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The Wikipedia project is a way to have students reflect back on everything theyve done in their coursework and then go to the deepest levels of Blooms Taxonomy of Learning to edit the articles, Lonnie Welch, Charles R. Jr. and Marilyn Stuckey professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said.

In fall 2021 and spring 2022, computer science students in Data Mining and Data Science worked toward the same goal to complete their course to improve a Wikipedia page with more robust descriptions, key visuals and reliable sources. This common goal was part of a final project, allowing students the opportunity to revise and edit their page drafts before their final submission.

A Wikipedia-based writing activity offers a more authentic learning experience than a traditional term paper and provides students with the opportunity to practice disseminating domain-specific knowledge to a broad audience while navigating the complexity and ambiguity of working through a real-life problem, Welch wrote in the projects description.

Hunter Burden, BSCS 21, participated in this project in both the Data Mining and Data Science course. In his final semester of his undergraduate degree in computer science, Burden worked collaboratively with his teammates to improve an article on Radar Charts, a type of graph that measures multivariate data, like performance metrics, where at least three variables are represented like spokes or points on a wheel. The culmination of his teams hard work resulted in a first-place win in the International Society for Computational Biologys Wikipedia Competition. The competition supports the ISCB's mission by promoting the improvement of topics relevant to computational biology on Wikipedia, which is widely accessed around the world as a free-to-use educational resource. Since Wikipedia is often the first port of call for someone learning about a new topic, ensuring that computational biology is well-represented on Wikipedia helps maximize the visibility and impact of the field on society, Alastair Kilpatrick, competition organizer and bioinformatician at the University of Edinburgh, said.

While winning the competition was a benefit of this project, perhaps more importantly, the project helped assess learning outcomes, indicating that students not only learned key topics in computer science, but were also able to communicate about those topics in an informative and reliable way.

Before we won, I felt like we did great work. Dr. Welch asked us honest questions throughout the semester about our process and the contents of the page. When we presented everything in the end, we felt really good about the result, Burden said.

This assessment strategy was not accidental. Through collaborative work with instructional designer, Audra Anjum, Welch decided to plan his class around learning outcomes and objectives. Then he devised assessment strategies informed by his intended outcomes. He used the example of tying one's shoes to communicate his vision for his course structure.

If someone is learning how to tie their shoes, you can either ask them a series of questions about tying shoes or you can simply ask them to tie their shoes to show you that they have learned that skill, Welch explained.

By authoring Wikipedia pages, students were demonstrating that they learned valuable topics in computer science by writing about those topics for the layperson, creating visuals, incorporating data and identifying reliable sources that bolster their edits to the page.

We specifically developed the Wikipedia project to not only create a unique and interesting experience [for] students, but also to demonstrate that they met the learning outcomes, Anjum said.

Additionally, this project allowed students to practice critical written communication, a skill that is often underemphasized in both engineering and computer science coursework.

Theres an art to writing things that are concise. You dont want to overload people with jargon. This is an important skill in computer science when writing comments or updates on your work, so another party knows whats going on and what their task is, Burden said.

You need to be able to communicate your ideas to get people excited about what you are doing. Much of the written communication we do is to sell things, ideas and ourselves. In computer science, you need to be effective at communicating requirements, designs and test plans, Welch said.

Using their written communication skills, students collaboratively enhanced articles to improve the general landscape of Wikipedia a resource that is often stigmatized due to the user-editable nature of each page. In this circumstance, however, students demonstrated that thoughtful, informed editing can improve the landscape of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has a reputation for being unreliable since so many individuals can contribute to the content. Wikipedia is a widely accessible open education resource for students and faculty, however. Experts have a responsibility to their professions to make sure that their fields are represented accurately and broadly on Wikipedia to discourage the spread of misinformation, Anjum said.

Editing a Wikipedia page well can be a significant undertaking, but the final product results in a more informative and accessible resource for people around the globe.

It's important for university students (and academics in general) to edit Wikipedia pages, as they possess important domain knowledge that can vastly improve Wikipedia's coverage of their subject of interest. They also should have some vested interest in ensuring that Wikipedia articles describing their subject of interest are accurate and up to date, Kilpatrick said.

Explore the winning teams Wikipedia articles in Radar Charts (first place), Biological Networks (second place) and Cosegregration (third place).

To learn more about how to incorporate Wikipedia editing into curriculum design, read this article by Anjum, Kilpatrick and Welch.

