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Welcome to Source Notes, a Future Tense column about the internets knowledge ecosystem.

In March, Facebook was filled with posts that claimed that 5G networks, not a novel coronavirus, were making people sick. Yet searching for those same posts today leads to an error message: Sorry, this content isnt available right now. Thats because Facebook and other social media companies have removed many conspiracy-type posts from their platforms, including the thoroughly debunked 5G connection. But some internet activists are concerned that this pandemic-related content is not only being removed but erased, leaving future researchers with a gap-filled historical record.

Enter Wikipedia. In April, 75 signatory organizations sent a letter asking social media companies and content-sharing platforms to preserve all data that they have blocked or removed during the COVID-19 pandemic and make it available for future research. The letters recipients included Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia. When Wikipedia editors discussed the letter among themselves in forums like Wikipedia Weekly, the most common reaction was, Dont we already do this?

Over the past few months, Wikipedias coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely praised for its breadth and relative trustworthiness. To date, the main English Wikipedia article about the pandemic has been viewed more than 67 million times, and COVID-19 articles exist in 175 languages. The 5,000 articles related to COVID-19 cover everything from Anthony Faucis peers across the world, to the resulting global economic crisis (e.g., German Wirtschaftskrise and its Arabic counterpart), to a somewhat circular Wikipedia article about Wikipedias own response to the pandemic.

But todays wealth of Wikipedia content will also be valuable to future parties. As scholar and Wikimedia program coordinator Liam Wyatt writes, the text in Wikipedias archive will be of interest to linguists, historians or sociologists of the year 4000. In an interview, Katherine Maher, chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, told me, One of the things that historians will find valuable is the way Wikipedia documents the rate of acceleration of understanding the virus itself.

For example, a future historian looking back on Wikipedias coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic this year would likely review the relevant diffs. Every Wikipedia article, and every revision to it, is saved even if the edit is relatively minor or short-lived. The diff shows the difference between one version and another of a Wikipedia page, allowing anybody to see exactly what changed between two precisely time-stamped moments. The diffs for the Wikipedia article about the COVID-19 pandemic include this one on Jan. 7 noting the first suspicions that the virus had an animal source, and this one on Jan. 8 with the first use of novel coronavirus. More recently, this diff shows the first insertion of the word bleach on April 29, after comments from President Donald Trump. A historian could use Wikipedias diffs to construct a case about how knowledge about COVID-19 evolved throughout 2020.

Researchers in the future could also learn from debates among editors. Each Wikipedia article has a discussion page where editors can participate in conversations about building the encyclopedia. Throughout April and early May, Wikipedias volunteer editors engaged in a lengthy discussion about renaming the article from 20192020 coronavirus pandemic to its current name COVID-19 pandemic. Notice how the new name identifies the virus specifically and drops the time range. What might this renaming signify to a future historian? Its impossible to know, of course, but one interpretation is that this was an early recognition that this pandemic could last until 2021 and beyond.

Future researchers will struggle more with historical data from social media companies. In March, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube removed videos from their platforms in which Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for COVID-19. While this helped stop the spread of medical misinformation on those platforms, the deletion of the posts (and all associated comments and metadata) makes it more difficult for researchers to understand how the public engaged with that misleading content before it was taken down. In the past, these companies have not disclosed data on deleted posts, even after the fact, as they consider such information proprietary.

And its not just big tech companies that are purging the future historical record. Woody Harrelson and John Cusack posted support for the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory before voluntarily deleting those posts from Twitter and Instagram. And some journalists have begun routinely deleting their old tweets in order to reduce the risk of online harassment, a practice the Columbia Journalism Review characterized as erasing the first draft of history. But Wikipedia is less likely to be accused of this historical erasure since, with few exceptions, the software preserves the projects entire edit history.

