Wikimedia Projects

"Wikipedia is the most comprehensive compendium of up-to-date knowledge assembled at gargantuan scale almost entirely by volunteers. It works, too, because they form a huge community that for reasons of camaraderie, rivalry, vanity, purity and sometimes just deep suspicion constantly monitor and vet one another's work. There are flaws in the process, but each entry is a living organism that matures and self-corrects over time."

"Wikipedia is an exceptional case. If we can figure out how it becomes sustainable, that would be a major contribution. Because it's a new way of managing human resources."

"We thought, let's not fight Wikipedia, but instead teach students to use it better."

"About a decade ago I migrated into community work from a non-community background. This is the guide I wish I had read back then. When I say community work, I am talking about stuff like Wikipedia: large distributed groups of people doing something together, usually online, often unpaid. Usually international, often nerdy, often (but not always) FLOSS or FLOSS-adjacent."

"...people have talked about open politics and things like that, and its really hard sometimes to say that yes, you can apply the same principles in some other areas... So, obviously open source in science is making a comeback. Science was there first. But then science ended up by being pretty closed with very expensive journals and some of that going on. And open source is making a comeback in science with things like arXiv and open journals. Wikipedia changed the world too. ... So there are other examples. I am sure there are more to come. ... It is up to you guys to make them."

"Like many university lecturers, I used to warn my own students off using Wikipedia (as pointless an injunction as telling them not to use Google, or not to leave their essay to the last minute). I finally gave up doing so about three years ago,..."

"Two years before Wikipedia, I had the dream, the vision, of a free encyclopedia written by volunteers in all the languages of the world. This inspiration came to me from watching the growth of free software, open-source software, as most people know it. And watching programmers coming together and giving away their work for free online."

"In India and Nigeria, over 75% of participants said they had never heard of Wikipedia."

"Progress has been slow, but several independent ventures show how the attitudes of major players in the biomedical ecosystem are beginning to shift further, and take Wikipedia more seriously."

"Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests."

"...phishing on Wikipedia is effective enough – and lucrative enough – to retain the interest of the dark net's richest dwellers. ... Although Wikipedia's editors work to root out the false links, it's a slow and never-ending fight."

"The researchers [...] found that the Wikipedia entries were written at a much higher reading level compared with the medication guides and well above the average consumer reading level, which could contribute to patient misunderstanding of medication information. ... The study authors conclude that as the public use of Wikipedia increases, the need for health care professionals and the pharmaceutical industry to actively educate and provide reliable resources to patients remains important."

"Page views of Wikipedia are immense compared with views of primary literature articles. As a result, if you edit a page to include results from your research, your audience will likely expand by at least an order of magnitude."

"For the record the Daily Mail banned all its journalists from using Wikipedia as a sole source in 2014 because of its unreliability."

"The fate that befell the Mail happened for one reason, and one reason alone: it's terrible, and by banning it, Wikipedia sends a message that it values its credibility."

"Wikipedians this week added greatly to the amusement of the internet after around 40 contributors loftily declared that the Daily Mail was not a reliable source for citations. Much public hilarity ensued – for the reason that The Mail and Wikipedia are really far more alike than either would care to admit. ... Both can resemble a real chamber of horrors."

"However clumsy the Youth Parliament's approach to Wikipedia may be, it's still an improvement on a government order issued by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last August, when he established a working group to study the creation of an all new Russian-engineered Wikipedia clone."

"...for an organisation that calls itself a ‘small non-profit' business and begs users for donations (‘the price of a cup of coffee') to keep it afloat, it enjoys bulging cash reserves. The Foundation's accounts show it has assets of more than $90 million (£73 million), and spent $31 million (£25 million) in salaries last year, up from $26 million (£21 million) the year before. ... Are these amounts not excessive?"

"...this ban has set a dangerous precedent, raising profoundly troubling questions about free speech and censorship in the online era. ...a social media giant whose pages are riddled with inaccuracies, unilaterally deciding, at the request of a handful of people, that a major newspaper is somehow not valid."

