Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-12-17/In the media

Numerous news outlets are reporting on Wikipedia's December 17 release of its first-ever year-in-review video, accompanied by the hashtag #Edit2014. The video, produced by Wikimedia Foundation storyteller and video producer Victor Grigas ({{u|Victorgrigas}}), is just under three minutes in length and is set to a performance of the Prelude from Bach's first cello suite. The video features screenshots of and images uploaded on various Wikipedia projects, highlighting events documented by Wikipedia editors in 2014 including the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa, the Indian general election, 2014, the Umbrella Revolution, the 2014 FIFA Club World Cup, and the Ice Bucket Challenge.

File:Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum at the World Economic Forum Summit on the Global Agenda 2008 1.jpg

The Daily Dot [http://www.dailydot.com/politics/jimmy-wales-uae-prize-money/ reported] (December 15) on the blistering criticism directed at Jimmy Wales on [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=638903719#Congratulations his user talk page] following his receipt of the Knowledge Award on December 7. Wales and Tim Berners-Lee jointly shared the award and a one million dollar cash prize, presented at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Dubai by Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and constitutional monarch of Dubai.

According to Human Rights Watch:

{{centered pull quote|The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has continued to crack down on freedom of expression and association. The authorities arbitrarily detained scores of individuals they suspected of links to domestic and international Islamist groups. Court convicted dissidents after unfair trials. The UAE made no reforms to a system that facilitates the forced labor of migrant workers.[http://www.hrw.org/middle-eastn-africa/united-arab-emirates] }}

The Daily Dot highlighted criticism from some editors, including one who identified themselves as Emirati, directed at Wales for accepting money from the UAE. Following the criticism, Wales pledged that "Every penny of the money will be used to combat human rights abuses worldwide with a specific focus on the Middle East." He did note that his actions were not in response to the criticism because "I started the process from the moment I was told about the prize."

This echoes prior criticism of Wales for his alleged links with the government of Kazakhstan (see previous Signpost coverage), criticism which was reiterated during the talk page discussion. Wales wrote that this was "total and utter and complete bullshit. I have no past connection of any kind to the Kazakh dictatorship."

File:L Sanger.jpg

Newsweek [http://www.newsweek.com/wikipedia-news-becomes-open-public-292613 reports] (December 16) on Larry Sanger's new project [http://www.infobitt.com/ Infobitt], which promises to be a "Wikipedia for news". The users of the crowdsourced website supply a collection of facts, each a sentence long and taken from published news articles, for each story called a "bitt". Users then vote on how to rank each fact within the bitt and the importance of each bitt.

During an AMA, a question and answer forum on the social media website Reddit, Sanger [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2peu84/im_cofounder_of_wikipedia_and_with_my_new_startup/cmw277u wrote]:

{{centered pull quote|Because pieces of content are one sentence long, it becomes possible to simply ask the community which of competing sentences should be displayed and what order they should be in. This completely sidesteps the interminable edit warring of Wikipedia.}}

He also [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2peu84/im_cofounder_of_wikipedia_and_with_my_new_startup/cmw1nnv wrote] of his hopes that Infobitt would channel the impulses of information seeking in a way that would produce reliable news content:

{{centered pull quote|Infobitt will fill a universal need, or desire, to get caught up with the news very fast. We'll make it possible to get caught up five times as fast as you could before. You'll be rushing to Infobitt to include the latest news in the way you now do on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit. We'll also finally give the long tail of citizen journalism a route whereby it can make it onto the front page of a hard news site.}}

• A royal deal: The Royal Society of Chemistry [http://www.rsc.org/news-events/rsc-news/articles/2014/dec/gold-journals-donation-for-wikipedia-editors/ announced] (December 18) that it was donating 100 accounts offering access to "the complete portfolio of Royal Society of Chemistry journals and databases" to The Wikipedia Library.
• Local history: In The Leader, the director of the Steuben County Historical Society [http://www.the-leader.com/article/20141217/BLOGS/312179998 discusses] (December 17) his experiences editing Wikipedia articles related to Steuben County, New York.
• Boredom, forever: The Washington Post (December 16) [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/12/16/this-is-what-happens-when-a-bot-writes-an-article-about-journalism/ reports] on a bot created by artist and programmer Darius Kazemi called [http://tinysubversions.com/contentForever/ Content, Forever]. Inspired by the television documentary Connections, the bot automatically generates an article on a particular topic by copying Wikipedia text from the article on that topic and from other articles linked to in the original one. Kazemi's bot echoes pieces of meandering, poorly-written media content on platforms like Medium.
• All sides of Wikipedia: On WOSU's [http://wosu.org/2012/allsides/tech-tuesday-hollywood-vs-google-wikipedia-gadgets/ All Sides with Ann Fisher] (December 16), Wikipedia editor Sydney Poore ({{u|FloNight}}) and writer David Auerbach discussed the encyclopedia and Auerbach's recent article for Slate (see previous Signpost coverage).
• Freebase shuttered: VentureBeat [http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/google-plans-to-integrate-its-fact-database-freebase-into-wikimedias-wikidata/ reports] (December 16) that Google will be shutting down Freebase, its crowdsourced knowledge base of metadata, over the next six months and assisting participants with integrating its information into Wikidata.
• Editor profiled: On the Huffington Post, {{u|Netha Hussain}} [http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/netha-hussain/rosie-stephenson-the-woma_b_6302636.html profiles] (December 11) editor Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight ({{u|Rosiestep}}), who has contributed over 89,000 edits, had 1000 articles featured at Did You Know?, and founded Wikipedia:WikiProject Women writers.

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17 In the media