Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-08-14/In the media
Portland pol profile paid for from public purse
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Portland politician spends $6,400 in taxpayer dollars to "spruce up his profile on Wikipedia"
The Oregonian reported that Portland city commissioner Rene Gonzalez spent $6,400 of city taxpayer dollars "to spruce up his profile on Wikipedia" as part of his mayoral bid, by hiring a contractor, WhiteHatWiki, who "helped craft eight requested edits" which were then posted on the article's talk page by a staffer. Only half of these were approved by the volunteer editor who reviewed the request, with one of the rejected ones asking for the removal of a mention that "Gonzalez tagged a member of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer in a Twitter post thanking supporters after his race for City Council in 2022."
In contrast, the newspaper reports that neither Portland's current mayor nor any of Gonzalez' colleagues on the Portland City Council "have paid money to spruce up their Wikipedia entries, according to their offices." It also quotes a political consultant calling the practice "highly unusual" ("I haven’t seen that before"). However, Gonzalez’s chief of staff offered what The Oregonian called "a full-throated defense" of the practice, arguing for a need to be "innovative in how we manage our public profile and how we invest in educating our staff."
Unfortunately this is only one of many such incidents recorded at Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia. – B, HaeB
AI claim might cause a storm
R&D World says you can "Write a Wikipedia-style article draft in a few minutes for less than a penny using STORM" STORM stands for 'Synthesis of Topic Outlines through Retrieval and Multi-perspective Question Asking', and is "an open-source AI system that promises to generate Wikipedia-style articles on pretty much any topic using large language models and web search."
The R&D World author tested this promise, using the topic of "double descent." Did it work? On the plus side STORM quickly produced a Wikipedia-like article at a cost of about half a cent. To this non-expert on the topic, it appears to be at least o.k. On the negative side, STORM had the advantage that Wikipedia already had an article on double descent, which STORM used to create a new article. For its next trick, I suggest R&D World try to create an article about Bronx cheer.
Fortunately, STORM was written by a team from Stanford University, not from R&D World. See further coverage in this issue's Recent research. – S
Faster, higher, stronger and older
Stephen Harrison in Slate (paywalled) covers the oldest living Olympians, while noting that they are no longer automatically considered to be notable and deserving of a Wikipedia article unless they've won a medal. His source material is from Paul Tchir, a San Diego State University sports historian can be viewed here
Next time, check Wikipedia first
The New York Times reports on Earl M. Washington, a convicted art forger who is now serving a 52 month term in Federal prison. Washington sold woodblock prints and the intricately carved woodblocks themselves, "more than 3,000 blocks and more than a million prints," sometimes claiming they were antiques dating back to the 16th-17th centuries. After a 2004 Forbes magazine questioned the authenticity of the prints and reported accusations of Washington copying M.C. Escher prints, Washington took a break from the scam until about 2010.
Dr. Douglas Arbittier, who owns a private museum of antique medical instruments bought 130 prints from Washington from 2013–2016 for about $118,810 according to these articles. Washington and Arbittier then lost contact for a few years. Arbittier began to suspect that the works were forgeries. About 2018 he began a Javert-like pursuit of information about Washington and his forgeries.
In 2020 Arbittier read the Wikipedia article about Washington, which at the time looked like this. "The world comes crashing down at that point," he told the Times. "It was gut wrenching because, oh my God, why did I spend all that money, but also it was a betrayal of the trust and relationship that we had."
Soon he sent an 286 page report to the FBI. Washington was indicted in January 2023, later reaching a plea deal and confessing to reduced charges last summer. He was sentenced in April 2024.
The Wikipedia article's history, as checked by this reporter, is quite surprising. It was created in 2006 based on the 2004 Forbes story. It has remained quite critical of Washington since then and readers would have seen that Washington's honesty had been questioned. About 2008 the article explicitly included accusations that Washington forged M.C. Escher prints. Two deletion discussions (2006, 2008) made clear that Washington might be a scammer, but was he a notable scammer? Washington was accused several times in edit comments and on the talk page of editing or whitewashing the article himself. There were several clumsy attempts to remove negative details in the article, but none of them approached a complete whitewashing. – S
Conservative Jewish media criticize Wikipedia and Wikimedia
Three center-right Jewish media outlets have criticized the English Wikipedia's coverage of the Israel–Hamas war as being biased against Israel.
The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) says, "Wikipedia hates Israel and Jews":
Wikipedia’s antisemitism is practically ubiquitous across the website. It features an extensive article accusing Israel of “war crimes,” “indiscriminate attacks” and “genocide” as Israel seeks to eliminate the Hamas terror organization.
The JNS article goes on to portray Wikipedia and Wikimedia as "big tech's antisemitic propaganda arm":
The connection between Wikipedia and Big Tech is easy to establish. Though Wikipedia likes to beg regular users for money, its Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) features a who’s who of Big Tech donors: Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce and more. Besides direct grants from these firms, woke programmers, engineers and other staff at companies like Apple and Google, as well as LinkedIn, Intel and Netflix have used matching gift programs to multiply their contributions.
