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Margaret Thatcher

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With its alluring blend of fictional drama and real life characters, The Crown has long captivated audiences, becoming a major hit for Netflix. Yet this season more than any other has prompted outcries of historical inaccuracies and perhaps unfairness towards some of the real life 'players', from the Duchess of Cornwall (then Camilla Parker Bowles) to the Queen herself.

That said, audiences still find themselves Googling the storylines of each episode hungrily after watching, with Wikipedia reporting a surge in activity on its site in the past week.

Unsurprisingly, two of the most fundamental new characters this season saw a large increase in traffic to their pages - Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson, and Princess Diana, played by Emma Corrin. Their pages were two of the most visited on the site, with 3 million views combined.

Princess Diana

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People also found themselves turning to Wikipedia to find out more about Thatcher's husband Dennis, and children Mark and Carol, after an episode dedicated to the family's dynamics.

Yet the figure who garnered the most increased attention was Michael Fagan, the Buckingham Palace intruder, whose story plays out in episode 5. With the action taking place two decades ago, it is unsurprising that many might have forgotten the incident, and were intrigued to discover more. The episode on Mr Fagan, who broke into Buckingham Palace twice, prompted a 78,000 per cent increase in daily page visits.

Michael Fagan

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Another more marginal figure whose Wikipedia presence increased was Edward Adean, Prince Charles Private Secretary, with viewers no doubt questioning if the portrayal of his slightly frosty relationship with Princess Diana was accurate.

Other who round out the top 10 people Wikipedia saw a spike in traffic on related to the series include Koo Stark, Prince Andrew's ex, Lord Mountbatten, whose death is covered in the season premiere, and of course, the Queen herself.

The pages for real life incidents covered by The Crown this season also saw renewed interest, including the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana, and the Falklands War, which appears in an episode about Margaret Thatcher's son Mark.

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This is the surprising person The Crown viewers Googled the most after this series - Tatler

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos from Wikipedia.

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AdaptedexcerptfromWikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution, edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The web was a very different place for news in the United States between 2001 and 2006. The hanging chads from the 2000 presidential election, the spectacular calamity of 9/11, the unrepentant lies around Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the campy reality television featuring Donald Trump were all from this time. The burst of the dot-com bubble and corporate malfeasance of companies like Enron dampened entrepreneurial spirits, news publishers were optimistically sharing their stories online without paywalls, and blogging was heralded as the future of technology-mediated accountability and participatory democracy. You was Time magazines Person of the Year in 2006 because Web 2.0 platforms like YouTube, MySpace, and Second Life had become tools for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.

Wikipedia was a part of this primordial soup, predating news-feed-mediated engagement, recommender-driven polarization, politicized content moderation, and geopolitical disinformation campaigns. From very early in its history, Wikipedia leveraged the supply and demand for information about breaking news and current events into strategies that continue to sustain this radical experiment in online peer production.

I first encountered Wikipedia as an undergraduate student around 2004. My introduction to Wikipedia was likely a product of the socio-technical coupling between Google and Wikipedia during this era. Google helped Wikipedia because Googles ranking algorithms privileged Wikipedias highly interlinked articles, which brought an influx of users, some (tiny) fraction of whom became contributing editors like me. Wikipedia also helped Google because Wikipedia could reliably generate both general-interest and up-to-date content that satisfied its users information-seeking needs, which brought users back to Google rather than to its competitors. The aftermath of a natural disaster, the death of a celebrity, or a new pop culture sensation are all occasions for people to seek out background information to help them make sense of these events. Traditional journalistic offerings provide incremental updates about the immediate subject but often lack context or background: Why are there earthquakes in Indonesia? Who is Saddam Hussein? What is Eurovision? The availability and timeliness of Wikipedia content around topics of general interest would prove to be critical for its own sustainability in addition to complementing other platforms need to serve relevant and up-to-date content.

Wikipedia also entered the popular awareness of undergraduates like me through the pitiless warnings from instructors and librarians about its lack of reliability as a citation. While these anxieties were largely reversed through empirical research and changes in professional culture, they also missed the forest for the trees: The value and authority of Wikipedia was not in any single articles quality but in its network of hyperlinked articles. More than synthesizing knowledge as a tertiary source like traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedias hyperlink network invited users to follow their interests, dive deeper into topics, introduce missing connections, and create new articles where none existed. Where the decentralized web created a fragmented user experience requiring directories (Yahoo) and search engines (Google) for navigation, Wikipedias hyperlinked articles foreshadowed an era of centralized web platforms that sustain user engagement with a consistent experience and bottomless content to consume and engage.

