PLANNING WIKIMEDIA GHANA RESPONDS TO GOVERNMENT’S STATEMENT ABOUT WIKIPEDIA

This is in response to a recent publication by citifmonline.com on January 10th, 2014 about the Government of Ghana struggling to edit information on the Wikipedia page for Ghana.

Planning Wikimedia Ghana as a volunteer group has been working for almost 3 years to encourage the use and contribution of Ghanaian content to Wikipedia. We also help other global editors to update content and clean-up inadequate information about Ghanaian topics.

From the publication, Minister for Information and Media Relations, Mahama Ayariga said: “It came to our attention indeed and my colleagues have tried to edit and take out some of the misrepresentations there but they tell me that subsequently whoever it is that is bent on misrepresenting Ghana’s image globally went back and re-edited,”

Wikipedia is a wiki, meaning content is written by any volunteer, (collaboratively) with others.

While writing, important basic rules apply:

1. RS, reliable sources, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources

2. NPOV, meaning neutral point of view, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view

3. COI, conflict of interest editing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest

Where these rules are not applied by an editor, other editors and administrators do their best to correct that edit when notified.

The information on Ghana's article about corruption has been sourced unfortunately. Unless the credibility of the source is challenged or an update about “economic corruption and economic crime” in Ghana appears, it will remain. However the language was somewhat generalised and one sided.

As Ghanaian Wikipedians, we have looked into the matter and the rules that apply.

Currently, Wikipedia has put the article under some protection from unconfirmed users.

We would like to point out again that as WIkipedia is a wiki "permanent arrangements" cannot be made to keep information static. But Planning Wikimedia Ghana will organise an editing session to clean up the article and also choose a member of our community to monitor the article for a untruthful and biased information.

The government can move to support this effort.

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that is used and created by global contributors. Ghanaians can help better the quality of information on Ghana there and that is one of the objectives of Planning Wikimedia Ghana has. Find out more about PWMG here

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Regards,

Sandister Tei

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Cardiff University
JOMEC -- International Journalism
www.sandistertei.com | +447448223686