| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Wikipedia news

Page history last edited by Mahrukh Khan 10 years, 6 months ago

 Look for news articles, blog posts or academic articles about Wikipedia in other languages, providing interesting points of view or news events. (Or look at how certain groups view Wikipedia - LGBT community, librarians, PR-agencies, etc). Mention a link below, and write a brief summary of the article (no need to translate), and feel free to comment about why you found it interesting. Let's try to gather as many different viewpoints as possible before the next class.

 

I've started, and I chose Russian, because I'm in the process of learning it (with some patience, and some help from Google translate, it was fun - feel free to challenge yourself in a language you're not fluent in). I found a few different news clips:

 


 The PR-company of the oligarch Alisher Usmanov deleted facts about him from Wikipedia

Alishev Usmanov trying to hide his criminal past

 

The owner of Arsenal, and a Russian oligarch, had his PR agency RLM-Finsbury anonymously edit his page, taking away all mention of his criminal records, and the disappearance of the wife of a former shareholder, who had a dispute with his company. 

 

I checked his article in English and Russian Wikipedia. English WP page mentions controversy. Russian WP page adds that Arsenal sent a detective to investigate his past for half a year, but could not come to any conclusions, because the Uzbek government did not collaborate. 

 


Requiem for Poltavchenko. Wikipedia to "bury" the Governor of St. Petersburg

 

Georgy Poltavchenko is the governor of St. Petersburg, and his death was falsely announced on his Wikipedia-page. According to the government, he was only on vacation, but remembering how it was in totalitarian Russian, many citizens feared that it was true, and that the government was hiding it until they could find a replacement, to avoid chaos. 

 


 Wikipedia and Russian politics

 

The article (with a tongue-in-cheek) measures the influence of Russian politicians according to how many languages have Wikipedia-articles about them. They start with the mayoral candidates for Moscow elections (just a few weeks ago), where the blogger and anti-corruption activist Navalny has the most pages. Zyuganov (well-known far-right politician) and Kasparov (chess player and political activist) have lot's of articles, but the article also lists many Russian politicians who have a lot of power in Russia, but are not mentioned in any foreign language articles.

 

They also compare Putin's standing (134) with Obama (202), as well as former Russian/USSR presidents Gorbachev (104), Yeltsin (94), Khrushchev (86), Nicholas II ( 77), Brezhnev (76), Stalin (137) and Lenin (144)


US senate accused of insulting Snowden through Wikipedia

An anonymous user of Wikipedia edited Edward Snowden's article, and replaced "American dissident" with traitor. It turns out that the IP address making the edit belongs to the US Senate. 

 

My comment: I tried searching for Wikipedia and a few different things in Russian - corruption, Moscow mayoral election (that just happened), and Edward Snowden, thinking that these would be interesting topics. Some of the articles I found were either republished from English sources, or were things I had heard of internationally. Others were similar incidents, with a Russian twist (it's popular in media to write about people who are accidentally "killed off" by Wikipedia, but the link to the Soviet Union tradition of hiding leaders' health conditions was interesting), and I enjoyed the article measuring Russian influence through articles in other languages... I couldn't see a US newspaper doing that, they might think that English is all that matters?

 

What can you come up with? Post below!

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

By: Meara Hurtig

 

I thought it would prove difficult finding different content on the same wikipedia page! As it turns out, the main page of wikipedia is different in French than in English. 

English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page 

French: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Accueil_principal 

Why so different? Well apparently people who speak french do not care as much about "Squeeze", is the third episode of the first season of the American science fiction television seriesThe X-Files, premiering on September 24, 1993" as they do about new generation computers from Macintosh and how this new technology is being exploited. The front pages display completely different information, including political news. In English, there is much more content about China, but in French the focus is on their own political happenings (did you know there was a federal election on September 22nd? Me neither!) The English page is much longer as well, but it offers LESS information on wikipedia itself in comparison to the French version. Perhaps English-speaking users are more familiar with the site? Something else that is very interesting is the fact that "participation" on wikipedia is advertised on the French main page, while in English it is not. When I looked into the data, it seems as though there is MORE editing done by French-speaking wikipedia users than English (in terms of ratio, not the total number). 

