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Wikipedia: Sources & Methods

How tweet it is…

by sashi

It all started when I noticed a badly-spun tweet being added to a biography on Wikipedia, sourced to a click-baity headline from Politico. Now, a month later, the decontextualized tweet has been removed after much discussion, and an exclusive article the subject of the biography had written for the Daily Mail has been disappeared without any discussion. The biographical entry remained on full-protect lockdown all throughout, because earlier manipulation of the article had led to bad press for Wikipedia and an Arbitration Committee case.1

This affair — along with recent highly-publicized furors about public figures’ pithy snark — got me wondering just how many tweets were sufficiently notable to be included in Wikipedia. A fellow exile taught me the proper syntax for searching inside of citation templates (insource:”web.site”), and ever since I’ve enjoyed watching the unexpected portrait of an elephant emerge as I investigate the source-linking data.

Blind monks examining an elephant, Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724)

There were 35,735 links to Twitter in the elephant’s belly that day. Since then, it has been fed just under a dozen tweets a day, so by now the number will have grown to over thirty-six thousand. No worries, though: the internal pressure has simultaneously been reduced each day by shedding a half-dozen references to the Daily Mail. (This is because 50 people back in February 2017 decided that publication should be banned from Wikipedia, at least in part because of their click-baity headlines.)

The English-language Wikipedia indulges in tweets much more than most other languages do. While the Spanish Wikipedia does link to Twitter almost 30% as often, both the German and French Wikipedias have limited themselves to fewer than a tenth of the Twitter-links

…continue reading Wikipedia: Sources & Methods

Wikipedia’s treatment of academics: shallow, distorted and sometimes mean

Kingsindian relates the bizarre story of Jacob Barnett’s biographical article on Wikipedia.

…continue reading Wikipedia’s treatment of academics: shallow, distorted and sometimes mean

What can fact checkers learn from Wikipedia — how not to do things, perhaps? (Part 2)

After investigating whether Wikipedia works in theory, Kingsindian looks at whether Wikipedia works in practice.

…continue reading What can fact checkers learn from Wikipedia — how not to do things, perhaps? (Part 2)