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Submission + - Wikipedia admin's manipulation "messed up perhaps 15,000 students' lives" 5

Submitted by Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe writes: Recently, "ArbCom", Wikipedia's highest court, banned an administrator account that for years had been manipulating the Wikipedia article of a bogus Indian business school – deleting criticism, adding puffery, and enabling the article to become a significant part of the school's PR strategy. Believing the school's promises and advertisements, families went to great expense to send sons and daughters on courses there – only for their children to find that the degrees they had gained were worthless. "In my opinion, by letting this go on for so long, Wikipedia has messed up perhaps 15,000 students’ lives," an Indian journalist quoted in the story says. India is one of the countries where tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet, making Wikipedia a potential gatekeeper.

Submission + - Dad and daughter recreated 'Jurassic Park' with $100,000 in Lego pieces (mashable.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: ego pieces and dino-DNA — both considered "building blocks of life" and very useful for creating dinosaurs from scratch.

Animator Paul Hollingsworth and his daughter Hailee, along with some help from a few "master builders" — decided to recreate iconic scenes from Jurassic Park using only Lego pieces. More than $100,000 in Lego were used, according to the video's description.

The result is a surprisingly stunning and hilarious version of the 1993 dino-thriller. The team behind the film also released an in-depth behind-the-scenes look at the production.

Submission + - Are Google and Wikipedia in a mutually-destructive relationship? (newslines.org)

Submitted by metasonix
metasonix writes: Who benefits from Google's increasing of Wikipedia data to support its search results? Mark Devlin, CEO of Newslines, a new crowdsourced news search engine, says the increasing co-dependency between the multi-billion dollar search corporation and its built-for-free partner hurts users experience, devalues web results and has turned unwitting Wikipedia editors into Google's slaves." And he offers evidence, unlike most WMF press releases.

Previously by Devlin: Stop Giving Wikipedia Money

Submission + - Wikipedia and the Oligarchy of Ignorance 1

Submitted by Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe writes: A recent news story reported that a Wikipedia editor had take it upon himself to make tens of thousands of volunteer edits to eliminate a single perceived grammatical mistake ("comprised of") on the online encyclopedia's pages. In Wikipedia and the Oligarchy of Ignorance, David Golumbia looks at what motivates people to become involved in a crowdsourced project like Wikipedia. He finds lust for power, and concludes that even though Wikipedia purports to be engaged in a democratisation of knowledge, its structurelessness has actually made it a "breeding ground for tyrants". Golumbia approvingly quotes Mako Hill and Shaw, both enthusiastic supporters of the crowdsourcing concept, who nevertheless found that "the adoption of peer production’s organizational forms may inhibit the achievement of enhanced organizational democracy".

Comment Re:"Millions of dollars spent" / state of Flow (Score 1) 94

Lots of examples. Article talk page and subpage working areas where people collaboratively create an organised list of source quotes, or post draft paragraphs in wikitext for discussion and subsequent transfer to the article. Votes, polls and requests for comment, for example to decide which of several possible image files to use. Customised user talk pages. Talk pages that exceed three indent levels (the maximum allowed in Flow) are very common, and if you've ever tried to have an intricate discussion on Facebook (vs., say, Reddit, which has excellent indenting), you'll appreciate the benefits. Present talk pages are very flexible and handle all such uses very well. Flow not so much.

Submission + - The bizarre and complex story of a failed Wikipedia software extension

Submitted by metasonix
metasonix writes: Originally developed by Wikia coders, "Liquid Threads" was intended to be a better comment system for use on MediaWiki talkpages. When applied to Wikipedia, then each Wikipedia talkpage or noticeboard would become something resembling a more modernized bulletin board, hopefully easier to use.

Unfortunately, the project was renamed "Flow" and taken over by the Wikimedia Foundation's developers. And as documented in this very long Wikipediocracy post, the result was "less than optimal". After seven years and millions of dollars spent, even WMF Director Lila Tretikov admits "As such it is not ready for “prime time” for us."

Thus, like almost every other large software project undertaken by the WMF in recent years (for example), "Flow" didn't flow, it crashed and burned. Remember this story the next time Wikipedia runs more fundraising banners on its articles; now you have some idea of where the money actually goes.

Submission + - Thirteen Wikipedia editors sanctioned in mammoth GamerGate arbitration case (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by The ed17
The ed17 writes: The English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee has closed the colossal GamerGate arbitration case. One editor has been site-banned, while another twelve are subject to remedies ranging from admonishments to broad topic bans and suspended sitebans. Arbitrator Roger Davies told the Signpost that the case was complicated by its size and complexity, including 27 named parties and 41 editors presenting roughly 34,000 words worth of on-wiki evidence—a total that does not include email correspondence.

Submission + - Is Wikipedia biased for Israel and against Palestinians? 5

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wikipedia's pro-Jewish bias has been discussed in Wikipedia-criticism circles for years, but today the Wikipediocracy blog ran a item relating to it that will attract controversy: it proves that English-language Wikipedia is heavily biased in favor of Israeli and Jewish subjects, and against Palestinians. And it starts with very disturbing examples — Wikipedia biographies of Israeli and Palestinian children who were killed in the endless civil war. Specifically, articles about Palestinian children who were killed by Israelis are almost guaranteed to be deleted from the "encyclopedia of record", while articles about Israeli children killed by Palestinians receive "special protection".

Comment Re:I don't think you know what that word means (Score 1) 274

by Andreas Kolbe (#48510233) Attached to: A Mismatch Between Wikimedia's Pledge Drive and Its Cash On Hand?
The circle goes like this:

Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!

Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!

Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!

Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!

Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!

Etc.

Or simply look at this graph. The reserve they shoot for is a function of the spending, and the spending is a function of how much money they have.

They still want to "scale up" much more. And they can *always* justify that they need a bigger reserve next year than this year by spending more in this year. So it's always just "prudent and sensible" to ask for more money than last year, whether the money was spent sensibly or not.

I don't think anyone minds if they spend more, if there is a commensurate benefit to the end user, such as enhanced quality and reliability, and readers are told honestly what their donations are supposed to fund. But 1. product quality has been lacking, and 2. none of this is about "keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free" as the banner implies. The more they spend on paid staff, the smaller the proportion of their budget concerned with that actually becomes.

Just for a laugh, listen to Jimmy Wales speaking in 2005 about hosting, server and bandwidth costs. (Yes, articles are longer today, page views are 15 times higher than in 2005, but on the other hand bandwidth has become cheaper and there are economies of scale.)

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