Wikipedia:Wikipedia_on_TV_and_radio

Wikipedia:Wikipedia on TV and radio

Wikipedia:Wikipedia on TV and radio

Wikipedia coverage on TV and Radio:

Please do not list any instances of Wikipedia being a product placement or a mere reference; for those, see Wikipedia in culture.

2024

  • "Pantera - Wikipedia Fact or Fiction (Best of Compilation)". Loudwire. 12 January 2024. Retrieved 14 January 2024. Loudwire has had 3/4ths of Pantera's classic lineup confirm or deny the statements on their Wikipedia page.
  • "UK academic works to raise profile of women on Wikipedia". CNN. 10 March 2024. Retrieved 10 March 2024. Isa Soares speaks with Lucy Moore, a Wikipedia editor on a mission to highlight women throughout history by creating a new Wikipedia page for a woman in every country of the world.
  • "SWE Diverse Podcast Ep 251: Highlighting Women Scientists on Wikipedia With Dr. Jess Wade". Society of Women Engineers. 12 March 2024. Retrieved 25 March 2024. Dr. Wade has created thousands of Wikipedia pages that highlight the achievements of women scientists and engineers. In this episode, she shares her own STEM journey, the inspiration behind her Wikipedia initiative and the unexpected surprises she has learned along the way.


2023

  • "These women are closing Wikipedia's gender gap". Radio National. 6 June 2023. Retrieved 7 June 2023. More than 80% of Wikipedia's volunteer editors are male, and this gender bias is reflected in its articles: less than 20% of published Wikipedia biographies are about women. We meet two Wikipedians trying to close this gender gap, one profile at a time. Guests: Dr Jess Wade – Physicist and Research Fellow at the Imperial College London. Annie Reynolds - Wikimedian, WomenInRed project member, family and local history researcher.
  • "Wiki Wars". BBC. 4 July 2023. Retrieved 22 July 2023. Tech journalist Lara Lewington looks into information battles played out on Wikipedia.
  • Runciman, Brian (3 August 2023). "Wikipedia: Pretty good in parts". British Computer Society. Retrieved 8 August 2023. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, speaks to Brian Runciman about the site's progress over the last 22 years; fakes news; reliable sources; the Wikipedia community and funding model; and being a pathological optimist.
  • Baird, Julia (2023-12-08). "VIDEO: The Drum Friday December 8th". The Drum (ABC Australia). Retrieved 2023-12-08. discussion of Wikipedia and gender bias from 14:10 to 27:00 min


2022

  • "Ksenia Coffman Corrects Nazi History on Wikipedia". History News Network. January 20, 2022. Retrieved January 24, 2022. This week, she joins SH!TPOST to talk about her motivations for taking on this monumental task, the reactions her contributions have received in the broader Wikipedia community, and her outlook on the importance of accurate history existing online.
  • "Fighting for more diversity at Wikipedia". Deutsche Welle. March 4, 2022. Retrieved March 4, 2022. Anasuya Sengupta wants to see more gender diversity at Wikipedia. Her "VisibleWikiWomen" initiative managed to get more than 15,000 photos of women uploaded to the site so far, and its fourth campaign is about to start.
  • "Q&A with David Ferriero". C-SPAN. May 1, 2022. Retrieved May 17, 2022. I learned early on... ...that you can build a digital archive, but don't expect people to come to it. You need to be where the people are, so figure out where the people are. If you are looking for a photograph, you would not ordinarily come to the National Archives... ...Wikipedia has become the encyclopedia of the Internet, and we have thousands and thousands of our records tagged in Wikipedia, and people are using them to do research. More than three billion hits per year, as opposed to 750,000 on our catalog. (Note: This interview was with David Ferriero on his last day as Archivist of the United States.)


2021


2020

2019

2018

2017

The keyboard player Rick Wakeman appeared on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends program today and was interviewed by Clive Anderson. In the course of this he mentioned Wikipedia and a fact he claimed we'd got wrong about him; from memory, he said that he played on the second Clive Dunn single in the early 70s, which didn't become a hit, not the one which became a No. 1 single (Grandad). He made a further, derogatory comment about Wikipedia as a whole which I see no point in repeating here. Meltingpot (talk) 07:28, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

2015

2014

2013

2011

  • 2011-07-08: The Torchwood: Miracle Day episode "The New World" shows a Wikipedia-style page on which Gwen and Andy look up the number of people who are born and die each day in an article about the Earth.
  • 2011-06-13: Terry Pratchett was seen viewing the article Snuff (Pratchett novel) while working on the novel, about 5 minutes into the BBC TV documentary "Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die".
  • 2011-06-12: Wikipedia editor Andy Mabbett was interviewed by BBC presenter Carl Chinn on his BBC WM radio show, discussing the Birmingham 3 meet-up and Wikipedia in general. During the interview, Mabbett took a photograph of Chinn. He then uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons, and used it to illustrate the article on Chinn, all within the hour, and Chinn referred to this having been done, near the end of the programme. The interview is on iPlayer, and will remain there until 19 June.
  • 2011-06-06: In response to Sarah Palin supporters changing Wikipedia's entry for 'Paul Revere' to substantiate Palin's statement that Revere, during his famous midnight run, rang a bell and fired his musket repeatedly to signal Americans and British alike that battle was imminent, Stephen Colbert prompts viewers to update the Wikipedia page for 'bells' to further substantiate Palin's claim.
  • 2011-01-05 Jimmy Wales appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to celebrate Wikipedia's tenth anniversary.

2010

  • 2010-01-27 Daniel Tosh of the Comedy Central show Tosh.0 told his viewers, "So why don't you go to our Tosh.0 'boring' wikipedia page and put whatever you want. I'm not gonna fix it." The result was numerous changes made to the Tosh.0 Wikipedia article, culminating in the page being blocked from editing a few hours after the show aired. All entries from that date, factual and not, were deleted by Wikipedia personnel rather than simply being revised. Other Wikipedia articles, such as Conan O'Brien, Demetri Martin, and Jay Leno, were also affected. Tosh read some of the humorous revisions made to the article the following week on his show, and proceeded to apologize to Wikipedia for the mayhem he started. The Tosh.0 page, however, remains blocked.
  • 2010-05-18 Geoff Lloyd of Absolute Radio mentioned the Macclesfield article and noted that his name is no longer there as a 'notable resident'.
  • 2010-06-06  Wikipedia's article on money laundering is seen in the Breaking Bad episode "Half Measures". In the episode, the character Skyler White is browsing the page to find out how to launder money from her husband's meth business. The page version in question is from between March 5, 2010 and April 19, 2010. (None of the differences are visible on-screen.)
  • 2010-08-09 Wikipedia is used as an example of collaborative writing in the CBC Radio show Ideas episode, Blue Metropolis Bleu - The Future of the Book, and encyclopedias are discussed as being indicators of social and technological change - the mass-popularity once a level of general literacy was obtained in the 18th century, and encyclopedias being at the forefront of technology in the forms of cd-roms and now online. (starting at 41:00)
  • 2010-09-29 In the second episode of the TV series Undercovers, one of the characters discusses trivia about Caracas, Venezuela, then ends with, "But you can't believe everything you read on Wikipedia. It isn't true that Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck are twin brothers".

