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The consensus that Israels occupation of the West Bank does not constitute a form of apartheid is shifting on Wikipedia. While the validity of drawing an analogy between Israel and the apartheid regime of South Africa has long been debated on Wikipedia, a new article titled West Bank bantustans shows cracks in the editorial agreements that have stood for almost a decade on the volunteer-edited online encylcopedia.

Wikipedia has had an article on Israel and the apartheid analogy for almost 15 years. However, editors active in this arena told Haaretz that the new entrydirectly comparing Israels control of the West Bank to the Black-only enclaves set up in South Africa indicates a possible shifting of balance in the encyclopedia, where facts are decided by consensus between different groups of volunteer editors.

Editors note that just the fact that a new article with such a contentious title survived a proposal to delete it shows how real-world political events, namely Donald Trumps Middle East plan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus pledge to annex parts of the West Bank, are undermining the factual basis of one of Israels most important public diplomacy talking points. According to this point, Israel supports a two-state solution and at least in theory strives for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in parts of the West Bank.

The Trump plan put everything out in the open, says the editor who opened thearticle, who uses the online name Oncewhile. The last 25 years of peace talks provided a sense of what scraps were being left on the table for Palestinians, but those were leaks, not firm proposals.

Explaining how recent developments facilitated the new bantustans article, the editor adds that after the release of the Trump plan, The ensuing annexation debate resulted in many reliable publications describing what the Israeli government are planning for their captive Palestinian population. As a result, it is no longer credible to argue that the Israeli government does not expect to trap the Palestinians in noncontiguous enclaves. This is the reason for the outcome in the deletion debate.

But Jack Saltzberg, the head of the Israel Project, a pro-Israel advocacy group that also focuses on Wikipedia, disagrees. This is simply another example of an anti-Israel editor creating an article with the singular purpose of promulgating negative and inaccurate information about Israel. Yes, it is a big deal, but no, it is not new, he says.

Its a big deal because Wikipedia is a big deal because so many people, specifically students, get their immediate education through Wikipedia. But its not new. This happens all the time, he says, adding that it is nearly impossible to create a new article if it in any way shows the Palestinians in a negative light, not Israel.

If so, why has this article only now gone live and managed to stay online? Wikipedia, now entering its 20th year, has long been accused by various groups of having political biases. For example, Conservapedia was set up in 2006 to give evangelical Christians in the United States an encyclopedia better reflecting their religious worldview on evolution and climate change, with scientists widespread agreement on the factual basis of these issues deemed political.

Allegations of Wikipedias liberal bias have made headlines on Breitbart in recent years as the encyclopedia fought back against falsehoods pushed out by the Trump White House. Similar claims are even appearing in India, manifesting as claims of anti-Hinduism in debates about Prime Minister Narendra Modis nationalist policies that critics say unfairly target the countrys Muslim minority.

Pro-Israel groups like Saltzbergs have also long claimed that Wikipedia has a pro-Palestinian bent, but opposite claims of parity have also been voiced. For example, in Britain in 2018, a pro-Israel editor was accused of targeting critics of Israel and others in the British far-left in a case that was amplified by Russian media. These allegations went so far as to claim that the Wikipedia editor was a front for the British defense establishment if not the CIA.

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Anatomy of an analogy

The West Bank bantustans article was created on November 12. Two days later, it was nominated for deletion, on the basis of the claim that it was not really a new article but only a biased narrative already covered by, and part of, Israel and the apartheid analogy.

The article Israel and the apartheid analogy was opened in 2006. One of over 3,000 articles on the topic, this page too has faced countless edits and rewrites by the various camps active on the encylopedias coverage of the conflict.

There were no less than 10 attempts to delete the analogy article during its first four years of life. When it was created in late May 2006 it was called Israeli apartheid and in a testimony to Wikipedias political dynamics, by early June 2006 it was nominated for deletion for the first time. After it survived its first deletion debate, which also ended in a lack of consensus, its title was changed in a compromise to Allegations of Israeli apartheid.

