The current media debates about the role of digital communication technologies in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 focus mostly on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but Wikipedia was mentioned a few times as well. As already noted last week, activist Wael Ghonim made headlines by saying "Our revolution is like Wikipedia... Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don't know the names of the people contributing the content. This is exactly what happened".
In an article about the role of the Internet for the protesters on the New York Times' "Link by Link" blog ("Egyptians Were Unplugged, and Uncowed"), Noam Cohen drew from, among other things, impressions and contacts made at Wikimania 2008:
| “ | This comfort with a relatively free-flowing Internet was on display in 2008, when Wikipedia's annual convention was held in Alexandria, at the new high-tech library built near where the legendary Library of Alexandria had been.
Filled with much of Egypt's technical class, which included many women, the gathering was billed as an effort to bolster Arabic Wikipedia. The relatively low number of articles didn't accurately reflect the importance of technology in the Arab world, the thinking went. Many Egyptians had an active, even bustling, Facebook presence, and attempts were made to organize protests at the site on behalf of bloggers who had been persecuted by the government. |
” |
Trying to draw a direct line to the recent events where the government had shut down the entire Egyptian Internet to quell the protests, Cohen quoted Moushira Elamrawy, "an advocate for free culture and free software in Alexandria" nowadays working for the Wikimedia Foundation (where she recently became "Chapter Relations Manager", see Signpost coverage; in fact she received the news about Mubarak's resignation during her first IRC office hour). She "remembered the conference as a chance for the budding techie community in Egypt to meet in person. Two years later, the Internet shutdown showed the need for an independent community of technical experts to protect Egyptians' connection to the world. The day the Internet was shut off represented a point of no return, Ms. Elamrawy said. 'It was definitely one of the most provoking things. We felt abandoned – completely isolated from the world.'"
In his 2008 coverage of the event, Cohen had observed that "In Egypt, Wikipedia is more than hobby", putting "the enthusiasm for building a stronger Arabic Wikipedia" among the young local participants in the context of the then-ongoing April 6 Youth Movement.
The choice of Egypt as the site of Wikimania 2008 had initially been controversial because of the Egyptian government's human rights record (Signpost coverage).
The Guardian featured a long portrait of Jimmy Wales last week ("The Saturday interview: Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales"). It opened by noting that Wales had just moved to Britain to join his fiancee, who was Tony Blair's diary secretary, is currently a director at Freud Communications, a London-based PR firm (where she is handling the 2012 Summer Olympics) and is about to give birth to Wales' second child. Author Aida Edemariam then covered many topics about Wales' life and Wikipedia that have been reported elsewhere, adding several details, for example that Wales had grown up as a "'super-geek' with thick glasses and a very early interest in computers". While describing Wales as "generally being the suave public face of his company [i.e. Wikipedia - sic]", the article also gave examples of how he was still doing "some of the nitty-gritty" of Wikipedia editing, "of keeping an eye on new entries, vetting the quality of their sources, flagging up inappropriate bias ..., and reverting anything dubious". Wales noted that there are several kinds of vandalism, distinguishing libelous modifications of BLPs from more harmless edits that are called "sandboxing – people are treating it like a sandbox – they know they can't really hurt anything." The article claimed that Wales "is, in fact, generally dismissive of traditional modes of authority – peer-reviewed journals, the requirement for strings of letters after names. 'I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.'" On Wales' actual company Wikia, the article reported claims by unnamed critics that it "in effect piggybacks on the reputation built up by the legions of unpaid contributors to the encyclopedia, and thus ruthlessly exploits them", a charge dismissed by Wales.
A recent essay titled "The Missing Wikipedians" argues that "as large parts of Africa go online, it is expected that they will start to edit Wikipedia and that they will edit it in their own language. Both of these assumptions may be incorrect." The author, South African Heather Ford, a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board, published the essay on her personal blog, but it will be part of an upcoming reader edited by the "Critical Point of View" (CPOV) Wikipedia research initiative (cf. Signpost interview with two of its organizers).
The essay centers around the case of the article Makmende on the English Wikipedia, about a fictional superhero that last year became what has been called Kenya's first Internet meme. Around that time, blogger and Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman (also a member of the WMF advisory board) had tried to look up the term on Wikipedia and instead encountered deletion log entries telling him that the article had been speedily deleted three times (a later version was kept). This prompted him to write a blog post presenting the deletions as a case of what Wikipedians call systemic bias: "Makmende may never become particularly important to English speaking users outside of Kenya. But the phenomenon's quite important within the Kenyan internet". Ford's essay expands on Zuckerman's blog post, quoting from a subsequent AfD: "Wikipedia editors claimed that the article needed to be deleted because there existed 'no reliable sources, and no claims of notability'. Pointing to the lack of sources relating to African culture online [a user] came back with this retort: 'The problem is that there is hardly any content on African influences in the 90's and 80's which may make it hard to make the connections'. However, Ford also noted that "interestingly, Makmende does not exist in the Swahili version of Wikipedia ... There seems to be a disconnect between where ordinary Kenyans want their cultural narratives to live, and where outsiders imagine it."
