Finding truth in Sandy Hook

President Obama's remarks on the day of the shooting

The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds at our opinion desk.

This week's big story on the English Wikipedia is obviously the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (which, by the time you read this, may be renamed 2012 Connecticut school shooting). Quickly created and nominated for deletion not once but twice, and both times speedily kept, the article saw the expected flurry of edits (a look at the history suggests an average of at least one a minute over the first day and a half) and more than half a million page views on the first full day.

Controversy came quickly from a combination of two factors: the eagerness of editors—some new to Wikipedia—to report everything that was reported, and the eagerness of the media to report everything that was said or suggested. Errors resulted and so did edit-warring, but the decision to semi-protect the article was not made until two serious biographies of living person (BLP) violations. First, an IP editor placed a link in the article to the Facebook page of someone with the same name as the person erroneously identified by the media as the shooter, and soon afterward another IP editor placed links smack-dab in the article to photographs ripped from that Facebook page and posted on the internet. Those edits were subsequently rev-deleted.

The decision to semi-protect was immediately contested in the court of public opinion, in this case the article's talk page, since the administrators noticeboard (AN) was uncommonly quiet—perhaps involved editors were too busy dealing with edit conflicts on the article talk page to go there. A thread on AN indicated support for the decision, and semi-protection was later lengthened by Dennis Brown.

There was also discussion on AN and linked pages about semi-protecting the talk page: as of the time of writing this has not been done, but the possibility of BLP violations at the article is taken seriously by a number of the editors and admins who are monitoring the situation, guiding discussions, and answering edit requests—among others, Pol430, MrX, Ryan Vesey, Barek, Uncle G, Masem, and Dennis Brown. Relevant to the scenario is WP:BDP: posting information on recently deceased persons "has implications for their living relatives and friends", and the BLP policy still applies.

Further discussion on AN may lead to a more concentrated effort to handle the fallout from such dramatic events. Masem suggested a shortcut leading to a page with some behavioral guidelines: "a shortcut of accepted admin steps to take that have been accepted and need no discussion in the very short term after such events (eg, is semi-prot of the article appropriate, is creating and full prot of names associated with the event appropriate, etc.); these are decisions that after the initial flurry of edits can be come back to evaluate but in the short term to avoid disruption".

In the meantime, our coverage attracted the attention of the Nieman Journalism Lab, which ran an update with interesting stats on the development and growth of our Sandy Hook article. The Nieman article gave a shout-out to User:Wrong Way Go Back, and was quite positive about how collaborative the editing environment was after the initial few hours: "The ability for these collaborations to unfold as smoothly as they do appears to rest on the ability for Wikipedia editors with newswork experience to either supplant or compliment [sic] the work done by amateurs who first arrive on the page".^[1]

School shootings and other high-profile events will continue to occur and to cause problems for Wikipedia editors. Considering that there is an unstoppable drive to write, expand, and update these articles, we are in the same boat as some of the other "new" media whose problems were highlighted in a recent story on American National Public Radio (NPR). According to that story, early coverage in the media is often wrong, and even the New York Times had a "staggering" number of errors. Why? According to a Times editor on the NPR report, "journalistic missteps were driven by the push to meet the speed of expected social media platforms".

As Wikipedia editors, we do not, I believe, have a responsibility to be the first to report anything; but it's a matter of fact that this is how articles are written, expanded, and updated. However, the NPR story cited Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, in which he debunks as myths all the truths we thought we knew about the "trench coat mafia" being bullied by the jocks. Wikipedia articles are more like Cullen's book than they are like blog updates, since they are durable if not always stable; we have, then, the responsibility as encyclopedists to get it right—to get it righter.