2009

2008

2007

  • 2007-11-21 – Paul Levinson talks about Wikipedia, and the importance of keeping it open to editing by everyone, at the end of interview on The Alcove with Mark Molaro
  • 2007-11-19 – the University Challenge second-round contest, between the University of St Andrews and the University of York, broadcast on BBC2, featured a set of three questions about Wikipedia terminology (paraphrased here): (1) What is the Wikipedia term for a page that can refer to several different objects or topics with the same name? (Answer: a disambiguation page); (2) What is the Wikipedia term for a phrase that inflates the importance of the subject of an article? (Answer: a peacock phrase); (3) Stated by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as "absolutely non-negotiable", what does the acronym NPOV stand for? (Answer: neutral point of view) The question was posed to the University of York team, who got all three questions correct, but ended up losing the contest.
  • November 2007 – In the film Lars and the Real Girl, Lars's brother, Gus, does an ask.com lookup for the words "mental illness delusion", and a Wikipedia hit is clearly shown on the screen as the first hit.
  • 2007-11-02 – BBC1's Have I Got News For You began with guest host Jo Brand incorrectly introducing panelist Andy Hamilton as a famous darts player ranked 7th in the world. She said she was surprised by this but it must be true because it said so on Wikipedia.
  • 2007-09-05 – BBC News's Newsnight introduced a report on Wikinomics by explaining the Wiki concept through the history of Wikipedia. Programme plan Stream available until approximate 2007-09-06 2130 UTC, at approximately 40'
  • 2007-08-21 – Comedy Central's The Colbert Report did a segment making fun of the recent revelations of corporate Wikipedia edits via the Wikipedia Scanner, and advocated getting rid of the scanner to protect the anonymity of corporate "online personalities".
  • 2007-08-13 – RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland intervies John Collins of The Irish Times who explains how it was discovered that CIA computers were used to edit pages relating to the Middle East.
  • 2007-08-13 – The Enemies of Reason on Channel 4, where Richard Dawkins claims that: "Wikipedia world presents both great opportunity and huge danger." 45:12
  • 2007-08-02 – The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, where Bernard Goldberg talks about Wikipedia having false information, libel, and defamation on the article about him. 05:00/05:31
  • 2007-07-24 – The Wikipedia Story on BBC Radio 4. "Clive Anderson looks at one of the world's fastest growing websites, the online encyclopedia to which anybody can contribute. Is Wikipedia a valuable source of human knowledge or a symptom of the spread of mediocrity and the devaluation of research?" link
  • 2007-07-01 – During a weekend sports recap on WFLD Fox Chicago, Ryan Theriot, a baseball player for the Chicago Cubs, was asked about unusual claims on his Wikipedia page, which claimed he was related to the author of a fictitious book My Girlfriend is Hotter Than Yours, and She Can Hold More Liquor, Too. Theriot stated he did not have such a relative, although he wished he did.
  • 2007-06-27 – Lewis Black, on The Daily Show, humorously discussed how conservatives were either buying liberal organizations or creating contrasting organizations, referenced Wikipedia's and Conservapedia's differences (specifically Conservapedia's conservative lean and the alleged liberal lean of Wikipedia), portraying each sites' main page as well as each sites' article on homosexuality.
  • 2007-05-22 – Charlie Rose interviewed Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales on his television show again, discussing Wikipedia and Wales's newer Wikia-related ventures.
  • 2007-03-27 NPR station WUSF, in Tampa, Florida, aired a story about Wikipedia, issues regarding its accuracy, and the new Citizendium project. Featured interviews by Larry Sanger, Mike Halterman, and Kat Walsh. Articles mentioned by name in the segment include "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should," Ronda Storms, Sinbad, "Believe" and Cher.
  • 2007-03-23 The BBC Radio 4 satirical comedy show The Now Show acknowledged the use of Wikipedia as the source for the origin of the name O'Hare for O'Hare International Airport, during a satirical sketch on people who have had airports named after them.
  • 2007-03-22 On the American news program NBC Nightly News, correspondent Lisa Daniels reported on a story titled "Fact Check" about the sometimes dubious facts on Wikipedia and how they affected the class of a history professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. The same professor was interviewed for a February NPR story mentioned below.
  • 2007-02-27 CNN The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer (John King guest-hosting) featured a two to three minute interview with their Internet Reporter Jacki Schechner concentrating on the 2008 United States Presidential Candidates and their articles on Wikipedia. John King: "Wikipedia, it's the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. But, as the Internet's influence on political campaigns grows, what role will the popular Web site play in deciding the next president?" Jacki Schechner: "Well, John, let's say you want to learn more about former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his possible bid for the White House. You type his name into the search engine Google, and the first thing that comes up is his Wikipedia entry. The second thing is his official exploratory committee Web site." transcript
  • 2007-02-26, WHYY-FM First broadcast 26 February 2007 11:00 am UTC−5, Podcast. "Why one of the internet's most popular internet encyclopedias is also considered unreliable. We'll talk with NEIL WATERS a professor at Middlebury College, who discovered an obscure but incorrect fact on his students' exams. It turns out they all got it from the same source Wikipedia. Then we'll hear from VIBIANA BOWMAN a librarian at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey about how Wikipedia and the internet in general is changing how we get information and we must adopt new standards for vetting it. Bowman is also author of The Plagiarism Plague in which she argues that the internet has made plagiarism an even bigger problem."
  • 2007-01-12 : French private channel TF1 early evening news report aired a reportage about Wikipedia. Florence Nibart-Devouard was interviewed, as was a French editor. The Nature report on Wikipedia reliability was mentioned.

