Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikiconference USA in the media

Craig Franklin wrote: The part of the piece I found most striking was that the author readily, and almost boastfully, admits to speaking to "a minority of the minority of the minority," but she seems to have no issue using this very limited sample size to evaluate Wikipedia on the whole. Even if we assumed that there are 22,000 registered Wikipedians, is a sample size of five or six appropriate? If she meant 22,000,000, it seems like an even crazier leap. After re-reading the piece, I'd probably stand by a lot of it. It's not a great reflection of Wikipedia, but I also wouldn't call at least many parts of it inaccurate, per se, just crudely distorted and manipulated. The author used the tactic where you mention that Mandela was a convicted criminal that spent 27 years in prison, but fail to mention that he won the Nobel Peace Prize and was the revered president of South Africa. This tactic is an easy way to create a distorted, but technically accurate, impression. Some of the fine folks at Wikipediocracy are very good at employing this tactic as well. :-) MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>