QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 4th January 2010, 6:37pm)
Connolley upset that a journalist
got something wrong about his WP efforts .
Well, so what, Connolley? It can still be used as a cited source now for a Wikipedia article! Unlike your BLOG.
Um, I'm afraid Connelley is (mostly) right in this instance.
The original "story" being quoted by Climate-Change deniers all over the internet is
this online op-ed written by Lawrence Solomon, who is described thusly:
QUOTE
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
OK, so he's a (former) journalist. But the numbers Solomon uses are so obviously misleading and deceptive as to be laughable to anyone who understands how Wikipedia actually works. He probably used the "WikiChecker" to get the total number of articles Connelley ever touched, and then just used that as the "total number of Global Warming articles controlled by Connelley," and assumed nobody would bother to actually check.
I'd just have to guess that Solomon felt he couldn't make the case for Connelley's POV-pushing unless he presented it as far less subtle than it actually was - to the extent that he presented it as not being subtle at all. And, naturally, that people's attention spans and their willingness to check the facts on these things is so limited that he could pretty much say whatever he wanted, and it would be repeated uncritically by everyone who has any anti-environmentalist leanings whatsoever.
Connelley may have been a terrible admin, and clearly took many, many liberties on GW-related subjects, but what I've been seeing with this Solomon opinion piece, and the degree to which it's been disseminated without anyone questioning it, is really frightening.
And it pisses me off, too, because here we've spent months making the case against Connelley, with diffs and links and anecdotes from real experiences, showing that he's a terrible choice to defend the environmentalist position on WP - and then this other guy comes along, out of the blue, spouts ludicrously wrong numbers that can be knocked down by anybody with five minutes to spare, and he's copied and quoted
en masse by practically every blogger on the planet. It really makes you wonder.
A child's garden of wikipedia, part I - ScienceBlogs (blog)
Tue 5th January 2010, 12:10am
Wow, tough old world, huh?
