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:



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.)

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (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." )

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

And not even grammatical …

Jon

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".

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

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.

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.

As it happens, I already know where that is.

Life is rife with teachable moments. The question is — what lesson should we take away from this one?

If people are still buying the premiss that anyone in control of the situation does now or ever will care about making an honest encyclopedia out of Wikipedia — after all they've seen for the last 9 years — then they may not be teachable at all. Not in this domain. Piling up one more pixel of the same ole same ole data is just not going to get the picture through any of the channels they have on their sets.

Jon

Frequent Jayjg adversary ChrisO steps in and attempts to prove that eventualism works.

I'm thinking that Jimbo probably does mushrooms.

Right. And eventually someone will create a page for every single Lutheran, Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist, Unitarian, and Hutterite church in continental North America, to match the list of synagogues.

Actually, does this prove eventualism, or Review-ism? Surely nothing would have happened if Greg hadn't mentioned it here.

Apparently, Jayjg is a graduate of the Wikipedia School of Geography, too.

Hey, Greg, I've advised Jayjg not to block any of your harmless sockpuppets in the future, especially with inaccurate summaries such as block "evasion"…

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...:Log&user=Jayjg

…hopefully, he will heed my advice, and no more threads of the grasping-at-straws-struggling-to-find-wrongdoing variety will be necessary.

Since there are very few things in life which have more than 3-degrees of separation from mushrooms, it's possible that our zealous metaphorical mycologist might be able to insert spores and hyphae into nearly every Wikipedia article , much to the dismay and eyerolling of people who later had to go and remove the stuff or stick it in some mushroom-trivia section. Which would not be so bad, if such an editor were not an administrator with the habit of indef-blocking those whose edits he disagrees with, and the habit of traveling in a little kabbal of tag-teaming mycelium-pushers who are making sure that this is not just a polite and reversible offering of moldy connections into WP-- but rather a regular forest of toadstools which bespeaks a serious fungal infestation.

ChrisO reads the Revue! Or are one of you actually ChrisO?

Anyway, it looks like Jayjg may be an SPA. That might should be noted in the current ArbCom case he's a party to. Actually, I don't think being an SPA is wrong if the account follows the rules and edits in good faith, which I think is evident that Jayjg does not when it comes to certain subjects.

Back to Greg's original post in this thread...what you're seeing is incrementalism. Adding random facts to various articles, which I do also, usually about military subjects, is supposedly helping build the 'pedia. I remember, however, hearing in a graduate class about government policy administration that incrementalism equals mediocrity. Thus, most Wikipedia articles are mediocre and probably will remain so as long as all that happens to them is that random editors pass by and add random details.

Cla68, if you added military factoids to every article on any subject you ran across, and then edit warred over it, I'd think you were doing some harm. SPAs make very, very, very poor administrators.

Well, well, well... The plot sort of thickens.

It seems that someone in Jackson named Lane Montgomery with connections to the Temple Beth Israel website (a 25-year-old convert to the Jewish faith) wanted to get more information into Wikipedia about the synagogue. In fact, the editor reveals that he's acting at the request of his rabbi (conflict of interest by proxy?).

Meanwhile, Jayjg salivates (like a chewing worker bee we recently learned about) at the thought of wholesale conversion of copyrighted content over to the GFDL.

I completely agree with you, SPA's should not be administrators, especially a checkuser or oversight. If it is discovered that an administrator is an SPA, he/she should be stripped of those privileges immediately.

Please stop tiptoeing around it.

Jayjg should be desysopped immediately. He's playing games with Greg. He added that
bit about the synagogue, probably knowing it would get Greg's goat, Greg being from
Jackson originally. Jay's done penny-ante shit like this before. And worse.

But of course, Jay won't be challenged, because Jay is as pure as the driven matzoh.

I just asked Jayjg about this. Here is what he wrote:



Seems consistent with his edit summaries, at least:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&action=history

Now whether he created this article to begin with in order to get Greg's goat, who knows? Although since Greg doesn't have a reputation for antisemitic comments, I don't see why anyone would conclude that this was an effective way to bother him, even if Jayjg did know that Greg was from Jackson (I didn't.)

