This past weekend I attended WikiConference USA at the New York Law School in—you guessed it—New York City. Not counting Wikimania 2012 in DC or Wikimania 2006 in Cambridge, this was somehow the first national meeting of US Wikipedians (and Wikimedians) to be organized and, with any luck, it seems likely to become an annual thing. The bulk of this post was written on the Vermonter back to DC, and completed upon my return. With the event still fresh in my mind and not in fact fully concluded at this writing, what follows is a non-exhaustive and yet non-brief summary of what I saw and thought about it.
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My trip actually commenced on Thursday morning, when I hopped an 8:10 train out of Union Station with Andrew Lih to make a 1:30pm tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized by digital collections specialist (and Wikipedian, natch) Neil Stimler. We got a tour of the extensive archives—from current art auction portfolios to folios hundreds of years old—saw the specialized camera equipment they use to capture old books to digital file, and enjoyed a brief tour of some pieces in the public collection. This was my first visit, and I was impressed, especially by the Temple of Dendur exhibit, imported from a soon-to-be-flooded Egyptian valley in the 1960s:
Following a good night’s sleep at a Club Quarters location in the Financial District (seriously, best business commuter hotel ever), first-day events included a morning keynote by Sumana Harihareswara, that I didn’t see all of, but which she generously recapped for me afterward. I wasn’t previously familiar with the Hacker School social rules, but they’re worth checking out (especially “No well-actuallys”) and applying elsewhere in life.
Hacker School Social Rules sounds like a discarded early name of Sunny Day Real Estate. #wikiconusa
Other events before lunch included a presentation by Andrew on the state of video on Wikipedia (Video in Wikimedia) which, sadly, is not strong. (We also discussed some aspects of this on Bloggingheads.tv last September.) Long story short, Wikipedia’s commitment to using only copyright-free media formats prevents it from using the MP4 codec, which is the global standard. Want to shoot a video on your iPhone and upload it to Wikipedia? Nope, not gonna happen. That RfC failed pretty decisively.
Want to shoot professional-type video for Wikipedia? @fuzheado says: learn the @BBC "5 shot method" #wikiconusa
Another was Jake Orlowitz presenting the results of his work on a project called The Wikipedia Adventure (The Wikipedia Adventure: Play with Learning). Jake’s project uses “gamification” to teach newcomers the basics of Wikipedia editing, and his talk included results showing the game has promise. Following that was Amanda Levendowski talking about Wikipedia and the legal profession (Wikipedia for Lawyers: Researching, Citing, and Contributing To Wikipedia). Did you know celebrated federal judge Richard Posner has cited Wikipedia in rulings far more than any other judge? It’s a fact—indeed, the 7th Circuit has cited Wikipedia in 62 opinions, most by him, far more than any other US circuit. Next was Lianna Davis talking about lessons learned from the early days of the Wiki Education Foundation (The 7 biggest mistakes the Wikipedia Education Program has made — and what we’ve learned from them). Among the learnings? College students plagiarize… a lot.
The entire second half of my day was spent in one room, encompassing two panel discussions on the messy subject of paid editing, paid advocacy, COI and PR on Wikipedia—the topic is so thorny, in fact, that the community cannot settle on one term to describe it. This is also fair: in fact it does bring together several related and seemingly-but-maybe-not-related topics.
The first hour in fact was the panel I had submitted (How the PR Industry Views Wikipedia), featuring myself (of course) with real-deal PR executive Michael Bassik (formerly of Burson-Marsteller, now with MDC Partners) and Andrew Lih again. Besides the main topic, I also talked about my experiences as a Wikipedian and a consultant, and the three of us talked about a meeting between representatives of public relations firms and Wikipedia editors which I organized earlier this year. (More about that fairly soon, but not quite yet.)
The second half operated mostly as a discussion involving most of the room (Paid Editing Moderated Discussion). While this topic is one Wikipedians haven’t addressed well in the past, I thought it was a really productive day. As one of the participants put it during a Wikipedia Weekly recording afterward, it seemed like we managed to get this down to a “manageable pool of ideas”. You can view the Etherpad notes from the discussion here.
