Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-11-18/In the media
Summons issued for Wikipedia editors by Indian court, "Gaza genocide" RfC close in news, old admin Gwern now big AI guy, and a "spectrum of reluctance" over Australian place names
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Asian News International case against Wikimedia and Wikipedia editors
- Background: Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation blanked by court order, Litigation involving the Wikimedia Foundation, prior Signpost coverage
Summons issued for Wikipedia editors in ANI case
Commentary and facts involving the case were published by Bar and Bench, India Legal Live (ENC Network), The Hindu, and Hindustan Times. At least one source said that according to a summons issued by Delhi High Court, WMF had released or will release email addresses of three editors, "Defendants 2–4".
According to MediaNama, one of the defendants signed the on-wiki open letter protesting the case (see related Signpost coverage). – B
Should Wikipedia be treated like a publisher?
Aditi Agrawal covers the ANI case for Hindustan Times. The question of Wikipedia's publisher-like status is also addressed in India Today's Fiiber channel on MSN, "Why has the Indian government issued a notice to Wikipedia, explained in 5 points". – B
Bias complaint: the phantom menace / MIB is MIA
As we went to press on our last issue apblive reported that "According to ANI, the government has written to Wikipedia highlighting a number of complaints of bias and inaccuracy. In the letter, the Centre pointed out that a small group of people have editorial control over the website." The "Centre" refers to the central Indian government or specifically the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB).
The existence of this letter, or the timing of its issue, has itself been called into question. At The Signpost, we could not find a solid report to base a story on.
Some media just said there was "a notice" sent, another said unnamed government sources had spoken to one media outlet, and none we could find provided any real details (example, example). Since then, TechCrunch is also reporting that no complaint has been found by their staff, either. – B
RfC closure noted
- "Wikipedia Editors Add Article Titled 'Gaza Genocide' to 'List of Genocides' Page" (Haaretz)
- "'It's not close' - Israel committing genocide concludes Wikipedia ending editorial debate" (Middle East Monitor)
This closure of a more than month-long Request for comments (RfC) at List of genocides was noted in several press sources ...
The RfC confirming the page title follows a Requested move talkpage discussion which initially set the title earlier this year – see previous Signpost coverage. – B
Luckey Gaetz Wikipedia
There's a bizarre style of biography that commonly appears off-Wiki in the less-than-reliable press with headlines like John Doe Wiki. This week "GhanaCelebrities" provided the best example I've seen "Ginger Luckey Gaetz Wiki, Age, Career, Husband". The article is so well-written – it doesn't seem to have been authored with either artificial intelligence or natural stupidity – that if provided with references it would take at least a week to delete if it were posted on-Wiki. Luckey Gaetz's main claims to fame – if not notability – are that she has a rich brother and is married to the former congressman and currently nominated U.S. Attorney General Matt Gaetz. Mrs. Gaetz, according to the article, is a KPMG manager who has taken some MBA courses through Harvard's online program and in person at UC Berkeley. Mr. Gaetz's notability includes accusations of drug use and paying for sex with minors.
A completely separate linking of Gaetz with Wikipedia was published as a trivia question in Above the Law. Kathryn Rubino asked "What law school did (Matt) Gaetz attend?" Despite a wealth of official sources that she could have linked to document the answer, she linked to Wikipedia. She told The Signpost that she did so "because Wikipedia is the easiest way to encapsulate multiple facts about a source with a single link. In this instance I wanted a reference that Matt Gaetz went to William & Mary Law as well as the other notable legal figures that went to the law school but never held the position of U.S. Attorney General." – S
Gwern interview: How a longtime Wikipedian became an influential voice in AI — and still remains anonymous
Dwarkesh Patel (a US podcaster who TIME magazine recently described as one of the 100 most influential people in AI) published an interview titled "Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory". According to Patel, Gwern has "deeply influenced the people building AGI," and "If you've read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive."
User:Gwern is also a longtime Wikipedian with almost 100k edits on English Wikipedia. While the interview mostly focused on AI and Gwern's life as an independent writer, it also discussed the pivotal role that editing Wikipedia had played for him:
- Dwarkesh Patel
What is it that you are trying to maximize in your life?
- Gwern
I maximize rabbit holes. I love more than anything else, falling into a new rabbit hole. That's what I really look forward to. Like this sudden new idea or area that I had no idea about, where I can suddenly fall into a rabbit hole for a while.
[...]
- Dwarkesh Patel
What were you doing with all these rabbit holes before you started blogging? Was there a place where you would compile them?
- Gwern
Before I started blogging, I was editing Wikipedia.
That was really gwern.net before gwern.net. Everything I do now with my site, I would have done on English Wikipedia. If you go and read some of the articles I am still very proud of—like the Wikipedia article on Fujiwara no Teika—and you would think pretty quickly to yourself, “Ah yes, Gwern wrote this, didn't he?”
- Dwarkesh Patel
Is it fair to say that the training that required to make gwern.net happened on Wikipedia?
- Gwern
Yeah. I think so. I have learned far more from editing Wikipedia than I learned from any of my school or college training. Everything I learned about writing I learned by editing Wikipedia. [...] For me it was beneficial to combine rabbit-holing with Wikipedia, because Wikipedia would generally not have many good articles on the thing that I was rabbit-holing on.
It was a very natural progression from the relatively passive experience of rabbit-holing—where you just read everything you can about a topic—to compiling that and synthesizing it on Wikipedia. You go from piecemeal, a little bit here and there, to writing full articles. Once you are able to write good full Wikipedia articles and summarize all your work, now you can go off on your own and pursue entirely different kinds of writing now that you have learned to complete things and get them across the finish line.
However, echoing concerns Gwern had already detailed in a 2009 essay titled In Defense of Inclusionism, he cautioned that
It would be difficult to do that with the current English Wikipedia. It's objectively just a much larger Wikipedia than it was back in like 2004. But not only are there far more articles filled in at this point, the editing community is also much more hostile to content contribution, particularly very detailed, obsessive, rabbit hole-y kind of research projects. They would just delete it or tell you that this is not for original research or that you're not using approved sources.
He also recalled other ways in which Wikipedia was different in its earlier years:
- Gwern
I got started on Wikipedia in late middle school or possibly early high school.
It was kind of funny. I started skipping lunch in the cafeteria and just going to the computer lab in the library and alternating between Neopets and Wikipedia. I had Neopets in one tab and my Wikipedia watch lists in the other.
- Dwarkesh Patel
Were there other kids in middle school or high school who were into this kind of stuff?
- Gwern
No, I think I was the only editor there, except for the occasional jerks who would vandalize Wikipedia. I would know that because I would check the IP to see what edits were coming from the school library IP addresses. Kids being kids thought they would be jerks and vandalize Wikipedia.
For a while it was kind of trendy. Early on, Wikipedia was breaking through to mass awareness and controversy. It’s like the way LLMs are now. A teacher might say, “My student keeps reading Wikipedia and relying on it. How can it be trusted?”
"Gwern Branwen" is a pseudonym. Of interest to Wikipedians who are conscientious about keeping their real name separated from their public editing activity (see also coverage of a current open letter in this issue's News and notes), the interview also discusses benefits of maintaining anonymity. While it was conducted in person, responses were re-recorded by a different person, and for the customary video of the interview, an AI-generated avatar was created as a stand-in.
In other parts of the interview that might likewise resonate with Wikipedians who devote large amounts of unpaid work to their hobby, Patel asked various probing questions about Gwern's personal finances, again starting from his Wikipedia volunteering:
- Dwarkesh Patel
When you were an editor on Wikipedia, was that your full-time occupation?
- Gwern
It would eat as much time as I let it. I could easily spend 8 hours a day reviewing edits and improving articles while I was rabbit-holing. But otherwise I would just neglect it and only review the most suspicious diffs on articles that I was particularly interested in on my watchlist. I might only spend like 20 minutes a day. It was sort of like going through morning email.
and later
- Dwarkesh Patel
How do you sustain yourself while writing full time?
- Gwern
Patreon and savings. I have a Patreon which does around $900-$1000/month, and then I cover the rest with my savings. [...] So I try to spend as little as possible to make it last.
I should probably advertise the Patreon more, but I'm too proud to shill it harder.
[...]
I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. [...] I live like a grad student, but with better ramen. I don't mind it much since I spend all my time reading anyway.
The interview then took a rather consequential turn:
- Dwarkesh Patel
It seems like you’ve enjoyed this recent trip to San Francisco [home of several AI labs mentioned earlier in the interview, like OpenAI and Anthropic]? What would it take to get you to move here?
- Gwern
Yeah, it is mostly just money stopping me at this point. I probably should bite the bullet and move anyway. But I'm a miser at heart and I hate thinking of how many months of writing runway I'd have to give up for each month in San Francisco.
If someone wanted to give me, I don’t know, $50–100K/year to move to SF and continue writing full-time like I do now, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
Patel then encouraged him to share contact information for potential donors, and two days after the interview' release noted that these had indeed been found and that Gwern would be moving to San Francisco.
– H
In brief
- Exploding Whale Day (including video coverage) was celebrated in Exploding Whale Memorial Park in Florence, Oregon and reported in The Oregonian. See previous Signpost coverage here or just click on the illustration on the right. Pageviews of Exploding whale, of course, went up 60x over the median on the anniversary.
- "Climate change researchers make 100 improvements to Wikipedia ahead of COP29" (University of Exeter News)
- itsnicethat.com tells us how 'Wikipedia rabbit holes' are the backbone of Chantal Jahchan's intricate editorial collages.
- Digital gravestones for lost species: Wikipedia articles about extinct species are a "place people return to in order to remember, or perhaps discover, what we once had", according to a study highlighted at The Conversation.
- Busybody, hunter, dancer: which one are you?: The New Indian Express [1], Nature briefing blog [2], RealClearScience [3], Australia's National Tribune website [4], and The Conversation [5] covered new research that outlines styles of information-gathering Wikipedia user employ, using catchy nicknames.
- Troubled effort to address Australian place names: As covered in the previous Signpost issue, representation of Australia place names has had some trouble. Now the Australian Computer Society's Information Age reports on research findings of "a spectrum of reluctance, hesitation, discomfort, sanitisation and also active resistance and racism" in the topic area. They also said, "Despite researchers' attempts to find a diversity of editors to interview, only one who took part identified as a woman, while one identified as non-binary, and none were First Nations people... [researchers found] that 'basically any non-white experiences or non-dominant experiences' were omitted from many Australian Wikipedia articles".
- Goldstar does not get a gold star from Wikipedia: According to the article, Goldstar Air was a "fake airline". Yet newsghana.com says that editors describing it as such are "saboteurs [who] hatched an evil plot". You be the judge.
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