Wikipedia

Jimbo is on a rampage again

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Via Making Light and Fanwank I see that Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has gone on one of his periodic rampages, deleting everything that could be construed as pornographic images, after catching some (predictable) flak from Faux News:

It began in early April, when Larry Sanger, arguably co-founder of Wikipedia, announces that he Reported Wikipedia to the FBI, alleging some of the hosted images violated the law.

There was brief discussion of this, but not much happened until this week, when Jimbo Wales decided to make it policy to purge some content from Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia’s image host. Jimbo Wales isn’t actually in charge of Wikipedia anymore, but he states that the Foundation will be issuing a statement shortly. It includes the wonderfully double-think line,

Although there is a common saying that “Wikimedia Commons is not censored,” this statement should not be interpreted to imply that we do not make editorial judgments about the appropriateness of content. We do, all the time, and we must.

And continues to him saying that “explicit sexual content and other imagery without serious merit [must be] deleted.”

Admins are concerned about this, and begin editing the proposal, trying to make it into a workable policy. Eventually, it’s edited into a policy with fairly widespread support, which excludes non-photographic works, allows works of historical, artistic, or other merit, and so on.

…And that’s when Jimbo begins deleting 19th century artworks, diagrams and sketches meant to explain sexual acts, and so on. When Wikipedia has a bot which automatically removes all uses of a file when it’s deleted, making it extremely hard to put files back.

It is not the first time Jimbo has gone on an unilateral delete spree, dictating content and policy from on-high, bypassing the normal channels for dispute resolution. Two examples I myself was (briefly) involved with were the blanking of the article on John Byrne when Byrne complained about it and the difficulties with Giovanni Di Stefano, who seemed to have pressured Jimbo to wipe away perfectly uncontroversial accusations against him. Both cases were lowkey enough that Jimbo got away with his dictatorial behaviour, but with this he seemed to have bitten off more than he can chew; there’s now a proposal put forth to take away much of his powers. This can only be a good thing, as a international, volunteer driven, “open source” project like Wikipedia should not be hampered by the whims and fears of one man.

Incluing is not good enough for Wikipedia now?

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Logged in to Wikipedia tonight to get a message that the article on incluing I wrote almost five years ago was considered for deletion:

Apparently a neologism, but I can’t find evidence of wide use. Google Scholar and News searches turn up nothing but misspellings of “including”. Only references currently are a newsgroup faq, and the livejournal of the (admittedly notable) author who coined it. Quote: “This is totally a word I made up when I was fifteen”.

If reliable sources can be found, there could possibly be something on the concept to salvage into Exposition (literary technique), but I very much doubt it.

It’s this bloody attitude that has increasingly soured me on Wikipedia over the years. Way back when I started getting involved with Wikipedia, around 2003-2004 or so the idea of an online encyclopedia that would hold everything and which you could write articles for yourself was intoxicating. It was easy too to whip up a quick article, just a stub and see it grow over the days and years. But those days are long gone, smothered by the ever growing self-important bureaucracy that has grown up around it.

Too many people seem to think that noticability means everything, that if a subject is obscure or too fannish or cultish it doesn’t deserve an entry, when it’s those very things that makes Wikipedia different from every other encyclopedia. Incluing is a useful term of literary criticism, especially within science fiction and is precisely the sort of semi-obscure concept that should have an entry at Wikipedia explaining it.

I just don’t understand the mindset of people who go around Wikipedia looking for articles to delete. Sure, there’s a certain amount of spam and such to get rid off, but I’ve seen so many examples now of editors and administrators who went out of their way to get rid of articles that are clearly not spam, but just obscure or fannish or not suited to the New Seriousness of Wikipedia. As if an entry like incluing demands Wikipedia by being there.

How the Worldbank uses Wikipedia

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Using Wikipedia as contentmanagement

Via Edwin Mijnsbergen, enthusiast biblioblogger for my old hometown’s library, comes the news that the Worldbank has started to use Wikipedia as a contentmanagement tool, as explained in the presentation above. Basically a few of the researchers in their Latin-America section started looking at the best format to publish or keep their research in and as a pilot project started working on a lot of the socalled country overviews on Wikipedia. This instead of setting up their own branded Wikipedia, as they were geeky enough to realise that sharing the info and allowing others to acces it and update it would improve it quicker than keeping it in house.

The Socialtext site has an overview of the project.

If it’s not online it doesn’t exist

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Via Caveat Lector we learn that physicists think that if it’s not online it isn’t worth reading:

In brief, the author asked a bunch of physicists and astronomers about how they prefer to access materials. No big surprise; they’d rather grab it online. What is curious is a connection drawn by some respondents between online accessibility and perceived quality. In my paraphrase: “if it’s not online, if nobody’s taken the trouble to scan it or throw it up somewhere, how important can it be?”

Whoa. Every single librarian reader I have just cringed. I admit that even I winced a little.

From personal experience, where I see this bias a lot is on Wikipedia. Subjects that have little to no online presence are much less well represented but worse, when the importance of an subject cannot be easily established online, they’re much more likely to be deleted as non-noticable. So you get a sort of systemic bias towards subjects that are so obviously important that you’ll also find them in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, or new enough to have a deep online presence or with enough of a following/interest in them for an active online community to spring up around it. Subjects that fail those requirements though, even if there are proper offline sources for them are much vulnerable to deletionism.

Dutch Wikipedia self-censors

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Last year, ex-member of parliament Patricia Remak was convicted of benefit fraud, because she claimed wachtgeld for her work as member of parliament when she was already employed as a civil servant at the finance ministry and a member of the provincial states of Noord-Holland. She appealed this ruling, but was convicted again earlier this year. All these facts can be found in the English Wikipedia article about her, but if you look at the same article on The Dutch Wikipedia, no mention is made of this at all.

How did this happen? Simply because Remak complained to Wikipedia that mentioning her conviction was an invasion of her privacy, the details of her conviction falling under the Wet Bescherming Persoonsgegevens (WBP), which meant that only with her permission Wikipedia could’ve mentioned her crimes and conviction. Under the WBP any sort of publication of private data is strictly controlled, and in general can only be used with permission. A criminal record is one example of the sort of data that’s protected under the WBP, so Remakr had a case if she was just an ordinary citizen. However, as an ex-member of parliament, who in large part is only noticable for her conviction, the details of her crime and conviction are fair game, as shown by the simple fact that her case was widely reported on in the Dutch papers, not something that happens with every conviction for benefit fraud. It is a bit cheeky if understandable to then object to publication in Wikipedia, because who wants to be known as a benefit cheat forever?

It is disappointing however to see Wikipedia cave in, as by doing so it has been deliberately falsified. At the moment, everybodyknows Remak was a benefit cheat and was convicted for it, but how many people will remember this in five years time? In ten? In a hundred? How many people will take the Wikipedia article at face value and not realise that Remak was not just your average member of parliament, but one shown unworthy of the trust of the voters by committing fraud? And if it’s this easy to let Wikipedia remove unpleasant facts about yourself, how many other people and companies will start doing so? An encyclopedia cannot be reliable if unpleasant truths are omitted when people object to them.