The irony here of course is that Wikipedia's content (at least as long as it's not a hoax) is based on the selfsame news outlets that the public apparently trusts less than Wikipedia. It's a case where the copy is considered more reliable than the original!
Wikipedia has, however, become an effective competitor to news outlets on breaking news. The day Michael Jackson died, for example, millions of people turned to Wikipedia rather than news outlets to get a digest of the latest coverage.
You're technically correct, though what the paragraph describers is exactly what happens. If you register an account that is simply a company name, the account is blocked immediately, and people are asked to register a "non-promotional" name. Such blocking is routine, and hundreds of thousands of such accounts have been banned, obliterating what could have been useful transparency. The German Wikipedia in contrast does allow company accounts, verified by e-mail from the company domain to Wikipedia's OTRS volunteer service to prevent impersonation, and it is permissible for more than one person to operate the company account.
Sounds a bit like Pending Changes (installed on the German, Polish and some other Wikipedias, but not on the English one). This requires all IP edits to be approved by a "trusted" editor. Not a perfect system, but better than what is in place now.
Well, the latest edit tweeted by @congressedits for example is this one, inserting the following into David Icke's biography: "He is also a disinformation agent funded by the [[Pleiadians]]." That's just someone wasting their and everyone else's time. That's not to say there haven't been edits on politically contentious topics from gov't IP addresses; there most certainly have, and that's why these Twitter accounts are a good idea. The downside is that long-term, they will drive this sort of editing underground. People who do want to make a politically contentious edit will go to the nearest Starbucks to avoid detection. It's an inherent weakness of Wikipedia, because on less well watched pages some of those edits always slip through. Wikipedia is full of articles edited by people with an undeclared conflict of interest. It's arguably one of the reasons for its popularity.
That's it; quite a few edits will be perfectly fine, others are vandalism by bored staff, and occasionally you will get something interesting like the Snowden edit and others described here.
@parliamentedits, @wikiAssemblee, @gccaedits and @RiksdagWikiEdit Twitter accounts have been the set up to do the same for the UK, France, Canada and Sweden.
One thing to remember here is that most of these edits are probably made by junior IT staff rather than elected representatives (recall the recent Hillsborough case in the UK).
"It's not that simple. The problem is that dirt sells, so for any given interesting person, there is always dirt. Getting reliable sources to say anything else about the subject of the BLP is harder, because good news doesn't sell. So if you are a person who is prominent in a small community, and you get famous because of an exciting news story, you wind up with a BLP page that makes you look like a scumbag, and says absolutely nothing about whatever it was that got you prominent enough that a gossip story about you was able to make the news. I've seen this happen to a couple of prominent figures. It's unfixable, because a gossip column is more reliable than an organizational web page. Personally, I count myself lucky that I don't have a wikipedia biography."
Well said. This is very true, generally speaking, and one of the systemic problems with Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia that writes biographies on the basis of gossip rags.
In this case, however, it also seems that Wikipedia contributors may actually have gone slightly overboard in excluding positive material – Barry's philanthropic endeavours have attracted quite a bit of sympathetic coverage, little of which seems to be reflected in the article.
The question is not whether some of the bad stuff was true, it's whether it was unduly emphasised (at one point for example, an editor changed the infobox format to the one used for criminals, which does seem a bit malicious), and whether balancing coverage was excluded. I think the editors may have reacted to what they perceived as somewhat promotional edits, and decided to punish the biography subject. If so, that may not have been a good idea.
Read the German Wikipedia article about it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/... – interestingly, the German Wikipedia seems to be the only one that has an article on this.
Another question is: Why does the article cite dicehateme.com, which is an anonymous self-published website? That's against Wikipedia's rules on citing self-published sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Another interesting fact is that Jimmy Wales once personally intervened on the article's talk page suggesting that a negative review of the game (cited to an unreliable source) be removed. But the positive material sourced to dicehateme.com has been in the article, unmolested, to this day. The sourcing of the article looks iffy in general (it includes primary sources of the type I've often seen Wikipedians remove on sight).
According to the latest comments under the piece, it looks like HyperfineCosmologist and the 173 IP can reasonably be assumed to be two of the other creators of the game. http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...
The article was demonstrably (re-)created on 11 June 2011, four days before the launch, after the earlier version by Jsdillon had been deleted. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... (go to the oldest contributions). Do you think that re-creation was unrelated to the launch four days later? I don't. (Note that someone at Wikipedia has restored the earlier, pre-deletion edits by Jsdillon since this was published; the December 2010 edits were invisible before, and Jsdillon had only 11 edits showing in the contributions history.)
