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Fake news has been, well, in the news a lot lately. But for the world's largest crowdsourced encyclopedia, it's nothing new.

"Wikipedia has been dealing with fake news since it started 16 years ago," notes LiAnna Davis, deputy director of the Wiki Education Foundation.

To combat misinformation, Wikipedia has developed a robust corps of volunteer editors. Anyone can write new entries and scrutinize existing ones for adherence to Wikipedia's rules on sourcing and neutrality. While it's not free of errors or pranks, what results is a resource that 50 million people turn to daily on hundreds of thousands of topics in a few dozen languages.

Today, educators are among those more concerned than ever with standards of truth and evidence and with the lightning-fast spread of misinformation online. And the Wiki Education Foundation, a freestanding nonprofit, is sharing Wikipedia's methods with a growing number of college students, and striking a blow for digital literacy along the way.

The foundation gives professors the technical assistance they need to assign students, instead of writing a research paper, to write a brand-new Wikipedia entry, or expand an existing entry, on any topic in virtually any discipline.

This spring, 7,500 students are expected to participate. Among the many items past students written on are:

Since the program began six years ago, Davis says, students have collectively added more than 25 million words of content to Wikipedia.

Jennifer Malkowski, an assistant professor of film and media studies at Smith College, assigned her class on new media and participatory culture to write and contribute to Wikipedia entries this past fall.

"One of the things they really liked about it was the ability to share knowledge beyond the professor that audience of one," she says. While all Smith students are expected to use good research methods in their classes, knowing that their entries might be rejected outright if they didn't conform to Wikipedia's standards "felt like a higher stake than the difference between a B and an A-minus," she says.

Malkowski will be leading a workshop to help her colleagues, some of whom are less technically minded, learn how to make Wikipedia assignments in their own classes as well.

Davis says many professors report a greater level of effort from their students on Wikipedia assignments. "If you're writing something millions of people are going to read, it's a reason to do a really good job, to go into a library and get a deep understanding of the topic."

Some professors, like Tamar Carroll, an assistant professor of history at Rochester Institute of Technology, see Wikipedia as a way to make previously neglected areas of knowledge more visible. For Carroll, it's women's history. She says a former student recently emailed her to say that her Wikipedia entry on Mary Stafford Anthony, the suffragist and sister of Susan B. Anthony, was "the most meaningful assignment she had" as an undergraduate.

There's another learning opportunity too. Every Wikipedia entry has a "talk" page, where editors discuss changes, and a "view history" page that shows additions and deletions over time.

Peeking behind that curtain, says Malkowski, helps "expose how knowledge is collectively created and how different voices might come to consensus, or not, on a particular topic." Right now, she adds, "is an especially important time to be asking these epistemological questions."

According to the foundation's own survey, 87 percent of university faculty who participated in the program reported an increase in their students' media literacy. By grinding some Internet info-sausage themselves, essentially, they gained a better understanding of what goes into it.

It's an interesting turn of events for Wikipedia, which, as Davis acknowledges, has had a bad rap in academic circles as the lazy student's substitute for real research.

"When I first started going to academic conferences, people would hide and say, 'Don't let my department chair see me,' " talking to you, says Davis. She added that Wikipedia should only be a starting point for a university-level research paper, never a footnoted source.

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What Students Can Learn By Writing For Wikipedia : NPR Ed : NPR - NPR

Forbes

How Wikipedia Is Making Kids Dumber Than Ever Four Things To Watch For In Your Cloud Blind Spots Forbes Crowdsourcing is great for helping NASA organize photos or raising money for your band, but not for everything. Cartoon by Shannon Wheeler. See more cartoons: Why Bathrooms With Motion-Activated Lights Is The Worst Idea · Gallery ...

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How Wikipedia Is Making Kids Dumber Than Ever Four Things To Watch For In Your Cloud Blind Spots - Forbes

Pepe the Frog's decade-long journey from webcomic character to everyman meme to alleged hate symbol has been a topsy-turvy one, but his importance to the meme economy cannot be denied. The trope of trading and collecting "Rare Pepes," distinctive images of the famous frog, has been part of meme culture for years. And now there's real money behind it.

A February article from Reddit's Meme Insider, a parody trade publication dedicated to serious coverage of memes, explains how the fictitious market for Rare Pepesbecame a booming business.

The piece, by pseudonymous redditor JeffTheDunker, describes how the Rare Pepe economy initially functioned on a system of "Good Boy Points," a largely fictitious currency that people would trade for new and unique images of Pepe. It started out circa 2015 as a 4chan in-joke about an autistic kid who would exchange "Good Boy Points," earned by doing chores for his mom, for precious "chicken tendies," and somehow they became the dominant imaginary currency of the Rare Pepe economy.

Good Boy Points were unsustainable, though, because there was no accountability in the system: Anyone could fabricate their Good Boy Point totals. In short: the points just weren't real.

Additionally, the idea that there was valueeven imaginary or purely social valuein Rare Pepe memes caused the demand for Pepes to go up, and the market to become flooded by new content.