By 2008, after eight additional attempts to have the article deleted by editors considered part of or close to the pro-Israel contingent on Wikipedia were thwarted, another debate was held. I suggest pursuing a rename and a rewrite, since its very, very clear that theres no consensus to delete, the administrator overseeing that discussion ruled.

By 2010, the article had stabilized and a stalemate of sorts between the different sides emerged: Instead of deciding on the validity of the comparison, the article focused on the very existence of the debate regarding the analogy.

Israel and the apartheid analogy is criticism of Israel charging that Israel has practiced a system akin to apartheid against Palestinians in its occupation of the West Bank. Some commentators extend the analogy to include treatment of Arab citizens of Israel, describing their status as second-class citizen, the current version of the analogy article says.

Edit wars on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have had a fundamental influence on how Wikipedia addresses contentious issues; for example, the practice of locking articles to public editing and permitting only editors with a username and certain level of Wikipedia experience to contribute. The result has been the emergence of two ideological camps, so-called pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian editors, who have been locked in what some describe as an editorial stalemate.

Indeed, even though the analogy article has remained extremely contentious over the past decade, all attempts to have it fundamentally changed have failed, including an allegedly technical debate in 2017 regarding a suggestion to retitle the page Israeli apartheid analogy, which pro-Israel editors claimed was an attempt to push the article into non-neutral territory.

I doubt there ever was a consensus on Israels apartheid status, says Federico Leva, another editor active in the debate. Wikipedia and its community dont take a position on something like is Israels occupation apartheid. We only describe what sources say, so the question is usually whether theres consensus that a certain summary of the sources is accurate/appropriate.

Now, this consensus regarding sources seems to be shifting.

Remember, the [bantustans] article is not about any particular analogy it is about describing the areas proposed for Palestinian sovereignty, and how that has evolved over time, says Onceawhile, the editor who opened the article. Part of the name debate may be technical is the word bantustan a proper noun referring only to South Africa, or has it become a common noun referring to entities with a reasonable level of similarity?

In the past, such claims were easily relegated to other articles; for example, those about areas A, B and C in the West Bank, which were set up by the Oslo Accords and offered Israel and the Palestinian Authority different levels of control of different parts of the West Bank.

The new article now claims: The West Bank bantustans, or West Bank cantons, figuratively described as the Palestine Archipelago, are the proposed noncontiguous enclaves for the Palestinians of the West Bank under a variety of U.S. and Israeli-led proposals to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

No single truth

The opening highlights how the increasingly permanent status of the areas once considered under temporary Israeli control serves as the justification for a new article. A telling example can be found in the article in a special section dedicated to Trumps peace plan, which calls for dividing the Palestinian state into five different areas. The section opens with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas claim that the plan would turn Palestine into swiss cheese.

According to Leva, one of the editors active in the debate, There is no single truth or historical consensus on such a giant topic yet, and there probably wont be for a long, long time. Any discussion of the topic is bound to be messy. The English Wikipedia merely reflects this cultural fact and cannot change it.

The article, in that sense, reflects a wider shift in consensus on Israels intentions: General claims made in the media, even in opinion pieces in Haaretz, are now permitted greater significance than perhaps was possible in the past. The article states: According to Haaretzs Chemi Shalev, in a speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War, Netanyahu thus envisages not only that Palestinians in the West Bank will need Israeli permission to enter and exit their "homeland", which was also the case for the Bantustans, but that the IDF will be allowed to continue setting up roadblocks, arresting suspects and invading Palestinian homes, all in the name of "security needs"'.

In the past, such analyses would have been dismissed by pro-Israel editors claiming that Haaretz, Israels sole paper of record, is biased. But today, such arguments, supported by official Israeli statements and academic research, resonate as an accurate reading of the political reality. For example, other sources in the article are academic papers like a 2020 work on the one-state reality emerging from Israels policies and the peace plan as envisaged by Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner.

Together these sources highlight the increasingly open Israeli policy of striving for annexations in the West Bank.

According to the different editors, the deletion failed to gain the needed consensus mainly because the pro-Israel editors focused solely on the articles name.