The article creation was also *well-timed*, just four days before the sales launch of the hardcopy version, with staff clearly involved. That's a marketing effort, not encyclopedia writing. Like most Wikipedia articles on companies. Look at Wikipedia articles on, say, management consulting firms, or law firms. They're generally ads, written by single-purpose accounts that you can generally assume to be staff members or PR agents.
It has to be said that often PR agents or article subjects start editing the article because someone has turned it into a hatchet job, and nobody cares. Risker, a longstanding member of Wikipedia's arbitration committee, recently said, on Jimbo Wales' talk page:
"You remember when the press made a huge deal about people from Congress editing the pages of congressmen, and when the edits were actually reviewed, almost all of them were (a) cleaning up vandalism, (b) fixing errors of fact (c) updating factual information (e.g. voting records) or (d) removing BLP violations. Everyone got all upset about "congress" editing its own pages - until they realised that their interests were the same as our interests.(For the record - I personally reviewed about 75 of those edits and there wasn't one that I looked at that should have been reverted, but several that did get reverted and shouldn't have been.)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Well, in the example given in the WO post, the article on the game was apparently created (or rather recreated) four days before the launch of the hardcopy version. Complete with positive reviews. Tell me the company didn't have an interest in that.
According to EU law on deceptive advertising – and potentially, too, FTC guidelines in the US – there has to be a disclosure to the reader on the article page itself if companies write or contribute to their own Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia does not enable such disclosures. Enabling them has never been up for discussion. (For EU law, see the German frankincense – "Weihrauchpräparate" – judgment, which was quite clear on this matter.)
It's worth noting that the Wikipedia article on the game was created four days before the launch of the game's hardcopy version. Basically, it would have supported the launch. In the 2013 Christmas season, the article got over 120,000 views (around 4,000 views a day throughout December 2013). Smart marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
The irony here of course is that Wikipedia's content (at least as long as it's not a hoax) is based on the selfsame news outlets that the public apparently trusts less than Wikipedia. It's a case where the copy is considered more reliable than the original!
Wikipedia has, however, become an effective competitor to news outlets on breaking news. The day Michael Jackson died, for example, millions of people turned to Wikipedia rather than news outlets to get a digest of the latest coverage.
You're technically correct, though what the paragraph describers is exactly what happens. If you register an account that is simply a company name, the account is blocked immediately, and people are asked to register a "non-promotional" name. Such blocking is routine, and hundreds of thousands of such accounts have been banned, obliterating what could have been useful transparency. The German Wikipedia in contrast does allow company accounts, verified by e-mail from the company domain to Wikipedia's OTRS volunteer service to prevent impersonation, and it is permissible for more than one person to operate the company account.
Quite.
Topical complaint from a Wikipedian about anonymous checkusers being granted access to Wikipedians' private information, on the talk page of a Wikimedia Foundation trustee: Why Did You Support Granting Private Information of Editors to Anonymous Administrators?
Sounds a bit like Pending Changes (installed on the German, Polish and some other Wikipedias, but not on the English one). This requires all IP edits to be approved by a "trusted" editor. Not a perfect system, but better than what is in place now.
Correct, though note that checkusers are not staff members but unpaid volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation doesn't even necessarily know who they are.
Well, the latest edit tweeted by @congressedits for example is this one, inserting the following into David Icke's biography: "He is also a disinformation agent funded by the [[Pleiadians]]." That's just someone wasting their and everyone else's time. That's not to say there haven't been edits on politically contentious topics from gov't IP addresses; there most certainly have, and that's why these Twitter accounts are a good idea. The downside is that long-term, they will drive this sort of editing underground. People who do want to make a politically contentious edit will go to the nearest Starbucks to avoid detection. It's an inherent weakness of Wikipedia, because on less well watched pages some of those edits always slip through. Wikipedia is full of articles edited by people with an undeclared conflict of interest. It's arguably one of the reasons for its popularity.
That's it; quite a few edits will be perfectly fine, others are vandalism by bored staff, and occasionally you will get something interesting like the Snowden edit and others described here.
A prominent reason is probably boredom in the lunch break.
Not to forget Norway ... http://boingboing.net/2014/07/...
@parliamentedits, @wikiAssemblee, @gccaedits and @RiksdagWikiEdit Twitter accounts have been the set up to do the same for the UK, France, Canada and Sweden.
One thing to remember here is that most of these edits are probably made by junior IT staff rather than elected representatives (recall the recent Hillsborough case in the UK).
