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Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, published a blog postthis month declaring that the online encyclopedias neutral point of view policy is dead due to the rampant left-wing bias of the site. Noting the article on President Donald Trump, Sanger contrasted its extensive coverage of presidential scandals with the largely scandal-free article on former President Barack Obama.

Sanger also criticized Wikipedias coverage of religion and other controversial topics. After Fox News reported on his blog post, many Wikipedians ignored the bias Sanger identified and instead responded by attacking the conservative outlet as well as Sanger.

On May 14, Sanger published a blog piece titled Wikipedia Is Badly Biased and started by declaring Wikipedias Neutral Point of View policy dead. Having founded the online encyclopedia with Jimmy Wales and having been involved in the original drafting of the policy, Sanger offered particular insight into its development and its practice in recent years. On the current policys rejection of providing equal validity to different views, Sanger stated this went directly against the original policys intent and that as journalists turn to opinion and activism, Wikipedia now touts controversial points of view on politics, religion, and science.

Providing examples, Sanger noted former President Obamas article excludes most notable scandals during his Administration, such as the bungled ATF Fast and Furious operation that armed Mexican cartels who killed a U.S. border agent or the targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS. By contrast, Sanger pointed to Trumps article containing overwhelmingly negative sections on the President regarding his public profile as well as investigations and impeachment. The sections critical of Trump and his presidency are nearly as long as those dealing with his presidency overall. He further criticized Wikipedia repeatedly saying Trump makes false statements rather than attributing such characterizations to sources.

Wikipedias coverage of other contentious political topics such as abortion were also criticized with Sanger singling out Wikipedia claiming abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine. He pointed out how articles on legalization of drugs and gay adoption were focused on positives with little to no mention of criticisms. In the latter case, Sanger noted the section on debate about gay adoption only included arguments in favor rather than any against it. Sanger also criticized Wikipedias coverage of religion describing the article on Jesus as a liberal academic discussion focused on assorted difficulties and controversies without explaining traditional or orthodox views of those issues.

Further criticism was directed at Wikipedias handling of scientific issues, where Sanger acknowledged some would consider a bias towards science to be desirable. However, he noted that it is not always clear what constitutes a legitimate scientific view and Wikipeda tends to take for granted and aggressively assert the views of the scientific establishment despite scientific minorities rejecting or criticizing these views such as on global warming. In the end, Sanger called on Wikipedias community to concede that they have abandoned neutrality, while stating this was unlikely as Wikipedia editors live in a fantasy world of their own making.

After his post was covered by Fox News, editors on Wikipedia posted about his remarks on a discussion page for the sites other co-founder, Jimmy Wales,where users bring issues to his attention and seek his comments. While Wales has yet to respond to Sangers criticism, many other editors responded to the news, though most avoided addressing his concerns about political bias. Instead, editors mainly focused on criticizing Fox News with one of the first editors responding stating fact and neutrality have their own bias, and one largely at odds with Fox. One cynically suggested Sangers criticism was him angling for a position at the network.

Editors on Wikipedia often dismiss criticism of the sites history of left-wing bias, despite repeated incidents such as editors burying information about CNNs blackmail controversy, an editor running a smear campaign against then-nominee for the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh, or Antifa supporters downplaying the far-left groups violent conduct including by censoring mention of the attack on journalist Andy Ngo. Smears of President Trump have included listing him and various prominent conservatives as advocates of a Neo-Nazi conspiracy theory for talking about South African farm attacks. Editors contrarily defended then-incoming New York Times editor Sarah Jeongs bigoted anti-white commentary.

Wikipedias bias was particularly evident on Russiagate as editors sought to purge reliable sources that criticized Russia hacking allegations and continued pushing the Trump campaign collusion theory, such as by insisting on the credibility of the infamous Steele Dossier, despite Muellers report into alleged Russian interference finding no evidence supporting the theory. They also repeatedly spun articles on the Ukraine controversy against Trump and censored the alleged name of the whistleblower whose complaint sparked the impeachment drive.

Editors have even banned numerous conservative news sources, including Breitbart, sometimes citing their unfavorable reporting of the Russiagate narrative as evidence.

Having departed Wikipedia in its earlier years, Sanger has been a critic of the sites path in the time since and has attempted to help or establish various alternatives to the site such as Citizendium and Everipedia. In his blog post he cites his latest project Encyclosphere, which seeks to build a network of online encyclopedias with a variety of perspectives similar to the blogosphere. Such alternatives have struggled to challenge the dominance of Wikipedia due to Big Tech sites such as YouTube and Facebook heavily incorporating and favoring Wikipedia.

Media outlets increasingly tout the reliability of Wikipedia, many citing it as the solution to fake news and numerous recent pieces describing it as a vital information source on the coronavirus pandemic. Wikipedia is so widely relied on that studies found its content shapes scientific research and economic patterns. News outlets and academic textbooks have sometimes copied Wikipedia content uncredited, such as the sites heavily slanted article smearing the GamerGate anti-corruption movement in gaming, which has been copied extensively by outlets including the BBC and USA Today. Given widespread adoption of Wikipedia by establishment institutions, the criticism from its co-founder will likely go unheeded.

T. D. Adleredited Wikipedia as The Devils Advocate. He was banned after privately reporting conflict of interest editing by one of the sites administrators. Due to previous witch-hunts led by mainstream Wikipedians against their critics, Adler writes under an alias.

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Wikipedia Co-Founder: Site's Neutrality Is 'Dead' Thanks ...

Everybody uses Wikipedia.

Its currently the 8th most visited website in the U.S. and the 13th most trafficked site in the world. The website bills itself as the free encyclopedia, providing knowledge free of charge to a global user base. However, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, hopes that some companies will pay for it.

Dont worry, itll still likely be free for you, dear Mashable reader. But for companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, Wikipedia is hoping to charge them for publishing its content.

A new report by Wired looks into a brand new division under the Wikimedia umbrella called Wikimedia Enterprise. In a first for the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Enterprise will offer a paid service targeting Wikipedias biggest users: Big Tech companies.

Wikimedia Enterprise, according to the organization, will provide a commercial product that tailors Wikipedias content for publication on services provided by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon services that millions upon millions of people use every day.

Input a query into Google and the search engine will often provide a snippet from Wikipedia right there on the page. Users dont even have to leave Googles search engine for their answer. Ask Apples Siri or Amazons Alexa a question and both the virtual assistants will dig into Wikipedias archives to spit out an answer for you. YouTube even depends on Wikipedia to fight misinformation on its video platform.

Wikipedias current cost to the multi-billion dollar tech conglomerates? Nothing. Its completely free of charge.

In a 2018 interview with TechCrunch, Wikimedia Foundation Chief Revenue Officer Lisa Seitz-Gruwell shared that while Wikipedias content is free to use by all, some companies were exploiting the organization by not reciprocating.

For now, Wikimedia Foundation's $100 million budget is funded by donations from users and grant money provided to the Wikimedia Foundation. Some of the companies they're looking to charge, like Google, have donated millions of dollars to the organization. The year Gruwell spoke to TechCrunch, however, the tech outlet pointed out that Amazon had donated nothing.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation, these companies currently have employees and, in some cases, entire teams, working on delivering Wikipedias content through its own systems. The paid service provided by Wikimedia Enterprise will help do that work for them and, in turn, bring in a new revenue stream for the nonprofit.

Obviously, Wikipedia will continue to be free for its regular global user base. In fact, Wikimedias Seitz-Gruwell tells Wired that the free service currently being used by Google and the other Big Tech companies will continue to be available to even those for-profit corporations.

So will Big Tech kick back some of its profits to Wikipedia, a service that has provided them so much free content for years? According to Wikimedia Foundation, the organization is already in talks with these companies and deals may be reached as early as June.

