Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-10-28/In the media
Bans, celebs, and bias
Wikipedia "bans" Breitbart
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Vice, PC Magazine, American Libraries magazine, The David Pakman Show, and others covered the English Wikipedia community's decision not to allow Breitbart News sourcing. On October 3, Breitbart called themselves "blacklisted" but of course we can't link the article for The Signpost because... well, the site is on the blacklist. — B
Wikipedia's celebrity
Steven Pruitt (Ser Amantio di Nicolao) is currently Wikipedia's top editor, with over 2.7 million edits. He has fairly consistently attracted media coverage, including being named one of the top 25 most influential people on the internet in 2017, by Time. Pruitt was recently flung into the limelight yet again, with a series of prominent newspapers reprinting a piece originating with The Washington Post. — E
Jimbo Wales lays off his journalists
John Enoch, reporting for The Times (paywall) tells of Jimbo Wales firing the reporters of his WikiTribune, the place for "news by the people and for the people", after only one year of publication.
Nine million broken links, fixed
An article in TechCrunch reports on the collaboration of volunteers from the Internet Archive succeeding in repairing 9 million broken links. Maximilian Doerr and Stephen Balbach created software tools, including IAbot, to automate correction of 6 million links. Other Wikipedia volunteers fixed 3 million more by manually linking to Internet Archive.
In brief
- Vandalism: Marcus Gilmer of Mashable lists a selection of "[t]he most unforgettable Wikipedia vandalism trolls of all time".
- Women: A two-day edit-a-thon on the Isle of Skye adds 13 biographies of women. "It was wonderful to see so many new articles created, and people leave with the skills to continue to edit and update Wikipedia entries".
- Sexism: More on the Strickland affair in Quartz – "Sexism at Wikipedia feeds off the sexism in the media", while WMF executive director Katherine Maher writing in the Los Angeles Times acknowledges that "Wikipedia's shortcomings are absolutely real."
- Movies: Apparently, some people like reading plot spoilers on Wikipedia so that they can avoid being scared by watching horror films, according to Katie McDonough in The Muse – with an interesting illustration by Angelica Alzona.
- Bias on Wikipeda: John Lubbock writing in New Statesman America discusses "Wikipedia's resilience to biased editing" and government interference.
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