http://slashdot.org/submission/1231968/Jim...st-go?art_pos=1

Mod up!

Hey, mod up! It was red for a half hour and now it's down to yellow.

Yo, go help unconfuse the Slashdotters:

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/05/07/04...-From-Wikipedia

Larry, you're on the wrong venue with this. Slashdotters are, nearly universally, armchair internet libertarians; they are going to be absolutely antithetical to your position on this issue. Basically what you're doing is sending out an alert to them: "Yo, copy off all the porn on Commons before it's all gone!"

In any case, Slashdot hasn't been an opinion leader in a decade; the site is a backwater cesspool of barely any more significance than Wikipedia Review. Nobody who matters reads Slashdot.

I confess that's the first time I ever looked at Slashdot, although I've heard of it. It looked like a much worse version of a Wikipedia talk page. People with silly names, incoherent ranting. Enough.

Kelly's right about this. You've done a great job on exposing Wikipedia because you started the discussion outside the Tech Press. The usual course is the coverage starts in the libertarian tech press who are given ample opportunity to frame the issue in their own terms. By the time MSM pick a story up they usually just use the pre-established narrative. By beginning with Fox you caught them with their pants down.

I know a thing or two about Slashdot. You might remember that I work on the Internet. They still have a lot of influence, although of course they have come down in the world.

Frankly I think you'd get better reception at boingboing than you will at Slashdot. I'd think you'd be better off engaging Internet feminist, educational, and political communities than you will the technonerd crowd at Slashdot. Slashdotters tend not to be politically active, and when they are they almost always on the far fringes and get routinely dismissed as crackpots. The only way this works in your favor is if you get them up in arms against you (which I admit is possible), but even so that just makes it into a process story ("Internet child protection advocate attacked by crazed nerds!") that might get you 15 seconds of fame but will not, ultimately, accomplish anything.

Get the attention of Alas, a Blog, Pam's House Blend, the Huffington Post, and the Volokh Conspiracy and you will have done far more to further your cause than you will with a double dozen Slashdot stories. If you can get one of the bloggers at WoW to notice, that would be totally killer.

One of the things that most disturbs me about Slashdot is the corruption of the "modding up/down" feature, in violation of the site's policy. In much the same way that the "central cabal" on WP silences and marginalizes rival editors, there are some on Slashdot who will corruptly manipulate the "modding" process to silence their rivals and critics.

Dr. Sanger, with the utmost respect, I think there are better ways to get your message out than Slashdot. Slashdot can reach a large number of people, but if you really want to make change happen on Wikipedia, then the relevant pressure groups aren't the people who read Slashdot. If you want my advice, though I doubt you do, you should spend your time preparing an Op-Ed for the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

History has shown that there is essentially one way to make things change on Wikipedia and that is to somehow apply pressure on Jimmy Wales. It was Wales who, after the Seigenthaler incident, acted to prevent anonymous editors from creating pages (a worthless change but a change nonetheless). It was Wales who announced that flagged revisions would become policy (though we must wait to see if that actually transpires), and though there was a so-called "consensus" it was Wales who gave the nod to enabling semiprotection. At the end of the day, the "community" on Wikipedia is too divided and lacks the leadership to ever agree on substantial change. For better or worse, only Wales has the power to force through major initiatives.

What does this mean? It means that in order to make something change on Wikipedia, you can't work through the grassroots, you have to influence elite opinion. The one thing that over and over again has worked to put pressure on Wales is negative press. Whether this puts pressure on him because he is genuinely shocked or because he sees change as an effective PR move I don't know, but frankly it doesn't matter. If you want to make things change on Wikipedia, you have to appeal to the broadest possible audience. The place to do that is in the mainstream media, and so Dr. Sanger, please write an op-ed piece. Please get it published in a major outlet. Please. And all of the rest of you, why not write to your local paper?

There's another way that change might come about on Wikipedia, through government pressure or through pressure from major donors, but both of those are also most likely to be influenced by attention in the mainstream press.

Finally, I had myself vowed to stay off this site, and I am breaking that vow, but I made that vow, in part, because I did not see Wikipedia Review as an engine for change, and I think in this situation things are different. I stand by the idea, though, that you won't get anywhere by talking to people who are already involved in Wikipedia enough to read Wikipedia Review or the Signpost or the Village Pump, etc., but if this site could serve as a place to plan ideas, then it could be something much more than it is right now.

Nice to hear from you again John Limey.

Oy. The point is that tech stories are often broken on Slashdot. This is probably why the story got onto PC Pro. This makes it possible to get the attention of the big bloggers etc.

They get "broken" in more ways than one.

No, they're not. Slashdot rarely ever breaks a tech story anymore; that's far more likely to happen on any of a half dozen of other blogs now. Slashdot hasn't been an opinion leader, not even in tech, since about 1999, and these days they usually run three to five days behind the curve when it comes to tech stories.

I personally think FirstMonday might be a good venue.

Jon

If I am not mistaken, FirstMonday is a peer-reviewed journal. It can take six months to a year for a submission to appear in FirstMonday.

Yes, I'm hoping WP won't still be here in a year, but just in case we aren't that lucky — I wasn't really talking about the fist-in-the-pan issue of the wik …

Jon

I can agree with that---their participation fell off dramatically after the dotcom collapse in 2001-2002. Today most of their hardcore commenters are just "free culture" trolls.

Nevertheless, Larry did the right thing--otherwise this story would have been ignored.

If you think the Slashdot gang is annoying, read the Reddit threads dealing with this.

Yep, the Internet is still for porn. So say all the nerds who inhabit it.