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Fact And Fiction on Wikipedia | Slate

This is an October 3, 2018 episode of If Then, a podcast on technology, society, and power from Slate.

On this week’s If Then, Will Oremus and April Glaser talk about the announcement that Amazon will raise the minimum wage for its U.S. workers to $15 an hour. While Jeff Bezos may be receiving praise for the move this week, another enigmatic tech CEO is facing retribution. Elon Musk has agreed to settle with the SEC following tweets he made about potentially taking the company private, and he will step down from Tesla’s board.

Net neutrality is also back in the news: California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill on Sunday to implement net neutrality protections in the state starting next year. But within hours of Brown’s signing, the Justice Department announced it would be suing the state of California to prevent it from circumventing the federal net neutrality repeal.

And the headaches continue for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Last week, it was announced that a massive security breach to the social media site allowed hackers to take control of upward of 50 million accounts. Facebook does not yet know who the culprits are.

The hosts are then joined by Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, best known for, well, Wikipedia: the fifth-most-popular website on the planet. Maher talks to Oremus and Glaser about how it all works: how a community of millions of volunteer editors is able to pull fact from fiction, how a site dedicated to trying to be correct deals with false news, how the site deals with harassment within its editor community, how its relationship with Google is changing, and why diversity is important in writing the web’s massive nonprofit encyclopedia.

Source: Fact And Fiction on Wikipedia | Slate