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Wikipedia is an incredible free resource and the quintessential example of the power of crowdsourcing. And yet, it can't help but suffer from the same biases as society at large. Because of the digital divide, black people (and people of color more broadly) lack the same reliable access to the Internet as white people. Meanwhile, black employees make up a tiny fraction of the tech sector's workforce. The result is a lack of black Wikipedia editors and a lack of articles relating to important aspects of black history.

"There is a gap that exists when it comes to people of color on Wikipedia, both as subjects of articles and as contributors," says Maira Liriano, the associate chief librarian at the Schomburg Center, the New York Public Library's center for research in black culture.

As part of its programming during black history month, the Schomburg Center is hosting a Wikipedia edit-a-thon where Schomburg staff will train participants on how to properly edit Wikipedia and then set them loose on the free encyclopedia to create and improve articles relating to black history.

"Black life matters, and one way you can demonstrate that is by having a really strong presence in Wikipedia and having a voice," Liriano says. "It's a two-fold endeavor: having the entries there to inform people as well as giving people the skills to edit so that as time goes on people of color have those skills to contribute to Wikipedia."

Unfortunately, that strong presence isn't there right now. The gap in entries related to black people gets worse when you look beyond the U.S. to the rest of the globe, she says.

To its credit, Wikipedia has long been aware of this issue. A page on Wikipedia itself is devoted to the issue, noting that Wikipedia is "inhibited by systemic bias that perpetuates a bias against underrepresented cultures and topics. The systemic bias is created by the shared social and cultural characteristics of most editors, and it results in an imbalanced coverage of topics on Wikipedia."

"The omission of black people and black history makes it seem like it's not important," says Liriano. "Wikipedia is the go-to place for information, especially for young people who were born in the digital age. It's what they seek out. So even if they do a Google search and there is information about somebody or something online, they look for Wikipedia. The existence of an entry on Wikipedia gives it weight. It's kind of like 'Oh, it's on Wikipedia? Then it's important.' "

Liriano idenitified several articles that she hopes will be added to or improved in Wikipedia.

Roi Ottley was a journalist and author born in New York in Harlem in 1906. He was a journalist for the Chicago Tribune during World War II and is considered the first African-American war correspondent for a major news outlet. He's also said to be the first African-American to interview the Pope. A book he wrote in the '40s, called New World A-Coming, was very popular. "There is information about him on the web, but there's nothing about him in Wikipedia," says Liriano.

The National Black Theatre in Harlem has no Wikipedia entry. "That's one topic that I really hope somebody works on, given that they're still around and have a huge cultural significance not just for Harlem but really for the whole U.S," says Liriano.

Read more from the original source:
Black History Matters, So Why Is Wikipedia Missing So Much Of It?

Federal correctional workers who have been using government computers to make Wikipedia edits may face disciplinary measures for posting offensive and inappropriate comments on the site, an agency spokesperson says.

The edits range from homophobic remarksto commentary about Correctional Service Canadas own institution to apparent inside jokes between employees.In some instances, names of current correctional officers were also posted on the online encyclopedia.

CSC employees are expected to act according to the highest legal and ethical standards, spokeswoman Veronique Rioux said in an email. The content (the Citizen) highlighted is indeed offensive and inappropriate. CSC is examining this matter and disciplinary measures will be taken as appropriate.

In January 2014, someone using the CSC network wrote that Fenbrook Institution in Gravenhurst, Ont. now amalgamated with Beaver Creek Institution, a medium and minimum security prison operates quite differently than other institutions by allowing protective custody inmates to operate as if they were Free Men, allowing them to shop, cook and court as if they were in Canadian Society.

The editor cited Facebook as the reference.

The edit goes on to say: While the Correctional Service of Canada does not have an official position or statement, Fenbrook is known to house the largest concentration of Homosexual Inmates in the entire Ontario Region.

In 2010, someone using the CSC network changed the Canadian Official Languages Act to the Quebec Nazi Act, and a paragraph was added saying the law gives French Canadians preferential treatment in government job contests in Ontario.

A 2011 Wikipedia edit referred to porn star Peter North as a big queer. Another edit claimed poker playerVanessa Rousso was a lesbian.

CSC declined an interview request, but thanked the Citizen for bringing the edits to the agencys attention.

The comments made by these individuals are their own and do not represent the values or opinions of the Correctional Service of Canada in any way, Rioux said.

Originally posted here:
Homophobic Wikipedia edits lead to correctional service investigation

Water Buffalo Wikipedia
Explore the Wild is a Nature series produced by http://www.VideoFort.com in partnership with REP Interactive. In this series, VideoFort will take you on a tour of t...

