Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-01-31/In focus

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It is not the case that Donna Strickland had an article that was deleted. A draft was written and declined [1]. XOR'easter (talk) 20:58, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Hrm. The correction is appreciated, though now I'm torn between thinking that's a distinction without a difference, in terms of society at large, and feeling like that's even worse, in terms of how it reflects on our own processes / biases. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 14:20, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Declining a draft is a decision taken by a single person, whereas deleting a page requires a whole process. If the Donna Strickland draft had been promoted and then taken to Articles for deletion, I'm almost certain it would have been kept, per the notability guideline for academics. (And I've seen a lot of deletion debates for scientists and other scholarly types over the last few years.) XOR'easter (talk) 16:45, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

@XOR'easter: Well, yeah, exactly. So once an article is successfully created, it can take the bureaucratic equivalent of the Twelve Labors to get it deleted. (Ignoring, for the sake of argument, the Speedy Deletion process.) But that same article's initial creation (or, acceptance into mainspace) can hinge on a yea/nay call from a single person? That feels perhaps a tad imbalanced, or at least there's a case to be made that it is. Not to mention, it creates a prime opportunity for lots of what could look like fairly arbitrary and inconsistent decision-making, when viewed as a whole. (Through no fault of the individuals making those decisions, and no matter how careful and impartial each of them are, or try to be.)

(I also don't completely understand the "not edited in six months" part of that speedy-deletion notice, since the history seems to indicate that the draft had only been created 2 months prior. But maybe that was a later addition to the template, and regardless it's tangential to the decision-making process itself.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 19:12, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

@FeRDNYC: in my opinion you make the same mistake as a lot of the media coverage around the Strickland decline. We would love nothing more than to have a panel of 10 editors reviewing each draft and working to improve every promising piece of content someone writes in good faith to the point where it can be included. But we are overwhelmed and number too few to do this. This draft process is overrun by conflict-of-interest editors whose financial imperatives to get crap accepted would massively outweigh our hobbyist editors' ability to do one of the least-rewarding, highest skillset, most undervalued tasks on the site if we didn't let the few outstanding human beings who consistently work in this area apply strict standards for acceptance.

The Signpost piece touches on a very interesting point about the media (and by extension the public) viewing Wikipedia as "the Man" as time goes on. But we are not The Man. In so many cases, people attribute malice to what is actually just lack of resources. An error of omission is likely due to inaction rather than conscious "suppression" of information. Poor-quality articles are likely due to lack of eyes on it rather than that the article represents the standards and ideals of the community. If anyone is responsible for the lack of coverage of women on Wikipedia then why would it be the editors we have rather than the people who choose not to edit? (Sure, people biting newbies or setting double standards in treatment of content can make us complicit, but none of us are morally obliged to write any particular article that is missing, because we are volunteers.)

On the other hand, I don't feel articles for deletion is particularly burdensome and it is often a painless and low-drama process. As for the six months question, drafts are deleted only after six months of no edits (unless they're egregious spam or similar), and can be continually resubmitted after improvements in accordance with the reviewer feedback—this is why a draft decline is just not comparable with deletion. The reason the notice shows in that old revision even though it was only two months old at the time is because the template looks at the current date whenever you view the page (so it wouldn't have shown that notice at the time). — Bilorv (talk) 00:21, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't know whether the actual story makes Wikipedia look better or worse than the story that's often told (I could probably spin it either way if I tried). The first step is to get the facts accurate, after which we can debate the interpretation. XOR'easter (talk) 13:49, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

A great overview of public perception of Wikipedia. I can't speak to Harrison, but I've read Omer Benjakob before and they are one of the few journalists who really "get" what we do here. I predict that in the future wiki press coverage will still include stuff about the gender gap, it's a given at this point. I do hope we will be able to see Wikipedia expand to other countries and have the media discuss that. Time will tell! -Indy beetle (talk) 02:38, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

• • Sure, you know Harrison, he's the guy who has a piece in Slate about Wikipedia (almost) every month explaining Wiki issues to the public mostly from multiple editors' points of view. What I am always amazed at is his ability to find the right words and phrases to explain what I thought was a very complicated concept. I "borrow" a few of those words and phrases from time to time - once I've seen them, why settle for second best? Plus I'm always amazed at his relaxed writing style - it's never work to read through the text no matter how much content is in there. As far as Omer - all I need to say is that about February 5 2020, a month before WHO declared that there was a pandemic, Omer wrote a great article on the work Wikipedians were doing to combat COVID disinformation. Talk about a scoop! Dozens of very good papers and journalists repeated the story for several months. A 3rd journalist should be mentioned, Noam Cohen who's been writing great Wiki-journalism from almost the very beginning, as noted in the text here. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:53, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

• Many thanks, Smallbones. I would write about stories about Wikipedia MORE than once per month if I could, but I'm often strapped for time! Stephenbharrison (talk) 04:02, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