The truth is that WMF, together with the Wikimedia Endowment, holds over $350 million in assets. This means that with no further donations or investments, Wikipedia can continue operating comfortably for over a century. Yet its relationship with Big Tech has only deepened and diversified.
In 2021, Wikimedia launched Wikimedia Enterprise, providing paid services for companies and organizations that reuse Wikipedia content on a large scale. A routine search using Google, Alexa or Siri often brings you a highlighted result drawn from Wikipedia like the Google “Knowledge Panel” at the top of search results. This is, in part, why a Google search for "apartheid" features recurring instances of antisemitic fiction on its first page of results.
Besides Big Tech, there is one more Wikipedia donor to consider: the Soros-funded Tides Foundation. Tides has also given millions of dollars to groups that instigated and supported the antisemitic protests across America since Oct. 7. This is the company Wikimedia keeps.
The article concludes by calling on Big Tech to rein Wikipedia in.
Another article, in Tablet magazine, comments on the English Wikipedia community's recent decision to designate the Anti-Defamation League "generally unreliable" on matters pertaining to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The Tablet writer expresses the view that –
Wikipedia's articles are now badly distorted, feeding billions of people—and large-language models that regularly train on the site, such as ChatGPT—with inaccurate research and dangerously skewed narratives about Jews, Jewish history, Israel, Zionism, and contemporary threats to Jewish lives.
The article also reviews the Grabowski/Klein paper (see previous Signpost coverage: 1, 2) and likens the present situation in the English Wikipedia to the historic right-wing takeover of the Croatian Wikipedia, describing it as "incomprehensible" that the Wikimedia Foundation took so long to address that situation.
In a third article, the Jewish Journal gave a very detailed description of the move discussion for the article Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza, which resulted in that article being renamed Gaza genocide. The Journal notes that the article Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel continues to feature the word "allegations" in its title and wonders if this indicates a double standard, pointing out that a discussion to remove the word from that article's title as well appears to have stalled.
The Journal quotes two Wikipedians arguing that there is such a double standard and a third arguing that it may not necessarily be a double standard "if the academic sources don't refer to the Oct. 7 massacre as a genocide but do refer to Israel's actions in Gaza as such." The article ends with a discussion of what Middle East scholar Asaf Romirowsky views as the "Palestinization of the Academy", which he says has led to a problematic focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) narratives where Palestinians are portrayed as victims worthy of support rather than as perpetrators of crimes. This view is echoed by a Wikipedian:
"The main problem is that since academia is biased against Israel, and Wikipedia sourcing policies give deference to academia, such opinions find their way into Wikipedia articles and it is hard to counteract. It is a kind of closed loop of bias and misinformation, much as would have happened if the Nazis had won the war and taken over universities and think tanks. We are at about that point with Hamas and its allies. I think that even if Wikipedia editors wanted to be NPOV (which is a fiction) it would be hard."
– AK
"Darkness reigns over Wikipedia", finally
Ars Technica reports on the Wikimedia Foundation's recent rollout of dark mode for Wikipedia readers on desktop and mobile, evidently having some gloomy fun while crafting the headline ("Darkness reigns over Wikipedia as official dark mode comes to pass"). Ars points out that Wikipedia is a bit late to the dark mode trend, which "had something of a peak moment around 2019–2020." However, it notes that implementation of this feature is much more difficult than may seem on first glance, quoting from a detailed explanation by Redditor (and Wikipedian) Gwern: "It's truly one of those things where you can get 95% of the way by simply adding 1 line of CSS like body{filter: invert(100%);}, but then to get to 99% correctness and squash all the annoying bugs, you have to completely rewrite your entire site design, and getting to 100% is impossible." (Editor's note: Signpost stylesheets are part of that final one percent) See also the Wikimedia Foundation's summary of the process from late 2023. —H
In brief
- Internet in a box:[1] Boing Boing says go buy Wikipedia in a box (See also Internet-in-a-Box) from WMF's store. The price is $58, but as of August 2 they are sold out, though the elves are working overtime to get them back in stock.
- Borderline: The Washington Examiner notes that there have been edit wars over whether U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris should or should not be included in the List of U.S. executive branch czars, based on past descriptions of her – especially by Republicans – as a "border czar" or "immigration czar". (Status at the time of writing is that Harris is not so listed in the article.)
- Unexpected Source of Motivation: A story in MSN reports that Olympic gymnast Max Whitlock used Wikipedia for motivation after a mental health crisis following the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He used the site to confirm that he could break a record at the 2024 Olympics by winning a medal in pommel horse. Unfortunately, he had two fourth place finishes.
- Unprintable: The Daily Mail, Sky News, and the Daily Mail again report that a television presenter's Wikipedia article was vandalized for a sum total of 31 minutes. The revision's been revdeled as libelous, but the reversion summary "you would need evidence that he is best known for this" gives a general idea of what it was.
- Edit-a-thon in Canberra: The Canberra Times reports on an editathon held by Franklin Women at Canberra's Shine Dome.
- How the Regime Captured Wikipedia : Pirate Wires avers that the Wikimedia Foundation has transformed Wikipedia into a "hyper-centralized space of top-down social justice activism and advocacy", and weighs in with gusto on the Framgate incident of 2019.
—J
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