On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 8:51 PM, David Gerarddgerard@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!