Conspiracy videos? Fake news? Enter Wikipedia, the ‘good cop’ of the Internet; The Washington Post, April 6, 2018

Noam Cohen, The Washington Post; Conspiracy videos? Fake news? Enter Wikipedia, the ‘good cop’ of the Internet

"Although it is hard to argue today that the Internet lacks for self-expression, what with self-publishing tools such as Twitter, Facebook and, yes, YouTube at the ready, it still betrays its roots as a passive, non-collaborative medium. What you create with those easy-to-use publishing tools is automatically licensed for use by for-profit companies, which retain a copy, and the emphasis is on personal expression, not collaboration. There is no YouTube community, but rather a Wild West where harassment and fever-dream conspiracies use up much of the oxygen. (The woman who shot three people at YouTube’s headquartersbefore killing herself on Tuesday was a prolific producer of videos, including ones that accused YouTube of a conspiracy to censor her work and deny her advertising revenue.)

Wikipedia, with its millions of articles created by hundreds of thousands of editors, is the exception. In the past 15 years, Wikipedia has built a system of collaboration and governance that, although hardly perfect, has been robust enough to endure these polarized times."

[Podcast] 10 Years of Wikipedia; On the Media, 1/14/11

[Podcast] On the Media; 10 Years of Wikipedia:

"Wikipedia, the free, web-based, crowd-sourced, multi-lingual encyclopedia, turns 10 years old this month. Brooke talks to Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, about the challenges of maintaining an online democracy that doesn't descend into chaos, and also about what it's like to be targeted by Stephen Colbert's horde of vandals."