• Very well written, some great thoughts in there. I somewhat bristle at the idea that we should hand out access to deleted content to reporters, but the idea that we need to be more accessible and understandable to the media is super important. AdmiralEek (talk) 16:55, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
• This is an exceptional piece and it has given me a lot to think about. It also raises some points I've already been thinking about recently:
  • Many times, we as journalists have been told to "fix" Wikipedia instead of write about it. I think journalists would be better doing better journalism if they want to help fix Wikipedia. It's now basically a cliche to hear a celebrity complaining about the inaccuracy of their Wikipedia article, but that information is usually just repetition of news media. We're the symptom, not the disease. They never want to look inwards. WP:CITOGENESIS is a huge problem but it's really in the power of journalists, not us, to avert its cause. At the same time, I don't think the individual journalist is my enemy; rather their material conditions are. The solution is journalists being less overworked, better-paid and having more workers' rights. Unfortunately, these goals are unachievable under free market economics and populist bourgeois governments, which respectively control the industry and the regulators and lead to an outcome where journalists scramble for clicks and only steer clear of libel, rather than patiently collecting the highest-quality information.
  • The more it seems as if Wikipedia has become aligned with Big Tech, the more likely the encyclopedia will receive similarly adverse coverage. And yet we have no choice in the matter! Big Tech abuse our open license in many instances, like YouTube's PR move of putting links to Wikipedia articles beneath (e.g.) neo-Nazi propaganda topics rather than removing them, as if the supporters of such videos don't already view Wikipedia as part of the disdained "liberal elite-run mainstream media". They have the ability to monitor their site 100 times better than they do, and they are sometimes quite rightly satirised for this (e.g. The Onion), though woefully inadequate attention is given to the abusive conditions of the few overworked outsourced moderators YouTube have. But the offloading onto Wikipedia is a trick: fault with the system becomes fault with Wikipedia rather than fault with Big Tech. The headline is "Amazon shouldn't trust Wikipedia" rather than "We shouldn't trust Amazon", even though Alexa has been found cherry-picking Wikipedia article content to spread antisemitism.
  • Much of the popular coverage of Wikipedia is still lacking and is either reductive or superficial, treating Wikipedia as a unified voice and amplifying minor errors and vandalism. Absolutely. Every time they treat us as static rather than changing, or complete rather than in progress, they actively decrease readers' awareness and ability for critical evaluation of what they are reading. I see people in internet arguments treating Wikipedia either (implicitly) as an unerring body of All Truth or a vandalism-ridden 99% false site, and almost never anything even resembling what Wikipedia is. "Reductive or superficial" coverage allows the first view to go unchallenged, while the latter is caused by media "amplifying minor errors". If you understand how Wikipedia is written, you can evaluate an article's reliability on a case-by-case basis or at least apply some general principles about what our biases are and what our strengths are.

— Bilorv (talk) 01:32, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

• Just an aside on Bilorv's example of a misreported article "Amazon shouldn't trust Wikipedia" Yes, that's a doozy. Gearbrain, which seems to exist to sell computer gear, was rewriting a story from the Sun (which reads like an urban legend) which they got from Kennedy News & Media (the link explains how they pay for cute or horrific stories). Checking the Wikipedia article likely involved, it wasn't edited very much in the 3 months before the Sun published the story, and the word "stab" never appeared during that time. In short Alexa wasn't quoting Wikipedia. Rather if it was Alexa at all (on the video), it was likely quoting a cynical paid-for hoax. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:35, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

  A source worse than The S*n, never thought I'd see the day. At least The S*n bothers to quote "It said it was reading from Wikipedia but when I checked the article online, it didn't say [the sentences about killing myself] on there". But it ends with It is believed Alexa may have sourced the rogue text from Wikipedia, which can be edited by anyone. Journalists need to learn how to click the button "View history". There's no point saying "it's believed that there may have been..." about a completely open-source website with a transparent revision history. — Bilorv (talk) 11:26, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

A quick note to say thanks for the kind and constructive feedback on the article. Yes, we certainly worked hard and spent a lot of time on it for Wikipedia @ 20. Stephenbharrison (talk) 04:02, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Toward a better working relationship

The paragraph in the text

Yet although the Wikimedia Foundation has made press contacts much more accessible, there is still work to be done to enhance communication between Wikipedia and the media. Creating a special status for wiki journalists, for example, recognizing their users and granting them read-only status for deleted articles and censored edits – a right currently reserved for official administrators – could help reporters better understand the full context of edit wars and other content disputes.

interests me a great deal.

As noted the WMF PR folks can be very helpful. I use their help on over half of Signpost issues. They are professional and competent. They're probably better than good corporate PR folks, because they recognize that communicating with the community - as well as the press and the public at large - is part of the job. But in the end, they are PR people and suffer from the same built-in limitations that all PR people have, e.g. they are going to give the official views of the corp. execs every time, they'll try to tone down controversy,they won't give any indication of a debate within the organization (WMF). They shouldn't be expected to do that.

I'll sugest working with both the WMF and independently with the community. That might be in the fotm of a WikiProject. Editors who want to see better coverage by journalists could encourage (and criticize) the press. Wikipedians could develop a reputation among journalist by suggesting good stories (and not overplaying their pet stories). They could suggest that they'd be open to an interview. (Note journalists should register Wiki accounts so that they can send email to users who want it.)

