Wikipedia

"Whether or not Wikipedia has managed to attain the authority level of traditional encyclopaedias, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and cannot do."

"Most have simply washed their hands of the problem, claiming that the bigotry or bias on Wikipedia is just an unfortunate side-effect that we have to accept. But this is not a trivial unintended consequence of an open source system; bias goes against the very principle of Wikipedia and must be addressed. I have to deal with this bias and misinformation every time a journalist interviews me and references my Wikipedia article. I need to spend the first 30 minutes of interviews to correct all the misleading information from my Wikipedia article... Most of the skeptic editors on my article believe me to be a very dangerous man — and believe that it is Wikipedia's responsibility to warn the world of how dangerous my ideas are."

"The prime agent of this change is a development that nobody (save perhaps Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) would have predicted. It is called Wikipedia—an online encyclopedia collectively produced and edited by 'amateurs' who have created what is effectively the greatest reference work the world has yet produced."

"Beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story. And it can be particularly unwelcoming to women."

"The problem instead stems from the fact that administrators and longtime editors have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia, and thus antagonize and even persecute them."

"We can learn a lot from Wikipedia about Internet governance and collective knowledge-building. It’s ultimately up to the site’s editors to choose to learn to temper their fortress mentality, get more outside eyes and ears, listen to the most moderate and reflective among them, and perhaps even entertain the idea that they might sometimes be wrong. Wikipedia’s future may depend on it."

"Wikipedia is amazing. But it’s become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess."

"Last week, Wikipedia’s highest court, the Arbitration Committee, composed of 12 elected volunteers who serve one- or two-year terms, handed down a decision in a controversial case having to do with the site’s self-formed Gender Gap Task Force, the goal of which is to increase female participation on Wikipedia from its current 10 percent to 25 percent by the end of next year. The dispute, which involved ongoing hostility from a handful of prickly longtime editors, had simmered for at least 18 months. In the end, the only woman in the argument, pro-GGTF libertarian feminist Carol Moore, was indefinitely banned from all of Wikipedia over her uncivil comments toward a group of male editors, whom she at one point dubbed “the Manchester Gangbangers and their cronies/minions.”"

"And then there's Wikipedia – astroturf's dream come true. Billed as the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the reality can't be more different. Anonymous Wikipedia editors control and co-opt pages on behalf of special interests. They forbid and reverse edits that go against their agenda. They skew and delete information, in blatant violation of Wikipedia's own established policies, with impunity – always superior to the poor schleps who actually believe anyone can edit Wikipedia, only to discover they're barred from correcting even the simplest factual inaccuracies. Try adding a footnoted fact, or correcting a factual error on one of these monitored Wikipedia pages, then poof! Sometimes within a matter of seconds you'll find your edit is reversed."

"Could the pressure from mobile, and the internal tensions, tear Wikipedia apart? A world without it seems unimaginable, but consider the fate of other online communities. ... The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes – the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in – and to design a mobile-oriented editing environment. ... The worst scenario is an end to Wikipedia, not with a bang but with a whimper: a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy and usefulness that is not quite dramatic enough to jolt the community into making meaningful reforms. No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into the hands of so many – a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of profit and owners. In an age of Internet giants, this most selfless of websites is worth saving."

"When Wikipedia launched, it raised immediate concerns about the sanctity of accreditation – could knowledge be created by amateurs? But its steady rise in utility meant that, in time, nearly everyone made their peace with it – some more happily than others."

"The Wikimedia Foundation has gotten far off track. Every year, it builds its campaign around a budget many millions larger than the year before."

"If you're selling to customers that you're familiar and competent with new media, and you can't manage something like Wikipedia, that's a failure."

"It is clear that our deep state is obsessed with controlling information and moulding it to fit its narrative. On Wikipedia, a number of 'users' and 'editors' have been planted to ensure that only Pakistan's official stance or the Nazaria-e-Pakistan [ideology of Pakistan] is reflected in the pages on Pakistan. Consequently, the pages on Pakistan's history read like a secondary school Pakistan Studies textbook... All alternative views on Pakistan's constitution, role of religion and federalism are stifled by this group...If one were to venture a guess it would be that these manipulators of the Pakistani narrative on sites like Wikipedia and others are operating out of some nondescript building in Islamabad's G sectors [where Pakistani intelligence agencies are located]."

"A lot of students write a paper for a class, and eventually it winds up in the dustbin. When students write an article for Wikipedia, they have to learn to collaborate, to research and to write for a popular audience, and their work will benefit the millions of people using the site."

"Linux and Wikipedia (as well as other, less known achievements) show unambiguously that the idea of requiring any kind of payment for great tools, culture, or knowledge to come into being is an utter falsehood."

"For a website with no paid writing staff that is still overcoming an out-of-date reputation for inaccuracy, Wikipedia punches above its weight. ...it is especially powerful in an election season: On the day of the 2012 election, Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's entries alone were read 1.6 million times. [...] you can see a virtual version of the presidential race playing out every day."

"It turns out there are people, typically they're probably unemployed kids with student debt you know that are stuck in their parents' basement with Cheetos stains on their t-shirts that haven't been able to get their first job so what they do is they play games to see how long they can edit Wikipedia pages in order to have games with their friends all around the world. So my advice to you is, if you do have a Wikipedia page, check it once in a while..."

"... what Wikipedia and Facebook teach us is that social models of content curation and collaboration do scale. ...organisations will increasingly need to crowd-source a lot of their meta-data. ... In other words, [organisations] will need to build a Corporate Data Catalogue that looks and feels a lot like Wikipedia, but which borrows the “like” and “share” concepts from Facebook."

"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."