Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-28/In the news

The catacombs of contested deletions
Search marketing specialist Danny Sullivan wrote a scathing account of his experiences on Wikipedia trying to intervene on behalf of a colleague, Jessie Stricchiola, whose article had been deleted at AfD in late October. While the unpopularity of Wikipedia's restrictive notability policies for biographies among internet users and the furor of subject matter experts at its egalitarian norms will not be news to readers, Sullivan also had harsh words for the complexity and relentless user-unfriendliness of the procedures he encountered. Confronted with Afd-top – ''The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.'' – Sullivan seethes "Already, I’m annoyed. As usual, trying to contribute to Wikipedia means that you’ve got to know what a "talk page" is or where to find a "deletion review"." Finding that the talk page the notice directed him to had evidently been deleted, and no indication as to where the "deletion review" might be found, Sullivan (as ) tried to post directly on the closed AfD itself his rationale for why Stricchiola merited an entry.

Next he was confronted with an email notifying him that his user talkpage had been changed (this feature, activated by default in user preferences, is documented at mw:New Editor Engagement/Email notifications), linking to a diff of the edit in question, which provoked Sullivan further: "OMG, my message is a revision comparison of what’s been added to the user talk page that I barely even know that I have? Who creates this type of mess? Who tolerates this as an effective working environment?" The edit was an explanation that posting comments on a closed AfD is discouraged, and containing a link to the deletion review. Sullivan followed the link in the email to the userpage of the editor who had left the message to respond, but was greeted with a notice asking him not to post messages there, but on the user talk page instead, leading him to remark "Oh, don’t post messages on the page I was specifically told to go to in order to contact the editor. Nice, Wikipedia." At the top of the user talkpage, the following notice appeared:

This served only to incite Sullivan further: "Yeah, there’s nothing like that. If you’re leaving a message about an article that was deleted, assuming you even know how to leave a message, you’re also informed to do it with an “appropriate red link” with instructions on how to make links red, except that leads to a page that doesn’t explain this, and OMG, did my head just explode over all this bureaucracy?" He protested to the editor who had left him the message, venting his frustration questioning whether the Wikipedia interface and bureaucracy was serving the interests of creating an "accurate crowd-sourced encyclopedia", or only those of the "incredibly tiny few number of people who care to play in the high priesthood of Wikipedia editing". From here, he proceeded to deletion review, but the morass of unintelligible instructions there failed to indicate to Sullivan that it was the appropriate venue for objecting to closed deletion discussions, and he sought out Requests for undeletion instead. The sight that confronted him (pictured at top) sufficed to push Sullivan over the edge. The process asked for the title of the deleted page, which he did not know how to find, and explained the venue's purpose in alternately vague and impenetrable terms (for pages that have been "uncontroversially deleted" by processes "such as CSD G6" or that had had "little or no participation"). After leaving a request for the restoration of the article, which was declined with a default template, he concluded: "It’s insane. It really is. And with respect to the many hardworking people who have created a generally useful resource, it’s not a friendly resource. It doesn’t have systems, as far as I can tell, designed to help it improve. It has walls, walls you believe (with many good reasons) are designed to protect it from being vandalized. But those walls themselves are their own type of vandalization of the very resource you’re trying to protect."

The internet responds
Comments were closed on Sullivan's post, but it was picked up at Hacker News, where it attracted reams of discussion between sympathisers and Wikipedia defenders. Commenters defended Wikipedia's inclusion criteria, made the point that people should not try to add or edit content about subjects related to them due to potential conflict of interest, and debated whether those responsible for creating the bulk of content on Wikipedia were a separate caste from those controlling the byzantine and cryptic maintenance systems. That these systems were prohibitively bureaucratic and hostile to new participants was less contested, but many put the blame on an overactive immune system that had developed in response to combating articles like the one that Sullivan was trying to save.

