[[Marti Pellow]] had some vandalism that made the media - it said for five hours on Friday that he was dead. If people could watchlist it, that would be good (that should be enough for now).
The Independent, Tue 16 Jan
=== Pellow fans upset by death reports
Fans of the Wet Wet Wet frontman Marti Pellow were left stunned yesterday after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that he had died last Friday. One fan, Sophie Cornwell, said: "I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that he was dead - I was absolutely shell shocked." Natasha Mensah, Pellow's publicist, confirmed he was "definitely still alive". A Wikipedia spokesman, David Gerard, said: "We would like to apologise for any distress we may have caused... but occasionally pranksters change details on the site." ===
(Thanks to Steel359 for typing it in. Article was a tiny space-filler on p12.)
I'm sure what I actually said was "Yeah, we get this sort of rubbish all the time ..." But newspapers are a reliable source, so that must be what I actually said.
By the way, this article did not have a {{WPBiography}} template on the talk page. Every bio should have one of these, particularly living bios. If you EVER spot a bio, particularly a living one, with a red-linked talk page, please put {{WPBiography}} on the talk page! [[Template:WPBiography]] lists how to fill it in.
- d.
On 1/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
[[Marti Pellow]] had some vandalism that made the media - it said for five hours on Friday that he was dead. If people could watchlist it, that would be good (that should be enough for now).
Note, same IP claimed that Dec, of Ant and Dec, was dead: and this stayed until yesterday. :(
On 17/01/07, Abigail Brady morwen@evilmagic.org wrote:
On 1/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
[[Marti Pellow]] had some vandalism that made the media - it said for five hours on Friday that he was dead. If people could watchlist it, that would be good (that should be enough for now).
Note, same IP claimed that Dec, of Ant and Dec, was dead: and this stayed until yesterday. :(
Huh, thought that one had been fixed. He also claimed Dec was 3'7" tall ...
- d.
On 1/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Fans of the Wet Wet Wet frontman Marti Pellow were left stunned yesterday after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that he had died last
The word "reported" is very telling of how we are still misperceived. We're not a news site. Why do people think we are?
Steve
The word "reported" is very telling of how we are still misperceived. We're not a news site. Why do people think we are?
Because the principle of "anyone can edit" means we're often more up-to-date than many news sites. Short of introducing a policy saying we don't add anything to an article until 24 hours after it is published in another source (which could be a good idea, but I don't think so), there isn't much we can do about that.
On 17/01/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Fans of the Wet Wet Wet frontman Marti Pellow were left stunned yesterday after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that he had died last
The word "reported" is very telling of how we are still misperceived. We're not a news site. Why do people think we are?
I actually spoke at some length about this with the person who called me - death notices often do in fact show up on Wikipedia before almost anywhere, e.g. the death of [[Andrea Dworkin]], where it went straight from a feminist mailing list to her article and only hit the media during the following day. Being *current* is one of our really strong suits, and the readers know this.
- d.
On 1/18/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I actually spoke at some length about this with the person who called me - death notices often do in fact show up on Wikipedia before almost anywhere, e.g. the death of [[Andrea Dworkin]], where it went straight from a feminist mailing list to her article and only hit the media during the following day. Being *current* is one of our really strong suits, and the readers know this.
Ok, so what do we do when mostly we're right, we're occasionally laughably (or harmfully?) wrong, and we don't seem to have much control either way? Tough to implement any policies telling vandals how to behave when they're up to no good...
Steve
On 17/01/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Ok, so what do we do when mostly we're right, we're occasionally laughably (or harmfully?) wrong, and we don't seem to have much control either way? Tough to implement any policies telling vandals how to behave when they're up to no good...
I've been trying to turn the phrase "Wikipedia is not a reliable source" into a positive thing ;-)
"What people say is true, Wikipedia is not a reliable source. We can't guarantee it. It's a useful source and we try to keep it useful, but it's just written by people - read it critically, like you would any web page. If you see something really surprising like that, check the history tab and see if it was just added ..."
Journalists are a good audience to get this across to, because they looove Wikipedia - it's the universal background resource (an area where our breadth is a strength).
This is also useful for getting across to journalists that saying "according to Wikipedia" is as appropriate as it would be using any useful but non-canonical source. Attribute your sources!
- d.
On 1/18/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
"What people say is true, Wikipedia is not a reliable source. We can't guarantee it. It's a useful source and we try to keep it useful, but it's just written by people - read it critically, like you would any web page. If you see something really surprising like that, check the history tab and see if it was just added ..."
You know what would be great? Any text added less than 24 hours ago appears in a different colour, with a red background perhaps. No ifs, no buts. Wouldn't that solve a *lot* of problems?
Steve
On 17/01/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/18/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
"What people say is true, Wikipedia is not a reliable source. We can't guarantee it. It's a useful source and we try to keep it useful, but it's just written by people - read it critically, like you would any web page. If you see something really surprising like that, check the history tab and see if it was just added ..."
You know what would be great? Any text added less than 24 hours ago appears in a different colour, with a red background perhaps. No ifs, no buts. Wouldn't that solve a *lot* of problems?
Great idea! Go code it ;-p
- d.
On 1/18/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Great idea! Go code it ;-p
Yeah. I'd like to. Quite a learning curve to get going though.
