The sudden death of former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay last week brought renewed media attention to how editors respond to current events on Wikipedia articles. Reuters came out with a widely reprinted story focusing on some of the early changes to Lay's article, with the headline "Ken Lay's death prompts confusion on Wikipedia".
News reports of Lay's death began appearing around 14:00 UTC on 5 July. The first Wikipedia edit reporting Lay's death (at 14:01 UTC) was actually in error, as it gave the date of his death as 3 July. This was fixed in the following edit, and the first reported cause of death, at 14:03 UTC, correctly indicated "an apparent heart attack." This was changed to suicide two minutes later, and Reuters only began its chronology after this point. Their timeline included both causes being mentioned simultaneously, then backpedaling to saying the cause was "yet to be determined", an edit attributing the supposed suicide to Lay's "guilt of ruining so many lives", and finally restoration of a heart attack as the cause.
All of this transpired by 14:12 UTC, when the article was semi-protected, which cut down on the problems with this particular issue in the article. Interestingly, before semi-protection all of the edits indicating a cause of death, whether correct or erroneous, came from unregistered users. Reuters did note the later insertion and removal of some "speculation as to the cause of the heart attack" connecting it with stress from Lay's recent criminal trial and conviction.
As Mathias Schindler noted, in the rush to put the story out on its wire service, Reuters itself managed to misreport the source of its own information about the cause of Lay's death. The initial version of the story said the information came from a Lay family spokeswoman. Subsequently a corrected version appeared, indicating that the spokeswoman only confirmed the death, not the cause; the report of a heart attack had come from a pastor at the family's church. By the time Reuters published, more than six hours had transpired since the initial reports of Lay's death. Reuters previously contributed to publicity over a mistranslated quote from Jimmy Wales at last year's Wikimania conference purporting that Wikipedia would start permanently freezing articles once they reached a sufficiently high level of quality (see archived story).
Aside from this error, some criticism was directed at the sensationalism of the headline. Andrew Lih dismissed the notion that "confusion" was the problem or that Wikipedia was "reeling", as a subsequent headline on CNN.com put it, "rather irresponsibly" according to Lih. The accuracy of the story itself garnered less objection, but the reporting in the body of the article didn't explicitly reach the conclusion contained in the headline, much like last month's New York Times story on semi-protection (see archived story). The Times subsequently issued a correction and changed its headline after Wales complained.
In an analysis on his blog, Lih concluded that the evolution of the Lay article was actually fairly routine for the circumstances. From his background as a journalism professor, he compared it to the typical "sausage factory tour" of a newsroom where the parts of a story are put together as a deadline approaches. Lih concluded that the Reuters story was an example of "parachute journalism" where the reporter wrote from a perspective on the outside of a community, but without taking the time to understand it.
The Washington Post also carried a follow-up on the story Sunday in its Web Watch column by Frank Ahrens. Ahrens declared himself "a fan of Wikipedia" but said the incident "exposed the critical weakness of Wikipedia that prevents it from becoming the go-to source for Internet knowledge that it ought to be." He pointed to the expectations of reliability people have for an encyclopedia and the problems when this is misused to serve an agenda. On the CBS Public Eye blog, Vaughn Ververs thought this criticism was "a touch over-the-top for such a short-lived incident". But Lih agreed that it is problematic to approach Wikipedia "with the same expectations as a uniformly and systematically edited publication". He suggested trying to manage expectations while also systematically improving quality through such efforts as WikiProjects.
A new proposal to implement stable versions of articles was put up for community discussion last week. While most plans for identifying stable, quality-reviewed versions have been awaiting anticipated support for such a feature in the MediaWiki software, this proposal, dubbed "Stable versions now", would be capable of use without any additional features.
The plan, suggested by Gmaxwell, involves moving articles to a development subpage once an acceptable revision has been found to serve as the stable version. The wikitext of that revision would then be copied into article's original location and protected. The two versions should be labeled with {{stableversion}} and {{development}} templates, respectively. The article can be "destabilised" at any point by deleting the protected article and moving the development version back to that location.
