Phil Sandifer wrote
Unfortunately, the Chronicle article goes on to state
that the
Halavais added, as an anon, an article on communication theory within
his area of expertise, and it was swiftly gutted.
Sadly, that article isn't mentioned, making it harder to identify
what went wrong there. But we ought take caution, once again, about
[[WP:BITE]] - the anecdote of "I corrected this information but it
got changed back to wrong" or "I contributed an article on topic X
that I'm a clear expert on but it got gutted" is getting too common.
Quoting the piece:
'Shortly after Mr. Halavais's career as a troll ended, the professor this time
posting anonymously contributed another article to Wikipedia, a piece on theories of
communication, his area of expertise.
"It got shut down pretty quick, and I think there's just a small piece of it left
online," he says. "Some other professors I talked to said the same thing
happened to them: They were experts in their fields, they wrote something well in their
area of expertise, and it got cut up." '
Let's bear in mind that the piece has no clear idea of the difference between a troll
and a vandal. The original prank edits were made all of two years ago (2004). This may
relate also to 2004, therefore. We can't trust the article to know the difference
between anonymous and pseudonymous edits. Under current conditions an anon cannot start
such an article.
We also cannot trust the article to know the difference between a serious copy edit and
the removal of trustworthy stuff. There may have been existing coverage: many new articles
end up redirected or merged. We cannot know whether it was written in encyclopedic style,
or was a personal essay/lecture notes style of submission.
In short, besides this being anecdotal and time-expired data, the source seems iffy and
the report scanty.
Charles
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