 

The "news" section in French includes quite a bit of Canadian content, leading to me conclude that French-speaking users are divided between countries, just as english-speaking users! But I would guess that there are fewer countries that utilize the French site than the English site, as English is one of the most spoken languages world-wide. It's exciting that Canadian news is even mentioned on a main page- sadly it does not make the cut on the English main page. 

 

To note: the picture of the day on the french version ("Les Parapluies") is way more artsy than the english version (an image of a crab).

 


 

Here are some interesting articles that I [Chantel] found! :D

 

http://www.prensa.com/uhora/tecnologia/wikipedia-editores-investigacion-eu-panama/148726

 

This is an article from one of Panama's top news sources called La Prensa. It talks about how  a study confirms that Wikiepdia is losing editors in the english language rather than gaining. I found this interesting because with the popularization of wikipedia recently, you would think that the amount of editors and collaboraters would be increasing rather than decreasing.

 

A study directed by Aaron Halfaker of the University of Minesota shows that number of collobraters or editors has reduced from 56 million in 2007 to 35 million by the end of 2012. The research concluded that this is due to 2 reasons: the rise of automated programs and also the fact that some editors may be discoruaged by the structure of the page.

 

So basically, the wikepedia community made changes in order to improve the quality and consistency due to the reality of massive growth in participation but this ended up back-firing because it actually reduced the growth of participants. The Research says that while wikipedia attempted to remove its most "incompetent" editors, it also discouraged the newcomers.

 

http://www.prensa.com/impreso/mundo/wikipedia-%C2%B4anuncia%C2%B4-asesinato-de-ministro/134943

 

Something not new to Wikipedia, infact it probably happens several times a year (this is just my guess); it falsely announced the death of the Mexican Government Secretary of State Alejandro Poire at the hands of the criminal group los zetas

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

http://alimbukad.com/2008/02/21/wikimperyo/

(A Filipino blog)

 

According to Añonuevo, whoever wishes to contribute to the website has to adhere to Wikipedia’s rules, which represents the West. Wikipedia is only favorable to countries where intellectuals are ubiquitous and where citizens have easy access to computers/internet. However this is not the case for countries like the Philippines who may not have qualified contributors and literate readers.

 

Wikipedia may claim that it presents unbiased and objective information, holding that its editors genuinely care about sharing the right information. This is not the case for Wikipedia Tagalog as it does not have the ability to express the real conditions of the country through Tagalog as its contents are only translated from English (not originally written in Tagalog), far from the traditional, literary Tagalog that our ancestors used. These vague and simplistic translations contribute to the destruction of the language. Moreover, not all Filipinos are as patriotic as the Americans regarding the use of their own language and therefore can easily be controlled by powerful states and corporations, thus losing their identity.

 

Filipinos turning a blind eye on Wikipedia does not necessarily mean acceptance. It may mean opposition against the use of new, Western technology. In response to all these issues, the Philippines has to have an alternative website for Filipinos, a website that only Filipinos can utilize in their own language that offers something Wikipedia and Yahoo cannot.

 

My comment: I honestly had a hard time looking for an article in pure Tagalog as educated Filipinos are bilingual and often use either English or “Tag-lish” in articles/blogs. I found this article interesting because the author made me realize that almost every Filipino article/news nowadays (at least online) is either republished from English sources or written in English for international readers, not for the majority of poor Filipinos who cannot understand English. Cultural homogenization? I guess so.

 

Sydney Tan

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

http://www.jutarnji.hr/jimmy-wales--srbi-i-hrvati-ne-smiju-imati-odvojene-wikipedije/1126205/

(Croatian daily news)

 

This article is about the controversy of Wikipedia Croatia. Essentially, there are two different versions of Wikipedia for the same language (just different letter): one for Serbia and one for Croatia. The Croatia Wikipedia is unapologetically far-right and nationalistic where some revisions are blatantly bias and have created false histories. The administrators of the Croatian Wikipedia have blocked editors the right to change and edit the content.

The Minister of Science, Education and Sports has condemned this falsification and blockage. He has also urged students not to use Wikipedia Croatia and instead use the English version. Jimmy Wales co-founder of Wikipedia commented on the seriousness of the situation and agreed with the minister. He explained that the proper authorities and editors will be contacted.

