» 2009 The Wikipedian

Archive for 2009

All the Rage: Raging Again

Tagged as 2012, Berlin Wall, Chris Brown, JEdward, Ke$ha, Rihanna, Robert Enke, Roland Emmerich, Simon Cowell, The X Factor, Tom DeLay, WikiRage
on December 1, 2009 at 9:39 pm

When I launched The Wikipedian in the spring, one of my initial plans that fell by the wayside was the continuation of a weekly feature at my ever occasional political site, Blog P.I. called “All the Rage”. The feature, made possible by Craig Wood’s WikiRage tool identifying the most-edited articles across Wikipedia according to various periods of time, sought to explain why certain articles happened to be trending during a given week. Today at last, “All the Rage” returns on a trial basis. (Let’s say for now, monthly?)

So let’s take a look at the ten-most edited articles* on the English Wikipedia for November 2009:

2012 (film) — The surprise fall box office hit is the surprise most-edited Wikipedia article for the month. And, apart from a one-week period in the middle of November (when the film was released) one of the most-vandalized.

Assassin’s Creed II — The next installment in a video game series, the first of which I’d been led to believe received a mixed reaction from critics. No matter, Roland Emmerich’s previous films were no masterpieces either, and look how his latest did.

Rated R (Rihanna album) — The first album from R&B singer Rihanna since the all-too-public incident wherein she suffered a brutal beating from then-boyfriend (and fellow R&B artist) Chris Brown debuted well in early release.

The X Factor (UK series 6) — How long before this very popular UK talent show crosses the pond to the United States? Difficult to say. No doubt multi-millionaire host Simon Cowell could import it stateside alongside the Idol franchise if he cared to do so.

Robert Enke — This 32-year-old German football (soccer) goalkeeper committed suicide on November 10. I’m not quite sure why this page, except that the obviously sudden news caused a sudden spike in traffic (and edits) suggesting his fame in Germany exceeded that of sportswriter Mike Penner in the United States or model Daul Kim in South Korea. Hidden in the revisions are clues to the possible motivations, however morbid. On a somewhat lighter note, I did just learn that Wikipedia has a category titled Suicides by jumping in front of a train.

Berlin Wall — Did something happen with that twenty years ago this past month?

Left 4 Dead 2 — Another video game sequel. Scoff if you must, but this zombie shoot-’em-up does feature one shockingly complete article after two weeks’ release.

Dancing with the Stars (U.S. season 9) — This is the show that readers of Blog P.I. might remember as the one in which former House Majority Leader Tom “The Hammer” DeLay took part. You may wish to forget, but YouTube never will.

John & Edward — If you’ve been wondering what that “JEdward” phrase in Twitter’s top searches was all about (and are not yet hip to What the Trend) then wonder no more. And blame Simon Cowell.

Kesha (singer) — Who? Another singer, this one with only a hit single to her name but also a deletion debate and argument over whether the article should be named Ke$ha like her stylized stage name. Current consensus: no. Check in after her first album debuts in early 2010.

That’s about all for now, folks. We’ll see you next time we play “All the Rage”.

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*Almost. We will be doing a few things different this time around. One is that we will not profile articles scheduled for feature on the Main page — in most cases, these are Featured articles. We will, however, mention them in an “honorable mention”-type section here in the footer. One perennial, and the only article affected this time, is Deaths in 2009 (or soon enough, Deaths in 2010).

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Wikipedia in the news

Who’s The Idiot?

Tagged as Lakewood, Maurice Clemmons, Mike Huckabee, Puget Sound, Seattle, Stephen Colbert, Tacoma, The Hill, Washington
on November 30, 2009 at 9:28 pm

wikipedia-iggy-pop-idiot So I’d thought that Stephen Colbert had finally quenched the national and political media’s thirst for amusement derived from Wikipedia vandalism, but The Hill newspaper has proved me wrong. If you are not following the 2012 presidential campaign three years out, you may have missed the storm today surrounding 2008 Republican dark horse (and arguable Romney spoiler) Mike Huckabee.

In 2000, serving in his capacity as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee granted clemency to a convicted felon who is currently a suspect in the murder of four police officers in a suburb of Tacoma, Washington. [Update: Was at the time. Hours later, Maurice Clemmons, the aforementioned felon, was killed by Seattle police.] Being a national news event, perhaps the best source of reported information is Wikipedia’s Lakewood police officer shooting article.

But it’s the article about Huckabee that caught The Hill’s attention, because earlier today, this was added to the lead paragraph:

WILL FOREVER BE KNOWN AS THE IDIOT WHO RELEASED THE COP KILLER MAURICE CLEMMONS HE WAS SERVING A 35 YEAR SENTENCE FOR ARMED ROBBERY THE IDIOT RELEASED HIM AFTER 9 YEARS

In addition, next to Huckabee’s name in the infobox sidebar, the following clarification was noted thusly:

THE IDIOT

Yep, that sure is Wikipedia vandalism. And The Hill had quite the hot scoop, because the vandalism was gone within 10 minutes, and The Hill’s date stamp is just three minutes before it was reverted.

The Hill’s Jordan Fabian commented:

Any Internet user can edit or write Wikipedia entries, it is not clear who edited the page under the site’s revision history.

Well, in fact we can know that the vandal is in Seattle, simply because that IP address traces to that area. We can also look at the IP user’s previous edits, which include the clumsy expansion / temporary vandalism of the article about South Puget Sound Community College (his alma mater?) and editing the article of Golden Girls actress Betty White (?) to note something clearly heard on Seattle radio.

And then, as Wikipedia would hope, it was removed by a user just as anonymous as the one who added it. Or to quote the first commenter on The Hill’s breakthrough story:

Non-story, welcome to Wikipedia.

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Direction of Wikipedia, Wikipedia critics

What Does Objectivism Have to Do With Wikipedia?

Tagged as Altruism, Andrew Lih, Ayn Rand, Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov, Notability, NPOV, Piotr Kropotkin, Wikipedia Revolution, Yochai Benkler
on November 28, 2009 at 10:25 am

Writer Evgeny Morozov has a long essay about Wikipedia, organized as a review of Andrew Lih’s “The Wikipedia Revolution“, in the latest issue of Boston Review. Morozov identifies his chosen takeaway in a post on his blog, but I’m interested in what he has to say, via Lih’s book, about how Wikipedia’s co-founders first met through their shared regard for the philosophy of Ayn Rand:

Two of Wikipedia’s co-founders found each other on philosophy-related mailing lists. Indeed Sanger has a philosophy PhD (his Ohio State doctoral thesis is titled “Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification”), while Wales almost completed a PhD in finance. They came to the project with assumptions about human cooperation that appear to be rooted in philosophy, economics, and evolutionary psychology (among other disciplines), but those ideas are poorly articulated in the book.

Lih does point out that Sanger and Wales were heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (shades of Alan Greenspan), according to which, reality exists independent of consciousness and life’s great purpose is the rational pursuit of self-interest. Wales’s fascination with Rand was so deep that he even named his daughter after a protagonist in one of Rand’s books. But Lih does not explain the steps from Objectivism to an encyclopedia that “could detail what is true in the world without judgments.” After all, didn’t the Encyclopedia Britannica (or Diderot’s Encyclopédie, for that matter) aim to check judgments at the door and detail only “what is true in the world”? And isn’t that the aim of the new computational search engine, WolframAlpha? How does Objectivism enter the picture?

Maybe it doesn’t.

I’ve puzzled over this fact, as well. One of the core tenets of Objectivism is that altruism is no virtue. From Wikipedia’s Objectivism (Ayn Rand) entry:

A corollary to Rand’s endorsement of self-interest is her rejection of the ethical doctrine of altruism—which she defined in the sense of Auguste Comte’s altruism (he coined the term), as a moral obligation to live for the sake of others.

Yet Wikipedia’s volunteer-driven non-commercial nature seems the very definition of altruism. As an amateur observer of Objectivism and Objectivists — I ran a libertarian-leaning magazine in college — my best reconciliation is that so long as one’s motives for editing (or creating) Wikipedia are defined in terms of one’s own self-interest then there is no contradiction. If one derives personal value from research and writing for its own sake, or from esteem among one’s peers (fellow Wikipedians) then it makes perfect sense. In that case, production of an online encyclopedia useful to the world is a happy byproduct. However, If Wales or Sanger have discussed Wikipedia vis-à-vis Rand, it would be news to me.

So if the question is, how does Objectivism enter the picture, I presume that it doesn’t necessarily explain anything and that it’s entirely possible Wales and Sanger could have met on a listserv for almost any intellectual pursuit.

But Morozov is not done with Rand yet; his criticism of Lih’s book is that it raises a few theories about what motivates Wikipedians without arriving at a conclusion. Since Lih’s book is primarily a lay history of Wikipedia it doesn’t seem fair to me that Lih should have had a unified theory ahead of writing the book, though he did devote space to the subject. Morozov asks:

Lih relies on the work of Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler to address the puzzle. Benkler’s studies of “peer production” draw on the thought of Russian anarchist Piotr Kropotkin, who believed that cooperation is as important in the evolution of species as competition and that “mutual aid” is essential to human survival. Lih does not mention that Rand and Kropotkin are not exactly intellectual soulmates. Lih also does not explain how these two diverging philosophies—one prizing egoism, the other altruism—could live happily together in one site.

Morozov has been doing original research, because while Benkler and Kropotkin both appear in the book, they do not come within 65 pages of each other. Anyway, here is what Lih says about Benkler’s proposed explanation for Wikipedian motivations on p. 108:

He asserts that motivation comes from two main things other than money: the “socio-psychological” reward of interacting with others, and the “hedonic” personal gratification of the task.

Which is essentially identical to the rational self-interest described above; just because Randians are strong advocates for a capitalist economy does not mean they love only money. And even if there was a contradiction here, all one must do is look to Wikipedia’s pillars to see how the ideas of Rand and Kropotkin may coexist on Wikipedia in NPOV as a principle and policy.

That said, Morozov’s essay is otherwise well worth reading, as it delves into worthwhile questions about Wikipedia’s structural biases, such as its heavy reliance upon online sources (nearly always found via Google) and resulting quandaries such as determining whether a person from the 1920s may be considered Notable. Questions such as these, rather than the influence of Ayn Rand, are what keep Wikipedians up at night.

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Wikigroaning

The Archangel, the Renaissance Master and the Ninja Turtle

Tagged as Bible, Cartoons, Christianity, Comic books, Fancruft, Islam, Judaism, Ninja turtles, Paradise Lost, Renaissance, Something Awful, TMNT, Warning templates
on November 22, 2009 at 3:37 pm

raphael-angel raphael-painter raphael-tmnt

Back in March I considered the subject of “wikigroaning”—a joke / criticism about Wikipedia popularized on the Something Awful Internet forum in 2007. The idea is this: Sometimes, Wikipedia articles on weighty subjects are shorter and less well-developed than articles about similar, less-weighty subjects.

What I found was that this critique no longer applied to a comparison of “Lightsaber combat” vs. “Modern warfare“; the former entry no longer strictly exists, as the page now redirects to the larger topic of “Lightsaber” while the latter is essentially a hub for accessing articles on various sub-topics (assymetric warfare, biological warfare, etc.).

Today, let’s look at another one suggested by Something Awful members: Raphael (archangel) vs. Raphael (ninja turtle). How do the two compare?

Superficially, the joke is on Wikipedia: the main text of the article about the comic book character is approximately 3,000 words long, whereas the one about the Judeo-Christian figure is about 1,350. But here’s the thing—the TMNT-related article is basically devoid of any citations, and was clearly written by fans of the various comic books, TV shows and movies in which he appears. One might assume that the details should be relatively accurate, as it doesn’t seem to be a contentious subject, but who is to say? One citation is provided for the entire article, and indeed the article has been tagged as needing citations since December 2007:

That’s almost two years in which fans have been stopping by to work on the article, but no one has yet bothered to clean up problems identified by a non-fan editor, nor have they bothered to provide citations to verify any of it. From this we can infer that most editors on this particular article are focused on this particular topic and are not involved with Wikipedia otherwise.

Meanwhile there is another problem with this article. While much of it summarizes discrete events that occur in the TMNT series, other sections read as commentary on / interpretations of the character. For example:

He has an extremely loyal side and is the first to react when another of his brothers is in trouble. This happens on numerous occasions, like when he stops a blow from hitting Donatello using only his sais or kicks the Shredder away from Leonardo when the latter is about to attack.

So one could certainly verify the existence of a particular scene by citing directly from the comics. Yet the interpretation of Raphael’s actions is left to the reader, and adding this information directly to Wikipedia is a clear-cut case of original research—expressly forbidden by Wikipedia guidelines.

What is one to do if there is no published commentary on this aspect of the character’s personality? Is it then to be left out of Wikipedia entirely? In theory, yes. In practice, no. I could remove this section immediately and much more of the article if it so pleased me. But you know what? I won’t do it. The article isn’t hurting anyone, so in that way its relative frivolity helps. Moreover, it’s entirely possible that many or most of these interpretations could be found in published reviews, and without having done this I’m disinclined to delete someone’s sincere work, however inexpert. As a known issue, Wikipedia has an informal term for this type of material: fancruft. Fancruft is often deleted, but this much is so far not offensive enough to merit outright deletion.

tmnt-cover And how about the archangel? For an article about a Biblical figure I am surprised that it is not better. Only seven citations have been provided, and sections including “Raphael in Islam” and “Raphael in Paradise Lost” have none whatsoever. The quality of the writing is likewise uneven. Clearly, different sections within the article are substantially the work of different editors, and I would probably base my trust in each section according to the quality of the prose. Unsurprisingly, the better-written sections are also the ones with more sources.

But let’s now finally address the obvious: Something Awful seems to have made a mistake, because the Raphael the turtle is not named for Raphael the archangel. He is named for the Renaissance artist, just like his ninja turtle brothers Leonardo, Michaelangelo and Donatello.

Before we come to a final conclusion, let us consider the article about the real person, which is simply titled Raphael. And guess what? It’s the best of the bunch, and it’s not even close. The article is more than 6,000 words, well-written, well-sourced (84 in-line citations, nearly all from serious biographies) and well-illustrated (easy to do when the subject’s work is all public domain). There is not even a mention of the TMNT character, although it has been suggested before and appropriately rejected.

Did Something Awful purposefully avoid making the comparison? Hard to say. In 2007 the article about the Renaissance master was much shorter and completely unsourced, though carefully-written. At that time, the article about the ninja turtle was certainly longer but also less sophisticated.

According to the original Something Awful post, the criteria was simply an assesment of which article is “longer.” But this is too simplistic—it should be obvious that not all words are equal. Just as Something Awful seeks to highlight the mistake of determine a subject’s importance by the space allotted on Wikipedia, it’s also a mistake to assume that the quality of an article is directly correlated with the number of words contained within.

Both are important to keep in mind when reading Wikipedia. How many readers approach the site with these considerations in mind? That’s what I’d like to know.

Images via Wikipedia.

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Ha Ha Funny, Wikipedia critics

Examples of Bias in Conservapedia’s Examples of Bias in Wikipedia

Tagged as Andrew Schlafly, Conservapedia, Joseph Farah, Malik Hasan, North American Union
on November 14, 2009 at 3:07 pm

conservapedia_logo I can’t say that I spend much time thinking about Conservapedia, the creationist wiki created as a counterpoint to Wikipedia, but today I happened to find myself on the page titled “Examples of Bias in Wikipedia“. As you might expect, it’s a fun one. The one-line introduction to the page states:

The following is a growing list of examples of liberal bias, deceit, frivolous gossip, and blatant errors on Wikipedia.

It certainly is growing. The list of examples stands at 150 and counting as of this writing, and it defies easy summary. Many relate to disagreements over the portrayal of religion and use of international or non-U.S. standards, or complaints that certain details they find important have not been included on certain pages. For example, one of the most recent (#150) states:

Wikipedia’s Nidal Malik Hasan article fails to mention any connection to Obama’s transition government.

It’s true that Hasan participated in a task force associated with a GWU think tank that offered advice to Obama’s transition team. In fact, the detail has been considered for inclusion on the article about Hasan. Maybe something about it will be, however if it does it will surely fail to imply… whatever it is that this factoid is supposed to imply.

And then there are some objections (#2) that would never have occurred to me:

Wikipedia’s article on engineering features a photo of … an offshore wind turbine, which is an inefficient liberal boondoggle and certainly not a representative example of engineering. None even exist off the shores of the United States because they are not competitive.

Actually, as of today there is no such photograph in that particular article. Victory for Conservapedia! As it happens, there are other cases where the Conservapedia perspective has “won”; here (#45) is another:

Wikipedia has once again deleted all content on the North American Union. The old pages are inaccessible, and re-creation is blocked.

Turns out, there is now a North American Union article, and has been since December 2007, following a period where it indeed had been deleted. This was certainly in error, as the concept has received plenty of coverage — the article has nearly 50 sources.

And then there are some examples (#14) which are not, in fact, genuine examples:

In his article entitled Wikipedia lies, slander continue, journalist Joseph Farah supports his observation that Wikipedia “is not only a provider of inaccuracy and bias. It is wholesale purveyor of lies and slander unlike any other the world has ever known.”

