Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-10-09/Grupthink
Wall Street Journal associates Wikipedia with Grupthink
In a twist on the charge sometimes leveled at Wikipedia editors, the Wall Street Journal included Wikipedia in its discussion of Grupthink last week (no, that's not a misspelling, although it's sometimes written Grūpthink).
Grupthink, the subject of a Wednesday piece by Journal columnist Aaron Rutkoff, is actually a website that allows users to create and run polls on virtually any subject imaginable. As one example of this, Rutkoff noted a Wikipedia Showdown poll, which asks site users to pick "the weirdest, funniest, craziest, and most bizarre entries" Wikipedia carries.
Leading the poll, which started running 10 May, is the List of fictional expletives. Lists were actually rather popular choices in the poll, such as List of English words containing Q not followed by U (which is also a featured list on Wikipedia), "List of songs featuring cowbells" (despite the fact that the article has since been deleted), and of course Lists of lists. Other poll options included Groupthink (inevitably), the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Nihilartikel, and the always-popular Heavy metal umlaut (see archived story).
A cowbell segue
The deleted article on songs with cowbells also made an appearance in Sunday's New York Times as well. This was in an article exploring several recent discussions on Articles for deletion; also included were Pooky (merged), Chuck Greene (deleted), and the Constantian Society (kept). The most interesting case was Diane Farrell, a Connecticut congressional candidate whose article was deleted in July and re-created three different times. The third time, which came after the appearance of the Times story, led to a reconsideration of the original deletion because the content was not identical and presented new arguments for her notability.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia seems to be a fairly popular resource with the Grupthink community (see [1]). Another poll currently has Wikipedia leading in response to the question of what is the "best open source project".
Shockingly, considering the way internet phenomena are documented on Wikipedia, nobody had attempted to create an article on Grupthink at the time the Wall Street Journal wrote about it. It did show up as an external link related to the Choose Your Own Adventure series (someone had started a group of polls structured in a similar fashion), but no other articles mentioned it and there were no signs of a linkspam campaign. Grupthink did appear as a "requested article" listed on the Culture and fine arts subpage, under "Internet and tech culture - Miscellaneous".
Discuss this story
Stock markets