2006

  • 2006-12-10 (perhaps earlier): In a Cisco Systems commercial aired in the United States includes a brief shot of a child using a laptop to read a Wikipedia article.
  • 2006-12-10: In the United States, CBS Sunday Morning aired a featured story on Wikipedia reported on by Serena Altschul. Footage from Wikimania 2006 was shown, as were interviews of Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger and a representative from Encyclopædia Britannica.
  • 2006-12-05: On BBC One in the herecomeseverybody.co.uk episode of Imagine hosted by Alan Yentob, Wikipedia as a project was discussed in the context of the one millionth article in English. Alan Yentob interviewed Wikipedian Ewan MacDonald (Nach0king; the original writer of the Jordanhill railway station article) on the station platform.
  • 2006-11-02: On NPR's weekly news quiz program Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, Jimmy Wales participated in the "Not My Job" segment.
  • 2006-10-26: On CNN International's monthly "Global Office" programme, Jimmy Wales spoke about Wikipedia in the programme's feature about open source software (free software was not mentioned and neither was Richard Stallman).
  • 2006-10-13: On CBC's The Hour, interviewing Jimmy Wales about Wikipedia in China.
  • 2006-10-09:On Media Watch a West Australian community newspaper journalist from the Wanneroo Times, Tom Winterbourn is accused of plagiarism of the Mitchell Freeway Wikipedia article .
  • 2006-10-04: On PBS's Charlie Rose, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is interviewed during the second half of the show.
  • 2006-09-12: On Nightline "Wikipedia: Getting to Truth by 'Community'. Online Encyclopedia Founder Says Despite Criticism, Project is Working." Video
  • 2006-09-11: On Morning Edition "Wikipedia is the ever-evolving work of hundreds-of-thousands of volunteer writers and editors who range from high school students to academic scholars. This leaves the online encyclopedia open to criticism and ridicule. That doesn't seem to stop people from using the site as a source for knowledge."
  • 2006-08-25: On Radio Concierto in Chile, a humor segment called "Super Mandolino" aired, parodying Wikipedia in the form of an old wise Mapuche mentor of the main character, Aucan Wikiman.org.
  • 2006-08-28: On The Stephanie Miller Show, a caller called in to comment on "voice monkey" Jim Ward's usage of a Somerset accent in a skit he had done on the show the previous week. The caller commented that he had thought that the accent sounded like a pirate, so he went to Wikipedia and confirmed his suspicions. Apparently a reference to the article at West Country dialects.
  • 2006-08-21: Mastermind, a television quiz show on BBC2, featured this question in its general knowledge round: "Which internet encyclopedia was founded by Jimmy Wales in 2001?" The contestant (who won that show) gave the correct answer: "Wikipedia."
  • 2006-08-04: The Now Show: On a joke on coursework, they were saying that it is easy to find coursework that has been copied for Wikipedia because all the nouns are covered in blue (all the nouns are linked). an audio clip
  • 2006-08-02: On Point interviews Jimmy Wales in "Wikipedia: Open Intelligence".
