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Remember the 2018 floods in Sudan?

If the answer is no, youre not alone and its not just disaster fatigue making you lose track. The devastating floods that killed 23 people and affected 70,000 more barely caused a blip in American media.

That erasure now lives on in Wikipedia, the collaboratively written online encyclopedia that receives billions of visits per year. According to a recent study, the 2018 Sudan floods are just one of many major floods in low-income countries especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that either have truncated Wikipedia pages or lack pages altogether.

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The researchers cross-referenced three global databases to identify major floods that occurred between 2016 and 2019 and found that fewer than 20 percent of major floods in low-income countries have Wikipedia pages in English. Meanwhile, 68 percent of major floods in high-income countries have been immortalized on Wikipedia. Although a bias toward English-speaking places can be expected in English-language Wikipedia articles, the authors found that language alone doesnt account for the magnitude of difference in article quantity and quality between the Global North and South.

Wikipedia allows anybody to edit or submit articles and has come under fire before for non-representative or biased coverage in areas ranging from women in STEM to black history. The root problem is often diagnosed as a lack of editor diversity: The vast majority of editors are white men, a trend thats even more pronounced among frequent editors.

Wikipedias information gap about floods also reflects the broader dearth of media coverage of disasters in low-income countries. Wikipedia authors are required to cite sources when they write or edit articles, and a severe lack of media coverage on floods and other disasters in underreported regions makes the corresponding Wikipedia articles inevitably less detailed. Articles about poorer and non-English speaking places that do surface in Western media tend to reinforce stereotypes or provide a flat, truncated snapshot of the situation.

These omissions on Wikipedia make even basic information about disasters in overlooked areas much more difficult for citizens or local policymakers to find, since data can be scattered across different flood databases. And people living in countries that tend to be ignored by Wikipedia editors might also be missing out on an important benefit that Wikipedia provides to higher-income communities as disasters are happening.

In particular in disasters, those pages are created when the disaster unfolds minutes or seconds after the disaster hits, said study author Carlos Castillo, a data science professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. And then they are visited very heavily. Theyre clearly providing a service to the community. English-language Wikipedia pages clearly wouldnt do much good in areas where most people dont speak or read English or areas without reliable internet access. But more robust Wikipedia coverage could provide helpful and accurate information in areas that are considered the most vulnerable to extreme weather events related to climate change.

If Wikipedias breathtaking variety of pedantic, obscure, and borderline pointless articles is any indication i.e. this bizarre New Yorkerlength article about the urge to defecate upon entering a bookstore the collective army of online editors should certainly be capable of amassing information about major disasters in developing countries. Efforts to tackle other famous gaps in Wikipedias coverage, like articles on female scientists or African-American public figures and history, have included mass Edit-a-thons focused on boosting information about a single topic or subject area.

Changing the makeup of the people who write (or dont write) the information that millions of people reference seems to be the best, and perhaps only, solution. All information about disasters is biased, Castillo added. But Wikipedia in reality is only as representative as the editors it has.

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Wikipedia is flooded with information but it has a blind spot - Grist

Building the bots that keep Wikipedia fresh

While we can all learn from Wikipedias 40 million articles, government bot builders specifically can get a significant education by studying the creation, vetting and roles of the 1,601 bots that help maintain the site and interact with its more than 137,000 human editors.

Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology classified the Wikipedia bots into nine roles and 25 associated functions with the goal of understanding what bots do now and what they might do in the future. Jeffrey Nickerson, professor and associate dean of research at Stevens School of Business, and an author of The Roles Bots Play in Wikipedia, published in November 2019, likened the classification to the way humans talk about occupations and professions, the skills required to do them and the tasks that must be performed.

Each bot performs a unique job: some generate articles based on templates; some fix typos, spelling mistakes and errors in links; some identify spam, vandals or policy violations; some interact with humans by greeting newcomers, sending notifications or providing suggestions.

The nine main roles account for about 10% of all activity on the site and up to 88% of activity on subsections, such as the Wikidata platform, where more than 1,200 fixer bots have made a total of more than 80 million edits, according to the report.