By: REP Interactive

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Water Buffalo Wikipedia - Video

Earth, also called the world [25] and, less frequently, Gaia,[27] (or Terra in science fiction[28]) is the third planet from the Sun, the densest planet in the Solar System, the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets and the only astronomical object known to accommodate life. Earth's biodiversity has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, expanding continually except when interrupted by mass extinctions.[29] Although scholars estimate that over 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet are extinct,[30][31] Earth is currently home to 1014 million species of life,[32][33] including over 7.2 billion humans[34] who depend upon its biosphere and minerals. Earth's human population is divided among about two hundred sovereign states which interact through diplomacy, conflict, travel, trade and communication media.

According to evidence from radiometric dating and other sources, Earth was formed around four and a half billion years ago. Within its first billion years,[35]life appeared in its oceans and began to affect its atmosphere and surface, promoting the proliferation of aerobic as well as anaerobic organisms and causing the formation of the atmosphere's ozone layer. This layer and the geomagnetic field block the most life-threatening parts of the Sun's radiation so life was able to flourish on land as well as in water.[36] Since then, the combination of Earth's distance from the Sun, its physical properties and its geological history have allowed life to persist.

Earth's lithosphere is divided into several rigid tectonic plates that migrate across the surface over periods of many millions of years. Seventy-one percent of Earth's surface is covered with water,[37] with the remainder consisting of continents and islands that together have many lakes and other sources of water that contribute to the hydrosphere. Earth's poles are mostly covered with ice that includes the solid ice of the Antarctic ice sheet and the sea ice of the polar ice packs. Earth's interior remains active with a solid iron inner core, a liquid outer core that generates the magnetic field, and a thick layer of relatively solid mantle.

Earth gravitationally interacts with other objects in space, especially the Sun and the Moon. During one orbit around the Sun, Earth rotates about its own axis 366.26 times, creating 365.26 solar days or one sidereal year.[n 4] Earth's axis of rotation is tilted 23.4 away from the perpendicular of its orbital plane, producing seasonal variations on the planet's surface with a period of one tropical year (365.24 solar days).[38] The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It began orbiting Earth about 4.53 billion years ago. The Moon's gravitational interaction with Earth stimulates ocean tides, stabilizes the axial tilt and gradually slows the planet's rotation.

The modern English word Earth developed from a wide variety of Middle English forms,[40] which derived from an Old English noun most often spelled eore.[39] It has cognates in every Germanic language, and their proto-Germanic root has been reconstructed as *er. In its earliest appearances, eore was already being used to translate the many senses of Latin terra and Greek (g): the ground,[42] its soil,[44] dry land,[47] the human world,[49] the surface of the world (including the sea),[52] and the globe itself.[54] As with Terra and Gaia, Earth was a personified goddess in Germanic paganism: the Angles were listed by Tacitus as among the devotees of Nerthus,[55] and later Norse mythology included Jr, a giantess often given as the mother of Thor.[56]

Originally, earth was written in lowercase and, from early Middle English, its definite sense as "the globe" was expressed as the earth. By early Modern English, many nouns were capitalized and the earth became (and often remained) the Earth, particularly when referenced along with other heavenly bodies. More recently, the name is sometimes simply given as Earth, by analogy with the names of the other planets.[39]House styles now vary: Oxford spelling recognizes the lowercase form as the most common, with the capitalized form an acceptable variant. Another convention capitalizes Earth when appearing as a name (e.g. "Earth's atmosphere") but writes it in lowercase when preceded by the (e.g. "the atmosphere of the earth"). It almost always appears in lowercase in colloquial expressions such as "what on earth are you doing?"[57]

World map color-coded by relative height

Stratocumulus clouds over the Pacific, viewed from orbit

The shape of Earth approximates an oblate spheroid, a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole such that there is a bulge around the equator.[58] This bulge results from the rotation of Earth, and causes the diameter at the equator to be 43 kilometres (27mi) larger than the pole-to-pole diameter.[59] Thus the point on the surface farthest from Earth's center of mass is the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador.[60] The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 kilometres (7,918mi), which is approximately 40,000km/, because the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole through Paris, France.[61]

Local topography deviates from this idealized spheroid, although on a global scale these deviations are small compared to Earth's radius: The maximum deviation of only 0.17% is at the Mariana Trench (10911m below local sea level), whereas Mount Everest (8,848m above local sea level) represents a deviation of 0.14%. If Earth were shrunk to the size of a cue ball, some areas of Earth such as mountain ranges and oceanic trenches would feel like small imperfections, whereas much of the planet, including the Great Plains and the Abyssal plains, would actually feel smoother than a cue ball.[62] Due to the equatorial bulge, the surface locations farthest from Earth's center are the summits of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador and Huascarn in Peru.[63][64][65][66]

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Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Can I Use Wikipedia?
This video shows you the good and bad points of using Wikipedia as part of your research for your assessment.

By: Library La Trobe University

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Can I Use Wikipedia? - Video