"Wikipedia key party"—hilarious, horrifying idea from @fuzheado about how to handle Wikipedia COI (which he is not advocating). #wikiconusa
Speaking of which, I joined in an impromptu, audio-only recording of Wikipedia Weekly, talking about the first day. We recorded standing around a microphone in the main event room after the first day’s schedule concluded, and it went about 45 minutes. You can listen to it here:
Afterward, a decently massive group (about 15 of us?) convened at Sing Kee Seafood in Chinatown for a tremendous feast of things I have no idea the name of, except it consisted of different combinations of pork, chicken, shrimp, noodles, dumplings, vegetables, tofu, and Tsingtao beer (note: the Tsingtao was not combined with anything else).
I slept in a bit on Saturday, and arrived in time to hear Newyorkbrad talk about the problem with BLPs—articles about living persons, specifically articles about living persons that have had serious problems, causing anxiety and sometimes resulting in legal threats, media coverage and (usually) eventual resolution (The current state of the BLP problem). Before that was finished, I hopped over to see Librarygurl talk about “social drama” on Wikipedia, invoking anthropological theories to discuss the 2011 incident where Sarah Palin’s supporters edited Wikipedia to make her “right” about a spurious Paul Revere claim (Social Dramas of Wikipedia).
Anthropological theory of social drama: Breach → Making Public → Redress → Reintegration or Recognition #wikiconusa
The next session was one of my two favorite sessions (that I did not participate in). This was a presentation of results from a study by Jason Q. Ng from the University of Toronto comparing the Chinese-language Wikipedia to the other two Chinese online user-edited encyclopedias, Hudong and Baidu Baike (Rethinking Censorship via a Comparison of Chinese Wikipedia with Hudong and Baidu Baike). Chinese is one of the few languages where Wikipedia is not the largest online encyclopedia, and this owes to the fact that most of its speakers are in mainland China, where censorship is an everyday fact of life, and where other global platforms have Chinese-created equivalents (think Weibo for Twitter). For some reason, China has two encyclopedias, and they differ greatly from the Chinese Wikipedia, which is mostly edited by users in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ng showed lists of articles on the Chinese Wikipedia for which there are no equivalents in the other two, as well as articles that are much shorter there.
The last session I attended was my other favorite, a presentation by James Heilman, a “small town ER doctor”, as he put it, who also happens to be the top contributor to medical articles on Wikipedia (Wikipedia and Medicine). Even more than that, he leads an organization called Wiki Project Med Foundation, which is involved in some really incredible projects: determining a core base of the most-needed medical articles and working with Translators Without Borders to bring them to (eventually) every language. Another is a collaboration with UCSF creating an elective course for med students to work on Wikipedia articles. Among the many fascinating statistics and data points he brought to the presentation, the most striking point was summed up in a slide I quoted as follows:
"Every day tens of thousands die for lack of low cost health care. … Wikipedia is a viable way to address this knowledge gap." #wikiconusa
One nit to pick: while the conference itself was a success and no great technical disasters befell it, the up-front organization was not so impressive. For one thing, I never actually received a formal notification that my proposal had been accepted; instead I heard it secondhand, and then saw it on the published schedule. It’s a good thing I was keeping tabs on it! Of course the whole thing was rather ad hoc, more of a Barcamp un-conference kind of thing, but hey, that’s the wiki way.
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So that’s not everything, but it’ll have to do for now. I didn’t mean to write 1300 words, I swear! Let’s do this again next year, shall we?
When former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum started gearing up to launch his presidential campaign earlier this year, there was one question he could not avoid. It had to do with the matter of alt-weekly editor and advice columnist Dan Savage, who has for years positioned himself as Santorum’s most prominent critic. Many politicians have fierce opponents, but few did what Savage did in 2003, and that was hold a contest to give an alternate meaning to the word “santorum”. I hope you’ll forgive me for declining to quote the winning definition, but you can find it here, and suffice to say that it has stuck. So much so, in fact, that eight years later Savage’s term has come to dominate the web search results for Rick Santorum’s name.