"False information is being disseminated at a far greater rate when it seems to have been vetted by a brand name and Wikipedia's branding is global. It would be ideal if a more credible site like Encyclopedia Britannica or a useful news site like Reuters could be granted the “zero-rate” – but those sites [...] do [not] have the same foundational interest in spreading their content without financial gain that Wikipedia has."

"Wikipedia, as it is currently run, is simply and literally out of control, and a potential menace to all kinds of institutions and individuals. This is an organisation that – quite scandalously – polices itself, judges itself, and legitimises itself. It is always right because it decides what is right. You are always wrong because it decides what is wrong. ... And it has power without responsibility or accountability. ... It is high time this arrogant, self-admiring, self-regulating, often bullying organisation be placed under the formal supervision of an independent watchdog."

"I fear we are moving beyond a natural skepticism regarding expert claims to the death of the ideal of expertise itself: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, teachers and students, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those with achievement in an area and those with none."

"Despite being an American-born site, its popularity and utility have expanded around the world since its foundation in 2001."

"Wikipedia has often been treated by news organizations like the black sheep of the information business. ... But as trust in the media wanes and news organizations struggle to engage with readers, Wikipedia has emerged as a leader in transparency and user growth..."

"The cyber age has tremendous potential, as indicated by Wikipedia. But if it bypasses space and time where there's just this obsession with the present – this neglect of our heritage and history – then our world will change."

"For the benefit of Wales as a nation, it is crucial that Wikipedia contains a wealth of knowledge about its history and culture and that the range of articles on the Welsh language Wicipedia covers the widest possible range of subjects."

"Unlike some commercial companies, Wikimedia has no incentive to cave into authoritarian demands to self-censor."

"The online crowd-sourced encyclopedia is perceived as increasingly trustworthy, [...] with immediate impacts on scientific literacy."

"Wikipedia, like other new, non-commercial information technologies, can be used to open new public spaces for [indigenous] languages, and gradually recover the ground lost to more dominant languages. ... However, the representation of indigenous languages on the platform is very low,... [In Latin America indigenous communities speak 420 different languages.] To date, only four official indigenous-language versions are represented: Quechua ..., Náhuatl ..., Aymara ... and Guaraní."

"As the originator of and the first person to elaborate Wikipedia's neutrality policy, and as an agnostic who believes intelligent design to be completely wrong, I just have to say that this article is appallingly biased. ... I'm not here to argue the point, as I completely despair of persuading Wikipedians of the error of their ways."

"In many ways Wikipedia pioneered the [fake news] phenomenon, and journalists' lazy reliance on using it as a source helped falsities to propagate on a scale never seen before."

"As we are trying to deal with all this terrorism, [Wikipedia] makes us look like we work with terror groups."

"But on Wikipedia, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that’s led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web’s leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever."

"Wikipedia is basically a format in which people who hate you can go into your ... , I don't even know what you call these, into the search of your name, and then there I have a profile of sorts, into my profiler page, and poison it. ... "Views on political issues, groups and politicians" – [...] what happened between 2009 and 2017? Well, doesn't matter. ... What was my context for [calling Bernie Sanders a "radical Marxist who believes in violence"]? They don't even discuss it, the shooting in Alexandria. ... [That paragraph] is all mickey mouse stuff. It is cut and paste cherry picking. ... I've written about [progressivism] in great length, but not a word in my "political views". ... Who has a section on "controversial views"? It is as if it is written by Media Matters. ... "Levin compared supporters of the Affordable Care Act to Nazi brown shirts." ... No I didn't! Completely taken out of context! ... If you want to know about me, you should go as far away from the Wikipedia page as possible... ... What they're supposed to do, if they're a responsible organisation, is to get the basic information on me [...] and lock it so that miscreants and malcontents can't abuse and post it. ... Very, very dishonest information in there. ... The book reviews are scores positive, maybe one or two negative by leftists and so forth. You would have no idea reading their comments about my books on Wikipedia."

"Why is Wikipedia so good? I'm not sure, but part of it is the internal review process started by Jimmy Wales. Other Wikis fail miserably; I no longer look at WikiAnswers, because I rarely get good help from it. So a publicly edited encyclopedia isn't obviously going to work, but somehow Wikipedia pulled it off."