Preservation is Wikipedias strong suit, but a long-term challenge for the project is the issue of systemic bias. Largely unintentional bias can be seen in the encyclopedias biographical articles (more than 80 percent male) and the disproportionate number of articles about sci-fi and technical topics (mirroring the preferences of the sites earliest contributors). We know that when original source material is biased, this limits the understanding of future researchers, who will ask questions millennia later like Where are all the women in ancient philosophy?

But todays Wikipedia supercontributors are keen to ensure that future historians will have access to a better archive. Comprehensive coverage was a recurring theme at this months virtual symposium on Wikipedia and COVID-19 organized by Wikimedia NYC, which featured prolific volunteers like Jason Moore. Moore has been documenting the pandemic in real time from many viewpoints, starting articles about the pandemics impacts in various U.S.states, the LGBTQ community, and discrete sectors like the cannabis industry. Another presenter at the symposium, Lane Rasberry of the University of Virginia, demonstrated how Wikidata can visually represent outbreaks of the virus on a world map. Because this language is machine-readable, it can be filtered out immediately from the central hub of Wikidata into the various language editions of Wikipedia. But Rasberry cautioned that this wiki outbreak data overrepresented North America and Europe and underrepresented places with fewer wiki editors. Thats just the way its working for now, he said.

Then again, future researchers may be able to account for some geographic distortions so long as the original record is still accessible. After the symposium, presenter Netha Hussain described an article she started on English-language Wikipedia called Misinformation related to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in India. But if you search Wikipedia for that article today, you will not find it. Thats because other Wikipedia editors voted to delete the page on May 6. (The pro-delete group argued that it was improper for India to have a separate article for misinformation when other countries did not.) The article about misinformation in India is not completely lost to posterity, however, and unlike social media companies, Wikipedia is not claiming that it retains ownership of deleted content. These deleted articles can be viewed by Wikipedias volunteer administrators, and Hussain has also saved a copy of the deleted article about India and the editorial discussion about its deletion. Perhaps a future historian will someday comb through this discussion to better understand how editors responded to allegations of a corona jihad, a false narrative that has led to persecution of Indias Muslim minority.

Interestingly (at least to me!), these hypothetical future researchers would be using Wikipedia as a primary source. That may sound heretical, given that librarians and educators have been reminding us for nearly 20 years that Wikipedia is not a primary source, not a secondary source, but a tertiary source. Thats why Wikipedia has a handy help page to remind readers that you probably shouldnt be citing Wikipedia. But citing Wikipedia as a primary source makes sense in a future state where enough time has passed that todays Wikipedia revisions have become a historical artifact. Imagining this distant future presents an interesting thought exercise not only for Wikipedians but for other creators of online content: How might this digital media someday be interpreted as a revealing artifact from this period of distress and disease?

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

See more here:
Future Historians Will Rely on Wikipedias COVID-19 Coverage - Slate Magazine

It was just a decade ago when people talked about the website Wikipedia as, let's be blunt, a place for lies and nonsense. As Dunder Mifflin's Michael Scott noted in "The Office," "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So, you know you are getting the best possible information."

But, since then, the site has transformed. Today, Wikipedia is regularly the first place many of us check for information about everything. In fact, Wikipedia's pages on COVID-19 and the pandemic are viewed more than a million times a day, and edited almost every hour of the day.

And chances are good that when you visit the page, Dr. James Heilman may have just finished editing it.

"We don't have a vaccine, but we do know that this disease can be stopped," said Heilman, or "Doc James" as he is known. He is one of the hundred or so editors with WikiProject Medicine, which edits and reviews all the medical content on Wikipedia.

His view? The only proven way to stop COVID-19 is through social distancing.

Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson asked Heilman, "Do you think that social distancing is working?"

"Yes, definitely. You know, we have a good understanding of the transmission of disease. You know, if everybody was to hold entirely still for four weeks, this disease would be eradicated," he replied.

In his other life, Heilman is an ER doctor at a small hospital in Canada. "I do not recommend people trust Wikipedia blindly," he said. "I think doing so would be silly. Yet, you know, people shouldn't trust other sources of information blindly, either."

