Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-01-31/In focus



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It is not the case that Donna Strickland had an article that was deleted. A draft was written and declined [1]. XOR'easter (talk) 20:58, 31 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hrm. The correction is appreciated, though now I'm torn between thinking that's a distinction without a difference, in terms of society at large, and feeling like that's even worse, in terms of how it reflects on our own processes / biases. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 14:20, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Declining a draft is a decision taken by a single person, whereas deleting a page requires a whole process. If the Donna Strickland draft had been promoted and then taken to Articles for deletion, I'm almost certain it would have been kept, per the notability guideline for academics. (And I've seen a lot of deletion debates for scientists and other scholarly types over the last few years.) XOR'easter (talk) 16:45, 1 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@XOR'easter: Well, yeah, exactly. So once an article is successfully created, it can take the bureaucratic equivalent of the Twelve Labors to get it deleted. (Ignoring, for the sake of argument, the Speedy Deletion process.) But that same article's initial creation (or, acceptance into mainspace) can hinge on a yea/nay call from a single person? That feels perhaps a tad imbalanced, or at least there's a case to be made that it is. Not to mention, it creates a prime opportunity for lots of what could look like fairly arbitrary and inconsistent decision-making, when viewed as a whole. (Through no fault of the individuals making those decisions, and no matter how careful and impartial each of them are, or try to be.)
(I also don't completely understand the "not edited in six months" part of that speedy-deletion notice, since the history seems to indicate that the draft had only been created 2 months prior. But maybe that was a later addition to the template, and regardless it's tangential to the decision-making process itself.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 19:12, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@FeRDNYC: in my opinion you make the same mistake as a lot of the media coverage around the Strickland decline. We would love nothing more than to have a panel of 10 editors reviewing each draft and working to improve every promising piece of content someone writes in good faith to the point where it can be included. But we are overwhelmed and number too few to do this. This draft process is overrun by conflict-of-interest editors whose financial imperatives to get crap accepted would massively outweigh our hobbyist editors' ability to do one of the least-rewarding, highest skillset, most undervalued tasks on the site if we didn't let the few outstanding human beings who consistently work in this area apply strict standards for acceptance.
The Signpost piece touches on a very interesting point about the media (and by extension the public) viewing Wikipedia as "the Man" as time goes on. But we are not The Man. In so many cases, people attribute malice to what is actually just lack of resources. An error of omission is likely due to inaction rather than conscious "suppression" of information. Poor-quality articles are likely due to lack of eyes on it rather than that the article represents the standards and ideals of the community. If anyone is responsible for the lack of coverage of women on Wikipedia then why would it be the editors we have rather than the people who choose not to edit? (Sure, people biting newbies or setting double standards in treatment of content can make us complicit, but none of us are morally obliged to write any particular article that is missing, because we are volunteers.)
On the other hand, I don't feel articles for deletion is particularly burdensome and it is often a painless and low-drama process. As for the six months question, drafts are deleted only after six months of no edits (unless they're egregious spam or similar), and can be continually resubmitted after improvements in accordance with the reviewer feedback—this is why a draft decline is just not comparable with deletion. The reason the notice shows in that old revision even though it was only two months old at the time is because the template looks at the current date whenever you view the page (so it wouldn't have shown that notice at the time). — Bilorv (talk) 00:21, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know whether the actual story makes Wikipedia look better or worse than the story that's often told (I could probably spin it either way if I tried). The first step is to get the facts accurate, after which we can debate the interpretation. XOR'easter (talk) 13:49, 4 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A great overview of public perception of Wikipedia. I can't speak to Harrison, but I've read Omer Benjakob before and they are one of the few journalists who really "get" what we do here. I predict that in the future wiki press coverage will still include stuff about the gender gap, it's a given at this point. I do hope we will be able to see Wikipedia expand to other countries and have the media discuss that. Time will tell! -Indy beetle (talk) 02:38, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Sure, you know Harrison, he's the guy who has a piece in Slate about Wikipedia (almost) every month explaining Wiki issues to the public mostly from multiple editors' points of view. What I am always amazed at is his ability to find the right words and phrases to explain what I thought was a very complicated concept. I "borrow" a few of those words and phrases from time to time - once I've seen them, why settle for second best? Plus I'm always amazed at