Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-10-25/In the news

Good faith vs. bad faith debated
Last week, an online editorial in The Atlantic asked "In rancorous times, can Wikipedia show us how to all get along?" (also featured on Slashdot). Based on Joseph Reagle's new book "Good faith collaboration: the culture of Wikipedia" (cf. Signpost review and Reagle's response) and his observation that the founders of Wikipedia had tried to avoid the problems of USENET culture, it mused that "obviously, Wikipedia has a slightly smaller mission than world peace, but perhaps some of the lessons about good faith the site teaches us can be applied to other realms.... Maybe this period of extra nasty divisiveness in politics will push us out of the USENET phase and into a productive period of Wikipedian civility." The Atlantic article was written on the occasion of a talk by Reagle at Harvard University's Berkman Center (video and audio recordings and slides).

Like the book, the presentation featured several quotes from Raul's laws and WikiSpeak. Opening the discussion after the talk, Charles Nesson asked Reagle about his reaction to the (thus far only) customer review of the book on Amazon.com, by indefinitely blocked Wikipedian User:Thekohser (owner of MyWikiBiz), who admitted not having read it beyond the freely available first chapter, but nevertheless recommended against buying because "the entire work regurgitates the tired old public relations pablum that the Wikipedia organization sputters forth on the Internet and on the increasingly uncritical media". Nesson called this a "bullying tactic" and an example of bad faith that stood in contrast to the good faith culture of Wikipedia postulated by the book. In response to a question by Clay Shirky, Reagle mentioned the recently concluded Climate change arbitration case. He answered a question from User:SB Johnny (relayed by indefinitely blocked User:Moulton) about how communities like Wikimedia projects could overcome a "founder effect" with regard to Jimmy Wales. On October 21, Reagle gave another presentation about the book in the form of a webcast on Red Hat's site Opensource.com (recap and slides).

Global warming skeptics react to Arbcom decision
Besides being mentioned by Reagle, the Arbcom decision regarding the climate change "battlefield" (see last week's Signpost coverage) generated coverage in blogs opposing the mainstream scientific view on global warming, and news media from the North American political right. Most of them commented favorably on ArbCom's sanctions against User:William M. Connolley (William Connolley), whose earlier conflicts as a scientist with global warmings skeptics had been highlighted in Nature, The New Yorker and Journal of Science Communication as an example of the problems that experts can face when contributing to Wikipedia (see Signpost coverage: "Role of experts on Wikipedia and Citizendium examined"). A comment in the Wall Street Journal ("WikiPropaganda – Wikipedia bars a global warming censor from editing its pages", paywalled) said that "last week Wikipedia acknowledged it had been hijacked by global warming alarmists who squelched dissenting science ... It is censorship, and Wikipedia deserves credit for finally, if belatedly, stopping it." The Canadian global warming skeptic Lawrence Solomon, who had been criticizing Wikipedia's climate coverage and attacking Connolley in several earlier comments published in the National Post, likewise showed satisfaction with ArbCom's ruling ("Global warming propagandist slapped down"): "William Connolley, arguably the world’s most influential global warming advocate after Al Gore, has lost his bully pulpit." Connolley retorted, pointing out factual inaccuracies in Solomon's article. Bloggers Anthony Watts and Luboš Motl appeared to welcome the ArbCom decision as an opportunity for global warming skeptics to re-engage in the topic on Wikipedia, although the latter expressed disappointment that his first attempts to do so were stopped by two admins whom he suspected to be sockpuppets of Connolley.

But Connolley was only one of many users topic-banned from climate-change articles, several of whom had been engaged on the other side of the "battlefield" to advocate a global warming skeptic viewpoint. On his "The Wikipedian" blog, William Beutler (User:WWB) discussed the focus on Connolley in the coverage, noting that "he is among the most carefully-scrutinized Wikipedia editors – the discussion page associated with his account is the 11th-most 'watchlisted' Talk page outside of a couple technical pages and those belonging to Wikipedia’s best-known contributors."