As Leva puts it, Its possible that the users who supported the deletion will regroup, find an agreement on what article should contain this information, and reach a consensus on merging [West Bank bantustans] into it. The article may still be moved to another title. Im also sure that the discussion on what sources and language to use within the article will continue.

Indeed, as no consensus was reached on the articles existence, a new bid to have it renamed has been launched.

Saltzberg isnt optimistic. The consensus [on English Wikipedia] is still the same and this article proves it: anti-Israel! he says.

Since the antis have taken over the entire [Israeli-Palestinian] topic area, the 30/500 protection has allowed them to continue their fiefdom with impunity, he says, referring to the rule allowing participation only by editors with over 30 days and 500 edits under their belt. It is near impossible to create a new article if it in any way shows the Palestinians in a negative light, not Israel.

Onceawhile takes offense at claims that he is somehow anti-Israel or even that Wikipedia should reflect the two-sided nature of the debate regarding the conflict. Our work on Wikipedia is not, or at least should not be, a competition between two opposing factions, he says.

Wikipedia remains the worlds primary open source publication on Israel and Palestine, and by working with those we disagree with we are trying to create a neutral picture of the situation. Each argument removes barriers between the two communities. In the case of this discussion on the West Bank bantustans, even the most ardent Israeli propagandist will have learnt something about the conditions of the Palestinians, and the most ardent Palestinian propagandist will have learnt that much of history happens by accident rather than design.

Read more here:
On Wikipedia, Israel is losing the battle against the word 'apartheid' - Haaretz.com

We live in a post-truth world where the facts often get lost in the cacophony of emotional wails and motivated narratives. One website which has occupied the drivers seat in the information-warfare era is Wikipedia. Wikipedia has become the agent of misinformation and propaganda. In a post-truth world where facts are relegated to the right-wing imagination and the Left narrative is considered as the Gospel truth, Wikipedia reigns supreme. OpIndia coverage of the Wikipedia misrepresentation of facts started right after the Delhi Riots 2020, where Islamists coordinated and executed violence across the national capital.

After OpIndias extensive coverage of the inherent bias of the platform, we also interviewed the co-founder of Wikipedia, who explained in detail why the platform is a cause lost to Lefts propaganda. Almost vindicating everything that Larry Senger told us later about the functioning of Wikipedia, the platform had blocked OpIndia from being referenced in Wikipedia almost immediately after our Delhi Riots coverage and the reportage on how Wikipedia editors are heavily biased towards the Left.

The Left was not too happy with OpIndia and it was evident. Jimmy Wales himself went on a tirade on Twitter, but more on that later. Since the Delhi Riots have become a propaganda flash-point for the Left, sympathetic media has now decided to presumably pick up the issue to ensure that Wikipedias credibility, which has been on the slide, is maintained, if not improved.

Presumably to that end, Caravan Magazine, that was recently counting the caste of the soldiers who laid their life down at Pulwama in defence of the nation, reached out to OpIndia saying that they were doing a story on OpIndias coverage of Wikipedia and wanted to ask us certain questions.

The Left has not exactly covered itself in glory, considering how they conveniently cherry-pick facts and misquote the people and organisations that they wish to malign. Hence, OpIndias responses to Caravan Magazine are being reproduced here in the spirit of transparency and honesty, tenets long abandoned by not just Wikipedia, but also the Left media that it seems to rely on heavily.

The questions asked by Caravan Magazine are in bold, and OpIndias response to them follow each question.

OpIndia started its coverage of how Wikipedia was biased in its coverage of the Delhi anti-Hindu Riots 2020 on the 26th of February. It is pertinent to remember that the Delhi Riot itself started on the 24th and lasted in the wee morning of 26th February.

Here are some of the issues we raised regarding the Delhi Riots page of Wikipedia.

Our detailed first report can be read here.

Since repeated attempts of getting the page rectified did not work, it was on March 2nd that an OpIndia report investigating who was editor DBXray, was published.