Anyone can build a bot -- an automated, artificial intelligence-powered software tool -- for use in Wikipedia, but before its deployed, it needs the blessing of the Bot Approval Group. Members determine what the bot will do and which pages it will touch, and they review a trial run of the bot on sample data. That may be all that's required, or the group may also ask to check the source code, Nickerson said. That entire process is public.

Its a good place to start [for bot builders] because you can actually see it, Nickerson said. You can see the bots that are successful, and you can see the conversations take place there, and you can see the way the developers of the bots actually talk to the end users.

Builders consider risks and advantages of their bots, what functions they will start with and which features will come later, and how their bot might interact with others that perform similar functions, for example, he said.

Theres this vetting of the bot, Nickerson said. If the bot is going to do something fairly minor and not on very many pages, there may be less vetting than if the bot is going to create a whole bunch of new pages or is going to do a lot edits.

Another feature of the Wikipedia bots is how they work with human editors. Often, editors create a bot to automate some of their editing processes, Nickerson said. Once they build it, they set it loose and check on it periodically. That frees the editors to do the work that most interests them, but they also become bot maintainers.

The subsection of Wikipedia called Wikidata, a collaboratively editedknowledge baseof open source data, is especially bot-intensive. The platform is a knowledge graph, meaning that every piece of knowledge has a little fact involved and because of the way these are hooked together, the value of it can be a link to another fact, and essentially it forms a very, very large graph, Nickerson said.

Wikidatas factual information is used in knowledge production in Wikipedia articles, thanks to adviser and fixer bots. For example, when theres an election, the results will populate in Wikidata, and pages about a citys government will automatically update the name of the mayor by extracting election information from Wikidata.

Bots interaction with human editors are critical to the success of a website based on knowledge production. On Wikipedia, if someone makes an incorrect edit, a bot may reverse that change and explain what was wrong. Being corrected by a machine can be unpleasant, Nickerson said, but bots can also be diplomatic.

The researchers call these first- and second-order effects. The former are the knowledge artifacts the bots help protect or create, while the latter are the reactions they bring out in humans.

They can actually pay attention to what people are interested in, he said. They can be patient. They can direct somebody toward a page that they know with high probability is going to be the kind of page where that person can actually make an important contribution. The instinct of some people is to go to the pages that are actually very highly edited and very mature and try to make changes to those pages, and thats actually not the right place to start. The place to start is with a page that is newer and needs a particular kind of expertise.

When human editors have a positive interaction with bots right out of the gate, that helps with the cultural aspect of bot building. It also provides insight into what makes a bot successful -- a topic Nickerson plans to study more in the future.

Researchers at MIT, meanwhile, have developed a system to further automate the work done by Wikipedias human editors. Rather than editors crafting updates, a text generating system would take unstructured information and rewrite the entry in a humanlike fashion.

Unlike the rules-based bots on the site, MITs bot takes as input an outdated sentence from a Wikipedia article, plus a separate claim sentence that contains the updated and conflicting information, according to a report in MIT News. The system updates the facts but maintains the existing style and grammar. Thats an easy task for humans, but a novel one in machine learning, it added.

About the Author

Stephanie Kanowitz is a freelance writer based in northern Virginia.

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Building the bots that keep Wikipedia fresh - GCN.com

The site's innovations have always been cultural rather than computational. It was created using existing technology. This remains the single most underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the project: its emotional architecture. Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors; in fact, without getting gooey, you could even say it is built on love. Editors' passions can drive the site deep into inconsequential territoryexhaustive detailing of dozens of different kinds of embroidery software, lists dedicated to bespectacled baseball players, a brief but moving biographical sketch of Khanzir, the only pig in Afghanistan. No knowledge is truly useless, but at its best, Wikipedia weds this ranging interest to the kind of pertinence where Larry David's Pretty, pretty good! is given as an example of rhetorical epizeuxis. At these moments, it can feel like one of the few parts of the internet that is improving.

