Justapedia Foundation

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Justapedia is an open and freely accessible online encyclopedia that is being developed and maintained by volunteers through open collaboration in a mediawiki editing environment; editors are referred to as Justapedians. It is the registered trademark of the Justapedia Foundation (JPF), a tax deductible section 501(c)(3) charitable organization for educational purposes. It was officially registered on October 5, 2022, and was founded by Betty Wills, who has been an editor of Wikipedia for over a decade.[1] Justapedia has included the required legal attribution on the articles it imported from Wikipedia, all of which are freely licensed content under CC-BY-SA. The same free licenses apply to Justapedia's revisions of the imported articles, as well as any new articles created by Justapedians, as noted in the respective article's page footer, and edit history.

Origins

Justapedia was born of founder Betty Wills' desire to restore the spirit of neutrality and objectivity that Wikipedia has long since lost.[2] She was drawn to Wikipedia in 2011 by the same spirit she sought to restore. A retired television producer and magazine publisher, Wills found fulfillment in contributing, editing, and assisting others on Wikipedia. Her duties as a volunteer included being a tutor for the new pages patrol, which is the frontline defense against undesirable content; she was driven by a desire to engage and support the platform's integrity. Her volunteer work under the pseudonym Atsme was a "project of love", which she stated in an interview with the NPR station WGBH (FM)–Boston[3] during the 2019 WikiConference North America, hosted by MIT.[4] Wills has expressed her views about politics with humor as evidenced by her measured responses when interviewed by Slate[5] and Fast Company.[6] However, the systemic biases of Wikipedia's new woke community grew, notably during the 2016 presidential election.[7] A select group of biased editors and administrators guarded the articles of progressive left and left wing Democrats while at the same time being highly critical of the Republican candidates. That group of editors viewed her contributions and attempts to include a diversity of views as disruptive, frequently imposing blocks and topic bans to prevent what they termed as disruptive behavior in a very cancel culture approach to editing.[8][9][10][11] Wikipedia's systemic biases are well-known as evidenced by Wikipedia's own article on the topic.[12] The responses to a comment Wills made in The Signpost in March 2018 about Southern Poverty Law Center further confirm Wikipedia's systemic biases and extremist views.[13] She has also contributed as the author of a few op-ed articles published in The Signpost, including one that addressed the issues of an editors right to be forgotten,[14] and another about political bias.[15] In February 2019, an unknown editor using the pseudonym Selltherally created a user talk page challenging the Wikipedia establishment over their treatment of Wills.[16] As one would expect based on the editing patterns of cancel culture editors, that user was quickly blocked.[17][18]

About

Fresh start-woman-1920px JPF.jpg

The Justapedia Foundation (JPF) is an educational, Sect 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization dedicated to providing and operating an open source, neutral and objective encyclopedia that will remain free to the world in perpetuity. Foundation headquarters at the time of origin are located in north Texas.

The Foundation's Board of Directors and Executive Committee includes:

  • Betty Wills, founder, CEO/president
  • Christian Gribneau, CTO/vice president
  • Ryan Stiles, secretary/treasurer
  • Laraine Katzev, Member at Large

The Foundation is dedicated to maintaining a friendly and welcoming community for its volunteers, and is looking forward to hosting fun educational activities, spirited debates and sponsorships and endowments with the help of tax deductible donations. The Foundation envisions Justapedia continuing its mission to maintain and protect the spirit of objectivity and neutrality in its encyclopedic content as volunteers continue to add to the building blocks of true knowledge in perpetuity.

Foundation's mission and goals

One of the early truth images.

The Justapedia Foundation's mission is to host and operate Justapedia, a free and open-source encyclopedia, by providing the platform and tools to enable volunteers to easily edit, create and share their knowledge while maintaining compliance with Justapedia's fundamental principals, and its policies and guidelines.

Criticism can be a tool for necessitating improvements. Wikipedia has received more than its share of criticism relative to lacking objectivity, allegations of it being used as a weapon, and for having a strong political bias that is unacceptable for a neutral and objective encyclopedia. Mainstream media's criticism ranges from politics to social and medical sciences, including a range of topics such as global warming,[19] COVID-19,[20] historic events,[21] and more.[22] Wikipedia's failure to maintain objectivity and neutrality in contentious topic areas is evidenced by their own admission, and in their own own articles, including gender bias,[23] systemic bias,[24][25] political bias,[26][27] and science. The Washington Post published the following criticism: "Groups that are underrepresented in academia tend to be missing at an even higher rate on Wikipedia. And there is growing evidence that Wikipedia articles have tangible effects, including the power to influence the contents of scientific papers. Wikipedia does not just passively reflect biases. It amplifies and reinforces them."[28][29]

