also expected to chip in at the same time.

We will ask participants who they get inspiration from, who they admire, and then we will identify key people ... and then we will teach them how to research and add to Khmer Wikipedia, he said.

According to Vannarith, Khmer Wikipedia had 4,655 articles as of Thursday. This places it ahead Kashubian, a Slavic language spoken in parts of Poland, and behind Sardinian in rankings.

While the approach of the 5,000-article-in-Khmer mark is a significant milestone for Wiki since the local language pages launched in 2013, Vannarith said that the lack of female editors was among his biggest concerns as an editor.

Go here to see the original:
Wiki activists help to write Cambodian womens history

Oxford Electric Bell was set up in 1840. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell Oxford Electric Bell From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Oxford Electric Bell or Clarendon Dry Pile is an experimental electric bell...

By: Gobal

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Oxford Electric Bell was set up in 1840. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Video

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to speak at Purdue
Wales will present "Democracy and the Internet" on March 9 at 7 p.m. in Loeb Playhouse, Stewart Center.

By: WLFITV

Read more here:
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to speak at Purdue - Video