Well, I am sure he is sincere in this belief, but I would still have to tag that “citation needed”.

Conservapedia logo via Conservapedia.

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Interview

Ken Auletta on Wikipedia

Tagged as Brian Lamb, C-SPAN, Google, Ken Auletta, Microsoft, SEO, The New Yorker
on October 30, 2009 at 11:46 am

On Sunday November 1, New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta will appear on C-SPAN’s “Q&A” with host and network founder Brian Lamb. In the three-minute excerpt below, Auletta talks about Google’s algorithm, search engine optimization, and Wikipedia:

Auletta’s expertise stretches far beyond the media mogul interviews he writes for his magazine’s editors — in 2001 he wrote a book on Microsoft and its enemies — but wait for the part where Lamb stumps Auletta on Google search results.

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Wikipedia in the news

The CIA Director’s “Occasional” Wikipedia Habit

Tagged as C-SPAN, Georgetown, Intellipedia, Michael Hayden
on October 21, 2009 at 5:57 am

Via C-SPAN, here is a short clip of CIA director Michael Hayden speaking at Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies on Monday, October 19, in which he makes some generally on-point—if perhaps overly skeptical—observations regarding Wikipedia:

It’s a short clip, so I don’t know if he mentioned the U.S. government’s Intellipedia program or not. If you saw the full speech, please share your thoughts in the comments.

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Ha Ha Funny, Wikipedia etiquette

More Ironic than an Alanis Morissette Song

Tagged as Alanis Morissette, Irony, Original research
on October 12, 2009 at 6:07 pm

Every once in awhile you just come across something like this which makes you out laugh out loud and start showing it to people sitting next to you. For me, this is such a something:

There is an explanation, and some additional curiosity, in the fact that the idea of “original research” as conceptually separable from “research” is primarily a concept at Wikipedia—namely that information in articles should be previously published in reliable sources, which makes this a self-referential article. Wikipedia usually tries to avoid having articles about Wikipedia-related subjects that have not gained currency off-site. For example, “Neutral point of view” has no dedicated article separate from Objectivity, while the Wikipedia biography controversy involving John Seigenthaler does. Should this article exist? It’s been debated before, and even put up for deletion before, but consensus has never been achieved, and others have floated potential sources for inclusion in the article.

Oh, and it doesn’t take all that much to be more ironic than the song referenced in the title; as the “Linguistic usage disputes” section of the Wikipedia article about the song notes, by most definitions the situations posited in Alanis’ song fail the requirements of irony. And that’s kind of ironic, don’t you think?

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Augmented Reality, Visualization

Change Your Wikitude

Tagged as Adams Morgan, Android, Ben Parr, Columbia Road, Cyclopedia, GPS, iPhone, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Mashable, New Media Strategies, ReadWriteWeb, San Francisco, Tom Peterson, Washington DC, WikiProject, Wikitude
on October 4, 2009 at 10:00 am

wikitude_itunes Because I work in social media, every so often I’ll get the question: So, what’s the big new thing? For a couple of years now the answer has been “Twitter,” but the micro-blogging service finally “arrived” in early 2009, so I’ve needed a new answer. Lately, I’ve settled on “augmented reality.” As Wikipedia describes it:

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with-, or augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality.

I.e. Terminator-vision, more or less. Now that the iPhone, Android-enabled devices and many more smartphones on the way have cameras and GPS (and compass in the iPhone 3GS) it becomes possible to determine where someone is, what they are looking at and serve up information to them on the spot. And it’s a no-brainer to imagine that one of the first information resources likely to be used is Wikipedia—especially considering how many articles about real-world objects contain geographic coordinates for their subjects (for this you can thank the people at WikiProject Geographical coordinates).

Just this week a program called Wikitude, available to Android users for several months, hit the iTunes store. Wikitude actually pulls information from elsewhere too, but like the name implies, Wikipedia is a key resource. Ben Parr at Mashable explains:

The app, which only works on the iPhone 3GS model (since it has a compass), utilizes three layers of information and superimposes them on your iPhone: information from Wikipedia, local reviews from London-based Qype, and finally crowdsourced information from its Wikitude.me website. With it, you can tag any location with personal notes that others can see. You can’t tell me that isn’t awesome.

He is right. I can’t. And Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb writes:

It’s because Wikitude is so open to user generated content that I find it the most exciting of all the Augmented Reality apps. Unfortunately, none of these apps that I’ve tested on Android are performing fabulously yet - the GPS is just too imprecise and the data too sparse. These are early days though, and even today it’s a lot of fun to look at the world around you through Wiki articles.

As he indicates, Wikitude is not the only player in the game. Another one available for iPhone is Cyclopedia, which I didn’t focus on just because I didn’t want to pay for it (but here is Gizmodo’s review). Wikitude, on the other hand, is available for the low, low price of free. (And as Tom Peterson would say, “free is a very good price.”) I took it for a quick test run at the corner of 18th and Columbia in Washington, DC. Here’s what I saw looking south along 18th Street:

And looking west in the direction of Columbia Heights:

Not displayed here is the ability to adjust the distance it will scan, a list-view of POIs (Points of Interest) and settings, which include the ability to turn on and off the different sources of information as well as different types of information. If you just want information from Wikipedia, it’s just a few taps away. If you want information about shopping and sights but not traffic or towns, you can adjust this as well.

I’m not likely to use this a great deal here in Washington, DC where I’d at least like to think I know what everything is. But when I’m traveling, such as when I visit San Francisco for the first time later this month, I can see myself not only making use of the program but using it enough to move it temporarily onto my first page of apps.

Have you used Wikitude or a similar application? Anything you like or dislike about them? Please share in the comments.

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Flagged Revisions, Wikipedia critics

Jimmy Wales Weighs in on Flagged Revisions

Tagged as Farhad Manjoo, Huffington Post, Jimmy Wales, Time
on September 22, 2009 at 11:14 am

My post this weekend made a point of separating uninformed Wikipedia criticism from informed Wikipedia criticism. One that I listed as meriting a response was the weirdly-titled article “Where Wikipedia Ends” by Farhad Manjoo in Time. In fact, only a day later Wikipedia co-founder and (these days mostly) spiritual leader Jimmy Wales took on the hype at Huffington Post. Here’s the core of his response:

[M]aybe you read this story on Time.com: “They recently instituted a major change, imposing a layer of editorial control on entries about living people. In the past, only articles on high-profile subjects like Barack Obama were protected from anonymous revisions. Under the new plan, people can freely alter Wikipedia articles on, say, their local officials or company head — but those changes will become live only once they’ve been vetted by a Wikipedia administrator.”

That’s all very interesting, albeit completely untrue.

Imagine if the stories told instead said things like this:

“In a major shift towards greater openness, Wikipedia is taking the first steps towards doing away with controls that kept certain pages ‘protected’ or ‘locked’ for many years. Previously, certain high profile and high risk biographies and other entries were kept locked to prevent vandalism by users who had not registered accounts on the site for a ‘waiting period’ of 4 days.”

“The new feature, long advocated by the site’s founder Jimmy Wales, eliminates that restriction by allowing anyone to edit these pages, even without logging in. The secret to being able to do this is that the new feature creates a queue where tens of thousands of longtime users of the site can approve these changes - changes that were previously completely forbidden.”

What? Really? The solution to the problem of bad speech is actually more speech? Openness and collaboration actually work?

Nevertheless, it is true. English Wikipedia will soon launch a new feature that will allow you to edit, as an inexperienced user, articles that have previously been locked more-or-less continuously for years.

To read more about flagged revisions, see Flagged Revisions Come to the English Wikipedia.

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Wikipedia critics, Wikipedia in the news, Wikipedia scholarship

Super Mario Wiki?

Tagged as Ars Technica, Eric Goldman, Erin Harty, Farhad Manjoo, Super Mario Galaxy, The Argonaut, Time, University of Idaho, University of Santa Clara, Wii
on September 20, 2009 at 2:18 pm

From the “merits no response” file:

Wikipedia, billed as the “free encyclopedia,” is not really an encyclopedia at all but an online magazine written by volunteers who do not need to have any specialized knowledge on anything at all.

The Web site says the content is mainly based on anonymous contributions. Anyone who can access the Web site can make changes to articles. I find it odd that someone who has extensive knowledge of a subject wouldn’t want the world to know his or her name. Wikipedia specifically states, “Visitors do not need specialized qualifications to contribute.” Does this make anyone else leery? This means an 11-year-old, who thinks Super Mario Galaxy is based on real planets, could write or edit the entry on the solar system.

Yes, well. This is an excerpt from a student newspaper column at the University of Idaho, so perhaps it’s not fair to pick on this particular individual. It is, however, quite obvious that she is not terribly familiar with how Wikipedia works. If the author wishes to believe that information from Super Mario Galaxy would be allowed to stand on the Solar System article, I am not about to disabuse her of this notion.

The rest of the column a) professes that students should not cite Wikipedia articles in class papers, and b) students should take advantage of the university library. I agree with both points, as I am sure do her professors and the Wikimedia Foundation as well.

More likely meriting a response, however, are critiques from a few higher-profile writers. One is Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who has been writing for several years on what he believes is the impending demise of Wikipedia, as recently covered in Ars Technica. Another is tech writer Farhad Manjoo, who has an article in this week’s Time Magazine called “Where Wikipedia Ends”.

These deserve greater consideration because they are the work of individuals who have some academic knowledge of how Wikipedia works — not to mention the reach they enjoy. As time permits, I may get around to publishing them in this space. If you have any thoughts, drop me a line or leave a comment here.

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Wikipedia in the news

How Did the New York Times Overestimate Wikipedia’s Popularity? [Corrected]

Tagged as Alexa, Compete, Facebook, Google Photobucket, MySpace, Noam Cohen, PageRank, Quantcast, Rankings, Web traffic, Wikimania, YouTube
on August 30, 2009 at 11:59 am

Update: Man, did I blow this one? Yeah, I think I did. David Gerard points out in the comments that updated gobal comScore figures — which are not easy to come by but which have been donated to Wikimedia and are available here — indeed show that the Foundation’s websites at #4 globally, with Wikipedia presumably the biggest traffic-driver by a long shot. So, hey, that’s great news. And that should be more widely-known. However, in the U.S. Wikipedia is still somewhere around #9 overall.

Which brings me to the mistake that got me here: I had misquoted ComScore and Quantcast numbers below as being global figures when in fact they were U.S. That’s just my mistake, and essentially the same mistake I had accused Cohen of making. So, there you have it. I will retreat now to the assertion that the New York Times should adopt Wikipedia’s inclusion of inline citations. Then maybe I wouldn’t make mistakes like this one.

New York Times tech correspondent Noam Cohen, reporting on the final day of the Wikimania conference in Buenos Aires for the NYT’s Bits blog, begins his most recent dispatch as such:

Considering that Wikipedia has reached Top Five world status among Web sites – with more than 330 million users – its annual Wikimania conference, which ended Friday night in BuenosAires, featured a lot of hand-wringing about all the problems the project faces.

What catches my attention is the assertion that Wikipedia has attained “Top Five” status worldwide. Cohen doesn’t provide a source (no small irony there) which makes his decision to uppercase the phrase “Top Five” all the more curious. According to what metric? There are several to choose from. And according to whose calculations? There are several competing firms who collect, analyze and determine such rankings, but none of them is necessarily authoritative.

The best-known but least-respected is Amazon-owned Alexa, which currently puts Wikipedia at #6 globally, according to a combination of users and pageviews counted by Alexa’s (somewhat murky) sources. That’s close, but it’s not in the top five.

Compete.com, a web metrics company which makes some public rankings available, lists Wikipedia at best #9 globally, according to Unique visitors. Somewhat surprisingly, it doesn’t rank for their other metrics, such as Visits and Page views.

A similar company is Comscore (I mean, comScore) which releases such information on a press release basis. Their last report, in July, put Wikimedia Foundation Sites at #10 for Unique visitors — actually down one place from a few months earlier.

Another service is Quantcast, one of the newer entrants and also one of the most-praised. Quantcast currently puts Wikipedia at #8. Although I like that figure — it reflects figures I’ve seen in months past and have quoted numerous times — perhaps we can split the difference and say, right now, Wikipedia is #9 overall. Nothing to be ashamed of there.

But then where does Cohen’s “Top Five” claim derive? I tried Googling for the answer, and I think I might have it.

According to an August 8, 2009 entry published on the blog of a web design firm which may be called PJ Designs and Concepts, Wikipedia lands in the “top five Social Media websites in terms of Inbound Links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast.” In fact Wikipedia ranks second, behind only MySpace and ahead of YouTube, Facebook and Photobucket. I find this claim somewhat suspicious. For one thing, Facebook routinely ranks in the top three of rankings by Alexa, Compete and Quantcast (follow the above links). It also has an identical PageRank to MySpace: 9/10, which Wikipedia also enjoys. That the post is authored by “admin” does not especially inspire confidence, either. And of course, these are just “social media” sites and not all “Web sites.”

Granted, it’s possible that new scholarship was announced at Wikimania, but I think that would have been worth a headline itself. As much as I’d like to see Wikipedia at #5 (let alone #2) I think we’d know if this was the case. If there is another explanation for Cohen’s assertion than the one I propose above, I can’t find it. But I’ll let you know if I find out.

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Biographies of Living Persons, Direction of Wikipedia, Flagged Revisions, Wikipedia critics, Wikipedia in the news

Flagged Revisions Come to the English Wikipedia

Tagged as Andrew Lih, Authority, Mashable, New York Times, Noam Cohen, Openness, Reliability, The Moderate Voice, The Register
on August 26, 2009 at 6:39 am

Earlier this week, New York Times web reporter Noam Cohen, who does some of the best Wikipedia reporting this side of The Register, broke the news about a decision by Wikipedia’s parent organization to instate tighter controls on some articles. Wrote Cohen:

Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.

The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.

It’s worth pointing out early on, as Cohen’s story unfortunately did not, that these changes will apply only to biographies of living persons. In Wikipedia, that is a proper noun: Biography of Living Persons (BLP) is one of Wikipedia’s most strenuously enforced policies; earlier this year, Wikipedia veteran Newyorkbrad explained this in a series of posts on Volokh Conspiracy, which The Wikipedian previously discussed.

Blogosphere reaction has been much more widespread than any Wikipedia story that comes to mind from this past year. I think this is because everybody who uses Wikipedia has some opinion about the website’s curious balance between openness and reliability — and now the balance has shifted. I’d say reaction is roughly divisible into four quadrants: those who mourn Wikipedia’s openness vs. those who will continue to question Wikipedia’s reliability, with those who are optimistic about the change vs. those who are not. Here is a walk-through:

Among those who feel that Wikipedia’s openness is key to the site’s success, count Judd Antin at TechnoTaste, who is studying Wikipedia as part of his PhD work:

As part of my dissertation research I’ve been interviewing less experienced Wikipedians about their perceptions of the site. One constant theme has been the perception of a class system in Wikipedia. Casual editors worry that their edits aren’t good enough, and that they’ll be rebuked by Wikipedia’s upper-classes. They perceive a mystical group of higher-order contributors who make Wikipedia work. … This latest move is troubling in that it seems to represent a lack of faith in crowdsourcing and the wisdom of crowds, in the model that made Wikipedia what it is today. This change will also remove another of the important social-psychological incentives that draw new people into the Wikipedia fold: the instant gratification that comes from seeing your work reflected on a Wikipedia page.

This is not always a good thing; Kate McMillan at Small Dead Animals is an example of someone who is the subject of a Wikipedia article, but is not exactly pleased about the fact. She also isn’t exactly optimistic that things will change:

My own Wiki page was instigated by an internet “stalker”, in fact, the same individual who once authored a blogspot site using my stolen identity. Requests to Wikipedia to delete the page went unheeded, and it’s remained a reliable source of misinformation, false attribution of quotes, and drive-by smears ever since. … It wasn’t until I threatened a Wiki editor personally with legal action for restoring defamatory material to the page, that they began to take tighter control of the content.

Another skeptic is Ann Bartow at Madisonian.net:

I have doubts about how effective this is going to be in improving the reliability of the content of Wikipedia entries, but it is a great PR move by Jimmy Wales, that’s for sure.

From the perspective of a frustrated editor, here is Andy Merrett at The Blog Herald:

As someone not in the Wikipedia “elite”, I’ve long since given up trying to edit entries on the site, having already wasted not insignificant time adding information only to have it reversed. I foresee that Wikipedia will increasingly become a place where only a minority of privileged and “trusted” editors have the keys to the kingdom.

