[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's role in the Palin selection

[Oldak Quill]

2008/10/20 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
> I quite like the last sentence:
>
> "In a post-Wikiepdia [sic] universe, in which the quantity of
> information may too easily be conflated for its quality, such mistakes
> may be all the easier to succumb to."
>
> I think that's an excellent point. People using Wikipedia need to know
> what they are using - a fantastic source for wide ranging information,
> but not a specialist resource that can be trusted to have everything
> you need to know about a given subject (and have it it correct). There
> must be better ways to research politicians (political who's whos,
> looking at actual polls, reading transcripts of their actual speeches,
> reading manifestos, etc.) than looking them up in a general
> encyclopaedia.

I agree that it is a catchy sentence, but it misses the point. The
mistake regarding reading about Palin on Wikipedia is interpreting an
entry as complete, when it is not. The completeness of Wikipedia's
coverage is, in the best circumstances, limited by the completeness of
the resources that are available.

The article specifically discusses the problems in using Wikipedia to
identify a "good politician": where it is easy to determine how
popular a candidate is using Wikipedia, their stances, and so on, it
is very much harder to use Wikipedia to understand the character of a
person. The article identifies such undocumented characteristics as
"her tendency to let her nerves get the better of her in interviews,
her seeming lack of intellectual curiosity, and the way that her
mannerisms, fairly or not, could easily become the butt of jokes".

For a national politician with extensive coverage, these
characteristics may be identified in reliable resources and could find
their way into a Wikipedia article. For less known, and less covered,
politicians, it is far less likely that the reliable resources
relating to them that exist will document such character traits.
What's more, it may require national coverage and scrutiny to identify
these character traits in the first place.

I think the problem is more to do with the nature of how reliable
sources cover little known public figures and well known public
figures, than to do with Wikipedia itself. A complicating factor here
is that the characteristics that weren't covered in the Wikipedia
entry such as 'her tendency to let her nerves get the better of her in
interviews' may only be exposed when the person is thrust into the
national spotlight.

It is the nature of qualitative information about character to be less
reported (and harder to sufficiently reference) than quantitative
information about their political stances and their following.
Quantitative information falls back on statistics and clearly defined
data, which is easy to report and reference. Qualitative information
comes down to the impression the politician has on the person who
initially reports, and can only really be referenced when several
different commentators identify the same traits and a consensus comes
about regarding the character of the politician.

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)