Ryan McGrady

Read of the day: @brianckeegan.com and Casey Fiesler's 2017 @icwsm.bsky.social paper analyzing 15 years of @wikipedia.org rules and rule-making practices. Read a while ago, but revisiting today. For a particular kind of wikinerd, this kind of paper, um, rules. ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...

I like to channel my nighttime procrastination into new @wikipedia.org articles. Today I learned the creator of Clippy didn't have an article. So en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevan_A...

He made it on a Mac. Ha.

2000s: The Age of Creating Big Problems

2010s: The Age of Big Solutions to Artificial Problems

2020s: The Age of Terrible Solutions to Big Problems

#history

Not to be outdone by its former colony, Portugal is now ordering global takedowns from Wikipedia.

Attention mis/disinfo researchers! I have identified the #1 piece of viral misinformation ever to be spread on Instagram. It's called the "link in bio" conspiracy, and it's *everywhere*. The Algorithm™ must be targeting me because it sent me down fake-link rabbit roles twice today.

Thankfully few of these cases are successful wrt Wikipedia (h/t @wikimediafoundation.org legal team). This was AFAIK the first time for English Wiki, but there's at least one German case that resulted in removals from dewiki. In that case, the decision seemed to hinge on... link rot of the citation.

Wikipedia can challenge Online Safety Act if strictest rules apply to it, says judge Wikimedia Foundation says it will be forced reduce access to site if it is classified as a category 1 provider

The judge has ruled on our UK case today. See my colleague’s comment at the end of this piece. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

What I'd really love to happen, though, is for someone with real platforms+speech legal chops (eg @daphnek.bsky.social, @evelyndouek.bsky.social [oh how I miss Moderated Content]) to take a closer look and write something up. It's a perspective sorely lacking in the wiki community and these threads.

There will inevitably be some journalism about this, but like with the ANI case I suspect the most we can hope for is to describe how the situation played out on-wiki and summarize the community's anxieties.

English Wikipedia has developed a severe allergy to all things generative AI. Erring on the side of exclusion is a good place to be, though the immune system is a little sensitive. Long recent discussion about ethics of AI generated Roblox art by the WMF that wasn't actually AI-generated.

WikiSLAPP update from WMF Legal: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Still a lot of open questions about implementation, limits on how to summarize the order on-wiki (so as to prevent material from simply being restored accidentally later), etc.

@techpolicypress.bsky.social @ethanz.bsky.social @justinhendrix.bsky.social @eff.org @wikimediafoundation.org @wikipedia.org @cdt.org

And I haven't even gotten into the other side of this: how to handle court orders for private information of users sued for summarizing high-quality sources (or, in the case of ANI, merely undoing ANI's own efforts to whitewash their article). Chilling and worse.

These cases raise hard questions about global platforms and the reach of a single country's speech restrictions, about competing rights, and how to balance dual missions of *access* to knowledge (not getting filtered) and *producing* content according to community-defined principles.

Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation - Wikipedia

If this sounds like a familiar situation, you may recall the ongoing Asian News International case in India -- another case of courts being used to censor information on Wikipedia they do not like (material that merely summarizes pre-existing reputable sources). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_N...

Here's where most of the community conversation is taking place (the community doesn't speak for the WMF and vice versa FWIW): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

High stakes for the Wikimedia projects in Portugal: Fighting a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) César do Paço’s lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation is an ongoing legal case in Portugal that raises serious concerns about privacy and free expression. We are concerned that this is a strateg…

Here's WMF's blog post from 2023, before the latest round of appeals: diff.wikimedia.org/2023/07/27/h...

The order requires removing past allegations of misconduct, political affiliations, and some other material from the article about businessman Caesar DePaço. Wikipedians are current working out what to do with a now policy-noncompliant article. Display a banner? Delete it?

Major Wiki news: after an unusually complicated appeals process, the Wikimedia Foundation was directed by a Portuguese court to remove content from an article in English and Portuguese, applicable globally. Potentially terrible precedent for SLAPP-based censorship.

How Bad Is Your Streaming Music? Our sophisticated A.I. judges your awful taste in music.

I'm late to
@puddingviz.bsky.social 's wonderful data-and-design-heavy journalism fun. Love NYC words & Star Spangled Banner diva metric. Now it's judging my Spotify. pudding.cool/2021/10/judg... "Your spotify was remember-when-williamsburg-was-cool-moms-spaghetti-garden-state-soundtrack bad" ouch

Over in @idpiumass.bsky.social we often talk about the idea of a "loyal client" that would give users more control over their social media feeds. @slane.bsky.social is working on exactly that (Gobo.social) and wants your social media opinions via this survey! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Last year we had couple yellow-billed cuckoos hanging out on the base of the Prospect Park peninsula in Brooklyn for an extended period, feasting on lanternflies attracted to the tree of heaven.

My friend Eryk has a wonderful personal and insightful piece of writing about the great chasm between real people and the data they produce, and the myth of a bridge across that chasm. Gradual changes in interiority, dogs that look you in the eye, hummingbird observations.

‘Tremendous uncertainty’ for cancer research as US officials target mRNA vaccines Amid Trump cuts and state-level backlash, experts worry that progress in messenger RNA vaccines could stall

Over 120 mRNA cancer trials are now at risk as the Trump admin cuts funding & tells researchers to scrub “mRNA” from grant proposals.

What started as COVID fearmongering is now derailing life-saving cancer research.

Hope remains - but scientists say time is running out.


zurl.co/YBGNy

Birds of New York - Rhododendrites - Commons Gallery Photographs of birds in New York (mostly NYC).

The folks at @wikiportraits.bsky.social and @wikimediach.bsky.social made a neat tool for wikiphotographers to create galleries/profiles from WikiCommons photos. Tested it with my "Birds of New York" gallery: commons.gallery/@rhododendri...

GitHub - iDPI-Umass/superFreq: Software for social music discovery. Powering Freq. Software for social music discovery. Powering Freq. - iDPI-Umass/superFreq

just released the open source software powering Freq, superFreq, developed during my soon-to-end time at
@idpiumass.bsky.social

can’t believe I got to build this crazy thing at this job. now it belongs to you, world.

github.com/iDPI-Umass/s...

Archive links: archive.ph/lFd9c archive.ph/L0I1N

Talked to the Hindustan Times for a pair of articles about YouTube (today on the web, Sunday in print): www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/ar... www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/ar...

Love the trend of new, intentionally small, journalist-owned-and-operated news outlets, and it's hard to think of one with a more outsized impact on discourse about tech/politics than 404.

Is Google about to destroy the web? Google says adding more AI to its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites. One thing is clear: this era of online history is closing.

Google has a new button. It might destroy the web as you know it. Experts say the new “AI Mode” is an asteroid aimed at the heart of the internet, one that could decimate millions of websites. It seems this chapter of online history is over. Here’s what comes next: www.bbc.com/future/artic...