Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-03-20/News and notes

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News and notes

Wikimania submissions deadline looms, Russian government after our lucky charms, AI woes nix CNET from RS slate

Wikimania 2023 will be held on 16–19 August 2023 in Singapore. If you'd like to host a session, hands-on workshop, discussion, performance, lightning talk ... the Wikimania wiki will accept program submissions until 28 March 2023, 23:59 AoE. The conference will have a hybrid format, so speakers can submit proposals for in-person or virtual sessions.

Wikimania Singapore lettering
Wikimania Singapore currently accepts program submissions. The conference will be a hybrid event, so both in-person and virtual sessions can be proposed. The deadline for submissions is 28 March 2023, 23:59 AoE.

There are 11 tracks to submit your proposal to:

  • Community Initiatives
  • Education
  • Equity, Inclusion, and Community Health
  • ESEAP (East, South East Asia, and the Pacific) Region
  • GLAM, Heritage, and Culture
  • Governance
  • Legal, Advocacy, and Risks
  • Open Data
  • Research, Science, and Medicine
  • Technology
  • Wild Ideas



For further information about Wikimania 2023 and the submissions process see:

Community submissions to date can be viewed here. – AK, r

Court date in Russia

The Wikimedia Foundation will have another court date in Russia on 6 April. The Russian authorities complain that the Wikimedia Foundation has failed to remove misleading information about Russian military operations in Ukraine from Wikipedia. The Signpost has reported on many previous instances of similar interactions with state actors over the years, with the Russian government taking a harsher stance recently.

CNET deemed unreliable due to AI use

CNET lettering

The technology website CNET was recently found by consensus to be no longer a reliable source for material published since November 2022, in part due to its publishing content created with some sort of "AI" (presumably a large language model) beginning circa that date. Consensus was not reached for reliability between October 2020, when the outlet was purchased by a new owner and editorial standards changed, and November 2022.

The website was founded in 1994 and described by The Verge as "once a high-flying powerhouse of tech reporting". According to The Verge, the content came from some thing called "Wordsmith", by a company called "Automated Insights" (see, "AI", get it?) and was published without attribution or acknowledgement of the source.

According to Signpost research, CNET is used as a source in as many as 10,000 articles or more, including Apple Inc., Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Wikipedia. It is not known at this time how many of these are using CNET articles from after its expiration date.

In January, CNET published a new policy saying they had "changed the byline for articles compiled with the AI engine ... clearly say[ing] the story was created in part with our AI engine" and "moved the disclosure so you don't need to hover over the byline to see it", dutifully following the Signpost's example of doing this in August of last year.

Is this the beginning of a trend? – B

Brief notes

A photo of the Tabouna Falls [fr] in Kindia, captured as part of a photoshoot conducted by the Wikimedia Community User Group Guinée Conakry. As Voice of America reports, the area is "the type of tropical paradise that draws tourists. But the West African country has few visitors and earns almost all its foreign revenue from mining, which can damage that environment. Now some are working to change that." Then again, tourism is not without impact on the environment either.