 

My thoughts: I found this article very interesting for a variety of reasons. For starters, I did not know that administrators had the ability to block editors – I thought that instead an ‘edit war’ would ensue. This is extremely problematic in that the administrators have the ability to create and disseminate knowledge, with power over other users. This hierarchical nature goes against the visions of a participatory and networked society. It shows another example that physical access to ICT is not the only limitation and the internet is far from an equal playing field.

Interestingly, the Minister was insistent that students not use the Croatian version of the site but rather the English version. He states the openness and reliability of Wikipedia Croatia as a knowledge source has been discredited but the English version still remains intact. He explained that the extreme right wing minority group has usurped the right to produce knowledge on the world’s most widely used encyclopedia. The issues of neutrality regarding languages are called into question; why is English seen as a neutral source of knowledge but Croatian is not? How are Croatian administrators able to have power on a medium that is dedicated to collaborative and open source knowledge?  Does it mean that very few people are using Wikipedia Croatia and they are able to exploit this to their advantage?

 

 

 

Jennifer Trinder 
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES IN WIKIPEDIA 

http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-5213496

 

(Martes 21 de febrero de 2012) ( Tuesday 21 of september 2012)

 

     This is an article from Colombia's top news paper called El Tiempo. The article describes the effort that has been made by a university in Argentina to incorporate Indigenous languages into wikipedia. The article highlights that is effort is part of a program to fight against the extinction of this native languages. Interestingly enough the effort has been quite successful and contacts have also been made in Bolivia to incorporate articles in the native language of the people in that country.

 

     According to the article there are: 

      1.500 articles in guaraní

      1.700 Articles in aymara

     16.000 articles in quechua

 

     I find this article intriguing because it poses a counter argument to the idea that technology is a threat to indigenous cultures and cultural diversity. The efforts to use wikipedia as a way to incorporate and revive indigenous culture in todays world is extremely interesting.    

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

This is a page about Wikipedia itself in Hindi, the dominant language used in India. Although I can speak and understand Hindi very well, I can not read it ( unless of course it is in English phonetics ) 

I was extremely surprised by the immense amount of information on Wikipedia in Hindi. Moreover as proof to the point that I had made in one of our interactive debates about internet access ( Wikipedia )  being an advantage to third world countries. There is a specific area dedicated to the debate about whether or not Wikipedia is a reliable source of information or not, hence building on the point of Wikipedia would necessarily be the first choice to obtain information from. Needless to say that the sub-heading before this explains Wikipedia's free to edit nature and so on and so forth. I believe the Hindi used to type this article is far to Shudh (pure) for translation. 

Interestingly enough, the articles and forums cited are all in English, although translated to Hindi, the links when i clicked them are all English websites. To my astonishment one of the links were Italian ! 

This brought up the interesting question of : are the editors on Wikipedia predominantly  native speakers of that particular language, or are they individuals who know it as a second hand language ?

 

The beauty of all this is that culture and language are so innately bound to one another, yet the diversity of sources for this article shows how language has no boundaries.

 

http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%95%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%A1%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE

 

-Jazba    

 

 

 


 

 

www.novilist.hr/Vijesti/Hrvatska/Jovanovic-Djeco-ne-baratajte-hrvatskom-Wikipedijom-jer-su-sadrzaji-falsificirani

 

This article, from the Croatian website novelist.hr, discusses the Croatian government’s concern with the trend of political organizations writing and editing wiki entries on Croatian history, politics, and important social issues in a right winged fashion.  The Croatian Minister of Science, Education and Sports, Zeljko Jovanovic, is asking students to disregard Croatian Wikipedia in favor of what he views as  more reliable sources like English Wikipedia, until the matter has been cleared up. 

 

What I find interesting about this article is it demonstrates the complex issues that freedom of information often conjures up. Is this a case of the source of the information being the issue, or the context of the entries being a problem?  I do not know enough about Croatian politics to comment on the validity of Jovanovic’s concerns. If this is just a case of the government trying to silence political opposition through slander. But what I have gathered from the comment section of the article, Croatian wiki entries and related news reports is that some of the entries are promoting homophobic and xenophobic rightwinged agendas.  But I am not sure if those posts are related to the posts that the Croatian government is concerned with.

