[WikiEN-l] Reliable sources— some of these babies are ugly

[Charles Matthews]

Shmuel Weidberg wrote:
> On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> "Though he remains the president of the Wikimedia Foundation," ...
>> "'He had the highest level of control, he was our leader,' a source
>> told FoxNews.com. When asked who was in charge now, the source said,
>> 'No one. It’s chaos.'"
>>     
>
> I'm not sure what the issue with this news article is. It is
> essentially accurate. It sounds funny, but the fact is that Jimbo had
> the ability and the authority to make unilateral decisions before, and
> now he's given some of that up.
>   
We all have the "authority" to make unilateral decisions on a wiki we 
edit. That's not the point, never has been the point. Fundamentally wiki 
editing is about who has permission to do what (which could be described 
as to do with access, not authority). If Jimbo edits and gets reverted, 
this is a "normal" wiki situation. The trouble with "in charge" is that 
it postulates a notional power structure which has never actually 
existed. In fact under the heading of "office actions" there would be 
more of that around than before. Trying to analyse enWP in particular, 
which is not the same as the other 700-odd WMF wikis and has been 
anomalous for at least five years, in terms of its power structure, 
usually leads into garden-variety troll talk. If you like, it is an 
elementary blame game, and is the normal first move of some critics. The 
insight that "it's the community, stupid" is quite lacking in that 
analysis.
> Sure the news has a slant, is sensationalized, and bears the
> inaccuracy of being written by a non-community member for
> non-community members, but it remains as accurate as could be
> expected.
>   
It would be more "accurate" if it didn't rely on selective quotation to 
put forward, tendentiously, a bizarrely wrong version of what is true on 
the ground. It is not true that anyone can now run a bot on enWP, for 
example, which really would be chaos. It is not true that no one is now 
baby-sitting key policy pages. I don't suppose that admins are blocking 
people using very different criteria, this week. On these measures of 
"control", which apply to reality on the site, what has changed?

Look, the "command and control" idea of how to run a wiki encyclopedia 
is so bad a model of enWP as to constitute a classic "straw man".  So 
the argument put forward is a fairly basic fallacy.
> The purpose of requiring reliable sources is so that people can't make
> things up and put them in the articles. Using this as a source will
> show more or less the truth. Unfortunately it is a limitation of
> general news media that it always distorts whatever it reports and
> there is no good reason to consider any news reports as reliable,
> especially when it comes to details.
>
>   
Well, I agree with that, to the extent that the Fox report could be 
taken as "professional" at the level of not verbally mangling the 
quotes. Beyond that it doesn't constitute good, objective journalism.

Charles