The essay was discussed on the Foundation-l mailing list, where participants questioned the accuracy of the description of the deletions. Thewub argued that "this particular example is portrayed absolutely incorrectly", explaining that the first version had been rightfully deleted as G1 ("Patent nonsense, meaningless, or incomprehensible"), consisting only of "Makmende. Kenyan Superhero. Spawned. Not born. Amphibious. Breaths underwater." The next two speedy deletions concerned a copyright violation. And the AfD had in fact resulted in an eight keep votes and none for deletion except the nominator (but only his statement was quoted by Ford). He concluded "Honestly, I think this is an example of Wikipedia working pretty well. The only problem was perhaps a misleading third deletion summary" (citing G3 - "pure vandalism" - instead of G12 "Unambiguous copyright infringement"). Last year, Wikimedia Trustee SJ had offered similar clarification about the speedy deletions in the comment section of Zuckerman's blog post.
Asked by the Signpost for comment, Ford acknowledged that "thewub makes some good points about the exact sequence of events that I think are important to add to the story", but that they would not refute the larger arguments in the essay, which had used the Makmende deletion "as a story that epitomises Wikipedia's current growth problems and the challenges it faces as it seeks to 'make all human knowledge accessible'."
Indeed the Foundation-l criticism did not extend to the rest of the essay. After citing various researchers on the slowing growth of Wikipedia, rising revert rates and deletionism, and questioning the expectation that increased Internet access in developing countries will generate an influx of new Wikipedians, Ford comes back to the Makmende example, asking "why was the Kenyan community so determined that the Makmende article exist on the English version of Wikipedia?", despite the existence of a Wikipedia in their own language, with much less bureaucratic red tape. To answer this, she applies four different kinds of motivation to contribute to public good in online cooperations that sociologist Peter Kollock identified: Anticipated reciprocity by other users, reputation, a sense of efficacy (having an impact) and need (of others, i.e. altruism).
In the conclusion, Ford argues that for "people in developing countries like Kenya ... the motivations for contributing in English Wikipedia are ... much greater than [for] contributing to the Swahili version, but it is unlikely that the vast holes in geographical and cultural content will be filled when the costs of contribution are so large." She observes that "far from having nothing left to talk about, Wikipedia has a number of holes", but that it needs "a strategy for dealing with local notability".
Discuss this story
Regarding "the article reported claims by unnamed critics that [ Wikia ] "in effect piggybacks on the reputation built up by the legions of unpaid contributors to the encyclopedia, and thus ruthlessly exploits them" - hey, I resemble that remark :-). But the snippet garbles the point that Wikia is intended to "take the success -- and, indeed, the underlying philosophy -- of Wikipedia," and "commercialize the hell out of it", phrases which come straight from a Trader Monthly interview on this topic, so are not easily dismissed. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 07:17, 23 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think the Africa problem is really a conjunction of two separate problems;
Here's a rule - if something appears in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, it's notable. If it doesn't, it isn't. Sorry Africans!
A very short open letter to The Equinox and other media
If you don't understand how Wikipedia works, either learn, or don't write about it.
In almost every other subject this is an accepted norm. If you don't understand how the (electoral college/cooking/the human body/etc.) works, either learn, or don't write about it. For some reason though, everyone from school newspapers all the way up through top tier national or international daily papers seem to ignore this common sense guideline when it comes to Wikipedia. The number of reports that inaccurately depict how Wikipedia works is substantial, and is one of the core reasons why academics and the public at large are so conflicted on Wikipedia.
Also, not getting facts wrong in your reporting is generally just considered good practice in journalism.
Now there are a number of ways to avoid such mistakes. First of all you could join in as an editor, spend some of your time working on articles and getting the Wikipedian experience firsthand. Secondly, you could send an email to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that runs the hardware, plans events, does outreach, and oh yeah, gives interviews. Third, you could always ask a few Wikipedians about Wikipedia. I recommend talking to a few of them, not just one, as you'll get a bit more balance in the opinions you hear that way (that being said almost any of them would have caught and corrected your error on staff article reviewers.)
In the end, it comes down to putting in the effort and caring about getting the facts right, both of which should be in the core of the journalistic ethos, but sadly do not seem to be when it comes to Wikipedia. Perhaps in time this will stop happening, but until it does, I leave you with this: Wikipeida is a unique resource, which more and more people are recognizing and treasuring as such. For whatever its flaws, it's a beautiful thing. However, every time a story in the media misrepresents or distorts Wikipedia, it damages that beautiful thing, and it hurts many of us ordinary people that have devoted so much time to making it possible. Journalists should know better than to drop the ball with facts, but it's not just Wikipedia that suffers in the end, the dedicated editors as well as the millions of users that visit Wikipedia come off a little worse off each time as well.
Thank you for your time,
Sven Manguard Wha? 21:16, 27 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]