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The Nicholas Alahverdian Story, Part Three

A case study in Wikipedia failure

by Dahlia Raven (see also: Part One, Part Two, Epilogue)

If you look at the current version (at the time this blog entry was written) of Wikipedia’s Nicholas Alahverdian article, you will see it includes a picture of a white guy with a beard. That is where the story goes from a case of sockpuppetry and promotional editing to something weirder, because that is not a picture of Nicholas Alahverdian.

That picture is of Jonathan Finer, former Chief of Staff and Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. It appears to have been taken from the “Leadership” page at the Foreign Policy for America website, flipped horizontally, edited slightly, and then uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in October 2017. The uploader gave it a description which reads, “Nicholas Alahverdian sits for a portrait in March 2017.”

[Editor’s note, 1/31/2021: This image has since been deleted from Commons.]

Well… that’s strange

It was Wikipedia editor and administrator Nihonjoe who noticed that the picture was not Alahverdian. They removed the picture (“rm photo with dubious claim of being the subject”) and nominated it for deletion on Commons. And then it went from weird to weirder. Norsk81, the uploader in 2017, returned to claim that it was indeed Alahverdian, even though it didn’t look like him.

As the photographer working on assignment I took this photo of Nic (the subject) at the statehouse in Providence RI. Nihonjoe gave ten year old photos for proof, and the photo I shot was seven years more recent. I am unsure how to respond other than I know who I photographed in 3/2017 and it was definitely him. Norsk81 (talk) 01:22, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Pointing out a few things would not be wrong

…continue reading The Nicholas Alahverdian Story, Part Three

The Nicholas Alahverdian Story, Part Two

A case study in Wikipedia failure

by Dahlia Raven (see also: Part One; Part Three; Epilogue)

Why does Nicholas Alahverdian have a Wikipedia entry at all?

The simple answer is that an editor named Tkfy7cf created it. Not as “Nicholas Alahverdian,” but as “Nicholas Alahverdian I” (note the “I”). It was started on 14 November 2019, fully formed and including a photograph. On Wikipedia, that in itself is usually considered suspicious, so it was only a matter of minutes before it was moved to the correct title, and then immediately nominated for deletion.

The deletion discussion was closed with a very lukewarm keep:

The result was keep. I see that there are concerns about sockpuppetry in this discussion, but on the substance it seems like the various GNG-based claims of notability have been only weakly contested even if the “Harvard University alumnus” notability claim has not gained much acceptance. The BLP1E point is somewhat less clear but it hasn’t received enough support to make a deletion consensus.

There will very likely be another deletion discussion and another chance to debate the merits of Alahverdian’s article, but let’s examine one of the non-sockpuppet comments, if only because it’s so terribly misguided:

Keep. He was also an author who attended Harvard University He wrote: Dreading and Hoping All He was also published in the Providence Journal. Seems to have non-trivial coverage. Quebec Tribune, and again Quebec News Tribune. My opinion is non-trivial SIGCOV exists. It is concentrated on the East coast, New England, but that is not a concern for our guidelines. Lightburst (talk) 21:42, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Alahverdian is an author; a self-published author.He did attend Harvard, and was “administratively withdrawn,” as covered in Part One of this series.He was published in the Providence Journal. It was

…continue reading The Nicholas Alahverdian Story, Part Two

Wikipedia: Sources & Methods

How tweet it is…

by sashi

It all started when I noticed a badly-spun tweet being added to a biography on Wikipedia, sourced to a click-baity headline from Politico. Now, a month later, the decontextualized tweet has been removed after much discussion, and an exclusive article the subject of the biography had written for the Daily Mail has been disappeared without any discussion. The biographical entry remained on full-protect lockdown all throughout, because earlier manipulation of the article had led to bad press for Wikipedia and an Arbitration Committee case.1

This affair — along with recent highly-publicized furors about public figures’ pithy snark — got me wondering just how many tweets were sufficiently notable to be included in Wikipedia. A fellow exile taught me the proper syntax for searching inside of citation templates (insource:”web.site”), and ever since I’ve enjoyed watching the unexpected portrait of an elephant emerge as I investigate the source-linking data.

Blind monks examining an elephant, Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724)

There were 35,735 links to Twitter in the elephant’s belly that day. Since then, it has been fed just under a dozen tweets a day, so by now the number will have grown to over thirty-six thousand. No worries, though: the internal pressure has simultaneously been reduced each day by shedding a half-dozen references to the Daily Mail. (This is because 50 people back in February 2017 decided that publication should be banned from Wikipedia, at least in part because of their click-baity headlines.)

The English-language Wikipedia indulges in tweets much more than most other languages do. While the Spanish Wikipedia does link to Twitter almost 30% as often, both the German and French Wikipedias have limited themselves to fewer than a tenth of the Twitter-links

…continue reading Wikipedia: Sources & Methods