In news stories this year it was mostly described—by ABC News, Roll Call, Slate, and Huffington Post, among others—as Santorum’s “Google problem”. Indeed, one of the top three results for Santorum’s name is Dan Savage’s website promoting the campaign. But Google and Wikipedia are often joined at the hip, and one of the top results has been a Wikipedia article, not about Rick Santorum per se, but in fact about the campaign against him… or about the word itself… it hasn’t always been clear. And by mid-summer 2011, the article—then called Santorum (neologism)—had grown to several thousand words, and had itself become the focus of controversy among Wikipedians.
This blog post traces the history of the article’s evolution in some detail—not exhaustive, but getting there—because it’s an interesting window into how Wikipedia deals with controversial topics. Wikipedians can’t always agree, and in fact the article in question still remains a matter of dispute. But after 200,000 words and numerous debates in various forums around Wikipedia, the community has arrived at something approaching a satisfactory conclusion. Below, I aim to show how things got out of control, and how the Wikipedia community worked it out.
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August 2006—To start from the beginning, let’s start from the beginning. The first version of this article was created five years ago this week, simply as Santorum.
(I should take a moment here to point out that—spoiler alert—because the article today is called Campaign for “santorum” neologism that is what appears at the top of all historical versions of the article; generally speaking, for each version I’ll link here, I will boldface article’s name at the time upon each reference.)
At this point the article was just a few paragraphs, outlining the circumstances that led to Savage’s coinage and a few examples of the term’s usage in the U.S. media. Prior to becoming its own article, most of the relevant material had been contained in a sub-section of the article about Savage’s sex advice column: Savage Love#Santorum.
It didn’t take very long at all before editors questioned the article’s suitability for a standalone article—what Wikipedia calls “notability”. In fact, the same day the article was first created, it was nominated for deletion. The reason for the nomination is one that would be echoed many times over the next half-decade:
The neologism referred to, created by Savage Love, does not have any evidence of real currency as a neologism. It should be treated as a political act by Savage Love, and described under that article.
The nomination failed and the article remained, as it certainly had received some media attention, but it was decided a renaming was in order. The suggestion was made that it be called Santorum (neologism), or possibly Santorum (sexual slang). Recent followers of this controversy might assume that the former was selected, because that was the name of the article for a long while. However, it was the latter, with a large reason being that Wikipedia has an explicit policy against creating articles about neologisms.
But that hardly settled the matter; the next issue concerned which Wikipedia page readers should find when they search for the word “santorum”, which now was considered to have—and here you could say that Savage had already won—two legitimate meanings. So the question was taken to a “straw poll”. For now, the article was still called Santorum, but what would the average Internet user be looking for when they looked up that term? How should the ambiguity be handled—in Wikipedia terminology, “disambiguated”? And what exactly should they call the article about the coinage?
Related to the word “Santorum”, the options included, and I quote:
Santorum should be an article about Savage’s attempt to define the word “santorum”
Santorum should be a disambiguation page, with its “traditional” content
Santorum should be a disambiguation page, with some other content (explain)
Santorum should be a redirect to Rick Santorum, and Rick Santorum should have a dablink…
Santorum should be a redirect to Rick Santorum, with no reference to the Savage neologism in the Rick Santorum article
Related to the article about Savage’s coinage, the options included, and I quote:
The article on the Savage neologism should be titled Santorum (neologism)
The article on the Savage neologism should be titled Santorum (sexual slang)
The Savage neologism needs no article; sufficiently covered at Savage Love#Santorum
And the result was… inconclusive. Nevertheless, a proposal was made, and subsequently accepted, to keep Rick Santorum as it always was, to call the Savage Love-inspired article Santorum (neologism), and to make Santorum a disambiguation page with links to relevant pages, among other details. The best summary of the considerations involved was stated by User:Dpbsmith, a veteran and still-active editor, who wrote:
Frankly I’ll support anything meeting these criterion:
A user who types in “santorum” as the Go word intending to find information about the Senator can find it very easily.
