Mediaboss Marketing

Wikipedia is used as a resource by millions, but compared to the total amount of its users the site has a small number of mostly male contributors. A 2010 study by the Wikipedia Foundation found that at the time only 13% of its contributors were women. RIT Libraries Women on Wikipedia-edit-a-thon events are geared to change that imbalance.

RIT libraries has hosted the annual event for 5 years, offering its space and resources for people to contribute and create new pages of women on the popular website.

RIT Librarian Rebekah Walker says that before the pandemic the event was held on RITs campus and was open to the public.

People could show up with devices and we could find them devices in the library to use to edit said Walker. And then we have very similar resources like books for people to browse through.

Over the past 20 years, Wikipedia has become an essential resource for quick web references and preliminary research. However, males have dominated the site's contributor ratio. It's estimated that about 20% of all Wikipedia biography pages are about women. Some people attributed the lack of diversity in content as correlating to the high representation of its male editors.

Since 2011, there has been an initiative by the Wikipedia Foundation to invite more women to be represented as both contributors and in biographical content.

Walker said there is a distinction between the way women and men are written about on the website. She said many women's stories are often told through their relationships to men.

Women articles more often describe their familial relationship, their marriages, said Walker. People refer to them by their first name or by Mrs. so-and-so. Foregrounding their relationships other than their accomplishments.

Previous Women on Wikipedia-edit-a-thon events have resulted in 10 new pages and edits to 260 existing pages.

Walker said there is a current list of women that includes the first deaf NASA engineer, and lesser known actresses and artists that they hope to create new pages for during this years event.

Women on Wikipedia-edit-a-thon will be held virtually this year on Friday March 26. To register visit library.rit.edu

Read more from the original source:
RIT hosts Women on Wikipedia-a-thon - WXXI News

A 26-year old who goes by the pseudonym Nohirara, which means falling in love in Central Sulawesis local language, remembers clearly how he was introduced to Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia. Choosing only to use his Wikipedia username and not his given name, Nohirara, who works for a digital comic publisher, takes The Jakarta Post back to his high school days, six years ago. His history teacher had asked the class to write a paper about Indonesias rule under the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during the colonial era. He knew that there were books in the school library that would help his research, but limited in quantity, all those books had been rented out. Seeing Nohirara uneasy about the situation, a friend told him about this site containing nearly everything called Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia, the Indonesian version of Wikipedia.

I copy-pasted the whole page and submitted it. My teacher didnt know [I was cheating], so I got a good grade, he laughed.

The next day, driven by curiosity, he returned to Wikipedia and found that anyone could edit the pages. From that day on, Nohirara spent his recess on the librarys computer, editing Wikipedia pages. Today, he is one of the websites administrators and manages Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesias Twitter account. An administrator can delete or protect (ensuring no malicious edits are made) articles and ban problematic accounts.

One of the most popular websites in existence (it was ranked the fifth-most visited website globally as of January 2021 with 6.1 billion monthly visitors), Wikipedia is powered by a community that shares a passion for information; it has served as a lot of people as the first stop for general information since its launch in 2001. Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia launched in 2003.

Benny Lin (also using his Wikipedia username), a then-17-year-old Indonesian living in the United States (he is now 36), was one of the first Wikipediawan a term Indonesians use for local Wikipedia editors. He remains an active editor.

Wikipedia [Bahasa Indonesia] challenged me to be able to write and edit in formal Indonesian. As an Indonesian living abroad, it made me realize I was not that good at writing in my mother tongue, said Benny. In his early contributions, Benny wrote about musical instruments, history and anything he could translate often until ten at night using the computer at the universitys library.

Majoring in Computer Science, Benny helped develop the early stages of Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesias user interface, such as the categorizations feature or the formatting template. Thanks to his work, a then-third grader, Ramzy from Pekanbaru, was able to navigate his way on the website quickly, sometime in 2007.

It was all about soccer articles in the beginning. Slowly but surely, I (worked on) history, politics, law, film and pop culture, said Ramzy Muliawan, now a 22-year-old law student at Andalas University in West Sumatra. In 2013, he was nominated as an administrator.

#BoikotWikipedia campaign

In 2020, a viral #BoikotWikipedia (boycott Wikipedia) hashtag made the editors fear for their safety.