In the report, we relied on publicly available information and at no point was personal information not on the public domain was released. Some of the information, like the Editors real name, was already published in a Reddit thread at the time. OpIndia embarked on a journey to verify publicly available information, much of it, was already in the Wikipedia archive and his Facebook profile.

Interestingly, the anonymity of Wikipedia editors is a part of the problem that Caravan, at least by the tone of the question, seems to be defending. Wikipedia editors are increasingly functioning as Mainstream Media editors where they decide what information should be included in an article and which information should not be included. No longer is Wikipedia a purely publicly sourced platform, as was proved during the Delhi Riots fiasco where the page was locked and peoples counters were dismissed with derision. When the Editors of Wikipedia behave like MSM editors, they should not be granted the luxury of anonymity. What is even more interesting is that while the editors of Wikipedia mirror Left editors, who deride anonymity and consider it a yardstick on which authenticity should be measured, they are more protective of their own identity while peddling the very same agenda.

OpIndia believes that any editor, whether on Wikipedia or otherwise, who decides which fact is worth communicating to the public and which isnt, based on their own world-view and narrative, does not deserve the shield of anonymity. Just like you have the means to reach out to the Editor of OpIndia to pose questions to us about our coverage, editors of Wikipedia who are now functioning in the same realm, have no right to claim anonymity while spreading falsehoods about sensitive and important events of India.

While Caravan Magazine uses the word dox to define what OpIndia did, thankfully, reputation does not indicate that it is, in fact, the truth. There was no attempt made by OpIndia to compromise his personal details like his address, phone number etc. The information that was investigated by OpIndia was publicly available information available on Wikipedia and his own Facebook profile. We take exception to this being called doxxing since Caravan Magazine seems to believe that being protected while spreading falsehood was his right. It was not.

Further, unlike the Left, OpIndia has no documented strategy to investigate more editors. In our coverage, if we feel that other editors need to be investigated, we will take that decision on a case to case basis. However, if the question posed is inquiring whether we will stop investigating Wikipedia, its antecedents or its Editors, the answer is certainly in the negative.

OpIndia again takes exception to the Caravan Magazine journalist calling the investigation doxxing. While we put this on record, we are sure that in their article, Caravan will use this word since we abandoned our expectations from the portal a long time ago.

Instead of OpIndia opining on its blacklisting from OpIndia, we would like to add some quotes by Larry Sanger, who is the co-founder of Wikipedia on how the platform really functions:

There are several such quotes and explanation by the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, which if the journalist or the magazine really wants to understand the issue instead of doing a shoddy hit-job, could go through.

Here is the link to his interview by OpIndia.

We dont agree with the adjectives used or the characterization of our work, but we plead guilty to treating journalists the same way journalists treat others. Celebrity journalists are often the object of our articles, which upsets the Omert that is there exists in the media where they dont take potshots at each other. This Omert was broken for at least Arnab Goswami by the rest of the media, while we broke this code for entire media years back.

Perhaps you could read an example of that in this article, where Caravan Magazine allowed blatant lies to be published against Arnab Goswami without due diligence or basic journalistic investigation:

Anvay Naik suicide case for which Arnab Goswami was arrested: Letters exchanged, the closure report, and unanswered questions

A 5000-word email was sent to Jimmy Wales on the 5th of March after Mr Wales had, messaging OpIndia editor Nupur Sharma personally, claimed that he can be an ally in solving issues and that the editor must help him with people who were questioning him on Twitter. No help was offered, however, a detailed email was sent to him focussing on the misrepresentations in the Delhi Riots page. Other than his strange rant on Twitter, we have not received a response from him yet.

OpIndias coverage of Wikipedia has increased not after the ban on OpIndia but after its biased article as far as the Delhi Riots 2020 is concerned, which was a case investigated extensively by OpIndia.

I understand why Caravan Magazine would want to impugn the ban as a motive, but it must understand that OpIndia works differently from the Left media.

Here is a list of the articles OpIndia has published with regards to Wikipedia after we reported on its bias as far as the Delhi Riots were concerned:

Ranging from child rape videos to an FBI complaint about paedophilic content, changing history of the Noakhali genocide and a global bias against conservatives, OpIndia has covered a range of issues that ails Wikipedia.

