Wikimedia Projects

"[Wikipedia] is therefore a reflection of the world's biases more than it is a cause of them. ... If journalists, book publishers, scientific researchers, curators, academics, grant-makers and prize-awarding committees don't recognize the work of women, Wikipedia's editors have little foundation on which to build. ... We may not be able to change how society values women, but we can change how women are seen, and ensure that they are seen to begin with."

"... debilitating factors – such as excessive bickering and poorly worded arguments – have led to about one-third of RfCs [i.e. Request for Comment deliberation processes] going unresolved. ... the experience of participants and the length of a discussion are strongly predictive of the timely closure of an RfC."

"Medical images and articles found on Wikipedia may help patients better understand their radiology reports, ... And despite both internal and external metrics concluding Wikipedia's health information to be variable in quality, but continually improving, the authors believe the website's detailed information could pair well with the lay-definitions housed within the PORTER [i.e. Patient-Oriented Radiology Reporter] glossary."

"The magnitude of [Wikipedia's visitor] numbers piqued the interest of Matthew Kock, website manager of the prestigious British Museum in London. "I looked at how many Rosetta Stone page views there were on Wikipedia... That is perhaps our iconic object, and five times as many people go to the Wikipedia article [...] as to ours." This realization inspired him to propose a novel idea to British Museum administrators – invite a Wikipedia contributor into the institution as the first ever "Wikipedian in Residence" to serve as a liaison within the Museum. Despite his fears about proposing collaboration with unknown and uncredentialled Wikipedia volunteers, [...] he met with enthusiastic interest from numerous departments at the museum."

"Science Wikipedia pages aren't just for non-experts. Physicists – researchers, professors, and students – use Wikipedia daily. When I need the transition temperature for a Bose-Einstein condensate (prefactor and all), or when I want to learn about the details of an unfamiliar quantum algorithm, Wikipedia is my first stop. ... Despite [this], it is rare for professional physicists to contribute, in part because there are few, if any, professional incentives to do so. ... only a small fraction [of them] have edited even a single Wikipedia page."

"Many professors are ditching the traditional writing assignment and instead asking students to expand or create a Wikipedia article on the topic."

"Like other social media platforms, Wikipedia has evolved into an echo chamber where the user is presented with only one type of content instead of being shown a balanced narrative. This disinformation is powerful since the articles are written in an academic style and users do not see other sources that disagree with the article.... Some editors of Wikipedia are failed academics with demonic energy who wish to conquer anonymously what they were unable to do in their normal careers. And spending much of their working life editing Wikipedia articles and by the use of multiple anonymous handles they have obtained administrative status which entitles them to block opposing views. The anonymous persona of the editors and the low stakes have made Wikipedia politics much more vicious than real politics."

"Wikipedia is not going anywhere. It's definitely part of everyone's life. But the question of accuracy is one of the most important aspects of it. ... Our purpose here is not to evaluate whether Wikipedia is good or bad. ... It's not so much about warning people about what Wikipedia is. It's about showing what it is. ... Librarians are interested in trying to broaden our community's education with information in general, be it digital or otherwise."

"Wikipedia's extreme form of democracy sounds even stranger in 2019 than it must have sounded in 2001."

"Wikipedia has become an ideological battleground in recent years, with zealots from both left and right using it to mock and smear their enemies."

"Supporting Wikipedia is [...] a shrewd business decision that will likely benefit Google for years to come."

"Wikipedians in residence (WIR) have been around since at least 2010, with the first one hired by the British Museum in the U.K. Since then, other museums as well as universities, archives, libraries, art galleries and health organizations, have followed suit with a total of 165 WIRs hired worldwide. According to the Wikimedia Foundation [...], right now 65 WIRs are actively working — and registered — with the foundation."

"Indeed, Fram seemed like the perfect test case for a new kind of enforcement from the foundation – a prolific user whose bad behavior warranted a severe sanction short of a lifetime ban. But as is the case in so many enforcement decisions on social platforms, the ban created more questions than it answered."

"The real cause of the Fram flare-up wasn't the sudden overreach by the foundation, but the community's own laissez-faire attitude about toxic users. ... The community is currently blaming the foundation for their own mess, in my opinion, which was caused by our abject failure to develop procedures to enforce civility without Foundation intervention."

"It’s been tradition that our communities are by and large self-governing, except for issues around child protection, threats of suicide, threats of violence, and legal matters."

"The Commissioner sees the ongoing blocking of access to Wikipedia as forming part of a broader pattern of undue restrictions on the right to receive and impart information on the internet, and more generally as an illustration of the disproportionately heavy-handed approach currently prevailing in Turkey to any content or information the Turkish authorities consider offensive. ... Commissioner Mijatovic concludes that the way Turkish administrative authorities and courts routinely have recourse to internet blocking is unacceptable in a democratic society and not compatible with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights which protects freedom of expression. ... The systemic nature of the problem requires far-reaching measures, including the complete overhaul of the relevant Turkish legislation."