There are many ways to promote Wikipedia articles to its front page. Immediately to the right of From todays featured article is the In the news (or ITN) box, featuring articles that have been substantially updated to reflect recent or current events of wide interest. The presence of newslike content in an encyclopedia is uncanny. On the one hand, encyclopedias are supposed to be stable references of historical knowledge, rather than dynamic accounts of current events. On the other hand, there is a long history of encyclopedia editors grappling with how to incorporate new knowledge, and encyclopedia publishers competing to be the most up to date. Wikipedias choice to privilege content related to current events via the ITN is also shrewd: It simultaneously is a shortcut to content users may already be searching for, it showcases the dynamism and quality of Wikipedia articles, and it invites users to consume and contribute to content outside of their primary interests.

To understand how Wikipedias ITN template and its broader culture of breaking news collaborations came about, we have to return to the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Wikipedia was 10 months old at the time of the attacks, and while it already surpassed its elder sibling Nupedia in its number of articles, it was far from certain that the project would ever reach a sustainable level of activity. Although a comprehensive accounting of the editing activity in the immediate aftermath of the events has been lost to a server migration, snapshots from the Internet Archives Wayback Machine, along with listserv discussions, document the extent to which the Wikipedia community at the time went into overdrive in response to the attacks. Far from being an idiosyncratic case of online collaboration, the decisions made by editors at the time to use Wikipedias unique collaborative capacities to deeply cover the Sept. 11 attacks would fundamentally change the direction, scope, and culture of Wikipedia as a project to the present day.

A Wayback Machine snapshot of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack article from Oct. 31, 2011, captures the remarkable breadth and depth of topics that were authored and organized together about the attacks. There were timelines, documentation of closings and cancellations, lists of casualties, links to donating blood and money, articles on political and economic effects, and newly created articles about the buildings, cities, flights, and perpetrators as well as topics like terrorism, box-cutter knife, and collective trauma. Approximately 100 Sept. 11related articles were created in total (at a time when Wikipedia as a whole had only 13,000 articles), but Wikipedias content attracted links from other prominent web gateways like Yahoo that brought in an influx of desperately needed new users to the project.

Wikipedias unique anyone can edit model had the effect of entangling current events with the viability of theproject.

The list of casualties enumerating each of the nearly 3,000 victims (sorted by name and location and categorized by civilian or first responder) became a source of tension in the weeks following the attacks. Some editors argued this level of detailed coverage was unbecoming of the traditional encyclopedia Wikipedia was trying to emulate stylistically. Supporters referenced the rule that Wikipedia is not paper to justify a goal of writing biographies for thousands of victims, survivors, and leaders. As the trauma-induced altruism continued to fade, Wikipedia editors continued to raise concerns about the quality, notability, and importance of these memorialization efforts given the other demands of writing an encyclopedia. By September 2002, the community reached a consensus decision to move the Sept. 11related recollections and non-notable pages to a memorial wiki. The launch of the memorial wiki led to heated discussions about which Sept. 11related articles would get to stay on Wikipedia and which would be relegated to the memorial wiki. The memorial wiki ultimately failed to thrive: Its stagnant content and lack of editing activity led to accumulating vandalism, and it was effectively shuttered by September 2006. The creation, rejection, and disappearance of the Sept. 11 memorial wikis content remains an underappreciated cautionary tale about the presumed durability of peer-produced knowledge: This content only persists when it remains integrated with the larger common project rather than being relegated to a smaller and more specialized project. Wikipedias peer production model is not immune from rich get richer mechanisms.

The Wikipedia communitys overreaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and the discussions about the memorial content led to reflexive rule-making about news that persists today. The What Wikipedia is not (WP:NOT) policy predates the attacks and enumerates that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, manual, directory, or a variety of other reference genres. In the midst of the debates in 2002 about what to do with the Sept. 11 memorial content, the WP:NOT policy was expanded to assert that Wikipedia is not a news report. The revised policy attempted to thread the needle between the channeling of collaborative energy following current events against diluting the mission of writing an encyclopedia. The policy emphasized that Wikipedia should not offer news reports on breaking stories but conceded creating encyclopedia articles on topics currently in the news is an excellent idea as long as current events articles are written in an encyclopedic style. This NOT NEWS policy has persisted to the present, and the policy now emphasizes that Wikipedia should not offer first-hand news reports on breaking stories and newsworthy events do not [automatically] qualify for inclusion breaking news should not be emphasized or treated differently from other information. Another change in identity that emerged as a result of the Sept. 11 memorial content was the addition of Memorials to the WP:NOT policy. The policy, revised in 2004, now emphasizes that Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet such requirements. These normative guardrails remain in place today to channel the outpouring of pro-social collaborative energy and sense-making in the aftermath of traumatic events.