We would like to understand from Caravan if the magazine believes that these issues do not deserve coverage simply because Wikipedia seems to pander to the ideology that Caravan follows.

Further, Wikipedia, for most issues, is the first result that Google throws up. Any bias or misinformation in that regard becomes crucial since the platform seems to be re-writing history from a Left prism and furthering blatant misinformation as we speak. Perhaps issues like the truth, propriety, transparency, an accurate representation of history and current events etc are not issues that the Left likes to concern themselves with, but is certainly something OpIndia holds dear and will continue to report thereof.

See the original post here:
Caravan Magazine asked us about our coverage on Wikipedia and its Left bias Here is our detailed response - OpIndia

Margaret Thatcher

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With its alluring blend of fictional drama and real life characters, The Crown has long captivated audiences, becoming a major hit for Netflix. Yet this season more than any other has prompted outcries of historical inaccuracies and perhaps unfairness towards some of the real life 'players', from the Duchess of Cornwall (then Camilla Parker Bowles) to the Queen herself.

That said, audiences still find themselves Googling the storylines of each episode hungrily after watching, with Wikipedia reporting a surge in activity on its site in the past week.

Unsurprisingly, two of the most fundamental new characters this season saw a large increase in traffic to their pages - Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson, and Princess Diana, played by Emma Corrin. Their pages were two of the most visited on the site, with 3 million views combined.

Princess Diana

Getty Images

People also found themselves turning to Wikipedia to find out more about Thatcher's husband Dennis, and children Mark and Carol, after an episode dedicated to the family's dynamics.

Yet the figure who garnered the most increased attention was Michael Fagan, the Buckingham Palace intruder, whose story plays out in episode 5. With the action taking place two decades ago, it is unsurprising that many might have forgotten the incident, and were intrigued to discover more. The episode on Mr Fagan, who broke into Buckingham Palace twice, prompted a 78,000 per cent increase in daily page visits.

Michael Fagan

Getty Images

Another more marginal figure whose Wikipedia presence increased was Edward Adean, Prince Charles Private Secretary, with viewers no doubt questioning if the portrayal of his slightly frosty relationship with Princess Diana was accurate.

Other who round out the top 10 people Wikipedia saw a spike in traffic on related to the series include Koo Stark, Prince Andrew's ex, Lord Mountbatten, whose death is covered in the season premiere, and of course, the Queen herself.

The pages for real life incidents covered by The Crown this season also saw renewed interest, including the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana, and the Falklands War, which appears in an episode about Margaret Thatcher's son Mark.

Here is the original post:
This is the surprising person The Crown viewers Googled the most after this series - Tatler

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos from Wikipedia.

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication.

AdaptedexcerptfromWikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution, edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The web was a very different place for news in the United States between 2001 and 2006. The hanging chads from the 2000 presidential election, the spectacular calamity of 9/11, the unrepentant lies around Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the campy reality television featuring Donald Trump were all from this time. The burst of the dot-com bubble and corporate malfeasance of companies like Enron dampened entrepreneurial spirits, news publishers were optimistically sharing their stories online without paywalls, and blogging was heralded as the future of technology-mediated accountability and participatory democracy. You was Time magazines Person of the Year in 2006 because Web 2.0 platforms like YouTube, MySpace, and Second Life had become tools for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.

Wikipedia was a part of this primordial soup, predating news-feed-mediated engagement, recommender-driven polarization, politicized content moderation, and geopolitical disinformation campaigns. From very early in its history, Wikipedia leveraged the supply and demand for information about breaking news and current events into strategies that continue to sustain this radical experiment in online peer production.