In June 2020, a group of unidentified people on the internet began the campaign, utilizing threatening language, because they were not happy with the way Wikipedia wrote about the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and the massacre of 1965. They think we were presenting inaccurate information, because it did not match the official history narrative of the government, said Ramzy. The weird thing is, it was only Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia they were campaigning to boycott, not Wikipedia English, where they could clearly see that the story [there] is more antigovernment than ours.

Rian hopes more experts will write and edit for Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia to improve the quality of its articles. (JP/Courtesy of Hari Suharto)

The impact was huge for the local Wikipedia community. Many of my friends werepersecuted online, said Nohirara. Those people even tried to find personal information about the contributors involved in the article and sent threats.

Thank God, there was no real violence. After that, we learned to separate our online presence from our real identity, said Benny. Ramzy even changed his username.

Despite the turmoil, Hari Rian Suharto still uses his real name on the site. As a veterinarian working at the Ministry of Agriculture in South Sulawesi, the 32-year-old has a mission in mind. One problem I want to solve regarding Wikipedia (Bahasa Indonesia) is its lack of expert contributors. I use my real name and write about something Ive deeply learned about to inspire other experts to do the same.

Rian, who just got promoted as an administrator a month ago, was the first to create the Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia page about COVID-19 last year.

Wikipedia and women

Rahmi has been working at Wikimedia Indonesia since 2018, a host institution that is officially part of Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia. The 25-years-old woman works day-to-day as an educational program coordinator.

Wikimedia often holds writing and editing training courses, we need more people, because contributors are the backbone of Wikipedia, said Rahmi. It is a challenge, because contributors, both administrators and supervisors, are nonpaid positions.

Another big challenge for Rahmi, Benny and everyone in the Wikipedia community is how to get more women involved.

Ramzy presents at the WikiPelatih (WikiTrainer) workshop in Jakarta in 2009. (JP/Courtesy of Ramzy Muliawan)

A woman finally joined us [as an administrator] last year, Benny said, after nearly 16 years of all-male administrators. Benny shares part of the blame on history.

At Encyclopedia Britannica, the editors are hundred percent men. (History tells) us that writing and editing is a men-only type of job, but now we are trying our best to [close] the gap. The problem also occurs globally. According to a 2018 survey by Wikimedia, only 8 percent of global Wikipedia contributors are women.

One of their efforts is the Wikigap program, which trains women to write about women-related articles. Wikigap has been held four times: in Yogyakarta (2018), Padang (2018), Bandung (2019) and as a webinar format (2021), with 30 to 40 participants in each session.

Wikimedia also has an Indonesia-exclusive monitoring program called Wikisedaya to supervise the women theyve trained.

Benny tries to do his part by sharing Wikipedia articles that anyone can relate to. I try to attract more women readers in the hope that it will encourage them to edit on the site, Benny said.

As of March 18th, 2021, Wikipedia Bahasa Indonesia has 1.2 million users, 2,093 active users, 38 administrators and 564.044 articles.

Not surprisingly, Many people write about themselves in Wikipedia, even though most of them are not qualified for an article; bureaucrats and businesspeople even often order articles about themselves, said Ramzy, when asked about some memorable moments taking care of the site. He mentioned that you have to be in three credible sources book, journal, media to have your own Wikipedia page.

He laughs, recalling one particularly heated exchange among editors. We had a good debate in 2014 to decide whether or not we should make an article for each member of girl band JKT48.

Your premium period will expire in 0 day(s)

Subscribe to get unlimited access Get 50% off now

Visit link:
Passion for information: Wikipedia contributors share what goes on behind the scenes - The Jakarta Post - Jakarta Post

Wikipedia is one of the most highly trafficked sites in the world and one of the top websites for finding information online. It really is the online encyclopedia for almost everyone. Its free and funded by donations, but Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs this site, wants to change that.

According to Wired, the Wikimedia Foundation wants to raise additional money by charging tech companies for publishing their content. To accomplish this financial gain, Wikimedia Foundation would spin-off Wikimedia Enterprise to create a new division under the Wikimedia brand.

Wikimedia Enterprise would offer a commercial product that would customize Wikimedias content for paying customers like Apple. For example, Wikipedia could work hand in hand with Siri, Apples digital assistant.

When a user asks Siri a question, the Wikipedia service would then mine their archives and pull out the appropriate answer for the user.

Wikimedia currently operates with a $100 million budget that is funded primarily by donations from its users. This move to charge for its services has been a long time coming.

