[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia dying?

[Shlomi Fish]

On Thursday 05 Nov 2009 21:06:08 Ryan Delaney wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Sage Ross
> <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com<ragesoss%2Bwikipedia at gmail.com>
> 
> > wrote:
> >
> > This article by Evgeny Morozov, nominally a review of Andrew Lih's
> > book "The Wikipedia Revolution", is worth reading:
> >
> > http://www.bostonreview.net/BR34.6/morozov.php
> >
> > -Sage
> 
> I've long puzzled over why journalists constantly post editorials
> criticizing Wikipedia and proclaiming that it will never take off. I
>  thought that eventually we'd win them over.
> 
> Then I realized why this will never happen.
> 
> News media is a business. We are a threat to their model. Therefore, it's
> important to them to convince their readers that Wikipedia is unreliable,
> whether it is or not. They will never stop criticizing and attacking us as
> long as  we undermine their bottom line.
> 
> As such I have no interest in news print or journalist opinions of
> Wikipedia. Their paychecks depend on our failure. Pay them no heed.
> 

Wow! This is what I call a "conspiracy theory", where people claim that 
another entity has an interest to do something out of his implicit nature so 
they do it on purpose. However, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in it.

First of all, if someone criticises the wikipedia (and it doesn't matter 
whether they are the president of the United States, or someone who wrote a 
blog comment that few people have read), what he said may be factual, partly 
true, or completely false, and we need to determine whether it is the case 
according to logic and evidence. Immediately dismissing something someone said 
based on its origin is an ad hominem fallacy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Secondly, it is the job of media reporters and journalists (as well as less 
official forms of civil reporters such as bloggers) to point that something is 
wrong in the Wikipedia or wherever (e.g: the government, a school, a crime 
being committed somewhere, etc.). If something bad happens in something that 
interests me or affects me, I'd like to know about it.

I am a Wikipedia contributor, but I also wrote a parodical (and naturally 
critical) piece about the wikipedia here:

http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/How-many-Wikipedia-Editors/

And I've seen other bloggers and/or Wikipedia contributors being critical of 
the wikipedia inside or outside it.

So I think a journalist who reports something wrong with the Wikipedia is: 1. 
Doing their job. 2. May not act out of fear for their livelihood. This is as 
long as what they said has some merit - if it's just FUD / dis-information / 
twisted facts etc. we should provide a rational response to the contrary and 
dismiss it as a falsehood.

I don't think the Wikipeders should fear criticism from journalists or anyone. 
It's a bit far-fetched to believe that it will convince anyone to stop using 
the Wikipedia, which is a bit hard to miss given that Google and other search 
engines tend to favour it in most common searches and from what are usually 
good reasons. We should still be self-critical and try to improve the 
Wikipedia and the way it is managed as best as we can, but we shouldn't make a 
fuss over some petty, external, negative, criticism (whether by the mainstream 
media or by a fool-on-the-hill blogger) against the Wikimedia projects because 
such criticism is very unlikely to do a lot of damage. The Wikipedias and 
open-content and/or collaborative sites in general face much graver problems, 
both external and internal. 

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shlomif )

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Understand what Open Source is - http://shlom.in/oss-fs

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