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If you're a senior banker, how important is it that you have a glowing Wikipedia entry? Many in the industry may not have given it much thought. However,someone claiming to be acting on behalf of Andrea Orcel has been taking an interest in his own particulary entry.

For anyone who hasn't visited it, Orcel's Wikipedia pageis a work of art. Running to nearly 4,000 words it details everything you could want to know about a banker who it says has, "consolidated an enduring legacyof being one of the most successful investment bankers of his generation." Alongside a description of theSantander saga, there are words on Orcel's time atUBS, a detailed dealmaking list and a section entitled 'Public Image and Legacy.'

Orcel's lengthy entry might simply be because he is "widely known"as the "Ronaldoof investment banking" (in the words of his page).

However, it couldalso be because people acting in Orcel's interest have been contributing.According to the revision history for Orcel's page, a Wikipedia editor 'MAaR11Aa 2019' restructured the 'profile' in April 2020to "make it simpler and more organized." The editor claims thathe or shemade the changes, "at the request of Mr Orcel." The same editor has made around 26 other amendmentssince February 2019. It's not clear that the changes were genuinelymade at the request of Orcel or not.

Some of the most recent changes include: replacing the word 'controversial' with 'leading' in the sentence, 'Orcel is a controversial figure in European business and international banking;' removing a sentence that said Orcel had been criticized for an abrasive management style, overworking subordinates and being hyper-competitive;and removing a claim that Orcel received $12m in advisory fees for the RBS-ABN AMRO deal of 2007, plus the fact that the deal was subsequently dubbed "disastrous" by the Daily Telegraph. The pages created byMAaR11Aa 2019in April arevisible hereand here.

It's not clear whoMAaR11Aa 2019is. The editor may have nothing to do with Orcel, despite claiming to act on his behalf.Many of the changes made in late April weresubsequentlyreversed by other Wikipedia users and proved onlytransitory. If you're a senior banker interested in managing your public profile, this might seem a bit of a shame. It will be interesting to see whether further edits follow.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment youd like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will unless its offensive or libelous (in which case it wont.)

Photo by Muhamad Reza Junianto on Unsplash

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Andrea Orcel and the importance of having a positive Wikipedia page - eFinancialCareers

This is part 2 in a series of investigative reports on the systemic problems with Wikipedia. Read part 1 here: Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing

Internet encyclopedia giant Wikipedia has listed The Grayzone as a deprecated source, censoring the independent organization, alongside several other news websites, on an official blacklist of taboo media outlets.

The blacklisting is the result of a long-running campaign run by a coterie of regime-change activists who have effectively hijacked Wikipedia, scrubbing the site of information that runs counter to their sectarian agenda and editing their political adversaries out of existence.

At no point has this cabal of editors pointed to a pattern of errors or fabrications by The Grayzone. Instead, they have argued for its blacklisting on the grounds of the political views of its writers, a wholesale violation of Wikipedia guidelines that demand neutrality in editing.

As detailed in part one of this series, Wikipedia founders and the Wikimedia Foundation have done nothing to address the fundamental corruption of the internet encyclopedia they oversee by a gang of hyper-partisan censors.

That might be because the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, veteran US regime-change operative Katherine Maher, share the interventionist and corporate agenda that disproportionately powerful, neoconservative-oriented editors advance under their watch.

Born from seemingly humble beginnings, the Wikimedia Foundation is today swimming in cash and invested in many of the powerful interests that benefit from its lax editorial policy.

The foundations largest donors include corporate tech giants Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Craigslist. With more than $145 million in assets in 2018, nearly $105 million in annual revenue, and a massive headquarters in San Francisco, Wikimedia has carved out a space for itself next to these Big Tech oligarchs in the Silicon Valley bubble.

It is also impossible to separate Wikipedia as a project from the ideology of its creator. When he co-founded the platform in 2001, Jimmy Jimbo Wales was a conservative libertarian and devoted disciple of right-wing fanatic Ayn Rand.

A former futures and options trader, Wales openly preached the gospel of Objectivism, Rands ultra-capitalist ideology that sees government and society itself as the root of all evil, heralding individual capitalists as gods.

Wales described his philosophy behind Wikipedia in specifically Randian terms. In a video clip from a 2008 interview, published by the Atlas Society, an organization dedicated to evangelizing on behalf of Objectivism, Wales explained that he was influenced by Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rands novel The Fountainhead.

Wikipedias structure was expressly meant to reflect the ideology of its libertarian tech entrepreneur founder, and Wales openly said as much.

At the same time, however, Wikipedia editors have upheld the diehard Objectivist Jimmy Wales, as the New York Times put it in 2008, as a benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch, digital evangelist and spiritual leader.

Wales has always balanced his libertarian inclinations with old-fashioned American patriotism. He was summoned before the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Operations in 2007 to further explain how Wikipedia and its related technologies could be of service to Uncle Sam.

