Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-11-29/In the media

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Looks like CNET has not figured out that Ryan Merkley is Canadian - not that it matters much, and I am sure he is fully qualified to answer their questions about the US elections.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:16, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

but it really was the only data publicly available - meaning laziness of this person. Wikipedia articles are based solely on data publicly available. And if there were no references in wikpedia article they used then they are an naive idiots.Lembit Staan (talk) 21:42, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

But it wasn't really just him - he was helping to run a major advisory group to the UK government. Of course knowing there are sources out there and actually checking and recording the sources are two different things. So the point of the criticisms was that Wikipedia was doing a better job than the UK government. The speaker was probably coming at it from a different angle - the UK govt wasn't providing them any official data that was any better than Wikipedia's. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:31, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On a whim, I wrote a Letter to the Editor about that New Yorker column. This was the meat of it:

Louis Menand's entertaining column ("Wikipedia, “Jeopardy!,” and the Fate of the Fact", 23 November 2020) misrepresents Wikipedia in a few ways. When it comes to citations, peer-reviewed journals and blogs are not treated the same. Blog posts, social media and other self-published sources can only be used in restricted circumstances. In medical matters, a blog would virtually never be an acceptable source, and even many peer-reviewed journal articles would not make the cut, as Wikipedia values review articles that summarize and contextualize over initial reports that might not hold up. Menand is correct to say that Wikipedia functions as "in essence, an aggregator site", but long experience has taught its community that there need to be standards for what is aggregated.

Menand describes Jimmy Wales as the project's "grand arbiter", but the vast majority of day-to-day decisions about when editors get the boot are made by the volunteers themselves. Community members who successfully run a gauntlet of a nomination process become "administrators", who can then block editors temporarily or permanently, as well as impose various types of editing lock-outs upon individual articles. Similarly, when Menand writes that Wales "doesn't care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors", this elides the fact that "pretending to expertise" is only one kind of imposture. One way for an editor to get booted and their contributions deleted is to be unmasked as a paid shill.

The wiki-links here were hyperlinks in my email. I doubt I'll hear back, but it was fun to use imposture in a sentence. XOR'easter (talk) 18:12, 12 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that. I'm not sure it comes thru in what I wrote about the New Yorker piece, but it was my 2nd favorite (after the Canadian border guard articles) of everything I read about Wikipedia last month. Very informative, and entertaining, and a very interesting style. That said, yes, journalists who don't specialize in Wikipedia make a lot of mistakes. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:29, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]