This is a fork of a previous thread for people who are serious about developing a Guidebook that might actually be useful to external communities of reporters and researchers.


I would like to propose a collaborative project for The Wikipedia Review — the development of a «Guide to Wikipedia for Reporters and Researchers».

The purpose of the Guidebook would be to help academic investigators and media commentators cut through the layers of hype, misrepresentation, and rhetoric generated by Wikipedian hawkers and shills, to facilitate the asking of more intelligent and probing questions, and to save inquirers and journalists the time that they would otherwise waste wading through the full array of hard knocks trial and error that most of us here have had to go through in order to learn what we currently know about the reality of Wikipedia.

The Guidebook that guides best will be practical, not polemic, focused on policies and practices, not just personalities. It will of course be necessary to mention concrete cases of conduct by particular agents, but it will be equally necessary to remember the overarching purpose of the Guidebook, to show interested parties the ropes of Wikipedia's riggings, not to entangle them in every last trapping of Wikipedia's dead ends.

To that end, I propose the following plan —

• To reserve the present thread for developing instructive modules, perhaps on dynamic pages, and for carrying on the necessary discussion.
• To reserve a another thread for Stable Versions of the developed modules, yielding responsibility to the Moderators for transporting individual modules to the stable thread when and if there is a general perception that the module in question is «Ready For Prime Time», as it were.

Who knows, it just might work …


One of the needs that I see out there comes to mind whenever I see an academic paper, a conference presentation, a blog blurb, or a newspaper article whose authors are clearly still laboring under one or more myths about «How Wikipedia Works», specifically, the brands of fables that are cranked out by the dark satanic mills of Wikipedia's myth-representation factories.

All that illusionment strikes me as a «Cry For Help», and one of the formats that might help would be the sort of «Reality Check» that many news programs provide these days, where they present for examination one or more claims that a particular interest group happens to be promoting on the current scene and then tick off a checklist of facts that weigh pro and con that claim.

Things have been getting slightly more encouraging out there — strangely enough, rather more improved in the blogosphere than in the groves and the ivory-ivy towers of academe — so it looks like now is the time for all good Reviewers to come to the aid of whatever investigators are actually getting back to the basics of investigation.

Jon Awbrey

By way of Old Biz we have the following suggestions on the table —

• Proposal of a «Reality Check» format for dispelling popular myths and promotional PR about Wikipedia.
• Proposal of a module on Wikipedia's Putative Organizational Chart (WP:POC).

Sticking to the idea of developing a practical Guidebook for the more intrepid investigator, I think that we should defer the tantalizing temptation to develop a grand theory of Wikipedian Domination In General (WP:DIG) and stick to those facts that the hardy adventurer in the Wikipedian Wild Wood can verify in the medium of his or her own participatory observation.

Jon Awbrey

The following post and the contexts of discussion in the external media to which it links may help to explain some of the reasons why I believe that a «Guide to Wikipedia for Reporters and Researchers» is critically needed at this juncture in time.

Jon, I will develop a list of the most notable Jimbo lies/flip-flops/denials in the history of Wikipedia. Perhaps this bullet-point list with short descriptions will be a big help in simply outlining that Jimbo can't be trusted at his word. And, in turn, the project he co-founded is prone to unreliable position statements, etc.

I'm going to do this anyway, but I'm hoping you'll find it useful for your journalists' project, and I'll give you first, unrestricted rights to the content. If you don't feel it will be helpful, I'll take it out on the blog-road myself.

Greg

I should think it's only fair. After all, it was you and Kato who got me venturing out into the blogosphere in the first place, just so I could post comments on your essays and Digg your stories. I'd always avoided leaving any tracks in those sands on account of how nosey most blogs are about personal data before they let you post a comment. And then Kato went and pulled his carpetblogger bit and skipped town before the posse got wind of his routine — the dirty rat — leaving me with accounts in banks that I never wanted to know my business, wiki or otherwise.

Oh well, toothpaste, tube, and all that …

Jon Awbrey

When I consider the sorts of things that I have been reading about Wikipedia on the Web, I realize that it would be a good idea to start with a select number of very simple points. In that connection I think that it would help to make a list of rather obvious no-brainers that have nevertheless become obscured in some people's minds by cloud upon cloud of Wikipedian PR. Perhaps the simplest things to note about Wikipedia would be the following two facts.

Wikpedia Is A Publisher Of Content. The main thing that distinguishes Wikipedia from other publishers of content is that Wikipedia denies that it is a publisher of content.

Wikipedia Maintains An Editorial Point Of View. The main thing that distinguishes Wikipedia's editorial point of view from other editorial points of view is that Wikipedia denies that it maintains an editorial point of view.