Steve
You know what would be great? Any text added less than 24 hours ago appears in a different colour, with a red background perhaps. No ifs, no buts. Wouldn't that solve a *lot* of problems?
Great idea! Go code it ;-p
Shouldn't be hard, all the code for diffs already exists. It just a matter of parsing the wikicode in the diff, rather than printing it as source code, and obviously the parsing code already exists as well.
I think the Stable Version feature that is being worked on is a better solution, though. It's more flexible, but does pretty much the same job.
On 1/17/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Shouldn't be hard, all the code for diffs already exists. It just a matter of parsing the wikicode in the diff, rather than printing it as source code, and obviously the parsing code already exists as well.
Agreed -- I don't know any PHP, but it seems to me that most of the technical support for that sort of feature is already in place. We can already make diffs and parse code, and we can already tell which edits were made when, so just compare against the most recent oldid that's over 24 hours old, I guess.
That might have some interesting impact on content disputes. Or what happens when the version being compared against was the vandal version. But it's at least possible.
I think the Stable Version feature that is being worked on is a better
solution, though. It's more flexible, but does pretty much the same job.
Even if we only applied stable versions to a select few articles (say, those that seem to get sprotected all the time, because vandals think they're funny, or anything that may have or frequently has BLP concerns), it would probably go a long way toward avoiding this sort of situation, and the resulting press.
Unless staying in the press is a good thing. And in some cases, it is.
So, I dunno. Our counter-vandalism efforts seem to work, for the most part, but BLP is always a hard patrol.
-Luna
On 17/01/07, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/17/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I think the Stable Version feature that is being worked on is a better
solution, though. It's more flexible, but does pretty much the same job.
Even if we only applied stable versions to a select few articles (say, those that seem to get sprotected all the time, because vandals think they're funny, or anything that may have or frequently has BLP concerns), it would probably go a long way toward avoiding this sort of situation, and the resulting press.
Note by the way that stable versions doesn't exist yet. If this 'showing stuff under 24 hours old' is in fact technically not horrible, run it past wikitech-l or #wikimedia-tech and see what the devs think of the idea. And if it exists first, then our readers (who now vastly outnumber our editors) will have another thing that makes Wikpedia more useful to them.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
On 17/01/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Ok, so what do we do when mostly we're right, we're occasionally laughably (or harmfully?) wrong, and we don't seem to have much control either way? Tough to implement any policies telling vandals how to behave when they're up to no good...
I've been trying to turn the phrase "Wikipedia is not a reliable source" into a positive thing ;-)
We could always adopt a slogan like, "Wikipedia, the preferred unreliable source of journalists." ;-)
Ec
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 1/18/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I actually spoke at some length about this with the person who called me - death notices often do in fact show up on Wikipedia before almost anywhere, e.g. the death of [[Andrea Dworkin]], where it went straight from a feminist mailing list to her article and only hit the media during the following day. Being *current* is one of our really strong suits, and the readers know this.
Ok, so what do we do when mostly we're right, we're occasionally laughably (or harmfully?) wrong, and we don't seem to have much control either way? Tough to implement any policies telling vandals how to behave when they're up to no good...
While vandals are a fact of life, I think that the discussion is best furthered by assuming that the editors involved in a current events article are acting in good faith.. In the rush to get things done errors will crop up, but we are in a better position to openly admit an error. We can go on with the correction much faster than the more traditional media. .An ongoing event warning remains important.
Ec
On 1/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 17/01/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Fans of the Wet Wet Wet frontman Marti Pellow were left stunned
yesterday
after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that he had died last
The word "reported" is very telling of how we are still misperceived. We're not a news site. Why do people think we are?
I actually spoke at some length about this with the person who called me - death notices often do in fact show up on Wikipedia before almost anywhere, e.g. the death of [[Andrea Dworkin]], where it went straight from a feminist mailing list to her article and only hit the media during the following day. Being *current* is one of our really strong suits, and the readers know this.
Andrea Dworkin's dead? Nobody tells me anything...
On 18/01/07, Nina Stratton ninaeliza@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I actually spoke at some length about this with the person who called me - death notices often do in fact show up on Wikipedia before almost anywhere, e.g. the death of [[Andrea Dworkin]], where it went straight from a feminist mailing list to her article and only hit the media during the following day. Being *current* is one of our really strong suits, and the readers know this.
Andrea Dworkin's dead? Nobody tells me anything...
There's this online encyclopedia I know that will tell you all about her ...
- d.
On 17/01/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Fans of the Wet Wet Wet frontman Marti Pellow were left stunned yesterday after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that he had died last
The word "reported" is very telling of how we are still misperceived. We're not a news site. Why do people think we are?
Hmm. The alternative word would be "stated". Reported makes it sound a bit less bad, at least to my ears...
On 1/18/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 17/01/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Fans of the Wet Wet Wet frontman Marti Pellow were left stunned yesterday after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that he had died last
The word "reported" is very telling of how we are still misperceived. We're not a news site. Why do people think we are?
Hmm. The alternative word would be "stated". Reported makes it sound a bit less bad, at least to my ears...
Maybe I would even prefer "was reporting". If you picture Wikipedia as a whiteboard with people wandering past writing stuff or rubbing out stuff, would you say it "said" or "did" something? Or would you say "was saying"?
In this case maybe "was claiming" would have been the best.
Steve