One challenge in seeing Wikipedia clearly is that the favored point of comparison for the site is still, in 2020, Encyclopedia Britannica. Not even the online Britannica, which is still kicking, but the print version, which ceased publication in 2012. If you encountered the words Encyclopedia Britannica recently, they were likely in a discussion about Wikipedia. But when did you last see a physical copy of these books? After months of reading about Wikipedia, which meant reading about Britannica, I finally saw the paper encyclopedia in person. It was on the sidewalk, being thrown away. The 24 burgundy-bound volumes had been stacked with care, looking regal before their garbage-truck funeral. If bought new in 1965, each of them would have cost $10.50the equivalent of $85, adjusted for inflation. Today, they are so unsalable that thrift stores refuse them as donations.

Wikipedia and Britannica do, at least, share a certain lineage. The idea of building a complete compendium of human knowledge has existed for centuries, and there was always talk of finding some better substrate than paper: H. G. Wells thought microfilm might be the key to building what he called the World Brain; Thomas Edison bet on wafer-thin slices of nickel. But for most people who were alive in the earliest days of the internet, an encyclopedia was a book, plain and simple. Back then, it made sense to pit Wikipedia and Britannica against each other. It made sense to highlight Britannica's strengthsits rigorous editing and fact-checking procedures; its roster of illustrious contributors, including three US presidents and a host of Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, novelists, and inventorsand to question whether amateurs on the internet could create a product even half as good. Wikipedia was an unknown quantity; the name for what it did, crowdsourcing, didn't even exist until 2005, when two WIRED editors coined the word.

Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors. You could even say it is built on love.

That same year, the journal Nature released the first major head-to-head comparison study. It revealed that, for articles on science, at least, the two resources were nearly comparable: Britannica averaged three minor mistakes per entry, while Wikipedia averaged four. (Britannica claimed almost everything about the journal's investigation was wrong and misleading, but Nature stuck by its findings.) Nine years later, a working paper from Harvard Business School found that Wikipedia was more left-leaning than Britannicamostly because the articles tended to be longer and so were likelier to contain partisan code words. But the bias came out in the wash. The more revisions a Wikipedia article had, the more neutral it became. On a per-word basis, the researchers wrote, the political bent hardly differs.

But some important differences don't readily show up in quantitative, side-by-side comparisons. For instance, there's the fact that people tend to read Wikipedia daily, whereas Britannica had the quality of fine china, as much a display object as a reference work. The edition I encountered by the roadside was in suspiciously good shape. Although the covers were a little wilted, the spines were uncracked and the pages immaculatetelltale signs of 50 years of infrequent use. And as I learned when I retrieved as many volumes as I could carry home, the contents are an antidote for anyone waxing nostalgic.

I found the articles in my '65 Britannica mostly high quality and high minded, but the tone of breezy acumen could become imprecise. The section on Brazil's education system, for instance, says it is good or bad depending on which statistics one takes and how they are interpreted. Almost all the articles are authored by white men, and some were already 30 years out of date when they were published. Noting this half-life in 1974, the critic Peter Prescott wrote that encyclopedias are like loaves of bread: the sooner used, the better, for they are growing stale before they even reach the shelf. The Britannica editors took half a century to get on board with cinema; in the 1965 edition, there is no entry on Luis Buuel, one of the fathers of modern film. You can pretty much forget about television. Lord Byron, meanwhile, commands four whole pages. (This conservative tendency wasn't limited to Britannica. Growing up, I remember reading the entry on dating in a hand-me-down World Book and being baffled by its emphasis on sharing milkshakes.)

The worthies who wrote these entries, moreover, didn't come cheap. According to an article in The Atlantic from 1974, Britannica contributors earned 10 cents per word, on averageabout 50 cents in today's money. Sometimes they got a full encyclopedia set as a bonus. They apparently didn't show much gratitude for this compensation; the editors complained of missed deadlines, petulant behavior, lazy mistakes, and outright bias. People in the arts all fancy themselves good writers, and they gave us the most difficult time, one editor told The Atlantic. At Britannica rates, the English-language version of Wikipedia would cost $1.75 billion to produce.

There was another seldom remembered limitation to these gospel tomes: They were, in a way, shrinking. The total length of paper encyclopedias remained relatively finite, but the number of facts in the universe kept growing, leading to attrition and abbreviation. It was a zero-sum game in which adding new articles meant deleting or curtailing incumbent information. Even the most noteworthy were not immune; between 1965 and 1989, Bach's Britannica entry shrank by two pages.

