The Wikipedia Story | Ep 4 | Hoax

11/09/21 • 43 min

1 Listener

Pizzagate! Covid's made up! Trump really won! Cher's dead! We're ruled by lizards and Q rules all! Fake news, misinformation, or (to call a spade a spade) lies. We all know them. We've seen them around, on Twitter, Youtube, Reddit. But how does Wikipedia deal with breaking news and hoaxes? How do the editors sift the believable from the bull? Many lies get caught. But some manage to slip through the net and onto the page, where they take root and burst into seed in ways we can't imagine.

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Previous Episode

The Wikipedia Story | Ep 3 | Moving The Needle

Have you noticed anything about most of the Wikipedians we've met so far? One little thing they all have in common? Katie has. We've only heard two women. Two women and eight men. That's not great, but it's normal. There are deep, systemic problems with Wikipedia: 90% of editors are male, and they're overwhelmingly white. Only 5.5% of all articles on Wikipedia are to do with the entire continent of Africa. So Katie's asking, why? What does this mean for the 'sum total of all human knowledge'? And can anything be done?

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Next Episode

The Wikipedia Story | Ep 5 | Wikimania

Katie's been in this world, this weird and wacky Wikiverse, for about six months now. But there's one thing she still doesn't understand. Wikipedia's more than just a URL, a web page on your screen. It's a community where people form a deep connection with the world...right? But when the power's switched off and the screen goes black, does that bond stay put or does it flicker and disappear? In this episode, Katie's taking you somewhere she hopes to find the answer. She imagines what it's like to be at Wikimania, the annual wiki conference, where the dots are connected between your username and your face, and the strength of that bond is tested in the real world.

The clips used in this episode are from Wikimedia Commons and are published under the Creative Commons License. No changes we made. Wikimania 2015 - Jimmy Wales - State of the wiki (cc-by-sa-3.0, author: Wikimedia México); Wikimania 2018 - Closing Session (cc-by-sa-3.0, author: Wikimedia Foundation).

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