I first encountered Wikipedia as an undergraduate student around 2004. My introduction to Wikipedia was likely a product of the socio-technical coupling between Google and Wikipedia during this era. Google helped Wikipedia because Googles ranking algorithms privileged Wikipedias highly interlinked articles, which brought an influx of users, some (tiny) fraction of whom became contributing editors like me. Wikipedia also helped Google because Wikipedia could reliably generate both general-interest and up-to-date content that satisfied its users information-seeking needs, which brought users back to Google rather than to its competitors. The aftermath of a natural disaster, the death of a celebrity, or a new pop culture sensation are all occasions for people to seek out background information to help them make sense of these events. Traditional journalistic offerings provide incremental updates about the immediate subject but often lack context or background: Why are there earthquakes in Indonesia? Who is Saddam Hussein? What is Eurovision? The availability and timeliness of Wikipedia content around topics of general interest would prove to be critical for its own sustainability in addition to complementing other platforms need to serve relevant and up-to-date content.

Wikipedia also entered the popular awareness of undergraduates like me through the pitiless warnings from instructors and librarians about its lack of reliability as a citation. While these anxieties were largely reversed through empirical research and changes in professional culture, they also missed the forest for the trees: The value and authority of Wikipedia was not in any single articles quality but in its network of hyperlinked articles. More than synthesizing knowledge as a tertiary source like traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedias hyperlink network invited users to follow their interests, dive deeper into topics, introduce missing connections, and create new articles where none existed. Where the decentralized web created a fragmented user experience requiring directories (Yahoo) and search engines (Google) for navigation, Wikipedias hyperlinked articles foreshadowed an era of centralized web platforms that sustain user engagement with a consistent experience and bottomless content to consume and engage.

There are many ways to promote Wikipedia articles to its front page. Immediately to the right of From todays featured article is the In the news (or ITN) box, featuring articles that have been substantially updated to reflect recent or current events of wide interest. The presence of newslike content in an encyclopedia is uncanny. On the one hand, encyclopedias are supposed to be stable references of historical knowledge, rather than dynamic accounts of current events. On the other hand, there is a long history of encyclopedia editors grappling with how to incorporate new knowledge, and encyclopedia publishers competing to be the most up to date. Wikipedias choice to privilege content related to current events via the ITN is also shrewd: It simultaneously is a shortcut to content users may already be searching for, it showcases the dynamism and quality of Wikipedia articles, and it invites users to consume and contribute to content outside of their primary interests.

To understand how Wikipedias ITN template and its broader culture of breaking news collaborations came about, we have to return to the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Wikipedia was 10 months old at the time of the attacks, and while it already surpassed its elder sibling Nupedia in its number of articles, it was far from certain that the project would ever reach a sustainable level of activity. Although a comprehensive accounting of the editing activity in the immediate aftermath of the events has been lost to a server migration, snapshots from the Internet Archives Wayback Machine, along with listserv discussions, document the extent to which the Wikipedia community at the time went into overdrive in response to the attacks. Far from being an idiosyncratic case of online collaboration, the decisions made by editors at the time to use Wikipedias unique collaborative capacities to deeply cover the Sept. 11 attacks would fundamentally change the direction, scope, and culture of Wikipedia as a project to the present day.

A Wayback Machine snapshot of the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack article from Oct. 31, 2011, captures the remarkable breadth and depth of topics that were authored and organized together about the attacks. There were timelines, documentation of closings and cancellations, lists of casualties, links to donating blood and money, articles on political and economic effects, and newly created articles about the buildings, cities, flights, and perpetrators as well as topics like terrorism, box-cutter knife, and collective trauma. Approximately 100 Sept. 11related articles were created in total (at a time when Wikipedia as a whole had only 13,000 articles), but Wikipedias content attracted links from other prominent web gateways like Yahoo that brought in an influx of desperately needed new users to the project.

Wikipedias unique anyone can edit model had the effect of entangling current events with the viability of theproject.