By the time the internet came into being, a limitless encyclopedia was not just a natural idea but an obvious one. Yet there was still a senseeven among the pioneers of the webthat, although the substrate was new, the top-down, expert-driven Britannica model should remain in place.

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Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet - WIRED

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, recently attended the CoinGeek Conference in London. During the conference, Wales spoke about cryptocurrencies, stating that they do not have a single practical use-case that would convince him that they could contribute to Wikipedia in any way.

Quite the opposite, in fact, he is concernedthat crypto would damage the way that the platform has been operating for allthe years since its creation.

Wales said that he did dedicate some seriousthought to the idea, and he tried to distinguish between the ideological andpractical nature of cryptos. However, his conclusions did not change. Healready declined numerous proposals from crypto supporters and advocates whowanted him to consider the possibility of rewarding content creations throughmicrotransactions.

He repeated that it would be a bad idea, andthat would not actually work. He said taking something that is a bad idea andputting it on the blockchain does not make it a good idea. Instead, Wikipedia,as it is right now, relies on volunteer experts and enthusiasts, who add andedit content, check facts, remove irrelevant or inaccurate materials, andalike.

Adding cryptos would allow companies and people to pay for the content that they want to be on Wikipedia, which would be taking a step back, as Wales sees it. Further, if editors and creators were to stake cryptocurrency, Wikipedia could see serious harm. It would be like saying that people have to pay or put their own money at risk in order to be allowed to edit the platform.

Next, if the platform had people deposit themoney, that could lead to the exclusion of experts and enthusiasts who areadding content out of interest in the topic. Instead, there would be people whoare after the earnings, which would lead to competitions, inaccurate entries,and alike.

Still, Wales is not against cryptocurrency,only against this kind of use. He stated that he had no problem if the platformwere to accept donations in different forms of crypto. After all, Wikipedia isa charity, and it accepted BTC donations since 2014.

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Wikipedia co-founder says that involving crypto with the platform is insane - iNVEZZ

ANN ARBOR, MI -- The Stamps Gallery at the University of Michigan is hosting the Ann Arbor Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon.

Attendees of this kid-friendly event from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Feb. 22, at 201 S. Division St. in Ann Arbor, will edit pages to improve representation on Wikipedia of transgender and non-binary women, along with people of color in arts and activism.

The Edit-a-thon is a part of the Stamps Gallery Feminist Futures: Art, Design & Activism Series, which launched last fall and focuses on the connection with feminism in art, scholarship, design and politics.

The Wikipedia Edit-a-thon seeks artists of all generations to properly reflect who they are and acknowledge their accomplishments.

It is recognizing that we are living in a digital world and most of the information that we take in is coming to us through the internet, said Srimoyee Mitra, director of the Stamps Gallery. There are major biases on the internet.

Editing Wikipedia pages to reflect accuracy has become a global campaign. Wikipedia even has a page dedicated on how to run an Edit-a-thon.

Wikipedia is what we feed it, said Mitra. We have the capacity to change that.

Detroit-based artist, educator and community organizer Diana Nucera, known as Mother Cyborg, will DJ and have a conversation at the event. She is a former director of the Allied Media Projects and has worked on accessible education in technology.

She will be talking about digital technology justice who has access to certain kinds of technologies, said Anne Cong-Huyen, digital scholarship strategist at UM Libraries. And specifically in Detroit, the issues related to broadband internet connection, poverty, access to information and some of the work she has done.

In addition, there will be free lunch, refreshments and giveaways with cake at the end of the event. Organizers advise to bring your own devices for editing, but some laptops will be available for usage.

With the Stamps Gallery organizing the event, other co-sponsors involved are the Center for the Education of Women+ Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund, The Institute for Research on Women & Gender and UM Libraries.

We do a lot of supporting of Wikipedia editing in classes, said Cong-Huyen. We help faculty members design Wikipedia editing assignments. We want to make sure our students, faculty and community members know how to evaluate the information thats coming at them.

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Wikipedia edit event will create accurate representations of people in arts, activism - MLive.com