Any article "of a reasonable quality level" is theoretically qualified for this proposal, without needing other designated such as featured article or good article status. The article "must contain no obvious factual, grammatical, or typographical errors and must contain at least some level of referencing." To avoid actual content forking, the protected stable article generally should not be edited for any reason, only replaced with a new revision from the development version once that is chosen.
Gmaxwell also recommended that only actively edited articles be stabilised. He explained that he hoped people would regularly "resync" the article to a new stable version. However, he said the proposal was not intended for use on controversial articles, since consensus on a particular version would be impossible to get. The effort to solve the problem of controversial articles, which Gmaxwell called a minority of articles, is what he said has made previous technical designs too complex to implement.
The proposal received an enthusiastic response from some editors, and Wikimedia Foundation interim Executive Director Brad Patrick commented, "I love it." Others raised questions about the need for administrator involvement, since the stable article would be protected and destabilisation requires the ability to delete. SPUI called it, "Yet another piece of the growing divide between admins and non-admins." Gmaxwell responded that protection was necessary to prevent a fork of the article. Lar said he thought it was a good idea and recommended trying it as an experiment on a few articles before going further.
Wikimania recap
28 August 2006
Wikimania recap
14 August 2006
Wikimania recap
7 August 2006
Wikimania last-minute information
31 July 2006
Events: Contests, parties, and the local area
24 July 2006
Wikimania updates
17 July 2006
Wikimania updates
10 July 2006
Meetups And Newsworthy International Assemblages
3 July 2006
More featured speakers at Wikimania
26 June 2006
Hacking Days
19 June 2006
Featured Speakers at Wikimania
12 June 2006
Other international meetups
5 June 2006
About Wikimania
29 May 2006
About Wikimania
22 May 2006
About Wikimania
15 May 2006
About Wikimania
8 May 2006
About Wikimania
1 May 2006
About Wikimania
24 April 2006
Three years of meetups : 2003-2006
17 April 2006
Introduction to a series: Looking forward to Wikimania 2006
10 April 2006
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Wikimania recap |
This week, the Signpost discusses a few of the panels planned for Wikimania.
Reference work publishing -- have you ever wondered how reference works such as encyclopedias or dictionaries are produced at the top 'traditional' publishing houses? How do editors find contributors, verify the information that comes to them, and decide what content to leave in or out? In this panel, Karen Christensen, of Berkshire Publishing (a speciality encyclopedia publisher), Paul Kobasa of World Book, and Erin McKean of Oxford University Press dictionaries, will discuss their work as reference work editors and answer questions. These panelists would explicitly like questions beforehand about the work of professional encyclopedia editors; please leave questions on the discussion page.
A Question-and-answer session with the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee -- members of the Arbcom, including Mark Pellegrini, James Forrester, Kat Walsh and former arbitrator Kelly Martin will be available to answer questions about the work of the Arbitration Committee. The intended audience is (1) members of the English Wikipedia community who are interested in the dispute resolution process and functioning of the Arbitration process; (2) users on other-language Wikipedias who are interested in setting up Arbitration Committees on their projects; and (3) Members of the press interested in how dispute resolution on Wikipedia occurs.
Organizational uses of wiki technology -- This panel, run by Harvard Professor Karim Lakhani, will discuss the use of wikis inside organizations, and associated challenges and opportunities with IT departments, work flow integration, and cultural challenges. Panelists will include representatives from various companies that use wikis for knowledge sharing and organizational coordination, including Socialtext, MathWorks, Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Company.
Wikis: Enabling library knowledgebases -- This panel, featuring Meredith Farkas, Ellyssa Kroski and Mary Carmen Chimato, will deal with the uses of wikis in library settings particularly, and how they might be used to create a knowledge repository to benefit a community, whether that community is an individual library or the whole profession. Case studies will include wikis currently used in the panelist's own libraries. Presenters will document development, how they get contributors, and how they document institutional knowledge.
