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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Image: INQUIRER.net stock photo

In one fell swoop last Saturday, the Turkish government banned Wikipedia and television dating shows, and axed 3,974 public officials.

According to the countrys official gazette, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also signed Decree no. 689 to shut down a newspaper, a magazine, 14 associations, 13 health clinics and 18 foundations.

In a report from state-run Anadolu news agency, the Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Ministry blocked Wikipedia because of articles and comments showing Turkey in coordination and aligned with various terrorist groups.

The capital Ankara was willing to lift the ban if the website complied with its demands to remove offending content.

However, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales expressed support for Turks through a tweet: Access to information is a fundamental human right. Turkish people I will always stand with you to fight for this right.

Jimmy Wales. Image: Screen grab from Twitter/@jimmy_wales

The Turkish government has a history of removing access to websites for security purposes. Rights groups view these actions as a means of curtailing freedom of speech and information. Social media sites and instant messaging apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, WhatsApp, and Skype have been blocked after militant events, such as anti-government protests and bombings.

The government had been mulling a dating show ban because these were against Turkish traditions and customs. Critics fearthat the current administration aims to make Turkey more conservative.

The dismissed officials included 1,000 in the justice ministry, 1000 in the army, and nearly 500 members of the academe in state institutions.

This is part of an ongoing purge against alleged supporters of United States-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, who the government alleges instigated the failed coup attempt on July 2016. Gulen has denied any involvement in the military insurgence.Nia V. Guno/JB

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After Wikipedia ban, Turkey blocks dating shows, fires officials - Inquirer.net

For more than 15 years, Mr Jimmy Wales has been the poster boy for the promise and the power of crowd-sourcing. When he launched Wikipedia in 2001, virtually everyone scoffed at the idea of a free and open-sourced online encyclopaedia with articles written by amateurs. Today it is the world's fifth-most visited website, a go-to destination when almost anyone wants to learn about almost anything.

Having redefined and restructured one historical repository of trusted information, the encyclopedia, Mr Wales is now taking on another, the newspaper. His new initiative, called Wikitribune, will combine the work of paid professional journalists with volunteer contributors. It's an effort to counter the rise of "fake news" and other forms of misinformation by exposing it to the scrutiny of the entire world.

The model is similar, though not identical, to that of Wikipedia, with which Wikitribune is not formally affiliated. The news site will be free of advertising and free to read, with funding provided by donors and by "supporters".

These monthly subscribers will have the ability to shape the site's agenda, for instance, by steering journalists towards coverage of particular issues, although the editorial process will block attempts to artificially boost pet projects or perspectives. The public will be able to modify and update articles, but updates will not be published until they have been approved by a Wikitribune journalist or another trusted source.

In other words: crowd-funded, crowd-sourced and crowd-fact checked.

Will it work? The success of Wikipedia suggests it might. Wikipedia now includes nearly 5.4 million English-language entries, totalling 42 million-plus pages. It also publishes in 294 other languages, including a great many that most of us have never heard of, and claims 68 million users worldwide.

Although no one has yet had clear success with crowd-funded news, initiatives like pay-per-view news aggregator Blendle and member-funded De Correspondent (both Dutch in origin but testing the United States market) continue to innovate. Someone is going to get there.

Yes, all that information is from its own website. But I believe it.

And that's the point. Wikipedia has earned the trust of millions of users by listening to its critics and transparently making a good faith effort to address their concerns. Information found to be flawed is removed, and various other changes through the years have strengthened the reliability of its content without gutting the central concept: real people have interesting and valuable contributions to make to the storehouse of what the rest of us know.

As Mr Wales admits: "It's noisy and not a perfect place." But Wikipedia's openness has proved to be its strength. It's not so much about the general wisdom of the crowd as about the particular wisdom of the millions of individuals who make up that crowd.

Will Wikitribune prove financially sustainable? Again, it might. The election of Mr Donald Trump was, at least for some segments of society, a wake-up call that high-quality news is valuable enough to actually pay for. Leading print publications such as The New York Times and The Guardian, among others, as well as investigative sites such as ProPublica, have seen a sharp increase in subscriptions.

Although no one has yet had clear success with crowd-funded news, initiatives like pay-per-view news aggregator Blendle and member-funded De Correspondent (both Dutch in origin but testing the United States market) continue to innovate. Someone is going to get there. And it might well be Mr Wales. He has the experience, the connections, the vision and the passion.

Will it help?

Finally, the most important question is whether Wikitribune will change anything. Again, it just might. The surge in populist politics in Europe and the US has had shocking effects but isn't inherently startling. The anger and frustration of people who feel they are being ignored, misled or outright trammelled by powerful institutions in society - including the media - were palpable well before the Brexit referendum, the 2016 US election or the rise of Ms Marine Le Pen in France. And around the world, trust in the media is at a historic low.

Wikitribune proposes to counter that sense of alienation not just by making people feel the news is relevant to them, but also by inviting them to directly and personally engage with its production. If you feel a news account is inaccurate, propose a correction. If you feel it is biased, provide the countervailing evidence. If you are wrong, no harm done. Your contribution will be vetted and rejected, and at least one bit of fake news will not blight our collective understanding of the world. But if you are right, then you have helped not just yourself but the rest of us as well. Because in the end, we all share responsibility for the health of our networked society.

The writer is professor of journalism innovation at City University of London.