  • 2006-07-31: On the July 31, 2006, Stephen Colbert discusses Wikipedia on The Colbert Report, urging people to insert a false statement into the article on elephants. This causes a spike of Wikipedia activity and protection of the article on elephants.
  • 2006-07-27: Reporter Vince DeMentri of WCAU Philadelphia discusses the accuracy of Wikipedia. As an example he vandalizes his own Wikipedia article, adding that he has 27 children.
  • 2006-07-08: The Philosopher's Zone on ABC Radio National: Interview with Jaron Lanier about his essay "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" and his views on Wikipedia.
  • 2006-06-22: Primetime Morning Show on Channel NewsAsia: Angela Beesley answered general questions about Wikipedia's growth and how vandalism is dealt with.
  • 2006-06-21: Asia Squawk Box on CNBC Asia with Lisa Oake – Angela Beesley discussed semi-protection and other issues.
  • 2006-06-19: MSNBC's The Most with Alison Stewart discussed how accurate Wikipedia was, protected pages and past controversies.
  • 2006-05-11: Radio Prague, the international broadcasting of Český rozhlas, presented an interview with Petr Kadlec (User:Mormegil) about Wikipedia.
  • 2006-05-10: On the May 10, 2006 episode of The Colbert Report (Comedy Central), Stephen Colbert talks about his research about Sigmund Freud during "The Wørd" segment. He mentions that he read the entire Wikipedia article, and the sidescreen shows a response: "Even the accurate parts."
  • 2006-04-17 In the UK, Five's The Gadget Show had a feature reviewing Wikipedia and the history of the Wiki, as well as featuring the pros and cons of Wikipedia and comparison between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. However, since the feature went on air, The Gadget Show article on Wikipedia, despite the plea of the show's presenter, Jason Bradbury to treat Wikipedia with respect, has been repeatedly vandalised.
  • 2006-03-01: On the The Colbert Report (Comedy Central), Arianna Huffington challenged Stephen Colbert on his claim that he had invented the word truthiness. During the interview, Colbert declared, "I'm not a truthiness fanatic; I'm truthiness's father." Huffington corrected him, citing Wikipedia, that he had merely "popularized" the term. Of her source, Colbert responded: "Fuck them."
  • 2006-02-08: Filip Maljkovic and Dragan Sataric of Wikimedia Serbia and Montenegro talked in the radio show Dekoder, aired on one of the most popular radio stations, Idea.
  • 2006-02-01: Wikipedia featured on NPR regarding the congressional edits, on the Digital Culture section with Andrea Seabrook and Alex Chadwick.
  • 2006-01-24: Jovana Milicevic and Goran Obradovic of Wikimedia Serbia and Montenegro talked in the television show Mozaik, aired on the third highest ranked national channel.
  • 2006-01-18: Nicholas Moreau (user:zanimum) appeared on CP24 program Home Page with David Onley, this afternoon at 5:00 PM EST. The show is also simulcast across Canada on CLT.
  • 2006-01-05: BBC Radio 2 presenter Ken Bruce and traffic reporter Lynn Bowles referred to their own and other entries on Wikipedia. Following the discussion, the latter's entry, then a mis-titled stub, was corrected and expanded within minutes.