Other panels include a legal review, Section 230: At the Gates between Liability for Harmful Speech and Wikipedia; Wiki uses in learning and teaching -- part of the education track on Saturday, August 5th; a panel on information visualization techniques, Can Visualization Help?; and Wikipedia and the Semantic Web. All these panels may be discussed on their respective discussion pages, and ideas for the conference on the discussions page.
More updates next week. To come: things to do in Cambridge, Boston and the surrounding areas.
Tim Starling announced proposed changes to the blocking mechanism in a wikitech-l post on Monday. The change would allow for the fixing of bug 550, a request to only block anonymous IP edits from blocked IP addresses with an additional option to allow or deny creating accounts from the blocked IP. Brion Vibber said that the change might go live in as little as 24 hours.
Following the quickly developing news story on the death of Ken Lay, some typical short-lived instances of biased speculation introduced to Lay's Wikipedia article caught the eye of Reuters, "Lay's death prompts confusion on Wikipedia". (See related story)
The video-blogging team of Rocketboom, which covered Jimmy Wales' appearance at the TIME 100 gala, has gone their separate ways. News of the breakup between producer Andrew Baron and host Amanda Congdon circulated on the Internet and eventually reached major media while the Wikipedia articles were being updated accordingly. Andy Carvin, a Rocketboom correspondent, analyzed how Wikipedia policies influenced what it reported about the reasons for the split and how this compared to other sites. Carvin noted that earlier it had been suggested that Congdon's article be merged with Rocketboom, observing "that's pretty much a moot point now." Interestingly, Congdon's own website directs you to her Wikipedia article to learn more about her.
The Salt Lake Tribune seemed to be amused in its report about a vandal adding nonsense to the article about Utah's Senator Orrin Hatch. The paper commented that "many techies aren't fans" as a result of Hatch's previous comments about music downloading.
Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley's for-profit wiki hosting company, Wikia, Inc., launched a Campaigns Wikia site last week that received considerable publicity. In light of the efforts of political operatives so far on Wikipedia, one might expect the initiative to be a potential minefield, but Wales said it could be "a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent." David Postman of the Seattle Times said he expected political campaigns to increasingly adopt wikis in some fashion, in the same way that they have begun to use blogs. On his own blog, Postman pointed out some similar local initiatives, the moreperfect.org site started by two activists and separate partisan wikis for Democrats and Republicans from Seattle company Wetpaint. Another candidate, Pete Ashdown, has a wiki for a campaign site.
Three users were granted admin status last week: Avraham (nom), Mangojuice (nom) and Tyrenius (nom).
Ten articles were featured last week: Sikhism (nom), Poetry (nom), Knights of Columbus (nom), Cornell University (nom), Sesame Street (nom), Muhammad Iqbal (nom), Damon Hill (nom), Jabba the Hutt (nom), Manila Metro Rail Transit System (nom) and Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (nom).
Two articles were de-featured last week: Hero of Belarus and H. P. Lovecraft.
The latest portal to reach featured status is Portal:Portugal.
Five lists reached featured list status last week: List of circulating currencies, 2004 NFL Draft, List of Prime Ministers of Luxembourg, List of Australian ODI cricketers and List of European Union member states by political system.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Pope Pius XII, History of New Jersey, Three Laws of Robotics, Cystic fibrosis, Cædmon, Nauru and Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
These were the pictures of the day last week: Hypervelocity, Caslon, Warship, Great Wall of China, Woolworth Building, Lockheed SR-71 and Toda people.
Six pictures reached featured picture status last week:
Note: Last week's report, which was not ready at press time, is now available.
The Arbitration Committee closed one case and opened four others this week.
Four cases were opened this week; all are in the evidence phase.
There are currently no motions to close on the table.