Journalist and Wikipedia critic Seth Finkelstein wrote a response to the episode on his personal blog, focusing on the issue of the treatment of subject matter experts, which he said was indicative of "very troubling social undercurrents" – that experts such as Sullivan expect to be treated with respect but run up against a status hierarchy of an altogether different kind at Wikipedia, where only "with the right political skills, clique alliances, and of course a huge amount of time and effort, that expert could hope rise to as exalted a ranking level as the Wikipedia editor". Finkelstein cited this culture, and the alienation of experts it inspires, as a contributory factor in his not embracing the project.

A twist in the tale
ReadWriteWeb senior writer Marshall Kirkpatrick was also inspired to respond to Sullivan's post, but from a different angle: his own experiences in writing the Fubonn Shopping Center article as an inexperienced editor. His account is markedly different from that of Sullivan. Kirkpatrick's first step was to review and copy the coding of the articles related to the topic, then adapt it to fit his topic, and finally flesh it out with sources gleaned from Google News. He ran into a stumbling block when trying to copy an image from Flickr's Creative Commons section for use in the article, as it was swiftly deleted, as he learned from "a long paragraph of confusing explanation". A patrolling editor made some minor changes to the article and assessed it for WikiProject Oregon as Start-class and Low-importance, causing Kirkpatrick to take issue with the latter designation, after research revealed the notoriously uneven application of the rating of the assessment scheme. He commented: "There were some parts of the experience that I found confusing and disappointing, but when I woke up in the morning I felt silly for having complained about that the night before on Twitter and Google Plus. This was my first major contribution to the giant sprawling, pseudo-democratic experiment that is Wikipedia. Why am I entitled to just jump in and be praised for everything I do?"

Despite conceding his encounter with Wikipedians had made him "bristle", Kirkpatrick did not endorse technologist Nat Torkington's acerbic invocation of Wikipedians as "vain nano-Napoleons" who "having built a valuable resource ... hide behind hostile UIs". He was enthused by the positive responses to the Fubonn article expressed by readers through the Article Feedback Tool, and began to muse that involving his nine-year-old niece in contributing to Wikipedia would be "an incredibly empowering experience for a young person old enough to appreciate it." He concluded: "If Wikipedia can figure out how to welcome more and more new editors onto the site, and I don’t think coddling us is necessary, perhaps that will become reality in the future. It’s an incredibly complicated community management situation though. Danny Sullivan’s experience having his entry about an important woman in technology get deleted is super frustrating and an example of how things can go wrong.

But there’s a whole lot about that’s right about Wikipedia, too. The difference between many Wikipedia entries and old encyclopedia entries on the same topics is so substantial that it deserves to be sung about from mountain tops."

Fun and games with the Fundraiser
The 2011 Fundraiser continued its successful start this week (see "News and notes"), but its reception in the news media and wider internet focused less on its record-smashing haul of donations and more on how to get rid of or ridicule the donation appeal banners, which have been variously found to be sources of annoyance, intimidation and hilarity.

Female-oriented tech site Chip Chick led the coverage with one of the more serious assessments, outlining the background of what the Wikimedia Foundation is and why it has opted for funding based on donations rather than advertisements—as some commenters have called for (see Signpost coverage). Network World revealed that even Jimmy Wales found the banners annoying, but as TechEye reported defended the use of his appeal as effective in raising money, while TIME magazine offered readers "three easy steps" to banishing the banners from reader's view.

On November 22, the Jimmy Wales banners were replaced with those of Wikimedia Foundation Senior Designer Brandon Harris, whose long, lustrous hair and stern countenance elicited much glee, fear and speculations as to the programmer's possible biker gang/metal band affiliations from internet denizens. TechCrunch writer Alexia Tsotsis reacted to the switch by swiping "Now You’re Just Messing With Us Wikipedia", after being inundated with emails comparing Harris's appearance to that of Jesus, Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger and a member of Hell's Angels. The column was greeted with fierce defences of Harris and the fundraiser in the comments.