That is a plus to others. Among the critics of Wikipedia’s reliability was Lisa Gold at Research Maven, who nonetheless is a skeptic herself:

I’m glad there is finally some acknowledgment among the powers that be at Wikipedia that accuracy is important. But that’s not enough. If accuracy is important, you have to make it a priority and do things on many different levels to try to achieve it. You have to apply your policies to the entire site, not just some articles. You have to bring in people with knowledge, experience, and qualifications to do real editing and fact-checking. (With all of the unemployed editors, fact-checkers, and journalists out there, why not hire a few and let them work their magic.) This new policy is not really about making Wikipedia more accurate, it’s just about trying to stop the embarrassing vandalism stories that hit the news with disturbing regularity.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Dr. Jim West, who appears to have some experience arguing with an intellectual opponent about Wikipedia content. His reaction to the change:

In a word, duh. Now if you’ll do the same for every entry then perhaps your resource might be worth visiting some day. Until then, I think I’ll continue to abstain. I’m not really interested in reading an article on the Dead Sea Scrolls that Raphael Golb has edited using one of his 200 fake names.

While I understand the concerns of both above, I also think they go too far. Striking a balance and offering a more optimistic view is Ben Parr at Mashable:

[W]e can’t help but feel a bit sad that this change had to happen. Wikipedia was egalitarian in the spread and use of information, and it treated everyone as equal contributors of knowledge. While that may not necessarily be true in the real world, it still was the driving force behind the creation of 3 million articles, more than any other encyclopedia could ever hope to boast.

The move was necessary, but it does mark a new chapter in the Wikipedia information age and the end of an old one.

And here’s another philosophical take from Joe Windish at The Moderate Voice:

There is little doubt the debate will be passionate, but that’s exactly as it should be. Eight years into the incredible success of Wikipedia, long one of the 10 most popular sites on the Web, many of us still don’t understand it. … The thousands of volunteer Wikipedian editors take their responsibility seriously. Flagged revisions may or may not work. What’s best about it is that the Wikipedia editorial community will watch and wonder about and debate it. And if it should not succeed, they will try and try again.

My own take on the situation? I don’t know yet. As Andrew Lih explains in his book, The Wikipedia Revolution, the German-language edition has had this feature for several years, and it seems to work there. On the other hand, the English Wikipedia is much larger, and the possibility certainly exists that some articles will be left unchecked and un-updated for extended periods of time. Will the site grow stagnant? Will the vast majority of people who read but do not edit even notice? These are just a few of the operative questions.

WikiProject Flagged Revisions, which will try to keep articles current, was only established on the 19th of August and as yet has just four listed participants. It’s also worth noting, once the details are hammered out — which they are not just yet — the plan will be implemented on a two-month trial basis. And after that? Well, I’m very interested to find out myself.

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Direction of Wikipedia, Wikipedia in the news

Three Million Served

Tagged as Beate Eriksen, Wikipedia Weekly
on August 18, 2009 at 6:32 am

This week marks a milestone for the English-language Wikipedia that is both major and somewhat arbitrary: the creation of its 3 millionth article. If you visit the front page of Wikipedia now, you will see this message:

That article, about Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen is currently locked down to prevent vandals from messing it up, something that happens with nearly every article that gets widespread attention. Of course, usually it is because the subject was in the news, rather than the article itself.

As the chart below indicates (taken from here), Wikipedia passed 2 million articles in the third quarter of 2007. Will it take another 2 years for Wikipedia to reach 4 million?

Actually, it may take a bit longer: Wikipedia’s article growth has been slowing down. This has been a topic for discussion on the Wikipedia Weekly podcast at least as far back as a year ago, and is inevitable. Given Wikipedia’s success and its strict rules on what qualifies for an article, there will come a point where most articles have already been created. We may have reached that point.

Or, as I think more likely, we have created most of the articles that can be assembled from web sources and in-print books. That’s why I think the next phase of Wikipedia’s growth will have to depend on archived materials involving historical subjects that are exactly the type of article Wikipedia does least well at. This wouldn’t stop Wikipedia’s growth from slowing, but it would keep its growth meaningful.

Update: From the comments, here are two thoughts from very smart and much more experienced Wikipedians than yours truly. First, David Gerard:

Actually, I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of books, in-print or not. What’s been done so far isn’t even the low-hanging fruit, it’s the fruit that’s actually sitting on the ground waiting to be picked up.

The growth curve so far looks like a logistic curve with a linear increase on top.

One interesting thing is that is the growth curves for the other large Wikipedias look similar. And the smaller Wikipedias are typically in early linear growth or the exponential upcurve of the logistic curve.

And from Sage Ross, a Wikipedia Weekly contributor:

“we have created most of the articles that can be assembled from web sources and in-print books”

That’s not nearly the case, especially if you count digitized scholarly journals as available sources too. Wikipedia could easily have another 3 million articles (probably more like 30 million) based on published sources. It’s just that the deeper you go into specialized areas where the untapped sources are rich, the fewer people there are who are interested in and/or capable of writing about those areas.

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First Versions

Bill Clinton’s Excellent Adventure

Tagged as Bill Clinton, Euna Lee, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Kimg Jong-Il, Laura Ling
on August 5, 2009 at 11:27 am

Update: Hmm, so it looks like I may have gotten out ahead of the details on this one. See the comments, where fellow Wikipedian Graham87 points out that the current Wikipedia database does not in fact include edits from the early months of Wikipedia. As he points out, here is an earlier version of the Bill Clinton article. And what does that mean for this particular series? Well… at least I will have to select articles from approximately 2002 on.

The 42nd president is enjoying a pretty good week, having returned this morning from North Korea with American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee free upon his successful negotiations with Kim Jong-Il. This seems as good a moment as any for the second installment in a series on the first versions of major Wikipedia articles.

Bill Clinton left office just five days after Wikipedia was founded in January 2001. Although one might think this would make him a strong candidate for being one of the first articles created, it so happens that no such article was created until November 17 that year. And even then another editor would not contribute again for nearly another month — coincidentally the same day a Wikipedia article was created for his successor.

The first version of the Bill Clinton article was fairly substantial: 979 words excluding the Table of Contents. This is less than a tenth of the 9,900-some words of the Bill Clinton article today — to say nothing of all the articles about the many peripheral articles such as Electoral history of Bill Clinton — but it’s still pretty good.

Here is the first paragraph (of a much longer intro) today:

William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III, August 19, 1946)[1] served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He was the third-youngest president; only Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were younger when entering office. He became president at the end of the Cold War, and as he was born in the period after World War II, he is known as the first Baby Boomer president.[2] His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is currently the United States Secretary of State. She was previously a United States Senator from New York, and also candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. Both are graduates of Yale Law School.

Here is the first paragraph (of a much longer intro) then:

William Jefferson Clinton (Democrat) was the 42nd President of the United States, from 1993-2001. He was born August 19, 1946 in Hope, Arkansas. He was named after his father, William Jefferson Blythe II, who had been killed in a car accident just three months before his son was born.

In the original version, the Lewinsky scandal is handled in two short paragraphs in the intro section; by now Lewinsky and the subsequent impeachment trial have two short sections which link away to very comprehensive sections of their own.

While Wikipedia today strives to be non-partisan and avoid self-references, these concepts were less-developed early on, and this can be seen in how the original version closed. The last proper article sentence concluded:

There’s a great deal more to be said about him — let’s try to keep it non-partisan and encyclopedic.

And a deprecated link to the Talk page, at the time included in the text of the article itself, said:

/Talk (go ahead and be partisan there)

Not to worry — eight years later, they still are.

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Edit wars, Wikipedia in the news

Too Hot to Handel? Wikipedia’s Troubled Role in State Political Campaigns Continues

Tagged as Erick Erickson, Georgia politics, Jim Galloway, John Oxendine, Karen Handel, Stu Rothenberg
on July 6, 2009 at 8:59 am

As noted here recently in the case of Creigh Deeds, a well-written, informative Wikipedia article can have a positive impact on a candidate’s reputation. As noted here a couple months back in the case of Ryan Coonerty, a Wikipedia article edited primarily by opponents can have the opposite effect.

The case of Georgia secretary of state and gubernatorial hopeful Karen Handel is one of the latter, and it points to exactly why politicians should keep a close watch on their page as well as just what can happen when they do not.

In early June, a relatively new editor going by the name RomneyGingrich12 changed Handel’s article from…

She served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Vice-President Quayle’s wife, Marilyn Quayle, where she worked to promote breast cancer awareness.

…to…

She dropped out of highschool, but later got her GED. She forwent college to served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Vice-President Quayle’s wife, Marilyn Quayle, where she worked to promote breast cancer awareness.

Forget the typos. Forget the lack of a source. And forget the tendentious nature of the change. This was not obvious vandalism — the edit contained neither obscenity nor nonsense — and it remained on the page for 20 more days, until Georgia politico Erick Erickson — known nationally for editing the conservative website RedState — posted about it on his Peach Pundit blog:

In fact, Handel both graduated from high school and went on to college until getting a job in the White House.

Judging by RomneyGingrich12’s history on Wikipedia, he appears to be a big fan of John Oxendine, having edited the Ox’s bio religiously and also having made sure to point out in Ray McBerry’s biography that McBerry came in second in a straw poll to Oxendine. The original reference to McBerry just said he came in second.

And it so happens that Stu Rothenberg, a Washington-based political analyst, had already picked up the GED information from Handel’s Wikipedia article. Jim Galloway at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution questioned Rothenberg on the subject:

We called Rothenberg this afternoon. The political analyst said he picked up information about the GED by talking to his Georgia contacts. Rothenberg acknowledged that he saw the information on Wikipedia as well, but said that’s not what he based his reporting on.

“I may have made a mistake,” Rothenberg said. But the columnist said he has also asked Handel’s staff for more information. “I’m waiting for a response,” he said. “I’m waiting for data on the woman’s life.”

Granted, it’s hard to fault Rothenberg if a detail he found on Wikipedia was backed up by interviews in the state. The GED claim was finally removed on June 29, but by then it was too late for Handel to stay quiet. On July 3, WBS-TV in Atlanta ran a story titled “Karen Handel Upset Over Altered Wikipedia Entry” which begins:

Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican running for governor, wants to set the record straight about her education.

“For the record, yes, I have a high school diploma,” said Handel.

Yikes. Although Handel seems to have dealt with the situation appropriately, by the time this kind of thing gets into the press, the damage has been done. After all, one thing people know about her is a false story — and they may or may not know it is false. Now the page is attracting vandals from beyond Georgia, some of whom are writing much worse things.

Erickson claims to have identified RomneyGingrich12 as an Oxendine staffer, and while the circumstantial evidence is certainly there, it seems unlikely to hurt Oxendine as much without a smoking gun, resignation or firing — and one can expect the Oxendine camp to do whatever they can to avoid such a scenario. That may not be fair, but that’s politics.

If there is one leveler here, it is that now both the Oxendine and Handel pages currently are affixed with the same warning templates:

Those won’t last forever, and I have to wonder which article will be improved first. So far, all the news has not resulted in significant changes to either. Both campaigns need to have open representatives working through the Wikipedia community to make sure their articles are written as fairly as possible. Until then, the coverage will continue.

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Wikipedia in the news

The King of Wikipedia Traffic

Tagged as Barack Obama, Biographies of Living Persons, BLP, Google, Jay Walsh, John McCain, Michael Jackson, Noam Cohen, Sarah Palin, Traffic statistics
on June 27, 2009 at 4:42 pm

Michael Jackson’s sudden and shocking death just about blew up the Internet this past week, and Wikipedia was no exception, even getting briefly knocked offline. And as the New York Times’ tech reporter Noam Cohen reported, the stunning news produced another milestone for Wikipedia:

The Michael Jackson entry in Wikipedia Thursday evening appeared to have set the record as having the highest traffic in the eight-year history of the online encyclopedia.

In the 7 p.m. hour alone Thursday, shortly after Mr. Jackson’s death was confirmed, there were nearly one million visitors to that article. (In fact, for that hour more than 250,000 visitors went to the misspelled entry “Micheal Jackson.” Even his brother Randy Jackson had 25,000 visits that hour.)

“We suspect this is most in a one-hour period of any article in Wikipedia history,” said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.

The article goes on to note that this represented about 1 percent of Wikipedia’s total traffic on the day — this may not sound like much, until you recall the English Wikipedia has more than 2.9 million articles. Writing midday Friday, Cohen predicted that the article could surpass 5 million visits on Friday. As it happens, Cohen set his target a little too low:

1.4 million visits is pretty remarkable, but 5.9 million visits in unprecendented. However, there is one discrepancy: yesterday’s estimates from User:Henrik’s Wikipedia article traffic statistics tool (and Cohen’s article) put the figure at 1.8 million visits, which means the numbers where somehow reconciled downward in the interim. I’ll be looking to find out why. And while Cohen names as a point of comparison President Barack Obama’s Wikipedia article, which received 2.3 million visits on Election Day, I know of a page that received more traffic still and offers a better comparison:

That spike you are looking at occurred on the day that Senator John McCain announced Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in the final days of August, 2008 (as previously discussed on Blog P.I.). Between Jackson and Palin we have one well-known but mysterious and one little-known but suddenly very public figure, thrust into the middle of a breaking news story. By comparison, Obama was a highly visible public figure and Election Day was known far in advance. Perhaps that actually makes the 2.3 million that day even more impressive. But it’s hard to read much more into bar graphs such as this beyond acknowledging they represent a sudden and externally-driven interest in the subject.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that the article containing the information people presumably want most, Death of Michael Jackson, has not recorded anything like the traffic of the primary MJ article:

Why is this the case? Part of the answer is the power of Google, which is the overwhelming driver of traffic to Wikipedia. On that note, I don’t know about you, but in the past 24 hours, Michael Jackson’s official site and his Wikipedia article have traded places on Google, with Wikipedia now ranked first overall. Second, the link to this article is found deep in the primary one, albeit of course at the top of the section concerning his death. Still, 527 is a rounding error compared to 5.9 million. Perhaps the Michael Jackson article itself satisfied their curiosity, before clicking over to iTunes and downloading a copy of Thriller.

And one last, somewhat morbid note: it is strange indeed that the King of Pop is no longer covered by Wikipedia’s Biography of living persons guideline.

Update: In the comments, one of the more knowledegable Wikipedia editors, Tvoz, suggests I’m wrong on the last point:

One thing: actually Michael Jackson’s article *is* still covered by the “biographies of living people” guidelines. Those guidelines protect the integrity of Wikipedia’s articles and intend to thwart defamation, and it is expected that editors will continue to follow the policy and remove poorly sourced defamatory material immediately, even after the death. His family members are alive, and causes of action as a result of such defamatory material could still be brought.

An interesting point, and I think a fair clarification. My inclination is to say this means that Jackson’s family members are still covered by BLP, and this means that any material on the Michael Jackson page must conform to the policy in order to protect them, rather than MJ himself. And of course, spurious information shouldn’t be added at any time — and Jackson’s continued celebrity probably means that this page will be scrutinized more than most.

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Wikipedia Optimization

Watch Out, Laszlo Panaflex!

Tagged as Aunt Selma, László Kovács, Laszlo Panaflex, Notability, NPOV, Panavision, Reliable sources, The Simpsons, Troy McClure, Verifiability
on June 22, 2009 at 10:42 pm

laszlo_panaflex In a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, washed-up movie star Troy McClure — you may remember him from such self-help videos as “Smoke Yourself Thin!” and “Get Confident, Stupid!” — enters a sham marriage with Aunt Selma to squash rumors about his sordid personal life and regain his former screen glory. As he is “romancing” Selma along a Simpsonized version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, McClure declares:

One day, my lady Selma’s gonna have a star right next to mine, so watch out [camera pans right] Laszlo Panaflex!

Like most throwaway Simpsons lines, it has faded from mainstream recognition — the episode’s imagined musical version of “Planet of the Apes” is surely better known — but lives on in offhand references made by those of us who have been watching long enough to remember the controversy over Bart Simpson and those “Underachiever and Proud Of It” T-shirts.

I thought of it again while watching Ghostbusters on TV last night, noticing that the cinematographer was László Kovács. Was Kovács’ the name Simpsons writers were riffing on? Following a well-established routine, I plugged his name — Panaflex’s of course — into Google, hoping for but not really expecting a Wikipedia article to pop up.

It turns out Wikipedia did show up first — but it wasn’t an article. Instead, it was a user page for someone using the fictional lenser’s moniker as a handle. It reads in full:

User:Laszlo Panaflex

On the episode of the television show The Simpsons called “A Fish Called Selma,” actor Troy McClure attempts to revive his career by marrying Marge’s sister Selma. When Troy gets a star on the Springfield Walk of Fame, he says that Selma will soon have the star next to his, “so watch out … Laszlo Panaflex!” — the name on the star next to his.
The name refers to cinematographer László Kovács, who used a Panaflex camera on some of his films. A picture of a movie camera appears under the name on the star.

Simpsons Episode Guide: A Fish Called Selma
László Kovács at the Internet Movie Database

Nice. But this also got me wondering: is this a loophole in Wikipedia policy? Isn’t this a way to get an encyclopedic page on the site even if it would be otherwise deleted by Wikipedia’s relentless arbiters of significance? After, all articles appearing on what Wikipedians call the “mainspace” of Wikipedia are expected to satisfy a handful of core guidelines lest they be removed or radically altered.

First there is the general notability guideline requiring the subject to meet a certain threshhold of importance (often determined by news coverage). Articles failing the requirement are deleted, and relevant content is sometimes relocated to existing articles about the same topic. Laszlo Panaflex, as one joke in one episode, would never pass Wikipedia’s notability requirement because it would obviously belong on the page about the episode (and as of this writing, it is not even there). An example of a Simpsons reference that does meet this requirement is Homer Simpson’s ubiquitous “D’oh!”