In Wikipedia as in Geometry, two points determine a line, and I think that the reader who has passed the pons asinorum will have already noticed a pattern that runs through the above two data points.

Jon Awbrey

If I had to sum up what I've learned about Wikipedia over the last two years in single sentence, I guess it would be this —

Wikipedia is a website whose content is controlled by fundamentally dishonest people.

Jon Awbrey

My "Jimbo's flip-flops" thing should help here.



Jon, one thing you may want to consider within your thoughtful comments above... I sometimes cringe when people make legalistic arguments about "Wikipedia" (which is alternatively a project, a community, a reference site, etc., but doesn't have standing in a legal sense), rather than about the "Wikimedia Foundation" or "key administrators of Wikipedia" or "the Wikipedia community" or something else that you can actually put your finger on (and perhaps summon in part or whole to a courtroom). I dunno, may be too confusing to these meatheaded journalists of late, but I would try to shy away from "Wikipedia is..." types of statements.

Greg

It's that end-o-th-year time of reflection, y'know. I'm approaching the 2nd anniversary of my Wikipedia Incept Date (WP:ID) of 20 Dec 2005 and I was just mulling over in my mind this morning — only half way through that first cup of coffee — «What is it that really bugs me about Wikipedia?»

Wikipedia is a website whose content is controlled by fundamentally dishonest people.

That is pretty much the gist of it for me. The statement is more carefully mulled than it may look at first.

Your Mullage May Vary …

Jon Awbrey

My version:

Wikipedia is a compendium of overworked articles which are subject to manipulation by editors who may on occasion be misinformed, misguided, or misanthropic.

Compendium? Weighed together? Very loosely speaking, I guess, but nowhere near the judicious sense that constitutes the usual connotation of the word.

Articles? Sure, but the website contains a lot more in the way of content than the officially designated articles, and anyone who wants to understand how the articles are manipulated cannot help but delve into all the rest, perhaps even extending out the Wikienlist, and beyond …

May on occasion? You are too kind.

Misinformed? Sure, but worse than that, desperately desirous of maintaining their current belief system. And worse than that, deliberately conniving to force that belief system on the rest of the world.

Misguided? Yea, verily, and misguiding, too.

Misanthropic? Sure enough, they must harbor a fundamental hatred toward the human race to want it to become as ignorant as they are.

Jon Awbrey

If I don't seem like the same wild and crazy, happy go lucky feller I used to be, you can blame Greg and Kato for that. They're the ones who nudged me out into the blogosphere, and though the news that we've always gotten from our RoboReporters has never failed to discourage, I guess I always just assumed that it must have been the scrapings off the bottom of the barrel, and that somewhere some folks would have to be better informed than that. But, no, apparently not, not so far as I've been able to see so far. All in all, it makes Wikipedia a lot less funnier than it used to be. Still absurd, of course, but now something more akin to dangerously absurd.

It makes a man just a bit edgy, seeing the wall of illusion that we're really up against.

And as I began to post links back to this Review for more e-lightenment than I could fit into a blog comment box, it forced to try on the linkee's web-shoes, and I became more conscious of just what our Dear Old Agora looks like to the hapless link-follower. I have to say I began to worry whether we are doing much of anyone from the outside world much good at all, beyond the accidental bit of serendip.

Anyway, here's my latest comment on the Chronicle Of Higher Education Blog, partly in response to the comment just above it —

One of the main sources of misundertanding about Wikipedia, a confusion that arises time and again even in discussions with people who ought to know better, is the confusion of Image with Reality.

This can be formulated in generic terms as a confusion between de jure X and de facto X, for just about any X of significance that anyone might care to name.

Just by way of recent Xample, Wikipedia's de jure dominance hierarchy, the sort of thing you could paste up on an organizational chart, is a very different thing from Wikipedia's de facto dominance hierarchy, the sort of thing that it would take a bevy of trained anthropologists a non-trivial empirical study just to begin sketching.

Another name for this general issue is what Argyris and Schön called the distinction between Espoused Values and Enacted Values.

Jon Awbrey

I've been away for a couple of days. I missed the predecessor thread, and I just read it cold as leftovers (like spaghetti.) I think this might be a very good idea.

1. avoid jargon and loaded language, both or WP and WR.
2. start with an objective and dispassionate history of WP.
3. provide a brief primer of the mechanics and working of WP.
4. Vandals, Handles and Scandals: A Critique of WP
   • The John Seigenthaler and the assassination of Robert Kennedy controversy.
   • Discussion of Sec 230 Immunity.
   • The Essay Scandal.
   • Discussion of hostility toward experts.
   • The Fuzzy Seller defamation.
   • Discussion of the problem of anon and pseudonymous editing.
   • "Living in the U.K. in a Similar Way."
   • Discussion of Sockpuppets and Internet Sleuths.
   • Darkest Speculation: SlimVirgin, Real Life Spies and The Lockerbie Flight Bombing.
   • Discussion of social networking influence, manipulation and abuse.