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OHIO students place first, second and third in international Wikipedia editing competition - Ohio University

As the Supreme Court prepares to begin its next term, experts in privacy and national security law are watching closely for hints about whether justices will take up a potentially precedent-setting challenge to the governments use of a state secrets law to avoid scrutiny of its surveillance programs.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, last month asked the nations highest court to hear arguments on its lawsuit over the National Security Agencys warrantless surveillance of Americans international phone and email communications. The organization, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, has been fighting the NSA in court over such upstream surveillance for the past seven years.

At the heart of the case is a question about how broadly the government can invoke its state secrets privilege to block civil cases from moving forward if they involve disclosing information that is reasonably likely to cause significant harm to the national defense or the diplomatic relations of the United States. The NSAs critics argue that the agencys definition of such information has expanded over time, without apparent justification.

On one side, there is one of the largest archives of human information, maintained and edited by millions of people across the world. On the other is the U.S. government invoking a law that is specifically designed to curtail the spread of information or at least information it deems unfit to be shared.

Corbin Barthold, internet policy counsel at the nonprofit group TechFreedom, said that the focus of the case on the scope and expansion of the state secrets privilege makes it catnip for the Supreme Court, with potential interest from both members of the courts conservative majority and its liberal minority. For example, Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed by then-President Donald Trump, has pushed for stronger protections under the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures. Moreover, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals the last body to weigh in on the case split on the matter.

Barthold also noted that it has been years since the high court has heard a case examining how broadly the government can apply the national security law.

But as with most things when it comes to the Supreme Court, nothing is a given.

Weve always seen mass surveillance as a really significant threat to the privacy and free expression rights not just of Wikimedia users, but internet users in general, said James Buatti, senior manager for legal, governance and risk at Wikimedia. Weve always believed that nobody should have to worry about their government looking over their shoulder when theyre deciding whether to read an article or contribute to a controversial topic. So filing this case back then was kind of an easy decision.

The Department of Justice declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

Details of the NSAs behind-the-scenes practices and its exhaustive surveillance of people in the U.S. and elsewhere burst into public view in 2013, when former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden disclosed them to multiple news organizations.

The Wikimedia suit centers on one of these methods, upstream surveillance. It entails collecting all communications that people in the U.S. have with parties outside of the country. This type of dragnet, authorized under Section 702 of 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, pulls in things like emails, search engine entries and what people browse online. The government is able to collect this information by tapping into the internet backbone, which includes the high-capacity cables and routers our data travels across to make the internet function around the world. The NSA searches this information using thousands of keywords, the results of which the government says it further analyzes to pick up on potential threats to national security. But thats not always where use of the information stops.

Its easy to lose sight of the way that data that was originally collected in the name of national security can potentially flow to police or any number of investigations, said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP). All thats stopping it is the belief in the goodwill of agencies that have systematically violated our trust at every turn.

Wikimedia contends that given this surveillance, it cannot ensure the confidentiality of the tens of millions of people who read, edit and communicate about Wikipedia, one of the largest repositories of human information to ever exist.

Aeryn Palmer, legal director of compliance at the Wikimedia Foundation, said that the ability to read and to contribute to Wikipedia under a pseudonym has been important since the projects earliest days.

When we think about what we might be collecting from anyone who visits the site, when we think about how we do research with our readers or with our contributors to better understand what sorts of features they might like to see and how they want the projects to evolve, were continually thinking about how we can best protect their privacy, said Palmer.

Wikimedias suit hinges on state secrets privilege, which the government has repeatedly used to fend off legal challenges to upstream surveillance. It has argued, in this case and others, that upstream surveillance is so secret that legal challenges to it cannot proceed.

The NSA has vacuumed up Americans and international communications using upstream surveillance, and to date not a single challenge to that surveillance has been allowed to go forward, said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Unions national security project and one of the attorneys representing Wikimedia. The Supreme Court must make clear that NSA surveillance is not beyond the reach of our public courts.

He argued that the government has continued to expand its use of the state secrets law as a cudgel to bat away civil litigation.

Toomey pointed to a lawsuit filed in 2007 by Khaled El Masri, a German citizen with Lebanese roots who was abducted by Macedonian police before they handed him to the CIA, claiming that the CIA kidnapped and tortured him in a case of mistaken identity. An appellate court recognized there was public evidence of El Masris mistreatment but decided that state secrets were too central to the case to allow it to go forward.