his relaxed writing style - it's never work to read through the text no matter how much content is in there. As far as Omer - all I need to say is that about February 5 2020, a month before WHO declared that there was a pandemic, Omer wrote a great article on the work Wikipedians were doing to combat COVID disinformation. Talk about a scoop! Dozens of very good papers and journalists repeated the story for several months. A 3rd journalist should be mentioned, Noam Cohen who's been writing great Wiki-journalism from almost the very beginning, as noted in the text here. Smallbones(smalltalk) 01:53, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Very well written, some great thoughts in there. I somewhat bristle at the idea that we should hand out access to deleted content to reporters, but the idea that we need to be more accessible and understandable to the media is super important. AdmiralEek (talk) 16:55, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is an exceptional piece and it has given me a lot to think about. It also raises some points I've already been thinking about recently:
    • Many times, we as journalists have been told to "fix" Wikipedia instead of write about it. I think journalists would be better doing better journalism if they want to help fix Wikipedia. It's now basically a cliche to hear a celebrity complaining about the inaccuracy of their Wikipedia article, but that information is usually just repetition of news media. We're the symptom, not the disease. They never want to look inwards. WP:CITOGENESIS is a huge problem but it's really in the power of journalists, not us, to avert its cause. At the same time, I don't think the individual journalist is my enemy; rather their material conditions are. The solution is journalists being less overworked, better-paid and having more workers' rights. Unfortunately, these goals are unachievable under free market economics and populist bourgeois governments, which respectively control the industry and the regulators and lead to an outcome where journalists scramble for clicks and only steer clear of libel, rather than patiently collecting the highest-quality information.
    • The more it seems as if Wikipedia has become aligned with Big Tech, the more likely the encyclopedia will receive similarly adverse coverage. And yet we have no choice in the matter! Big Tech abuse our open license in many instances, like YouTube's PR move of putting links to Wikipedia articles beneath (e.g.) neo-Nazi propaganda topics rather than removing them, as if the supporters of such videos don't already view Wikipedia as part of the disdained "liberal elite-run mainstream media". They have the ability to monitor their site 100 times better than they do, and they are sometimes quite rightly satirised for this (e.g. The Onion), though woefully inadequate attention is given to the abusive conditions of the few overworked outsourced moderators YouTube have. But the offloading onto Wikipedia is a trick: fault with the system becomes fault with Wikipedia rather than fault with Big Tech. The headline is "Amazon shouldn't trust Wikipedia" rather than "We shouldn't trust Amazon", even though Alexa has been found cherry-picking Wikipedia article content to spread antisemitism.
    • Much of the popular coverage of Wikipedia is still lacking and is either reductive or superficial, treating Wikipedia as a unified voice and amplifying minor errors and vandalism. Absolutely. Every time they treat us as static rather than changing, or complete rather than in progress, they actively decrease readers' awareness and ability for critical evaluation of what they are reading. I see people in internet arguments treating Wikipedia either (implicitly) as an unerring body of All Truth or a vandalism-ridden 99% false site, and almost never anything even resembling what Wikipedia is. "Reductive or superficial" coverage allows the first view to go unchallenged, while the latter is caused by media "amplifying minor errors". If you understand how Wikipedia is written, you can evaluate an article's reliability on a case-by-case basis or at least apply some general principles about what our biases are and what our strengths are.
— Bilorv (talk) 01:32, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Just an aside on Bilorv's example of a misreported article "Amazon shouldn't trust Wikipedia" Yes, that's a doozy. Gearbrain, which seems to exist to sell computer gear, was rewriting a story from the Sun (which reads like an urban legend) which they got from Kennedy News & Media (the link explains how they pay for cute or horrific stories). Checking the Wikipedia article likely involved, it wasn't edited very much in the 3 months before the Sun published the story, and the word "stab" never appeared during that time. In short Alexa wasn't quoting Wikipedia. Rather if it was Alexa at all (on the video), it was likely quoting a cynical paid-for hoax. Smallbones(smalltalk) 03:35, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    A source worse than The S*n, never thought I'd see the day. At least The S*n bothers to quote "It said it was reading from Wikipedia but when I checked the article online, it didn't say [the sentences about killing myself] on there". But it ends with It is believed Alexa may have sourced the rogue text from Wikipedia, which can be edited by anyone. Journalists need to learn how to click the button "View history". There's no point saying "it's believed that there may have been..." about a completely open-source website with a transparent revision history. — Bilorv (talk) 11:26, 3 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A quick note to say thanks for the kind and constructive feedback on the article. Yes, we certainly worked hard and spent a lot of time on it for Wikipedia @ 20. Stephenbharrison (talk) 04:02, 4 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]