2008/5/19 Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com:
2008/5/15 Mark Nilrad marknilrad@yahoo.com:
If someone uninvolved with Wikipedia was following the news on Wikipedia, what kind of headlines on the news articles about Wikipedia would he see? More or less, he would see: "Jimbo Wales Financial Troubles/Philandering" (and...sexual exploits, and some troubling issues with his ex's article), "Village in Englad falls to Vandalism (about vandalism, which was immediately reverted after the story came out, to a page, which is now significantly improved, about an English village)
Actually I run a small rss news aggregator that focuses on news about Wikipedia. In my experience our press is overwhelmingly positive. Even the gossipier stuff seems to make a much bigger splash within the community and on its peripheries than it does outside--exactly the reverse of my expectations. Most of the debate outside Wikipedia circles, in the mainstream press, focuses on the reliability of Wikipedia and its appropriateness for various uses. Those are very appropriate topics for debate and we should take it as a huge compliment that a project built completely by untrained volunteers is regarded as comparable in any way to the works of highly educated specialists. We shouldn't lose sight of that utterly remarkable and unexpected achievement.
Indeed.
We have plenty of worthwhile criticism of Wikipedia that we should take heed of. You won't see it reading W*k*p*d** R*v**w or ad-banner trolls' news sites. You'll see it by running a Google alert on the word "Wikipedia" for news and blogs. It's well worth reading, well worth engaging with and well worth addressing.
The fact that we're criticised (and often rightly so) isn't surprising. The fact that we receive so little criticism and have had so few problems, given the open parameters and huge scope of the project, is one of the most amazing facts of Wikipedia's existence. Wikipedia doesn't have any significant PR problems at present.
Speaking as someone who gets some of the calls: Mostly our PR problems involve:
* people taking Wikipedia as much more editorially-reviewed than it is ("our town's article's been vandalised") * problems with biographies of living people.
Living bios do, I think, count as a significant PR problem. We're getting iteratively better at BLP issues. We still need to do better, probably by technical measures to better watch all the living bios and be as harsh as necessary. Although BLPs have to be written to NPOV/NOR/V just like any article, the essential difference (I think) is that we don't have the luxury of eventualism. At all. Every version that lasts more than a few minutes has to not be problematic. That's a very high standard, but as long as (a) we're aware of it (b) we can keep up with them (c) we apologise profusely for our failures in this and fix them up, we should do well enough that we don't get lynched.
The first I think will require making people more aware of just how Wikipedia is produced - it's written by ordinary people, it's very imperfect, it's a live working draft, we do try to get it right, etc. This is still enough to explode people's heads ...
For the issue of reliability: "We're not reliable as such and we've never promised to be. What we try to be is useful. You have to think about what you read, of course." That usually gets the idea across in my experience.
- d.