 

Stephen Bloom

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 http://resolver.scholarsportal.info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/resolve/15322882/v62i0010/1899_cbiwcofp

 

I chose a formal academic journal that is published by the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in October of 2011. The title of the article is “Cultural Bias in Wikipedia Content on Famous Persons”, and is written by two professors who study Interactive media, and information science.

 

As we all know, Wikipedia was originally US-based, as it allowed public to edit the content, this encyclopedia now has versions in many languages and multiple perspectives on one subject. For this assignment, I wanted to find an article that deals with how neutral and balanced is the coverage of entries in different languages, in regards to controversial issues.  This article that I found, identifies the presence of cultural bias in famous persons in Wikipedia despite its policy that advocates a strict neutral point of view (NPOV). This study examines the extent to which content and perspectives vary across cultures by comparing about the famous persons in the Polish and English editions of Wikipeida. They analyzed 60 entries that ranges from family, education to nationality, life adversities, and further romance life styles in Wikipedia, and it revealed quantitative and qualitative differences in entries in the different language versions related to the different histories, cultures and values of Poland and the United States. They found that monolingual Polish and English readers would get different amounts and kinds of information about famous people through Wikipedia, and that both versions incorporate cultural bias to some extent. 

I summarized the results for what they found in the entries according to subject nationality:

While Famous Americans overall receive more positive coverage, as well as being more associated with personal relationships, romance, and democracy, famous Poles receive more balanced coverage (more mentions of adversity), as well as more mentions of nationality, career controversies, and communism. Also, entries about Americans in Polish have many mentions of American democracy, and the articles written by Poles for Polish readers contents much reflect what Poles find interesting about famous Americans.

Furthermore, there are differences relating to language version:

- • English language entries have more references and external links, as well as an overall more positive tone, a greater diversity of information, and more mentions of controversy. They also tend to be longer than Polish language entries.

• Polish language entries are more likely to include information about professional accomplishments and personal life only, without mentioning other types of information.

 

 

- Diana Lee- Diana Lee's Page

 


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charte_des_valeurs_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9coises

 This article is about the Bloc Quebecois charter of values. The bill is an attempt to remove visible religious symbols from the public sphere, the bill has a slight majority support among Quebecois Francophones but the non Francophones are largely against it. This is why i thought it would be interesting to contrast the French and English versions of the article. The French version is largely more even as far as noting instances of individuals who agree and disagree with the bill. The ending of the French version even notes that there was a march in Montreal in support of the bill. The English version makes no note of this march, it largely details the nationwide opposition to the bill and highlights comments by Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau that criticize the bill. It also highlights an anecdote of a woman in an Islamic veil being publicly accosted by someone who was a proponent of the bill. The English version paints the bill and its supporters as borderline racist while and frames the supporters as a relatively small group of extremists. The French version clearly shows two sides to the story and leans toward support of the bill, even at time rationalizing it.  The fact that this issue is significantly divided along cultural and language based lines made it an interesting comparison. It was a lesson in the non neutrality of Wikipedia, the influence of personal beliefs and views on what should be academic entries. 

 

-Jeff Nwagbo

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.katturai.com/?p=4022

 

I found this article on Tamil Wikipedia (http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia) which talks about a Tamil editor from India receiving award for the best web Tamil editor. This article was written fully in Tamil. I am able to read, write and speak Tamil fluently. I was able to understand this Article fully in Tamil. What is more interesting is that there were no errors that I found and it makes clear sense unlike some translation articles. The editor that was mentioned in this article is M. Subramaniyam and he gave a brief speech about what is Wikipedia, Wikipedia in other languages, Wikipedia in Tamil, why Wikipedia in Tamil Nadu (State in India) is still undeveloped, why is there not much awareness about Tamil Wikipedia among the Tamils and are there any future plans within Tamil Nadu to bring this awareness.

This article was very interesting because for any Tamil person that doesn't know what is Wikipedia and where it stands in our Tamil society today, this article will give clear sense about it. I was happy to find that the first Tamil Wikipedia page was created by a Srilankan man Mr. E. Mayuranathan although Tamil is one of the primary languages in India.  Most interesting part is when he describes the reasoning as to why Tamil Wikipedia still holds less awareness among Tamils. He brings up the issue of Indian organizations failing to promote Wikipedia vs promoting Face book which earns profit though advertisement. To be honest, I was not aware of Tamil Wikipedia, although I am in a developed country where I have unlimited access to Wikipedia and fluent in Tamil. This article made me realize the truth about how today's young generation are neglecting the Tamil Language. Wikipedia is truly a resource for current and future Tamil Generation.

 

-Yalini Ilangeswaran-

 



http://www.seoul.co.kr/news/newsView.php?id=20130802009012

 

Above article talks about the implementation of Wiki in the training government officials/employees by creating a website particularly for the training purposes.  The Wiki would be available to everyone with internet access. The process would begin by government officials and/or employees posting about the new and existing regulations, by-laws, or any new changes that the government is trying to enforce, and then the working employees, trainees, citizens or any others who are interested and wish to contribute would follow up the posts with their views or make amends. What draws attention to the new government wiki is that it is a multi-directional, collective intelligence rather than a one-way information. As the intention of this website is to train the government employees or of those who wish to become one, it is expected that they would be able to gather collective and updated data that reflects fairly large population. 

 

By Hannah Song

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%94%BF%E5%BA%9C%E9%96%93%E6%B0%A3%E5%80%99%E8%AE%8A%E5%8C%96%E5%B0%88%E9%96%80%E5%A7%94%E5%93%A1%E6%9C%83

 

This news is talks about a group called Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under United Nation (UN) and intergovernmental organization, which is formed in 1988 by world meteorological Organization (WMO) and UN environmental programme . The IPCC is will not doing research on human activities which will affect the climate change, the IPCC is focus on taking action on United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change. For example in 1997 IPCC helped countries signed Kyoto Protocol in Tokyo Japan.

 

Hosang Ching  

 



 

I found an article in Tagalog (Filipino) about Renato Corona, the 23rd Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines. The article was written in January of 2012 and claimed that the Wikipedia page of Renato Corona used very negative language and gave a biased tone towards the former Chief Justice. The article is titled "Corona binaboy sa Wikipedia". This translates to Corona trash-talked on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page apparently used descriptions like "Thief Justice" and "Illegally appointed". The Wikipedia page then ended with "The people are hoping for his impeachment at the Senate impeachment trial."

 

As I was reading this article, I felt that the author or the news page was defending Renato Corona. It was really attacking Wikipedia for failing to be a "neutral" source. This reminded me of the Neutral Point of View that Jimmy Wales spoke about in the TED Talk we saw a couple of weeks ago. He emphasized that anytime there is a controversial issue, Wikipedia does not take a stand on the issue but instead just report the views of opposing parties. As I was reading this article, I wanted to learn more about why there was such a negative perspective on Renato Corona so I went onto the current Wikipedia Page. As I was reading this current page, I did feel a very negative emotion towards Corona's career as a chief justice but there was less of a bias in comparison to what the article described. 

 

I then decided to go to the update history of the wikipedia page and "Thief Justice" was included in the 15:50, 3 January 2012 page. This brings up the question again, of who controls wikipedia? Where does the real power the distribution of knowledge lie? Is there such thing as "neutrality" if the author of these pages inevitably have biased opinions? 

 

by Charmaine Ramirez 

... 


http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rep%C3%BAblica_Popular_China

 

I found it interesting because different language have different point of view on one topic. For example I search "China" in the Wikipedia, regarding the argument of whether Taiwan is belongs to PR China are various. In the English version, it mentions Taiwan is belongs to PRC and it mentions the reason that cause the argument of this is because of the unsolved civil war. In the Chinese Simplify version (which is the language used by mainland of China), it does not mention anything about the argument of whether Taiwan is belongs to China, it says Taiwan is one of the province of PRC. In the Chinese Complex version (mainly used in Hong Kong and Macau), it describe the situation of Taiwan and PRC which is China has never ever been united or disrupted, the connection between PRC and Taiwan is closer than before. In the Spanish version, it does not mention the argument whether Taiwan belongs to PRC, instead it describe it as the result of disruption between two parties after World War II.

 

Peihua Guan


 

When I search up news about Wikipedia, it seems that the Chinese Media doesn't have much news about it, I supposed it is because it is a North American website, so not a lot of people uses it in China. Therefore, I found several news about Wikipedia itself and also as well as the founder of it. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger who worked together and launched Wikipedia at 2001.

http://baike.baidu.com/view/828001.htm

This link above is from Baidu Baike, which is something very similar to Wikipedia but in Chinese.

http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%90%89%E7%B1%B3%C2%B7%E5%A8%81%E7%88%BE%E6%96%AF

This link above is from Wikipedia in Chinese.

 

Both links I provided above are biographies about Jimmy Wales, and something surprising I found is that both of them are exactly same. Although when you click on the menu bar at the left side for the wikipedia link, it will direct you to the English version of the biography of Jimmy Wales, but the content of them are different. The English version of the biography is longer and very detailed, but the Chinese version seems very short. Also what I noticed is that in English version of the biography, the content not only talked about how did Jimmy got inspired to create Wikipedia, but also talked about the achievements that he has gotten, while the Chinese version just generalized everything. I don't understand why the Chinese version of Jimmy's biography in baidu baike and wikipedia has the exact content, so I assumed that maybe one copied from another, and simply pasted it to the website due either laziness or lack of information about this person.

 

I am a little bit surprised because usually whenever we use something, we would always know the founder of the product, whether if it's reported in news or that we just heard it from someone. For example: When we talk about Apple, we will think of Steve Jobs; When we talk about Microsoft, we'll think of Bill Gates. But not only the Chinese media don't talk about Jimmy much, even the North American media don't even talk about him either. This find drew my attention to how much does Chinese media actually know about Jimmy or Wikipedia, since it is such a well known website that is used in North America, therefore I went to Baidu, which is the search engine similar to google that most Chinese people use, to search up news about wikipedia.

 

http://finance.qq.com/a/20130628/015538.htm

 

The link above is one of the slightly more interesting news I found out of the many. Most news I saw about Wikipedia are usually just describing what are the changes for the company in development, how convenient does wikipedia work and what's in it, and some translated news from foreign website. This link talks about how Jimmy is the founder of Wikipedia, but he is only a millionaire even though Wikipedia is such a well known website which has more clicks than more than 20 billion popular websites in the world. What I usually think is that, if someone is successful and created something that is so popular, the person must have be very rich and well known. But after these research I just realized, not only poor Jimmy is not well known to most of the people, he is also making a lot less money than all the other famous entrepreneurs. But I guess that is just how normal people like us would think, Jimmy is rich in his own way as he claims that "I am a person that receives a lot of information globally without spending any money", and in a modern world like nowadays information leads to fortune.

 

By:  Ma, ShiQi (Stephanie)

 

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I searched the history of Wikipedia in different versions: English website and Chinese website. I found it is interesting because the English version is much more detailed than the Chinese one. It focuses more on the background, founding and development of Wikipedia and even, it mentions the importance of evolution of the logo. What's more, it also provides a trend chart to demonstrate the increasing amount of articles that Wikipedia has so far. However,. the Chinese version has not mentioned those parts. As " Diaoyu Island" is a hot topic recently, the Chinese website lists a special column for the dispute about the correct name for this island. It says that in Japan, the island is called "senkaku" but in China, people call it "Diaoyu Island". So author had controversy when they were editing the article. The two websites do have the common part, which is timeline, both of them consider it as the most essential part to exhibit the history of Wikipedia.

The English version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia#Lawsuits

The Chinese version:

http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BB%B4%E5%9F%BA%E7%99%BE%E7%A7%91%E5%8E%86%E5%8F%B2

 

By: Yingwen Xu.

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Link: http://www.somewhereinblog.net/blog/bellayetblog/28962282

 

This is blog post written by a Bangladeshi blogger, who talks about the establishment of Bangla wikipedia over the last few years. He talks about  growth of bangla wikipedia from small scale to medium scale. Contents have been added over the years from 2007-2009 which led to its growth. However the contents added were either incomplete, insufficient or not from credible sources. Therefore instead of adding more content in Bangla the contributors decided to raise the standards of the contents and make them more reliable. The blogger very clearly shows these information graphically and has explained each graph too. He showed the increase in contributors and users of Bangla wikipedia and the size of the data base through bar graphs, that he found from the wikimedia website.

 

By: Mahrukh khan

 

Comments (6)

Stian Håklev said

at 8:22 pm on Sep 22, 2013

Hi Sydney, thanks a lot for sharing. I'd love to know more about the language situation in the Philippines -- are most news sources in English there? I know the situation in India is a bit similar - a lot of people go to school in English, and although they speak Hindi (or other local languages) every day, they don't often use them in more formal situations (academics, news, debate) - thus can find it hard to read a complicated article. I asked my Indian friends working for the same NGO in Varanasi when they had last read a book in Hindi - often the answer was: not since school... I also read an article once about translating OpenOffice to Nepali (which is close to Hindi), where the NGO spent a lot of time making sure all the terms for "save" "document" etc were proper Nepali words... But people complained that it was hard to use, because they hadn't seen those terms before...

Also interesting about the content of course! We'll probably cover this in more detail in class, there are definitively many issues with both the Wikipedia norms, the content, the sources, etc.

Sydney Tan said

at 9:04 pm on Sep 23, 2013

Well different social classes read different kinds of newspapers. English newspapers are more expensive which I believe is double or triple the price of tabloids written in Tagalog. From what I remember, they do not even use literary Tagalog. News on TV are in Tagalog, but English for cable TV subscribers. And yes, the situation is quite similar to that of India's. Everything is taught in English in schools, except of course in Filipino literature classes. In middle school teachers even made us pay one peso (=$0.025) per Tagalog word we speak within school premises. We were only allowed to speak English and Chinese (since I went to a trilingual school) or we would get in trouble. Despite all these enforcements I'm happy to have paid attention in my Filipino classes or I would have just blankly stared at this blog.

Stian Håklev said

at 8:23 pm on Sep 22, 2013

Hi Chantel, thanks for posting! I guess every country has their own "Wikipedia said someone famous is dead" story. Also interesting to see which stories are pretty similar around the world (or sometimes even reposted/translated from international media) -- the issue about declining participation in English Wikipedia has been discussed a lot -- and which are more local. For example, what is the participation rate for Spanish Wikipedia? Which countries are most active - what is the culture like?

Stian Håklev said

at 5:08 pm on Sep 23, 2013

Hi Tumaini and Jennifer, thanks for contributing. Please post a sentence or two about the link - part of the idea is that most of us don't speak those languages, and rely on you to help us out -- you don't need to translate the text, but let us know the gist, and why you found it interesting. Thanks!

Stian Håklev said

at 3:48 pm on Sep 25, 2013

Jazba, there are many others in your situation. There are actually some (imperfect) ways around it. One is to get the website transliterated into English phonetics automatically - if you go to http://switchit.quillpad.in/, and type in the URL of Wikipedia, and choose English, you can see the whole site transliterated... Here's an example:

vikipeediya sabhi vishyon par pramanik aur upyog, parivartan v punarvitran ke liye swatantr vishwakosh banane ka ek bahubhasheey prakalp hai yeh yathasambhav nishpaksh drishtikon wali suchna prasarit karne ke liye kritsankalp hai sarvpratham angreji vikipeediya janvari 2001 mein aarambh kiya gaya tha, aur hindi vikipeediya ka shubharambh julai 2003 mein hua sahayata prishth par jayen aur prayogasthal mein prayog karke dekhen ki aap swayam kisi lekh ko kaise parivartit kar sakte hain।

it's actually quite possible to understand. Another possibility is to use text-to-speech. If you paste the text into Google Translate, and translate from Hindi to Hindi, there is a little loudspeaker, which will read the text aloud. Of course not perfect, but better than nothing! :)

Stian Håklev said

at 11:41 pm on Sep 29, 2013

Peihua, could you provide links? There should not be a difference between the simplified and the traditional (complex) version - they are the same, using automatic conversion.

You don't have permission to comment on this page.