> On 09 December 2019 at 11:47 Fæ <faewik@gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> That the press has picked up on this story, could be seen as an
> opportunity to embrace the criticism and to do more to make the
> environment less hostile for committed contributors like Jess.

>From Jess:

https://twitter.com/jesswade/status/1203583885369630721

Jess does not subscribe to the narrative found in the Telegraph and Mail, for sure.

That narrative has been around for ten years, during which time much progress has been made on English Wikipedia. I think in fact around 2011 the community realised there needed to be a more positive effort with newbies; and as recently as 2016 some kinds of knee-jerk deletionism started to receive serious deprecation.

I don't doubt that more work needs to be done. As far as I know, the editor retention issue is much less pressing than it used to be. In 2009 the Murdoch press was pushing the line that the 2007 decline in editors, which had just come to light in terms of stats rather than anecdote, was an existential threat. No longer.

> Regardless of the trivial of this incident, the underpinning issues
> are real and measurable and are the real reason for this long-running
> perception of Wikipedia culture.

So, informed and accurate coverage of Wikipedia stories is also to be wished for. If a single idiot adding templates can cause a media furore, it is either trivial or non-trivial. If it isn't trivial ... well, the link to ANI I gave has to be interpreted. In a past furore I helped a Guardian journalist to understand exactly what had happened, via a page history. We see shoddy journalism based on the vaguest ideas of fact-checking. We should call that out.

Charles

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