Other guidelines it could elide and does in this case: Verifiability and Reliable sources. Sure, it helps to confirm my suspicion that Laszlo Panaflex is inspired by the real cinematographer with the accented name discouraging me from Ctrl-C/V-ing it again. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if it was named for him, but certainly doesn’t offer a citation for the claim. I need more proof, and articles in the Wikipedia mainspace do, too.* User pages have no such requirement.

On the other hand, I think it passes NPOV with flying colors.

But is it a loophole to treat a user page like an article? After all, Laszlo Panaflex ranked right at the top of Google; other articles on semi-obscure subjects could as well. I don’t believe there is a policy, guideline or essay that specifically addresses this, though I fully acknowledge I may be wrong. In that case that I am not, the possibility exists for unworthy (or even “unworthy”) articles to be given a second home on user pages.

I can say for certain — alas, without being able to summon a link (I’ll look) — that there are a number of editors whose user pages are written to resemble a Wikipedia article. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. However, I do think it could make the Wikipedia community uncomfortable if it became a widespread practice, and was seen as a gray hat SEO technique.

In that unlikely event, the first suggestion that comes to me would be requiring a banner on user pages that specifies that it is not an “article”. It would be phrased like the banner I keep atop my own page, included as a disclaimer in case the page is swiped by an unscrupulous mirror site. After all, this non-accusatory template puts even a flawed but useful article about one Laszlo Panaflex in the proper context:

This is a Wikipedia user page.

This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WWB.

*It may be out there. Many other Simpsons-related Wikipedia articles, including “A Fish Called Selma”, are buttressed by citations to the commentary tracks on the official DVD releases. If anybody knows for sure, I’d be happy to help add the citation.

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Featured articles, Interview, Visualization, Wikigroaning, Wikipedia critics

Wikipedia On Dead Tree Redux

Tagged as art, print, Rob Matthews, Stephen Colbert
on June 20, 2009 at 3:31 pm

More than a week ago I posted a photo that’s been making the rounds lately — and even wound up as the basis for a joke on Conan O’Brien this past week — about a student artist who had created a physical book of Wikipedia’s Featured articles, one taking up approximately 5,000 pages. I noted at the time that the explanatory text

Reproducing Wikipedia in a dysfunctional physical form helps to question its use as an internet resource.

wasn’t terribly satisfying to me, and I asked at the time

Would printing all of Google’s search results also question its use as an Internet resource? Would printing an image of a sundial question its use as a physical timekeeping device?

and I resolved to find out more if I could. In fact I did hear back from the book’s creator, Rob Matthews, not long after. When posed with the question above, he responded at first:

I’m comparing the Internet Wikipedia to a traditional encyclopedia, by putting it in the same format, therefore suggesting that Wikipedia is dysfunctional compared to a normal encyclopedia. This is suggested by how I’ve conveyed Wikipedia physically.

I still wasn’t satisfied with this, but after a bit of back and forth, Matthews confirmed that his intention was to point out, compared to a traditional paper-based encyclopedia, it’s less reliable because of its radical openness, or hard to find what’s important among the incomplete and unbalanced articles that exist on the site. Those are my words, but he agreed with this much.

I actually do not agree with this view. Not that I don’t agree there is some truth to the point, because there is, but because I do not actually see how anyone is impeded from finding what they want because of Wikipedia. Moreover, “what’s important” is always in flux, and Wikipedia is a reflection of that.

It’s also nothing new. Those who lament the fact that Wkipedia gives disproportionate coverage to trivial matters — a criticism voiced by none other than Stephen Colbert, who sarcastically riffed on the subject, “any site that’s got a longer entry on ‘truthiness’ than on Lutherans has its priorities straight” — should also recognize that these imbalances are often corrected.

I’ve never been one to take my social commentary from visual art such as painting or sculpture, in significant part because it is rare that an image or an object can convey a subtle point while also succeeding as art. For such a purpose — in this case offering commentary on a subject which is overwhelmingly composed of words — I think nonverbal art is inferior to something like the novel, the essay or even the sitcom.

Even if I thought Matthews had a strong argument about Wikipedia to make, I think this fails as standalone commentary. But if Matthews does actually sell copies of this book, consider me interested (price dependent). Mr. Matthews doesn’t have answers for his questions, but his artwork would make for an excellent conversation piece.

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Edit wars, Wikipedia in the news

Words and Deeds: Wikipedia and the Virginia Governor’s Race

Tagged as Bob McDonnell, Creigh Deeds, Daily Kos, inPhonic, John Broughton, John Huang, NPOV, Prudential, Telergy, Terry McAuliffe, Virginia, Virginia gubernatorial election, Waldo Jaquith, Washington Post
on June 14, 2009 at 8:03 am

The Democratic Party of Virginia settled on a nominee for governor this past week, choosing state senator Creigh Deeds over two better-known rivals, including former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe. (On the Republican side, Bob McDonnell was unopposed for the nomination.) Following the race, Virginia blogger and Wikipedia contributor Waldo Jaquith posted about “Wikipedia’s role in Sen. Deeds’ nomination“, featuring quotes from a live discussion WashingtonPost.com. Wrote one voter:

I voted for Deeds. The WaPo endorsement really helped. I started doing the research this weekend and was disappointed that the WaPo did not have a quick guide the issues. I searched for a half an hour and did not find a quick rundown of the candidates and the issues.

Also, Deeds had a wikipedia page about his past stances. That really helped. The other two did not have similar pages.

Interestingly, the specific page quoted — “Political positions of Creigh Deeds” — has been merged back into the main Deeds article, but the content appears intact. Jaquith writes:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Wikipedia is going to play a large role in year’s Virginia elections. The campaigns that a) understand that, b) harness that and c) do so in a fair, unbiased way will reap the benefits. The campaigns that ignore Wikipedia or attempt to manipulate its information in a way that is anything less than fully truthful will be penalized accordingly.

In fact, that seems to have already occurred in the primary. As noted in an overexcited but basically correct diary at Daily Kos last week, ““You can’t handle the truth!” TMac’s dogs scrub Wikipedia of facts” supporters of McAuliffe did remove sourced information, none of which has been restored as of this writing.

In the first instance, material about a land deal and disgraced Democratic fundraiser John Huang because it “lacked NPOV” (i.e. not written from a neutral point of view), and in the second about business deals involving Telergy and inPhonic “for being unsourced.” Well. Lacking a neutral tone is cause to rewrite a section, but not a reason to delete — certainly not as a first resort. Second, the inPhonic material was properly sourced, and better than deleting the Telergy section would have been to find a citation. On the other hand, this goes both ways — the material was almost certainly added to cast doubt upon McAuliffe’s fitness for office, and according to the discussion page about McAuliffe’s article, much of this criticism popped up just days before the Tuesday primary vote. And so it goes.

So now the Commonwealth turns to the general election where, if Jaquith’s prediction is correct, the articles about Deeds and McDonnell will be both important resources as well as the locus of battles to establish narratives about each candidate. Indeed, both articles are the top non-official sites listed in Google searches for each candidate’s name. (Another important article will be Virginia gubernatorial election, 2009.)

As yet, Deeds’ article is the better one, in part because of the aforementioned section outlining Deeds’ political positions. His article is also somewhat more active, probably due to the active primary, and more experienced editors working on the page. Recent contributors to Deeds’ page include Virginia resident John Broughton, who literally wrote the book on editing Wikipedia, whereas most recent work on McDonnell’s page has been done from unregistered accounts represented only by the user’s IP address. Jaquith, for his part, has recently edited both.

It’s a good bet that, after the summer, editing on both articles will ramp up as November draws closer. It will be interesting to see how they develop.

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Wikipedia On Dead Tree

Tagged as art, print, Rob Matthews
on June 10, 2009 at 6:35 pm

OK, now this is something else — artist Rob Matthews printed all of Wikipedia’s Featured articles as a 5,000 page book. It’s a great image:

Which raises the question — what would a book containing every article from Wikipedia look like?

Meanwhile, Matthews doesn’t offer much explanation for the art or what it is supposed to mean, although he does offer this much:

Reproducing Wikipedia in a dysfunctional physical form helps to question its use as an internet resource.

Hmm… it does? Would printing all of Google’s search results also question its use as an Internet resource? Would printing an image of a sundial question its use as a physical timekeeping device? I love the book as an art piece, but I’m not entirely sold on this point. (No matter what, though, it’s still more constructive than the other Wikipedia art.)

I will drop Mr. Matthews an e-mail and ask both questions — and I’ll update if I find anything out.

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Wikipedia critics

The Wikipedia Haters Club

Tagged as About.com, Alan Greenspan, Answers.com, Bing, Examiner, Google, NNDB, Reliable sources, Steve Juetten, Verifiability
on June 9, 2009 at 8:42 am

Count as one member Examiner.com personal finance columnist Steve Juetten, who writes in a review comparing Microsoft’s newly launched search engine, Bing, with old standby Google:

Before I started the search, I set two rules. First, I was looking for information from reliable sources. As a result, if a search placed information from Wikipedia high on the list, the search engine sank in my review. As with information from any source (human, web or book), trust but verify and Wikipedia is not trustworthy when it comes to your money.

Anyone who spends much time around Wikipedia is pretty familiar with complaints such as these, and to this end the Wikipedia community maintains a page called Replies to common objections. Juetten isn’t quite specific enough for me to highlight a particular section, but I’m pretty sure he will find some answers in the answers to “Wikipedia can never be high quality“.

Meanwhile, a few objections to his objection do occur to me. For one thing, who is to say that other sources will be more trustworthy? Juetten undoubtedly singles out Wikipedia for its high profile, but it’s difficult to see why it should be placed at a disadvantage to About.com, Answers.com or NNDB, all of which can rank well for certain terms.*

Are these other information resources likely to be more reliable? I know of no reason why they should be. And if About.com or NNDB does happen to be wrong, there’s not a thing you can do about it.

Lastly, I agree with Juetten that “trust but verify” is a good personal rule and a sound approach to research, but I don’t understand why he doesn’t extend it to Wikipedia when this is an area in which Wikipedia often shines. One of the site’s core content policies is in fact Verifiability, that articles need references. But Juetten’s objection becomes even more ironic when you consider that said references are required to meet another core policy: Reliable sources.

Juetten’s worldly cynicism is understandable but, in this case, selectively applied and ultimately misplaced. It is true that Wikipedia is not completely reliable, but it shouldn’t be penalized for being one of the few reference websites that actually admits the fact.

_____
*For example, try searching for Alan Greenspan on Google and Alan Greenspan on Bing. As of this morning, the top three results for each are: Wikipedia, Answers.com and NNDB.

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Wikipedia in the news

Thoughts on Wikipedia and Scientology

Tagged as ArbCom, Huffington Post, Scientology, The Register
on June 8, 2009 at 9:21 am

scientology_symbol_logo It’s unfortunate that The Wikipedian has been in suspended animation for the week or so, because it has been a big past week or so for Wikipedia in the news. On May 28, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee — the court of last resort for Wikipedia disputes — banned all IP addresses associated with the Church of Scientology from editing Wikipedia for repeated disruptive editing and the use of “sock puppet” accounts to tilt Wikipedia consensus on Scientology-related articles.

The decision has been all over the tech and mainstream press since, from The Register’s first report on May 29 to the New York Times finally covering the story this morning. In between, Google News shows hundreds of results about the subject.

I have not looked closely at the decision, but my own general take on it is about what you might expect: Wikipedia reserves the right to regulate its own community and, upon fair consideration, expel those who are determined to prevent Wikipedia from operating. This was certainly the case here, as the deliberations ran for more than six months, reportedly the longest in Wikipedia history. It is not the case, as one Huffington Post contributor erroneously imagined, that “all members” of Scientology were banned from editing. Instead, Wikipedia merely banned IP addresses known to be controlled by Scientology. Any Scientologist can still log on from home and, one expects, have their individual account banned if they too persist in deleting good information that the Church does not like.

This is not the first time Wikipedia has taken such an action, and I’d say it’s easily less controversial than the ban on an entire Utah neighborhood in 2007 for incredibly involved reasons that you can read about here.

If I had an objection it would be that an indefinite block, which is what the ArbCom imposed here, should be less desirable than a period of one year or perhaps even two. However, it is probably the case that a year or two from now Scientology would be just as interested in deleting critical information about their organization from Wikipedia as they are now. And to some extent it is likely to continue in any case.

After all, the flagship Scientology article has a long history as one of the most contentious on Wikipedia. Visit the discussion page, and you’ll find 27 archive pages of discussion stretching back to 2001. (Few articles are so active as to need their discussions archived; and the Roman Catholic Church, with vastly millions more adherents, has just 26 archived pages of discussions associated ith its article) The very first, undated, comment on the Scientology Talk page was this one:

As in entries on like organizations such as The Local Church of Witness Lee and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, no fair discussion can take place on this topic. If anyone dare edit this article, it will be swiftly and aggressively reverted to reflect only the official point of view of Scientology. Try it.

And in the week since, more than 6200 words have been expended on the Scientology Talk page, as veteran and newbie editors alike — some of them undoubtedly Scientologists — continue argue over what the article should say.

Scientology logo via Wikipedia, reused here with the same non-free use rationale.

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Uncategorized, Wikipedia in the news

License to Chill: What Does Wikipedia’s Adoption of Creative Commons Mean to You?

Tagged as Copyleft, Copyright, Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation, GFDL, Jay Walsh, Wikimedia Foundation
on May 25, 2009 at 7:15 am

Jay Walsh, head of communications at the Wikimedia Foundation — the organization which owns Wikipedia’s trademark and its equipment — announced on the Foundation’s official blog last week:

Today we announced some fantastic news. The proposal to see Wikimedia’s content adopt a new dual license system has been voted on and approved by the Wikimedia community. With the full approval of our Board of Trustees, this now means that the Wikimedia Foundation will proceed with the implementation of a CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual license system on all of our project’s content. The new dual license will begin to come into effect in June.

This is pretty inside baseball, but I can imagine the average Wikipedia reader would have at least two questions about this change: 1) Why did this change take place? and 2) How will this affect my experience at Wikipedia?

Fortunately, the Foundation released a FAQ answering those very questions (and many more, because many Wikipedia contributors may be unfamiliar with these issues). I will attempt to summarize:

GNU

as in speech and beer

I’m not sure I succeeded in making that simple. But I promise I can make the second one easy, and I can quote directly from the FAQ:

If most Wikipedia editors aren’t going to notice a difference, then neither will anyone who simply reads Wikipedia for fun and information. So rest easy — the new and improved Wikipedia and the familiar old Wikipedia are one and the same.

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Biographies of Living Persons

Newyorkbrad on “the BLP Problem”

Tagged as BLP, Daniel Brandt, Eugene Volokh, Newyorkbrad, Volokh Conspiracy
on May 24, 2009 at 6:57 pm

Newyorkbrad is a longtime Wikipedian, known very well to the most active of editors as one of their most creative and thoughtful cohort. To the extent that he is known externally, it is for leaving the site under threat of having his real identity exposed by off-site critics. As it happened, Newyorkbrad returned about three-and-a-half months later, whereupon he has resumed his former positions as an Administrator and member of Arbitration Committee.

His identity is of little interest to most Wikipedians, but two weeks ago he name-checked himself in a fascinating series of blog posts about Wikipedia and how it works at the Volokh Conspiracy. For what it’s worth — and only because he volunteered it — Newyorkbrad is Ira Metetsky, a New York City lawyer whose middle name is Brad, and whose presence on the site owes something to a childhood friendship with UCLA law professor and chief Conspirator Eugene Volokh.

While he started off with the still kind-of obligatory explanation of “what Wikipedia is all about,” most of his writing was devoted to a subject of internal debate at Wikipedia, which is commonly referred to as “the BLP problem“:

That is the problem of how easy it is, in the era of near-universal Internet access and instantaneous search engines, to inflict devastating and nearly irreversable damage to people’s privacy.

BLP stands for Biography of Living Persons, which informally can refer to any article about a living person and formally to the policy developed in 2005 following a couple of incidents in which people objected to biographical articles about them. One is very famous as far as Wikipedia goes, while the other is very much not, but that may be a subject for another post.

Beyond just explaining the controversy to the uninitiated, Newyorkbrad also proposed one part of the solution:

[T]he suggestion [has been] made that when an issue arises concerning whether a biographical article should be kept on Wikipedia or deleted, there be a presumption in favor of deletion unless there is a collective decision to keep it, rather than the other way around. (In Wikiparlance: when a BLP is AfD’d [nominated for deletion], “no consensus” would default to delete. In an ordinary deletion discussion, by policy, “no consensus” defaults to keep.)