Indian Supreme Court and US court base judgments on information from Wikipedia
The Supreme Court of India has cited information taken from the Wikipedia article Common Law Marriage as the basis for a judgment. The ruling has shocked the orthodox among the Indian judicial community. Based on the article, Justice Markandey Katju listed four conditions a couple must satisfy if they are to get the benefit of such a marriage: they must hold themselves out to society as being akin to spouses; they must be of legal age to marry; they must be otherwise qualified to enter into a legal marriage, including being unmarried; and they must have voluntarily cohabited and held themselves out to the world as being akin to spouses for a significant period of time. See "Can Wikipedia be the basis of SC ruling?" in The Times of India and "Government counsel takes exception to use of word ‘keep' in judgment" in The Hindu.

In similar news from the US, a column in the The Huffington Post by Josh Sugarmann, "Activist judge rules against Wisconsin's CCW ban, cites Wikipedia, ignores facts", criticized a decision of a Wisconsin Circuit Court that overturned the state's ban on carrying concealed handguns in public, for citing the Wikipedia pages List of fatal cougar attacks in North America and List of fatal bear attacks in North America as evidence for the necessity of guns for "the outdoors person".

The two decisions add to a long list of uses of Wikipedia as a court source. According to a database search conducted by Legally India ("'Offensive' SC judgment cites Wikipedia to define legal term"), Wikipedia "has been cited as a source at least 63 times by Indian courts".



"Necropants" win "weirdest medieval fact on Wikipedia" contest
As reported in the Signpost, the blog "Got Medieval" recently announced a humorous contest to find "the weirdest claim about the Middle Ages on Wikipedia", with both true and false statements eligible, selected by a jury of bloggers and rewarded with a $75 gift certificate to Costumes, Inc. The winning statement, announced last week, comes from the article about Icelandic magical staves (rune-like symbols), explaining one such symbol, the "Nábrókarstafur", as "Necropants, a pair of pants made from the skin of a dead man that are capable of producing an endless supply of money". It is sourced from galdrasyning.is, which describes itself as the website of the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, whose extended description of the necropants adds the caution that one has to get permission to use the man's skin before his death in order for the magic to work, and further explains that "a coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper" to activate the garment's revenue-generating functionality.

Briefly

 * "Extremist material" on Russian Wikisource: The Moscow police recently investigated a complaint about extremist material on "the international collaborative project Wikipedia", as reported by various Russian media including English-language publications RT ("Russian police probe Wikipedia for extremism" and Moscow News (Russian police investigation into Wiki-extremism"). As discussed on Foundation-l, the documents in question appear to be located on the Russian Wikisource: A translation of Benito Mussolini's The Doctrine of Fascism and a leaflet about the Beslan school hostage crisis, both of which are contained in the country's Federal List of Extremist Materials (which is itself available on the Russian Wikisource).
 * School principal rounded on for mentioning Wikipedia: Andrew Buck, the principal of The Middle School for Art and Philosophy in Brooklyn, New York, has been criticized for saying students can learn without necessarily having textbooks available. He recommended his critics view Wikipedia to find educational theorists whose work, he says, will back up this claim. Press reporting has distorted this to imply he is saying his pupils can use Wikipedia as a textbook: Head teacher says schoolchildren do not need books and recommends Wikipedia in the British Daily Telegraph. The story was also reported in New York Daily NewsMandel zoom 00 mandelbrot set.jpg
 * NYT obituary uses Commons image: A recent obituary in The New York Times for mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, known for coining the term fractal, featured an illustration of the Mandelbrot set that was apparently taken from a featured image on Wikimedia Commons. The illustration page correctly credits German Wikipedian Wolfgang Beyer, but asserts "Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company".
 * Wikipedia "godsend to journalists": A comment in Scottish newspaper The Herald (In praise of ... Wikipedia., by Robert McNeil) called Wikipedia "a godsend to journalists who, like everyone else, affect to despise it. ... That it can make journalists look clever – reader: 'I see no evidence of that' – makes it a Wonderful Thing."
 * Indian language Wikipedias: The Indian Express has interviewed several Indian Wikipedians about their motivations to contribute to the various Wikipedias in Indian languages instead of the English Wikipedia ("Aapka Apna Wikipedia").