Wikipedians do it for love. Really.
- by Olivia Stren; Globe and Mail

Excerpts:

Wikipedians are the lonely guy who always volunteered to run the projector in grade school.

I always ran the projector because I was the only person who actually knew how.

Great. Another disgusting butt-nozzling that Sue can put on her CV. Although Ms. Stren appears to be nothing but a celebrity/lifestyle puff-piece writer.....

Here she is, blubbering about buying a condo. Now you know where she lives.

Female Canadian media hack seeks new position in sunny Kalifornia.
See Puff purr. Purr, purr, purr. Oh, oh, oh, funny, funny Puff.

Jon

haha. I was assuming the source was another horrendous British tabloid with less accurate content than Wikipedia (like the ever amusing Daily Mail), but the Globe and Mail is actually Canadian. But apparently just as bad?

"adoptive parents"

I need a spiked Fresca.

And after I had a really big meal and everything...


Uh, sorry Sue, only the last part of that statement is actually true... and their desire for praise has absolutely nothing to do with "love," you can trust me on that score.

Remind them all that Jimbo says altruism is evil.

Narcissists just want to be praised.

Evidence of my moral corruption no doubt, but I read it without the slightest twinge of my gag response. After all Gardner's performance was standard for a marketing journalism piece, both the interviewee and the journo know what the deal is and the ground rules are set out in advance. This is the same world as that in which Coke is just a refreshing drink, Macdonald's sells nutritious meals and your Bank has the well being of your future as its guiding principle. Wikipedia is a 'commerced' entity, a business with opperating with a pretence of being philanthropised, why therefore wouldn't its ED give it the fullest slush if given the opportunity ?

Of course the 'story' is bollox but until there's an overwhelming: 'causes toothdecay/obesity/financial meltdown/pollutes the Gulf of Mexico angle, then Gardener and co are going to be able to ride a journalistic softped[d][a]ling (softporn) technocool for the masses lovein with much of the media. There's no point in expecting Wikiedia to behave differently than any other business in its dealings with the media, when opportunities to sell are opportunities to excell.

A.virosa

And, of course, for the children...and sometimes farm animals.

I think we all understand that Sue Gardner is giving us all the wub à dub dub she gets paid the Big Loonies, er, Big Bucks‡ to give us — the thing that some of us nøøveau media nøøbs are still a bit schlocked to see is that an e-litterata with all the e-vident talent of Olivia Stren is being paid enough to buy her downtown Toronto condo for whatever the hecque it is she does.

It's enough to make you think the Glob & Mall is just askin' for what Wikipedia is tryin' to do to them.

Jon

‡ At the current rate of exchange, 1 Looney = 0.97 Bucks.

Olivia Stren really got bashed in the comments. Maybe she'll learn in the future to be a journalist, not a conduit for PR.

Hope springs eternal...yes.

Oy vey! I'm going to have to dissect that article.

The tone of the article sounds like fluff propaganda. No deep questions. No critics. No other people interviewed. No signs of any other information gathering besides the interview or Wikipedia. This is terrible journalism.



Couldn't she have investigated Ms. Gardner beyond Wikipedia (which, of course, is going to be kind to one of its leaders anyway)? Again, non-objective terrible journalism.



And unrealistic as well. Unwilling to deal with the major problems like Biographies of Living People.



That's what journalists do. That's what they've always done. It's why they want to become journalists. They investigate and organize information to provide vital information to people. Why must things change? No person is ever 100% unbiased, but journalists try to give us information in the most objective way possible. Good journalists go into a story open-minded and are willing to put aside their pre-conceived notions if the facts speak otherwise. Now we have "news shows" that just have people arguing, screaming, cutting each other off, and unwilling to consider anyone else's opinion but their own. They learn nothing and teach none of us anything except that human beings are ignorant, close-minded and stupid. Just look at the drama on Wikipedia over the Climate Change arbitration or Ottava Rima going berzerk at Wikiversity. I don't want that for where I get my information. I want less madness, not more!



See paragraph above.



Waste of donor and Wikimedia Foundation money. "Weary as a spark plug?" What kind of analogy is that? How about "Weary as an English Wikipedian Arbitrator?" or "Weary as a banned editor?"



People may have had their hearts in the right place when Wikipedia began, but no one had a plan. When the Pilgrims were about to leave the Mayflower, they made a compact to avoid problems in the future. When problems do present themselves on Wikipedia, it usually takes a scandal in order to force a change.

