[WikiEN-l] Durova/!! matter now in newspaper.

[Alec Conroy]

Well, I wouldn't expect that the article's going to win a Pulitzer.
The article dramatically overstates things, but only to an extent.
The Durova Secret List outrage is quite real-- poor Mercury got sixty
straight oppose votes in less than six hours for reasons that had more
to do with the secret list meta-issue than with him personally.   The
Register article makes it look like Wikipedia is burning, when really,
we're doing fine.


That said, if I was the foundation PR peeps, I'd get a statement
ready--  word on the street is that there's another story or two
coming from higher up in the media food chain, and anything that would
help the world understand that while this may well be a very big deal,
it's not the biggest big deal in the world.

This secret list thing feeds into a bunch of different memes the media
has about us-- that we're cliquish, unreliable, and amateurish.  I
wouldn't be shocked to see this story echo a few more times.  Of
course, Colbert has a writers strike to deal with, so-- that's a plus.
:)

---


As far as the existence of stories LIKE this--  I actualy think it's
comforting to see that Wikipedia isn't in a vacuum.   We're the #1
content site on the internet-- our community can either manage it
reponsibly, or else the outside world will call us on it, and the
content will end up getting forked to someone who can.  I for one
sleep better knowing that there are those outside checks and balances.

I've always been a little bit worried in the back of my mind that
Wikipedia is hierarchical, rather than totally open.  Wikipedia isn't
like the Internet or like the Web--  a small group of people can
decide to delete something from Wikipedia, and it actually will get
deleted.   That is our gift, and our curse.  It's both our strength
and our Achilles' heel.

I've never seen any misteps from the upper echelons of Wikipedia.
Except for small little thinkgs, we've always gotten it right.   But
I've always worried about what would happen if we started habitually
getting it wrong.  The fact that we have a monarch immediate beg the
question-- what would happen if the monoarch went mad, or was hit by a
bus, or whatever.

But, there is an outside world out there, watching over our shoulder,
and if our community-system ever started failing the encyclopedia, I
think the rest of the world would step in and correct us, or else fork
us.  That is a good thing.

Alec