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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 5:19 AM, Shmuel Weidberg <ezrawax at gmail.com> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.

Jimmy isn't the president of the Wikimedia foundation.  He's one of
ten board members as has been the case for years (well, the number of
board members has changed). Michael Snow is the chair of the board.
Jimmy is the president of _wikia_, an unrelated commercial wiki host,
as noted on his WP bio page, which I guess is the origin of this clam
which has since been regurgitated by several other journalists.

Continuing the pattern, A majority of the non-trivial statement of
fact in the article are incorrect.

"has relinquished his top-level control over the encyclopedia's
content... Wales is no longer able to delete files, remove
administrators, assign projects or edit any content"

He's still an administrator on the english Wikipedia, able to delete
page and, like everyone else, edit content, though he'd has already
long since voluntarily declined to perform blocking there due to the
resulting drama.

Even substituting commons, he's never been a visible participant in
the commons community, certainly not a leader there for which there is
now a vacuum. He still has the same ability to edit there— but not the
authority of "a low level administrator", he now has the same
technical abilities there as the general public.

This also greatly misunderstands the structural model involved.
Charles Matthews explained it better than I could.


"their existence was revealed exclusively by FoxNews.com", Fox was
only reporting on the letter by sanger which had been widely
circulated its author, and was covered by the register. Not exactly an
exclusive.

"he'd ordered that thousands more be purged", that isn't correct. He
performed a some deletions himself and indicated strong support for
other persons who would delete things. This isn't an order.  They
could have factually claimed that he ordered people not to undelete
things, but that is not the same.  It's also continuing the
implication that Jimmy has the authority to order such things, but he
didn't.

"Wales had personally deleted many of the images" this is correct,
though perhaps a bit misleading: Jimmy personally deleted 70 images,
which might count as 'many', but it's out of 450 or so total deleted
images, or out of a few thousands of fairly explicit images most of
which weren't deleted.

"Now many of those images have been restored to their original web
pages."  Holy crap, a non trivial factual statement which isn't wrong
or misleading.

"Hundreds of listserve discussions among Wikimedia board members..."
okay, well, hundreds of _messages_. This is basically accurate too,
but not all that informative.

"which legal analysts say may violate pornography and obscenity laws"
No one competent would say it did after an analysis of the facts, but
anyone can say "may"— so this isn't helpful or informative.  If they
gave a name with a reputation to uphold and they made a statement
stronger than a completely empty "may" it might be interesting. The
author of the Fox news article _may_ be a Ewok from the planet Endor.

"The debate heated up when FoxNews.com began contacting high profile
corporations"  This isn't accurate, it implies a chain of causality
that doesn't exist. To the best of my knowledge, Jimmys first actions
on commons happened before anyone at Wikimedia was aware of Fox's
activities.

"Several of those donors contacted the foundation to inquire about the
thousands of images" I know for a fact that some simply called to warn
that Fox was trying to stir up trouble, though I suppose some could
have inquired about images on the site.  I don't see how fox would
have any factual way of knowing about the content of any calls placed
by donors.

"There also are graphic photo images of(...)"  The word also implies
that the "child pornography" they mentioned people asking about in the
prior sentence was also hosted on the site— but they are very careful
to avoid making that bogus allegation directly. No doubt they've been
amply lawyer-slapped after their prior slanderous statements. That
point is misleading, but the rest of the classes of images do exist
and are accessible as they say.

As a matter of rule commons does not host things which are illegal in
the US, although it often doesn't stop much short of the limit of the
law!

"When the donors started calling, Wales immediately" as mentioned, not accurate.

"This led to outrage among the sites' many volunteer editors and
administrators" okay, that is correct.

Most of the rest are quotes. I'll assume that they accurately quoted
without checking. What they didn't do is apply good scholarship to
contextualize and weight the quotes— from a sourcing perspective on
the quotes the fox article would be no better than going to the
primary sources directly.

Basically there is very little in the way of true and not misleading
factual information in the article. On the balance, the bulk of it is
unattributed opinions, trivialities, and inaccurate, or misleading
things.

You could make an argument that the article might give an uninvolved
party a reasonable "feel" for the situation, but there still would be
effectively no way to incorporate the _facts_ from this article into
Wikipedia in a manner which would not reduce the accuracy of the
encyclopaedia.  We use citations to source the factual details of our
articles, and this work generally gets the details wrong.