A user who types in “santorum” as the Go word intending to find information about the neologism can find it easily.
A user who types in “santorum” as the Go word is not presented immediately with the details of the neologism, but must click on a link, and the link must have some kind of label that communicates that fact that they are about to read about a political attack on the the [sic] Senator.
There should be no implication that Wikipedia endorses the neologism as somehow being “the real meaning” of the word.
Oh, did I mention there was also then a page called Santorum controversy, which is now called Santorum controversy regarding homosexuality, that also came up in the discussion? Well, now I have. Just wanted to be clear about that.
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Late 2006-Early 2007—Although the matter seemed to have been handled appropriately, that didn’t stop editors from raising objections—even the very same objections—in the months following. In fact, someone had changed the article’s title back to Santorum (sexual slang) by the time the article came up for a second deletion debate in December 2006. The nominator focused on the fact that the media hits for the article were trivial—sure, The Daily Show and The Economist had used it, but neither had focused on it as a topic—while several less well-known sources appeared to be joining Savage’s campaign to popularize the term. Meanwhile, the nominator’s first argument was that the primary information was already covered in the Santorum controversy article (now you see why I mentioned it). Following a week’s worth of debate involving approximately two dozen Wikipedians and several thousand words…
The result was hopeless, hopeless lack of consensus.
(Emphasis in the original.) Lack of consensus to delete an article always means that it stays, and so it did. Some editors had suggested moving the article’s content to Wiktionary, Wikipedia’s dictionary sister project, where in fact the term had registered its own entry (without controversy) several months ahead of Wikipedia.
Later in December, one of the editors involved in the previous debate suggested moving the article from Santorum (sexual slang) to the oddly-titled Santorum (sexual slang activism), though the article stayed put. In January, a suggestion was made to merge the article back into the Savage Love entry, but that didn’t happen either.
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Late 2007—Debate continued. In September, someone renamed it to Santorum (fluid)—ugh—and it was returned to Santorum (neologism), as it was then called. By this point, the article had grown substantially, was attracting the efforts of serious Wikipedians, and was… well, it was actually getting pretty good. In September 2007, the article was nominated for “Good article” (GA) status, and it looked like this. Later that day, the reviewing editor failed the article for including unsourced and “poorly sourced” material—The Onion in particular was singled out, although it was really an interview with Savage in the sister publication, AV Club—and for being a “BLP liability”.
That is to say, the article skirted the line of Wikipedia’s Biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, which aims to keep out scurrilous and weakly-sourced material about living persons that could be damaging to a living person’s reputation. As you might imagine, that had long been an issue; one couldn’t write about this topic without it being an issue. One could argue that Savage’s campaign was all about damaging Santorum’s reputation—I presume Dan Savage would agree to that—and yet it was nonetheless notable. Many editors then, and to this day, wished it would simply go away. And yet some wanted to make it as “good” as possible.
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2008-2010—We can skip ahead, because after October 2007, fewer than 160 edits occurred in the three years intervening, and it was not changed substantially in that time. Santorum had lost his re-election bid in late 2006, re-entered private life in January 2007, and ceased to make headlines. In December 2007, the article looked like this. In January 2011, it looked like this. It was the same old back-and-forth, and not much happened.
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Early 2011—As Santorum started making moves to run for president, activity picked up. In mid-February, Roll Call was first to write about Santorum’s “Google problem”, and this was dutifully added. The article continued to draw attention (including from vandals) through the end of February, until it was put under temporary “semi-protection”. When Stephen Colbert mentioned the controversy on his show, a not-so-brief summary was added, then removed, with the point made that “not everything Colbert says needs to be repeated in Wikipedia”. (Imagine that!) March and April were months of relative calm before the proverbial storm: nearly 1,000 direct edits, from May to this writing, lay just ahead.
