Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/In the media
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In the media
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In brief
![Ban Comic Sans sticker](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/be/Bancomicsans.png/220px-Bancomicsans.png)
![Justin Knapp](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/Justin_Anthony_Knapp-1.jpg/220px-Justin_Anthony_Knapp-1.jpg)
![Jack Evans (D.C. politician)](https://cdn.statically.io/img/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/Jackevansdc.jpg/220px-Jackevansdc.jpg)
- More articles on Antarctica than Egypt: Joseph Stromberg, in an article covering Wikipedia's geographical imbalance in article coverage on Vox.com (September 14), reported on the January 21, 2014 Oxford Internet Institute study, "Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty."
- Learning to hate Comic Sans: In a digest of the typeface Wikipedia article in The A.V. Club (September 15), Mike Vago wrote about typography's millennium old East Asian roots, the accelerated changes in typography over the last 65 years, the legal thickets necessitating that publishing houses hire font lawyers, the comic book supervillain named Typeface, and the wide-spread loathing for and misuse of the Comic Sans typeface.
- Most prolific editor: "Wikipedia is stronger than people realize": Gus Lubin interviewedJustin Knapp for the Business Insider (September 19). Justin Knapp was the first editor to contribute more than one million edits to Wikipedia. In the interview, he puts his achievement in perspective as part of a larger collaboration.
“ | In terms of sheer numbers, there are only a couple of users which have near as many as me but the actual edit count is not as important as the quality. In that sense, many users have surpassed me. There are plenty of edits I make that have low value individually but you add them up and it makes the encyclopedia better. Other users put forth significant effort on a few edits that are very valuable individually. The thing that makes this project function is everyone doing their part. I'm impressed by anyone who puts forth serious, scholarly effort and freely shares that knowledge with the world, such as my late friend Adrianne Wadewitz. I am also particularly grateful to the software developers who make the back end structure of MediaWiki possible because they have skills that I entirely lack. | ” |
- Unsuccessful DC Mayoral candidate may have edited own biography: In the Loose Lips column from the Washington City Paper (September 19), Will Sommer concluded that email received by Jack Evans, who represents Ward 2 on the Council of the District of Columbia, was addressed by Wikipedia <no-reply-notifications@wikipedia.org> to the email address associated with a Wikipedia account whenever someone edited the Jack Evans (D.C. politician) article. Independently, this was also a topic on the Wikipedia Conflict of interest Noticeboard. The editor in question repeatedly removed information that was unflattering to the Councilman and unsuccessful Washington, DC Mayoral candidate.
Brief notes
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes our new administrators,
- Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones this week:
Discuss this story
in Brief/More articles on Antarctica than Egypt
I do really wonder, why someone starts a study like this, because the results were quite predictable. The comparison "Antartica" (a continent, a topic of relevance for all humans) and egypt, a mid-sized country with few inhabitable lands, which ist not of worldwide interest (at least apart from it history/sites of touristical interest) is questionable. The study seems not to mention, that Wikipedia has no policy of "uniform coverage of all topics" at all. So the results do not mean anything "negative" concerning WP. Its a simple fact, that countries with low internet access with respect to numbers and band with, countries where many people have to work all day for their live support, will create rather few articles. WP relies on reliable sources. In the counties of the "third world" those are often sparse or absent. The personal interest of editing or creating articles tends not to be the same for different developed countries too. - Andy king50 (talk) 19:02, 3 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]