Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
On 4/20/07 10:35 PM, "Michael Snow"
<wikipedia(a)att.net> wrote:
Which goes to the
point of Wikipedia's oft-cited ability to respond quickly to topics of
current interest.
This also has a tendency to be one of our greatest failings. By throwing up
"encyclopedia articles" as quickly as possible about people and issues of
which little notice has been previously taken and of which we know little
beyond the "topic of current interest," we are unable to look at these
issues neutrally or report on people of limited notability with any sense of
encyclopedic perspective and time. They're very easily taken over by people
with a clear POV (usually negative) they and end up being bias-fests.
There's an implicit presumption of controversiality in what you say.
You leave the impression that virtually none of these articles about
borderline notables are for doing anything worthwhile. A person who
decides to write a series of articles on each member of a sports team
will include very few that are notable, but little in what is written
will come close to negative bias.
For example, until I moved it, we had a
"biography" of [[Tiffany Adler]],
the entire contents of which were essentially that she was a woman from
[[Pacifica, California]] who had been arrested and charged with a
misdemeanor which happened to make it into a couple local newspapers. There
was nothing about the rest of her life, nothing about who she was, what
she's done other than that - so readers were left with an
entirely-unbalanced, biased and completely-out-of-perspective "biography"
which purported to say that this woman's entire life consisted of being
arrested. Even as it stands, the article lacks any sense of encyclopedic
perspective, and basically belongs in WikiNews, not Wikipedia. But there's a
couple editors who believe that the whole world needs to forever know that
this person has been accused of this crime, and that it should be the
person's first hit on Google. "Objectivity" is not the first word that
comes
to mind.
Judgement is also comes into play. A person charged with trespassing
because she went onto the grounds of city hall to plant flowers that
would make the place look better, would be different from one who went
there to plant marijuana.
We can no longer discount Wikipedia's status as a
de-facto scandal sheet for
everyday occurrences, serving as a permanent record of anything bad or
remotely controversial that anyone ever did, no matter how minor in the
grand scheme of things, as long as it ended up with a three-paragraph blurb
in a local paper. We need to, I think, think about that effect. Is that a
good thing, and where does it stop? Should a kid who gets expelled from high
school for carrying a knife (an article on which ends up in the local
fishwrap) then carry around a Wikipedia biography stating such for the rest
of their natural life?
Most papers are prevented from publishing the names of juvenile
offenders. What would be your source for that information.
That "oft-cited ability to respond quickly"
too often means that we respond
with haste, without perspective and without objectivity.
That's jumping to conclusions. What proportion of articles are you
talking about. While single edits may fit into what you describe, such
articles will undergo considerable change as they evolve through the
first 24 hours.
Ec