Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-04-26/In the media


 * This post-publication piece may interest readers 200,000 volunteers have become the fact checkers of the internet. Eddie891 Talk Work 22:19, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Let's not give ourselves too much slobbery self-congratulation. FAC is a dysfunctional mess that merely appears to function because it passes non-controversial articles, usually on tiny subjects like a road, a town, a coin, a defunct magazine, or a species of bird or fern. It is not even vaguely competent enough to evaluate meaningful articles like Bengal famine of 1943, which is the locus of a large amount of disinformation. The FAC reviewer did not even bother to read the FAC. If FAC has no validity, then neither does Wikipedia as a whole.Axylus.arisbe (talk) 04:31, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
 * There is absolutely no incentivization for reviewers at any featured-review process to give any meaningful feedback. Any feedback beyond "fix grammar" is completely ignored by the nominator and other reviewers.  Nergaal (talk) 14:45, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Isn't one of the Internet's main problem that many individual contributors remain anonymous? Even on Wikipedia, users normally employ aliases, although they are encouraged to validate an associated e-mail address they own (which itself may be an alias). Perhaps Wikipedia should take the lead by verifying the true identity of users, using a type of authority control on user pages to enhance the unique ID that already exists for each user. This could be linked to other standard information such as the user's passport number or photograph. Clearly users would have to opt in to the system: I'm not suggesting (yet!) that anonymous contributions be prohibited. However, users who did take part could then be awarded an enhanced status. Incidentally, I note that currently there is not even any system in place to prevent users having multiple log-in credentials on Wikipedia, although I accept that there may be valid reasons for allowing this. Michael D. Turnbull (talk) 15:16, 9 May 2018 (UTC)
 * That's one of the theories, a more nuanced one is that when people build up a reputation in a particular community they care about that reputation - whether their identity in that community is pseudonymous or the same as the real world. We cover a lot of businesses and we have a lot of articles on controversial people, pseudonymity is our best defence for our editors on such subjects. If we agree to the Public Relations industry's request that we insist on real name editing we say goodbye to neutral point of view on large swathes of the Wikipedia and hand them to the spammers, PR flaks and anyone who wants to employ lawyers to enforce their version of events. As for abusive sockpuppetry, we don't just have systems in place to detect it, we have a long long history of sockpuppets detected and banned.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  08:40, 15 May 2018 (UTC)
 * 1)	“We cover a lot of businesses and we have a lot of articles on controversial people” True. However, Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and one of its tenets is that every statement is backed up by a verifiable external source, preferably a secondary or tertiary source. If I, as a named individual contributor, quote a source that said something controversial but do so in a neutral tone, pointing out that there are other views (and referencing those also), what would be the problem? I don’t see the need to be anonymous.
 * 2)	“[if] we insist on real name editing we say goodbye to neutral point of view.” Why? Neutrality just means presenting the evidence without adding personal bias: a contributor can do that whether anonymous or not.
 * 3)	 “And hand them to the spammers, PR flaks and anyone who wants to employ lawyers to enforce their version of events.” In my (idealistic, I agree) world, there would be no spam because everyone could see who the contributor was and could detect if that contributor tried to express the same view over and over again. Wikipedia can already deal with most edit wars and it would be even easier to do so if each contributor could only make contributions from one account. I don’t think that “lawyers and PR flaks” would be in a stronger position than anyone else to enforce a specific version of events, since the references would be there in the article for all to see.
 * Can you give me some specific examples that would support your view? Michael D. Turnbull (talk) 16:12, 18 May 2018 (UTC)