[WikiEN-l] A sudden thought on the media coverage of flagged revisions

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:51 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> Yeah. It's difficult sometimes to get just how very mainstream
> Wikipedia is. We are the big time. Normal people know what we are, at
> least sort of.

<snip>

> The hard part is that people have no idea how it works. So stories
> like this are an opportunity to explain ourselves to the world, which
> is actually important.

I do hope some of the things being said in the papers are being
corrected, or something said somewhere.

When I read in the paper tonight (thelondonpaper - freebie that I like
but has had the plug pulled by Murdoch) was a bit depressing in how
wrong the tone it struck was:

"Experts sought"

"Wikipedia to end open editing rule"

"Wikipedia has been forced to ditch its policy of allowing anyone to
edit its pages."

"The free encyclopedia will draft in 20,000 unpaid "expert editors" to
check all changes to articles on living people before the pages go
online."

"The move is an attempt to stop malicious entries which could lead to lawsuits."

"Tory and Labour politicians, as well as 'web vandals', have in the
past falsified entries to discredit their enemies."

"And in 2007 it emerged one of Wikipedia's main contributors had faked
his qualifications. Ryan Jordan edited more then 20,000 pages after
falsely claiming to be a professor of theology. Wikipedia was set up
in 2001, built on the work of volunteers."

It was depressing to find that nearly every sentence was based on, or
perpetuated, a misunderstanding. The only crumb of comfort was that it
was buried at the bottom of page 6 and was short enough for me to type
it all out.

1) "Experts sought" - yes, but that's always been the case, nothing to
do with flagged revisions.

2) "Wikipedia to end open editing rule" - many people will interpret
this as Wikipedia requiring people to register to edit. It might seem
like splitting hairs to say that anyone *can* still edit, but the edit
will only go live if one other person (a reviewer) agrees with you. It
is an important point to make. It is moving from a system where each
edit only needs one person (the original editor) to approve it, to a
system where each edit now needs two people to approve it (the
original editor and the reviewer).

3) "Wikipedia has been forced to ditch its policy of allowing anyone
to edit its pages" - see above comment to point 2, but the addition
here is the word "forced". I've seen this word used quite a few times
in the media - where did this idea come from that we were "forced" to
do this? It was, surely, presented as the community of editors, based
on current status of the project, and current standards, and past
incidents, deciding to adopt a trial of a new system. Quite how
journalists get from that to "forced" I don't know. "Forced" gives the
impression that things were falling apart at the seams and failing,
or, worse still, that some form of external influence forced the
change ("influenced" maybe, but not "forced").

4) "The free encyclopedia will draft in 20,000 unpaid "expert editors"
to check all changes to articles on living people before the pages go
online" - the impression given here is that these will be *new*
editors, when presumably whatever source the journalist used was
referring to the core of active *current* editors (and calling them
"experts" as well). The use of "unpaid" in this way might suggest to
some people that there are other, paid editors, who failed to keep the
encyclopedia free of such things, and we are now needing to bring in
("draft") an army of 20,000 extra editors to clean things up
(actually, that wouldn't be such a bad idea). Going back to the start
of the article, the phrase "experts sought", in conjunction with the
phrase "expert editors" here, suggests that Wikipedia is looking for
20,000 new expert editors to deal with BLP stuff, when in fact we want
our core of active editors (presumably the recent change patrollers)
to approve revisions, and there is no special expertise needed here,
only the ability to spot vandalism and dodgy edits (though if things
go wrong with flagged revisions (such as a journalist saying that he
was unable to make a perfectly good edit stick), the papers will say
far worse things, and with even more inaccuracies - this is why major
companies have big public relations departments, to try and offset bad
or inaccurate newspaper coverage, or to set the news agenda, rather
than be responding to the news.

5) "The move is an attempt to stop malicious entries which could lead
to lawsuits" - it's not *really* for that, or at least not just for
that, but this might be the most accurate sentence in the article. On
the other hand, you could argue it misses the point that preventing
such edits is as much about "doing the right thing" and "avoiding
inaccuracies" than it is about lawsuits, as it is the editor (and now,
presumably the reviewer who lets the edit through) who gets sued, not
Wikipedia (unless that's changed, recently).

6) "Tory and Labour politicians, as well as 'web vandals', have in the
past falsified entries to discredit their enemies" - this gives the
impression that such changes stayed in the articles for some time,
instead of being removed fairly quickly. Even if you agree that some
entries stay in that state for too long, the point that most vandalism
is removed in seconds or minutes, is missed here.

7) "And in 2007 it emerged one of Wikipedia's main contributors had
faked his qualifications. Ryan Jordan edited more then 20,000 pages
after falsely claiming to be a professor of theology. Wikipedia was
set up in 2001, built on the work of volunteers" - oh dear, where to
start here (though the last sentence is OK)? One of Wikipedia's "main"
contributors? That gives the impression that he made major
contributions in proportion to the overall size of the encyclopedia,
as does "edited more than 20,000 pages". In reality, I'm guessing he
only created a few hundred pages, and the edits to the other pages
were mostly minor or vandalism reverts. The way Essjay is presented
here makes it seem as if he wrote (rather than edited) 20,000 pages.
It gives the impression most of the encyclopedia is written by a core
of editors making major contributions of new text, rather than being
the work of tens of thousands of smaller edits, plus anonymous
contributions. It also implies that his claim to be a professor of
theology gave him status on all those 20,000 pages, when Essjay's
reputation was more complex than that. But worse of all, people might
come away from that article thinking that, like this Jordan bloke,
they have to state their credentials (remember "experts sought"), and
when their credentials are confirmed, they will be installed as an
"expert editor".

They might, of course, be shocked to find that they only have to click
"edit this page".

Carcharoth

PS. Yes, I know, writing ten times the amount of text to rebut a tiny
little filler in a free newspaper is overkill, but it was easier than
doing it for a longer article in a newspaper with more impact, that
might have been more accurate.... What I don't get is why all the
papers are using the Essjay incident? I suspect the journalists are
reading Wikipedia or something!