References

In this issue

17 December 2012 (all comments)

News and notes

WikiProject report

Discussion report

Op-ed

Discuss this story

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Definitely. Wouldn't immediate semi-protection or PC-ing of pages like this work to keep away the less desirable edits? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:18, 19 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Certainly, but the same argument could be made that semi-protecting the entire encyclopedia would serve the same purpose. We do not do that, and we are reluctant to do it for individual articles, for a very good reason: that we want IPs and new users to edit articles. We only reluctantly shut them out if there are too many vandals out and about, but it's not a desirable state. Powers ^T 23:33, 19 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to me that such an article would be a perfect opportunity to test out PC on a current high viewed and edited article. We can see if it works well or not in such a situation. That should be done next time. Silver seren^C 00:59, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe--but who gets to approve the edits, admins or regular editors also? Besides, I wonder how that works when you have an edit per minute and want to reject an earlier edit. It's an interesting proposition, though. But what you're doing, then, is shrinking the number of gatekeepers even further. I'm not saying that's a bad thing: it probably is a good thing. At the same time, there will be a lot more clamoring about censorship. I'm surprised that it's actually relatively quiet on the talk page as far as that is concerned.
I tell you what, it's certainly something to consider next time, yes. Drmies (talk) 03:22, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'd think about it. We should have some decent field testing. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 06:33, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
If memory serves, one of the things we concluded from the initial trial was that PC isn't so good at pages like this - fast moving pages means that edits tend to pile up one on another, and by the time a version gets patrolled it's been edited again. Andrew Gray (talk) 10:42, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"either supplant or compliment" - oh dear. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 00:21, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I went back to check; indeed. Ah well, Demiurge, it's cutting-edge journalism. I tell you what, that article is chockful of data; a geek could have a field day with it. And it's interesting to see how we are studied... Drmies (talk) 03:22, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think the suggestion above about a page of "breaking news guidelines" is a pretty good one - we do the right thing in most cases, but there's a lot of effort expended on reinventing the wheel sometimes. WP:BREAKING, where I'd expected to find something, just points to the notability policy. Andrew Gray (talk) 09:43, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- … where there are seven paragraphs of guidelines for editors on not rushing. You could always help Drmies to write User:Drmies/Notoriety, too. Uncle G (talk) 09:57, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - Mmm, though those seven paras are oriented more towards the question of whether to have an article at all rather than "so, now we have one thrust upon us, how do you practically handle it"? Things like the recommendation to create and protect names, past decisions on when to apply semi-protection, etc. (And thanks for the notoriety page, I'd not seen that before!) Andrew Gray (talk) 10:42, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    - I hadn't seen it either, Andrew. Odd, no? Then again, Uncle G forgot he wrote up WP:LGB. Drmies (talk) 15:37, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think where we can do better than established outlets are in two areas
1. We do not need column inches or minutes of commentary, therefore we do not need to report poorly sourced information
2. What we do report is always sourced, and in the early stages should always be explicitly attributed - in a sense, by doing this we can only be reporting truth

The rush to report is not wholly negative, people come to us for information, and that it is recent is no reason per se to exclude it. And while the editorial decisions on what to leave out and what to put in do benefit form being a little on the conservative side, it is important to remember we are only documenting as a tertiary source and are capable of revising the content rapidly. On the other side of the coin, we need to remember that, deny it as they might, journalists will also be turning to Wikipedia, though they seem to be better at understanding our nature of recent years. Rich Farmbrough, 20:52, 20 December 2012 (UTC).[reply]

I have argued before that the tendency of articles on recent events to balloon into an unorganized mess is actually a desirable first stage in the article evolution process. It's always better to clean up a long article with many sources than to try to grow one after sources and enthusiasm are no longer readily available. Dcoetzee 14:01, 22 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- I wish people would archive the sources that they do use, though. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:06, 22 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
"all the truths we thought we knew about the trench coat mafia being bullied by the jocks." What is THIS supposed to mean? GeorgeLouis (talk) 05:20, 23 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
- Fortunately, there's an encyclopaedia around here somewhere, which has articles on the Columbine High School massacre and Columbine (book) — and indeed the Trenchcoat Mafia — that explain all of that. Uncle G (talk) 08:57, 23 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  - Thank you for the ~~somewhat~~ really very snarky answer. GeorgeLouis (talk) 02:28, 24 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Times change I guess. I protected the Osama bin Laden article on the day of his death only to be promptly overturned by other admins. This despite the fact that edits were occurring so fast I couldn't remove some "naughty words" vandalism and the fact that for at least an hour the article stated that the U.S. President had gone on TV and declared Osama was dead - at a time when all that had, in fact, occurred was an announcement that the President would soon speak. But the ability for everyone to edit was judged more important than mere facts then. Rmhermen (talk) 13:46, 23 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]