"It's not that simple. The problem is that dirt sells, so for any given interesting person, there is always dirt. Getting reliable sources to say anything else about the subject of the BLP is harder, because good news doesn't sell. So if you are a person who is prominent in a small community, and you get famous because of an exciting news story, you wind up with a BLP page that makes you look like a scumbag, and says absolutely nothing about whatever it was that got you prominent enough that a gossip story about you was able to make the news. I've seen this happen to a couple of prominent figures. It's unfixable, because a gossip column is more reliable than an organizational web page. Personally, I count myself lucky that I don't have a wikipedia biography."
Well said. This is very true, generally speaking, and one of the systemic problems with Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia that writes biographies on the basis of gossip rags.
In this case, however, it also seems that Wikipedia contributors may actually have gone slightly overboard in excluding positive material – Barry's philanthropic endeavours have attracted quite a bit of sympathetic coverage, little of which seems to be reflected in the article.
The question is not whether some of the bad stuff was true, it's whether it was unduly emphasised (at one point for example, an editor changed the infobox format to the one used for criminals, which does seem a bit malicious), and whether balancing coverage was excluded. I think the editors may have reacted to what they perceived as somewhat promotional edits, and decided to punish the biography subject. If so, that may not have been a good idea.
One problem is that people will typically read the Wikipedia article first, and allow it to colour their perception. Big mistake if the article is biased to begin with, and a sort of kafkaesque situation for the victim. Wikipedia has known problems in this area, see e.g. Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia by Andrew Leonard; The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose – A false and malicious identity is admitted by David Allen Green; the story of Taner Akcam, Any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent, by Robert Fisk (originally published in The Independent); or that of Philip Mould, Mayfair art dealer Mark Weiss in disgrace after admitting poison pen campaign against rival Philip Mould, by Gordon Rayner.
Read the German Wikipedia article about it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/... – interestingly, the German Wikipedia seems to be the only one that has an article on this.
Another question is: Why does the article cite dicehateme.com, which is an anonymous self-published website? That's against Wikipedia's rules on citing self-published sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Another interesting fact is that Jimmy Wales once personally intervened on the article's talk page suggesting that a negative review of the game (cited to an unreliable source) be removed. But the positive material sourced to dicehateme.com has been in the article, unmolested, to this day. The sourcing of the article looks iffy in general (it includes primary sources of the type I've often seen Wikipedians remove on sight).
According to the latest comments under the piece, it looks like HyperfineCosmologist and the 173 IP can reasonably be assumed to be two of the other creators of the game. http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...
Here is the re-created 11 June version, with the positive reviews. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... Another positive review had been added by the 15 June launch date. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...
The article was demonstrably (re-)created on 11 June 2011, four days before the launch, after the earlier version by Jsdillon had been deleted. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... (go to the oldest contributions). Do you think that re-creation was unrelated to the launch four days later? I don't. (Note that someone at Wikipedia has restored the earlier, pre-deletion edits by Jsdillon since this was published; the December 2010 edits were invisible before, and Jsdillon had only 11 edits showing in the contributions history.)
The article creation was also *well-timed*, just four days before the sales launch of the hardcopy version, with staff clearly involved. That's a marketing effort, not encyclopedia writing. Like most Wikipedia articles on companies. Look at Wikipedia articles on, say, management consulting firms, or law firms. They're generally ads, written by single-purpose accounts that you can generally assume to be staff members or PR agents.
It has to be said that often PR agents or article subjects start editing the article because someone has turned it into a hatchet job, and nobody cares. Risker, a longstanding member of Wikipedia's arbitration committee, recently said, on Jimbo Wales' talk page: "You remember when the press made a huge deal about people from Congress editing the pages of congressmen, and when the edits were actually reviewed, almost all of them were (a) cleaning up vandalism, (b) fixing errors of fact (c) updating factual information (e.g. voting records) or (d) removing BLP violations. Everyone got all upset about "congress" editing its own pages - until they realised that their interests were the same as our interests.(For the record - I personally reviewed about 75 of those edits and there wasn't one that I looked at that should have been reverted, but several that did get reverted and shouldn't have been.)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Well, in the example given in the WO post, the article on the game was apparently created (or rather recreated) four days before the launch of the hardcopy version. Complete with positive reviews. Tell me the company didn't have an interest in that.
For an English-language write-up of the German court judgment, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in the English Wikipedia.
According to EU law on deceptive advertising – and potentially, too, FTC guidelines in the US – there has to be a disclosure to the reader on the article page itself if companies write or contribute to their own Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia does not enable such disclosures. Enabling them has never been up for discussion. (For EU law, see the German frankincense – "Weihrauchpräparate" – judgment, which was quite clear on this matter.)
It's worth noting that the Wikipedia article on the game was created four days before the launch of the game's hardcopy version. Basically, it would have supported the launch. In the 2013 Christmas season, the article got over 120,000 views (around 4,000 views a day throughout December 2013). Smart marketing.