"[Wikipedia comprises millions of articles that are in constant need of edits to reflect new information. That can involve article expansions, major rewrites, or more routine modifications such as updating numbers, dates, names, and locations. Currently, humans across the globe volunteer their time to make these edits.] It would be beneficial to automatically modify exact portions of the articles, with little to no human intervention."

"[I have not seen a single practical use-case to convince me to integrate cryptocurrencies or blockchain into the platform. To reward content creators and editors with digital assets] is a really bad idea. ... By integrating cryptocurrencies, Wikipedia would be taking a step back by making it easier for people and companies to pay for the content they want on the platform. Creating a mechanism where you effectively authenticate that type of behavior ... isn't going to help with the quality of Wikipedia at all. ... To say to them, you're going to have to pay or put money at risk in order to edit Wikipedia is completely insane."

"If it is a mistake to keep comparing Wikipedia to Britannica, it is another kind of category error to judge Wikipedia against its peers in the internet's top 10. Wikipedia ought to serve as a model for many forms of social endeavor online, but its lessons do not translate readily into the commercial sphere. It is a noncommercial enterprise, with no investors or shareholders to appease, no financial imperative to grow or die, and no standing to maintain in the arms race to amass data and attain AI supremacy at all costs. At Jimmy Wales' wedding, one of the maids of honor toasted him as the sole internet mogul who wasn't a billionaire."

"The site has helped its fellow tech behemoths, though, especially with the march of AI. Wikipedia's liberal content licenses and vast information hoard have allowed developers to train neural networks much more quickly, cheaply, and widely than proprietary data sets ever could have. When you ask Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa a question, Wikipedia helps provide the answer. When you Google a famous person or place, Wikipedia often informs the “knowledge panel” that appears alongside your search results. These tools were made possible by a project called Wikidata, the next ambitious step toward realizing the age-old dream of creating a “World Brain.” ... As platforms like Google and Alexa work to provide instant answers to random questions, Wikidata will be one of the key architectures that link the world's information together..."

"Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay? Because they don't experience them as labor. “It's a misconception people work for free,” Wales told the site Hacker Noon in 2018. “They have fun for free.” A 2011 survey of more than 5,000 Wikipedia contributors listed “It's fun” as one of the primary reasons they edited the site."

"I can't tell you what the cause of the bias on Wikipedia is, I can only tell you that it's really obvious now. It used to be quite obvious, like even 10 years ago it was already pretty obvious 10 years ago. Now it's just embarrassing."

"There is a massive irony in the fact that Wikipedia is so extremely biased: it was started by someone who cares unusually deeply about neutrality (me), who developed and defended its neutrality policy at great length. Man makes plans, and God laughs."

"Making social media liable would mean Twitter, Facebook, even Wikipedia and Yelp couldn't exist as we know them"

"Even the common perception that Wikipedia provides a level playing field on which humanity can freely share all its knowledge is a pretense. The reality is that while all such digital structures behave like free and unrestricted systems, they are in fact controlled by gamification algorithms at the hands of those who own and operate them. Very few people grasp the profound deception of the system."

"[the infiltration had threatened the] very foundations of Wikipedia."

"This case is unprecedented in scope"

"[the foundation had been investigating the infiltration of Chinese-language Wikipedia for nearly a year. But this summer] credible threats [to volunteers' safety had] led us to prioritise rapid response"

"Like many other knowledge spaces, Wikipedia has a problem: it lacks visual representation, especially when it comes to notable figures who belong to the global majority, including Black, Indigenous, and people of color. To change that, we are starting a new initiative in collaboration with Behance and AfroCROWD: Discover #WikiUnseen"

"Once outlets like the Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Vox etcetera publish an article making baseless claims about a person, then the Wikipedia editors update that person's page to paint them in a false light and save the salacious hit pieces as the source in the footnotes cementing the allegations in the target's Wikipedia page."

"“Writing on Wikipedia always comes with a lot of responsibility,” Breslow said in an email. “Wikipedia is the major collective record of humanity’s knowledge, and its articles are read by a staggering number of readers. They influence what people believe and how they live their lives, so it’s essential we make them as reliable, neutral, and comprehensive as possible.”"

"“Editing Wikipedia from a bomb shelter is difficult,” said Mykola Kozlenko, the vice president of the Wikimedia Ukraine user group. “To be honest, covering the invasion is not our main priority now. People are mainly trying to put in place their plan B, either by evacuating to a safer place, by joining the army, or by joining volunteer organizations.”"

