Wikipedia – Wis[s]e Words

Deitch v Ramsey

Published on August 9, 2012Leave a comment

* from the department of largely unfair comparisons one: word count of wikipedia entry for minor X-Men character Doug Ramsey = 4063; word count of wikipedia entry for surpassing underground and alt-comics talent Kim Deitch = 1082.

It’s unfair because it falls into the lipstick fallacy: if only we spent as much on space as we did on lipstick, we’d be on Mars right now — not just our robots.

But it’s also unfair because it doesn’t take into account how Wikipedia works and why it’s easier to write about Doug Ramsey than it is to write about Kim Deitch. First, with a fictional character you don’t have the handicap of having to write under Wikipedia’s stringent rules about biographies of living persons where you have to double and triple check your sources and quotes before it can be included. Wikipedia has burned its fingers a couple of times with having dumb or malicious edits getting media coverage. In comics for example, there was the whole John Byrne kerfluffle. Second, it’s often much easier to source facts for fictional characters too: just summarise the comics themselves or fanpages about them.

Writing a good article about an important, but slightly obscure figure like Deitch is much more difficult. Less sources online, fewer facts you can just regurgitate, more room to fall foul to Wikipedia’s ever increasing body of rules. I’ve started a fair few comics subjects myself when I was still active there, but it can be very hard to do more than a skeleton outline, where you list the biographical basics, the various publications and such. Anything else –art style, critical impact and so on — is difficult to do on Wikipedia and not get challenged on it. There comes a point where it’s just easier to work on it for your own site or publication elsewhere than Wikipedia.

(Course, it doesn’t help that the sort of geeks who read X-Men are much more present on Wikipedia than the sort of geeks who are into underground comix)

Doomed Wikipedia still doomed

Published on March 5, 20122 Comments

The latest Wikipedia media controversy is a bit of a storm in a teacup, is the conclusion of the commenters at MetaFilter, but there is a kernel of truth in Timothy Messer-Kruse’s story:

One of the people who had assumed the role of keeper of this bit of history for Wikipedia quoted the Web site’s “undue weight” policy, which states that “articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views.” He then scolded me. “You should not delete information supported by the majority of sources to replace it with a minority view.”

The “undue weight” policy posed a problem. Scholars have been publishing the same ideas about the Haymarket case for more than a century. The last published bibliography of titles on the subject has 1,530 entries.

“Explain to me, then, how a ‘minority’ source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong ‘majority’ one?” I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. He responded, “You’re more than welcome to discuss reliable sources here, that’s what the talk page is for. However, you might want to have a quick look at Wikipedia’s civility policy.”

Timothy Messer-Kruse wasn’t quite as innocent as he made himself out to be in this story, but he does have a point here, that Wikipedia’s policy of verification over truth privileges wrong but easily traceable facts over the correct facts. It’s somewhat similar to the journalistic doctrine of objective reporting, where a reporter is not allowed to judge the truth of a situation themself, but has to provide a he said/she said sort of balanced coverage. With Wikipedia, there’s an allergy against anything that cannot be traced to an external source, preferably a secondary source at that. There’s some sound reasons for that policy: makes it more difficult for cranks to put their own pet theories in, makes it easier to judge articles on reliability, but it does mean that Wikipedia needs to sacrifice some truthfullness to achieve this. Hence situations like this, where the verifiable facts lag behind the state of the art.

This story also illustrates another large Wikipedia problem, something that’s perhaps even more worrying. It has become easier and more rewarding to be a rule lawyer at Wikipedia than be an actual editor. It’s easier than to just slap up a warning on a page that something is wrong (case in point) than it is to actually fix it. If you do attempt to fix something or even start something new, the odds are likely that somebody else will overrule you, as with the huge amount of rules and policies now guiding Wikipedia, it’s difficult not to do something wrong.

Which is why I stopped bothering a long time ago, save for obvious tyops and errors that I come across when reading Wikipedia. I still use it, but I don’t do much editing there as it’s just not fun anymore and hasn’t been for years.

The saddest page on Wikipedia

Published on May 6, 20111 Comment

Michel Vuijlsteke linked to this sad, moving article at The Awl about the last two surviving veterans of World War I:

There are two veterans of the First World War left in the world. Of all the parts of the world that move on without you, of all the borders beyond the horizon, of all the varying speeds and trajectories and characters and stories colluding together in giant waves of “now,” “yet-to-come,” “once was,” and then it boils down to two. It’s not even the whole hand.

Nine years ago, there were 700 left alive.

With the recent deaths of Frank Buckles, John Babcock and Harry Patch, we are left with Claude Choules and Florence Green. (Upon learning this, Claude remarked: “Everything comes to those who wait and wait.”) Nearly 10,000,000 men were killed in the conflict, 65 million participated, and now we are left with two. Think about that. Think about those numbers. What are you supposed to do when an era is inches away from disappearing?

