wikipedia

When you search something on Google -- a popular celebrity, for example -- you'll see an information panel that includes relevant details at a glance: age, notable works, immediate family members, birth date, and similar things. Facebook is now testing an information panel of its own that is largely the same, though it is found in the social media website's search results -- and it, too, is powered by Wikipedia.

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Facebook is expanding its fake news fighting publisher info system across the social network, offering readers background insight before they decide whether or not to trust what they read. The system was launched as a pilot last year, as a way for Facebook to challenge accusations that it allowed misleading or downright incorrect stories to proliferate across the site and influence the 2016 US presidential election among other things.

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YouTube may be looking to combat fake news and conspiracy theories by embedding Wikipedia information, but the tactic came as a total surprise to the crowdsourced encyclopedia itself. Stung with repeated criticisms that YouTube hosts offensive, misleading, or conspiracy-filled footage and does little to manage that, CEO Susan Wojcicki announced at South by Southwest this week that it would be pushing back by using Wikipedia facts.

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At South by Southwest (SXSW), YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that the company will take on conspiracy theories by linking to information from Wikipedia. This appears to be the latest development in YouTube's previously stated mission to deal with fake news being peddled on its platform. Last month, YouTube said it would start alerting users about videos from news corporations that get funding from governments.

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News of eBay's switch from Paypal sent both stocks reeling at the tail end of January 2018 - now there's word that eBay's new partner might be their key to Bitcoin. The auction site teamed up with payment service Adyen, replacing for the first time their primary payment company since Paypal was acquired in 2002. Adyen, in turn, at one point partnered with BitPay to accept cryptocurrency payments.

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Wikipedia has released an update for its iOS app, bringing it up to version 5.7.3. With this version comes a sleek new "Black" mode that Wikipedia says is "perfect for OLED devices" -- chief among those, of course, being the iPhone X with its OLED screen. As with other apps that have added a dark mode, Wikipedia's new Black Mode turns the display a dark shade, making it easier to read in dark environments.

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Wikipedia has revealed that it recently began using artificial intelligence (AI) in order detect and eliminate article edits that contain spam or false information from trolls. The goal of the AI, dubbed Objective Revision Evaluation Service, or ORES, is to not only make life easier for Wikipedia veterans who volunteer hours of their time to eliminate bogus updates, but also attract and encourage new contributors.

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It seems the Russian government hasn't changed its stance on internet censorship following the recent, and brief, ban of the website Reddit. Beginning late on Monday evening, the Russia's Roskomnadzor, or "Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications," issued a ban on all of Wikipedia after an entry was discovered about a type of hashish from India that reportedly included "instructions" on how to make it.

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It's not unheard of for companies, politicians, and other famous people to be caught making edits to their own Wikipedia pages in order to appear in a better light or hide information. But now it looks like the New York Police Department has tried its hand at the Wikipedia censorship game, as edits to entries about several instances of police shootings and brutality from the last year have been traced to NYPD computers. Among the edits have been changes meant to be favorable to the officers, as well as requests to delete certain passages.

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The NSA may be used to lurking in the shadows and quietly reading our emails, but the ACLU and Wikimedia Foundation aren't willing to let them stay that way, filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the government agency's actions. The suit, filed today in the US District Court for the District of Maryland, takes issue with NSA "upstream" surveillance which, it's argued, needlessly and intrusively gathers huge quantities of text-based messages sent and received by innocent people. That, the ACLU insists, is an infringement of both First and Fourth Amendment rights, among other things.

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Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that can be seen as both one of the most impressive collections of human knowledge, available to anyone, for free, as well as the first resource for students' last minute research when an assignment is due the next the morning. While the website runs on a non-profit model, asking for users' donations regularly, one town in Poland has gone above and beyond to show their gratitude by having a physical monument built.

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Bitcoin may be variously misunderstood and mistrusted by financial regulators, but users of the virtual currency are clearly also Wikipedia fans, if the first batch of donation numbers are anything to go by. The Wikimedia Foundation only began accepting bitcoin a week ago, but according to payment provider The Coinbase, the non-profit organization behind the editable-by-all encyclopedia has already raised more than $140,000.

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