Jimmy Wales shows favoritism on Wikipedia

by Gregory Kohs
March 4, 2011

There's something for everyone in this one. A US Congressman, a sexy tech-celebrity, statistical analysis, a Peruvian lady, Jimbo, and Sue!

Come on... crickets both here and on the Examiner page? Makes me just want to stop writing about important WMF-related activities altogether.

Jimbo = Major Snoozer …

A sleazebag is a sleazebag as time goes by …

You really need to put your skills to work on the Big Picture, Mr. Konkrite …

Jon

Jimmy Wales shows favoritism on Wikipedia

Examiner.com
According to his e-mail auto-reply, Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales is on a “semi-holiday”, most likely to play the supporting role for Kate Garvey, the new mother of his second child. Garvey is British and is the former diary secretary of UK Prime Munster …

That shows the danger of treating newspapers as "reliable sources". She was never his diary secretary. Such a being is a junior permanent civil servant who literally keeps a diary to ensure that a minister is not double-booked. John Prescott very famously had one too. Garvey was a "special advisor", a politician temporarily brought into Whitehall and paid by the taxpayer to help a minister. It was indeed erroneously announced that she would be a diary secretary but that was just confusion by people who didn't understand.

Maybe either Kate or her boyfriend will respond in the comments field, and then the article can be properly corrected?

Jon (or whichever mod, but I have to believe it was Jonny), thanks for putting this here. After about 4 hours (the usual maximum amount of time it takes Google to decide if a particular submitted Examiner story is actual "news" for its feeder), I had given up on this particular piece gracing their feed.

However, it looks like they took about 24 hours to decide that my work this time was, in fact, suitable for their wider distribution. What does that mean for the article?

Pre-Google, with only a post on Wikipedia Review to pump the article … 30 page views.

Post-Google, at least 120 additional page views.

I also sent the link to Julia Allison, so that might have accounted for another 10 page views as she forwarded it to a circle of friends. She replied to me:

This blog post also led to about 70 additional hits on the Examiner article.

Poor Julia.

The Google Analytics stats are in. This article of mine received 2.1 times the traffic over a 24-hour period than any other Examiner article of mine ever has.