Jayjg opines on Thekohser's hometown, it's about the Jews, of course Options

[thekohser]

I grew up in Jackson, Michigan. I lived there until I was 12, and I've returned to visit perhaps 15 times in the nearly three decades since.

Jackson is not a major hub of Judaism the way you might think of a place like Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or North Miami Beach, Florida, or Rockville Centre, New York might be. Rather, most of the religious residents of Jackson are either Catholic or Lutheran (if you're white), or any of a set of other Protestant churches (if you're African-American).

But, Jayjg has swooped in to add what he apparently knows about to the Wikipedia article about Jackson:

==Religion==
Jackson is home to [[Temple Beth Israel (Jackson, Michigan)|Temple Beth Israel]], a [[Reform Judaism|Reform]] [[synagogue]] founded in 1862 by [[History of the Jews in Germany|German Jews]].

That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. If you want to understand religion in Jackson, Michigan, Wikipedia will have you believing that it's pretty much a Jewish town, top to bottom.

Now, is this the way Wikipedia gets built? Is Jayjg doing the "proper thing" by adding this one fact, with the absence of any other facts about other religions in Jackson? Might I expect that other editors will be along shortly to describe the various other faith traditions that reside in Jackson?

(Point of fact... the Temple Beth Israel in Jackson is located on the SW corner of Michigan & West Avenues. My first piano lessons were conducted on the NW corner of the same intersection.)

This post has been edited by thekohser:

[thekohser]

46 views so far, nary a response.

Did I lay an egg with this one? If so, the moderators have my permission to delete the thread.

Greg

[Son of a Yeti]

Did I lay an egg with this one? If so, the moderators have my permission to delete the thread.

No, why? We can discuss this.


So maybe you are Jewish but your family forgot to tell you about that?

Jayjg cannot be wrong after all, can he?

[Jon Awbrey]

Did I lay an egg with this one? If so, the moderators have my permission to delete the thread.

No, why? We can discuss this.

So maybe you are Jewish but your family forgot to tell you about that?

Jayjg cannot be wrong after all, can he?

Sorry, Gregoreykvetch, I used up my Kohser Tax Rebate way last year — I was working on a line about knowing a Chopin from a Chutzpah when the wind is NOR-Westerlie, but I figgered Milton-&-Moulton (M&M) would beat me tuit.

Ja Ja (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/boing.gif)

[dogbiscuit]

I'll bite. Two things: this sort of one-sided viewpoint is obviously not news. In the good old stubby days it would have been acceptable, but it would not be beyond the wit of man to Google up some other balancing references.

The other wider point of view (in wide over-generalisation terms of course) is that this is the sort of Jewish fixation edit that divides me from that element of the community - everything is sought to be defined in terms of Jewishness. As a non-Jew, I don't have an urge to go around defining the successes of my non-Jewish culture, and, as I've said before in the past, I find that determination on the part of some to define the everyday in terms of the Jewishness of certain elements rather unsettling and unhealthy. An entry for say, York Minster or Wells Cathedral is defined not because of its religious but because of its architectural impact.

The Wikipedia sphere does seem to me to have a disproportionate Jewish noise around it (from a UK perspective of hearing nothing about Jewish goings on on a day to day basis) so something like that edit does grate as it does seem out of kilter - it is not an edit that says the most notable/distinctive/elegant/run down building is, is is simply an entry that throws the balance off. One edit is innocuous, but it is the knowledge that an experienced editor spends his days wandering around Wikipedia being fixatedly Jewish is unsettling.

[TungstenCarbide]

I grew up in Jackson, Michigan. I lived there until I was 12, and I've returned to visit perhaps 15 times in the nearly three decades since.

Jackson is not a major hub of Judaism the way you might think of a place like Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or North Miami Beach, Florida, or Rockville Centre, New York might be. Rather, most of the religious residents of Jackson are either Catholic or Lutheran (if you're white), or any of a set of other Protestant churches (if you're African-American).

