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."

Stop Spying on Wikipedia Users; New York Times, 3/10/15

Jimmy Wales and Lila Tretikov, New York Times; Stop Spying on Wikipedia Users:

"TODAY, we’re filing a lawsuit against the National Security Agency to protect the rights of the 500 million people who use Wikipedia every month. We’re doing so because a fundamental pillar of democracy is at stake: the free exchange of knowledge and ideas.

Our lawsuit says that the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance of Internet traffic on American soil — often called “upstream” surveillance — violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects the right to privacy, as well as the First Amendment, which protects the freedoms of expression and association. We also argue that this agency activity exceeds the authority granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Congress amended in 2008."

Online, the Lying Is Easy: In ‘Virtual Unreality,’ Charles Seife Unfriends Gullibility; New York Times, 7/1/14

[Book Review of Charles Seife's VIRTUAL UNREALITY: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It’s True?] Dwight Garner, New York Times; Online, the Lying Is Easy: In ‘Virtual Unreality,’ Charles Seife Unfriends Gullibility:

"Mr. Seife’s new book, “Virtual Unreality,” is about how digital untruths spread like contagion across our laptops and smartphones. The author is unusually qualified to write on this subject, and not merely because his surname is nearly an anagram for “selfie.”

A professor of journalism at New York University, Mr. Seife is a battle-scarred veteran of the new info wars. When Wired magazine wanted to investigate the ethical lapses of its contributor Jonah Lehrer, for example, it turned to Mr. Seife, whose report pinned Mr. Lehrer, wriggling, to the plagiarism specimen board...

In “Virtual Unreality,” Mr. Seife delivers a short but striding tour of the many ways in which digital information is, as he puts it in a relatively rare moment of rhetorical overkill, “the most virulent, most contagious pathogen that humanity has ever encountered.”...

One of Mr. Seife’s bedrock themes is the Internet’s dismissal, for good and ill, of the concept of authority. On Wikipedia, your Uncle Iggy can edit the page on black holes as easily as Stephen Hawking can. Serious reporting, another form of authority, is withering because it’s so easy to cut and paste facts from other writers, or simply to provide commentary, and then game search engine results so that readers find your material first."

[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."