Two days after this article appeared, Claude Choules died, leaving Florence Green as the last surviving veteran of World War I and Józef Kowalski, who fought in the Polish-Russian War as the last surviving WWI era veteran, but there are no more surviving witnesses of the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow. When Harry Patch died two years ago we lost the last survivor of the trench warfare at the Western Front; nobody’s left to tell us if Blackadder goes Forth got it right. Before that, when Henry Allingham died, just a week before Patch’s dead, we lost the last surviving founding member of the RAF, the last surviving RNAS veteran and the last eyewitness to the Battle of Jutland. Thus history passes out of living memory.

And hence the List of surviving veterans of World War I is the saddest page on Wikipedia, slowly shrinking in size, now with only two names left and no idea what to do with it if these last two die as well. Should the page then be deleted, its history gone as well, or kept in some way as a monument to this history? There’s still no consensus and time is ticking…

Nick Mamatas not noticable — further decline of Wikipedia

Published on May 5, 20112 Comments

Nick Mamatas’ entry on Wikipedia is considered for deletion:

A lack of reliable third part sources necessary for WP:BLP. Also, publications don’t seem notable and awards are regional, not enough to distinguish person as notable.

This is a writer who has written several science fiction and horror novels, been published in America as well as several European countries (Germany and Italy) and is the editor for the well received Haikasoru line of Japanese science fiction books For Viz Publications. He has received favourable critical reception for both his writing and his editing work, including several Bram Stoker Award nominations, a World Fantasy Award nomination, a few Hugo Award nominations, including one this year for Best Editor, long form and so on and so forth. In the greater scheme of things he may just be a minor writer at the moment working in still somewhat disreputable genres, but he’s clearly influential enough and noticed enough by his peers to be worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, with plenty of material out there to be able to write a reasonable encyclopedia entry about him. Everything therefore in the original argument of why Mamatas needs to be removed from Wikipedia is wrong, which is par for the course for a lot of deletions.

Searching for Wikipedia on this very blog will show a lot of other examples of this sort of heavyhanded and dumb “cleansing” of Wikipedia, usually aimed at subjects not traditionally part of an encyclopedia. But that’s the whole point of why Wikipedia can be better than any traditional encyclopedia, because it has room for any subject of worth to be included, no matter how obscure. It can be a generalist encyclopedia and go into enormous depth on every subject imaginable. A certain kind of Wikipedia editor doesn’t get this however and feels the need to patrol the project for subjects and articles they deem unworthy of inclusion because, umm well, they clutter up the place?

Hence absurdities like this, where somebody who clearly hasn’t the faintest idea about the subject he’s judging thinks “Nick Mamatas” needs to be deleted because his publications aren’t noticable and his awards, including the World Fantasy Award nomination are purely regional…

Wikipedia finally notices it’s in trouble

Published on March 28, 20112 Comments

Is doomed Wikipedia doomed?

graph showing the rate of active editors versus their retention

Here’s what we think the Editor Trends Study tells us: Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new editors were still active a year after their first edit. Post-2007, lots of people were still trying to become Wikipedia editors. What had changed, though, is that they were increasingly failing to integrate into the Wikipedia community, and failing increasingly quickly. The Wikimedia community had become too hard to penetrate.

As the graph shows, while the number of active editors shot up from 2005, the retention rate of editors, those who are still active a year later, shot down. So there are more editors, but they quit editing earlier. Which in turn means that you have a hard core of longterm, dyed in the wool editors who know how to game the system and a much larger mass of people who discover Wikipedia, start editing and usually drop out in a couple of months, either because they lose interest or because they’re driven out by the hardcore. Editing Wikipedia is not fun anymore.

Three reasons for this is: notability, verification and rules lawyering in general. It used to be that Wikipedia culture was fairly tolerant of people following their own interests, putting up entries on lesser known webcomics say and appreciated their efforts. But just when Wikipedia really took off, in 2005-2006, the rules started to change and anything that couldn’t be found in the Encyclopedia Brittannica was suddenly not noticable enough to be in Wikipedia either. The balance in Wikipedia culture switched over from erring on the side of inclusiveness to “when in doubt, delete” — with quite a few editors seeing it as a holy mission to get rid of “fancruft”, insulting and alienating just those people who would’ve made good recruits.

At the same time, responding to a couple of scandals (some more so than others), editing existing articles became harder as well, as verification became the magic word. Every fact had to be verified, linked to some source that proclaimed its truth. It’s not an unreasonable rule, it’s the way it has been used that’s the problem. Too often new editors have had their their heads bitten off for innocently adding facts without verification, or using “suspect” sources, or for using sources not easily verificable or for just happening to disagree with a particular editor’s hobby horse. And verification, like notability is also increasingly used in editor fights, as disagreeing editors nitpick each other’s editors.

Which brings me to the rule lawyering that this emphasis on process over content brought with it. Wikipedia could always be gamed, but when following the rules correctly became more important than actually writing articles, it became that much easier to do so. Too many editors who where more interested in playing this game than in improving Wikipedia became administrators or got themselves in other positions of power and hence warped the project towards their interests. It doesn’t help to improve Wikipedia, but of course winning your fights with other editors because you can twists the rules better is much more important…

However, the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation has finally woken up and recognised this danger is a good sign. Hopefully they will actually do something about it as well: relax the rules on noticability and verification, get rid of the rules lawyering and get back to making Wikipedia a good encyclopedia.

(Via Vuijlsteke.)