Wikipedia in Turkish politics; COI politics in Wikipedia; most cited work: And the burning question of the day, is the the monkey selfie going to space with the rest of Wikipedia?
The block began as a result of Turkish Law No. 5651, when in the English Wikipedia's article on state-sponsored terrorism, Turkey was described as a sponsor country for ISIS and Al-Qaeda. In a 27 January interview with Hürriyet, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher, stated "We are not sure why there is still a ban on Wikipedia. The Turkish authorities may not have examined the latest versions of [this] content."
Most cited on Wikipedia
World Köppen Classification
The most cited work on Wikipedia (see a Wikimedia blog post) was revealed to be an updated world map of the Köppen-Geiger climate classification, which was cited 2,830,341 times – more than 130 times the count of the second most cited study.
The findings were widely reported with mentions also appearing in The Guardian, Wired and South China Morning Post. The authors of the paper themselves were completely unaware about the use of their research, with one writing "Those numbers blew me away, none of us had any idea about this. We didn't know Wikipedia collected this information or anything about it."
The Köppen-Geiger climate classification was first proposed by climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1884, after being revised several times, including in 1918 and 1936. Rudolf Geiger worked with Köppen in 1954 and 1961. The system they created, used for climate classification, divides climates into five main climate groups, with each group being divided based on seasonal precipitation and temperature patterns. The five main groups are A (tropical), B (dry), C (temperate), D (continental), and E (polar). Each group and subgroup is represented by a letter. All climates are assigned a main group (the first letter). All climates except for those in the E group are assigned a seasonal precipitation subgroup (the second letter). The authors of the study used the same system, and applied it to the current world.
Crypto policy makes German News: English Wikipedia policy made international news as German cryptocurrency websites as well as the magazine Focustook note of cryptocurrency users being prohibited from editing articles related to cryptocurrencies. Focus coverage was unusually discerning, noting that merely holding cryptocurrency does not qualify one for the "subject-matter experts" quasi-exception to the policy.
Cinco de Mayo vandalism: A high school student inserted his name into Cinco de Mayo page as a prank to impress his friends, writing that "Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for "fifth of May") is a Mexican civic holiday held on May 5 that commemorates Jimmy Lovrien, a general in the Mexican army, and his unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862." The man, now a columnist for the Duluth News Tribunereported in this article on how it was picked up, and repeated hundreds of times.
Todd Howard-centered vandalism: Coordinated vandalism centering around Todd Howard (video game designer) (the designer of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls) largely committed by his fans, led to tens of pages being vandalized and locked. (ReportedbyNew York magazine.)
Good ol' Larry: Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, wrote an 8000 word essay on what's wrong with Wikipedia and how to fix with blockchain-based 'pedias. (Reported by thenextweb)
Artist re-writes Wikipedia article from scratch: The Adrian Piper article has lots of issues related to COI, largely because she rewrote her article. These have now been reasonably resolved. (ReportedbyArtnet)
Bringing Wikipedia into libraries: American Libraries magazine published an excerpt from Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge, written by a WMF employee and a Wikipedian in Residence (WiR) at National Library of Wales. Leveraging Wikipedia was published by American Library Association. The excerpt discusses bringing Wikipedians into libraries, "allow[ing] staffers to justify Wikipedia programming within their jobs", employing a WiR, etc.
Google Lens using Wikipedia: Google Lens draws augmented reality knowledge from Wikipedia. (Reported by The Verge and Tom's Guide)
We're going to the moon! The Arch Mission Foundation and Astrobotic Technology aim to "Put Wikipedia (and More) On the Moon to Preserve Humanity's History" with the Peregrine lunar lander in 2020. The Arch Mission Foundation plans to send 50 million pages or so to the moon, much of which will be the English-language Wikipedia. Apparently it's fairly easy to print all these pages on tiny nickel sheets - the sum of all knowledge will fit in a package the size of a CD (and worth every cubic centimeter). It will only take a week to print. (ReportedinSpace.com, and others)
Brave:Edit: Amnesty International's global Brave:Edit editathon for women's biographies, held May 19–20, attracted international media note, from Scotland's The National, America's US News, and India's Deccan Herald, among others. The program was coordinated under Amnesty and Wikipedia on Meta-Wiki.
Advertorial Tones and Paid-For Posts: How Are Brands Trying to Game Wikipedia: The Fashion Law, a blog covering the fashion industry, reviews some specific abuses, deletion discussions, and notability requirements in an intelligent manner.
Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or leave a tip on the suggestions page.
Artist re-writes Wikipedia article from scratch: The Adrian Piper article has lots of issues related to COI, largely because she rewrote her article. These have now been reasonably resolved. (ReportedbyArtnet)
Have they? Piper submitted an OTRS ticket in August 2013 and the article was deleted the same month—whether the article had copyvio or was just a mess, whatever, it was deleted. I recreated/stubbed the article in December 2013, heavily cited with reliable, secondary sources. So Piper writes, "In December 2013, the article was again replaced by a new one, which apparently had not been fact-checked and contained numerous factual errors." Looks pretty solid to me, actually. The citations are numerous enough that any reader should be able to contest any of the "factual errors" with specificity. But more likely, based on my experience with other BLPs, is that she disagrees with the source and not the paraphrase.
As for Artnet, how is this news? Piper wrote her own version in October 2013 or earlier. Did Artnet just happen to discover it from an unrelated inquiry? Nevermind that her version is based on that August 2013 mishmosh that we originally deleted/TNT'd as beyond redemption (no attribution, either, but was it copyvio to begin with?) and simply adds paragraphs of unsourced and primary sourced material that we would never include on Wikipedia. "Artist disputes Wikipedia and writes own encyclopedia article" is not a catchy headline, however, and the real subtext is Artnet trying to position Piper's reaction within her artistic practice of institutional critique. czar20:06, 26 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Czar: Is "Piper was/is able" supposed to read "Piper was/is not able"? If so, and you fix it, please feel free to also redact this post along with it. I thinking the answer is "yes", since I have difficulty getting your meaning in that sentence without the "not". — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 23:50, 1 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
(Rephrased) Piper was and remains able to contest inaccuracies, especially when they have direct references. My hunch is that her disagreements reside in the original source material and not the Wikipedia paraphrase, as it has been with every BLP I've discussed with its subject. czar03:47, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
and fwiw, Piper didn't rewrite "from scratch": the bulk of the article (i.e., the directly sourced parts) is lifted directly from the now-deleted WP article czar14:20, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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