This suggestion has been advanced and discussed on-wiki, and has won wide endorsements, but not quite enough to be adopted. A main sticking point is that a BLP can be nominated for deletion for reasons having nothing to do with defamation, privacy violation, or undue weight — say, a dispute whether an athlete or a performer is quite notable enough to warrant coverage. In many of these instances, ironically, if the article subject were asked, he or she might prefer that the article remain. …

I advanced a compromise proposal suggesting that deletion discussions on BLPs default to delete where the notability of the subject is not clear-cut (that would presumably be the case anytime the tentative AfD [Articles for deletion] result is “no consensus”) and (1) the article taken as a whole is substantially negative with respect to the reputation of the subject, (2) the article subject is a minor, or (3) the article subject is known to have himself or herself requested the article’s deletion. It may be time to revive discussion on-wiki of this suggestion.

Although I have not personally been involved in much policy discussion in my time on the English Wikipedia, that sounds like a policy proposal I could get behind. To this I may add a fourth: Articles about living persons should be removed as well. By definition, these articles have not yet passed the Notability requirement. In many cases when an article subject’s notability has yet to be verified, these articles may be saved (by Wikipedians of the “inclusionist” philosophy) from deletion. But given the particularly sensitive nature of BLPs, the unreferenced ones should simply go. If they are truly about notable subjects, they will be replaced sooner or later.

We don’t know just how big of a problem BLPs are but, in another post to come, I will discuss what we do.

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Wikipedia in the news

The Art of Editing Wikipedia

Tagged as MediaShift, Nathaniel Stern, Scott Kildall, Simon Owens, Wikipedia Art, XKCD
on May 18, 2009 at 5:14 pm

At the moment I don’t have a great deal to say about the controversy over Wikipedia Art — with work being so busy, I haven’t had a great deal to say about anything lately — that hasn’t been said by TechDirt’s Mike Masnick or summarzied by Wikipedia itself. There are two primary, and primarily separate aspects to the controversy:

The original concept, which was a Wikipedia article that was supposed to be the artwork itself, which was quickly deleted and isn’t especially controversial in itself but is sort of curious; and
The lawsuit by Wikimedia Foundation against the Wikipedia Art creators over the website wikipediaart.org, which they subsequently created to document the situation as performance art, and remains an ongoing controversy.

The second part is too complicated for me to address just now, but I find the first part amusing enough, and it so happens that my former colleague Simon Owens interviewed the creators of the controversial website for his PBS MediaShift column, and his report explains what exactly the Wikipedia Art creators were going for in the first place:

Artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern developed the idea to create a self-referencing Wikipedia article late last year. The plan was to write a new article, titled Wikipedia Art that was wholly devoted to the fact that the page had been created — an article that was completely meta and self-referential.

The axiom that all press is good press is especially apt when considering Wikipedia Art. The project is, in essence, the amalgamation of everything that references it. …

Because Wikipedia articles are strictly required to have citations (both to establish notability and to verify the facts they assert are true), the artists reached out before the article was published to several blogger and journalist friends, asking them to conduct interviews and write about the project, with the idea that those posts and articles would become fodder for citations.

“We knew when we put up the page we wouldn’t have any citations yet and it would be not notable,” Kildall told me. “But we simultaneously asked a number of people if they’d write about the project. We got about 15 to 20 people, some of whom wanted to do an interview with us based on the information we gave them. We had those ready to post at the time of the intervention. We didn’t know what they were going to write about beforehand, but we knew they were going to write something. So when we put up the page on Wikipedia, on Valentine’s Day, we simultaneously got everything released about a half hour from each other.”

As I said, it’s curious but there should be no surprise that the entry would be summarily deleted. The first pillar of Wikipedia is that it is an encyclopedia, and because one would not expect Britannica to play host to such a stunt, nor is Wikipedia going to go along with it.

I may write more about this subject as time permits, and perhaps as the case progresses, but for now let me conclude by pointing out that it reminds me greatly of the following recent XKCD comic:

Wikipedia Art logo courtesy wikipediaart.org. XKCD cartoon courtesy XKCD.

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Wikipedia in the news

A Jarre-ing Experience

Tagged as Irish Times, Maurice Jarre, Shane Fitzgerald, The Guardian
on May 7, 2009 at 9:09 am

Wikipedia is in the news this morning for another hoax, although the “joke” was not meant to be on Wikipedia per se. Here a Slashdot contributor summarizes a story in the Irish Times:

A quote attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre was posted on wikipedia shortly after his death in March and later appeared in obituaries in mainstream media. ‘One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,’ Jarre was quoted as saying. However, these words were not uttered by the Oscar-winning composer but written by Shane Fitzgerald, a final-year undergraduate student, who said he wanted to show how journalists use the internet as a primary source for their stories.

Here is the Wikipedia article for Maurice Jarre as it looks whenever you happen to come upon this blog post. At the time of this writing, someone has added a section describing the incident. I’m always ambivalent about meta-paragraphs of this sort — usually included when someone has tried to edit their own entry — and I am even more conflicted about this one. I would not be surprised if it gets the axe before long. And here is the precise edit as made by Fitzgerald, d/b/a 86.42.227.123. The section read in full:

Quotes

Nowadays, if a studio assumes that his film is bad, there is always an executive that gets more nervous than usual and thinks that if they change the music, the film will become a masterpiece.

One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear.

When I was 15, I did not know nothing about what concerned the world of music

Soon I worked during twelve years in theater works of the prestigious Theatre National Populaire. It was the best time of my life, the most difficult, the most interesting, the most exciting.

Kudos are in order for editor RayAYang, who flagged the section as needing verification just two minutes later. Credit also goes to editor Cosprings, who removed the section, presumably after being unable to verify any of them.

But that wasn’t the end of it, because what Irish Times does not say is that Fitzgerald went back several hours later and again added the “one long soundtrack” quote to the page, where it then remained for about 24 hours before Cosprings removed it again for the same reason. Fitzgerald persisted, adding the quote a third time before being quickly reverted by another editor.

There’s a word for this at Wikipedia: vandal.

Shane Fitzgerald’s experiment probably runs afoul of the Wikipedia guideline Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point, except as noted before, Wikipedia is only an object — if a key one — of the subject being “studied.” That’s why he added it again; if Wikipedia was being tested on whether articles about people in the news would be closely edited, well, Fitzgerald already had that unsurprising answer. In fact, one could say that diligent Wikipedians tried to assist lazy journalists by removing information that wasn’t credible.

So which newspapers fell for the hoax? As far as I can tell, the only big one in the English-speaking world was The Guardian, although via content syndication the erroneous quote probably traveled much further. India’s Economic Times also was duped. However, I can find no evidence that mainstream American journalists were among the hoaxed.

So you’ll have to put me among the crowd that is not impressed with Fitzgerald’s “findings.” That British journalism has less than rigorous standards is not a new revelation, and obituary writers in the U.S., Canada, Australia and elsewhere in English-language media managed to resist the temptation to take a Wikipedia article at its word. Good for them and good for Wikipedia. And as I finish writing this post, the “Wikipedia Hoax” section has in fact already been removed.

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Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Tagged as Radiohead
on May 3, 2009 at 11:52 am

I’m starting a new occasional series of posts here today — showing what the very first version of different Wikipedia articles looked like, one or two or a few at a time. After all, even the best had to begin somewhere, and it’s highly unlikely that they were delivered to Wikipedia as a fully formed article. This is partly because standards have improved over the years, but also just because of the nature of the wiki — most add just a little at a time, but over time those little bits and pieces turn into a complete article.

The first example is about Radiohead, the favorite rock band of yours truly since The Bends in 1995. The article today is ranked among Wikipedia’s best, and earlier this year was a Featured article, meaning featured on Wikipedia’s main page. But it wasn’t always so. Without further ado, here is the very first version of the Radiohead Wikipedia article from February 7, 2002:

Radiohead, British rock band.

Shot to critical acclaim with their third album, OK Computer, one of the best albums of the late nineties.

Others include:

* Pablo Honey
* The Bends
* OK Computer
* Kid A
* Amnesiac
* I Might Be Wrong (Live recordings)

Other decent artists include PJ Harvey, U2, Nirvana, and more recently, Ryan Adams.

Seriously, Ryan Adams? (Note: The original title for this post was I Might Be Wrong.) The notion that Nirvana, U2 or Radiohead may only be “decent” artists is amusing, too.

You may have also noticed that this version of the article would absolutely violate Wikipedia’s NPOV guideline, which proscribes editors from injecting their own opinions into Wikipedia articles, as it stands today. But it would also have run afoul of the much simpler guideline as it existed then, under the principal authorship of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger and The Cunctator, an editor who is one of Wikipedia’s most veteran.

I undoubtedly agree that OK computer is one of the best albums of the late 1990s, and so this is present in the article as attributed to the music critics who said so, and in the section header which currently reads:

OK Computer, fame and critical acclaim (1996–1998)

That works for me.

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Wikipedia scholarship

The Kids are Alright

Tagged as Alison J. Head, Cliffs Notes, Michael Eisenberg, Presearch, Research, University of Washington
on April 29, 2009 at 6:59 am

Straw man arguments against Wikipedia are fairly commonplace — it’s difficult to generalize accurately about a website with nearly 3 million pages and 65 million visitors (last month). Here’s just one, from University of Washington professors Michael Eisenberg and Alison J. Head, published in the Seattle Times last week. It’s about the research habits of students, and although the op-ed summarizes a paper about more than Wikipedia, you can tell it was a focal point:

The large majority of students we interviewed said they begin with Wikipedia, the vast, online peer-to-peer encyclopedia — despite professors’ cautions about Wikipedia as an authoritative source. As one student put it, Wikipedia is ideal for “presearch,” or big-picture background “in good English” before moving on to more serious research. Most students also said they don’t tell their professors they use Wikipedia; they simply avoid citing it in their reports.

But we’re not here to debate Wikipedia. We want students learning how to select the right sources and use them aware of limitations. Wikipedia, for example, may be suitable for presearch, but not for definitive judgments. Learning these differences is essential in our digital world because so much of what’s out there is flawed or incomplete.

Actually, it sounds like you are here to debate Wikipedia, especially as it seems that students have already figured out what it is you aim to show them, namely that Wikipedia is not to be relied upon for “definitive judgments.” So where’s the problem? And why complain about something that’s not?

I decided to have a look at the actual research paper, also produced by Eisenberg and Head. It turns out that there is more information there about how students really do seem to get this:

In our sessions, students also discussed concerns over Wikipedia and accuracy. However, most participants believed that they, themselves, had the ability to discern the credibility of a Wikipedia source, based on their “gut level” interpretation of Wikipedia’s rating system (e.g., posted notes by editors such as, “This article needs additional citations for verification”).

The report itself, “What Today’s College Students Say about Conducting Research in the Digital Age” [PDF], provides a fascinating exploration of the way students do use Wikipedia, with interviews producing explanations of Wikipedia use by students like this:

I go to Wikipedia just so to get an understanding of a topic. Like, I did a paper on Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia and I went to Wikipedia first just to check it out. I looked at the history of Puerto Rico and then, Puerto Ricans in the United States. Just to get a basic understanding, so that, I could say to myself, okay, I know the beginning now, I know the current situation, I’m okay, and now I’ve got some citations and stuff, I’ve got a stepping stone to get deeper into the issue I’ve chosen.

I highly recommend “FIGURE 3: Why Do Students Use Wikipedia?”; I’d say it answers the question definitively. Among the reasons explained in the paper is that Wikipedia can provide students with access points into difficult topics:

Students who used scholarly databases after a Wikipedia search said that they avoided starting with scholarly databases first because it was “too much too soon.” Overall, students reported that scholarly articles had “too much technical jargoabout” and “were often not up to date as Wikipedia.”

All are great points. On the last one, Wikipedia is especially unique, and this really underscores the profound development Wikipedia represents. I am fairly certain I was not aware of Wikipedia by the time I graduated from college in early 2002, and I certainly didn’t use it in any research projects. But I know I’m far from alone from wishing I’d had it to consult when I was in school — far more than Facebook, to be sure.

If the professors have any complaint I agree with (from the paper, not the op-ed) it is this:

While some students mentioned the penalties for using Wikipedia for course-related research assignments (e.g., ranging from public humiliation in class to receiving a failing grade), we found the majority of students ignored the negatives and went to the site anyway. Most students depended on and used Wikipedia for information cited in papers, but just never included Wikipedia entries on their Works Cited page.

Interesting point. There should be a way to do this. I would certainly support a system, accepted by university professors, for students to acknowledge that Wikipedia helped shape their research. Wikipedia is no substitute, but it should be considered an aid at least on par with Cliffs Notes. Better still, if a professor challenged an assertion in a student’s work and the wrong bit came from Wikipedia, it would be a pedagogic bonus and true service to correct that error. And there are no better professors to start doing so than Michael Eisenberg and Alison J. Head.

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Announcements, Wikipedia in the news

You’re With Me, ESPNDB

Tagged as Amazon, Citizendium, ESPN, ESPNDB, Facebook, Jaison Williams, Knol, Oregon Ducks, Twitter
on April 26, 2009 at 12:20 pm

Last week, ESPN unveiled a new website self-consciously intended to compete with Wikipedia: ESPNDB. The website has not made any kind of splash with sports blogs nor many other news websites. To my knowledge, the only in-depth coverage comes from MediaPost, which reported on April 16:

Curious where Shaquille O’Neal went to college? How many seasons Mickey Mantle played? ESPN wants to break the Google-to-Wikipedia flow chart that so many sports fans turn to for those kinds of answers.

So, it’s set to launch ESPNDB.com (the DB stands for database) — a site it hopes will serve as a sports encyclopedia-archive- statistical compendium. On one level, the goal is simply an ESPN-opedia — although the content would be thoroughly fact-checked and would come from professionals. (Like Wikipedia, however, there will be some user-generated aspects.)

As I said, ESPN doesn’t even try to conceal that Wikipedia is a serious competitor for providing sports fans with information about teams, players, statistics and, quite literally, the footnotes of sports history. Here is what the front page of the website says right now:

ESPNDB will be your definitive source for sports and sports-related information. We are building a product that combines the far-reaching resources of ESPN with the unique output of our industry-best Stats and Information Group to give you an immersive experience that no other site can provide. In months ahead, we’ll also employ some great new technologies to harness the collective knowledge of the world’s sports fans.

This strikes me as a worthy endeavor, one capable of real success. While sites like Citizendium and Google’s Knol have espoused ambitions to compete with Wikipedia in creating a comprehensive online reference website, ESPN is wise to focus on just one area of knowledge, naturally the one topic it understands very, very well.

Wikipedia is just one of many websites who dominate a category, where network effects and other social phenomena have bestowed a de facto monopoly: Google, YouTube, Twitter, Craigslist and Amazon are just a few others. Barnes & Noble has not had an easy time going head-to-head with Amazon online, but rare and out-of-print bookseller Alibris has carved itself a small but viable niche.

Another site with a relative monopoly in its particular category is IMDb, another site ESPNDB must owe something to, even if not candidly acknowledged. The continued success of IMDb (an Amazon subsidiary for more than a decade) should also be cause for encouragement, both for ESPNDB as well as Wikipedia. After all, IMDb still rates as high or higher than Wikipedia on Google searches for most movie titles. To be sure, IMDb launched a decade before Wikipedia and in fact predates the Internet as we know it today, and so has merely held on to its prominence, whereas ESPNDB has ahead of it the task of building its authority. Meanwhile, it shows that there is room for both “wiki” and “database” at the top of Google’s rankings.

And ESPN seems committed for the long term, or at least is taking their time in building out the site. The ESPNDB front page continues:

We begin by giving you a ton of information about the NFL Draft - about 500 pages’ worth! As we evolve, we will be adding many more cool features, so continue to check back with us.

There are indeed some hints of cool features to come, but ESPN’s plans remain unclear. For instance, right now one can “friend” or follow the Facebook profiles of NFL draft prospects. What I’d like to see them do is tap into Facebook Connect, which would basically mean anyone with a Facebook account is already signed up to participate — though there is not much to participate in just yet.

Also interesting is that ESPNDB pulls Twitter feeds onto its pages, which is something I doubt Wikipedia will ever consider even trying. Right now it’s very simplistic, just updates from the NFL Draft, on its second and final day as I type this now. Imagine, though, if each article or entry — like this one about the Detroit Lions — pulled recent tweets specific to that team or its players. That would be something interesting.

But these potential “cool features” don’t address the strengths of Wikipedia which ESPN ostensibly means for this website to answer. So let’s look at the actual pages themselves. Here’s a screen cap of the article about Oregon (Go Ducks!) wide receiver Jaison Williams:

Not much actual content so far, but the layout seems coherent and access to photos is a big strength ESPN has compared to Wikipedia. It has promise. Meanwhile, there is no Wikipedia entry for Williams, although that will probably change quickly once he is selected, which is expected sometime today. So the point goes to ESPNDB, at least in this narrow circumstance.

On the other hand, what’s the chance ESPNDB will ever allow users to write an article explaining the story behind “You’re with me, leather”?

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Wikipedia scholarship

The Wikipedia Story on Dead Tree

Tagged as Andrew Lih, Portland Oregon, Wikimania, Wikipedia Revolution
on April 13, 2009 at 8:21 am

Just in the mail this past week: The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih.

