Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-01-29/In the media
Every view on the 25th anniversary of everything
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Nerd to nerd: Wikipedia's 25th anniversary
The anniversary of Wikipedia's founding (see previous Signpost coverage) brought several reflections in the media, from a variety of sources: Block Club Chicago [1], The Verge [2], Deutsche Welle [3] (video) possibly with AI narration?, Tom's Hardware [4], Scientific American [5], The San Francisco Standard [6], and Financial Times [7] (subscription required). Even Adland covered Wikimedia Foundation's own promotional outreach on the event is that a good thing?.
Maybe one of our favorites, though, was a Boston Globe piece that described the creators of Wikipedia – you and this author – as "hard-core nerds" (subscription required). – B
Baby Globe a hit
Creative Bloq likes the Baby Globe rolled out for the 25th Anniversary, calling it "worthy of a spot in the iconic brands hall of fame" and noting it was, fittingly, conceived by community volunteer Jonathan Ferreira. – B
How not to sound like an AI: AI plug-in tells AI how to avoid AI tells catalogued by Wikipedians
"The web's best guide to spotting AI writing has become a manual for hiding it", says Benj Edwards in Ars Technica. He's talking about Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing where there are a few dozen "tells" ranging from style, to content, to syntax. (The AI writing guide helps editors find the output of generative AI which may be objectionable for several reasons.) Unfortunately for us, the same guidance can be given to the AI model as a counter-example that it will then obligingly try to eliminate from its generated text. – B
PR firm "rewrites Wikipedia for governments and billionaires"
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism says Portland Communications "rewrites Wikipedia for governments and billionaires". More secondary coverage of the story came from The Guardian and Jerusalem Post.
The Signpost has covered institutional manipulation of Wikipedia before; see for example previous Signpost coverage at 2022 disinformation report concerning the Kremlin's activities and a 2023 report on an Indian billionaire's editing. – B
Latest ChatGPT version uses Grokipedia for certain queries, The Guardian says
Tests conducted by UK newspaper The Guardian seem to show ChatGPT repeating versions of reality concocted/imagined/framed/comprehended by Grokipedia (take your pick) in specific instances where it and Wikipedia disagree. The investigation included more than a dozen questions including "queries on political structures in Iran, such as salaries of the Basij paramilitary force and the ownership of the Mostazafan Foundation, and questions on the biography of Sir Richard Evans, a British historian and expert witness against Holocaust denier David Irving".
Is this a case of a cybernetic echo chamber/self-licking ice cream cone (take your pick)? – B
New AI training deal, same as the old license deal
Reuters reports on Wikimedia Enterprise's January 15 announcement of deals with Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. Earlier deals were also announced including Perplexity and Mistral AI. Reuters was careful not to characterize the deals as a new license, unlike articles in some other media which were later updated. The deals provide easier, structured mass access to large users of Wikipedia data for a fee, but the content has the same old free licenses. – S
In brief
- The logos that might have been: "These rejected Wikipedia logos are a '00s design time capsule" at Creative Bloq. Logos considered around the time of Wikipedia's inception included the Wikipede shown here, an Omni magazine-style font, and other imaginative designs. Wikipede was also shown on a Wikimedia Foundation Instagram, which was noted by Boing Boing.
- Newspaper publishes a one-minute video about a Wikipedia editor fighting short-form video content: See video from The Straits Times.
- Where are they?: "Where Are All the Women? Notability and Digital Discovery" (Smithsonian American Women's History Museum blog, Smithsonian Institution)
- Grokipedia better than Wikipedia? The International Business Times reports on what is already an old question, is either encyclopedia less biased or "better". IBT appears to think that the young challenger might win the fight. Could IBT be a reliable source? To its credit, IBT links to a two month old French video from France 24 (in English) that is closer to the main line consensus.
- 1.9 trillion pageviews: That's what Wikipedia has earned in the last decade according to research by Pew Research.
- Headed for trouble?: Stephen Harrison writes about a future where it is not guaranteed Wikipedia operates within "a society based on the rule of law, where a government agency would hear a legal argument in good faith rather than overriding it with power" in Wired [8], archive
- We concur, Concord: Concord Monitor goes deep on the edit history of Concord, New Hampshire and concludes "this weird project [Wikipedia] has flourished into something truly unique and useful".
- News doesn't need to look like news: Says Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab noting how various most-edited Wikipedia pages are tip-offs to trending newsy happenings [9]
- Unbelievably useful: New Scientist says (subscription required) "So the fact that a public encyclopaedia, editable by anyone, has become one of the most useful repositories of knowledge in the world is, frankly, unbelievable." It is included in a special issue covering "the 21 best ideas of the 21st century".
- Truth, or bullship?: "the Wikipedia page for the Ship of Theseus philosophical exercise has been edited so much, it does not contain any words or phrases from the original version of the article" claims PCGamer, following a post by Annie Rauwerda to the same effect a while ago. [10]
- Jimmy Wales prefers "a place with paragraphs" online: Wired
- CTO talks: CTO Selena Deckelmann talks to 404 Media on their podcast titled "How Wikipedia Will Survive in the Age of AI"
- 300,000 edits, 3,000 refs, 96 million views: The Daily Californian at UC Berkeley shows what one professor, teaching three courses, can do over nine years with the help of Wiki Education to document LGBTQ+ history.
Discuss this story
there is under-appreciation and too little recognition/awareness of how Wikipedia is used to learn about events and topics also covered in news but in a superior way. Where news make clickbait and long static articles, Wikipedia integrates lots of sources and most importantly generally keeps it as short as possible (the ref is linked if you'd like to know more). Little respect for people's time attention in the news imo and nearly no news outlets do the same, including when it comes to reports about findings from new scientific studies (sth I was particularly interested in and of special note since these then often mean some info in WP articles is outdated/deprecated or missing key info).