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May 2011—In early May, a very active and respected editor-administrator, User:Cirt, began a series of more than 300 edits to the article, starting with a long-overdue link to Wiktionary. By this point, the article contained some 1,600 words, excluding links and references. Cirt announced his intention to add “some research in additional secondary sources”, and four days later he had expanded the article to some 4,300 words. On the discussion page, one editor objected:
Expanding an article about a vile attack on a living person – it’s twice the size now and refs have gone from 33 to 95 – has got to be against the spirit of least of our BLP policy. My proposal, and my intention, stated right now, is to return this article to the content it had on May 9th.
This kicked off the first sustained debate in years—one that has arguably not yet come to a close. A proposal was made to “stub” the article, meaning to reduce the article’s length to a mere stub of an entry; the argument went, because the arguably unfair subject obviously met Wikipedia’s previously-determined standards for inclusion, a possible solution was to reduce it to the shortest possible version. This proposal quickly failed, with Cirt himself citing an earlier comment by veteran Wikipedian (and current Wikimedia Foundation fellow) Steven Walling:
The BLP policy is not a blank check for deleting anything negative related to a living individual. Criticism, commentary, and even base mockery of a public figure like a Senator is protected free speech in the United States. While it would be ridiculous for anyone to try and make Wikipedia a platform for creating the kind of meme Savage did, it is perfectly prudent for Wikipedia to neutrally report on the overwhelming amount of coverage given to the topic.
Remember that part about using Wikipedia as a platform—it will come up later. Meanwhile, Cirt continued to add significant information about media usage and analysis of the term and events surrounding Savage’s campaign, all backed up with acceptable references. In particular, he focused on adding uses of “santorum”, in slang dictionaries and even erotica, to support the article’s focus as legitimately about the neologism, and not Savage’s campaign per se.
For those who did not wish for Wikipedia to contribute to the so-called problem of making Savage’s campaign seem more important than it arguably was, it must have been more frustrating still to observe that the article was quite well-written and scrupulously followed Wikipedia’s style and sourcing guidelines. Cirt was nothing if not sophisticated. Many had the impression that the article itself was now an attack on Santorum, although that conclusion was only in the eye of the beholder. Cirt knew what he was doing and, for lack of a better phrase, Cirt knew exactly what he was doing. One editor objected:
I realize you will defend this bloated attack piece with all your skills (that is actually what I find most disturbing) but you have to realize or at least have noticed that many experienced editors disagree with your massive expansion of it and at some point it will require wider input and a community RFC.
By the end of May, the article had grown to more than five times the length of the article Santorum controversy regarding homosexuality and more than two-thirds the length of the primary Rick Santorum biographical article. Discrepancies of this sort have been well observed, most significantly on the Internet forum Something Awful, but no Wikipedia policy exists to require proportionality among articles.
At its greatest length, on May 31, the article surpassed 5,500 words, including headers but excluding photo captions, links and references—a total of over 77,000 bytes of data.
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June 2011-Present— Were I to adequately summarize the debates and discussions that occurred beginning in late May and continuing sustainedly—with most debate occurring in June—this blog post could be three times its already considerable length. Instead I will attempt to summarize, although “considerable length” is unavoidable still.
From early June, Cirt pretty much stopped editing the article. To a significant extent, he’d become part of the issue, not just regarding this article but others as well, as can be seen on the discussion page for Cirt’s user account.
Among the many solutions offered around this time, one focused not on the article content itself, but rather its visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). The editor offered, even if just for the sake of argument:
While I don’t really like the precedent, there’s nothing to say that every article needs to be indexed by search engines. … The majority of the concerns here seem to be focused on how people are coming across this article (via Google bombing, etc.), not necessarily that the article exists. … Both sides have legitimate points in their favor, so a compromise might be best here.