Note WP's radical transparency would be very different from usual press contacts. Very little chance of an exclusive. Probably some good debates among users, with some occasional propaganda added. The talk page would be the only place anything would get done - no Wikipedia articles to write! - but the only thing that would really get done is making contacts and throwing out general ideas.

BTW I have a huge COI here as editor-in-chief of The Signpost. I'd use such a WikiProject extensively, but I'd have no qualms about other journalists using it to. The more good press stories the better, as far as I'm concerned. And then we'll quote the press - it just makes our job easier. BTW, I and likely other Signposters are available for cooperation with the press on most stories, with credit or on background. We do know a bit about covering Wikipedia , e,g. the jargon, rules, who's who, diffs, history, how to use the Signpost archives. Any help needed to get this started - just ask. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 15:57, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree that the WMF Communications team is an amazing resource, and it doesn't surprise me that they help with a number of your stories in the Signpost, Smallbones. As for your suggestion about working independently with the community, that certainly helps for a LOT of stories that I write. I wrote an article about COVID misinformation for Slate last year where I mentioned the English Wikipedia article "Misinformation related to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in India," which had been deleted. Luckily, I knew the editor who had created that article, and that person still had a draft saved, so I was able to link to the deleted content. I found that linking to that deleted page greatly enhanced the Slate article. But what if I hadn't personally known that editor from prior interviews? There are limits to the approach of "just talk to the community" because then the scope of coverage could be limited by who the journalist has reached out to or happens to know. Stephenbharrison (talk) 04:02, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

I second this idea of a WikiProject (and would appreciate a ping if one is ever made...). Maybe there could be crossover with academics who are interested in studying Wikipedia. Sometimes these studies are unethical (e.g. the classic, "introduce vandalism and see how long it lasts") and sometimes they have an odd focus; it could benefit researchers to know what Wikipedians think is important and what it would benefit us to know (assuming that papers are supposed to be concretely useful to someone in the real world rather than just playing games of chmess). — Bilorv (talk) 13:22, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

read-only status for deleted articles: Excellent article, I think this was the only point where I had an immediate negative gut reaction. We have had repeated proposals in the past to allow read-only access to deleted articles, generaly with very good reasons for the requests. Those proposals have always been rejected. Allowing read access would be fine for 99% of deleted articles. However we are acutely aware that a small number of such pages are attack pages filled with defamation, somebody's private personal information, or similar content that could cause real-world harm to real-world people. There is little chance we allow direct read access to arbitrary deleted pages, even though we support the reason for the request. What I can offer you, is that we often allow a copy to be provided on-request, for specific deleted page(s). An administrator would review the page before supplying a copy via email or by recreating the page in your Wikipedia userspace. I don't think we currently have a guideline covering reporter-requests, so admins may or may-not provide the page. I suspect the community would approve a guidelines for reporter-requests, if properly drafted proposal were posted at WP:Village pump (policy). In the absence of a guideline, I would suggest a request could be posted to WP:Administrators'_noticeboard (shortcut WP:AN) with a fair chance of success.

and censored edits: There are three possible interpretations of that phrase. One: If a page has been deleted, see above. Two: If the content was removed by an ordinary editor, or by an admin making an ordinary edit, then anyone can view it in the Page History accessible by the History link at the top of any page. If someone is unsure how to find and view the edit in History, they can put "{{help me}} explanation of what you want help with" on their own Talk page or on the article Talk page. Three: "Censored edits" most likely refers to WP:Oversighted edits. Oversight (also known as Suppression), is subject to strict limits. It is used for non-public personal information such as phone numbers, potentially libelous information, copyright infringement, hiding usernames which in-themselves make a blatant attack against somebody, or in unusual cases to deal with vandalism when other methods fail. Even admins cannot view oversighted content. There is little chance anyone would be allowed access to oversighted content. Probably the best you can do is check the list of oversighters and ask a different oversighter to confirm whether the removal legitimately complied with the approved reasons for oversight, and they can probably characterize why it was oversighted. (i.e. they might say it contained the address of a minor, or they may say a specific user posted an extremely abusive and racist personal attack.) Any abuse or concerns regarding Oversight are handled by the Arbitration Committee, or ultimately by the Wikimedia Foundation. Alsee (talk) 22:12, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Template:Globalize

Dear Signpost staff, thank you for writing this long, deep and well-sourced article.

However, I'm afraid that the examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.

Nearly every source quoted is American or British. And the other Wikipedia editions are barely mentioned.

We can always do better. --NaBUru38 (talk) 16:00, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

• @NaBUru38: This article was written by two journalists, not Signpost staff. -Indy beetle (talk) 21:25, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

• Indeed. From the introduction to the article, "Omer Benjakob is a journalist and researcher focused on Wikipedia and disinformation online. He is the tech and cyber reporter and editor for Haaretz and his work has appeared in Wired UK as well as academic publications. Stephen Harrison is an attorney and writer whose writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and The Atlantic. He writes the Source Notes column for Slate magazine about Wikipedia and the information ecosystem." ☆ Bri (talk) 18:59, 26 February 2021 (UTC)