Gardner, like many Wikipedians, assume that over time, Wikipedians will correct all the mistakes. That can't be true. Some articles stagnant, some are over-edited, some become caught in persistent, long-time edit wars, and the best articles require constant vigilance or some dunderhead will screw them up. It's a monumental, stressful task like Sisyphus rolling up that boulder over and over again.

It depends on the subject whether reading a text by a high school student or a PhD is best. If it's on physics, I'll take the PhD. If it's Pokemon, I'll take the high school student (though I did have a professor who specialized in American cartoons and such, so I would take his word on Pokemon over a teenager's).



What? Wait a minute. That doesn't make any sense. Didn't she just state earlier in the article about how Wikipedia was breaking away from traditional journalism? I'm confused. And poor John Caroll probably bemoaned louder after she told him that!



In terms of quantity, it's fine. What about quality, though? Thanks for mentioning Larry Sanger!



That's creepy and gives me the jibblies.



I don't understand how one can compare Wikipedia to the National Parks Service. I don't see what her point is. Wikipedia may at best be a place to start as a reference work, but it will never take the place of libraries or parks.



I know that the writer was trying to be flattering, yet it comes across as scary and truthful (emphasis mine).

I'll have to come back to this later.

It won't take a very sharp scalpel, but you'll need to take periodic breaks in the fresh air to keep from succumbing to the formaldehyde fumes.

Perhaps Sue, knowing that the correct name is "National Park Service" and not "National Parks Service", was making a point to say that Wikipedia is like a cherished institution that is inherently wrong all the time.

Well, it's not even wrong. The painful thing about WP is that it's right more often than the average person is. So it's useful.

Ask a crowd of people some true/false or yes/no standard questions like:

[A] Is July 4 celebrated as U.S. independance day because that's when the Declaration of Independance was signed?

[B] Does E=mc^2 mean that mass can be converted to energy?

[C] Is National Parks Service the correct name for the agency? (extra credit essay-- what's the funny hat they wear called, and why do they wear it?)

[D] Does a wetsuit insulate with a layer of water?

[E] Does bouyancy make an object weigh less (vs. just the scale sometimes read less)?

[F] Do all primates need vitamin C?

[H] Is venous blood blue?

[I] Is U.S. "paper" currency denser than water (does it sink)?

And so on, you'll find that Wikipedia is right, and the average person either doesn't know, or is wrong.

Indeed, it's gotten to the point in the sciences that Wikipedia is right so often that its few epic failures are now starting to stand out. The lacunae are more common, but it's harder to notice "holes."

And yet, for all their factses in all their pocketses, through those Wiki-Portals pass one of the most radically mis-educated populations that we may hope — against hope — never to see the ilk of again.

Jon

If by ‘good journalism you mean exclusively the work of people like Woodward and Bernstein then certainly Olivia Stren’s work is ‘bad’. But only a very few media operations value investigative journalism as part of their commercial operation. For much of the remaining print media and a whole chunk of the broadcast media the Globe and Mail article is reasonable quality work; yes it’s soft core marketing but that’s the nature of the product. Why else would there have been an editorial decision to publish it ?



You are missing the point, the brief of this journalist was to provide a comfortable schmooze piece, and how better to give a ‘plumped cushions’ feel, than to reference the subject’s own product to define the subject.

There’s a much larger and more worrisome context that embraces this article. With the abandonment of their own morgues and the sacking of the specialist librarians that managed them, the research base of many media operations has been severely downgraded in the last two decades. The void created by the loss of the librarians is being filled not by employing assiduous journalists who are granted increased investigation time, but by time pressed galley slaves scouring the internet looking for ‘justification copy’ – and the favourite source for many of these drudge journos is WIKIPEDIA. And the more the media rely on Wikipedia, the greater the pressure on journalists to support the idea that Wikipedia is actually trust worthy.

As Wikipedia becomes ‘legitimised’ there’s also an increasing danger that the media will become even less critical, with some media operations being fearful that criticism of Wikipedia will cause their own Wikipedia entries to be less favourably ‘maintained ‘ than those of their competitors. But again defining this as bad journalism sets the role of the journalist outside of their employer’s interest, something which has no practical basis where journalist and employer have a simple wage based relationship and the role of journalist has no vocational regulation in wider society.

Seth Finkelstein and Cade Metz may not fear the Wiki, but they have supporting editors and readerships that value critical thinking. The Globe & Mail is far closer to the mainstream of media product and while Fox News may get excited by paedophilia stories, hoping that journalism will form a bastion against the forces of ignorance riding the Web 2.0 wave is seriously naive. Much of the media has the same symbiotic/parasitic type realtionship with Wikipeda as exists between Wikipedia and Google, and there's little chance any of the players are going to try for divorce any time soon.

A.virosa