What I suggest above is, after a couple of general information sections, is the alternation of a "case study" followed by a discussion of the issues and criticisms that are illustrated in the incident.

That looks like an outline for a Really Big Book, and I certainly hope that anyone who is up to writing one or more chapters of it will get down to it, here or elsewhere.

My teachers all through life were always telling me «Focus, Focus, Focus» and «Rein In Your Scope», so I hope that they at least will appreciate it if I don't try to ravel up the world in this monofilament thread.

For my bit, I'm trying to stick to writing a Fieldbook or a Survival Guide, just enough knowledge of nuts and berries to keep the average birder from having to eat crow in a few months' time.

Jon Awbrey

Educators are aware that learners have many different paths to knowledge. Among the most obvious are these —

1. Learning by being told.
2. Learning by doing things for oneself.
3. Learning by watching what others do.

What do people learn from participating in the full range of activities provided by the Wikipedia website, considered with regard to each of these modes?

Some of the questions that educational researchers would naturally think to ask about the Wikipedia experience are these —

1. What do people learn about the ethical norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?
2. What do people learn about the intellectual norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?

For example, questions that one might ask under the indicated headings are these —

{1 b} «What do people learn about the relative values of primary and secondary sources from reading the relevant policy pages in Wikipedia?»

{3 a} «What do people learn about plagiarism from watching what others do in Wikipedia?»

Jon Awbrey

Wouldn't learning as regards any combination of the above require there to be some form of consistancy, either in the message delivered from the PTB at Wikipedia, or in the actions and words of the "normie" users of same? So far, from any stance, coherancy of signal is not strong.

How can you say what the message is, if the PTB won't even stay in tune?

The questions that I listed are empirical questions. They are very typical of the kinds of questions that researchers in the various disciplines of the Cognitive Sciences, Educational Psychology, Educational Systems Design, Information Technology, and many others are accustomed to ask and trained in methods to answer about any educational modality that comes down the pike.

Of course, anyone who has a modicum of personal experience with Wikipedia will have a variety of ancedotal observations, estimates, and hypotheses that are based on that experience and on the reports of others.

Still, all of that will get tested one way or another, whether formally or informally, and there will be a collective judgment in the end that arises from the mass of individual judgments.

Jon Awbrey

Many management science people make a distinction between the "formal" and "informal" organization. Shit, there is even a Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_organization

The formal is that piece of paper -- commonly called an "org chart" -- that lays down the chain of command. Stapled to it is Official Policy, or how information is to be mangled beyond all hope of recovery as it transits the various edges in the graph.

This is what you show to the bank, the investors, most low-level employees, and others who aren't supposed to have a clue.

The informal is the actual workings of the machine, and it is not written down. It is supposed to be discovered and/or created by the more productive members of the organization.

Exactly. I have often wished that Wikipedian managers would read some of Wikipedia's own articles on modern and post*modern management. Problem is, if they did, they are just as likely to warp the articles to fit their own misconceptions and ban the experts who initially wrote them. At any rate, I know that's what they do with Philosophy.

Jon Awbrey

Two hypothetical models of Wikipedia...

Model #1. Wikipedia is a marketplace of ideas. Ideas live and die on their merits. People live and die based on the merit of their ideas.

Model #2. Wikipedia is a marketplace of personalities. People live and die based on the force of their personalities. Ideas live and die based on the personalities of their proponents.

I like a high-falutin hypothesis more than most folks — and if a «Marketplace of Personalities» is a place where people who don't have a personality can go to get one, I can certainly see how lots of Wikipedians would be interested in that — but I also see the need for a practical field guide that would provide investigators with a thread through the maze of concrete data and the maya of concerted deception that we know as Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey

"Personalities" is a euphemism for "odd characters."

I understand "odd" as being a synonym for abnormal. To define this, do you then not have to define "normal"?

Isn't the an even moderately acceptible definition of normal functionally impossible?

Thus that would make (by minor leap of logic,) "Personalities" a euphemism for "anyone who doesn't agree with me/themajority/thehivemind." Since wikipedia seems to be about conforming on the most absolute of levels...wouldn't this make Wikipedia Review the marketplace for personalities...and wikipedia the potential market?

Conforming to the modal characteristic implies a unimodal distribution. The most ubiquitous unimodal distribution is the Normal Distribution. While personality traits are multidimensional, each dimension might be approximated by a normal distribution over the general population. Standout personalities must have at least some crucial dimensions of the personality out in the tails of the normal distribution.