But, Jayjg has swooped in to add what he apparently knows about to the Wikipedia article about Jackson:

==Religion==
Jackson is home to [[Temple Beth Israel (Jackson, Michigan)|Temple Beth Israel]], a [[Reform Judaism|Reform]] [[synagogue]] founded in 1862 by [[History of the Jews in Germany|German Jews]].

That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. If you want to understand religion in Jackson, Michigan, Wikipedia will have you believing that it's pretty much a Jewish town, top to bottom.

Now, is this the way Wikipedia gets built? Is Jayjg doing the "proper thing" by adding this one fact, with the absence of any other facts about other religions in Jackson? Might I expect that other editors will be along shortly to describe the various other faith traditions that reside in Jackson?

(Point of fact... the Temple Beth Israel in Jackson is located on the SW corner of Michigan & West Avenues. My first piano lessons were conducted on the NW corner of the same intersection.)

Some wikipedia editors do mushrooms, some do WWII, Jayjg does Jewish topics. I don't see a problem with that edit. The religion section just needs a little expanding to cover other historical churches.

This post has been edited by TungstenCarbide:

[Sarcasticidealist]

Eventualism at work. Accepting this kind of thing is an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia's model - we saw it in the animal rights thread too, where Cla68 expressed concern that it was written from a western perspective, and HellFreezesOver responded that this was because that was where her knowledge and sources were coming from, and she'd be happy to see somebody else flesh out the article with non-western perspectives.

The consequence is that you wind up with articles that are hodgepodges of accurate information with no sense of perspective or proper weighting. That's unfortunate on its face, but I don't think it's a big problem; all else being equal, as a reader of the Jackson article would I rather know that it contains that synagogue or not know it?

As with so many things Wikipedia, it only really becomes a problem when its effects start to extend beyond the reader. BLPs in which people insert accurate cited information with no regard for perspective or proper weighting are disasters.

In summary, I lack a coherent point.

[thekohser]

Did I lay an egg with this one? If so, the moderators have my permission to delete the thread.

No, why? We can discuss this.


So maybe you are Jewish but your family forgot to tell you about that?

Jayjg cannot be wrong after all, can he?

The "Kohs" family history is so confusing -- after a fire killed two parents, a matriarchal-side adoption of Dowadait children (what appears now to be practically an extinct surname) in the 1880's into the "Koos" family, then a spelling change during WWI to "Americanize" the name, which inadvertently aligned our surname with an existing (what I believe is Jewish) surname shared by noted sociologist Samuel C. Kohs. I can't possibly claim to "know" what the heck my true religious lineage is before about 1930.

My point of all this is, of course, to ask -- do the top worker bees at Wikipedia really know how to build an encyclopedia? For me, personally, I would never open a new "section" in a Wikipedia article, then populate it with information that is relevant only to (perhaps) 1% of the possible universe so encompassed by that section's topical title. Both fairness to knowledge and common sense dictate that, don't they?

If Jayjg had titled this new section "Judaism in Jackson", I'd fully understand. But, instead, he titled it "Religion", then spoke of the one, single, solitary synagogue in Jackson, without so much as mentioning that there are other places of worship and other faith traditions in the city.

An outsider looking in might conclude that Wikipedia's busiest editors don't know anything at all about constructing a neutral, reliable encyclopedia.

