Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-07-22/In the media
What's on Putin's fork, the court's docket, and in Harrison's book?
Putin's fork follies
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The Economist [1] (paywalled, syndicated here) notes that Ruwiki.ru, Putin's fork of the real Russian Wikipedia, censors "the sensitive zones of Putinist ideology: LGBT rights, oral sex, Soviet history, and the war in Ukraine." (See also The Signpost's June 2023 coverage about the project's genesis: "Wikimedia Russia director starts Russian fork and is replaced").
The Week expands upon the Economist article (also on Yahoo News). It states that the majority of the articles on Putin's fork are just copies from the real Russian Wikipedia, but gives five articles from the real Russian Wikipedia as examples of heavy censorship: Yevgeny Prigozhin, Battle of Bucha, Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Oral sex and Russian-Ukrainian war (starting in 2014).
This reporter has examined how Putin's fork covered those subjects.
- There is no article on Putin's fork on the Russian-Ukrainian war starting in 2014.
- The article on Prigozhin does not include a sentence in the real Russian Wikipedia, "According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW)... the order to kill Prigozhin was almost certainly given by Putin." But it does include a photo of Putin and Prigozhin together, that might be embarrassing to Putin.
- The battle of Bucha is best represented on Putin's fork in a section of the article Military operations in Ukraine (since 2022) named Incident in Bucha which essentially denies that an incident occurred. As The Signpost noted in January, an entry corresponding to the Wikidata item for Bucha massacre was also deleted from what appears to be a fork of Wikidata on the ruwiki.ru website, titled "РУВИКИ.Данные" ("RUWIKI.Data"), according to that wiki's deletion log (archive).
- The Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal has an article of the same name in Putin's fork. About 64% of the article has been removed, but almost all of the photos of related buildings and other locations have been kept.
- The article on oral sex is about one-third the length of the article on the real Russian Wikipedia and all 3 illustrations have been removed.
Meduza [2] and Invariant-T [3], two Russian news websites which are considered "foreign agents" in Russia, report that the Great Russian Encyclopedia (BRE) has lost its state funding, maybe in favor of Ruviki and Znanie (Knowledge), another state-funded educational site.
BRE announced its closure last month, saying that it had received no funds in the previous five months. Though wages and author royalties have not been paid during that time about 6,000 new articles have been posted. According to the announcement,
both resources of the Great Russian Encyclopedia - the portal and the electronic version of the printed edition - have published more than 100 thousand articles, and the number of reader requests to our encyclopedia reaches 1 million per week. We - more than 300 editorial staff and a team of 7,000 authors - are now able to prepare and publish up to 30 thousand scientifically verified articles per year.
- – S
Indian news agency sues Wikipedia over article
Mass media in India continues to take an interest in how the government of India reacts to Wikipedia in India. The Hindu [4] and Outlook [5] report that media house Asian News International (ANI) objects to the Wikipedia's article about ANI.
According to The Hindu;
The case pits, potentially for the first time in such a significant way, Wikipedia’s volunteer-centric editorial norms against Indian regulations like the IT Rules, 2021, which require all loosely defined internet "intermediaries" to take action against content online if it is, among other things, defamatory, and a court or government order is issued against them.
The court case is scheduled for August 20 with ANI claiming damages of 2 crore rupees – about US$240,000.
Live Law, a legal reporting service, states (archive) that ANI's plea (or complaint) claims that "Wikipedia had closed the ANI page for editing by the news agency except for its own (Wikipedia) editors". This suggests that ANI is claiming a right to have its own employees edit the article despite Wikipedia's policy prohibiting undeclared paid editors.
Live Law also says that "ANI has alleged that Wikimedia, through its officials, has actively participated in removing the edits to reverse the content." This claim appears to confuse actions by unpaid volunteers with actions by Wikimedia Foundation employees.
The Wikipedia article appears to summarize and cite reliable journalism covering ANI, and the complaint seems not to be about the journalism, but rather that Wikipedia presents what journalists wrote elsewhere then links to those articles.
