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

[Anthony]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Jimmy isn't the president of the Wikimedia foundation.


True, and that's the one really egregious error.


> 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.
>

Wow, so he's able to delete content on *one* of the 200+ languages of
Wikipedia.  I'd still say the statement is substantially correct.  He used
to have unlimited power on every project to do anything.  Now he's
administrator on one project, and has the ability to view certain things
that other people can't view on every project.

"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.
>

Eh, I guess.  The whole "revealed exclusively by X" has about as much
meaning in practice as "100% natural".


> "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.


I'd say that's a minor wording nitpick.  Yeah, it's sensationalized, but
it's certainly substantially correct.

"Wales had personally deleted many of the images" this is correct,


Yep.


> "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.
>

Yep.

"Hundreds of listserve discussions among Wikimedia board members..."
> okay, well, hundreds of _messages_. This is basically accurate too,
>

Yep.


> "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.


So another correct statement.  Yep.


> "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.
>

Do you have some sort of insider knowledge on that?  The deletions were
performed on the same day the news story broke.  Obviously the contacts were
made before that.  I find it hard to believe none of the donors would have
tipped off "anyone at Wikimedia".

If you do have some sort of insider knowledge, let's hear it.  When exactly
is the first instance of a donor contacting "anyone at Wikimedia" that you
are aware of?


> "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.
>

You don't?  It's certainly possible *they told them*.

Maybe this is factually correct, and maybe it isn't.

"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.
>

I really can't figure out what you're talking about here.  Quoting the
entire paragraph:  "Several of those donors contacted the foundation to
inquire about the thousands of images on Wikimedia’s servers that could be
considered child pornography. There also are graphic photo images of male
and female genitalia, men and women or groups of people involved in sexual
acts, images of masturbation and other pornographic material — all of which
can be viewed by children at most public schools, where students are
encouraged to use Wikipedia as a source encyclopedia."  Okay, so we don't
know whether or not there were actually several donors that contacted the
foundation about the images.  The rest of it seems perfectly accurate.


> 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!
>

Just because there is a rule against hosting things which are illegal in the
US doesn't mean that rule is being followed.


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

How do you know?  You don't even know when the donors started calling, or if
they started calling before or after Wales started his deletion spree.  In
any case, the word "immediately" is obviously not meant to be taken
literally.


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

Yep.


> Most of the rest are quotes.


A very good selection of quotes, in my opinion.


> 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.
>

Are you kidding me?  How many messages were there on the mailing lists?
Very few of us have the time to read through all that crap.  And taking a
random selection would be no better.

I was quite impressed by the selection of quotes.  Having read through the
mailing lists as it happened, it was a great excerpt of exactly the quotes
they needed to show their point.

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.


One of the basic problems with the idea of Wikipedia, really.  For anything
but the most uncontroversial of facts, "verifiability, not truth" just
doesn't work.