The list of casualties enumerating each of the nearly 3,000 victims (sorted by name and location and categorized by civilian or first responder) became a source of tension in the weeks following the attacks. Some editors argued this level of detailed coverage was unbecoming of the traditional encyclopedia Wikipedia was trying to emulate stylistically. Supporters referenced the rule that Wikipedia is not paper to justify a goal of writing biographies for thousands of victims, survivors, and leaders. As the trauma-induced altruism continued to fade, Wikipedia editors continued to raise concerns about the quality, notability, and importance of these memorialization efforts given the other demands of writing an encyclopedia. By September 2002, the community reached a consensus decision to move the Sept. 11related recollections and non-notable pages to a memorial wiki. The launch of the memorial wiki led to heated discussions about which Sept. 11related articles would get to stay on Wikipedia and which would be relegated to the memorial wiki. The memorial wiki ultimately failed to thrive: Its stagnant content and lack of editing activity led to accumulating vandalism, and it was effectively shuttered by September 2006. The creation, rejection, and disappearance of the Sept. 11 memorial wikis content remains an underappreciated cautionary tale about the presumed durability of peer-produced knowledge: This content only persists when it remains integrated with the larger common project rather than being relegated to a smaller and more specialized project. Wikipedias peer production model is not immune from rich get richer mechanisms.

The Wikipedia communitys overreaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and the discussions about the memorial content led to reflexive rule-making about news that persists today. The What Wikipedia is not (WP:NOT) policy predates the attacks and enumerates that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, manual, directory, or a variety of other reference genres. In the midst of the debates in 2002 about what to do with the Sept. 11 memorial content, the WP:NOT policy was expanded to assert that Wikipedia is not a news report. The revised policy attempted to thread the needle between the channeling of collaborative energy following current events against diluting the mission of writing an encyclopedia. The policy emphasized that Wikipedia should not offer news reports on breaking stories but conceded creating encyclopedia articles on topics currently in the news is an excellent idea as long as current events articles are written in an encyclopedic style. This NOT NEWS policy has persisted to the present, and the policy now emphasizes that Wikipedia should not offer first-hand news reports on breaking stories and newsworthy events do not [automatically] qualify for inclusion breaking news should not be emphasized or treated differently from other information. Another change in identity that emerged as a result of the Sept. 11 memorial content was the addition of Memorials to the WP:NOT policy. The policy, revised in 2004, now emphasizes that Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet such requirements. These normative guardrails remain in place today to channel the outpouring of pro-social collaborative energy and sense-making in the aftermath of traumatic events.

Encyclopedists have always struggled with the limitations of synthesizing knowledge into paper documents because when the knowledge changes, so must the paper. Wikipedia was not the first encyclopedia to use the online medium to rapidly and inexpensively revise content in response to changes, but its unique anyone can edit model had the effect of entangling current events with the viability of the project.

Wikipedia editors continue to invest enormous amounts of effort in covering breaking news and current events within the confines of these guardrails. Articles about the recently deceased, natural disasters, conflicts, and popular culture are sites of large and extremely dynamic collaborations involving dozens of editors making hundreds of revisions within hours. While Wikipedias MediaWiki software was not designed with this use case in mind, these high-tempo collaborations continue to serve crucial roles in sustaining the health of the broader project, close to 20 years after the early precedent of the Sept. 11 attacks: They bring in new users to the project, provide opportunities to disparate subcommunities to temporarily congregate, disseminate innovations and best practices into the rest of the community, and produce high-quality content hyperlinked to other relevant background.

Wikipedia remains a product of a particular historical moment from the early 2000s, in terms of not only its adorably dated interface but also the absence of the advertising and engagement, news feeds and recommendation systems, and virality and polarization as central features that define so much of the user experience on other social platforms. Wikipedias resilience to the disinformation that plagued Facebook, YouTube, and Google in 2016 would suggest this archaic user experience provided an important defense against actors who weaponized these attention amplification mechanisms on other platforms to malicious ends. But this story overlooks other explanations for Wikipedias apparent resilience: Wikipedia users and editors attention is shared around common articles, instead of being distributed across personalized news feeds.