2005

2004

  • 2004-12-11 17:30+02:00: Episode 4 of the television program go_open , which is shown on the South African channel SABC 2, had 3 short mentions of Wikipedia. The program dealt primarily with Creative Commons and featured an interview with Lawrence Lessig. It also had a short introduction to GIMP by Mark Shuttleworth, and segments on a local ISP using SpamAssassin and general user computer security tips. It then had short mentions of openphoto.net and Wikipedia. Transcript of the 3 mentions of Wikipedia: Segueing from a discussion of openphoto.net, [on screen: The cross section eye diagram from the Eye article.] "and if you want to find out about how the eye actually works, [on screen: The "Search results" page.] get en.wikipedia.org in your sight. Wikipedia [on screen: Language links on the Main Page with 1000+ (note that Afrikaans is one of the most common languages in South Africa) and 100+ articles.] is a free content encyclopedia in many languages. Wikipedia's content [on screen: Cheche.JPG in the article and scrolling down to Eye.png (which was removed on 2004-10-23t10:46z).] is created by its users, and its pages are always subject to editing, [on screen: "Eye" article's heading, and panning down to the "[edit]" link below the cross section diagram.] so no article is ever finished [on screen: "Editing Eye (section)" page.]. Now that's [on screen: The top of the Main page] a far cry from having to pay for your encyclopedia, isn't it? [...] Lastly en.wikipedia.org [on screen: Main Page, and the URI as a graphic at the bottom of the screen.] lets you expand your knowledge and everybody else's, for free." John Vlismas, stand-up comedian and program presenter: "Encyclopædia Britannica, a third of the size, very expensive. Wikipedia, three times the size and growing, absolutely free." Bittorrent of episodes 1 to 6.
  • December 4, 2004: An interview with Jimmy Wales airs on The Buzz, a popular science program on Australian Radio National. After a brief introduction to Wikipedia, the focus of the interview is Wikinews.
  • November 17, 2004: Angela discusses Wikipedia on the You and Yours programmme on BBC Radio 4. You can listen to it at but you might need some sort of plugins.
  • October 9, 2004: Andrew Lih was also briefly interviewed on New Zealand's National Radio. He explained the concepts behind Wikipedia and NPOV. He also spoke about Wikipedia 1.0 and the difficulties in capturing a snapshot of an ever evolving encyclopedia.
  • October 4, 2004: Andrew Lih was interviewed for BBC's Go Digital program which was webcast.
  • August 6, 2004: Featured on Chip Talk, a one-minute radio program on computer software, hardware, and the Web, produced at Seattle's KIRO (AM) radio, and distributed to member stations of the Associated Press Radio Network. The segment was called "The world's largest encyclopedia." Wikipedia was described as "one of the few examples of online services where people who don't even know each other have come together to create a successful product," and as a comprehensive reference in which you can read about Mars the planet, the god, and even the candy bar. A link to Wikipedia is provided from the Chip Talk home page.
  • August 4, 2004 – featured on National Public Radio's program Day to Day in a segment called The Web Browser: Silly Names for Serious Sites.
  • July 6, 2004: YleX, a Finnish-language national radio channel in Finland, recorded an interview with Timo Jyrinki. It was used as a part of "YleX Tänään" (YleX Today) -program the same day. The interview considered e.g. trusthworthiness and scope of Finnish and other Wikipedias. Paper encyclopedias were described as "old-fashioned" in comparison. In the relatively short interview, many main aspects of Wikipedia were introduced to the listeners – anyone can edit, anyone can fix if there are miswritings, freedom (fortunately, we have a separate word for libre) and the huge success as seen in bigger Wikipedias.
  • April 17, 2004 or April 20, 2004 20:00+01:00 or 21:00+01:00: Raidió na Life, an Irish-language community radio station in Dublin, Ireland, recorded a brief interview (about five minutes) with Gabriel Beecham on Wikipedia, specifically focusing on the Irish version. This interview is to be aired during the evening show Fios Feasa.
  • March 18, 2004: BBC ClickOnline, a minutes worth of coverage on BBC's ClickOnline show in a discussion about wikis. Video: Real media stream or Windows Media stream. See this note.
    • In the discussion, you can see the featured article of the day was Lego. Therefore, it (or at least that part of it) was filmed on March 11.
  • February 25, 2004: Tagesthemen, the late edition of Germany's primary TV news program aired an approximately three minute feature on Wikipedia. It included general information on the Wiki-principle as well as an interview with two German Wikipedians. However, while not being negative, it concluded with the statement that – in order to achieve the quality of established encyclopedias – much remains to be done. Read English translation by Google, WMV movie (9Mb), An English translation of the transcript, and a screenshot

2003
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