Similarly, in 2010, five people filed a lawsuit claiming that one of Boeings subsidiary companies had flown the planes carrying them to the black sites where they were tortured by the CIA. An appeals court dismissed that case as well, along similar lines of reasoning as the El Masri verdict. Both times, the government invoked state secrets privilege.

In Wikimedias current lawsuit, the government has taken the maximalist approach and asked the courts to dismiss the case on state secrets grounds, even though the government itself has released dozens of official reports, court opinions and other documents about upstream surveillance, said Toomey.

One reason that the NSA has successfully fended off lawsuits using state secrets privilege is that in many cases regarding surveillance, plaintiffs were not able to show harm.

The Wikimedia case is different. The foundation has relied on an analysis by Jon Penney, a legal scholar and social scientist at York University in Toronto, that quantifies the impact of government surveillance on Wikipedia articles.

The 2016 analysis measured the chilling effect of surveillance, or how people act differently sometimes including censoring themselves if they have reason to believe they are being watched.

Penney found that following reports of Snowdens exposure, traffic to Wikipedia articles on topics that raise privacy concerns for Wikipedia users decreased in a statistically significant manner.

The researcher arrived at that conclusion by choosing Wikipedia pages based off keywords the Department of Homeland Security uses to monitor social media, such as infrastructure security, terrorism and cybersecurity. Penney honed in on the category terrorism, which included terms like Iran, pirates and suspicious substance.

But he noted that more recent discussions about chilling effects have gone beyond national security issues. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade, for instance, civil liberties and pro-choice groups have revived conversations around the chilling effect of government surveillance specifically around cellphone, phone app and web search data that could inadvertently reveal when a person is pregnant or seeking an abortion.

You have a combination of government surveillance combined with overreaching laws combined with governments essentially whipping up harassment campaigns against people who are out there just simply attempting to vindicate their rights, said Penney. So, I think [privacy] is a concept that is in increasingly important.

An earlier version of this story misidentified the genesis of the government's state secret claims. This version has been updated.

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

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NSA and ACLU may face off in the Supreme Court over Wikipedia - Grid

You can always rely on Wikipedia as a source of information, and a new update to Sami Zayns page gives a hilarious take on his addition as an honorary uce.

On the latest edition of Friday Night SmackDown, Sami Zayn once again accompanied The Usos, Paul Heyman and Roman Reigns to the ring to open the show. At looked at one point as if the end of Sami Zayns run with The Bloodline had come, as The Head Of The Table demanded he removed his Bloodline shirt.

Rather than being given the boot, he was presented with a replacement SZ Honorary Uce shirt, signalling he is now an official member of The Bloodline.

A user name Lone Lim decided this was worthy of an update to The Great Liberators Wikipedia page. As well as temporarily listing him as Canadian-Samoan, his name was also given the addition of the Anoai surname.

Sami Zayn was also at ringside later in the night, when The Usos successfully defended Undisputed WWE Tag Team Championships against the Brawling Brutes combination of Ridge Holland and Butch. Earlier in the night, Solo Sikoa had attacked Madcap Moss and Ricochet backstage, which caused them to confront Zayn at the start of the match. Zayn and Sikoa will now team up against Ricochet and Moss on the 30th September 2022 edition of SmackDown.

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Sami Zayn's Wikipedia Given Humorous Update To Include Bloodline Induction TJR Wrestling - TJR Wrestling

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Coolio, the rapper who was among hip-hops biggest names of the 1990s with hits including Gangstas Paradise and Fantastic Voyage, has passed away.(Read More Here).

According to reports, his manager announced that the rapper died in Los Angeles on Wednesday, September 28, at 59.

The artist, whose real name is Artis Leon Ivey Jr, passed away at a friends house, his longtime manager, Jarez Posey, told the Associated Press. A cause of death was not immediately confirmed.

Coolio is best known for his 1995 single Gangstas Paradise, for which he won a Grammy for best solo rap performance. The runaway hit came from the soundtrack of the Michelle Pfeiffer film Dangerous Minds and sampled Stevie Wonders 1976 song Pastime Paradise. He was nominated for five other Grammys during a career that began in the late 1980s.

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BIOGRAPHY, AGE AND WIKIPEDIA: Family confirms death of West coast legend and Kenan & Kel rapper, Coolio - KossyDerrickEnt

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Why Wikipedia wants its own sound - The Hustle