A more pressing question, however, is how will Wikipedias army of volunteers react? The organization has depended on its volunteers to actually create, research, update, moderate, and fact-check its content since the websites founding. Will they view this as Wikipedia selling out? Will some want compensation for their work in return? Big Tech has been profiting off of services utilizing Wikipedia at no-charge for years. Now that Wikipedia looks to get paid, will its volunteers look to be compensated too?

Update: March, 16, 2021, 7:55 p.m. ET: The original story contained a sentence that read, "However, the nonprofit which runs Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, hopes that it soon wont be free for everybody." For the sake of clarity, we changed it to, "However, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, hopes that some companies will pay for it."

View original post here:
Wikipedia wants to charge Google, Amazon, and Apple for using its content - Mashable

Wikipedia's parent company has revealed it is set to launch a new paid-for service for companies that take information from the online encyclopedia.

The new Wikimedia Enterprise platform will only apply to companies that use content from Wikipedia, with the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook set to be affected.

However normal everyday users of Wikipedia will still be able to access the service for free.

Wikimedia Enterprise will look to provide "paid developer tools that make it easier for companies and organizations to consume and re-use Wikimedia data," the company noted.

The new endeavour is thought to be set to launch later in 2021, with the Wikimedia Foundation already revealing some parts of the modalities of the new programme.

While the regular Wikipedia offering will be free, the new option is an experiment toward sustainability and maintaining independence for the platform.

Top tech companies use Wikipedia in myriad ways, such as Googles knowledge boxes, as well as voice assistants like Amazons Alexa and Apples Siri using data from the same platform.

Some fund Wikipedia through donations, but many others that use Wikipedia resources in a major way, get away without even so much as a thank you note.

"This is the first time the foundation has recognised that commercial users are users of our service. We've known they are there, but never really treated them as a user base," Lane Becker, a senior director at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Wired.

Premium customers could see themselves getting access to Wikipedia data delivered quicker, or formatted in a way that suits them best - ultimately solving some of the most in-depth issues for these tech giants.

This is about setting up the movement to thrive for decades to come, to weather any storm, and to genuinely stand a chance at achieving the mission first conceived 20 years ago, the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in an online essay.

Were going to need more resources, more partners, and more allies if we are going to achieve the goals implicit in our vision statement.

Via Wired

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Wikipedia is getting a 'premium' paid version - but you can't get it - TechRadar

Why did you become an academic?

This question is often answered with idealistic references to making the world a better place by contributing to sciences grand endeavour. Yet as the digital era gathers pace, there is a growing dissonance between what we are doing and what we could be doing when it comes to educating the public.

That dissonance is particularly audible in academias peculiar attitude towards Wikipedia. In the early 2000s, it was understandable that many of us were sceptical of what we saw as an amateurish website whose primary purpose appeared to be to provide lazy students with poorly written content to plagiarise. However,several studies from the past decade have shown that the quality of this vast, free resource is comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias.

Moreover, academics themselves have gradually warmed to Wikipedia. Many use it themselves, and some require their students to contribute to it as part of their coursework. Yet the frequent calls for academics themselves to contribute entries including by several professional associations rarely translate into action. A quick survey of Wikipedias academic-focused discussion and coordination forums, known as WikiProjects (such as WikiProject Sociology or WikiProject Physics), reveals the sad truth: even the most active ones have an active membership of, at most, a dozen professional scholars. That is a fraction of what can be found on any mediocre listserv.

When I ask my colleagues why they dont get involved with Wikipedia, I no longer hear the excuse that it could hurt their reputations. The typical answer, instead, is: Wonderful idea, but I have no time. I need to write another paper/book. But this sense of what ought to be prioritised is misguided. Wikipedia entries appear in the top results returned by virtually any respectable search engine. It has millions of readers. There is no greater direct contribution to disseminating human knowledge that an academic could make than to lend it their expertise. And yet even academics who recognise that fact do not alter their behaviour.

