Hi all,
You might have seen that Facebook announced a test of a new feature today
that uses English Wikipedia content.[1] The new feature provides more
context about the source of news articles users see in their News Feed on
Facebook by pulling information about publishers from Wikipedia.
We got a heads up about this feature late last week and have been talking
to Facebook since then to better understand how it works.
Here is what we know so far: The feature is an “i” link which Facebook
users can click on to get more context about a news article's source. The
information provided includes Wikipedia content in addition to other
resources. The feature will pull the first three sentences (approximately
300 characters) of an English Wikipedia article about a given news
publication with a link to “continue reading” on Wikipedia, with
attribution to Wikipedia and Creative Commons licensing information. If no
article exists for that news publication, it will note that instead.
The feature will be made available to a limited number of users based in
the United States starting today as a part of their product testing. We
don’t have information on the roll-out plan, which will depend on the
results from the testing.
On a technical basis, this test is utilizing (and regularly updating) XML
dumps to get the Wikipedia content. This does not put as much load on our
servers, but also leaves the content slightly outdated. This is an issue we
are discussing with their technical folks alongside other issues like
content in other languages.
While this new feature did not come from any partnership with a Wikimedia
organization and our open access model means this is something they are
able to do without engaging with us, we appreciate them contacting us
before it went live. We are also always happy to see Wikipedia content
being used to inform more people. We hope to continue to have conversations
with Facebook about the impact of this feature on Wikipedia and will
continue to share relevant updates with Foundation staff and community.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, here is some press:
http://mashable.com/2017/10/05/facebook-wikipedia-context-articles-news-fee…
https://www.fastcompany.com/40477586/facebook-thinks-the-answer-to-its-fake…
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/05/facebook-article-information-button/?ncid…
--Toby
[1]
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/news-feed-fyi-new-test-to-provide-cont…