Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-05-27/In the media



In the continuing saga of User:Qworty's outing as author Robert Clark Young, several blogs and websites including Salon.com covered the now-banned user's anti-Pagan editing. In an article published on 22 May 2013, TechEye—calling Wikipedia (albeit inconsistently) "Wackypedia"—described Qworty's edits as a "reign of terror" and were pleased to find that he had not succeeded in removing several prominent Pagan biographies from the encyclopedia. The article cited one of Qworty's talk page comments as saying that practitioners of Stregheria (Italian Paganism) were "mentally ill, delusional people". The same day, Pagan blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters wrote on the group blog "The Wild Hunt" about Qworty's lack of NPOV and revenge editing against Jeff Rosenbaum, a prominent Pagan figure. Pitzl-Waters also quoted Qworty's previously mentioned comments about Stregheria at length and mentioned Qworty's numerous sockpuppets, concluding his piece with a call for his readers to help improve Wikipedia's Pagan content (see WikiProject Neopaganism).

On 24 May 2013, Andrew Leonard published a follow-up to his earlier article on Qworty (see related Signpost coverage) in Salon. Leonard pointed out the irony in Qworty's accusations that prominent Pagan writer David Jay Brown edited his own article, which was deleted in November 2012. Leonard quoted Qworty's comments during the AFD: "[Brown sees himself as] a modern-day messiah who combined all of the powers of Jesus and Freud and Einstein and Marx and, oh why the heck not, Timothy Leary, lol." Leonard states that Qworty's editing in this area was brought to his attention by the Pagan community after he published the initial outing article, and that the Pagan community was very concerned about Qworty's deletion nominations, as they felt those people were notable. Leonard noted the irony in Qworty's comments about Brown seen alongside his inflated writing about himself, quoting both extensively. Both Rosenbaum and Brown responded to Leonard's request for comment, saying that though they had violated the rules about spam and COI years ago, they had since learned how to edit properly and had contributed productively. Right as the story of Young's identity broke, Brown nominated his article for deletion under the same rationale Qworty had posted for his biography, what Leonard called "hilarious in its own perverse way"—though the article was kept.

In brief

 * Penalty for citing Wikipedia: An article on Patheos.com published on 23 May 2013 reported one professor's penalty if students "dare" cite Wikipedia&mdash;he will penalize them for citing Wikipedia, edit the article they cited, and then penalize them a second time for it not having the information claimed. The object is to have students realize that Wikipedia can be changed by anyone&mdash;though in view of this exact problem, Wikipedia’s guide to citing itself recommends that researchers use a permanent link rather than the normal URL.
 * Bad Astronomy on front page: Phil Plait reported in Slate on 24 May 2013 that his book, Bad Astronomy, was featured on Wikipedia's front page. He said he had Susan Gerberic to thank for this, who was spearheading a Guerilla Skepticism effort, a Wikipedia editing team whose mission is "to improve skeptical content of Wikipedia. We do this by improving pages of our skeptic spokespeople, providing noteworthy citations, and removing the unsourced claims from paranormal and pseudoscientific pages."
 * Wikipedia's coverage of hentai astonishes Japanese: Video game blog Kotaku, part of Gawker, reviewed Wikipedia's coverage of hentai, which is adult-oriented anime, manga and video game content, after related debates on 2ch, Japan's biggest online forum. The article showed that coverage in the Chinese and English Wikipedias was far more voluminous than in the Japanese Wikipedia, but attributed this in part to a cultural difference&mdash;the concept of hentai is more limited in Japan, while in the West, it is used as a general shorthand for adult art. "But as amused as 2ch commenters seemed by the wordy 'hentai' Wikipedia entries, they were also impressed. 'I want to send my congratulations,' wrote one user. 'This is amazing.
 * Simple English Wikipedia: The Week (US edition) had a story on the Simple English Wikipedia on 24 May 2013, comparing the descriptions of 16 basic concepts in the English and Simple English Wikipedias. "Even native English speaking adults can find it useful when the regular English Wikipedia leaves them scratching their heads over existentialism or the Higgs-Boson particle," the magazine said.
 * Edit wars mapped: On 29 May 2013, The Daily Dot reviewed the work of researchers who have created a Wikipedia conflict map. The article quoted Mark Graham, one of the map's creators: "Understanding the geography of conflict on different Wikipedia language editions gives us fascinating insights into what different groups of people feel is worth fighting about."