[The Adversary]

Well, I don´t think Jay did anything wrong here. It is just the way WP works; if you have read any of the history-sections in major older Israeli/Palestinian town, you will see the same all over. Take Lydda in the Crusader period: one Jewish dyer lived there! But nobody else, apparently, not according to WP (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif) (And about the 400 year long Ottoman period (ending 1918) we learn this: "During the early Ottoman period, there were no Jews in Lod, but a small Jewish community developed in the 19th century. The Jewish inhabitants were driven out in the 1921 Arab riots. In 1944, Lydda had a population of 17,000, one-fifth of them Christian Arabs." (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/confused.gif) (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/confused.gif) )

If you look at Hebron, Acre, Safad, Tiberias: apparently they were were all Jewish strongholds up through history, according to WP. Even if the actual population of Jews at times was .."one Jewish dyer". And now: Jackson, Michigan has been added to the fold. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif) (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

[Sarcasticidealist]

My point of all this is, of course, to ask -- do the top worker bees at Wikipedia really know how to build an encyclopedia? For me, personally, I would never open a new "section" in a Wikipedia article, then populate it with information that is relevant only to (perhaps) 1% of the possible universe so encompassed by that section's topical title. Both fairness to knowledge and common sense dictate that, don't they?

Well, that's sort of the lie of eventualism - you get enough people making small contributions to an article, and eventually you have an article that covers everything coherently and accurately. In fact, if you get enough people making useful contributions to an article, you eventually get an article that's a random assortment of accurate facts with no regard for context or organization. Wikipedia's good articles (as distinct from [[Wikipedia:Good Articles]], I hasten to add) are pretty well all the result of one or two editors deciding to perform a complete overhaul or, at worst, a bunch of editors independently doing so with a section or two each.

I doubt I'm saying anything that anybody here doesn't already know, so I'll stop.

[The Wales Hunter]

Open editing is nice, in theory, subject to certain caveats.

If everyone who knew something about an article added it, then eventually the article would be chock-full of masses of information.

However, until such a time as so much information from all sides is collated to make it somewhat balanced, the general public should not see the "work in progress".

A lot of Wikipedia's problems can be put down to its "work in progress nature".

For instance, once an article on, say, King William II covers as much as is reasonable, what is the point of still allowing evidence? The odds of more information coming out about a figure from 900 or so years ago is slim.

[thekohser]

By the by, thanks to this edit by Jayjg added on March 29, now on March 30 if one searches Google for ... religion "Jackson, Michigan" ... the Wikipedia article will be the # 3 result out of 36,700. I'm sure after this link I gave above gets spidered, it might go to # 1.

After clicking that link, one seeking information about religion in Jackson, Michigan would learn that there's a synagogue in Jackson.

As a banned editor, I will be patiently monitoring the "eventualist" process, to see how this section evolves over time to represent more than the 0.13% of Jackson's population that it currently addresses.

[Sarcasticidealist]

As a banned editor, I will be patiently monitoring the "eventualist" process, to see how this section evolves over time to represent more than the 0.13% of Jackson's population that it currently addresses.

Please don't interpret anything I said as a prediction that the answer to the above is "well"; my point wasn't that eventualism works, but rather that its failure to work doesn't really do any harm in cases like this, especially if readers are reading Wikipedia intelligently.

[Somey]

Well... personally I would think it's just common courtesy, if you're going to start a section called "Religion in Jackson," to do a simple Google search and find several churches that are about as old than the synagogue in question, if not older, and maybe include one or two of those as well, in order to avoid the appearance of bias.

Of course, we're talking about the people who insist on mentioning the Nazis in the intro to the Martin Luther (T-H-L-K-D) article, so what do you expect?

[Jon Awbrey]

Well … personally I would think it's just common courtesy, if you're going to start a section called "Religion in Jackson," to do a simple Google search and find several churches that are about as old than the synagogue in question, if not older, and maybe include one or two of those as well, in order to avoid the appearance of bias.

Of course, we're talking about the people who insist on mentioning the Nazis in the intro to the Martin Luther (T-H-L-K-D) article, so what do you expect?

Luthers negative writing about Jews remain controversial, especially after it was used in propaganda by the Nazis in 1933–45.[13][14]

And not even grammatical …

Jon

[thekohser]

Meanwhile, the Wikipedia article's section "Geography" states that "Jackson is considered to be part of Central Michigan."

When you click the link to "Central Michigan", you're taken to another Wikipedia page that portrays two different (conflicting) maps of Michigan regions...

