User:Barkeep49/Where are the Wikipedians

I grimace a little every time I read a headline about Wikipedia. The odds that the reporter, who is probably extremely well meaning, will get Wikipedia wrong is far greater than that they will get it right. Since, to the best of my knowledge, no reliable source has anyone on the "Wikipedia beat" this isn't surprising. Wikipedia's operations are a labyrinth of policies, guidelines, style guides, and enforcement procedures, not to mention explanatory supplements to all that and some essays that carry more weight than some guidelines. All this makes covering the internal operations of Wikipedia a difficult ask for someone not deeply entrenched in the encyclopedia. I don't possibly fault the average reporter pitching or assigned a story about some Wikipedia controversy for failing to understand them.

Instead what I expect is for that reporter of a reliable source to speak to an expert, maybe even two, who does understand how Wikipedia works. In theory that expert should be the Wikimedia Foundation Communications department and/or the Executive Director. For most Wikipedia press needs this assemblage of people represent the project thoughtfully and well. However, I am guessing that there is maybe one person in the department, Ed Erhart (aka The ed17), who has the detailed experience as an editor (and in this case also as a sysop) to explain the true ins and outs of our policies, guidelines, style guides, enforcement procedures, explanatory supplements and "controlling" essays. So when we find ourselves having to explain to the world some internal process, like Articles for Creation during the Strickland affair, there isn't someone ready to really answer their questions.

Fortunately there are a lot of people who understand the nuance of how English Wikipedia works: the hard working editors of the encyclopedia. An enterprising reporter wouldn't have to work too hard to find editors, but in fairness most reporters don't have the time to be enterprising. So we, the editors of English Wikipedia, need to make it easy for them. Even given that the Foundation wouldn't necessarily want Bakeep49 or other random editors representing them there are still a variety of options of people who the Foundation could easily make available to reporters. Here are a few different models that could be used in having willing editors ready to speak to reporters about the minutia of Wikipedia.


 * Use any serving Arbitrators who would like to volunteer. ArbCom seems to be enough of a media fascination that individual Arbitrators can even get their own articles in large part because of coverage around ArbCom. These editors are going to be steeped in all of the policy minutia and have been endorsed relatively recently by the community. Plus the relatively small numbers would make it easy to train any volunteers, should the Foundation wish to do that.
 * Another small group of trusted users would be the Bureaucrats. Their virtue is that this group is more stable than ArbCom (lifetime vs 2 year appointments will do that for you). On the other hand, the kinds of trust the community looks for in a Bureaucrat might not be the same as what we would need in a spokesperson.
 * Wikimedians in Residence are professionals whom an organization has hired to be a liaison between themselves and the Wikimedia community. People in these roles tend to have experience explaining Wikimedia community affairs in the field of the organization and also keeping good relationships with the Wikimedia community on behalf of that field of expertise. While they might have to be vetted in some way by the community or the foundation, their professional bearing and title would likely be helpful in dealing with the press.
 * Wikimedia Chapters are public facing community organizations which do outreach regionally to any organizations and individuals who seek to engage with Wikimedia content. While perhaps lacking in broader community endorsement for any given chapter leader, these chapters are recognized by the foundation and have the advantage of being local to a wide number of areas which might help with reporter accessibility - as a local hook is helpful to many.
 * Alternatively this could be a special permission granted to appropriate administrators or even editors. This has the virtue of opening it up to the wide range of talented Wikipedians. Of course it also has the disadvantage of opening it up to the wide range of Wikipedians whose talents are better spent not talking to the press but maybe don't realize it.

Getting more spokespeople, spokespeople who can really get into the nitty gritty, is one challenge. The other challenge is getting reporters to think to contact Wikipedians. There are two things the community should be doing there: communicating before there are stories and after there are stories. The advance communication, cultivating relationships with reporters and editors of major publications likely to cover Wikipedia, is something that I would hope and have every reason to expect, the Foundation's Communication staff is regularly doing and doing capably. This advance work would then pay off as the Foundation could pass along the contact information of editor spokespeople when the situation required it.

However, just as important is what Wikipedians can and should do after an article is written that lacks an understanding of our policies. We simply need to follow one of our explanatory essays and remember that communication is required. A civil email to the reporter explaining some of the nuance they might have lacked and offer of how the reporter could be in touch with a qualified person in the future could go a long way. Especially if they receive two or three such emails. We might not get any response, but as Wikipedian's we know that sometimes we leave a message that isn't acknowledged but still leads to a change in behavior. And even better since reporters are heavy users of Wikipedia this education effort of how Wikipedia really works is likely to have a positive effect not only in the articles about Wikipedia itself but about the information pulled from, or not pulled because the reporter sees the limitations of some pages, from any number of other articles.

 Thanks to for their help with possible groups of spokespeople