Charles Matthews wrote: A simpler representation: Don't feed the tabloids. Ec

Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Are you saying admins are not reliable sources? ;-) -SC

Emily Monroe <bluecaliocean(a)me.com> wrote: Well it's journalistically improper to use admins as sources. At the very least they would have to find an official cabal member. -SC

On 15 May 2010 21:40, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: There were quotes from Foundation-L in the article, which is, I believe, what Charles was referring to. It's time to recognise that anyone, including reporters, can read those mailing lists; one doesn't even have to subscribe for some of them, I believe. So it is advisable that people think carefully about what they are saying, and to be aware that the audience is not limited to people who are active participants in the various communities. Risker

AGK wrote: Personally my favorite sentence is: "After much pressure from within the Wikipedia community, co-founder Jimmy Wales has relinquished his top-level control over the encyclopedia's content, as well as all of its parent company's projects." "parent company's" ? Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Keep in mind statements like those were made in the context of an action by Jimbo, wherein the issue of "consensus" was moot, because there was none. The trend towards non-profit corporate culture has had a natural but unpleasant button-down effect. (And not to mention an inane corporate jargon effect - "assets" and "identity?") -SC

stevertigo wrote: Well, I was keeping various things in mind. In our very own inane jargon, WP:BOLD is qualified by "Often it is easier to see that something is not right rather than to know exactly what /would/ be right", which is something of a plea for measured responses, and WP:BRD with "In a way, you're actively provoking another person with an edit they may (strongly) disagree on [...]". I actually don't see that the issue under discussion is a new type of issue. There is a new type of context, which is what I hoped to be addressing. Charles

Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: BRD: Read "mitgated but still adversarial editing cycle" (see [[WP:PX]] bottom entry). As much as I agree with the issue, Jimbo's BOLD action appears to have been a shock to the systems of a great number of people who had all this time thought that seriously bold actions required consensus-first. Wikimedia. Hopefully Jimbo will soon write up his views as a formal argument and then in discussion we can weigh their validity. Just how arguments are weighed afterward is the interesting "context" as you put it. -SC

There is no centralized place here for ruling on the reliability of particular sources. Competitors and sites like FactCheck.org suffice in most cases, and people deal with sources as they come up. To my knowledge the particular news source you cite is generally not regarded as reliable on matters which have not been corroborated by other news sources beforehand. Do we give it an air of reputability to be cited here as a secondary source? Perhaps. But putting a label of "yellow journalism" on particular news outlets can only be done informally at the water-cooler. -SC Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm not sure what the issue with this news article is. It is essentially accurate. It sounds funny, but the fact is that Jimbo had the ability and the authority to make unilateral decisions before, and now he's given some of that up. Sure the news has a slant, is sensationalized, and bears the inaccuracy of being written by a non-community member for non-community members, but it remains as accurate as could be expected. The purpose of requiring reliable sources is so that people can't make things up and put them in the articles. Using this as a source will show more or less the truth. Unfortunately it is a limitation of general news media that it always distorts whatever it reports and there is no good reason to consider any news reports as reliable, especially when it comes to details.