Wikipedia runs solely on the good will of volunteers like Dr. Heilman. Some are your typical denizens of the internet. Others are academics and retirees, like Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight: "We, the editors of Wikipedia, are really like a learning machine," she said. "We collaborate. We have networks of people who work in various areas."

She wrote English Wikipedia's six millionth article last year.

"We've learned that what we did initially write articles that maybe didn't have any reference, or enough references that wasn't the best choice for an encyclopedic article," Stephenson-Goodknight said.

She said references and transparency are critical to Wikipedia's success.

Katherine Maher, the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit that runs Wikipedia), said, "You can check every edit. If something is wrong, you can go ahead and fix it. It relies on reliable sources."

Maher said that, in comparison to the news we get off of social media, Wikipedia almost always wins.

"It turns out there's a lot of challenges with social networks when it comes to information distribution, a lot of questions about whether they can be trusted, [and] who's monitoring for that," she said.

Maher said having your own private newsfeed can actually divide us, which is a problem Wikipedia doesn't have.

"There's just one front page of Wikipedia," she said. "It doesn't matter if you are in Iran or in Italy or in Japan or sitting here in New York City. You're all looking at the same information."

Still, even though medical pages are strictly monitored by the WikiProject team, and hot topics that get a lot of page views are carefully edited, inaccurate information persists on some of Wikipedia's less-read pages.

When Thompson started working on this story, he looked himself up on Wikipedia, and someone had edited his entry to describe him as "a Martian technology journalist."

So, how do you keep information accurate on Wikipedia? Wikipedia feels the answer is to recruit more, and more diverse, editors.

One way that Wikipedia has tried to expand its pool of editors is through "Edit-a-thons," like one held in Hong Kong in March, organized by Asia Art Archive and M+, of the West Kowloon Cultural District. "Wikipedia becomes more important because of people using the internet more and more widely," said one volunteer. "Different organizations with their own political aims and goals will try influencing Wikipedia."

Companies, governments and politicians all have tried to edit Wikipedia's entries for their own benefit. But Wikipedia editors are using computer programming to fight back.

Now every time someone makes an edit from the White House, a computer algorithm notes the edits, and sends out a tweet about them:

But, it's no secret why someone would want to influence Wikipedia.

"Knowledge is power," said Maher. "And that means that it is fundamentally disruptive, often to those in power. If you think about the history of what Wikipedia is, it's actually pretty radical. And I don't mean that in, like, a political sort of left/right way. I mean, that it is an inversion of power structures, this idea that information can and should be available to all."

But it's no secret why someone would want to influence Wikipedia, which explains why lowly Wikipedia, which was founded in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales almost as a kind of experiment, has grown to be one of the most-visited websites on the planet. It also explains why it's banned in China.

In fact, one in three Americans now get their medical information from the web.

That's just fine with Dr. Heilman: "I don't mind having an educated patient," he said.

Thompson asked, "And do you think that having accurate information about COVID-19 on Wikipedia can save lives?"

"Well, you know, right now the only tool we have at our disposal to combat this virus is education around how it spreads," Heilman replied. "You know, this disease can be stopped by knowledge."

Maher said, "I genuinely think that Wikipedia runs on generosity and care. Somehow, this encyclopedia on the internet has given an outlet to millions of people to show that good."

Oh, and in case you were wondering, on March 30, an anonymous internet user based in Hillsboro, Oregon, using their cell phone, decided to make two changes to Wikipedia. One was a detail about baseball's opening day, and the other was about Thompson, who is no longera Martian technology journalist, but an American technology journalist.

So, thank you, anonymous internet user!

For more info:

Story produced by Anthony Laudato. Editor: Chad Cardin.

Correction: In the original posting of this report, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight was referenced as Rosie Goodknight-Stephenson. We regret the error.

Read the original here:
The rise of Wikipedia as a source of medical information - CBS News

The Wikimedia Foundation has been asked by its board to overhaul its safety and compliance standards to better address harassment and incivility on Wikipedia and related Wikimedia communities.