Mission statement

Justapedia's mission is to restore the spirit of neutrality and objectivity in the articles forked from Wikipedia, and to develop and maintain articles that:

  1. are created and edited by editors with a good command of the English language;
  2. comply with Justapedia’s Manual of Style (MOS), and are compliant with Justapedia's policies and guidelines (PAG), particularly its core content policies concerning biographies of living persons (BLP), neutral point of view (NPOV), no original research (NOR), verifiability (V) and adhere to Justapedia's 5 fundamental principles;
  3. are fact-based, verifiable, corroborated and properly cited to reliable sources (RS) that are objectively chosen in an effort to include all significant views;
  4. contain minimal opinions, corroborated statements of fact, and when opinion is included, it will be with properly cited sources using in-text attribution,
  5. do not include breaking news as there will be a 7-day moratorium before any breaking news can be included.

Licensing

Justapedia is a work in progress that began in October 2022 with content originating from Wikipedia, all properly attributed in compliance with their free CC-BY-SA license. The same free license applies to revisions and new articles authored by Justapedia volunteers as noted in their page footer.

References

  1. ^ "User:Atsme". Wikipedia. 2015-02-06. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  2. ^ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (March 1, 2016). "Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia" (PDF). Retrieved April 11, 2024.
  3. ^ Leeson, Sarah (2020-01-10). "Wikipedia's Volunteer Army". News. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  4. ^ "2019/Main Page". WikiConference North America. 2021-08-18. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  5. ^ Mak, Aaron (2019-05-28). "Inside the Brutal, Petty War Over Donald Trump's Wikipedia Page". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  6. ^ Pasternack, Alex (2020-03-07). "How Wikipedia's volunteers became the web's best weapon against misinformation". Fast Company. Archived from the original on 2020-03-07. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  7. ^ "Is Wikipedia Woke?". Bloomberg. 2016-12-22. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  8. ^ "Wikipedia:Block log/Atsme". Wikipedia. 2023-12-10. Retrieved 2023-12-10.
  9. ^ "Wikipedia:Arbitration enforcement log/2015". Wikipedia. 2015-06-28. Retrieved 2023-12-10.
  10. ^ "Wikipedia:Arbitration enforcement log/2018". Wikipedia. 2018-06-29. Retrieved 2023-12-10.
  11. ^ "Wikipedia:Arbitration enforcement log/2019". Wikipedia. 2019-07-24. Retrieved 2023-12-10.
  12. ^ "Ideological bias on Wikipedia". Wikipedia. May 22, 2018. Retrieved April 11, 2024.
  13. ^ "Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-03-29/In the media". Wikipedia. March 29, 2018. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
  14. ^ "Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-02-05/Op-ed". Wikipedia. February 5, 2018. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
  15. ^ "Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-05-31/Op-Ed". Wikipedia. May 31, 2020. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
  16. ^ "User talk:Selltherally". Wikipedia. February 27, 2019. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
  17. ^ "User talk:Selltherally". Wikipedia. March 2, 2019. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
  18. ^ "User talk:Selltherally". Wikipedia. February 27, 2019. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
  19. ^ "Wikipropaganda On Global Warming". CBS News. 2008-07-08. Retrieved 2023-06-12.
  20. ^ Ryan, Jackson (2021-06-27). "Wikipedia is at war over the coronavirus lab leak theory". CNET. Retrieved 2023-06-12.
  21. ^ Aderet, Ofer (2023-02-14). "'Jews Helped the Germans Out of Revenge or Greed': New Research Documents How Wikipedia Distorts the Holocaust - Israel News". Haaretz.com. Retrieved 2023-06-12.
  22. ^ Main, Nikki (2022-12-08). "Wikipedia Founder Indirectly Tells Elon Musk the Site 'Is Not for Sale'". Yahoo News. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  23. ^ "Gender bias on Wikipedia". Wikipedia. 2014-04-30. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  24. ^ "Wikipedia". Wikipedia. 2001-11-06. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  25. ^ "Wikipedia:Systemic bias". Wikipedia. 2017-09-20. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  26. ^ Thompson, Alex; Meyer, Theodoric (2020-12-03). "Wikipedia page for Biden's new Covid czar scrubbed of politically damaging material". POLITICO. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  27. ^ "Inside Wikipedia's leftist bias: socialism pages whitewashed, communist atrocities buried". Fox News. 2021-02-18. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  28. ^ Baltz, Samuel (2021-02-24). "Analysis - Wikipedia's political science coverage is biased. I tried to fix it". Washington Post. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
  29. ^ "Is Wikipedia Biased?". AllSides. 2022-08-16. Retrieved 2022-12-19.
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