On 4/20/07 10:35 PM, "Michael Snow" wikipedia@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.
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.
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?
That "oft-cited ability to respond quickly" too often means that we respond with haste, without perspective and without objectivity.
-Travis Mason-Bushman