Encyclopedists have always struggled with the limitations of synthesizing knowledge into paper documents because when the knowledge changes, so must the paper. Wikipedia was not the first encyclopedia to use the online medium to rapidly and inexpensively revise content in response to changes, but its unique anyone can edit model had the effect of entangling current events with the viability of the project.

Wikipedia editors continue to invest enormous amounts of effort in covering breaking news and current events within the confines of these guardrails. Articles about the recently deceased, natural disasters, conflicts, and popular culture are sites of large and extremely dynamic collaborations involving dozens of editors making hundreds of revisions within hours. While Wikipedias MediaWiki software was not designed with this use case in mind, these high-tempo collaborations continue to serve crucial roles in sustaining the health of the broader project, close to 20 years after the early precedent of the Sept. 11 attacks: They bring in new users to the project, provide opportunities to disparate subcommunities to temporarily congregate, disseminate innovations and best practices into the rest of the community, and produce high-quality content hyperlinked to other relevant background.

Wikipedia remains a product of a particular historical moment from the early 2000s, in terms of not only its adorably dated interface but also the absence of the advertising and engagement, news feeds and recommendation systems, and virality and polarization as central features that define so much of the user experience on other social platforms. Wikipedias resilience to the disinformation that plagued Facebook, YouTube, and Google in 2016 would suggest this archaic user experience provided an important defense against actors who weaponized these attention amplification mechanisms on other platforms to malicious ends. But this story overlooks other explanations for Wikipedias apparent resilience: Wikipedia users and editors attention is shared around common articles, instead of being distributed across personalized news feeds.

Does Wikipedias success in covering breaking news and current events chart a path for other platforms to follow? Information seeking and sense-making about current events drive enormous flows of online collective attention, which explains why news feeds and trending topics are ubiquitous on social platforms. Whether and how Wikipedia can channel this demand for information likewise has been central to its ongoing identity, relevance, and sustainability. Wikipedia remains a valuable counterfactual for the potential of designing around information commons, human-in-the-loop decision-making, and strong editorial stances in the face of the Silicon Valley consensus emphasizing content personalization, automated moderation, and editorial indifference. The differences in how Wikipedia handles current event information may have insulated it from manipulation, but as platforms increasingly turn to Wikipedia for providing and moderating content, Wikipedias very real vulnerabilities risk becoming a target.

Edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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How Sept. 11 made Wikipedia what it is today. - Slate Magazine

The first reports of a new virus emerging in Wuhan came around Christmas 2019. By early January, there were 27 cases in the Chinese city. Within a couple of weeks, airports in Asia were screening all passengers who passed through their doors. Weeks on, UK airports still were not despite three direct flights a week from Wuhan to Heathrow.

Screening is ineffective as a method to stop the spread of a virus such as Covid-19, said one scientist.

We should have done it at least for the Wuhan flights, said another. It wouldnt have been a great imposition.

We left our doors open, said a public health expert, with barely controlled fury. And it contributed substantially to the rapid growth of the virus in the UK.

Such a back and forth was the defining feature of BBC Twos Lockdown 1.0: Following the Science? It is the latest contribution to what I suspect will become a string of more-or-less excellent documentaries about the UKs handling of the coronavirus pandemic. (The first was Channel 4s The Country That Beat the Virus, which compared and contrasted South Koreas response to the advent of Covid with ours no spoilers, but we dont come out of it well.)

Lockdown 1.0 also intertwined, though less overtly, two narratives. One involved the evolving amount and quality of the data that the scientists modellers, virologists, epidemiologists were receiving and, therefore, the predictions and other information they could obtain from it and hand on to groups such as the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and then to government ministers. The other narrative strand involved those ministers and what Professor Anthony Costello, a former director of maternal, child and adolescent health at the World Health Organization, described as the managerial issue how to test, how to gather the results, how to lock down, how to trace, how to isolate, and how to scale all that up quickly. Again, no spoilers but

What we might call, in bleak reference to earlier, happier, altogether easier times, the science bit was perhaps the more illuminating. The managerial issue is generally writ larger on our screens and in our newspapers as it is happening. The beavering away with numbers and in laboratories, less so. The science bit, perhaps tellingly, was also where most of the back-and-forth took place. The managerial response did not admit much nuance.

There was evident frustration, for example, among many of the modellers who comprised the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) about the fact that only Imperial College as an established collaborative centre with the WHO had access to what was, at the beginning, the best (though by no means perfect) data, coming out of China. Dr Ian Hall from Manchester University, deputy chair of SPI-M, noted: The public may be surprised to hear we were using data from Wikipedia very early on but it really was the only data publicly available.

Juxtaposed with them was Professor Graham Medley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and chair of SPI-M. Its not as simple as saying: Make it all publicly available. People own it; it includes patient information.

