On 09 December 2019 at 11:47 Fæ
<faewik(a)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