danah boyd, Wikipedia, The Fuzzy Hat, and All That

Cousin danah (not really, but aren’t we all cousins, really?) articulates how the Wikipedia process is broken, chronicling how it has led to so many inaccuracies in the entry about her:

[from apophenia: on being notable in Wikipedia]

I can’t fully put my finger on why the media-centric thing bugs me, but it does. The media has decided that i’m an expert because of my knowledge in a specific domain; Wikipedia has decided that i’m notable because i’m on TV. Why is Wikipedia not using transitivity and saying that i’m notable because of my knowledge in a specific domain? Why does it matter more that i’m on TV than why i’m on TV?

I think it’s totally brain dead to not approach living notables to clarify the details of their lives, or at least support a section of these entries with the individual’s asserted facts.

And to not get the fuzzy hat thing right?

Why does mainstream media play such a significant role in the Wikipedia validation process? We know damn well that mainstream media is often wrong. In the midst of this, the reference to my fuzzy hat had to be removed because it couldn’t be substantiated by the press and because i didn’t wear it on O’Reilly. Of course i didn’t wear it on Fox - i was trying to get across to parents, not be myself. As much as i don’t think of the hat as core to my identity, i’m very well aware that others do.

And if and when I am ever written up in Wikipedia (Tom Evslin managed to get Advisory Capital in there, and I am cited in an entry about Social Software), I want them to get the hat thing right: it’s not a beret, it’s a cap on backwards.

[pointer from David Weinberger]

Tom Evslin on Wikipedia’s Anti-blog Bias

Tom Evslin has an interesting post about his recent experience at Wikipedia, where he had created an entry on Advisory Capital (yes, the term I coined a month or so ago) that was “speedily deleted” because of anti-blog bias:

[from Wikipedians vs. Bloggers]

[…]

But Wikipedia is somewhat schizophrenic when it comes to blogs.

I realized this shortly after I created a Wikipedia article on advisory capital (a term Stowe Boyd introduced and many blogs are discussing) when the article suddenly disappeared. “WTF?” I asked myself.

Turns out that it was “speedy deleted” by a Wikipedia editor (there is such a thing – something like a sysop on a message board used to be). The reason given was “lack of context” which basically means the topic was made up out of the blue. The deleted article list pointed to the deleted article policy which told me how to appeal a deletion. I did.

Tom goes into the back-and-forth of his descent into the seven circles of wikipedia, and concludes:

The example of “advisory capital” is a trivial one but a good illustration. Within a few months use of the term “advisory capital” will either have died out or been picked up by the traditional media. According to some interpretations of Wikipedia policy, the article will become appropriate once the term appears on a dead tree. The irony is, of course, the traditional media will have picked the term up from the blog discussion which Stowe Boyd started.

Obviously blogs are authoritative and verifiable as a source for what is being discussed on blogs – the claim I’m making for advisory capital. But it is an oxymoron for Wikipedia to disdain self-published information on any subject. Sure, most individual bloggers (including me) have earned little public credibility. Individual contributors to Wikipedia don’t have individual credibility either. But the aggregate of the information and opinions presented on blogs or Wikipedia articles is an extremely useful source. There isn’t much difference between bloggers and Wikipedians.

One of the many strengths of Wikipedia is that everything including policy is open to discussion (altho Wikipedia disclaims being a democracy). Searching for my missing article and the reasons for its demise, I joined the WikiProject on Blogging to better integrate Wikipedia and blogs. You can join or lurk as well if you’re interested.

The discussion on whether or not to delete the advisory capital article is here. Not sure how that’ll come out (only one vote to keep so far) but I’m more concerned with the overall issue of blogs as one of many useful types of source than with this particular article.

I in particular liked Tom’s recommendation to the Blog Wikipedia project to counter the bias against blogs and level the playing field with other media:

[from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Advisory capital]

I have added a proposal to the blog wikiproject that an acceptable measure of current notability be the appearance of an article subject with a high technorati rank (or other measures of blog attention). Note that this does not make blogs an authority except on the subject of what’s being discussed - and does avoid narrow or vanity articles.—Tevslin 20:06, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

The whole thing is surreal, for me, since I am in the early stages of planning a one day summit on the topic of Advisory Capital (about which more later), and have been talking about the concept with dozens of people. This flap at Wikipedia makes for a strange backdrop to that.