News On Wiki

NOTE: We discussed this campaign in depth on our Sunday call, with guests. Eric took notes: 2020-11-22 WikiData

When individuals encounter an unfamiliar news source, they will often do a Google search. Their confidence in the source is often based, in part, on the infobox that Google (or another search engine) may or may not return. The existence of that infobox (and its content) is largely determined by what is (or isn't) on Wikipedia and Wikidata.

The News On Wiki campaign is designed to increase Wikipedia's coverage of local newspapers, to help people find information about the reliability of newspapers in the places they are already looking (Google, and to a lesser extent, Bing and Wikipedia.)

Mike Caulfield launched this campaign in 2018, focusing on all U.S. newspapers. Pete Forsyth and Sherry Antoine are running "Phase 2" in 2020-21, with funding from the Credibility Coalition. This phase focuses on: Black-owned newspapers, newspapers of Washington State, and newspapers of or about the Caribbean.

Our main page, describing the project, with links to many other relevant pages: News On Wiki (there's also a static version available on Federated Wiki: Wikipedia:News On Wiki)

We use pages like this one to track our progress in specific areas: Washington State

We also use maps based on Wikidata for this purpose. Note, this link may take 30 seconds or so to load: Washington State newspaper map

See here for information on the technologies behind that map, Wikidata and SPARQL

For this work (and of particular interest to the Federated Wiki community) it is very helpful to learn a bit about how Wikidata, and the language used to query this database (SPARQL Query) work. Please explore this here: Wikidata and SPARQL