Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-08/In the news

Praise for "efficient and impassioned" prose in Wikipedia and "revolutionary" WP:OWN policy
In her tech column for The New York Times Magazine ("What Wikipedia Is Best at Explaining"), Virginia Heffernan praised the "efficient and impassioned" prose in many of the WikiProject Video games' featured Articles, specifically Halo: Combat Evolved and Angry Birds. Interviewing one of the contributing Wikipedians, she learned about the policy against ownership of articles, calling it "revolutionary" and commenting: My jaw dropped. The page is fascinating for anyone who has ever been part of a collaborative effort to create anything. ... The magazine business could have used some guidelines about this all-too-familiar kind of authorship jockeying decades ago.

She posited that in the digital age, the identity of an "object" is defined by its Wikipedia article, and compared the role of Wikipedians to that of taxonomists and explorers in earlier times: Every new symbolic order requires a taxonomist to make sense of it. When Renaissance paintings and drawings first became fashionable in the art market in the early 20th century, the primary task of critics like Bernard Berenson was to attribute them, classify them and create a taste for them. ... Wikipedia has become the world’s master catalogue raisonnée for new clumps of data. Its legion nameless authors are the Audubons, the Magellans, the Berensons of our time.

Lastly, Heffernan called her readers to contribute to Wikipedia themselves.

Midterm update on the Public Policy Initiative
The Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative published a midterm update last week, reporting that the participating students were beginning to contribute articles to Wikipedia, a few of which had already been featured in the "Did You Know" (DYK) section on the main page. An Ambassador Steering Committee has been formed, "thinking through the big questions about the Ambassador program" (where experienced Wikipedians assist participating students). Five more courses have been added since the first announcement in August (Signpost coverage); two of them at the UC Berkeley, which announced in a press release that "UC Berkeley students help improve Wikipedia’s credibility".

The Public Policy Initiative was also covered in the NPR program All Things Considered ("Wikipedia Teams Up with Academia") and in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Wired Campus" blog ("Professors Shore Up Wikipedia Entries on Public Policy").

Use of Wikipedia in education debated
In related news, several comments on the use of Wikipedia in schools and universities were published recently.

The ZDNet Education blog asked "Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia".

The Cardinal Courier (a student newspaper at St. John Fisher College in Pittsford, New York) argued that "Wikipedia is a reliable source to use for assignments". While acknowledging that Wikipedia's General disclaimer contains "capitalized letters saying, 'Wikipedia makes no guarantee of validity'", it noted that several reputed news publishers and reference works, such as The New York Times Company or the Oxford English Dictionary, make similar statements about their own reliability (possibly drawing from the list at Non-Wikipedia disclaimers). Wikipedia's list of errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia was also noted.

A "Reader's view" published in the Opinion section of the Duluth News Tribune found Wikipedia "more enlightening than unilateral spin", regarding it as "the best place to begin research if proper protocol is observed".

An article about the American Library Association's "Top 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning" list in the Chicago Tribune revealed that "Yes, students, there's a world beyond Wikipedia", observing that "for parents with fond memories of the Dewey Decimal System, library card catalogs and thumbing through their family's World Book Encyclopedia, it can come as a shock to discover that their own children's research habits often begin and end with a quick click on Wikipedia."

On her "The Daring Librarian" blog, US school librarian Gwyneth A. Jones said that "Wikipedia Is NOT Wicked!", defending Wikipedia against fellow educators who regard it "with suspicion, sometimes derision, and occasionally with fear". She named hashtags and QR code as topics where Wikipedia offered information superior to that in the research databases provided by her own library, and gave teachers some advice on how to teach Wikipedia in class – summarized in an "at a glance" cartoon (see illustration). Exemplifying her advice to "establish your web presence!" (and apparently unaware of Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline), User:Thedaringlibrarian started the article about her employer, the Murray Hill Middle School.

"Truth in Numbers?" documentary about Wikipedia gains further attention
The documentary film Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia was reviewed by the AOL blog Urlesque, which also noted that it was "about to be deleted [from] Wikipedia itself" (the AfD message has since been removed). After its July premiere at Wikimania in Gdansk (see Signpost coverage), the film was released last month by a screening in New York City, and is set to be shown in more US theaters later this month. In some geographical regions, it has also been viewable online for free. Larry Sanger, who is featured in the movie, recently called it "not too bad, from what I saw", while Jimmy Wales recommended against featuring it as part of the upcoming 10 years of Wikipedia celebrations, because "the film was poorly received in Poland, and it is seriously out of date" (filming had started at the 2006 Wikimania; most of the footage seems to date from 2006 and 2007). Board member Samuel Klein (User:Sj), who had attended a panel discussion with the directors after the New York screening, said that he likes "the film a lot more after seeing it for the second time, in a very different audience (and seeing their live reactions)".

Briefly

 * Courtney Love prefers stub: US tabloid The New York Post reported that at a New York party, musician Courtney Love explained how she would like "her messy Wikipedia page" to improve: "I just want what awards I got ... who I [bleeped] – on the record — or who said nice things about [bleeping] me. And how many hits I've had. And that's it."
 * Social analytics: PARC researcher Ed Chi has uploaded slides of a recent talk titled Large Scale Social Analytics on Wikipedia, Delicious, and Twitter (the part about Wikipedia starts on p.11, and appears to include some charts that have already been published previously).
 * Medical advice about Wikipedia addiction: On the "Mediatrician" blog of the Boston-based Center on Media and Child Health, Dr. Michael Rich gave advice to a concerned parent who asked "Is my son addicted to Wikipedia?", describing that for several months, the 16-year-old "has been spending several hours a day on Wikipedia, reading and editing entries" and had also been treated for depression. (The first concern does not seem to apply to the user who last month started the Wikipedia article about the organization: His or her contributions don't extend much to other topics.)
 * Neologism revisited: A blog post from The Economist referred to the debate about the entry "malamanteau", which had been ignited earlier this year by an xkcd comic (summarized by User:WWB on his "The Wikipedian" blog). The post suggested that the word be used with a different meaning than that which Randall Munroe (xkcd's author) had tried to establish with the cartoon.
 * Jimbo interview: Canadian newspaper Toronto Star published a brief interview with Jimmy Wales about Wikipedia and other topics.