User:Chiswick Chap/Heroes

Here are some Wikiferous heroes of mine.


 * The editors keeping things accurate, as recorded by the BBC.


 * To a true believer in an alternative therapy, Guy said "Neutrality is not the average between bollocks and reality. In science, any compromise between a correct statement and an incorrect statement, is an incorrect statement." Good, eh?


 * On Wikipedia's 20th birthday, 15 January 2021, of course it's a toast to Jimmy Wales and all the wonderful volunteers. Here's The Economist on the subject: "As well as being roughly as accurate as old-style encyclopedias, Wikipedia is also incomparably broader." and "the world is much better off for its existence."


 * Alaric Hall's essay Are you an academic who vandalises Wikipedia? Then stop it!. I just love that it begins with a little box, all in Icelandic, on why it wasn't written in Icelandic. (I can't exactly read Icelandic but with Swedish I can sort of parse quite a lot of it.) He tells his fellow-academics to treat Wikipedia with more respect, given that they use it all the time...


 * George Monbiot's demand for free access to papers from publicly-funded research, mentioning Europe's Plan S. He wrote "The publishers have gone ballistic ... Elsevier says, 'If you think information shouldn't cost anything, go to Wikipedia', inadvertently reminding us of what happened to the commercial encyclopedias."


 * Dr. Blofeld: "...out of the  articles on Wikipedia... Adding good and featured articles and lists together gives a total of 0 articles (about 1 in 0). Good enough? No.". i.e. over 99% of articles are not good, or if you like 'decently written'. (Auto-Updated Parameters are in Bold)


 * George Monbiot again: "Immersed almost permanently in virtual worlds, we cannot check what we are told against tangible reality. Is it any wonder that we live in a post-truth era, when we are bereft of experience?" ("Our Greatest Peril", 2017)


 * Mary McCarthy's description of WP:OR: "every word [Lillian Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'".
 * Mark Twain, also defining WP:OR: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
 * Thomas Bewick's marvellously unclouded observation of people and nature.
 * Robinson Thwaites's honest rags-to-riches.
 * John Stewart Collis's descriptions of ordinary rural life, as it then was, as something special.
 * Sumana Harihareswara on how WP "privileges liberty way over hospitality".
 * David Runciman on Wikipedia's real merits.
 * Clay Shirky on Wikipedia's real authority.
 * Antandrus's perceptive "Observations on Wikipedia behavior", such as "The very existence of Wikipedia is a massive proof that there are more people in the world wanting to build than to tear down. Were that not true, vandals would have overwhelmed and destroyed us years ago."
 * Rich Farmbrough's WP:Wikipedia has more..., an essay that trashes some of the lies told about Wikipedia.
 * Santiago Ortiz's display of Wikipedian gender for different articles
 * A visual reminder of what bias means.
 * John Julius Norwich said in The Times that "As a writer of history I resort to [Wikipedia] at least a dozen times a day. I could never have written my last two books without it, and I have never caught it out yet, which is more than I can say of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its range is astonishing: it is almost impossible to find a person, place or subject that it has left uncovered." Nice of him (not sure if it's heroism, exactly, but never mind), but we editors do occasionally find one or two small gaps here and there.
 * Jimmy Wales celebrated Wikipedia's 15th birthday with the request "rather than succumb to fear, hatred, exclusion, and isolation, I believe we have reason to celebrate. Make an edit on Wikipedia."
 * How to edit Wikipedia. Yeah, it takes a YouTube video to say what we should be saying, as Serendipodous remarks.
 * Trusted more than the BBC, says the Telegraph.
 * Stuart C. Ray's WikiConference talk "Are the Obstacles Academic?" on the challenge of getting experts to edit Wikipedia. The talk starts at 4 hours and 36 minutes.
 * The Daily Dot: "Wikipedia is great", at least if you don't mind that in 2012 Encyclopedia Britannica stopped printing after 244 years.
 * Bee Wilson, striving to bring women and the kitchen to Wikipedia. I feel quite chuffed that I've written 8 Good Articles on famous cookery books by women.
 * Yngvadottir's wickedly precise coup de grace to machine translation: Excerpts from translations I have cleaned up. Let's hope the WMF take note.
 * Kevin Kelly (of Wired)'s "The Wikipedia is impossible, but here it is. It is one of those things impossible in theory, but possible in practice."
 * Bob Dylan's "My love winks, she does not bother / She knows too much to argue or to judge." (Love Minus Zero/No Limit)
 * Theodosius Dobzhansky's "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". A small hint on how to write biology articles, then.
 * Rusty Cashman - for The Malay Archipelago, History of evolutionary thought, On the Origin of Species and The eclipse of Darwinism... I guess I'm trying to follow in those footsteps, and am happy to have worked on some of them in my turn.
 * Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (User:Rosiestep) - for a steady stream of fantastic work on famous women (and many other topics besides).
 * Editors fight off religious conservatives who canvassed at an AfD.
 * Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman comment in "'Anyone can edit', not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap" that "First, Wikipedia's identity as an encyclopedia for facts is still governed by historically conservative (male) scientific understandings of expertise and authority. Second, viewed as an infrastructure, Wikipedia requires highly technical expertise, expertise that is traditionally gendered."
 * Jimmy Wales again: "What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse". It isn't."
 * David Auerbach for his Encyclopedia Frown: "rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic": guess which encyclopedia he had in mind ...
 * Aaron Swartz (sad story) for his provocative but well-supported claim that newbies write most of Wikipedia, while the oldies with editcountitis mostly just do cobweb-polishing. That chimes with my own desire to remain a content[ed] writer-editor, alongside (I notice) a small number of the top N-hundred editors.
 * Martin Kettle on First Past the Post: "In the British norm, the absurdity that a government with a majority of seats is entitled to a monopoly of power is surpassed only by the absurdity that a government with a minority of seats is equally entitled to it."