Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-04-25/In the media
Fernando, governance, and rugby
OK Google, what is a Fernando Machado burger?
Fernando Machado, Chief Marketing Officer of Burger King and Restaurant Brands International is leaving his job according to PRWeek (free registration), which reports his 3 biggest "hits" and 3 biggest "misses" in advertising campaigns. Marketing miss #1 was a 15 second advert from 2017 ending in the phrase "OK Google, what is a Whopper burger?" The ad was supposed to activate a Google Home smart speaker to recite a marketing spiel with the list of Whopper ingredients that User:Fermachado123 had inserted as the introduction of the Wikipedia article Whopper. By the time the TV advert ran, its text had been changed – some claimed it had been vandalized – and it's unclear whether any potential customers ever heard the advert at all. Fernando, you still owe Wikipedians an apology.
Cracking Wikipedia's governance problems
4 Wikipedia Editing Scandals That Slipped Under Readers' Radars in Cracked.com, an apparently humorous website. Three of the four editing scandals focus on admin behavior and might be viewed as anything but humorous. They are:
- Admin Neelix and his odd predilection for creating imaginative redirects to articles about breasts. He resigned his adminship in November 2015 after a lengthy discussion at WP:ANI (see prior Signpost coverage)
- Scots language Wikipedia (see prior Signpost coverage)
- Warsaw concentration camp hoax (see prior Signpost coverage)
- Qworty in 2013 (see prior Signpost coverage)
Women play rugby
Nevertheless, only 3% of Wikipedia's biographies of rugby players are about women, according to brewer Guinness as reported in Sport Industry Group last week. Only 30% of the players in the 2021 Women's Six Nations Championship, which ended yesterday, had an article on Wikipedia. Only 14% of those articles had more than a basic bio and a photo. Articles on the squads representing England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland, and Wales, had only 10% of the words (900 to 9,000) of the same nations men's squads.
Wikimedia UK and Guinness teamed up with the goal of having an article for each player in the tournament from the four "home nations". The players from France and Italy were left out of this goal. The sponsors invited Wikipedia editors, fans, writers, and journalists to help out by creating or adding to articles about all notable women rugby players, which seems to have changed some of the numbers reported above. England beat France to win the championship.
In brief
- QAnon + ADL = COI?: The Anti-Defamation League may have violated Wikipedia rules — editing its own entries, says The Forward recounting a March–April discussion at the conflict-of-interest noticeboard.
- World's youngest billionaire, 26-year-old owes it all to Wikipedia & YouTube (India Times) Austin Russell (businessperson), founder of Luminar Technologies – odd it is still a redlink.
- Using Wikipedia for Content Marketing, SEO on PracticalEcommerce demonstrates once again that there is an entire industry based on breaking Wikipedia's rules. (no, we won't link to them)
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Billy Joel - New York State of Mind |
- The Most Wikipedia Searched Name from Your Hudson Valley Town from "The Home of Rock'n'Roll", radio station WPDH which dug up the US map which replaced the name of a town with the name of the resident whose biography received the most page views. Hint: use your mouse to drag the map to the Hudson River Valley, well north of the big city of Donald Trump, and then zoom in to just south of Benedict Arnold. The only problem is that the map is two years out-of-date. No matter, it gives us an excuse to link to a Billy Joel song. No, not Summer, Highland Falls about the village where Joel spent one summer, but an equally relevant song from the same album.
Videos and podcasts
- Ziko van Dijk: wrote the ultimate 341-page wiki book in German (free pdf, CC BY-SA) but introduces it on the video "My new book about wikis: a short presentation in English".
- Jimmy Wales: on a one-hour nine minute podcast (skip the first four minutes) at The Political Party with Matt Forde. Forde, a comedian, does a good imitation of a blustering bandersnatch, so much of the podcast goes through the basics. Jimmy explains why he'd never edit an article involving Donald Trump - he'd get too emotional. He then compares himself to the Queen, twice. Brags about his cooking. All the usual stuff.
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