Other editors agreed it would set a bad precedent, and the suggestion did not go any further.
By now the topic had come to involve some of Wikipedia’s most influential editors, and a lengthy debate opened on Jimmy Wales’ discussion page. Wales’ take was as follows:
My only thought about the whole thing is that WP:COATRACK applies in spades. There is zero reason for this page to exist. It is arguable whether this nonsense even belongs in his biography at all, but at a bare minimum, a merger to his main article seems appropriate.
The “Coatrack” argument—one of many analogies Wikipedians have created over the years to illustrate key concepts—is not a policy or a guideline, but an informal essay, yet one with much currency. It states:
A coatrack article is a Wikipedia article that ostensibly discusses the nominal subject, but in reality is a cover for a tangentially related biased subject. The nominal subject is used as an empty coat-rack, which ends up being mostly obscured by the “coats”. The existence of a “hook” in a given article is not a good reason to “hang” irrelevant and biased material there.
In retrospect, it’s a little surprising that the “Coatrack” issue hadn’t been raised in any significant way before—and Wales is neither considered infallible nor is he always that involved in day-to-day Wikipedia issues—but this may yet have been a turning point. The next day, the highly respected User:SlimVirgin opened an RfC (Request for Comment) called “Proposal to rename, redirect, and merge content”. This led to the article being renamed, for a time, Santorum Google problem. Later, it was pointed out that “Google is not the only search engine in the world”, and so the search (as it were) continued.
The argument that the “neologism” had not evolved organically, but was the result of an organized campaign by Savage and his allies, had begun to exert some influence. For one thing, it was now quite clear that the majority of sources focused on the political campaign to bring relevance to the term, as opposed to the term’s relevance itself. In this way, one might say that Savage’s campaign had become a little too successful. Yes, the term was notable, but the controversy itself had become even more so.
Prior to the renaming mentioned above, editors in an adjacent thread had discussed several alternative names for the article. These included:
Santorum neologism controversy
Dan Savage santorum neologism controversy
Dan Savage santorum neologism campaign
Santorum neologism campaign
Spreading santorum (the name of Savage’s website)
Here one can start to see where the article’s current title would eventually emerge. Meanwhile, the article faced two more AfD (Articles for deletion) nominations, the first under its old name and the second under its current one. These were the fourth and fifth nominations overall, and surely the most futile.
As part of the ongoing RfC discussion in June, it had been strongly suggested that the article needed to be condensed, especially as Cirt’s expansion had contributed so significantly to the controversy. Besides the article expansion, in mid-May Cirt had created a new “footer” template, Template:Sexual slang, which further linked Rick Santorum’s name to dozens of NSFW topics. That template still exists, but on June 11 the link to Santorum (neologism) was removed. Again, it’s hard to say if this was another turning point, but a discussion about this template on Wales’ discussion page supports the notion that a consensus was coming into view: the article in its present form had itself become part of the campaign—that Wikipedia was being used as a platform for the campaign in the manner Walling had suggested.
A day later, a request for arbitration (RfAr)—a petition to the Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia’s equivalent of the Supreme Court—was opened against Cirt on the basis that his concerted efforts on the subject constituted “political activism”. On June 18 the request was rejected, but not before several dozen editors had contributed more than 28,000 words of opinion. One committee member wrote:
Decline for now, I’m inclined to think that this is more of a content dispute, and the community is able to cope with it.
On June 17, the community finally hit on a name that stuck: Campaign for “santorum” neologism. Initially, this was only intended as an interim move while further discussion took place. Among the names considered at this time, not all were serious, but most were:
Dan Savage santorum campaign
Dan Savage campaign
Dan Savage’s verbal attack on Rick Santorum
Santorum (sexual slang)
Santorum neologism campaign
Santorum neologism campaign
Santorum neologism controversy
Rick Santorum and homosexuality
Rick Santorum homosexuality controversy
Savage Santorum campaign
Dan Savage santorum neologism controversy
Dan Savage santorum neologism campaign
Spreading Santorum
Rick Santorum’s Google problem
Rick Santorum’s “Google problem”
Santorum Google problem
Rick Santorum Google problem
‘Spreading santorum’ campaign
Campaign for “santorum” neologism
Dan Savage campaign for “santorum” neologism
Savage–Santorum affair (a reply: “Oh Please God No.”)