Such was the reaction on the wider web that Harris submitted an AMA ("ask me anything") question-and-answer session on Reddit, the popularity of which soon took off and rocketed the programmer to the front page of the site. A link to the Foundation's fundraiser statistics visualisation tool Harris included to illustrate fundraising progress drew so many views that it crashed the tool and caused a server outage that brought down Wikimedia sites for 30 minutes on November 27 (see "Technology report"). The Q&A drew the attention of Gawker, New York magazine and a recalcitrant TechCrunch. The focus of the coverage was Harris' revelations that the alignment of the pictures in the appeals over the titles of articles was intentional on account of being lucrative, and the secret fashion tip he used to get his hair just so.

The internet was not done with the jovial potential of the fundraising drive, as Crunchyroll and Something Awful offered parodies – "Get Moe Wikipedia" Offers a Personal Appeal from K-On's Azusa and Please read: A personal appeal from Wikipedia guitarist Dave Mustaine – the Daily What proffered an animated interpretation and twitterers exulted over the availability of a Jimmy Wales action figure. Readers alarmed by the paucity of levity in responses to the charitable appeal may take comfort in the hypothesis that sober-minded analyses are being held at bay while the Fundraiser statistics tool recovers from the voracious interest of internet users overwhelmed by the charisma of Wikipedia's hirsute ambassadors.

In brief

 * ANC article blackout protest: Times LIVE reported the blackout protest instigated in this edit to the Criticism section of the African National Congress (ANC) article in protest at passage of the Protection of State Information Bill by the ANC-dominated South African National Assembly (edit summary: Censored by the POIB on 22 Nov). ANC spokesman Keith Khoza decried the action as inconsistent with a civilised society, asking "How does that assist any cause or anybody to tamper with information?" Critics of the bill allege it is an attack on press freedom. The IP address from which the edit was made geolocates to Johannesburg. The story was also picked up by News24, Business Live and Memeburn (who identified the use of similar tactics in Twitter protests).
 * For whom the bell Knols: Google this week announced the closure of a number of its faltering initiatives including Knol, a user-generated reference work hailed as a potential "Wikipedia-killer" after its launch in 2008 (see Signpost coverage). The announcement was widely picked up on in the online tech press, with articles in the Wall Street Journal blog, ZDnet, PC Mag, TechCrunch, SearchEngineWatch and Technologizer, which offered an analysis seeking to explain "Why Knol Failed". The demise of Knol, whose contents are expected to be exported to WordPress-based platform Annotum, had long been anticipated, as Business Insider reported, saying "Knol was supposed to provide a more authoritative source than Wikipedia – articles are written by subject matter experts – but after almost two years, the site has so many gaps in content that it's practically worthless. Google should be indexing the Web's knowledge, not providing a half-hearted storehouse for some randomly selected portion of it." One Wikipedia competitor refusing to give up is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose launch of their latest mobile offering, an app for the iPhone, was this week noted by the Chicago Tribune.
 * Scientists urged to flock to the wiki that dismisses them: Inside Higher Ed covered the recent "call to duty" by the American Sociological Association for its members to get involved in improving Wikipedia. This announcement was soon followed by that of the Association for Psychological Science's own Wikipedia Initiative, as Scientific American reported. Both focus on having students contribute to Wikipedia articles as part of assignments, to strengthen the encyclopaedia's coverage of their field, and are supported by the Wikimedia Foundation's United States Education Program. Meanwhile, chemist Antony John Williams, head of the ChemSpider public chemistry database which encourages its members to act as custodians of Wikipedia content, wrote a post asking "Why are pornstars more notable than scientists on Wikipedia?" in which he expressed his frustration that so many of his contributions were being rejected on the site. Williams' edits of his contemporaries' biographies had been flagged for conflict of interest and notability concerns, which led him to explore what else Wikipedia demarcated as (un)notable, a quest which concluded in his drawing attention to the gulf between the notability requirements for academics and those for pornographic actors.

Corrections
''Are you a regular follower of coverage of Wikipedia and related topics in the media? The Signpost is looking for regular writers for this column; interested editors are invited to email wikipediasignpost@gmail.com or leave a note in the Newsroom. Please consider contributing!''