Nah, I looked through his edits after reading another thread. He's been doing historical american synagogues for a long time. Nothing devious about that edit.

I'd have to agree with the part about Jayjg not knowing where Greg is from originally - I myself thought he was from a small town in Pennsylvania. There's no reason to think that Jayjg was aware of Greg's connection with Jackson, MI...

Nevertheless, Jayjg should be desysopped immediately. That pretty much goes without saying.

That's the official opinion of the Review, no question. It may be that some people have legitimate grievances wth Jayjg. But taking a look at WR staff, of the time I've been here, at least three of five have had sockpuppets legitimately and accurately busted by Jayjg at one point or another. Not that I'd judge all these socks to be alike and equal in wrongdoing, and socking per se is no sin - for example, Greg's socks do nothing unethical - but isn't that a massive undisclosed conflict of interest?

Maybe, but I'm afraid you've started with a false premise. That isn't the "official opinion" of the Review at all, as the Review doesn't actually have official opinions. (Prevailing opinions, maybe, but not "official.")

Also, with respect to the WR staff members who have been "busted," I wouldn't really call it a conflict of interest. What you're describing is more like "possible grudge-bearing," isn't it?

Even so, the coincidence is just amazing, especially after Jay's made a part time job out of
chasing real and suspected (and delusional) socks of Greg Kohs--for the last 2+ years, I believe?

Makes me wonder if Jay didn't go out and do heavy research on his "target".

I need to check if cities near Jackson with "historic" synagogues received
similar treatment from Jay or not.
If he's done it elsewhere, he's off the hook....maybe.

Yeah, he should still have his vile powers removed. I don't care if he writes about
every little synagogue in America and posts book-length screeds about the moral
superiority of Israel.....as long as he can't oversight things out of existence, and
harass people for socking (and he himself has been caught socking more than once!)

Well, Jayjg writes a lot of articles about synagogues.

That's a lot of goats to get. I didn't know that many places allowed livestock within the city limits.

There you go with the impugning again. First of all, if you will consult our roster, WR only has 4 staff members. Somey says he has never edited WP, and I have no reason to doubt his word. Next, how on earth would you know whether Jayjg's sock busts were legitimate and/or accurate? The evidence is never made public (although presumably other CUs can see it.) As someone else pointed out, Jayjg seldom CUs nowadays except in cases which bear upon his POV, which raises questions about the "legitimacy" of any CUing that he does. And as someone else, possibly Thatcher, wrote somewhere (forgive my vagueness on this point,) CUing is not an exact science -- much of it is based on hunches, rough geolocating (the perp lives somewhere in a Very Similar Way,) and "exceptional well-honed linguistic analytic skills."

I think he meant to include Poetlister in that count (i.e., "since I've been here," which would include part of the time Poetlister was around).

Herschel's conduct differs from others in a few key respects: he uses and links to the same username he used on Wikipedia, is upfront and sincere about his motivations and interests re Wikipedia's La Rouche related articles, hasn't impersonated anyone (e.g. young women) and hasn't, to my knowledge, lied to the Review's readers.

Well, thanks for all that, but I'd still like to know why you think we should take any of Jayjg's claims at face value.

"Mount Pleasent", heh.






Speaking of grammatical...

This update on the story comes directly from Temple Beth Israel...

Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggadah

The Passover Seder, the oldest continuously observed religious ceremony in the world, tells the story of the Jews' Exodus from Egypt. Jewish tradition says that people of each generation must imagine that they personally had departed from Egypt, and the sages say that each generation must tell the story in its own terms.

Yeah, unless you have edited from Jackson I'd have to assume this is a huge coincidence.

But even if he was playing subtle a mind game I'm pretty sure he would have created that article (and made exactly the same edits related to it) sooner or later whether he knew your stomping grounds or not.

But what are you gonna do when somebody writes an article about your piano school...

Bring down that admin, Mr. Gorbachev!

A pity there is no Mr. Gorbachev on Wikipedia.

I never suggested that Jayjg intentionally zeroed in on the article about Jackson to pester me personally in any way. Indeed, I even pointed out that what brought him there was the pasting of copyrighted content by another editor altogether.

He still should be desysopped, though.