Wales began his remarks stating, I am grateful to be here today to testify about the potential for the Wikipedia model of collaboration and information sharing which may be helpful to government operations and homeland security.

At a time when the United States has been increasingly criticized around the world, I believe that Wikipedia is an incredible carrier of traditional American values of generosity, hard work, and freedom of speech, Wales continued, implicitly referencing the George Bush administrations military occupation of Iraq.

The Wikipedia founder added, The US government has always been premised on responsiveness to citizens, and I think we all believe good government comes from broad, open public dialogue. I therefore also recommend that US agencies consider the use of wikis for public facing projects to gather information from citizens and to seek new ways of effectively collaborating with the public to generate solutions to the problem that citizens face.

In 2012, Wales married Kate Garvey, the former diary secretary of ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Their wedding, according to the conservative UK Telegraph, was witnessed by guests from the world of politics and celebrity.

Wales status-quo-friendly politics have only grown more pronounced over the years. In 2018, for instance, he publicly cheered on Israels bombing of the besieged Gaza strip and portrayed Britains leftist former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite.

Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation claim to have little power over the encyclopedia itself, but it is widely known that this is just PR. Wikimedia blew the lid off this myth in 2015 when it removed a community-elected member of its board of trustees, without explanation.

At the time of this scandal, the Wikimedia Foundations board of trustees included a former corporate executive at Google, Arnnon Geshuri, who was heavily scrutinized for shady hiring practices. Geshuri, who also worked at billionaire Elon Musks company Tesla, was eventually pressured to step down from the board.

But just a year later, Wikimedia appointed another corporate executive to its board of trustees, Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti.

The figure that deserves the most scrutiny at the Wikimedia Foundation, however, is its executive director Katherine Maher, who is closely linked to the US regime-change network.

Maher boasts an eyebrow-raising rsum that would impress the most ardent of cold warriors in Washington.

With a degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University, Maher studied Arabic in Egypt and Syria, just a few years before the so-called Arab Spring uprising and subsequent Western proxy war to overthrow the Syrian government.

Maher then interned at the bank Goldman Sachs, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations and Eurasia Group, both elite foreign-policy institutions that are deeply embedded in the Western regime-change machine.

At the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Maher says on her public LinkedIn profile that she worked in the US/Middle East Program, oversaw the CFR Corporate Program, and Identified appropriate potential clients, conducted outreach.

At the Eurasia Group, Maher focused on Syria and Lebanon. According to her bio, she Developed stability forecasting and scenario modeling, and market and political stability reports.

Maher moved on to a job at Londons HSBC bank which would go on to pay a whopping $1.9 billion fine after it was caught red-handed laundering money for drug traffickers and Saudi financiers of international jihadism. Her work at HSBC brought her to the UK, Germany, and Canada.

Next, Maher co-founded a little-known election monitoring project focused on Lebanons 2008 elections called Sharek961. To create this platform, Maher and her associates partnered with an influential technology non-profit organization, Meedan, which has received millions of dollars of funding from Western foundations, large corporations like IBM, and the permanent monarchy of Qatar.

Meedan also finances the regime-change lobbying website, Bellingcat, which is considering a reliable source on Wikipedia, while journalism outlets like The Grayzone are formally blacklisted.

Sharek961 was funded by the Technology for Transparency Network, a platform for regime-change operations bankrolled by billionaire Pierre Omidyars Omidyar Network and billionaire George Soros Open Society Foundations.

Maher subsequently moved over to a position as an innovation and communication officer at the United Nations Childrens Fund, UNICEF. There, she oversaw projects funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the US State Department which finances regime-change operations and covert activities around the globe under the auspices of humanitarian goodwill.

Soon enough, Maher cut out the middleman and went to work as a program officer in information and communications technology at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), which was created and financed directly by the US government. The NDI is a central gear in the regime-change machine; it bankrolls coup and destabilization efforts across the planet in the guise of democracy promotion.

At the NDI, Maher served as a program officer for internet freedom projects, advancing Washingtons imperial soft power behind the front of boosting global internet access pursuing a strategy not unlike the one used to destabilize Cuba.

The Wikimedia Foundation CEO says on her LinkedIn profile that her work at the NDI included democracy and human rights support as well as designing technology programs for citizen engagement, open government, independent media, and civil society for transitional, conflict, and authoritarian countries, including internet freedom programming.

After a year at the NDI, she moved over to the World Bank, another notorious vehicle for Washingtons power projection.

At the World Bank, Maher oversaw the creation of the Open Development Technology Alliance (ODTA), an initiative that uses new technologies to impose more aggressive neoliberal economic policies on developing countries.

Mahers LinkedIn page notes that her work entailed designing and implementing open government and open data in developing and transitioning nations, especially in the Middle East and North Africa.

At the time of her employment at the World Bank, the Arab Spring protests were erupting.

