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In the media

Journo proposes mass Wiki dox, sponsored articles on Fandom, Section 230 discussed

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By Smallbones, Andreas Kolbe and Bri

Hakuna Matata and Wiki donations

Georgia Tech announced a forthcoming paper by Casey Wichman and Nathan Chan. Though only the abstract and the Georgia Tech announcement are currently available, we can say that it appears the people who watch a video of the "Hakuna Matata" song from The Lion King are likely to donate more to the WMF than those who don't.

We promise to dig a little deeper when the paper is available. – S

To move Forward we must name names?

Placeholder alt text
The Forward, a non-profit newspaper written for a Jewish-American audience, has served its public for over 125 years

Robin Washington writes in Forward, where he is editor-at-large, about Wikipedia, where he was once an editor. He is upset about the Arbitration Committee's recent decision on a controversy brought to light by a paper called "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the Holocaust". He says the Wikipedia model is fundamentally flawed, that it is "possibly the most widespread source of disinformation in human history", and that the only fix is to dox all our editors, from gnomes to arbitrators, an organizational model closer to those of Citizendium and Baidu Baike.

While it's impossible to accurately predict what the reaction of the broader editoriat might be to such a policy, we can only guess at how it would play out, although Citizendium and Baidu Baike provide obvious case studies.

Which is why I'm surprised to see Shira Klein, a respected scholar, devote any energy into proving that entries about the Holocaust are false. More baffling is her attempt to correct them by diving into Wikipedia's rabbit warren of arcane rules for article review — administered by volunteer site police who gleefully hide behind pseudonyms.

"Widespread" is accurate: the English version of Wikipedia has 6,676,896 articles, which were viewed 10 billion times last month, on 756 million unique devices, and edited by 39 thousand unique users during that time. "Disinformation" seems unlikely — articles can be edited at any time, they occasionally contain nonsense, and their contents are often the subject of contentious partisan debate, but they are provided without warranty. The Wikipedia article Reliability of Wikipedia, aptly enough, summarizes the state of the matter in great detail (checking the references for an encyclopedia article is a standard component of scholarship).

The Signpost takes no position on the Holocaust in Poland dispute, other than to predict that, unfortunately, it will continue. – S, J

What happens when adverts are allowed

Fandom (née Wikia (née Wikicities)), the wiki host spun off from Wikipedia in 2004 by Wikimedia honchos Jimbo and Angela, has grown alongside Wikipedia over the years as a host for less formal, more inclusive, and more heavily advertising-driven subject-focused wikis. To the morbid-minded, the popups and video ads offer a glimpse of the fate that Wikipedia has fortunately avoided over the years. However, the actual inline content of Fandom sites has typically remained more strongly under the editorial control of individual wikis' editors and administrators.

Recently, however, Fandom has begun to question that control: on June 14th, the McDonald's Wiki page on "Grimace" (a mascot character used in the company's advertising campaigns) was modified heavily at the behest of McDonalds. Afterwards, editing was fully protected (i.e. to administrators only) with the summary "switching over entirety of grimace article at mc∂onald's[sic] request, just for the length of this campaign in 2023".

The previous version can be seen here: it admittedly probably wouldn't have survived on Wikipedia, but it nonetheless features a long list of obscure trivia: he danced at a baseball game in July 2012, and was subsequently not seen in the company's promotions, except for Happy Meal toys in Malaysia. The version it was replaced with, on the other hand, gives a slimmed-down "greatest hits", presumably omitting ads that McDonalds finds irrelevant to their current campaign, and ends with "At participating McDonald’s for a limited time. While supplies last. Grimace’s Birthday Meal includes choice of 10 pc. McNuggets® or Big Mac® © 2023 McDonald’s. ADVERTISEMENT: This page is sponsored by McDonald’s."

The article's main contributor, Nathan Steinmetz (nom de poste Humanstein) said of the edits:

McDon*ld's took over the Grimace wiki page and removed all the real world information, appearances, and citations that I've added over the years and turned the whole page into one big in-universe ad for the birthday promotion :(

Like I can just add it back but what's the point if they're literally paying a dude to undo it. They're partnering with Fandom for an ad campaign for the page now too..

In an interview with Kotaku, he says that "While The Grimace is a very silly page for this to whole thing to be about, I think it probably sets a really bad precedent that an IP holder can approach Fandom or whoever and have user generated content basically 'suppressed' and replaced with a press release".