This article first appeared in theconversation.com, a website of analyses from academics and researchers.

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Wikipedia founder takes the fight to fake news - The Straits Times

April 30 2017, 12:01am,The Sunday Times

Sarah Baxter

The site is to offer news but is unreliable; only a free press gets at the truth

It is very bad form to google yourself or to check your own entry on Wikipedia. It was my son who tipped me off that I sounded like a deranged warmonger. What? I immediately looked myself up. He was exaggerating, but not by much. Whoever compiled my Wikipedia entry clearly thinks my position on the Iraq War is the most interesting thing about me.

It was pretty accurate as these things go. Among the factual guff about my work and personal life culled from the News UK website, its true that I supported the First Gulf War in the 1990s and later backed George W Bush for US president over John Kerry in 2004 because of the war on terror.

Maybe these really are the

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Wikipedia won't break real news - The Times (subscription)

Often, the advice given to writers who claim they cant write for women or dont know how to write male characters is to write a character the way they normally would and then change the damn pronoun. But that hasnt stopped generations of authors from engendering certain actions and attitudes to the particular sexes. In general, it can be said that men are written to be active, while women are more often passive. Exploring this binary division further, data scientist David Robinson analyzed which verbs most often follow he or she in the Wikipedia plot descriptions of over 100,000 movies, books, TV shows, and video games. The results highlight a stark contrast along lines of violence, forgiveness, and power.

Credit: Variance Explained

Robinson was inspired by his colleague Julia Silges analysis of gendered verbs in the novels of particular authors, but wanted to expand the dataset, focusing on verbs with at least 200 uses and that skewed the most one way or another. Noting that the text hes analyzing is Wiki plot descriptions and not the authors original work, Robinson says its almost more about what happens than how an author describes the work: were less likely to see thinks or says, but more likely to see shoots or escapes.

A look at words relating to violence and crime. Credit: Variance Explained

At a glance, we can see that men are often instigators: He proposes; he rescues; he kidnaps. While female characters arent left with much else but resignation: She accepts; she forgives; she cries. Of course, as with any cold, scientific analysis, these graphs leave out many of the exceptions to the rule and lack any sort of nuance the original author might have employed. But its an interesting look at the way our culture has effected the gender binary in fiction, and vice versa.

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Wikipedia plot descriptions think men save, women forgive - A.V. Club

Despite all the differences that separate a bustling Asian metropolis and Anytown, U.S.A, humanity has a few common shared interests: pop culture, sex and ... geography.

This is according to data from Wikipedia, the crowd-edited encyclopedia thats one of the most popular websites in the world. The site is visited by more than 1 billion devices a day, according to the companys internal data, and it offers more than 41 million articles in more than 200 languages.

But despite that breadth of subjects, there are a few topics that are particularly popular across the globe.

Read: These are the websites that rule the internet in the U.S.

Among English-language articles, pop culture-related entries make up slightly more than 40% of page hits for the top 100 pages. That was also the most-popular category for Chinese-language (also slightly above 40%) and Japanese-language pages. Pop culture was by far the most dominant category in Japan, accounting for almost 80% of the page hits for the top 100 pages.

If you know Japan, that shouldnt surprise you, said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedias co-founder.

While pop culture ranked as one of the most in-demand categories on Wikipedia across regions, it was less popular elsewhere. In France and Germany, it was second to geography; nearly 40% of the top 100 pages in German were related to that topic.

Im not sure thats a good thing, Wales joked of Germanys keen interest in the rest of the globe.

Geography was also the top topic in Russian-language Wikipedia entries, followed by sex-related topics.

In fact, sex ranked as a major area of interest across regions, though not to the extent it was in Russia. It was the sixth-most popular topic in English and German-language pages, and the third-most popular on Chinese and Japanese pages, although it comprised a small percentage in Japan.

There are two languages where sex doesnt appear as a favorite topic: French and Spanish.

This confused me at first, Wales said, until it was explained to me that the French and Spanish are actually having sex, while the rest of us are just reading about it.

Read: Netflix finds a way into China, but its not quite what it really wants

Despite the ubiquity of Wikipedia, Wales acknowledged that these results could be skewed given certain biases in who writes and edits the site.

While anyone can make changes or submit new articles, 87% of the contributors are male. We do consider that a problem. Its something we would really like to change, Wales said. We know that people write about things theyre passionate about, and there is a gender component to that.

He noted that entries about award-winning female authors tended, on average, to be shorter than ones about award-winning male authors.

Its not that the contributors are overtly sexist, but due to issues outside Wikipedia, their interests arent necessarily consistent, which shows up on the site. He added that some women may be put off from contributing by the dominance of male contributors. We want to make sure that women arent being excluded by badly behaving men in the community, he said.

Wales spoke at the Morningstar Investment Conference, and focused his talk on the spread of free information. He noted that Wikipedia recently encrypted its programming as a security measure, prohibiting spying governments, for example, from seeing which specific article a reader was viewing.

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Previously, governments could have banned specific articles on Wikipedia, while leaving others accessible. The move to encryption forced them to decide whether to block the whole site or allow readers full access. Every country opted to allow Wikipedia, with the sole exception of China, Wales said.

It sounds like a paradox, he added, but encryption led to the spread of free knowledge.

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Sex, pop culture and the other most popular Wikipedia topics by language - MarketWatch