Interesting article on fivethirteight.com for people perhaps. It discusses Wikipedia, and other websites role in the selection of Sarah Palin. Not quite our use of the word "Wikipedian", but... :)
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/wikipedian-candidate.html
"Brickley, a self-described "obsessive" political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by "randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women."
I quite like the last sentence:
"In a post-Wikiepdia [sic] universe, in which the quantity of information may too easily be conflated for its quality, such mistakes may be all the easier to succumb to."
I think that's an excellent point. People using Wikipedia need to know what they are using - a fantastic source for wide ranging information, but not a specialist resource that can be trusted to have everything you need to know about a given subject (and have it it correct). There must be better ways to research politicians (political who's whos, looking at actual polls, reading transcripts of their actual speeches, reading manifestos, etc.) than looking them up in a general encyclopaedia.
When I posted a draft decision in the "Sarah Palin protection wheel war" case, I proposed a principle reading:
"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and is [[WP:NOT|not to be used]] for ideological warfare or to score political points for or against a candidate for electoral office or political party. Slanted edits motivated by political or ideological factors or by personal respect or distaste for a candidate violate the core policy of [[WP:NPOV|NPOV]], our guidelines against [[WP:COI|conflicts of interest]], and in many cases the BLP policy as well. Nonetheless, especially as elections approach, many articles relating to candidates for office are subjected to these types of inappropriate editing. Just as readers are cautioned not to rely on the content of Wikipedia articles for medical, legal, meteorological, or other advice, so too, voters should not rely upon the content of Wikipedia articles as the basis for their voting decisions."
The comments on the workshop were to the effect that this didn't belong in an ArbCom decision, so I didn't include it in the final decision, but it's still true.
Newyorkbrad On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
I quite like the last sentence:
"In a post-Wikiepdia [sic] universe, in which the quantity of information may too easily be conflated for its quality, such mistakes may be all the easier to succumb to."
I think that's an excellent point. People using Wikipedia need to know what they are using - a fantastic source for wide ranging information, but not a specialist resource that can be trusted to have everything you need to know about a given subject (and have it it correct). There must be better ways to research politicians (political who's whos, looking at actual polls, reading transcripts of their actual speeches, reading manifestos, etc.) than looking them up in a general encyclopaedia.
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2008/10/20 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
I quite like the last sentence:
"In a post-Wikiepdia [sic] universe, in which the quantity of information may too easily be conflated for its quality, such mistakes may be all the easier to succumb to."
I think that's an excellent point. People using Wikipedia need to know what they are using - a fantastic source for wide ranging information, but not a specialist resource that can be trusted to have everything you need to know about a given subject (and have it it correct). There must be better ways to research politicians (political who's whos, looking at actual polls, reading transcripts of their actual speeches, reading manifestos, etc.) than looking them up in a general encyclopaedia.
I agree that it is a catchy sentence, but it misses the point. The mistake regarding reading about Palin on Wikipedia is interpreting an entry as complete, when it is not. The completeness of Wikipedia's coverage is, in the best circumstances, limited by the completeness of the resources that are available.
The article specifically discusses the problems in using Wikipedia to identify a "good politician": where it is easy to determine how popular a candidate is using Wikipedia, their stances, and so on, it is very much harder to use Wikipedia to understand the character of a person. The article identifies such undocumented characteristics as "her tendency to let her nerves get the better of her in interviews, her seeming lack of intellectual curiosity, and the way that her mannerisms, fairly or not, could easily become the butt of jokes".
For a national politician with extensive coverage, these characteristics may be identified in reliable resources and could find their way into a Wikipedia article. For less known, and less covered, politicians, it is far less likely that the reliable resources relating to them that exist will document such character traits. What's more, it may require national coverage and scrutiny to identify these character traits in the first place.
I think the problem is more to do with the nature of how reliable sources cover little known public figures and well known public figures, than to do with Wikipedia itself. A complicating factor here is that the characteristics that weren't covered in the Wikipedia entry such as 'her tendency to let her nerves get the better of her in interviews' may only be exposed when the person is thrust into the national spotlight.
It is the nature of qualitative information about character to be less reported (and harder to sufficiently reference) than quantitative information about their political stances and their following. Quantitative information falls back on statistics and clearly defined data, which is easy to report and reference. Qualitative information comes down to the impression the politician has on the person who initially reports, and can only really be referenced when several different commentators identify the same traits and a consensus comes about regarding the character of the politician.