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Everyone’s a Critic: Manson Family Murderer Tex Watson Doesn’t Like His...
It’s not so weird for a prominent figure to solicit changes to their Wikipedia entry. After all, Wikipedia is the only reference website of its profile, thanks in no small part to its ubiquity in...
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Wikipedia is Not Therapy, but it Has its Benefits
That Wikipedia can be a toxic environment is not lost on many editors who’ve stuck around awhile, and likely even fewer who decide to walk away from the project. Wikipedia has rules—mandatory policies,...
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InstallAware Unaware, or, How Not to Create a Wikipedia Entry About Your Company
Unless you are a member of the small fellowship of netizens who keep a Google News search for “Wikipedia” bookmarked, chances are you missed out on a truly strange but totally real press release last...
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A Note on Wikimania 2016, and a Small Request
View from the road to Esino Lario. (Ed Erhart, CC-BY-SA-4.0) At this very moment, Wikimedians are traveling from all over the world to attend Wikimania, the annual conference for Wikipedia and its...
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All I Really Needed to Know I Learned Editing Wikipedia
Ten years ago today, I created a Wikipedia account for the very first time, and made a few small edits that I probably would not make exactly the same way in 2016. For those who know about my...
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Gene Weingarten Proves Wikipedia Still Needs a Better Way to Deal With Feedback
Wikipedia has two kinds of problems. The first category includes problems it recognizes and realizes how to fix, sometimes through a policy change but more often, in recent years especially, by...
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The Top Ten Wikipedia Stories of 2016
2016 was a hell of a year. In matters of war and peace, politics and governance, arts and celebrity culture—not to mention unexpected crossovers among them—it was a year that seemed to come off the...
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#1Lib1Ref and Adventures in Practical Encyclopedia-Building
The Wikipedian has long been of the opinion, perhaps controversial on Wikipedia, that it is a mistake to think that it can recruit the entire world to become Wikipedia editors. Yet this is the premise...
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What’s the Truth, What’s the Use?On Wikipedia and the Daily Mail
Earlier this week, Wikipedia editors decided to restrict the use of a publication as a source for information in its articles, and then a funny thing happened: it made international news. First The...
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Does WikiTribune Even Stand a Chance?
Almost four years ago, Jimmy Wales stood before an audience of Wikipedians at the 2013 Wikimania conference in Hong Kong, delivering his annual keynote address. Mere weeks had passed since former NSA...
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What You Missed at Wikimania 2017
N.B. At the end of this post I’ve embedded a Spotify playlist for the delightful 2006 album “Trompe-l’oeil” by the Francophone Montreal indie rock band Malajube. It’s what I was listening to as I...
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The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2017
Every year since 2010, The Wikipedian has delivered a roundup of the most interesting events, trends, situations, occasions, and general goings-on that marked the foregoing year on Wikipedia and in the...
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Why Aren’t There More Wikipedia Editors?
Why do some people contribute to Wikipedia? Conversely, why don’t others? Ever since Wikipedia became a self-aware community, this question has vexed those who participate in it, and would like to see...
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The Top Ten Wikipedia Stories of 2018
Were you exhausted by 2018? If not, then The Wikipedian doesn’t know what year you just lived in. The continued crises in Western democracies, ongoing wars in the Middle East, embrace of...
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What Happened to CongressEdits? The Thrilling Life and Untold Death of...
Wikipedia and Twitter are very different internet platforms, but parallels can be found if you look closely enough (as The Wikipedian did a few years back). One important commonality is bots written by...
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The Top Ten Wikipedia Stories of 2019
This blog post marks the tenth consecutive year this website has contemplated the most important events, trends, and phenomena affecting Wikipedia and the wider Wikimedia community over the prior...
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Wikipedia’s Front Page Needs a Dedicated Section to Inform Readers About...
Update: as of 5pm ET on Monday, March 16, the front page has one: Original post continues below. The front page of Wikipedia is visited millions of times every day and hundreds of millions...
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How Wikipedia is Covering the Coronavirus Pandemic
Words fail to capture the significance of the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic: the suffering of the disease’s victims, the pain of their loved ones, and the frustrations of those otherwise...
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How Wikipedia Has Responded to the George Floyd Protests
“There are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where decades happen” is an old and likely apocryphal quote attributed to V.I. Lenin. It’s been popular throughout the tumultuous and...
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The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2020
It’s no overstatement to say that 2020 was a year where everything changed. Since March, ubiquitous semi-ironic references to the “Before Times” have served to euphemize the unfathomable. To date,...
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