This requires what I would call arbitrary assignment of personality traits to dimensions. In the most basic form, you have to chose a series of emotional states that (according to the person creating the dimensional map,) are related. Thus you can create a gradient od some form, and call that a dimension. Repeat until you have either a) run out of emotions that you can qualify, or met your aribtrary pre-set number of dimensions.

Then you have to attempt to assign that personality a position on each gradient (dimension) and, yes, you're right, you could use Normal Distribution then to try to map what a "normal" person is.

The problem is that linking any emotions as related to eachother in order to form even a single gradient in the first place, and then assigning a personality, (based on what, observation? Expression? Action? EEG?) to a position on that gradient are entirely arbitrary! And who decides what emotions are related? The majority? Experts? An algorithm? Even the experts will agree we don't know nearly enough about psychology to make anything more than a "moderately reliable refereence" to map personalities, let alone attempt to mathmatically model them.

Until emotions/personality traits can be quantified, then determining "normal" is at best, a game of educated guessing, at worst...a crapshoot.

Emotions are just one of eight fundamental dimensions of personality.

And within emotions, there are perhaps a dozen distinct axes, such as Boredom-Interest, Anxiety-Confidence, Embarrassment-Pride, etc.

The measurement and quantification of emotions is an active area of current research in Neuroscience and Affective Computing.

Oh indeed, and you could bust out the MMPI, or any of a dozen others to attempt to quantify the "mind" of a person...but none of them are exact. Thus the ambiguity. I don't deny that 'normal' can be attempted with some minor degree of sucess, but there remains, at least at our current understanding, quite a bit of "wiggle room" in any possible definition.

And that's without even getting into the fact that modern psychiatry, neuroscience, pharmo-neurology etc. all have different ideas and "camps" which are themselves fractured on the subject.

...math is much cleaner.

Even atomic physics has its Uncertainty Principle.

That's why many scientific models are probabilistic in nature.

Playwrights and actors can devise characters which bear an uncanny resemblance to real people. No theatrical portrayal is exact, but many of them are nonetheless insightful.

No debate there. Some things we know more of than others. The science of the mind lags far behind that of the material world.

(Otherwise, they'd probably be able to 'fix' me.)

The attraction of a pleasant phantasy is not strange, it will keep the unboostered mind in its orbit for many a futile revolution, but the pull of reality is formidable, it will have its day before the days are done, and the sooner we make the vaster beauty of reality visible to our planetary eyes the better for us in the long run.

Jon Awbrey

Dynamic Page —

Read 'Em And Weep : Myths To Cry By

It may be necessary to create a separate thread for it eventually, but I'd like to start a dynamic page or two for collecting real-life examples of fond notions about Wikipedia that one finds are still being chanted like mindless mantras in the more clueless corners of the blogosphere. When we have done that, maybe we can begin a more systematic deconstruction of how they diverge from the reality of Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey

Links For Later Development —

Chronicle : Wired Campus ¤ Wikipedia's Founder Says the Site Has a Place in Academe





Chronicle : Wired Campus ¤ Can Google's New Open Encyclopedia Best Wikipedia?


Dan Colman : OpenCulture ¤ Betting Against Google’s Answer to Wikipedia

Myth: Wikipedia is an encyclopedic compendium representing the sum of all human knowledge.

Myth: Wikipedia articles meet the highest journalistic standards of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in online media, especially with respect to the biographies of living persons.

Myth: Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Myth: Content disputes on Wikipedia are resolved in a fair, judicious, and expeditious manner.

Myth: Errors and personal invective are promptly and courteously refactored in a spirit of good will.

Myth: The leadership at the top of the project are uniformly of impeccably high character.

These are of course manifestly typical examples of hyper-ventilated Wikipediot PR.

What I'm looking for here would be cases of bloggers and journalists echoing fragments of the Wikipediot Canon Shot without actually stopping to ask themselves if any of these wishful fantasies are really true, much less doing the requisite research to find out the facts of the matter.

Jon Awbrey

Much of the discussion above seems relevant to the project of collecting and correcting Misconceptions About Wikipedia.

Jonny

I just noticed that the Op-Ediot Piece by Magnus Linklater supplies us with a timely and typical example of what I'm talking about here. It recites, chapter and verse, paragraph by paragraph, nearly the whole litany of Wikipediot Misconceits.

Jonny

When it comes to scientific modeling of cultural phenomena, the daily press is not a particularly reliable source of original scholarship. For one thing, it's not peer-reviewed.

I'm beginning to think that all e-media are qwikly sliding down the silvery slop to a “bottom of the bag” condition, dragged down in large part by the grubitational dingularity we know as Wikipukia, but just in case — it could happen !!! — rag-tag bands of old school journalists and scholars yet survive within the sound of our keyboard rapping, I still see some merit in reviving this proposal one more time.

Jon Awbrey