"Facebook's introduction of a new feature that uses [Wikipedia] to combat “fake news” [...] poses arguably the greatest test in years to the volunteer-run online encyclopedia, constituting a massive threat to the internet's largest and ostensibly most trusted source of free knowledge. ... It also highlights the risks posed by Facebook's efforts to seemingly outsource its problems to the online encyclopedia. Indeed, Wikipedia has struggled to defend its standards in the face of its new role as the internet's “good cop.” As more and more tech giants like Facebook and YouTube make use of its content, a new influx of users has flooded the website [–] not all of them well intentioned."

"I'd argue that Wikipedia's biggest asset is its willingness as a community and website to “delete.” It's that simple. If there's bad information, or info that's just useless, Wikipedia's regulatory system has the ability to discard it."

"Communities of so-called “amateur experts” linked together by shared interests are the bread and butter of Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia actively encourages editors to congregate in “projects” and “portals” covering hundreds of articles that all fall under a single broad topic. ... So while it's easy to lament the dangers of the Wikipedia gun lobby, it is important to remember that groups with competing worldviews are what fuel the crowdsourced encyclopedia – where the question of what is true is always secondary to the question of what the community of different users can agree on as being true."

"With its nationalist sentiments, factual mistakes, lack of academic references and omitted facts about World War II history, Croatian Wikipedia is not a reliable source, analysts have told BIRN."

"When [people] get their information not from us – but [...] through something like Siri or [...] Alexa – that opportunity to either contribute back as an editor is broken, and that opportunity to contribute, to donate is also broken."

"The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker reported incorrectly last month that Pompeo was an Army officer who served in the 1991 Gulf War. ... The situation shows how much major media outlets have come to rely on Wikipedia, a crowd-sourced encyclopedia run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit that employs less than 300 people."

"On January 2, 2018, MBH participant published statistics on peak views of Russian Wikipedia articles in 2017."

"... Wikipedia is just one type of online community, which appeals to a fairly narrow (geeky, combative male) demographic. And, importantly, it doesn't appeal to many other demographics. ... if, as inevitably happens in such a place, some people get impatient and upset at [the] unfair treatment, they must tolerate the passive-aggressive condescension of the basement-dwellers who inform them, apparently with no awareness of the ironies involved, that courtesy is an absolute requirement."

"In this era where we've seen the rise of these fake news websites and so forth, Wikipedia has had almost no problems with this at all. Simply because our community is quite – you know, it's their hobby to debate about the quality of sources, and it's very difficult to fool the Wikipedia community with this."

"[Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee], which typically decides matters of user behavior, not content, doesn't lean left or right. Occasionally you could say there are people who are stricter or more lenient in terms of the spirit of the law or letter of the law."

"... independent bloggers Markus Fiedler and Dirk Pohlmann have found [that Wikipedia's] 'freely editable' model definitely doesn't mean an absence of censorship and biased political activism. ...the online encyclopedia is home to a major edit war where corrections are constantly added, information removed, and value judgements made to fit a specific narrative. ... [An inner circle of manipulators] are referees and players combined into one."

"Deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly *and* misleading the public in this way. ... the Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters."

"...Wikipedia has forced academics to re-examine how they validate sources. We should have been doing that all along. We should have been approaching an Encyclopaedia Britannica article with a certain level of distrust and questioning: What are the biases of people writing this? What are they leaving out? What communities are not included in this conversation?"

"[Wikipedia's] worst failing, much like BBC Radio 4's Today programme, is to portray subjects that are racked with unresolved controversy as if they were settled. ... and while I was inside it, it was a tiny, infuriating nightmare of totalitarianism. One day soon, I suspect this particular dream is all too likely to come true in the solid world."

"[YouTube,] a megacorporation with billions of dollars and thousands of brilliant employees is relying on a volunteer-run platform anyone can edit to fact-check information? It is odd. But it's also a validation of Wikipedia's mission and a reminder of its importance."