Costello professed himself pretty shocked by the situation. The whole point of science and scientists in these circumstances, he said, was to share findings openly.

There were many more moments and insights that complicated in a good way, by giving more detail, by exposing more structures, by expanding vistas the view we take from headlines, social media or, if we are committed, articles. The uncomfortable truth is that there are often no good choices, and that it can be irremediably unclear which choice is the best of a bad lot. Likewise, the bitter fact is that people cannot always be made to follow the best paths and, therefore, impositions on them must be watered down if they are to have any effect.

The data scientists made the nearest thing to an unequivocal error with the modelling they did around the risk in care homes, by failing to understand the movement of staff between homes. Should they have known about agency workers? If not, who should have told them?

Still, we are not yet at the stage of apportioning blame although there will surely be many documentaries to come that will deal with exactly that. By the end of this one, it was possible to feel both better and worse about the state we are in. There are people out there, definitely, who have our ignorant little backs. But the search for an overarching synthesising intelligence some kind of prime minister who could gather up all the reins, say continues.

Excerpt from:
Lockdown 1.0: Following the Science? review Wikipedia, Wuhan and worrying mistakes - The Guardian

NBA fans can do a lot of crazy things to tease rival teams and players. Some of them take things to the next level, using different tactics to troll their opponents. Myles Turner has been the last victim of these trolls, as his Wikipedia page was hacked recently.

The 24-year-old saw his official Wikipedia page altered by some hackers that put him in the Boston Celtics. The NBA offseason just started but Turner hasnt been part of any rumors in the last couple of days. Hes under contract with the Indiana Pacers until 2023 and the team hasnt shown any signs of wanting to trade him, even less to the Boston Celtics.

The person or people behind the attack had a lot of fun messing with Turners information. They took things off the court and wrote some crazy things about Turner. They even said he was a WNBA player and used a pic of Adolf Hitler to change Turners.

NBA Twitter noticed this activity and was quick to report it. Turner later found out about the whole thing and reacted on Twitter; he found these little changes funny and everything went back to normal in a matter of hours. He had his laugh, the hackers, too, and now its time to move on.

The Pacers have been mentioned in several reports in recent days thanks to Victor Oladipo and his future in the league. The combo guard doesnt have trade value and the team needs to figure out what to do next since the relationship between the player and his teammates isnt the best. Oladipo reportedly asked rivals if he could join them in front of teammates, something that caused trouble in the Pacers locker room.

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Myles Turner's Wikipedia Is Hacked: 'He Is Playing For The Boston Celtics' - Fadeaway World

Pooja Jadhav | (Pic: Tata Motors)

Wikipedia is everything. But when it comes to Indian languages there is a whole lot of distance to cover. Pooja Jadhav, who has a background in Computer Science, learnt 2D design, 3D design, communication and management and a whole lot more, is going that distance. The 25-year-old became a Computer Lab Assistant at Vigyan Ashram and began to mentor other students. Not just this, they also bagged a project with Wikipedia to convert articles to Marathi and now, she is the Senior Regional Contributor at Marathi Wikipedia. "As a part of T20, we had also learnt about presentation skills and personality development. Putting these skills to good use, I have travelled to other cities for the Wikipedia training and this has instilled a lot of confidence in me," says the youngster.

Pooja also took up a Fab Academy course last year and as a part of her final year project, she chose to work on a display that shows the reserve water levels of the dam in Pabal and also tells you how much longer it can be used. But this is just one feather in her cap, her immense contribution towards Marathi Wikipedia is laudable. "I have contributed over 400 articles and edited over 4,000 articles; scanned over 40,000 pages and uploaded it on Wikimedia and uploaded over 400 pictures on Wikimedia Commons as well," she lists. Astounding! She is even training other girls to contribute to Marathi Wikipedia and one such youngster is Komal.

"Pooja tai taught us all kinds of skills from photoshop to the basic knowledge of computers and from PowerPoint to video editing," shares the 21-year-old who is currently focussed on contributing to Marathi Wikipedia as much as she can. "When you Google anything, the first search that shows up is Wikipedia and I work for it. I feel so proud," she shares. Komal gave her BCom exams this year and is planning to pursue MCom soon.

A pilot project sowed half a decade ago, the Tata Motors Vigyan Ashram programme, T20, is the reason for all this. It has been helmed by Tata Motors and implemented by NGO Vigyan Ashram, who back in 2016-2017decided that an exclusive batch of 20 girls would be enrolled in Diploma in Basic Rural Technology at the Vigyan Ashram centre in Pabal, a village in the Pune district of Maharashtra. There is nothing more heart-warming than looking at young girls who are owning their futures and contributing towards a larger cause as well.

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Meet the 25-year-old contributor to Marathi Wikipedia who is inspiring others to chip in too - EdexLive