Does Wikipedias success in covering breaking news and current events chart a path for other platforms to follow? Information seeking and sense-making about current events drive enormous flows of online collective attention, which explains why news feeds and trending topics are ubiquitous on social platforms. Whether and how Wikipedia can channel this demand for information likewise has been central to its ongoing identity, relevance, and sustainability. Wikipedia remains a valuable counterfactual for the potential of designing around information commons, human-in-the-loop decision-making, and strong editorial stances in the face of the Silicon Valley consensus emphasizing content personalization, automated moderation, and editorial indifference. The differences in how Wikipedia handles current event information may have insulated it from manipulation, but as platforms increasingly turn to Wikipedia for providing and moderating content, Wikipedias very real vulnerabilities risk becoming a target.

Edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

Here is the original post:
How Sept. 11 made Wikipedia what it is today. - Slate Magazine

The first reports of a new virus emerging in Wuhan came around Christmas 2019. By early January, there were 27 cases in the Chinese city. Within a couple of weeks, airports in Asia were screening all passengers who passed through their doors. Weeks on, UK airports still were not despite three direct flights a week from Wuhan to Heathrow.

Screening is ineffective as a method to stop the spread of a virus such as Covid-19, said one scientist.

We should have done it at least for the Wuhan flights, said another. It wouldnt have been a great imposition.

We left our doors open, said a public health expert, with barely controlled fury. And it contributed substantially to the rapid growth of the virus in the UK.

Such a back and forth was the defining feature of BBC Twos Lockdown 1.0: Following the Science? It is the latest contribution to what I suspect will become a string of more-or-less excellent documentaries about the UKs handling of the coronavirus pandemic. (The first was Channel 4s The Country That Beat the Virus, which compared and contrasted South Koreas response to the advent of Covid with ours no spoilers, but we dont come out of it well.)

Lockdown 1.0 also intertwined, though less overtly, two narratives. One involved the evolving amount and quality of the data that the scientists modellers, virologists, epidemiologists were receiving and, therefore, the predictions and other information they could obtain from it and hand on to groups such as the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and then to government ministers. The other narrative strand involved those ministers and what Professor Anthony Costello, a former director of maternal, child and adolescent health at the World Health Organization, described as the managerial issue how to test, how to gather the results, how to lock down, how to trace, how to isolate, and how to scale all that up quickly. Again, no spoilers but

What we might call, in bleak reference to earlier, happier, altogether easier times, the science bit was perhaps the more illuminating. The managerial issue is generally writ larger on our screens and in our newspapers as it is happening. The beavering away with numbers and in laboratories, less so. The science bit, perhaps tellingly, was also where most of the back-and-forth took place. The managerial response did not admit much nuance.

There was evident frustration, for example, among many of the modellers who comprised the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M) about the fact that only Imperial College as an established collaborative centre with the WHO had access to what was, at the beginning, the best (though by no means perfect) data, coming out of China. Dr Ian Hall from Manchester University, deputy chair of SPI-M, noted: The public may be surprised to hear we were using data from Wikipedia very early on but it really was the only data publicly available.

Juxtaposed with them was Professor Graham Medley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and chair of SPI-M. Its not as simple as saying: Make it all publicly available. People own it; it includes patient information.

Costello professed himself pretty shocked by the situation. The whole point of science and scientists in these circumstances, he said, was to share findings openly.

There were many more moments and insights that complicated in a good way, by giving more detail, by exposing more structures, by expanding vistas the view we take from headlines, social media or, if we are committed, articles. The uncomfortable truth is that there are often no good choices, and that it can be irremediably unclear which choice is the best of a bad lot. Likewise, the bitter fact is that people cannot always be made to follow the best paths and, therefore, impositions on them must be watered down if they are to have any effect.

The data scientists made the nearest thing to an unequivocal error with the modelling they did around the risk in care homes, by failing to understand the movement of staff between homes. Should they have known about agency workers? If not, who should have told them?

Still, we are not yet at the stage of apportioning blame although there will surely be many documentaries to come that will deal with exactly that. By the end of this one, it was possible to feel both better and worse about the state we are in. There are people out there, definitely, who have our ignorant little backs. But the search for an overarching synthesising intelligence some kind of prime minister who could gather up all the reins, say continues.

Excerpt from:
Lockdown 1.0: Following the Science? review Wikipedia, Wuhan and worrying mistakes - The Guardian