Lih appears on the Wikipedia Weekly podcast and has been on Wikipedia since 2003 as the user Fuzheado, so he’s in a good position to be writing the first (to my knowledge) book-length history of Wikipedia. I’m only a couple chapters in as of yet, but I’ve already learned a few things I hadn’t known before, like the Spanish Fork and WP co-founder Larry Sanger’s Oregon connection. It also provides a useful overview of the encyclopedia market in the late 1990s around the time Jimmy Wales was running something called Bomis.com — which I distinctly remember having visited and not quite understood what was it was all about, a circumstance Lih more than explains to my satisfaction.

On the other hand, it does seem at times a bit self-congratulatory, especially the opening chapter, covering the Wikimania 2005 conference, and including narration of the Wikipedians present giving themselves a round of applause. This may not be the most inviting introduction for the Wikipedia newcomer, but it’s not a major distraction.

When I finish I’ll probably have something closer to a real book review, but for right now let me approvingly point out the very clever back cover:

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Visualization

Mr. Wales’ Neighborhood

Tagged as HowStuffWorks, Huffington Post, Information Architects, O'Reilly Media, Twitter
on April 12, 2009 at 10:13 am

For the fourth year in a row, a company named Information Architects has released what it calls a “Web Trend Map” — based loosely on the Tokyo subway map — that is nothing if not prime link bait, and The Wikipedian is unashamed to chomp down. Here is a crop from the much larger original showing Wikipedia’s “neighborhood”:

For the record, the four websites situated closest to Wikipedia are HowStuffWorks, the non-Bill O’Reilly, Twitter and Huffington Post. To which I can only say: sure, okay.

Wikipedia is on the “Knowledge Line” which explains its proximity to O’Reilly and HowStuffWorks, where its connection to Twitter and Wikipedia is based on their relative popularity on each “Line.” The size of the name and height of the station both correspond to Wikipedia’s influence as a function of the creators’ estimation. Wikipedia is in fact listed fifth overall, behind only Google, Yahoo, MSN and Apple. It’s a little arbitrary, but these things always are.

As for the tiny figures saying the names of “Trendsetters,” well, I wonder how either Jimmy Wales or Larry Sanger feel about the latter’s inclusion at this late date. But that’s a subject for another post.

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Wikipedia in the news

Could Intellipedia Improve Wikipedia?

Tagged as CIA, DNI, Encarta, Intellipedia, New Media Strategies, Time magazine
on April 10, 2009 at 8:48 am

The Intellipedia project is now a few years old, but the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (or CIA, which seems to get credit for these things on account of people knowing what it is) got a write-up in the latest Time magazine, so let’s agree for now to let Time continue its role as agenda-setters and quote from the article:

Intellipedia’s godfather is CIA analyst D. Calvin Andrus, who wrote a paper in 2004 titled “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.” For decades, the U.S. intelligence system had been structured to answer static Cold War–era questions, like how many missiles there are in Siberia. What the U.S. needed after Sept. 11, Andrus argued, was something that could handle rapidly changing, complicated threats. Intelligence organizations needed to become complex and adaptive, driven to judgments by bottom-up collaboration, like financial markets or ant colonies — or Wikipedia. …

Sean Dennehy, 39, and Don Burke, 43, used the Andrus paper to push the idea of an intelligence-community wiki on their superiors at the CIA. They didn’t get very far until the then newly organized Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that the idea had potential — and even then it faced stiff cultural resistance.

The resistance met sounds no different than any other bureaucratic or vertically-structured organization adapting to a “flatter” age, but the content is undoubtedly far more interesting than whatever your average corporate wiki might have (unless maybe you work for Wonka Chocolate).

Wikipedia having inspired Intellipedia, I wonder if there’s a chance Intellipedia could return the favor. As I wrote in a post last week at the New Media Strategies blog (and belatedly cross-posted here) on Encarta’s Wikipedia-overseen demise:

[W]hy not close the loop and allow Encarta’s knowledge to be used in building out Wikipedia? After all, one area where Wikipedia is deficient is material between the copyright of the last encyclopedia edition to go into public domain and the Internet age.

Same thing here: Wikipedia often takes information directly from government documents, so why not allow material declassified from Intellipedia be to be made available for use in Wikipedia? To be sure, this could be a long time off. But it undoubtedly has illuminating data that could enhance Wikipedia in ways I can’t imagine, mostly because I have never seen Intellipedia and, barring a sudden mid-career change, almost surely never will. But you know I want to.

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Cross-Posted, Wikipedia in the news

Microsoft Closes Encarta, But this Doesn’t Have to be the End

Tagged as Andrew Lih, Encarta, Microsoft, New Media Strategies
on April 10, 2009 at 8:38 am

Note: This was originally posted one week ago at the blog of my employer, New Media Strategies. This post is now dated if not out of date per se, but considering it’s about Wikipedia, better late to post it here than never.

Earlier this week Microsoft announced it will soon be shutting down its digital encyclopedia, Encarta. The official statement didn’t actually use the word “Wikipedia,” but then again, they didn’t really need to. Wikipedia has 97% of the online encyclopedia market, according to Hitwise, a share that makes Google seem to barely have a foothold.

But this was by no means a totally foregone conclusion — and it doesn’t necessarily mean the end.

Longtime Wikipedia editor Andrew Lih, originator of such indespensible articles as “Seven dirty words” and “Ana Marie Cox” and author of the new book “The Wikipedia Revolution,” explained at his own blog why the news caught him by surprise:

Because Microsoft could have kept it going indefinitely, given its cash pile and the “Windows Tax” paying for everything. With this being such a prominent example of “free” trumping commercial and proprietary, I do wonder if this makes for a victory that might give spiritual comfort to others in the free culture movement. What’s next in Microsoft vs Linux, Microsoft vs OpenOffice, MPEG vs Ogg and other battles? …

Interestingly, Encarta was a product that was always meant to be a throw-in: a me-too product that enticed consumers as part of the Microsoft suite when buying a Dell or Gateway PC. It was never destined to be a standalone moneymaker. Add to this, the fact that Bill Gates founded Corbis as a photo and video archive, and bought the prized Bettmann Archives, and Encarta suddenly had a wealth of visual multimedia features. Its rich interactive features were far ahead of others, and it had rights to the most important historical photos of the last century. It was more a showcase than a business. It was an old school model in a new media world.

How very appropriate, considering what Encarta did to Britannica 15 years ago:

Microsoft had originally approached Encyclopædia Britannica, the gold standard of encyclopedias for over a century, in the 1980s, but it declined, believing its print media sales would be hurt; however the Benton Foundation was forced to sell Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. at below book value in 1996 when the print sales could no longer compete with Encarta and the Microsoft distribution channel which gave away free copies with computer systems.

Are you wondering where that came from? Please don’t wonder too long: it’s from Wikipedia’s entry about Encarta. This actually got me wondering. What happens when you look up Wikipedia at Encarta? Although at first there appears to be an article there is not. When the apparition is clicked, one is diverted to an odd list that will (with enough clicking) eventually take you to the third page (!) of the “Encyclopedia” article, which has this to say about Wikipedia:

In the early 21st century a new type of online encyclopedia, known as Wikipedia, enabled readers to create and edit encyclopedia articles. A wiki is a type of server software that enables users to create or alter content on a Web page. Wikipedia was closely associated with the open source software movement and rapidly expanded to include hundreds of thousands of articles, many on popular culture topics, in a number of languages. The philosophy behind Wikipedia was that a community of volunteers could pool their knowledge and crosscheck their work to create a free encyclopedia. Articles may be written by enthusiasts, rather than experts, and they remain unsigned and “open” to revision. Due to Wikipedia’s open-access policy, it is sometimes the target of vandalism or abuse. However, a crew of volunteer editors polices the site, usually identifies malicious content quickly, and removes it. In cases where a subject is particularly controversial the article may be “locked” so that further alterations or amendments cannot be made.

Apart from the uncomfortably ironic past tense, this is pretty good. Nice dig about the pop culture emphasis, too. But it certainly could be improved, especially the overly simplistic gloss on when articles may be locked. And they should know, as Microsoft somewhat controversially once paid a third party to edit Wikipedia — coincidentally, about the open source movement. I guess you could look back to that 2007 incident and see Encarta’s demise. Not only would somebody from Wikipedia have been unable to pay for changes to Encarta, I can’t see why they would want to.

As Lih points out, Microsoft is frequently in conflict with the open source movement. Which is exactly why Microsoft should release Encarta under a free public license, under the GNU Free Documentation License (which Wikipedia currently uses) or Creative Commons’ Attribution-ShareAlike license (with which it is also compatible). Yes, their business plan was undercut by another model — in a manner similar to my “churn” semi-manifesto — as it had previously done to another. So why not close the loop and allow Encarta’s knowledge to be used in building out Wikipedia? After all, one area where Wikipedia is deficient is material between the copyright of the last encyclopedia edition to go into public domain and the Internet age.

I don’t think this will really happen, of course. And there could always be a hang-up with the non-exclusive rights from Funk & Wagnalls, upon which Microsoft itself built Encarta. But if Microsoft is looking for goodwill – and these days, they should be – letting Wikipedia absorb Encarta would be an act of magnanimity that could go a long way.

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Censorship

Is “Atlas Shrugged” Getting Fair Treatment on Wikipedia?

Tagged as 1984, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Dagny Taggart, George Orwell, Glenn Reynolds, Hank Rearden, John Galt, Libertarianism, Objectivism
on April 3, 2009 at 12:55 pm

Lead-ins don’t get much more intriguing than the one for an essay by EJ Moosa for a libertarian website (and subsequently picked up by Instapundit), titled “‘Atlas Shrugged’: Why has Wikipedia Removed Key Elements?”:

What happens when you combine “1984″ by George Orwell and “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand? You get a Wikipedia entry that begins to redefine what the key elements are. You get a level of censorship that defies belief. Why is this occurring?

OK, I’m hooked. The article specifically refers to a version of the article about the doorstop of a novel on Monday, so take for instance the last version of the article as it appeared on Sunday night. So what’s the specific complaint? Allegedly, there is

a major theme that is missing: The Failure of Government.

Search for the “Anti Dog Eat Dog rule”. Or for the “Equalization of Opportunity” bill. … Any references to them are gone from the Wikipedia entry. Search for any of the legislation passed to control private enterprise. It’s no longer there.

What is the reason that the references to these failed government actions have been deleted from the Wikipedia page on “Atlas Shrugged”? I have my theories. I would like to hear yours

Using the handy WikiBlame tool, I decided to check the past 1,000 versions of the page for occurrences of the phrases “Equalization of Opportunity” and “dog-eat-dog” (”dog eat dog” as well, just to be sure). In fact these phrases have occured just twice and once, respectively, since July 2007.

Back in August 2008, someone added 3,200+ words of commentary that included mention of both fictional laws, Googling some of the text, was clearly unattributed from CliffsNotes. Even if it wasn’t plagiarized, it was still far too long for a Wikipedia summary, and was therefore reversed (or “reverted,” as Wikipedia says).

Then a few days later, someone added approximately seven hundred words of what appears to be a rant about the Illuminati, which also mentioned Equalization of Opportunity. Somewhere there may be a wiki for ravings about the Illuminati, but Wikipedia is not it. And so it was quickly removed as well.

But here’s the funny thing: after the Moosa essay appeared, someone got in and edited the article in question:

The “Anti-dog-eat-dog” rule, as passed by the National Alliance of Railroads, is an example of this mooching becoming codified into law.

This time, it’s even cited to CliffsNotes. And so far it has remained. It’s not perfect, but I certainly don’t get the impression that anyone is trying to obscure the meaning behind “Atlas Shrugged,” let alone is anything like censorship happening. EJ Moosa would have been better served actually investigating the situation, rather than just asking questions and reaching for Orwell on his bookshelf.

Far from censorship, I’d say quite the opposite is happening: the article is longer than most at some 7,000+ words describing the novel in a variety of ways. If anybody is keeping this page from telling the whole story about Rand’s magnum opus, the blame lies squarely with her biggest fans.

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Ha Ha Funny

April Fools! …or Not?

Tagged as April Fools' Day, Ireland, TechCrunch
on April 1, 2009 at 8:35 am

Today is April Fools’ Day, and among those getting in on the act are the Wikipedians who update the “In the news” section of the English Wikipedia’s front page:

Ireland’s PM, naked? Diamonds in the sky? Hartford and New Orleans collide? Actually… yes, yes and yes. Where most April Fools jokes are invented from whole cloth — TechCrunch has a guide to many of the Internet’s more prominent hoaxes today — all of these stories are 100% true. They’ve just been couched in dubious language.

Click through the image today, or try here after April 1, to see the real stories for yourself.

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Congressional Wikipedia Edits

Did Rep. Hinojosa Get a Free Pass on Biased Wikipedia Edits?

Tagged as Conflict of Interest, Congressional edits, Josh Treviño, Rubén Hinojosa, Twitter, WWB
on March 30, 2009 at 9:21 am

This weekend, former Tacitus and RedState blogger Josh Treviño asked over Twitter:

Do you think Rep. Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX-15) had his staff edit his own Wikipedia entry? So blatant: http://bit.ly/TSbMm

The answer is yes, and yes it is and I see what could be regarded as something of a double-standard here. First of all, Hinojosa’s congressional staff was quite up front about editing the page in the first place, when they contributed from a House-registered IP address in early 2008:

I am a staffer for Congressman Hinojosa in his Washington office and have found some mistakes. We have edited them and added the official biography from our website. If there are questions, please [sic]

Not unlike Twitter, you only get so many characters to explain your edit in the edit summary. This was not a bad way to go about it, although another editor left this note on the Talk page associated with the IP address for the Hinojosa staffer:

ATTN: Staffer for Congressman Rubén Hinojosa

The edit was constructive in the sense that it did not delete unfavorable information from the page. At least, not all that unfavorable. For example, they changed

Finally in 2002 he was elected once again after running unopposed.

Finally in 2002 he was elected once again.

which it’s debatable whether this is even the right phrasing, but there is no question they removed (what may or may not be relevant) context.

However, I am not sure why adding material from his official bio is “constructive” when Wikipedia explicitly forbids plagiarism. Using information from the bio would be one thing, if there was at least a citation. Instead, are a few examples from what they added:

In Congress, Rubén Hinojosa is regarded as a champion for the disadvantaged and has distinguished himself as a strong advocate for education, housing and economic development. His primary goal in Congress has been to reduce the chronic unemployment rate in regions of the district.

And:

As chairman of the Education Task Force for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congressman Hinojosa ensures that federal education policy never loses sight of the youngest and fastest growing population in the country - Hispanic Americans.

And:

On the House Financial Services Committee, Congressman Hinojosa is widely recognized as a leader on issues affecting the underserved, from banking to housing.

Favorable impressions of a subject can be attributed to independent observers, but it should never presented as a true-because-Wikipedia-said-so fact. Yet as Treviño noticed, it has largely remained intact in the year-and-change since. In fact, one editor did stop by a few days later to clean it up, but only slightly.

A partisan job? Probably not — that editor was a retired aviation engineer from Bristol, England. Nevertheless, it’s worth asking whether a Republican congressional staffer making these kind of mistakes would have received the same benefit of the doubt? If one takes into account the case of former Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-Minn.), whose staff was caught in mid-2006 making similar changes to his Wikipedia bio, this seems unlikely. Then again, the staff of former Rep. Marty Meehan (D-Mass.) was called out for doing something similar earlier that year, so the answer is not so simple.

The bottom line here is that Rep. Hinojosa’s page needs some major work to bring it back in line with Wikipedia standards. If nobody gets to it soon — and in fact the page has remained unedited for two months now — I may just have to get in there and fix it myself.

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Edit wars, Wikipedia etiquette

How Not to Plead Your Case at Wikipedia

Tagged as CEI, Deletion debates, Discussion pages, Disruptive editing, Earth Hour, Human Achievement Hour, Meatpuppets, Michelle Malkin, Problem editors, Self-promotion, There is no deadline
on March 29, 2009 at 10:20 am

Yesterday I wrote a relatively lengthy post discussing the circumstances surrounding the deletion of a Wikipedia article about Human Achievement Hour (HAH), a parody holiday created this year by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The title — “Why WWF’s Earth Hour Gets a Wikipedia Entry But CEI’s Human Achievement Hour Doesn’t” — was a bit misleading in that it did not actually go point-by-point about why the Earth Hour article lives yet HAH is no more, mostly because it was a response to a request from CEI’s Twitter guy about whether environmentalist-oriented articles had been removed in a similar manner (they have).

There should be no great mystery as to why the article was deleted, and the reasons given can be found in the relevant deletion debate. But such discussions are not always easy for the uninitiated to follow, so let me try to explain a little more neatly:

The article’s supporters maintained that because the fake holiday had been mentioned in various publications, it deserved an article.
However, they failed to acknowledge that these citations do not trigger notability — Wikipedia’s rules are a little more complex than that.
For one thing, mentions in the National Post and National Review were by CEI employees; commentaries don’t count toward establishing Notability in the same way that reported news articles do.
Notices from actual news articles, in USA Today and Time, only mentioned HAH in articles about Earth Hour.
Therefore, HAH warrants a mention in the Earth Hour article (which was not in dispute for long) but because it does not yet have news reports dedicated to HAH itself, it doesn’t make the cut for a standalone article. It would need at least two or three to rate.

