[Wikimediaindia-l] [Press] : DNA : Mumbai blasts: Ajmal Kasab's birthday confusion
Achal Prabhala
aprabhala at gmail.com
Sun Jul 24 06:35:39 UTC 2011
Just to add to this, there are a few articles in each researched
language (Malayalam, Hindi, Sepedi) in development, all of which use
oral citations, and each of which will be catalogued on the research
page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects/Oral_Citations
(As of now, there are two that have been posted: one in Malayalam and
one in Hindi)
There are also links to the discussions happening both broadly and
within very specific Wikipedia communities, which should give you some
sense of why/how this is being taken up.
Cheers,
Achal
On Sunday 24 July 2011 10:20 AM, Ramesh N G wrote:
> There is one Malayalam article
> <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neeliyar_bhagavathi> where we already
> used oral citation
>
> User:Rameshng
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Anirudh Bhati <anirudhsbh at gmail.com
> <mailto:anirudhsbh at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> /“We have started using oral citations for non-controversial
> content. A tayyam dance form has been documented using such
> citations of proponents,” says Cherian, who is also at the
> forefront of creating Wikipedia content in Indian languages.
> /
>
> We have already started using oral citations?
>
> anirudh
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 9:38 AM, CherianTinu Abraham
> <tinucherian at gmail.com <mailto:tinucherian at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> *DNA : Mumbai blasts: Ajmal Kasab's birthday confusion*
> http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_mumbai-blasts-ajmal-kasab-s-birthday-confusion_1568800
>
>
> /As Mumbai reeled under shock, despair and anger over being
> attacked again on July 13, a message started clogging the
> jammed telephone networks and set the internet on fire. Though
> other information — another blast in Navi Mumbai, suspicious
> bag found in Santa Cruz — was also flying thick and fast, this
> one had the potential to spill mass anger onto the streets.
>
> The blasts were apparently a ‘birthday gift’ for convicted
> 26/11 terrorist Ajmal Kasab, it said, and no less than
> Wikipedia said so.
>
> The user-generated online encyclopaedia insists on
> verifibility, says *Tinu Cherian*, a Bangalore-based Wikipedia
> administrator: “It is all about verifiability, not necessarily
> of the truth, but whether readers and editors can check that
> the material has been published by a reliable source, and not
> whether they think it is true.” the resource has become a
> definitive go-to for unbiased information.
>
> But on that fateful Wednesday, verifiability itself was the
> problem. Three sources — Indian Express (2009), IBNLive (2009)
> and Hindustan Times (2010) had mentioned Kasab’s date of birth
> (DoB) as September 13, 1987, while two — The Times of India
> (February 2011), The Hindu (2008) said it was on July 13 that
> year.
>
> The entry on Kasab was created on November 29, 2008, three
> days after the attacks, and since December that year, his DoB
> has been mentioned as July 13.
>
> No wonder then that when a Chennai-based user changed it to
> September 22 at 8.18pm (the last blast occurred at 7.05pm),
> there was consternation among Wikipedians, and minutes later,
> an ‘edit war’ as the community calls such rapid changes, had
> begun. Unable to verify the date, an administrator locked the
> page.
>
> Wikipedians say such problems are not uncommon, two recent
> cases being the rumour that freedom fighter Bhagat Singh was
> born on Valentine’s Day (February 14), and premature reports
> that West Bengal chief minister had died. Though there is no
> laid-down code, and no one in particular monitors changes to
> the database, the loosely organised community says it
> self-regulates and decisions are arrived at on case-to-case
> basis and actions depend on creating consensus.
>
> Soon after the edit war, a group of Wikipedians went into a
> huddle on the ‘Talk’ page of the website. Among them was
> *Utkarsh Raj Atmaram*, a 27-year-old Wikipedia administrator
> from Hyderabad.
>
> Though he too had learnt about the controversy on Twitter, he
> was initially circumspect about the real date being July 13.
> However, when he checked the revision history of the article,
> he realised the truth was at best a shade of grey.
>
> “Though the DoB had always been July 13, somewhere down the
> line the reference was deleted. This fuelled the confusion
> further,” Atmaram says.
>
> A Washington Post blog later attributed a part of this
> confusion to: “Those who are making the Wikipedia entry
> changes [to September 13] are trying to delegitimise the
> terrorists behind the attack.”
>
> It was finally decided at 11.26pm that both the dates should
> be reflected after one contributor, ‘*kangzan*’,pointed out:
> “Right now Kasab’s birthday is both in September and in July
> at the same time, exactly like Schrodinger’s hypothetical cat
> is both dead and alive at the same time — a thought experiment
> used to illustrate physics’ aptly named uncertainty
> principle”. Later, when Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad chief
> Rakesh Maria confirmed the date to be September 13, the issue
> was laid to rest.
>
> The incident highlights the fragile nature of ‘truth’ on the
> internet — Wikipedia doesn’t know something happened until a
> credible source doesn’t ratify it. “That is why, even though
> Twitter can be ahead of us in breaking news, we do not create
> articles based on what is said there,” Atmaram says. Perhaps
> that is why Kasab’s birth date being mentioned as July 13 on
> Wikipedia created such a furoreas people trust its content
> more than even conventional sources of information.
>
> The flip side, however, especially in countries like India
> where only a fraction of government records are online, is a
> lot of information does not meet the encyclopaedia’s
> ‘notability factor’, which determines whether particular
> information can be added to the database. To circumvent the
> problem, Wikipedians in India are experimenting with a novel idea.
>
> “We have started using oral citations for non-controversial
> content. A tayyam dance form has been documented using such
> citations of proponents,” says Cherian, who is also at the
> forefront of creating Wikipedia content in Indian languages.
>
> As the dust settles on the debate, one thing is clear:
> Information wars of the future will be fought online, and in
> crises, what transpires between netizens will shape reality on
> the ground./
>
> Regards
> Tinu Cherian
> http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news#July_2011
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