While Grimace is a silly mascot character created to sell hamburgers, and his appearance in Malaysian Happy Meal toys is largely irrelevant to the broader arc of history, this does raise some questions for the "information ecosystem" writ large. For example, the Ford Motor Company has a site on Fandom, with a (rather brief) article about Henry Ford — should it mention those antisemitic pamphlets he endorsed? Well, it currently does.

In a Wikia of another age, would a General Electric fansite in 1980 have received polite letters requesting its list of Pyranol-brand polychlorinated biphenyls be silently pared down after they were banned by the EPA?

Meanwhile, Wikipedia itself has not been completely immune: an article about the Grimace milkshake was created on June 26.

"Grimace" indeed. – S, J

Section 230 discussion

Partnering with Wikimedia: New America President and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter

C-SPAN has video coverage and a full transcript of an event hosted jointly by New America and the Wikimedia Foundation. The topic: regulating big tech companies and social media platforms, and in particular Section 230.

Introductory remarks by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who authored Section 230 together with Republican Christopher Cox back in the 1990s, were followed by a panel discussion featuring New America Senior Director Lilian Coral, Axios reporter Ashley Gold, Politico reporter Rebecca Kern, Association of Research Libraries Director Katherine Klosek, Wikipedian and journalism professor Andrew Lih, the WMF's Rebecca MacKinnon (herself a former New America fellow), Internet Archive counsel Peter Routhier and New America President and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department under U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Ultimately, with AI ascendant, the panel seemed agreed that Section 230 was more vital than ever to safeguard the continued existence of the ecosystem of content and sources formed by Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and that Congress should appreciate that –

We are an ecosystem that is so crucial to not only global knowledge but American competitiveness. If you just want to ... pander to make America really competitive in this area, keep 230 around so that we are still in that leadership position.
— Andrew Lih, time code 1:40:18

– AK

Disinformation, dat information

The U.S. Republican Party is targeting universities, think tanks and also the Wikimedia Foundation "to undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and other hot political topics", reports The New York Times. Organizations researching disinformation stand accused of censoring conservative speech online. Specifically, it is mentioned that the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee "has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public," and that "America First Legal", "a conservative advocacy group led by Stephen Miller, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, filed a class-action lawsuit last month in U.S. District Court in Louisiana that echoes many of the committee’s accusations and focuses on some of the same defendants."

The New York Times' article mentions the Wikimedia Foundation only once, as one of the targets. It remains unclear whether the Foundation is a defendant in the lawsuit, or just one of the recipients of the committee's letters and subpoenas. It appears to be the latter, based on the fact that Wikimedia and Wikipedia are not mentioned in America First Legal's press release about the lawsuit (filed "on behalf of Jill Hines, the co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana, and Jim Hoft, the founder the popular news website The Gateway Pundit", which is listed as a deprecated source at WP:RSP).

In brief



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To move Forward we must name names?

The Signpost takes no position on the Holocaust in Poland dispute Um, no, you deliberately and controversially took a position on the dispute while the case was ongoing at arbcom. 72.213.11.193 (talk) 13:55, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • Like many disgruntled ex-editors, the Forward piece's author notes that Wikipedia was edited to include several pieces of disinformation in his area of expertise. This is a well-known problem. What he doesn't note is that all of the misinformation was shortly thereafter fixed, and none of his listed examples survive on the encyclopedia today. —Ganesha811 (talk) 14:30, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Shira Klien has an article dated: 14 June 2023 in the same magazine: The shocking truth about Wikipedia’s Holocaust disinformation. In it she states:"Wikipedia’s structure leaves it vulnerable to be exploited by any small group of people willing to spend the time to control the content, whether they are from a government or a corporation or are simply ideologically driven private individuals". It not the fact the misinformation was fixed in those listed examples. The problem is that it is happening at every level and every process and we no way of addressing it except with the people we have and the tools we have. And that is no longer enough and hasn't been for a long time. The scope of the problem is enormous. The arbcom decision at best is a plaster, for that area only. scope_creepTalk 15:08, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Just a quick note to say that Shira's article was covered in the previous Signpost issue. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-06-19/In_the_media. Regards, Andreas JN466 16:03, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd like to see a source afffirming that "checking the references for an encyclopedia article is a standard component of scholarship." Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are tertiary sources, and while I'm not an expert on the editorial practices used in encyclopedias generally, I am fairly certain that for this encyclopedia we are encouraged to use secondary sources.~TPW 14:04, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is a needlessly inflammatory headline.
    [T]hey can start by requiring everyone, occasional contributors and arbitration committee members alike, to use their real names, period is NOT doxxing, which OED defines as [T]o search for and publish private or identifying information about (an individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent. Washington suggested (IMO, flawed and even ridiculous) a policy change that will convert Wikipedia to Citizendium; he did not suggest that internet-sleuths publish PID about current the crop of editors and arbitrators.TrangaBellam (talk) 22:04, 15 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What happens when adverts are allowed

