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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The recent deaths of prominent and inspirational personalities have probably led to the awareness of the brevity of life and of people's memories. In that light, this new WikiVIP project tries to improve the growing body of knowledge in Wikipedia by injecting voice clips of these notable people for present and future generations to cherish and remember.
A German court has ruled that the Wikimedia Foundation is responsible for content contained in Wikipedia articles, which any third-party can alter. Though the Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart has held the foundation liable in its ruling, it does not require Wikimedia to fact-check articles before they are made live, which would have resulted in a substantial burden given the vast size of Wikipedia and relatively small size of the Foundation.
If you use the Internet, at one time or another, you've probably used Wikipedia even if you didn't realize it. For instance, if you ask Siri on your iPhone a question it often it pulls little tidbits of information from Wikipedia and other software platforms do the same thing. The problem with Wikipedia is that many of its entries are questionable and the staff of volunteers who maintain the site is on the decline.
Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales is no stranger to voicing his opinion, and has done such this week in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. During the talk, Wales discussed the issue of censorship, focusing extensively on China and saying that he'd rather Wikipedia not be available in the nation rather than having the website bow to demands of censorship.
Wikipedia has launched its first location-based feature for mobile readers, Wikipedia Nearby, which pulls up articles related to your current position. Described as the learning equivalent of services like Yelp, which show nearby coffee shops and entertainment, Wikipedia Nearby sifts through historic sites, parks, museums, and other points of interest, and also allows the reader to add to them while on the move.
Wikipedia allows users to check out edits made to an article via its accompanying history page, which lists changes along with the date and time, IP address or username, and an edit summary. Such is a useful feature, providing essential information to the crowd-created and updated online encyclopedia. It doesn't, however, make it simple to see the big picture, and that is what two developers have partly changed via their open source project.