"When [Rare Pepes] breached mainstream media outlets, early adopters and speculators around the globe packed their bags for good, as the Pepe had, in their minds, become useless," JeffTheDunker explains in Meme Insider.

In early 2015, a poster on 4chan's /r9k/ board, incensed at the mainstream popularity Pepe was starting to enjoy, tried to kill the meme by distributing a collection of more than 1,200 Rare Pepes, labeled "the end is nigh, hope you cash out now."

4chan called this Pepe massacre "the Peppening," and it led to posters jokingly watermarking their best Rare Pepes "do not save":

The watermarks obviously did nothing to protect the Pepes, other than making them uglier, and the Rare Pepe economy looked doomed. But what if there were a way to regulate Pepes and make them impossible to copy?

We've seen Rare Pepestraded on Craigslistbefore, where physical drawings or printouts of the frog that were offered in exchange for cold, hard cashsometimes as much as $100. We've even seen them sell on eBay for nearly $100,000probably as a joke. But JeffTheDunker also suggests there's a real demand for unusual digital images of Pepe, even though it seems like those images should be trivial to replicate.

Enter: the blockchain. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin use it to make sure that digital money is unique to its owner and can't simply be copied or faked, and now it's being applied to Rare Pepes.

A blockchain-based platform called Counterparty lets users make anything into a unique digital token, and "anything" now includes Rare Pepes.

Traders can buy and sell the Pepes using Counterparty currency, but they prefer a cryptocurrency called PepeCash, which currently trades at 302 PepeCash to the dollar.

RarePepeWallet.com

RarePepeWallet.com

The universe of Rare Pepes is constantly expanding, too. There are already more than 500 distinct cards, and collectors cansubmit their ownoriginal Rare Pepes for consideration. All it takes is a payment of 4,000 PepeCash (roughly $13), a dank idea, and some design skills.

The rules for approval are stringent:

This manual approval process means none of the 1,200 compromised Pepes from the 2015 "Peppening" is likely to show up on the site. Some of them may still be dank, but they're no longer rare.

One thing you'll notice about the selection of Pepe cardsand the Rare Pepe trading community at largeis that they don't carry even a whiff of Pepe's status as an alt-right, white supremacist, pro-Donald-Trump icon.

"Most of the community don't think Pepe is an alt-right thing. Some (like me) think that we should Make Pepe Great Again and free him of that connotation," Pepe trading enthusiast Django Bates told the Daily Dot via email. "Also, you have to be aware that Pepe as a symbol of hate and racism by alt-rights is a merely North American thing. The rest of the world does not see Pepe in that context. But our Rare Pepe trading community is global. We have people from Japan, Spain, France, the U.S., Switzerland (myself), Russia, Turkey, South Africa and many other countries.

"Pepe is a meme. If alt-right idiots use it for there bullshit, then be it. Pepe is much greater and does not care about them. Pepe is a mirror. And a mirror is not racist, just because a racist is using it."

So, instead of Trumpist Pepes, you'll find card designs like My Little Pepe, which might be the most expensive Rare Pepe ever sold. It recently changed hands for 1 million PepeCash (currently about $3,300).

rarepepewallet.com

The proud owner of My Little Pepe, alias American Pegasus, told the Daily Dot, "Only one of these exist, and it belongs to a tier of the rarest pepes of all - uniques with only a single card issued."

rarepepewallet.com

"But that Pepe wasn't listed for sale in Counterparty," American Pegasus continued. "Instead the seller only would accept cold hard Pepecash. A million of them to be exact. And so I'm darn glad I had some handy, and was able to score the trade."

We're a long way from Good Boy Points now. The Rare Pepe economy is based on real money, and PepeCash is starting to take off. A recent price jump seems to have been triggered by a January Vice articleand an article Wednesday in France's Le Mondethat introduced Rare Pepe Wallets toa new group of meme fanatics.

Unlike most other digital currencies, this one is tied to the enthusiasm for an underlying product: Pepes. Even though you don't needPepeCash to buy Pepes, Pepe enthusiast find it nice to own for a number of reasons.

"Pepecash offers a fun and abstract way to value Rare Pepes apart from their underlying Counterparty value," American Pegasus explained. "As we know, with money, the value is in the utility. There are several exciting Pepecash-only features being planned, such as an entire exchange based off Pepecash and a Pepestarter crowdfunding platform. Ultimately it's best for the Pepeverse to have a highly liquid asset like this that can act as a base token for all things Pepe."

No matter how much money you dump into Rare Pepes, though, you'll never own them all. There are a handful of one-of-a-kind Pepes, and some of their owners may have lost the passphrases to their Pepe wallets or may never sell their precious rares.

"In what can be seen as a satirical jab at this growing [altcoin] culture, Rare Pepes create a metaphorical representation of the pump and dump absurdity and legitimizes it through the use of the Bitcoin blockchains immutability," Bitcoinist's Ryan Strauss wrote in November.

The people trading Rare Pepes and PepeCash don't see them as just another flash-in-the-pan alternative currency, though.

