Ding!

Work In Progress …

Back In A Flash …

Ja, Ja, Ja

No, I don't have Flash enabled. Just use plain HTML.

Now what I have in mind here is a bit of PT for all those Carpal Tunnel Syndroners among us who are always breaking their arms patting themselves on the back about WR's supposed successes.

Frankly, I just don't see it.

Not if you tune in to the echolaliad of autoregenerative PR and the unchecked wikiparrotings of Wikipedia catechism that all the Major Mediots are still beating out on their empty drums for lack of surficient grit to investigate the truth.

I mean, it's 2009, for goodness sake, and you still see well-intentioned and moderately intelligent commentators referring to Wikipedia as "Transparent" or "Uncensored" or a host of other things that only someone wholly unacquainted with Wikipedia's internal workings could possibly say without choking or laughing or being struck by lightning.

Well alright, I think we can understand why well-intentioned and moderately intelligent people might not want to poke their noses all that close to the Belly Of The Beast, especially when it looks to them like Jimbo's Walefare Program for Lazy Journalists is designed to give them Job Security For Life — even if the rest of us know how deceived they are about Jimbo's designs — and so the Dirty Job of exposing the Ugly Truth About Wikipeda still goes begging.

Jon

You must be talking about this, eh?

Actually, I'm still caching up with last week's news, but I can already see that we may need a dab of disambiguation for the rank of Major Mediot.

Jon

For instance, the Very Idea that Wikipedia is For Transparency and Against Censorship, bits of mythology that derive from the Founding Ideals Of Wiki Systems — values that Wikipedia abandoned, bastardized, and warped beyond recognition almost from the very get-go.

And yet you still hear that clueless claptrap being repeated in the press by folks who have never bothered to probe it in depth for themselves.

Recent articles in several media venues, taken in conjunction with the comments thereon, not to mention the egregious censorship of many comments thereon, are a near perfect illustration of what I'm talking about.

Jon

Making A List For Future Reference —

• Padraig Reidy (29 Jan 2009), "Do wikis work?", The Guardian
  â—Š WR Discussion
• Stephen Foley (03 Feb 2009), "So is Wikipedia cracking up?, The Independent
  â—Š WR Discussion
• Michael S. Malone (06 Feb 2009), "One Man's Experiment With Wikipedia", ABC News
  â—Š WR Discussion
  â—Š WR Discussion

Jon

Good start. Perhaps this should be in the opinion-blog, with some
of the Cade Metz articles and such. Plenty here.

Well, no, I would have to count Cade Metz among the more clueful commentators on Wikipediana. And even though I begin to appreciate the Stephen Foley article more and more as time goes by, many of the comments that I see uttered there are as utterly clueless as any I've seen anywhere. So the Name of the Game here is collecting Models of Modern Major Mediots who are still chanting the Wikipediot mantras of bygone daze.

The point of the exercise being to impress upon the Local Vocals that our dear old Review has a heckuva lot more work to do in terms of getting even the basic facts about Wikipedia abroad in our various Lands.

Jon

Ah, well it should be easy to find brain-dead journos that had something to say about WP......
there's 72 pages in there.

On 2nd though......I've been reading in it randomly, and there are actually very few
airhead happy-time articles about WP. 95% of them are about screw-ups, BLP defamation,
technical talk, etc. Another thing: articles more than a few months old tend to disappear.

This one is the most pathetic that I've found.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/busi...8_ptgett03.html

Ding!

I'm guessing you weren't so hot at those Best Title For This Story exercises at school, now were you?

I'm not really interested in what some Sleeping In Seattle Second Stringer was writing about Wikipedia in the Summer of Wub 2006 — of course we were all idiots back then — I'm talking about the Major Myths about Wikipedia that are still going unchallenged in the Major Media Today.

It's time — long past time — to get out there and start challenging the myths with some facts.

See?

Jon

Okay, okay.....

It's a tall order, though. MY impression of the MSM's take on Wiki in recent
months is mostly as the butt of jokes. Colbert did a joke about editing one's own
BLP last week.

It's getting more and more difficult to find Major Myths that aren't negative in general tone.

OTOH, how often do you see negative articles about Citizendium?

The problem I see is that most commentators, pro and con, are still arguing on the basis of Wikipedia's underlying — and I do mean under-lying — premisses. The very meaning of all the most important words gets undermined when you allow that to happen. Critical thought simply cannot operate on that kind of wiksand.

As for Citizendium, aside from requiring real names, Sanger has tried to found it on exactly the same doctrines that led Wikipedia to perdition.

People with a respectable amount of training and experience in a given area will tend to agree about a large number of things — and they will tend to disagree about a relatively small number of other things. In their natural habitat it is not really necessary for subject matter specialists to reach consensus about everything. The very life of their subject matter depends on that. It is only the alien notions of a one-eyed objectivism — the attempt to obliterate all interpretation, perspective, point of view, subjectivity, and synthetic reasoning — that keeps killing off Sanger's ill-founded projects.

Jon

The stuff that's good about Wikipedia isn't news any more; the media only has something of interest to them when Wikipedia screws up, so you'll see increasing amounts of that in the media from now on. That is pleasing to critics, but it doesn't really mean that Wikipedia is getting worse or that the major media is more hostile to it, just that reporting on screwups is more interesting to the readers than another boring puff piece. (If the screwups are really the rule rather than the exception, as the critics claim, then eventually reporting on those will get boring and commonplace and perhaps the media will find more interest in the things Wikipedia gets right once again.)

The purpose of criticism is not to derive pleasure from the screw-ups of other people's enterprises. The purpose of criticism is to analyze the faults in a product, process, or system for the sake of reducing those faults. And it's not really about other people's enterprises, at least, not initially, since criticism most often begins with the enterprises that one cares enough about to join and work to improve.

No, it is only one of those peculiarities of Wikipedia that trying to make it work as advertised will so quickly get an insider shown the door to the highway.

Effective criticism is founded on accurate description, and that brings us round to the enounced topic of this thread.

The question is not whether the Press is booing or cheering Wikipedia. The question is whether the Press is describing Wikipedia accurately.

I don't think so.

Take Transparency.

Wikipedia is Transparent like Republicans are Fiscally Responsible. It's bunk, and it's been bunk for a long time now, but they have somehow managed to "bank" on a myth that derives from ancient history.

History teaches that people can run for a long, long time with a head full of gas, but sooner or later Reality hits them in the head and lets the gas out.

Jon