Savage–Santorum controversy
santorum (neologism)
The problem Rick Santorum is facing because every search engine in the world’s top search results says santorum is an anal sex by-product
Santorum (googlebomb)
SEO Campaign for “santorum” neologism
Santorum (cyberattack)
Santorum (cyberbullying)
Santorm (SEO attack)
Dan Savage’s “spreading santorum” campaign against Rick Santorum’s anti-gay stance
Santorum Google ranking problem
Dan Savage Google-bomb Attack on Rick Santorum
Campaign to attack Santorum’s name
Campaign to create ‘santorum’ neologism
Campaign to associate Santorum to neologism
In the end, inertia and the current title’s inherent virtues won out. Of the eventual “winner”—Campaign for “santorum” neologism—a veteran Wikipedian commented:
This one is growing on me – neutral, correct, to-the-point, and succinctly informative to readers both familiar and unfamiliar with the subject as to what the article will be about.
All that was left was to whittle the article down from its extreme length to a shape that covered the topic adequately, balancing relevance with discretion. While many edits were to follow, the key edit was made on June 21, when SlimVirgin replaced a 4,800-word version of the article (minus links and references) with a 1,400-word version. This is substantially the version of the article that remains in place today.
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Comparing the late May version of the article, at its longest point, to the trimmed-down and refocused current version, here’s what we find:
The earlier version focused on the term in and of itself, with the opening sentence including a definition and describing its use. The current version focuses on the events, explaining the aim of Savage’s campaign—though the definition remains.
Excluding the lead section, references and external links, there are only three sections in the current version, compared with seven in the earlier (not including “See also” and “Further reading”, which were also removed).
The content of the “Background” section was almost entirely removed, leaving just the key facts about Rick Santorum’s statements in the 2003 Associated Press interview.
The section about the website “Spreading Santorum” was removed, details added into the “Campaign by Dan Savage” section.
Almost all of the “Recognition and usage” section was removed.
“Media analysis” and “Political impact” were combined into one, shorter, summarized section, focusing on the reception of the campaign in the media and its political impact.
Santorum’s response to the controversy was kept in the current article, however condensed.
Up to the present day, in the Talk page discussions alone (including the RfC discussion), more than 200,000 words have been written about the article. That is probably well short of the true number.
Perhaps surprisingly, the impact on Rick Santorum’s Wikipedia article was not that great—the article had long summarized the events in a short final paragraph concluding a heading relating to his statements about homosexuality—83 words at this count.
Meanwhile, Santorum’s “Google” problem continues. Conduct a logged-out search today, and here are the top three results:
And let’s not imagine the argument is completely over on Campaign for “santorum” neologism. Visit today, and one will find at the very top:
Images courtesy Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons. Additional research and analysis provided by Rhiannon Ruff.
That is to say, as the world knows by now, the Wikipedia article about Osama bin Laden no longer describes a living person, and he is no longer subject to Wikipedia’s policy for Biographies of living persons (BLP).*
Quite something to see this template attached to this particular article. As I type this just before 9am Eastern Time, Wikipedia editors have been extremely active overnight; since early reports of President Obama’s announcement, there have been more (as of my counting) 430 edits to the main bin Laden page and 999 edits to an all-new article: Death of Osama bin Laden. And, of course, there was the obligatory circumstance wherein someone accurately updated the article to reflect his death without providing a citation, leading another editor to revert the change pending verification. And within a few minutes, it was.
*Of course it’s still covered by BLP insofar as other individuals mentioned on the page are concerned, but can we set that aside and take some satisfaction in this moment already?
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.
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.