The foundation oversees Wikipedia as well as its sister projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, and Wikisource, among others. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees voted last week to update safety standards across the brands, with the foundation sharing details of how it plans to clean up behavior that the board characterized as contrary to our shared values and detrimental to our vision and mission.

In a statement on the foundations culture and that of its respective properties, the board made it clear that more can and should be done to create safer and more inclusive spaces.

The Board does not believe we have made enough progress toward creating welcoming, inclusive, harassment-free spaces in which people can contribute productively and debate constructively, the board said. In recognition of the urgency of these issues, the Board is directing the Wikimedia Foundation to directly improve the situation in collaboration with our communities. This should include developing sustainable practices and tools that eliminate harassment, toxicity, and incivility, promote inclusivity, cultivate respectful discourse, reduce harms to participants, protect the projects from disinformation and bad actors, and promote trust in our projects.

The board has now tasked the foundation with overhauling any toxic behavior within the Wikimedia communities, including by taking action against users who do not comply with the new rules; working with site mods to develop retroactive review processes; developing a code of conduct applicable to all Wikimedia communities; and develop procedures for prioritizing the health of the individuals who run the various sites. While the board did not cite any one particular incident as an impetus for the change, it did say its statement formalizes years of longstanding efforts to curb abuse in its communities.

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The board said the foundation will work with appropriate partners from across the movement on its new goals for its communities, and further encouraged every member of the Wikimedia communities to collaborate in a way that models the Wikimedia values of openness and inclusivity.

Continued here:
Wikimedia Is Overhauling Its Communities to Clean Up Harassment - Gizmodo

New York rapper Camron is ready to light a fire on all of Wikipedias digital pages. The hip-hop veteran went online this week to target the online encyclopedia for its perception of where his expression No homo originated.

On Friday, Camron jumped on Instagram to troll on Wikipedia. Cam appeared to have his own take on where the catchphrase started.

So No Homo (no offense to homosexuality) has a Wiki? And this is where they saying it started?! Smh #georgefloydstill is the focus -Camrons Instagram

In the mid-2000s, Cam explained why he used the expression No homo in his everyday talk. Killa also made sure to say the phrase wasnt about letting people know his sexuality.

With me, No homo is just installed in my vocabulary. Its like even if Im in a meeting, Ill be with my lawyer and say something like No homo and my lawyer be like looking at me and Im like, I know you have know idea what Im talking about but I need to say that because I said something real homo, no homo. [Am I gay?] Not at all, far from it. It isnt about being gay. Its about saying something gay. For instance, my man Jim Jones said Ima beat you with that til all the white stuff come out of it. Thats wild homo. Telling somebody else that. No homo, he didnt tell me that. You understand what I mean? This isnt even about being gay, its about saying something this is about saying gay things by accident. No homo. This isnt about being gay. (Hot 97)

A few years back, Cam flipped the expression into an actual song. The rap heavyweight released his Silky (No Homo) record to the masses.

Back in 2009, Cam let loose the truth behind where the expression stemmed from. He also applauded longtime pal Lil Wayne for keeping the catchphrase going at the time.

A friend of mine, son, hes like three or four, hes like, Lil Wayne made up No homo but those kids, younger kids are getting into it, too I think Wayne just took it and crossed over with it. Thats my man. He can use it anytime he wants. I heard people messed with using it in songs. I think Lil Wayne crossed it over. I didnt originate that. Its from the East side of Harlem. I learned that from Jeffersons Projects on 115th and 1st. Theyre the originators of No homo. East side of Harlem. First time I heard that phrase, 1990, 1991. Its a 20-year old phrase. (HHDX)

Follow this link:
Cam'ron Trolls Wikipedia Over 'No Homo' Origin Story - SOHH

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The Impact of COVID-19: User-Created Content (UCC) Software Market 2020 Growing Demand, Size and Business Outlook Wikipedia, Fandom, Facebook,...