One of the maps doesn't even notate a "Central Michigan".

The second map notates "Central Michigan", but Jackson sits about 55 to 60 miles south of the southern border of that rendering of "Central Michigan". Jackson is positioned in an area called "Southern Michigan". (Bonus points if you find the misspelled word in this map.)

As a side note, Jackson was home to the State Prison of Southern Michigan, which was later partitioned and included the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility. Central Michigan University is 103 miles from downtown Jackson.

This is feeling like deja vu. Didn't I rail about the regional maps of Michigan back in 2007 or something? If I did, that would be further evidence of how Wikipedia is "always improving".

[Jon Awbrey]

Good Grief, Greg, It's 2009 —

The thing I keep seeing here is the way that Wikipedia pulls even it's "professional" critics down, down, down into the very wiki-pixelism that they once sought to criticize.

Jon

[thekohser]

Good Grief, Greg, It's 2009 —

The thing I keep seeing here is the way that Wikipedia pulls even it's "professional" critics down, down, down into the very wiki-pixelism that they once sought to criticize.

Jon

Sorry... I guess I'm just selfishly contemplating a whole "Wikipedia and Jackson, Michigan" blog post one of these days. If I can effectively show that Wikipedia consistently poops inaccuracies upon a town like Jackson (Abraham Lincoln's "fake" visit, the primary place of the Jewish religion, the physical location in Central Michigan, and hopefully much, much more...), maybe it will send an alert out to every Chamber of Commerce in the land, that Wikipedia can't be trusted.

You show them a high-level treatise on the ontological nature of the beast, and they will either deny it or, worse, not read it.

[Jon Awbrey]

Good Grief, Greg, It's 2009 —

The thing I keep seeing here is the way that Wikipedia pulls even it's "professional" critics down, down, down into the very wiki-pixelism that they once sought to criticize.

Jon

Sorry … I guess I'm just selfishly contemplating a whole "Wikipedia and Jackson, Michigan" blog post one of these days. If I can effectively show that Wikipedia consistently poops inaccuracies upon a town like Jackson (Abraham Lincoln's "fake" visit, the primary place of the Jewish religion, the physical location in Central Michigan, and hopefully much, much more …), maybe it will send an alert out to every Chamber of Commerce in the land, that Wikipedia can't be trusted.

You show them a high-level treatise on the ontological nature of the beast, and they will either deny it or, worse, not read it.

From what I know about Chambers of Commerce, they don't care what the Hell anyone says about their place on the planet, so long as it drums up the biz.

Jon (IMG:http://wikipediareview.com/stimg9x0b4fsr2/1/folder_post_icons/icon9.gif)

[gomi]

The thing I keep seeing here is the way that Wikipedia pulls even it's "professional" critics down, down, down into the very wiki-pixelism that they once sought to criticize.

OK, Jon, you're right, but let's try to find the teachable moment. As Somey cogently notes, it's not about synagogues or even Judaism, it is about personal point of view and persistent bias.

Well... personally I would think it's just common courtesy, ... to do a simple Google search and find several churches that are about as old than the synagogue in question, if not older, and maybe include one or two of those as well, in order to avoid the appearance of bias.

No credible writer of an encyclopedia page, whether Jewish, Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, Bhuddist, or Unitarian, would consider adding a religion section to an article containing only their own denomination. Not because one isn't or shouldn't be proud of one's co-religionists, but because the mere appearance of such a listing brings the author's lack of editorial distance to the forefront and shatters the illusion, however good or poor, that the article is encyclopedic, neutral, and balanced.

Now, no one really cares if you are an ardent admirer of Pikachu (T-H-L-K-D) rather than Jigglypuff (T-H-L-K-D). One might argue that editorial distance is wasted on the stuff of fandom. But when it comes to religion, politics, biography, history, and the like, one can reasonably expect one's reference works to be authored by people who can keep their biases under control.