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Wikipedia Gets Critical Reception from UK Press at Wikimania 2014
metasonix (650947) writes On Sunday the 2014 Wikimania conference in London closed. Wikimania is the major annual event for Wikipedia editors, insiders and WMF employees to meet face-to-face, give presentations and submit papers. Usually they are full of "Wiki-Love" and good feelings; but this year, as the Wikipediocracy blog summarized, Wikipedia and its "god-king" Jimmy Wales came under considerable fire from the UK media — a very unusual occurrence. And much of it was direct criticism of Wales himself, including a very hostile interview by BBC journalist James O'Brien, who had been repeatedly defamed in his Wikipedia biography by persons unknown.
Wikipediocracy isn't a "blog", it's a troll website for a walleyed lunatic fringe of Moonies, Scientologists, pro-ana activists and conspiracy loonies who got banned from Wikipedia and aren't taking it well. metasonix, the OP, is a prime example of such braincases - http://www.metasonix.com/v3/index.php/the-wikipedia-project
it's not a right to alter history. It's a right to disassociate yourself from your actions of the past in a search engine.
I mean, if you stole a candy bar 10 years ago and then got caught and charged, and that's the only bad thing you did, then it would pop up in a Google search unfairly because that's all Google has on you. Despite it being a minor offense.
So you ask for it to be forgotten and disassociated from your name, so you Google yourself and it doesn't show up. If you Google people who got charged for stealing candy bars, well, your name SHOULD show up. As well as if there's a Wikipedia page on lists of people charged with stealing candy bars.
Heck, legally there are two related concepts - how at age 18 your slate is wiped clean of any poor teenage decisions you may have made, as well as having "served your time".
Otherwise what you did at age 14 when you were too young to know better can come back to haunt you when you're 22 and looking for your first job and background research pulls up the indiscretion.
In fact, brand management companies do this by taking advantage of the fact that new items generally outweigh old ones - so if you did something back, they generate a bunch of positive PR news and articles to bury the bad stuff on page 4 of the search results.
But that assumes you can afford brand management. If you're just a regular old person, well, just because you were drunk years ago and got shoved in a drunk tank overnight shouldn't impact your life a decade later (assuming it was a one-time thing).
And it applies only to search engines. The news article on the BBC that said you were tossed in a drunk tank can stay (it's fact).
Then again, you're probably one of those goody two-shoes who keeps their nose sparkling clean and does absolutely nothing wrong or makes a bad decision so has absolutely nothing to hide from anyone.
Wikipedia is not news and news outlets are not an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia has entries for most major breaking news stories. These entries tend to be more accurate and more up-to-date than most news websites. You cannot go to Wikipedia for a list of headlines, but if you want information about a specific news event, it is a good place to go.
Well, this article he wrote is nonsense. I know nothing else about the guy.
He just takes every controversy and paints it as an unsolvable failure of the iron-fisted Wikimedia Foundation.
Funny -- it seemed to me like one of the most insightful and relatively balanced pieces on Wikipedia I've read in some time. Despite having a number of serious complaints, the author also talks about very positive aspects of the event, as in: "Wikimania was in many ways an inspirational event. There was a palpable sense of enjoyment and celebration in the air..." and later in the final conclusion "As I travelled to Wikimania, I worried that I might hate it. But my worst fears did not materialise." He clearly cares greatly about Wikipedia and wants to make it better.
In fact, some of the potential solutions he mentions address the biggest problems of Wikipedia and could finally be the path to solve them. For example:
Medical content, notably the current initiatives to have medical articles peer-reviewed by academic experts (Cancer Research UK is involved, and is now hosting a Wikipedian in Residence), and provide readers with a permanent and prominent link to that peer-reviewed article version. It's an excellent idea that in the long run could also be transferred to other topic areas. Experts might be more inclined to contribute and review articles if their work is guaranteed some lasting presence. We hope the Foundation will support that effort.
Wikipedia has grown over the years by leaps and bounds with all the wonderful contributions from random people. But for articles that have achieved a relatively good status, Wikipedia is spending more and more time fighting the "barbarians at the gates" who want to vandalize, post misleading information pushing an agenda, and just random editors with little expertise who wikilawyer their way into having the article the way they like, regardless of an expert consensus on the topic. All of this could be solved by keeping articles more "stable" (maybe have a separate proposed edits page, or an "experimental" page that could be edited by anyone and is not the default) and incorporating advice from subject matter experts.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is older than Wikipedia and the best resource on philosophy on the internet, shows how this can be done well. Wikipedia wouldn't have to let go of the option for the general public to edit pop culture articles on their favorite Star Trek or Buffy or Friends episode or whatever -- but for subject matter where there is a peer-reviewed expert academic literature available and experts who are willing to contribute, why not help make that possible?
Similar policies could solve some of the biographical article problems brought up in the summary -- even just holding proposed edits in a queue for experienced and validated editors to allow them would prevent nonsense such as that mentioned in TFA where a reporter has to complain about: "I have spoken publicly about my children having been born as a result of fertility treatment. And my Wikipedia page, which I didn't even know existed, contained a phrase along the lines of 'he wasn't man enough to impregnate his own wife'," a statement that went unchallenged on Wikipedia for nearly a month. The author (and the reporter complaining here) is right -- there's simply no excuse for that sort of nonsense, particularly when Wikipedia has such a poor track record of figuring out ways for real people to correct factual problems in articles about themselves.