As far back as 2018, the company has expressed displeasure that big tech companies were benefiting from Wikipedia and not contributing any money to keep it afloat.

Wikimedia doesnt plan on changing its service for users. It will still be free for people to read and will rely on volunteers to curate its content. Wikimedia allegedly already is talking to big tech companies about this monetization plan.

Continue reading here:
Time to Pay? Wikipedia Is Looking for Cash from Google, Amazon, and Apple - iDrop News

Wikipedia is funded largely by donations from its users and has been free to everyone since its launch in 2001. But WikiMedia Foundation, which administers the online encyclopedia, announced via an article in Wired that it is launching a paid API service for large-scale for-profit users.

Big tech companies like Google, Apple and Amazon have been using Wikipedia extensively as a source of information. Responses to queries on Google Search and questions to Amazons Alexa are often sourced from Wikipedia, and are available for free to these companies just like they are to any other user on the internet. Wikimedia is trying to change this with Wikimedia Enterprise, which will launch later in 2021.

Wikimedia Enterprise provides APIs for large scale content reuse, to pull content from Wikipedia more conveniently, efficiently, and securely. Previously, big companies had dedicated teams to clean and organize Wikipedia content. With Enterprise, not only is this service provided to them, but the data will be tailored to each companys requirement and delivered quicker than before, the company told Wired.

Wikimedia Enterprise will use Amazon Web Services to store data and provide services, unlike its free version which hosts content on its own servers. This is to provide better service to customers, Wikimedia said.

Although the new revenue source will be substantial, it will not be a significant contributor to the foundations $100 million budget, Wikimedia claimed. Responding to concerns that this could make Wikimedia over-reliant on corporate partners and shift the foundation from its core mission of providing free information, the foundation countered that Wikimedia Enterprise would provide the foundation with funds to provide better services in emerging markets in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia.

By 2030, one of the things that we want is to achieve something called knowledge equity, which really means we want to grow in emerging markets really significantly over the next ten years. That requires additional resources, increased investment, and we are hopeful that Enterprise can help get us the resources to grow around the world. Seitz-Gruwell, the chief advancement officer at the Wikimedia Foundation

While the free version of Wikipedia is still available to everyone, including commercial users, conversations between Wikimedia and big tech companies to attract them to the new service are reportedly already underway.

Also Read:

More here:
Wikimedia introduces paid version of Wikipedia for Big Tech - MediaNama.com

(Subscribe to our Today's Cache newsletter for a quick snapshot of top 5 tech stories. Click here to subscribe for free.)

Wikimedia foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, said it will launch a paid service for high volume commercial re-users of its content. The service has been designed for companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, commonly referred to as Big Tech.

The foundation said on its page there wont be an exclusive contract or content, and that the product will help provide smaller for-profit organizations to have a more level playing field to benefit from the use of Wikimedias content on their platforms.

The newly designed API is said to be an opt-in product for firms. Wikimedia will package existing publicly-available data from its projects and make commercial companies reuse them on their services. It is a new method of delivering content at a volume and speed designed specifically for major for-profit organisations that are using Wikimedia content commercially.

The foundation clarified that while the enterprise API is selling the service of this new method of access, it does not stop anyone from using the existing free methods of access.

Wikimedia noted that its content is often used by commercial organisations that rely on it to support their business models and earn revenue from it. Each of these large companies independently re-builds Wikimedia project data internally to address their very similar use cases, it added.

This significant investment is not only duplicated effort, but also represents resources spent within each company rather than in support of the free knowledge ecosystem, Wikimedia said.

The foundation wants to eliminate the system where software development needs of some of the worlds largest commercial organisations are met with donor money.

It is still working on determining the costs of the API by exploring factors such as the volume of content reuse to determine the appropriate cost for each customer.

As government around the world are brainstorming ways to build a financially sustainable model while working with Big Tech, Wikimedia believes enterprise API creates a way for those for-profit organisations that have built business models from the use of freely-available Wikimedia content to also invest in the Wikimedia movement in a reliable and ongoing manner.

With Wikimedia Enterprise, the foundation wants to create a new revenue stream and improve the content available to readers. It clarified that the revenue stream is an added source of revenue and the foundation will continue to rely on donors for funding.

Read more:
Wikipedia wants big tech to pay for using its content - The Hindu