One possible complication is that the Wikipedia community does not consider ANI to be a generally reliable source. The report at The Wikipedia project Reliable sources/Perennial sources says
For general reporting, Asian News International is considered to be between marginally reliable and generally unreliable, with consensus that it is biased and that it should be attributed in-text for contentious claims. For its coverage related to Indian domestic politics, foreign politics, and other topics in which the Government of India may have an established stake, there is consensus that Asian News International is questionable and generally unreliable due to its reported dissemination of pro-government propaganda.
This view is based on a 2021 request for comment where a BBC news report on disinformation in India was prominently mentioned.
Harrison interviewed on forthcoming novel
Wikipedia beat reporter Stephen Harrison, whose novel The Editors will be published August 13, was interviewed at least three times this month. The editor of Student Life, the student newspaper at Washington University in St. Louis where Harrison attended, published a long, detailed interview which gives the best overview of Harrison's career, but is mostly about the new novel, and about Wikipedia and its fictionalized version, Infopendium, which is the focus of the story.
Harrison has started another book, a murder mystery set at the Federal Reserve, where he used to work.
it gets into what I am really interested in, which are institutions that are experiencing a crisis. The Fed currently fits that description — people are not happy about inflation, and there’s even questions about: what is money, and what is currency?
Another interview, posted at Medium by Taylor Dibbert, focuses on Harrison's writing routine. He tries to write 1–2 hours a day before going to his day job as a lawyer, but first he starts with a cup of coffee and reading 15 minutes worth of fiction. He starts writing with his favorite pen and paper, but often switches to computer.
Citing the epigraph of the forthcoming book "this is a reported work of fiction", Harrrison continues "ultimately, I hope to be known for producing smart and well-researched stories throughout my career."
A third interview, this one by Caitlin Dewey on her "Links" blog, is more quirky. She starts with a question about "the four 'periods' of Wikipedia journalism", citing an essay Harrison co-authored with Omer Benjakob for the book Wikipedia @ 20 which was reprinted in The Signpost. Which period does the novel take place in? Harrison invents a new period and answers it "falls in the pre-AI, post-glory-days period of Wikipedia."
Dewey also asks about whether Wikipedia is past its glory days, and about Harrison's day-to-day interaction with Wikipedians, as well as about celebrity Wikipedians.
In brief
- Get over yourself: "Can Wikipedia Editors Get Over Themselves and Embrace AI?" (The Arabian Post) Perhaps as a reminder that Wikipedia is old enough to drink, and many of our community processes, policies, and norms are now decades old, the author states "The Wikipedia community should embrace a spirit of experimentation."
- What if you tried to print Wikipedia?: Following a 2013 cartoon, a July 2024 video from Randall Munroe of XKCD goes deep into the details. Laughing Squid essentially provides a text version of the video.
- The road not taken: "What is Conservapedia? The right-wing, conservative alternative to Wikipedia" explains how Conservapedia presents Einstein's Theory of Relativity as a liberal conspiracy, among other differences from Wikipedia (Here and Now radio program from Boston)
- Mi'kmaq edit-a-thon: Dal News at Canada's Dalhousie University reports on an edit-a-thon focusing on the Mi'kmaq of the Atlantic provinces. Articles improved include "fiddler Lee Cremo, artist Ursula Johnson, activist Anna Mae Aquash, [and] the first Mi'kmaq elected as Grand Chief, Gabriel Sylliboy."
- Wales warns of addictive nature of social media: Jimbo is interviewed in NikkeiAsia. Much of his message is standard Jimbology: social media can be addictive (which is bad), Wikipedians fact-check articles (which is good), but we have vandals and trolls (bad), the WMF's finances are fairly solid (good). It gets more interesting when he is asked about AI. "I think it's better if AI is trained on Wikipedia than if it's trained on Facebook or X. What we ask for in return is citation credit. A link back to us, this is important, so people can understand where the knowledge comes from."
- The most amazing Wikipedia page in history: After the Trump assassination attempt on July 13, The Intercept writer Murtaza Hussain tweeted "Say what you want about Trump but he is going to have the most amazing Wikipedia page in history." [6] Obviously Hussain has never read the articles on Seth Kinman or Yola Letellier.
- Come to the dark side: dark mode now available for mobile [7]
- Edit-a-thon in India: The Times of India and The Mooknayak cover an edit-a-thon in Dehli that sought to take on Wikipedia's gender gap.
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