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 5:19 AM, Shmuel Weidberg <ezrawax(a)gmail.com> wrote: Jimmy isn't the president of the Wikimedia foundation. He's one of ten board members as has been the case for years (well, the number of board members has changed). Michael Snow is the chair of the board. Jimmy is the president of _wikia_, an unrelated commercial wiki host, as noted on his WP bio page, which I guess is the origin of this clam which has since been regurgitated by several other journalists. Continuing the pattern, A majority of the non-trivial statement of fact in the article are incorrect. "has relinquished his top-level control over the encyclopedia's content... Wales is no longer able to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit any content" He's still an administrator on the english Wikipedia, able to delete page and, like everyone else, edit content, though he'd has already long since voluntarily declined to perform blocking there due to the resulting drama. Even substituting commons, he's never been a visible participant in the commons community, certainly not a leader there for which there is now a vacuum. He still has the same ability to edit there— but not the authority of "a low level administrator", he now has the same technical abilities there as the general public. This also greatly misunderstands the structural model involved. Charles Matthews explained it better than I could. "their existence was revealed exclusively by FoxNews.com", Fox was only reporting on the letter by sanger which had been widely circulated its author, and was covered by the register. Not exactly an exclusive. "he'd ordered that thousands more be purged", that isn't correct. He performed a some deletions himself and indicated strong support for other persons who would delete things. This isn't an order. They could have factually claimed that he ordered people not to undelete things, but that is not the same. It's also continuing the implication that Jimmy has the authority to order such things, but he didn't. "Wales had personally deleted many of the images" this is correct, though perhaps a bit misleading: Jimmy personally deleted 70 images, which might count as 'many', but it's out of 450 or so total deleted images, or out of a few thousands of fairly explicit images most of which weren't deleted. "Now many of those images have been restored to their original web pages." Holy crap, a non trivial factual statement which isn't wrong or misleading. "Hundreds of listserve discussions among Wikimedia board members..." okay, well, hundreds of _messages_. This is basically accurate too, but not all that informative. "which legal analysts say may violate pornography and obscenity laws" No one competent would say it did after an analysis of the facts, but anyone can say "may"— so this isn't helpful or informative. If they gave a name with a reputation to uphold and they made a statement stronger than a completely empty "may" it might be interesting. The author of the Fox news article _may_ be a Ewok from the planet Endor. "The debate heated up when FoxNews.com began contacting high profile corporations" This isn't accurate, it implies a chain of causality that doesn't exist. To the best of my knowledge, Jimmys first actions on commons happened before anyone at Wikimedia was aware of Fox's activities. "Several of those donors contacted the foundation to inquire about the thousands of images" I know for a fact that some simply called to warn that Fox was trying to stir up trouble, though I suppose some could have inquired about images on the site. I don't see how fox would have any factual way of knowing about the content of any calls placed by donors. "There also are graphic photo images of(...)" The word also implies that the "child pornography" they mentioned people asking about in the prior sentence was also hosted on the site— but they are very careful to avoid making that bogus allegation directly. No doubt they've been amply lawyer-slapped after their prior slanderous statements. That point is misleading, but the rest of the classes of images do exist and are accessible as they say. As a matter of rule commons does not host things which are illegal in the US, although it often doesn't stop much short of the limit of the law! "When the donors started calling, Wales immediately" as mentioned, not accurate. "This led to outrage among the sites' many volunteer editors and administrators" okay, that is correct. Most of the rest are quotes. I'll assume that they accurately quoted without checking. What they didn't do is apply good scholarship to contextualize and weight the quotes— from a sourcing perspective on the quotes the fox article would be no better than going to the primary sources directly. Basically there is very little in the way of true and not misleading factual information in the article. On the balance, the bulk of it is unattributed opinions, trivialities, and inaccurate, or misleading things. You could make an argument that the article might give an uninvolved party a reasonable "feel" for the situation, but there still would be effectively no way to incorporate the _facts_ from this article into Wikipedia in a manner which would not reduce the accuracy of the encyclopaedia. We use citations to source the factual details of our articles, and this work generally gets the details wrong.

David Gerard wrote: I would say the point of the Fox article is the subtext: no one rules the WMF, ergo they would have no way to comply with legal requirements such as a take-down order. NB the subtle solecism "free reign" (for "free rein") that turns the wiki ideal on its head, and the wholely misleading suggestion that Jimbo could ever "assign projects" as man-management (other than to employees), rather than operate as a "low-level administrator" does, by building small teams. Charles

David Gerard wrote: Yes, an ideal place to complain about getting blocked from enWP for editing [[Talk:History of Wikipedia]] on the assumption that Wikimedia Commons is part of the 'pedia. Still, it's after his time as editor, and they'll make him welcome on WR. Plenty of room in the [[Cave of Adullam]]. Charles

On Sun, 16 May 2010, Nathan wrote: If "riddled with errors" means "has more (frequent) errors than other sources", then this makes some sense. If "riddled with errors" means "has errors that we have recently had our attention called to" or "has errors that happen to be about some subject we are personally pissed off about", then it's a very bad idea.

This is more an indication that we need to start using blogs as sources rather than that we have a problem with how we use major media. I recently had to leave a one-sided paragraph in [[Marion Zimmer Bradley]]: For many years, Bradley actively encouraged Darkover fan fiction and reprinted some of it in commercial Darkover anthologies, continuing to encourage submissions from unpublished authors, but this ended after a dispute with a fan over an unpublished Darkover novel of Bradley's that had similarities to some of the fan's stories. As a result, the novel remained unpublished, and Bradley demanded the cessation of all Darkover fan fiction. We have the fan's side of this. It puts a very different spin on things, but it's in a Usenet post in the thread at http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/browse_thread/thread/264… and it's completely unusuable under Wikipedia sourcing policies (even as a self-published source, since it makes claims about other people).

