Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-11-26/In the media

There has been much discussion about the role of "fake news websites", and their distribution through social media sites like Facebook and promotion via online advertising platforms. As calls for the social media titan to evaluate news stories mounted, journalist Glenn Greenwald noted that: "People are (rightly) skeptical of the state censoring "bad" viewpoints but (dangerously) eager for unaccountable tech billionaires to do it.”

In “Facebook Doesn’t Need One Editor, It Needs 1,000 of Them”, Mathew Ingram of Fortune advised Facebook to look to Wikipedia for a solution. Ingram cited Wikimedia adviser Craig Newmark’s June 2016 blog post about Wikipedia’s role in journalism. The Harvard Business School paper (discussed in our previous edition’s In the media section, and noted below) might have offered an additional dimension to Ingram’s analysis.

A Wall Street Journal story, Most students don’t know when news is fake, Stanford study finds, pointed to media literacy as a key skill-set in countering fake news.

Melissa Zimdars, a communications professor at Merrimack College, published (under a free license) a list of questionable websites, annotated with suggestions for how to evaluate their contents. The list itself was widely shared, and was covered by a number of news outlets. Zimdars then penned an op-ed for the Washington Post, noting, “with some concern, that the same techniques that get people to click on fake or overhyped stories are also being used to get people to read about my own list.” She said: “I’m not convinced that a majority of people who shared my list actually read my list, much as I’m not convinced that many people who share or comment on news articles posted to Facebook have actually read those articles”, and concluded that “while we think about fake news, we need to start thinking about how to make our actual news better, too.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which advocates for individual rights, was highly critical of Trump on election day, and highlighted threats it felt he might pose to the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, among others.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which advocates for digital rights, “wrote that 'the results of the U.S. presidential election have put the tech industry in a risky position”, urging technology companies to address several issues before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Issues raised include permitting pseudonymous access, curtailing behavioral analysis, keeping minimal logs of user behavior, and encrypting data. The Wikimedia Foundation, and standard Wikipedia practices, already perform better than most tech companies on all these issues; in the EFF's 2015 "Who Has Your Back" report, which evaluates tech companies on their data and privacy practices, Wikimedia earned a perfect five out of five stars. A related EFF post highlighted relevant grassroots efforts, while another urged President Obama to "boost transparency [and] accountability" in his final days in office. PF

• Murder evidence: At the opening of the trial of Thomas Mair for the killing of British Member of Parliament Jo Cox, it was reported by media that Mair reviewed the Wikipedia pages of Cox, far right publication Occidental Observer, and also Ian Gow, the last MP to be murdered (in 1990).
• More murder: A&E's new documentary series The Killing Season examines unsolved murder cases. In its first episode noted evidence from a Wikipedia edit history, in which an unidentified editor made an edit that changed the phrase "Gilgo Beach Killer" to the name of a person. The IP address in the edit history was that of the Suffolk County Police. Personnel from the show followed up on the named person by visiting his house, calling him, recording him, and playing his voice for someone who was presumably called by the serial killer. The episode first aired on November 12, 2016; the Wikipedia segment began at about 3 minutes into the episode.
• And even more murder: The second episode explained in more depth (beginning at 39:00) how producers used Wikipedia editing history, and presented screenshots reflecting the edit in question.
• Fact or fiction: The Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction video series on Loudwire, where artists discuss the accuracy of the information listed on their own Wikipedia biographies, celebrated its 100th episode.
• Model Internet citizens: Wikipedia researchers Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu reported in the Harvard Business Review on their recent Wikipedia research. (The Signpost reported on the Washington Post's coverage of the study in our Nov. 4 edition.) The study explores how contributors with different political viewpoints interact, and suggests that we have a "remarkable record" of dealing with differing opinions "without it descending into hate speech and loutish behavior." Compared to the rest of the internet, at least?
• Wikipedia Records: Reports note that experimental musician Dedekind Cut released the B-side to his latest offering, Successor, on Wikipedia.
• Wikimedia is officially "a thing": Open education advocate Lorna Campbell blogged about the addition of Wikimedia to the University of Edinburgh’s "23 Things for Digital Knowledge" list, which "aims to expose you to a range of digital tools for your personal and professional development as a researcher, academic, student, or professional."