Yet there are at least two recently-arrived Wikipedia contributors who may not necessarily have CEI’s blessing but have continued to press their argument at Wikipedia. And, to put it diplomatically, they are going about it all wrong.

The first, as noted previously, is someone calling themselves Thehondaboy. The second is an account named Thelobbyist, which has only ever edited articles related to this issue. So let’s take a tour of the arguments made by these two and the mistakes they’ve made. This won’t contain all of the necessary context, but I will link to the pages that provide it.

Going chronologically, Thehondaboy argued in the HAH deletion debate on March 23:

The commentor presumably thinks that criticism from ClimateBiz determines the event is not notable. ClimateBiz commentary will obviously be opposed to CEI or anyone that sides with their position or takes part in the event. Obviously they believe (or hope) the event is not notable. Using their sentiments to determine notability is therefore asinine. The use of the link is clearly to show a major player in the environmental movement noting the event. The observation by the of the event taking place justifies its notability. Thehondaboy (talk —Preceding undated comment added 20:37, 23 March 2009 (UTC).

Thehondaboy makes two primary mistakes, that I see. The first is violating the “Assume good faith” guideline; making inferences about another editor’s political viewpoint does not change any of the facts under discussion and is no way to ingratiate you with other editors. It’s a tactic of weakness, and a sure sign you’re going to lose. Second, look up what “Notability” means to Wikipedians.

On the same page, Thehondaboy argued later:

It certainly sounds like the attempts of someone opposed to the event, rather than someone simply and unbiasedly concerned about whether it should or should not exist. The reasons for it’s removal are weak. There are reasonable sources that have listed the event. Whpq asks for reliable sources. I don’t know who Whpq is. He is some random guy on the Internet. Why would he get to decide what is or is not a “reliable source.” Weak argument for deletion. Additionally, he again makes the assumption based on personal bias that the event is not notable. The argument that “We don’t create articles in the hopes that the subject may become notable in the future,” is not valid because it has not been agreed on that the subject is not notable. The events notability has not been agreed upon, so therefore we can’t determine that it is currently or will be notable. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.Thehondaboy (talk —Preceding undated comment added 20:42, 23 March 2009 (UTC).

Pretty much the same thing here, although now that the discussion is resolved to the dissatisfaction of Thehondaboy, he’s making the same arguments again. There are a few behavioral guidelines that apply here, but one worth focusing on is “Characteristics of problem editors” which unfortunately describes Thehondaboy. Here he is again, on the talk page of an editor who had disagreed on the deletion review after the HAH page was first removed. And here is Thelobbyist also claiming to know the rules better than Wikipedia editors who regularly work in AfD:

Very clearly what I mean by political is the fact that editor’s of the Earth Hour page have been rallied to endorse deletion on our page whether it has merit or not. It’s obvious that no one actually cares about merit or WP rules. There is no way after this I could ever trust anything on WP ever again. There are climate articles built on blog citations. But Human Achievement Hour is mentioned in 3 national papers including the USA Today. And there is a story citing it in TIME MAGAZINE today. But these aren’t good enough for noteriety. Why? Because individuals personal bias is deciding when these will be good sources or not. This whole project is a sham. thehondaboy (talk) 17:03, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

“Problem editor” also describes Thelobbyist, another account created with the apparent sole purpose of arguing about HAH. Here he (or she) is on yet another editor’s discussion page, with Thehondaboy right on his heels:

Human Achievement Hour
Your deletion of HAH is based on a previous page that had no notability. A brief even callous glance at the new page placed up today would make it very, very obvious that the event is notable now. It appeared in the USA TODAY this morning, and two national news papers yesterday. This is censorship at it’s finest. Especially being that the event is tomorrow. It needs to be reinstated now. Thelobbyist (talk) 22:06, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Reinstate. thehondaboy (talk) 22:07, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Thelobbyist’s attempt to dictate content is laughable, although it is disruptive and therefore serious. This person makes a few obvious errors, such as arguing that Wikipedia is censored and trying to impose a deadline. Wikipedia does not take kindly to being called “censors,” and conservatives who know that only the government can truly impose censorship should not be flinging the term around. Likewise, Wikipedia is not a promotional tool, and will generally resist attempts to use it in this manner. And of course, it’s painfully clear neither of the pro-HAH contributors have bothered to study the aforementioned Notability guidelines even four days later.

Worse still is the fact that Thehondaboy’s comment was added just one minute after Thelobbyist’s, which raises the possibility that they are working as a team — a frowned-upon activity referred to as Meat puppetry:

While Wikipedia assumes good faith especially for new users, the recruitment of new editors to Wikipedia for the purpose of influencing a survey, performing reverts, or otherwise attempting to give the appearance of consensus is strongly discouraged.

I don’t know who either editor may be or whether they are in fact working in tandem, but I will reiterate my point from yesterday: it’s a shame that CEI cannot find someone more knowledgeable or conscientious to make sure they are represented fairly.

There are more examples from both editors, but they tend to mine the same territory. Four days later, both editors were still banging their heads against the wall. Here’s Thelobbyist reduced to being snide on still another editor’s talk page:

Enjoy your articles?
I hope so. Thelobbyist (talk) 06:58, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

And here’s Thehondaboy, back on the original deletion debate:

This just got picked up by Michelle Malkin. michellemalkin.com. Any further questioning of it’s relevance or notoriety is at this point garbage rhetoric from individuals biased against this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Thehondaboy (talk • contribs) 17:33, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Right, but Michelle Malkin is a blogger and that only counts under certain circumstances. It’s also hilarious — and almost as telling — that this person has confused “Notability” with a non-existent “Notoriety” standard. And if there’s one thing Thehondaboy knows, it’s garbage rhetoric. What’s more, this kind of edit activity makes it difficult to take seriously complaints from NewsBusters’ Christine Hall that there is an “Enviro Wikipedia Assault on Human Achievement Hour” going on. Doesn’t it look like the other way around?

Let me conclude with a few quick points of advice:

Don’t make demands.
Don’t issue threats.
Don’t keep making arguments that have already been resolved.
Don’t treat Wikipedia debates like a 50 percent-plus-one vote.
Don’t argue that other editors are politically-motivated — especially if you are also politically-motivated.

These are all negative, so here are a couple that are positive:

Remember that words like notable, verifiable, reliable and others have specific meanings at Wikipedia, so get to know them.
Ask for help.

Yes, ask for help. Go to the Help desk and ask uninvolved editors which content guidelines apply. Wikipedia is not monolithic, and if one or two editors are unfairly denying your argument, another editor is likely to make a non-judgmental call. Maybe you win or maybe you don’t. But you sure won’t get posts like this written about you.

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Edit wars

Why WWF’s Earth Hour Gets a Wikipedia Entry But CEI’s Human Achievement Hour Doesn’t

Tagged as CEI, Deletion debates, Earth Hour, Human Achievement Hour, WWF
on March 28, 2009 at 5:05 pm

You may have heard of Earth Hour, an eco-Hallmark holiday for the Twitter age, created by the World Wildlife Fund in 2007 and promoted in the media each year since.

You are probably less likely to have heard of Human Achievement Hour, a counter-holiday launched by the Competitive Enterprise Institute this year.

I was unfamiliar until I noticed CEI’s Twitter account acting upset on Friday about the deletion of a Wikipedia article about their new tradition. I responded to @ceidotorg and said I would take a look for myself. Here are the relevant tweets, in descending choronological order:

ceidotorg: #hah Attempts to ‘delete’ Human Achievement Hour in Wikipedia http://ping.fm/4rABR #fr33 #tcot #liberty #c4 –1:38 PM by CE

ceidotorg: #hah WIkipedia deletion discussion here http://bit.ly/kZMJ No good reason given for axing entry on HAH -#liberty #tcot –3:22 PM

ceidotorg: #hah deleted by Wikipedia now banned by Youtube in 1 minute -Human Achievement strikes again http://ping.fm/5wtS4 #liberty #tcot –12:44PM

williambeutler: Sorry, @ceidotorg, your Wikipedia article was not deleted because editors didn’t like your agenda: http://twurl.nl/ersp1o –1:11 PM

williambeutler: @ceidotorg Not surprising an event that hasn’t occurred yet and is just getting notice wouldn’t make the cut. Next year may be different. –1:16 PM

ceidotorg: @williambeutler if you could provide any solid evidence that the same occurred to an entry that agreed with green agenda-I’d believe that –3:34 PM

I said I knew just the place to look, and that was WikiProject Deletion sorting/Environment/archive, which saves past discussions from Wikipedia’s Articles for Deletion process — where entries that just aren’t ready for prime time go to die.

On that page, I counted 36 deliberations over keeping vs. deleting articles on Environmental topics since the archive category was created last year. And after counting twice, I found 14 nominated articles were kept, 13 were deleted and 9 were “other” — sometimes being merged into other articles.

This demonstrates in the aggregate that just any submission of interest to Wikipedia’s many environmentalist-minded contributors won’t stick just for being “politically correct.” The results even looks outwardly fair, although Wikipedia is concerned more with process than outcome.

Meanwhile, there are specific examples of such debates from the past and present we can study:

There is no longer an article about an outfit named Carbon Purging, which seems to be one of these “green” companies whose business model depends on an Al Gore-style guilt-trip.
Climate conflict, a little-used term apparently referring to some kind of feared global warming-sparked regional confrontation, got the boot.
More recently, the neologism Hot Stain (not what it sounds like, whatever you think that may be) is currently the subject of a sustained, as it were, debate on both sides (based on what I’ve seen, I lean “delete”).
And a biographical entry about an “eco-feminist” named Leslie Davies is currently headed down to defeat.

The important thing is that all of these decisions — and all of those that resulted in a “keep” — were made by community consensus based on the content guidelines with which anyone can familiarize themselves.

Since I started writing this post, I’ve been following the actions of an editor using the handle Thehondaboy, who had been pressing the CEI case on the “AfD” debate over Human Achievement Hour (aka #hah, if you didn’t catch that) in recent days, has been trying to dramatically expand the “Criticism” section on the Earth Hour page to include substantial details about the campaign, including just about every single mention in the media — over and over again, after being reverted — as if the previously-given explanations (about why they didn’t satisfy the guidelines) never took place.

And it’s not an insignificant point that Human Achievement Hour had in fact already been prominently mentioned on the Earth Hour article. Yet Thehondaboy was apparently not satisfied with that.

I’m a little surprised this account hasn’t been temporarily blocked from editing, although it does look like it’s headed in that direction. I have no idea who Thehondaboy is, though I do certainly hope it is not someone from CEI edit warring on this point. From this editor they’d be wise to keep their distance.

Wikipedia needs conservatives and right-leaners to contribute, especially at the margins where many topics would be lopsided in favor of the left-progressive perspectives of editors from WikiProject Environment. As an economic libertarian myself, it’s especially frustrating to see CEI’s cause reduced to a futile struggle against a set of rules (and a community) that its chief advocate hasn’t taken the time to understand.

I have written elsewhere that many conservatives’ complaints about Wikipedia are misplaced (see here and here, for example) and this seems to be another such case.

Conservatives are not unique in having a weak grasp of how Wikipedia functions, nor are they even alone among political activists. The website is undoubtedly complicated, but it’s hardly incomprehensible. If you learn to edit according to rules, you can figure out which battles are winnable — ahem, which content disputes are likely to be resolved in your favor — and save yourself a real headache.

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Wikipedia etiquette

How to Avoid Unnecessarily Annoying a Wikipedia Editor

Tagged as Essays, Nevada, New Media Strategies, Wiki
on March 28, 2009 at 1:05 pm

I work in an office where discussions of Wikipedia come up fairly often, which owes something to the fact that I work for an online marketing firm. However, one habit on the part of some co-workers (about which I have not previously commented and will permit myself just this one gripe) is the irritating habit of referring to Wikipedia as Wiki.

Now, I get the need to economize time spent devoted to communication, especially when everyone is on Internet time. “Wiki” is just two syllables and four letters, while “pedia” tacks on an additional three and five, respectively. Not to mention, between the two halves of the word, “Wiki” is more distinctive than “pedia,” and also ~pedia has been growing in usage as a suffix (mostly because of Wikipedia). So I understand why they (or maybe even you) do it. But here’s the problem — it’s just wrong.

Even if you’ve only used Wikipedia as a time-waster you are probably at least somewhat aware that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia built upon something called a “wiki,” which is analogous to a blog in that it is a relatively new platform for building a website. Although the Web is lousy with wikis — the software having business and entertainment applications alike — I’d wager that Wikipedia is the only one that most people ever use. This explains the habit, but doesn’t excuse it.

Calling “Wikipedia” by the abbreviation “Wiki” is expressly verboten on Wikipedia itself, which in fact has a guideline-like essay appropriately titled Don’t abbreviate Wikipedia as Wiki. This obviously does not proscribe such usage off-site — nor does it try to do so — but it would at least save a bit of the enamel on my teeth.

As the essay advises, in written communication “Wikipedia” can be abbreviated to “WP”; to be sure, this is also the initialism for WordPress and arguably so for the Washington Post as well — two other terms in common usage at my inside-the-Beltway workplace — but I think in most cases, context will make this clear. As for spoken word… you know, if you’re in a rush and call it “Wiki” I won’t correct you (like I will those who mispronounce “Oregon” or “Nevada”) but I would appreciate your attempt to call it “Wikipedia” whenever possible. Just out of common courtesy is all.

So there, I’ve said my piece. Sincerely, your trying-to-stay-friendly neighborhood Wikipedia editor.

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Wikipedia Optimization

Searching for Wikipedia Assistance on Craigslist

Tagged as Conflict of Interest, Craigslist, Jimmy Wales, Microsoft, Portland Oregon, Rick Jelliffe
on March 22, 2009 at 4:00 pm

Here’s an interesting request for Wikipedia assistance on Craigslist, sent to me by a friend and former colleague from my hometown of Portland, Oregon — coincidentally, also the birthplace of the wiki — just a few days ago:

some wikipedia help (SW Portland) Date: 2009-03-18, 11:01PM PDT I am looking for help with wikipedia. I could really use a good wikipedia editor willing to help and post what seems reasonable on Wikipedia within the rules. The topic is "string matching algorithms and structured data". You need to have a basic undertsnading of this topic. Your need to be an experienced wiki editor and have credit in the wikipedia community regarding such topics.

I’ve clipped a bit from the bottom, but it also includes this:

* Location: SW Portland
* it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
* Compensation: $25+ depends on qualifications.

With the math knowledge requirement and low monetary offer, I am not surprised that the ad remains at the time of this writing.

The mention of compensation could well raise concerns among editors who are wary of financial interests influencing content on Wikipedia. While I am sympathetic to this point of view for the simple reason that they are often correct — people who are willing to put money against getting something changed on Wikipedia are likely to be willing to pay for edits that satisfy their interests but fall short of Wikipedia’s goals — this is also why the Conflict of Interest guideline specifically states: Where advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of Wikipedia, that editor stands in a conflict of interest. How serious is the advertiser about following this? I’d say the phrase “what seems reasonable on Wikipedia within the rules” has to be pretty close, but what may seem “reasonable” to someone unfamiliar with Wikipedia guidelines may nevertheless conflict with them.

While this request appears to be small ball, it does remind me of the time when a Microsoft employee offered Australian programmer Rick Jelliffe money to edit a Wikipedia article of interest to the company. Presumably knowing he would be sympathetic, Microsoft instructed Jelliffe to use his best judgment, and the controversy only kicked off once Jelliffe himself wrote a blog post about it. Notwithstanding comments from the likes of Jimmy Wales saying he was “disappointed” in the situation, it is unrealistic to expect that interested parties cannot seek to correct inaccurate or incomplete information — which is what Microsoft says it was doing. Lost in the controversy was the possibility that IBM, Microsoft’s rival, may have had people anonymously weighting the article in question.

Ultimately, Jelliffe’s biggest mistake was not disclosing the arrangement on the article’s Talk page at the time of his edits. This may have meant additional scrutiny on the page, but that comes with the territory. And if anyone takes up this guy’s offer, I’d recommend they do the same.

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Edit wars

Don’t Be WorldNetDaily’s Aaron Klein

Tagged as Aaron Klein, Barack Obama, Deletion debates, Gawker, WorldNetDaily
on March 11, 2009 at 2:52 pm

As noted yesterday, a recent article by WorldNetDaily Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein about Wikipedia’s alleged “scrubbing” of President Obama’s Wikipedia article resulted in additional coverage that brought to light the probability that Klein himself had made the controversial edits in question and was also the creator and top contributor to his own Wikipedia entry (at least until yesterday, when it exploded with activity.

To be fair, Klein has now claimed (in a letter to Gawker) that he is not in fact Jerusalem21 but in fact only told a subordinate at WND to edit the page:

First, I am not “Jerusalem21,” but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story, which focused on investigating allegations I had received from others of Wikipedia scrubbing Obama’s page.