On 17 May 2010 20:45, stevertigo <stvrtg(a)gmail.com> wrote: Mhrm, that's arguable. The flags that Jimbo relinquished meant that he could no longer do such things as delete Commons images. That's far from symbolic; in fact, it essentially is him resigning rights that the community had began to angrily demand be taken away from him. AGK

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: True, and that's the one really egregious error. Wow, so he's able to delete content on *one* of the 200+ languages of Wikipedia. I'd still say the statement is substantially correct. He used to have unlimited power on every project to do anything. Now he's administrator on one project, and has the ability to view certain things that other people can't view on every project. "their existence was revealed exclusively by FoxNews.com", Fox was Eh, I guess. The whole "revealed exclusively by X" has about as much meaning in practice as "100% natural". I'd say that's a minor wording nitpick. Yeah, it's sensationalized, but it's certainly substantially correct. "Wales had personally deleted many of the images" this is correct, Yep. Yep. "Hundreds of listserve discussions among Wikimedia board members..." Yep. So another correct statement. Yep. Do you have some sort of insider knowledge on that? The deletions were performed on the same day the news story broke. Obviously the contacts were made before that. I find it hard to believe none of the donors would have tipped off "anyone at Wikimedia". If you do have some sort of insider knowledge, let's hear it. When exactly is the first instance of a donor contacting "anyone at Wikimedia" that you are aware of? You don't? It's certainly possible *they told them*. Maybe this is factually correct, and maybe it isn't. "There also are graphic photo images of(...)" The word also implies I really can't figure out what you're talking about here. Quoting the entire paragraph: "Several of those donors contacted the foundation to inquire about the thousands of images on Wikimedia’s servers that could be considered child pornography. There also are graphic photo images of male and female genitalia, men and women or groups of people involved in sexual acts, images of masturbation and other pornographic material — all of which can be viewed by children at most public schools, where students are encouraged to use Wikipedia as a source encyclopedia." Okay, so we don't know whether or not there were actually several donors that contacted the foundation about the images. The rest of it seems perfectly accurate. Just because there is a rule against hosting things which are illegal in the US doesn't mean that rule is being followed. How do you know? You don't even know when the donors started calling, or if they started calling before or after Wales started his deletion spree. In any case, the word "immediately" is obviously not meant to be taken literally. Yep. A very good selection of quotes, in my opinion. Are you kidding me? How many messages were there on the mailing lists? Very few of us have the time to read through all that crap. And taking a random selection would be no better. I was quite impressed by the selection of quotes. Having read through the mailing lists as it happened, it was a great excerpt of exactly the quotes they needed to show their point. You could make an argument that the article might give an uninvolved One of the basic problems with the idea of Wikipedia, really. For anything but the most uncontroversial of facts, "verifiability, not truth" just doesn't work.

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: While I don't think content decisions should be made from a position of ignorance about a subject, I would disagree with your last sentence. I think it *is* possible for a reasonably educated person, given a reasonably large pile of books, to write an *adequate* article on most topics (there are exceptions). Not the best article, and not an error-free article, but a good enough start that it shouldn't be rejected out of hand. Where the article goes from there is another matter, and in many cases some form of expert peer review is needed to have reasonable confidence in stating that an article is in any way "good". The key is that the layperson writing the article needs to *welcome* input from others. When people try to protect the article they have written and exclude others, and refuse to discuss changes, then you start to get problems. This I agree with. Some examples may help. Carcharoth

Philip Sandifer wrote: Second try at sending this... here goes nothing. (gmail, man up!) While this is not a reply specifically to what Greg raises, it is a fact that we aren't just giving the cold shoulder to "silent knowledge", but also stuff written down in a language not our own, when it happens to exist. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

On May 21, 2010, at 12:17 AM, Ian Woollard wrote: Permission, however, does not anywhere close to adequately translate into execution. We do not exclude non-English sources on a policy level, but on a social level, we heavily do. -Phil

On May 21, 2010, at 1:45 PM, Ian Woollard wrote: Yeah, but the last guy I saw adding them was... Umm... Right, there's the issue. -Phil

