[WikiEN-l] Tabloid sources (was Wikipedia leadership})

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Fri, 4/2/11, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > For better or worse, Wikipedia in its present state is
> more of a news
> > aggregator than an educational resource, and the
> reason is that the
> > community likes it that way.
> 
> Parts of Wikipedia are more like a news aggregator, yes.
> Other parts
> are clearly not. Most obviously the stuff that newspapers
> don't cover,
> or where other sources exist. Has anyone tried to do one of
> those
> network diagrams showing correlations between types of
> articles and
> particular types of sources? Some interesting patterns
> might emerge
> there.


Even parts of Wikipedia where other sources do exist frequently restrict 
themselves to aggregating news. 

There are no end of scholarly sources on [[Doris Lessing]], say. Our article
on her cites (news and web sources listed left, book sources indented):

NobelPrize.org
The Guardian
BBC News
Toronto Star
The Times
Bloomberg
The New York Times
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi
The New York Times
BBC News Online
------------------------------------- A book by Harper Collins
biography.jrank.org
------------------------------------- A book by Broadview Press
Newsweek
Voices of America
dorislessing.org
Huffington Post
BBC Radio
rslit.org
The New York Times
Daily Mail
Herald Sun
The Telegraph
CBS News
New York Daily News
BBC News Online
dorislessing.org
The New York Times
dorislessing.org
------------------------------------- "Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches"
otago.ac.nz
hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2007/lessing.html
lib.utulsa.edu/speccoll/collections/lessingdoris/index.htm
gencat.cat/pic/cat/index.htm

That's 32 media/web references (some of them with multiple citations), and 
3 book references (each cited once). 

We've been doing this for ten years. We have always said, "articles will
develop eventually". But by now, some articles are actually degrading again, 
and on the whole we have failed to attract great numbers of competent 
experts with real-life credentials. 

There are some promising signs that this is changing, and I am glad of it. 
But we should remember that the image we project through the quality and 
seriousness of our articles has a lot to do with what sort of editors we
attract. There are virtuous circles as well as vicious circles.

Another scholar for example who I asked for advice a while back volunteered 
the information that 

---o0o---

"I do not permit any of my students to cite your encyclopedia as any 
kind of reliable source when they write papers for me. Wikipedia is too 
much a playground for social activists of whatever editorial bent wherein 
the lowest common denominator gets to negotiate reality for the readers. 
No thanks."

---o0o---

Reactions like that are our loss, and perpetuate the problems we have. 

Our efforts at outreach could be coupled with efforts to make Wikipedia a
more reputable publication. Charles Matthews mentioned at a recent meet-up a 
BLP where editors were all focused on whether the subject was gay or not, 
while no one had any interest in adding information explaining what made the 
person notable. This seems rather typical.

Our beloved media gossip, complete with divorce details from thesmokinggun.com 

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&redirs=0&search=thesmokinggun+divorce&fulltext=Search&ns0=1

may be keeping those editors away who we most need to turn articles like 
Doris Lessing's into something worthy of an actual encyclopedia.

In other words, the more tabloid sources we cite, the more editors we
attract who like tabloids, while turning off those potential contributors
who don't read tabloids.

Andreas