Whatever. Klein is probably satisfied that he has brought to the world’s attention the horrible Wikipedia conspiracy to keep fringe theories out of articles where they don’t belong, but it may come at a price he didn’t expect:

If you check out the deletion debate itself, it’s not immediately clear which way it will go. Many votes for Keep and many for Delete as well. The fact that Klein (or his subordinate) wrote up a vanity page is not the issue — after all, it can always be changed — but whether Klein meets Wikipedia’s notability requirement certainly is.

Amusingly, some take the position that Klein did not meet the requirement prior to criticizing Wikipedia, but due to the ensuing coverage, he now does. And I think this is may be correct, though I think it’s arguable he met the requirement in the first place. I think the article will most likely survive, even if the decision is “no consensus.” But he may not like that, either — because as long as the article stays, so will some version of this:

Klein removed the name of the editor from the article after reports arose on blogs and Wired News that he might himself be the suspended editor described in the story.

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Edit wars

The So-Called Fight Over Barack Obama’s Wikipedia Article

Tagged as Barack Obama, Fox News, Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, WorldNetDaily
on March 10, 2009 at 7:27 am

There are two stories going around in the past 24 hours about President Obama’s biographical article on Wikipedia. One, from FoxNews.com, is about the article downplaying Obama’s relationship with the controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright and eliminating all references to erstwhile domestic terrorist William Ayers. The second is from WorldNetDaily and concerns Wikipedia editors reverting attempts to mention the alleged controversy over whether Obama was in fact born somewhere outside the United States, thus making him ineligible for the presidency (misleadingly promoted at Druge as “WIKIPEDIA scrubs Obama page clean of critical entries…”).

While I haven’t done extensive research into the history of this page or its associated talk page, I think there are reasonable questions involved but as we will get to later, this is ultimately a non-story.

First of all, Fox was wise to have ignored WND’s primary concern: there is a big difference between campaign controversies that merited mainstream press attention and those which remained the confined to blogs and message boards. The editor who removed the “eligibility” information the first time cited WP:FRINGE and WP:UNDUE and if neither guideline is familiar, they are worth studying. However, due to the actual lawsuits that were not covered in conjunction with the campaign, the subject is deserving of its own Wikipedia article, and it has one: Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, I can at least envision a case being made that Ayers warrants a mention on this page, although not much more of one than what Wright gets:

Obama resigned from Trinity during the Presidential campaign after controversial statements made by Rev. Jeremiah Wright became public.[200]

This sentence resides in the “Family and personal life” section, and is the closing sentence in a paragraph on Obama’s religious views. This also points to the fact that Wright was, by all accounts, a much more important person in Obama’s life than was Ayers. It’s true, the article does not mention that inspiration for the title “The Audacity of Hope” comes from Wright, but the article on the book most certainly does.

In fact, Fox News’ Joshua Rhett Miller concedes there is less than meets the eye here in this paragraph:

Obama’s controversial relationships with both men have two extensive independent Wikipedia pages: “Bill Ayers presidential election controversy” and “Jeremiah Wright controversy.” The associations, however, are largely downplayed or ignored altogether in Obama’s main Wikipedia entry.

True (see here and here, respectively). There is also a discussion of Wright in the article about Obama’s presidential primary campaign and mentions of Ayers in that article as well as the one about his general election campaign. This is whitewashing?

That said, the concern that supporters of President Obama may zealously guard the page is a real one. Wikipedia has a whole guideline pointing out that no single editor has ownership over any article, which is a pretty good indication that this does happen. Because Wikipedia runs on consensus, it is also possible that a group of like-minded editors are reinforcing each other’s desire to see negative material removed from the article. Likewise, relegating disputed material to another page in order to avoid debates is called POV forking, and is discouraged. However, I see no clear-cut evidence this either the case, and it would take several hours’ research for me to know enough to say.

Meanwhile, what is clear is that the editor whose reverted additions of aforementioned material did a clumsy job, is obviously motivated by political considerations and is hardly a conscientious Wikipedia contributor. As Wired points out:

Of more interest is the identity of the mysterious Jerusalem21, whose courageous disregard of Wikipedia’s ban on fringe material provided WND’s Aaron Klein with his smoking gun in the first place, spawning what will soon be a national wiki-scandal.

Curiously, it turns out that Jerusalem21, whoever he or she might be, has only worked on one other Wikipedia entry since the account was created, notes ConWebWatch. That’s Aaron Klein’s entry, which Jerusalem21 created in 2006, and has edited 37 times.

Who watches the watchmen, indeed.

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Wikigroaning

Wikigroaning: Less Random than a Blaster

Tagged as Lightsaber, Modern warfare, Something Awful, Star Wars, Systemic bias
on March 9, 2009 at 3:24 pm

On July 31, 2006, Stephen Colbert said of Wikipedia:

Any site that has a longer entry on truthiness than on Lutherans has its priorities straight.

This probably wasn’t the first time someone has noticed the tendency of Wikipedia to feature more information about arguably trivial subjects than arguably significant ones, but it certainly was not the last. Less than a year later, a contributor to Something Awful created (or popularized) a game called “Wikigroaning”:

The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called “Knight.” Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we’ll go with “Jedi Knight.” Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah. Yeeaaah, we know, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

The article included a list of amusingly juxtaposed concepts, such as Modern warfare vs. Video Game Crash of 1983 and while the concept is funny, Wikipedia recognizes this as a systemic bias they must deal with.

This seems to me like an opportunity a) to ask whether they have and in doing so b) launch an occasionally recurring feature, wherein we compare the Wikipedia of today (beginning in early 2009) to the Wikipedia of 2007. So let’s see how those specific articles from 2007 compare then, and now.

First, let’s benchmark the articles at June 1, 2007, just a few days prior to the article’s publication and about the time author Johnny “DocEvil” Titanium was doing his research. Naturally, the piece implies that the “Lightsaber combat” article was much longer than the one about “Modern warfare.” Unfortunately (sort of) the former article no longer exists: if you click the link you are now redirected to the article Lightsaber, and as I am not an administrator, I cannot see the old pages. No matter. If we substitute Lightsaber on June 1, 2007, that article was 9,500+ words long. Modern warfare on June 1, 2007 was just shy of 2,000.

Now, here are the two side-by-side as of today:

As you can see, the Modern warfare article is now somewhat longer than the Lightsaber article. Of course, length is not everything. For one thing, the Lightsaber article is now well-sourced (in 2007 it had just one in-line citation) whereas Modern warfare in fact has none. But there are mitigating circumstances here, as well. One thing that “Wikigroaning” doesn’t take into account is the amount of material on other pages, and here Modern warfare is nearly a list, serving primarily as a jumping-off point to other articles describing different aspects of modern warfare in greater detail. Some of these are well-sourced, whereas others are not. Another consideration is edit frequency: Lightsaber has been edited many, many more times than has Modern warfare, which speaks partially to the number of “experts” in the former and partially to the stability of the latter.

A more apt comparison might be to the AK-47 article, which I think is a better article still, and much better than the one about the Blaster.

This being the first post in a series I have yet to fully develop, I may develop a rating system and return to this post at another date to include it. Additionally, what I write is guaranteed valid for March 9, 2009 only and may warrant revisiting at another time. But let’s see where this takes us in the meantime.

Oh, and if you really want to know all about Lightsaber combat, Wookiepedia has an article of that name which runs more than 3,300 words — but no in-line citations.

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The Fix is In

Tagged as Eugene Volokh, Hillary Clinton, Saxbe fix, Verifiability
on March 6, 2009 at 8:44 am

Today’s Featured article on the English Wikipedia covers an interesting subject, and one that is recently relevant as well:

As you may remember, the fix was necessary for Senator Hillary Clinton to become Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and this is well-covered in the section titled “21st century.” But here’s my favorite part:

These pay raises were by executive order in accordance with cost of living adjustment statutes, as noted by legal scholar Eugene Volokh on his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy.[54] Before the January 2009 pay increases, secretaries made $191,300 and senators and congressmen earned only $169,300.[59]

If you know anything about the Verifiability guideline, one of the things you probably know is that blogs are nearly always disallowed as a “self-published source.” But the usage of Volokh’s writing on his widely-celebrated group blog falls well within the scope of this guideline:

Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications.

Check, and check. As a longtime fan if intermittent reader of The Volokh Conspiracy, I think Eugene Volokh’s admittance as a source on this rigorously-evaluated article — and not just once but in fact five times — is pretty cool.

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Wikipedia in the news

The Curious Case of Ryan Coonerty

Tagged as Disputed articles, Ryan Coonerty
on March 4, 2009 at 9:06 pm

There’s an interesting story from the San Jose Mercury News today about Ryan Coonerty, a moderately controversial mayor of Santa Cruz, California who has a much-contested Wikipedia article:

Young, highly educated and very popular with voters, or a politician who plies his trade by cashing in on resentment toward the homeless in Santa Cruz.

If you get your information online, your view of Councilman Ryan Coonerty may depend on who last edited his Wikipedia page.

Two years after Coonerty joined the Santa Cruz City Council in 2004, his supporters created an admittedly glowing Wikipedia profile that they hoped might hook Web-savvy young voters.

Though he has long since been re-elected to the council, what once seemed like hip political strategy has become a headache as Coonerty, 35, engages in an ongoing struggle to control his online image on Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

It has gotten to the point where, “given it all, I would rather just not have a Wikipedia page,” said Coonerty, who in 2007 became the youngest Santa Cruz mayor in 30 years. “It gets looked at a lot. I’ll give a speech and people will print out my Wikipedia page.”

So I’ve had a look through it now and what’s kind of amusing is that even after the article was posted this afternoon, drive-by editors were still taking their shots at Finnerty — only to be quickly reverted by more-established editors. Several hours later the article was drawing vandals who were less critics of Finnerty than out to make fun for themselves — a malady afflicting many articles in the news.

The upshot, however, is that the article seems to have several defenders, including Xymmax (today’s most active) and Delirium (a sometime contributor to the Greek Wikipedia). A more interesting case is Rthunder, a Santa Cruz resident and the article’s most frequent contributor. Rthunder appears to be no supporter of Coonerty, whose good faith edits have been rolled back for legitimate reasons but has also made edits of which Coonerty would undoubtedly approve.

Articles such as Coonerty’s can be difficult to keep neutral, as Delirium explains on the Talk page today:

I do think this is one of Wikipedia’s bigger blind spots in general, though: BLPs [Biographies of living persons] which have a few people who care a lot about them (on either side), but are neither non-notable enough to delete, nor notable enough to attract much attention from neutral editors. One I was involved in a while back, Erwin McManus, was fought over by partisans for over a year before they mostly went away and some more neutral editors showed up. I guess the BLP noticeboard is the best way to pull non-involved people into these sorts of articles?

I think that’s right on the first point, and probably correct on the second. Of course, then there is also the curious case of how public pressure can bring changes to articles, which is another way to pull in other editors. It happened here, and that’s certainly what happened in the much more infamous case of John Seigenthaler, what Wikipedia itself calls the “Seigenthaler incident.”

Oh, and one more thing? The Coonerty article is arguably better than it was yesterday — but it still needs a lot of work.

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Tweeting Wikipedia

Twitter + Wikipedia = How Can I Not Write About This?

Tagged as C-SPAN, Jimmy Wales, John McCain, Nevada, Twitter, Wikia
on March 3, 2009 at 6:57 am

I hadn’t realized that Sen. John McCain was on Twitter as @SenJohnMcCain, but with 127,000+ followers I am going to assume that it’s the real one and @JohnMcCain at ~6,700 followers is just a supporter. Given McCain’s war injuries it’s unlikely he’s typing these up himself (all updates are “from web”) but it’s nevertheless official, and the following tweet was just featured on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal a few moments ago:

I wasn’t familiar with the project, but a quick Google search reveals that he is obviously talking about the Online Nevada Encyclopedia.

Although I tend to share McCain’s skepticism that an encyclopedia of state history is something the federal government should be funding, my Wikipedia-specific thought was: Wikipedia guidelines may well not allow many of the articles the Nevada Humanities organization might want to create. In fact, Wikipedia suggests to frustrated newcomers that if Wikipedia doesn’t fit their goals, then perhaps starting another wiki is the way to go (where Jimmy Wales’ for-profit Wikia is theoretically poised to benefit).

Upon closer inspection, this putative New Mexico “encyclopedia” is not itself presented as a wiki, the writing style is far different and the so are the citation styles. The site runs to perhaps a few hundred articles at most so it’s highly conceivable that many or most could be rewritten and included in Wikipedia. But somehow I doubt Nevada would get a federal grant to do that.

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Conference Notes, Congressional Wikipedia Edits

The Electronic Slide: United States Congress Still Editing Wikipedia

Tagged as Congressional edits, PowerPoint, SlideShare, TransparencyCamp, WWB
on March 2, 2009 at 6:39 pm

As I mentioned in the first post, I presented at TransparencyCamp yeserday. As promised, I posted the related PowerPoint deck to my SlideShare account, but you can click through it right here (and if you’re looking at this on the front page yes, it’s too wide, I’ll get that fixed as soon as I can and remove this parenthetical statement once it has been):

Government and Wikipedia: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

View more presentations from William Beutler. (tags: wikipedia government)

If it doesn’t make complete sense, that’s understandable — it’s meant to support a discussion, after all. However, this was the first time I’ve given this particular talk and, like others I’ve given, it will benefit from additional iterations and refinement. I’ll certainly do plenty of that on The Wikipedian — looking more closely at the Wikipedia edits not just of other members of Congress, but of other government agencies.

In the meantime, you can take a look for yourself at the recent edits from the IP address of the U.S. House of Representatives. And if you’re feeling especially adventuresome, try to find the good-faith edit that I cleaned up and cited.

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Announcements

Welcome to The Wikipedian

Tagged as British Rail sandwich, New Media Strategies, PowerPoint, WWB
on March 1, 2009 at 11:49 am

Greetings and salutations! If you’re reading this (and I suspect that you are) then you have found the first post at The Wikipedian. I believe this here “Web-site” is the first “Web-log” about Wikipedia written specifically for the non-insider — that is to say, the non-Wikipedian. Which I suppose makes me your presumptively self-appointed host — the “The Wikipedian” — but I’ll probably just stick with “William Beutler.”

As the title suggests, I am an active editor on the English Wikipedia, where I contribute primarily as User:WWB and have been editing in some way, shape or form since the middle of 2006. Here’s how I put it on my user page:

I first started editing Wikipedia as a reader who finally decided to try my hand at editing the articles I read. Beyond that I continued with simple spelling, grammar and formatting corrections, which led to more substantial contributions to existing articles and, eventually, creating new ones.

I am not one of the very top elite contributors, nor am I an administrator or sysop, nor am I anywhere near being a member of the alleged cabal, but I’ll wager that I’m probably somewhere in the top 20 percent — just in deep enough to explain the inside to the outside and, one hopes, avoid being too jargony.

The idea first came to me late last year as I noticed two things happening, at work and in my spare time. In my capacity as Innovation Manager at New Media Strategies I’ve spent the past year (and then some) developing consultative services for clients regarding Wikipedia engagement, leading the white hat approach to Wikipedia optimization. Meanwhile, I noticed that my primary site, Blog P.I., was becoming more and more about Wikipedia (that is, when it wasn’t becoming more and more about Twitter) and so maybe it would be worthwhile to devote more resources to covering Wikipedia on a regular — who knows? maybe even daily — basis. Hence the brand-new blog before you.

Today’s soft-launch comes to you from a third-floor room of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet on the George Washington University campus during TransparencyCamp 2009, where in just a few short hours I will be delivering a brand new PowerPoint-supported presentation about Wikipedia; the focus of my talk will be Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia. Now, that much I had planned for. Less planned for: I’ve just received notice that, for the first time, an article I created made the front page of Wikipedia this morning in the “Did you know” category. Specifically, did you know

… that despite being an object of ridicule in popular culture, over 8 million British Rail sandwiches were sold in 1993?

Call it serendipity if you like, and then look it up on Wikipedia just for the heck of it.

As I get started on this project, there are many arguments and debates I want to cover but avoided previously for fear of hijacking my own blog, and I’ve got more than a few ideas about recurring features to create that heretofore remain uncreated for the same reason. One thing you will certainly see is a version of the old “All the Rage” series from my Thomas Magnum-esque previous base of operations. I will also be seeking guest posts and occasional contributions from others, so if the idea interests you, please contact me at thewikipedianblog at gmail (you know, dot com).

On a goofier note, this blog is named in part for The Oregonian, the daily paper of my hometown, and also in part the inspiration owes something to The Origamian, a defunct newsletter of OrigamiUSA, whose name was also inspired by The Oregonian.

And I might as well add that this is at least the fifth blog I have started since 2002 and at least the eighth I have contributed to in that time, but it’s the first I’ve launched in more than two-and-a-half years. Also noteworthy: this time I will not be shuttering my other sites: Blog P.I. will continue as my increasingly occasional outlet for writings on matters of politics and technology and the Washington Canard is still where I will post about life in the District, when said life and endeavors such as this aren’t keeping me too busy.

Okay, I think that’s enough for an introductory post. Expect topical posts to commence later today or tomorrow, and I hope to see you on Wikipedia.

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