On May 21, 2010, at 3:10 PM, Ian Woollard wrote: You're missing my sarcasm. Yes, we do a good job of punishing removal of non-English references. But we still do an awful job of *adding* non-English references. -Phil

At 04:08 AM 5/23/2010, Ray Saintonge wrote: Indeed. We needed the adhocracy to rapidly develop a broad project, but we failed to incorporate and implement procedures to move beyond that, imagining, I suspect, that we could do it "later." But by the time "later" arrived, constituencies had formed that were broad enough, at the core, to prevent the necessary extensions. It's a common problem with organizations that work when small but break down as the scale increases. Given that projects based on the idea that experts -- i.e., professionals -- should control articles, for free distribution, failed, what would have remained was "amateur experts," who will, indeed, freely contribute content. But an impolite term for "amateur expert" is "POV-pusher." (The parallel term for professional expert is "COI POV-pusher." Experts are rarely neutral!) Experts, however, will not make stupid misinterpretations of sources, as routinely happens with non-experts, and as even often happens with professional media, as anyone who is closely familiar with a topic has become accustomed to noticing when an article appears in a newspaper on what they know. The potential is for Wikipedia to do better than professional media, but it would require structure that was not developed. The key is that experts, indeed, should not control articles, but those who will use the articles should. An expert opinion that is not effective in communication to non-experts is useless except perhaps as a salvo in a battle between experts. Those of us who *need* a neutral encyclopedia will want to insist that expert opinin is used to prevent stupid mistakes, but that where there is variation in expert opinion, it is fairly represented so that we can understand the range of views. Wikipedia sometimes does well with this, but not when political debates and entrenched positions exist between experts. I argued, in RfAr/Abd-William M. Connolley, that those claiming expertise should be considered COI, which was preposterously taken as asserting that they should be sanctioned, a revealing assumption indeed. No, they should be protected, simply not allowed to *control* articles, but rather invited and encouraged to *advise* the community, and to point out supporting sources where possible. It will not always be possible, or it may be possible, but only with more work than we can expect an expert to contribute. At one point, there was some practice of, where a controversy broke out in an article where expert opinion could be valuable, seeking out expert opinion by emailing experts. That's what a professional encyclopedia would have done. In peer-reviewed journals, "private communication with X" as a source is often seen. We did use and should have continued to use this, as equivalent to unreviewed opinion from someone reasonably expected to have an informed opinion. (It's the same as a blog opinion by a recognized expert, an example of where self-published work is sometimes allowed.) None of this will work without true consensus process in place. The famous "anti-expert bias" of Wikipedia was a result of failing to develop such process. Obviously, genuine consensus process should not and would not exclude experts! That's the default, without deliberative process. Because deliberative process can be tedious and can more or less force people to re-examine their beliefs (or abandon the discussion and decision, or turn it into a battle and personality conflict), and because such process was not formalized early on, it has been and continues to be interrupted, and those with special privileges, or with bias that they do not wish to examine, often see it as a waste of time. Ray is correct in the sense that no source is fully reliable, just as no editor is fully neutral, unless ignorant, which sets up quite a conflict in an adhocracy that assumes neutrality for adequate function! Relative reliability and relative neutrality are possible, though. In any case, for Wikipedia, "reliable" is a term of art and does not mean that a fact or unattributed opinion found in such a source (deemed "reliable" because of the nature of the publication) is necessarily true, just that it is, ipso facto, sufficiently notable that neutrality requires it be included in the mix of a neutral article, directly or indirectly, not excluded unless possibly redundant to what is included. That's policy, in fact, confirmed by ArbComm, but when we stray into the obsessions of the anti-fringe interest groups, it has been commonly ignored. Neutrality is fundamental Wikipedia policy, but an error was made, an assumption that any editor or even group of editors, unless very broadly inclusive, can solely judge "neutrality." Bias in text may only be detectable by those who have a contrary bias or POV. Thus the fundamental policy required consensus process, not merely majority or even supermajority rule. "Consensus process" does not mean that everyone, in the end, agrees, but it requires that such agreement be earnestly sought, because whenever a view is excluded and disregarded, there is a risk to neutrality. If neutrality is important, and it certainly is, then, the goal of full consensus must be respected. And I certainly found, in my on-wiki experience, that it is not, and in RfAr/Abd-William M. Connolley, I was astonished to see so many administrators openly express that it was preposterous to seek full consensus. I did not think they would be so bold.