"To make sure your quotes are available to the widest possible audience, we're working with the Wikiquote project to collect and archive the quotes for posterity. ... Wikiquote has a section on chemistry-related material and we, working with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Wikimedian in residence, Andy Mabbett, are going to expand it...The best quotes are striking sentences or poignant paragraphs that hold fast in the mind, long after their source has faded from memory, snippets and soundbites that encapsulate feeling or opinion."

"There are good ways of checking stories and quotations. Just as the Internet is the source of a lot of misinformation, it also offers the tools to find the truth. Most well-known stories and quotes can be checked using the search box on Google.com or any number of other sites such as Snopes or WikiQuote."

"When you're looking for a famous quote from a movie, book, or historical figure, try Wikiquote. Wikiquote is a free, searchable database of quotes from people and creative works. The site, launched in July 2003, has blossomed quickly."

"Wikipedia has several sister projects, including Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and Wikispecies. They are all run by volunteers like you."

"In short, the goal of the Wikiquote is to produce a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books, films, and proverbs. There are, of course, a number of online collections of quotations already on the web, however Wikiquote is distinguished by being among the few that provide an opportunity for visitors to contribute, which is nice."

"Angelou's writing lends itself to the kind of short wikiquote soundbite wisdom the internet loves, but that does a discredit to its brilliance when taken as a whole."

"Situated on the 19-year-old's left forearm, the new ink reads: "So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." Miley is either an undercover history buff or really adept at using Wikiquote, because the words are a portion of a speech made by President Roosevelt at the Sorbonne, Paris, in 1910."

"If we were contacted by a copyright holder with a complaint about Wikiquote, of course, we would attempt to respond within reason to resolve the complaint without anyone's having to resort to litigation. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act actually provides for services like Wikiquote a way of resolving copyright complaints without serious risk of litigation through its notice-and-takedown procedures. I'm not aware of any DMCA notices regarding Seinfeld quotations on Wikiquote."

"As to the content, Wikiquotes does provide a good central repository of a massively broad range of references. I can imagine this will be of interest mostly to those reading for general interest, or doing specific research. For example, you can find articles based on anything from the cultured musings of Samuel Pepys, Ocar Wilde , or Immanuel Kant; to the lesser known quotes from the world of Star Trek or StarGate SG-1 !"

"Although you can search Wikiquote in a search box by topical words, such as "peace," "animal rights," "silence," "success," etc., that identifies applicable quotations, I find searching by categories to be more entertaining."

"Buzzy Jackson is dismayed by "inspirational" books. Not so much because they exist, but because she "never encountered a single one that spoke directly to those of us with a secular outlook." ... [O]n going to the bookstore, she found a void. If Chicken Soup for the Soulless didn't exist, would it be necessary to invent it? Yes, apparently.Jackson seems to have scoured an extensive book collection—or possibly Wikiquote—for timeless wisdom on thirty-three alphabetical subjects, from "advice" to "work.""

"Baby Doll's escape plan comes courtesy of a dream in which she meets Scott Glenn, playing a character called Wise Man. Well, not that wise; he gets all his best lines from Wikiquote, and hangs out in one of those how'd-they-find-time-to-light-all-those-candles Asian temples."

"It's somehow appropriate that in the same week that Michael Scott leaves The Office that two computer scientists at the University of Washington announce their particular breakthrough in natural language programing—a computer program that knows when to say "That's what she said" to a double entendre. ...[T]his type of language play is actually a complicated computer science program. ... To "train" the computer how to identify the right sentences, they used twssstories.com, a repository of user-submitted "TWSS" jokes, and non-entendre text from sites such as Wikiquote."

"Wikiquote has interesting and useful categories to peruse and also offers all readers the opportunity to become Wikiquotians (people who write and/or edit articles) themselves."

"Lazy recall frequently means any witticism is attributed to Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker, and any profound statement to Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. Wikiquote is good for tracing the correct wording and origin of bons mots, but bear in mind what Abraham Lincoln said: "Don't believe everything you read on the internet.""

"Wikiquote is a repository of quotations from prominent people, books, films, and so on. If you're reading a page of quotations by a person (like Mark Twain), you can jump to a Wikipedia article via a visible link and vice versa..."

"The Web is a community, and despite the questionable information you can find there, it also offers you the ability to connect with people and start a dialogue. Wikiquote, despite the inherent problems of any Wiki to which anyone can contribute, can be a worthy resource because it enables multiple people to engage in a dialogue. It also often contains links to external sources in text and audio formats where applicable."

"Wikiquote is a free online compendium of sourced quotations from notable people and creative works in every language, translations of non-English quotes, and links to Wikipedia for further information."