"I deeply believe that it is a lot more interesting as Dogecoin, which was only a currency," Bates told the Daily Dot. "This is not just a currency. It is Blockchain driven meme assets you really can own. It is also helping to develop Counterparty, the protocol that is used to create and trade these assets."

On the Rare Pepe Traders group chat, there's plenty of excitement about the PepeCash boom, but it's also clear that the traders and card creators have a passion for the meme.

"With pepetrading there are several things coming together as an extra: Memepower, Curiosity, Human nature of collecting all sorts of stuff, Hope for profit, Community, Interest in Blockchain Technology and above all - the lust to make fun about everything and everybody," Bates wrote. "It's the mix of it all."

One Rare Pepe designer, Nymity Nymz, told Le Monde,"I think these are just the beginnings of anindustry," and said it's even possible he could live on his Pepes someday.

Nymz, who described himself to RarePepeNews.com as a "Rapper, Ghost writer, FinTech Guru,"also told the site that the reason he creates Rare Pepes is "for 2020."

A Rare Pepe, he said, "is something that has the potential to outlive us all."

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The Rare Pepe economy is real, and there's serious money behind it - The Daily Dot

Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter sought to defend Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos comments about paedophiliaby incorrectly accusing immigrants and refugees of the same crime.

The woman who has built her career by speaking and writing aboutthe false premise that themain problem facing the US is immigration, and that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than native-born US citizens, tweeted: "Well, Milo learned HIS lesson. Pederasty acceptable only for refugees and illegals. Then libs will support you."

Her tweet, which prompted a backlash online, was related to recentlyresurfaced videos which showed Mr Yiannopoulos saying that boys as young as 13 were "sexually mature"and that having beena victim of sexual abuse made him good at oral sex.

Within 24 hours, publisher Simon & Schuster dropped his $250,000 book deal, he was uninvited to the Conservative Political Action Conference and his continued employment at Breitbart has reportedly threatened a walk-out of at least half a dozen staff.

He attempted to rectify the mistake on Facebook, saying he "deeply regretted"his "stupid wording".

"I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim,"he said. "I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors."

He also argued he had exposed three paedophiles during his career as a journalist and listed them off in a Facebook video, criticising left-leaning publications for allegedly covering up for people who had been accused of the crime.

Both Ms Coulter and Mr Yiannopoulos have accused liberals of outrage over the comments, yet it was the author being uninvited from a prominent Conservative conference that also caused headlines.

Ms Coulter and Mr Yiannopoulos met for dinner this month and have defended each other online.

Mr Yiannopoulos said on the Bill Maher show, "Having Ann Coulter on is the only time I watch your show."

It follows Facebook celebrity and right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren referring to refugees as "rapeugees".

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Ann Coulter accuses refugees and illegal immigrants of paedophilia in wake of Milo Yiannopoulos scandal - The Independent

The conservative pundit responded to Milo Yiannopoulos comments defending pedophilia

Beatrice Verhoeven, provided by

Ann Coulter on Milo Meltdown: Pederasty Acceptable Only for Refugees and Illegals

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter has made an entire career out of saying shocking, deliberately offensive things in response to public controversies.So she didtoday when sheweighed in on the career meltdown ofBreitbart Editor and fellow conservative Milo Yiannopoulos in terms calculated for maximum outrage.

Coulters tweet comesafter video emerged over the weekend in which Yiannopoulos defended pedophiliac behavior at length, referred to people as young as 13 as sexually mature, and joked that his own experience as a victim of molestation made him good at oral sex.

Also Read: Milo Yiannopoulos Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster

Most pundits roundly condemned Yiannopoulos. Heres Coulters take:

Well, Milo learned HIS lesson. Pederasty acceptable only for refugees and illegals. Then libs will support you.

Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) February 21, 2017

The self-described professional troll attempted to manage the PR disaster this morning with a statement on Facebook, insisting that his comments were taken out of context.

I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim, Yiannopouloswrote on his Facebook page Monday. I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors.

Yiannopoulos went on to say that he was horrified by pedophilia, adding that hes outed three of them, in fact three more than most of my critics.

Also Read: Milo Yiannopoulos Could Be Fired by Breitbart Over Pedophilia Comments (Report)

The effort was however to no avail. In short order, Yiannopoulos wasdisinvited from his plum speaking gig at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and lost his$250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster. In addition, rumors swirled this afternoon that his job at Breitbart is in jeopardy.

People were quick to bash Coulters remarks.

@AnnCoulter does being this fucking stupid hurt? Is it just like a constant migraine?

Jason Bailey (@jasondashbailey) February 21, 2017

@AnnCoulter did you really type this yourself? I pray for you. And hope you fill the hole in you with something more than hate.

Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) February 21, 2017

@AnnCoulter you should really just stop talking

MalyndaHale (@MalyndaHale) February 21, 2017

Read original story Ann Coulter on Milo Meltdown: Pederasty Acceptable Only for Refugees and Illegals At TheWrap

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Ann Coulter on Milo Meltdown: 'Pederasty Acceptable Only for Refugees and Illegals' - The Edwardsville Intelligencer