Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Wikipedia

Journalism Daily: Trinity Mirror’s Midlands consultation, Wikipedia’s editorial changes and the industry chicken and egg conundrum

Judith Townend — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:06:25 +0000

A daily round-up of all the content published on the Journalism.co.uk site. You can also sign up to our e-newsletter and subscribe to the feed for the Journalism Daily here.

News and features:

Ed’s picks:

Tip of the day:

Using Twitter as a point of contact

#FollowJourn:

@benjaminbland/Freelance journalist

On the Editors’ Blog:

Similar Posts:

Mashable: Wikipedia’s new editorial layer

Judith Townend — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:07:41 +0000

“Now a core feature, perhaps a core principal, of ‘the free encyclopedia anyone can edit’ is about to become restricted,” writes Ben Parr at Mashable.

“According to The New York Times, editing articles about living people on Wikipedia will require approval from an experienced editor first.”

Full story at this link…

Wikipedia ‘flagged revisions’ defined at this link .

New York Times piece at this link.

Similar Posts:

Michael Gray: Wikipedia listed as Google News source

Laura Oliver — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:43:41 +0000

The headline says it all – check out Michael Gray’s screengrab of Google News listing Wikipedia as a source on major news stories.

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

WindowOnTheMedia: Database journalism defined

Judith Townend — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:09:09 +0000

An interesting day to flag this one up (given that the Guardian is actively calling for people to play with the Swine Flu data today): Nicolas Kayser-Brill has written an entry on Wikipedia for ‘database journalism’.

Full story at this link…

Also see: #DataJourn Part 1: a new conversation (Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog)

Similar Posts:

vnunet.com: Wikipedia founder ends search engine project

Laura Oliver — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:04:07 +0000

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales has announced the end of his ‘user-generated search engine’ project, Wikia Search.

Full story at this link…

Similar Posts:

Wikipedia: Giles Hattersley’s ‘missing’ Wikipedia page

Laura Oliver — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:10:30 +0000

First – a piece by Giles Hattersley about Wikipedia referring to his own page on the site, which didn’t exist – the reference had been added during the sub-editing process.

Then – a ‘hatchet job’ entry is created to slight Hattersley and defend the encyclopaedia.

“It is not ok to create hatchet jobs about people for any reason, and especially if the reason is simply because you feel that they were wrong in some respect about Wikipedia. Not ok. Not ever,” writes (what appears to be) Wikipedia’s own Jimmy Wales.

Full story at this link…

Similar Posts:

‘Dragon’s Den’ styled competition spawns wikinortheast.co.uk

Fred Friedrich — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:04:14 +0000

Eager to find a new innovative project, Trinity Mirror launched an ‘in-house’ competition in the style of ‘Dragon’s Den’.

The winner, Louise Midgely, a web developer at their north-east division, NCJ Media, won a cash prize and a share in future profits for her idea – to create a wikipedia specialising in the northeast area – wikinortheast.co.uk.

The site will offer a cache of digital archives documenting the region’s history.

People holding information about the region will be able to access and update the site with their own knowledge.

So far top searches include the Roman emperor Hadrian, Alan Shearer, and Tyneside gangster, Viv Graham.

Similar Posts:

Brand Republic: Defamation charges against Wikipedia dropped

Laura Oliver — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:52:07 +0000

Defamation charges brought against Wikipedia have been dismissed by a US court. The claims that an entry on the site about literary agent Barbara Bauer was defamatory were thrown out after it was rule that those making defamatory comments are responsible and not the forum on which they were made.

Who’s behind Wikipedia: Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner investigates

Laura Oliver — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:19:00 +0000

Questions continue to be asked of the credibility of information on Wikipedia, but the online encyclopedia is increasingly becoming a tool – and often a first point of call – for journalists.

Enter Virgil Griffith’s Wikiganda project and device WikiScanner, nominated for a Knight-Batten award for its use by Wired.com.

The devices could help journalists to separate fact from fiction on the site – and throw up some news leads in the process, the California Institute of Technology student told Journalism.co.uk.

1)How does WikiScanner work?
WikiScanner’s core functionality is the listing of ‘anonymous’ edits [of Wikipedia listings] via real-world organizations.

When you make an edit to Wikipedia, you have two choices: first, you can register and leave your username; or you can edit anonymously. But, when you edit anonymously, it uses your IP address – a number which identifies what computer network you are from – in lieu of a username. Wikipedia does this for convenience to distinguish your anonymous edits from someone else’s anonymous edits.

In essence, WikiScanner combines two databases: the list of all IP adresses that have made edits to Wikipedia; and what IP addresses belong to which companies. So with WikiScanner you can type a company name, and it shows you what edits have come from IP addresses owned by that company.

2) You recently upgraded Wikiscanner – why?
Pretty much everyone agrees that transparency is good for Wikipedia.

WikiScanner went a long way towards this, but it had two major flaws: it was too easy to hide from by either registering an account or by editing from home; and secondly, it took too much effort to find the interesting stuff [such as this article using the tool by Wired.com].

WikiScanner 2.0 addresses both of these defects. It tries to discover what organization registered Wikipedia accounts are coming from, and it uses some intelligence to highlight the edits that are likely to be the salacious conflict-of-interest stuff that people love to find.

3)You’ve also been working on a project call Wikiganda – what does that entail?
We all know that there are real-world organizations with radically opposed views. Wikiganda is a personal attempt to discover whether these divergent views spill over into sustained edit wars on Wikipedia. I do not know the answer to this question, but I’d like to find out.

What you do is input two real-world organizations that are ideologically opposed to each other, and Wikiganda lists the edits to pages that both organizations have modified. If the two sides are continually contradicting each other, the user flags it, and the world gets to inspect the results for themselves.

4)What’s the purpose of the project?
I am demonstrating that to have reliable information online doesn’t mean we need to erect walls blocking anonymous contributions. Instead, we can do back-end analyses of the contributions to filter out the bad stuff.

Overall – especially for non-controversial topics – Wikipedia seems to work. For controversial topics, Wikipedia can be made more reliable through techniques like this one. As for related approaches, I think colored text [a project that highlights Wikipedia articles in different colours according to their trustworthiness] is an immensely promising direction for combating disinformation in Wikipedia.

5) Do tools such as Wikiganda and WikiScanner enhance Wikipedia and other open online information sources by making them more transparent, or do they undermine them?
WikiScanner and Wikiganda do not undermine open information sources at all – it merely tells us the truth – that interested people and parties attempt to shape and influence them. From there we can take steps accordingly to address the problem.

Similar Posts:

Wikipedia first with news of Tim Russert’s death

Laura Oliver — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:43:42 +0000

Wikipedia updated its pages to account for the death of NBC News’ Washington bureau chief Tim Russert half an hour before a news alert was release by the Associated Press (AP), Brian Cubbison from the Syracuse Post-Standard blogs.

The first update to the online encyclopedia entry for Russert was made at 7:01pm (GMT) on June 13 to add the date of his death to the page – 35 minutes before AP’s alert.

Cubbison’s post interestingly links to a Businessweek article on the same phenomenon – a commenter on which points out that the IP address of the user who made the first amendment to Russert’s Wikipedia entry belongs to Internet Broadcasting Systems, the same company behind NBC’s website.

Similar Posts: