Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it sta... - 0 views
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After Jason Moore, from Portland, Oregon, saw headlines from national news sources on Google News about the Buffalo shooting at a local supermarket on Saturday afternoon, he did a quick search for the incident on Wikipedia. When no results appeared, he drafted a single sentence: "On May 14, 2022, 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York." He hit save and published the entry on Wikipedia in less than a minute.
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That article, which as of Friday has been viewed more than 900,000 times, has since undergone 1,071 edits by 223 editors who've voluntarily updated the page on the internet's free and largest crowdsourced encyclopedia.
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In the middle of breaking news, when people are searching for information, some platforms can present more questions than answers. Although Wikipedia is not staffed with professional journalists, it is viewed as an authoritative source by much of the public, for better or for worse. Its entries are also used for fact-checking purposes by some of the biggest social platforms, adding to the stakes and reach of the work from Moore and others.
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"Editing Wikipedia can absolutely take an emotional toll on me, especially when working on difficult topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and other disasters," he said.
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"I want to direct people to something that is going to provide them with much more reliable information at a time when it's very difficult for people to understand what sources they can trust."
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"It is considered cool if you're the first person who creates an article, especially if you do it well with high-quality contributions," said Rasberry.
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To help patrol incoming edits and predict misconduct or errors, Wikipedia -- like Twitter -- uses artificial intelligence bots that can escalate suspicious content to human reviewers who monitor content.
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Rasberry, who also wrote the Wikipedia page on the platform's fact checking processes, said Wikipedia does not employ paid staff to monitor anything unless it involves "strange and unusual serious crimes like terrorism or real world violence, such as using Wikipedia to make threats, plan to commit suicide, or when Wikipedia itself is part of a crime.
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Rasberry said flaws range from a geographical bias, which is related to challenges with communicating across languages; access to internet in lower and middle income countries; and barriers to freedom of journalism around the world.
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"I've got many other editors that I'm working with who will back me, so when we encounter vandalism or trolls or misinformation or disinformation, editors are very quick to revert inappropriate edits or remove inappropriate content or poorly sourced content," Moore said.
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While "edit wars" can happen on pages, Rasberry said this tends to occur more often over social issues rather than news.
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Wikipedia also publicly displays who edits each version of an article via its history page, along with a "talk" page for each post that allows editors to openly discuss edits.
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"If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it," the page said.