On the Grimace Shake article: There's no reason to suppose that the author of that article, Arconning, has a COI regarding McDonald's, but its existence demonstrates a problem Wikipedia has with playing into the hands of commercial interests. We live in a world where TikTok memes get write-ups in The New York Times and USA Today, so any big viral marketing campaign is going to result in a Wikipedia article. Such articles might be merged or deleted further down the line, when editors can demonstrate a lack of sustained coverage, but by then the companies have already made their profits.
The Grimace Shake is currently on track for a Main Page appearance (see DYK nomination). Whether or not this will make any difference to McDonald's bottom line, I don't know, but it's certainly not a good look for us. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 20:06, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Cannot really understand the long-term significance of such articles which appear to be heavy on trivia. I understand articles on widespread "memes" but on corporate fads and temporary trends not so much where WP:TENYEARS should apply. The distinction between Fandom and Wikipedia as an encyclopedia becomes blurred. Gotitbro (talk) 00:16, 4 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with @Sojourner in the earth: (btw, any relation to Giants in the earth?) - there is no special reason to think that the article was created as an advertisement, but the effect of putting it on Wikipedia is the same. McDonald's gets free publicity. And ultimately we know the source of the article - from the McDonald's PR campaign. Under WP:What Wikipedia is not, "Editors are encouraged to ... develop stand-alone articles on significant current events," but not on insignificant current events or routine events. I'm not sure the ad campaign even reaches the level of "insignificant" or "routine". It doesn't have any permanent notability. Nobody will remember it 2 weeks after the campaign ends, certainly not in 10 or 20 years. BTW WP:NOT is a policy, that trumps the guideline WP:Notability. If an event doesn't pass WP:NOT, it doesn't pass WP:Notability. Thus I've objected to the DYK and put a "Recentism" template on the article. Likely, I'll follow up with an AfD when I have the time. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:00, 4 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with this approach is that is that it can be used to give real teeth to WP:IDONTLIKEIT. Don't like articles on mass shooting in the US? Delete them under WP:NOT! No need to demonstrate SIGCOV, RS or any of that sort of thing. Just vote to delete! Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:14, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Actually WP:NOT covers this "Editors are encouraged to include current and up-to-date information within its coverage, and to develop stand-alone articles on significant current events." But this just isn't a significant event. The problem is that McDonald's running adverts is simply not anything beyond the routine everyday day events that nobody is interested two weeks after they are over. WP:NOT also covers this under WP:NOTEVERYTHING. Smallbones(smalltalk) 13:15, 5 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In general, it has been my experience that, in any situation where there is more than one wiki on a given subject matter, the one that isn't a Fandom wiki invariably has a better user experience. Even when I use an ad-blocker, I still see a ton of links alongside and below the main content, all of which point to random nonsense that has little to do with the page I'm currently reading. It's as if somebody saw Wikipedia's See also and external links sections, built an algorithm to make a larger and less useful equivalent for Fandom pages, and then proceeded to saturate all of the unused pixels with it. The only benefit Fandom provides to its users is free hosting, and at this point, I cannot possibly believe that it's worth it, given current hosting prices from other, less opinionated web hosts. An independently hosted wiki probably would have told McDonald's to take a long walk on a short pier, if they even received such an absurd request in the first place. In short, I find it difficult to care what nonsense Fandom is doing this week. I wrote them off five years ago. --NYKevin 08:42, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Other

Hakuna Matata and Wiki donations

Why does this story claim that only the abstract and the Georgia Tech announcement are currently available? According to both [1] and [2], the full paper was already published on June 6. Regards, HaeB (talk) 00:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It's your Signpost. You can help us.
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