The reason, of course, is that they are given no credit for Wikipedia work by university management. In the deluge of emails about various university initiatives that I scan through every day, for instance, the word Wikipedia is curiously absent and anecdotal evidence makes me reasonably certain that my experience is not exceptional. It just isnt on managers horizon.

Nor are academics rewarded for reaching out to the general public in comparable ways, such as writing newspaper articles. Apart from teaching, professional credit and the pay rises and promotions that come with it still derives almost exclusively from publishing academic articles despite their vastly lower impact on the public.

What is particularly strange is that contributing to an academic reference work generally receives as much credit as publishing a book chapter unless the reference work is Wikipedia. It boggles my mind that if I write an article for the Traditional Publishers Encyclopedia of Specialised Knowledge, with its hard paywall, poor search engine optimisation and double-digit annual readership, I will receive career points and financial benefits from my university. Yet if I were to write the same article for Wikipedia, my official recognition would be zero.

And let us put aside the common misconception that contributors to Wikipedia entries are not identifiable. While their names are not displayed in the articles themselves, their identity is just one or two clicks away, via each articles history tab. Two clicks prove, for example, that I am the main author of Wikipedias article on the sociology of leisure, which receives an average of 24 views each day and has been accessed about 50,000 times since its creation in 2015.

Contrariwise, dozens of clicks are needed to locate several paywalled articles I wrote for traditional encyclopedias. Yet it is the latter that have been considered for my performance review.

It is high time we moved the relationship between academia and the worlds premier reference work to the next level. For that to happen, university administrators need to do their part and actively encourage faculty to contribute to it, via positive promotion reviews and financial bonuses. But academics, too, need to embrace the opportunity and recall why it was that they chose their career in the first place.

Piotr Konieczny is an associate professor in the department of media and social informatics at Hanyang University, South Korea.

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If you want impact, why aren't you writing for Wikipedia? - Times Higher Education (THE)

We all use Wikipedia. There is not a time that the free information providing encyclopedia has not helped you with your homework or solving a query you were having or simply answering sudden thoughts that pop into your mind about a certain topic.

This online Encyclopedia is free of cost and runs by a non-profit organization called the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Foundation's $100 million budget is funded by donations from users and grant money provided to the Wikimedia Foundation but the company wants things to change now.

Though the information providing website has been free of use for the longest time now, the company has been exploited by a lot of big names that use information directly from it for their users and now Wikipedia Foundation is hoping that the Big Tech Giants can pay for it.

The Foundation is hoping that companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon will pay for the content that they use from the free online Wikipedia.

A brand new division has been introduced under the Wikimedia umbrella called Wikimedia Enterprise which will offer a paid service targeting Wikipedias biggest users: Big Tech companies.

The company believes that such huge tech giants use their content and make a whole lot of revenue out of it. For example, if you search a query on Google, it will lead you to a piece of information right off from Wikipedia on the top of your search engine home page without you having to roam on different links for the searched query. Siri from Apple and Alexa from Amazon both are virtual assistants that dig into Wikipedia to answer the questions they have been asked. YouTube also depends on Wikipedia to fight misinformation on its video platform and while all these companies make billions of dollars in revenue, Wikipedia gets nothing in return because it is free of charge and thinks that through these the big tech giants are exploiting them.

Therefore, they have decided to acquire some amount of revenue in exchange of the information they provide. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, these companies currently have employees and, in some cases, entire teams, working on delivering Wikipedias content through their own systems. The paid service provided by Wikimedia Enterprise will help do that work for them and, in turn, bring in a new revenue stream for the nonprofit. The question stands will the companies agree to Wikipedias new demand? Well, according to the Wikipedia Foundation they already have sent the proposals to the company, the talks are in process and hopefully everything will be sorted out before June 2021.

If you are worried about that now you, the general public user will also have to pay for Wikipedia that is not the case. The Foundation will still remain free of cost providing authentic information to all the users worldwide.

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Wikipedia to Now Charge Big Tech Giants for Using Its Content - Digital Information World