In October 2012, in the early stages of the proxy war in Syria, Maher tweeted that she was planning a trip to Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the Syrian border that became the main hub for the Western-backed opposition. Gaziantep was at the time crawling with Syrian insurgents and foreign intelligence operatives plotting to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Just two months later, in December, she tweeted that was was on a flight to Libya. Just over a year before, a NATO regime-change war had destroyed the Libyan government, and foreign-backed insurgents had killed leader Muammar Qadhafi, unleashing a wave of violence and open-air slave markets.

Today, Libya has no unified central government and is still plagued by a grueling civil war. What Maher was doing in the war-torn country in 2012 is not clear.

Mahers repeated trips to the Middle East and North Africa right around the time of these uprisings and Western intervention campaigns raised eyebrows among local activists.

In 2016, when Maher was named executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, a prominent Tunisian activist named Slim Amamou spoke out, alleging that Katherine Maher is probably a CIA agent.

Amamou briefly served as secretary of state for sport and youth in Tunisias transitional government, before later resigning. He noted that Maher traveled to the country several times since the Arab Spring protests broke out in 2011, and he found it strange that her affiliations kept changing.

Maher replied angrily, seriously, Slim? Youve welcomed me in your home.

Amamou shot back, you gave me the impression that you were not who you claimed to be back then.

Maher denied the accusation. Im not any sort of agent, she said. You can dislike me, but please dont defame me.

Amamou responded, I dont dislike you. Im doing my duty of protecting the internet.

Amamou lamented that the Wikimedia foundation is changing.. and not in a good way.

Its sad, because rare are organisations that have this reach in developing world, he added.

In April 2017, in her new capacity as head of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher participated in an event for the US State Department.

The talk was a Washington Foreign Press Center Briefing, entitled Wikipedia in a Post-fact World. It was published at the official State Department website.

Maher spoke about the libertarian philosophy behind Wikipedia, echoing the Ayn Randian ideology of founder Jimmy Wales.

When journalists asked how Wikipedia deals with highly charged topics, where some entities sometimes countries, sometimes various other entities are often engaged in conflict with each other, Maher repeatedly provided a non-answer, recycling vague platitudes about the Wikipedia community working together.

The Grayzone has clearly demonstrated how Wikipedia editors overwhelmingly side with Western governments in these editorial conflicts, echoing the perspectives of interventionists and censoring critical voices.

A few months later, in January 2018, Maher appeared on a panel with Michael Hayden, the former director of both the CIA and NSA, and a notorious hater of journalists, as well with a top Indian government official, K. VijayRaghavan.

The talk, entitled Lies Propaganda and Truth, was held by the organization behind the Nobel Prize.

The moderator of the discussion, Mattias Fyrenius, the CEO of the Nobel Prizes media arm, asked Maher: There is some kind of information war going on and maybe you can say that there is a war going on between the lies, and the propaganda, and the facts, and maybe truth do you agree?

Yes, Maher responded in agreement. She added her own question: What are the institutions, what is the obligation of institutions to actually think about what the future looks like, if we actually want to pass through this period with our integrity intact?

Hayden, the former US spy agency chief, then blamed the Russians for waging that information war. He referred to Moscow as the adversary, and claimed the Russian information bubble, information dominance machine, created so much confusion.

Maher laughed in approval, disputing nothing that Hayden said. In the same discussion, Maher also threw WikiLeaks (which is blacklisted on Wikipedia) under the bus, affirming, Not WikiLeaks, I want to be clear, were not the same organization. The former CIA director next to her chuckled.

Today, Maher is a member of the advisory board of the US governments technology regime-change arm the Open Technology Fund (OPT) a fact she proudly boasts on her LinkedIn profile.

The OPT was created in 2012 as a project of Radio Free Asia, an information warfare vehicle that the New York Times once described as a worldwide propaganda network built by the CIA.

Since disaffiliating from this CIA cutout in 2019, the OPT is now bankrolled by the US Agency for Global Media, the governments propaganda arm, formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Like Mahers former employer the National Democratic Institute, the OPT advances US imperial interests in the guise of promoting internet freedom and new technologies. It also provides large grants to opposition groups in foreign nations targeted by Washington for regime change.

While she serves today as the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher remains a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, a Washington, DC think tank that grooms former military and intelligence professionals for careers in Democratic Party politics.

The Truman Project website identifies Mahers expertise as international development.

As The Grayzones Max Blumenthal reported, the most prominent fellow of the Truman Project is Pete Buttigieg, the US Naval intelligence veteran who emerged as a presidential frontrunner in the Democratic primary earlier this year.

The extensive participation by the head of the Wikimedia Foundation in US government regime-change networks raises serious questions about the organizations commitment to neutrality.

Perhaps the unchecked problem of political bias and coordinated smear campaigns by a small coterie of Wikipedia editors is not a bug, but a deliberately conceived feature of the website.

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.comand he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

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Meet Wikipedias Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundations regime-change operative CEO - The Grayzone

Photo illustration by Slate. Image via Wikipedia.

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.

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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.

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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