The new Hasbara-esque scandal (but worse) Options

[yow]

From Electronic Intifada

A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

A series of emails by members and associates of the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), provided to The Electronic Intifada (EI), indicate the group is engaged in what one activist termed a "war" on Wikipedia.

A 13 March action alert signed by Gilead Ini, a "Senior Research Analyst" at CAMERA, calls for "volunteers who can work as 'editors' to ensure" that Israel-related articles on Wikipedia are "free of bias and error, and include necessary facts and context." However, subsequent communications indicate that the group not only wanted to keep the effort secret from the media, the public, and Wikipedia administrators, but that the material they intended to introduce included discredited claims that could smear Palestinians and Muslims and conceal Israel's true history.


AND MUCH MORE.

[Saltimbanco]

What would it have to become, though? I mean, is it completely out of reach? Would they have to become Brittanica? Or could some modification of the Wiki way accomplish it?

[Milton Roe]

What would it have to become, though? I mean, is it completely out of reach? Would they have to become Brittanica? Or could some modification of the Wiki way accomplish it?

If by the wiki way you mean the Wikipedia way, no. Too many of WP's core policies are tied up here to allow the layers of name-editor and expert-editor review. But again, wikis were not invented by Wikipedia. They function in many places with ID'd name users, and users vetted for expertise.

The genius of WP was in recognizing that most of the grunt work of writing an encyclopedia can be oursourced and even done by volunteers. What Jimbo and cronies forgot was that Singer was going to use this as feedstock for an expert review system, and it still needed doing. When Sanger left, Jimbo kept the thing and never added the name review and expert review, and pretended it was okay and all his idea. Which it isn't and wasn't. Sanger, in turn, never could get his own platform off the ground, either, because a lot of people aren't experts and still want to do something. And should be allowed to. Together, Singer and Wales have two halves of the sacred Indiana Jones Lost Ark "Headpiece to the staff of Ra". But they no longer speak, and both are too proud to admit they need the other's idea/half. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/huh.gif) So no Lost Ark.

WP needs three layers and classes of editors: 1) grunts, 2) real-nameusers, and 3) subject matter experts (SME). You can let the grunts edit anon or from IP, same as now, but not to articles viewable by the look-up public-- only to a draft which must be viewed AS a draft (thus anybody can see the working-draft of any article by hitting a key, but they must be prepared for the same kind of recently-vandalized remains you see too often on WP NOW). Promotion of draft-copy to viewable-copy must be done by somebody we trust and know, and that's somebody with verified ID. Not just an annonymous admin, because if there's anything that Essjay and Slimey and JZ have taught us, it's that anonymous people can't be trusted no matter who they are, even if they are admins.

Finally, every so often, Wikipedia subjects that are amenable to academic vetting, need academic vetting, and for that we need somebody like the Britannica gets. Paid SMEs to look the things over and sign off on them (with a page for that, which appears with each article). Articles which aren't academic can have their last vetting be at the nameuser level. There are no ultimate-experts on Star Trek except the fans.

For giant debates on POV, you use the academic one for academic subjects (splitting them into subarticles when there are major academic camps). For others, you recognize that there are rarely more than a handful of major sides to any political argument, so you give them each their own article, requiring a short summary and link from the others (very much like now-- except you just quit lying to yourself and everybody else, and CALL it a POV fork). I doubt that there are more than a dozen major views about even Zionism or Israel. So divvy them up and invite each one to write the best article it can, trying to keep an even tone (not neutral-- just civil).

Not many changes in total, here, but they involve just about all 5 core pillars of WP. So don't look for them to happen soon.

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: