When asking for donations, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales likes to refer to the site as “a temple for the mind” and “a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others.” And when reflecting on what makes Wikipedia contributors want to share their knowledge with the world, current Executive Director Sue Gardner claims that “Wikipedians do it for love. Really.” That may well be so for some of Wikipedia’s more casual and idealistic writers, but many of the regular editors of the encyclopedia flock to it not so much for love but out of a desire to promote their political views, advertise their websites and novels, plump up their Wikipedia biographies and damage the reputations of people they don’t get along with in life.

Wikipedia is the sixth most-read site on the Internet, yet anyone with a computer and an internet connection can change its entries at any time while hiding behind an anonymous handle. Some Wikipedia contributors are experts at manipulating the site’s articles to reflect their own versions of reality, and some have been doing it for a long time without being discovered. The case of the British journalist Johann Hari using Wikipedia under a pseudonym to smear a number of his colleagues is not an isolated one. Welcome to the age of Wikipedia revenge editing.

Wikipedia editor Qworty – the early days

One of the site’s more prolific contributors, at over 13,000 edits, goes by the pseudonym of Qworty. He specializes in editing the Wikipedia biographies of writers, and, like many Wikipedians, Qworty prefers not to reveal his real-life identity. Is Qworty editing Wikipedia for love? His very first contribution to the site might suggest so. On March 10, 2007, Qworty removed a large section of negative comments from the discussion page for minor American writer Robert Clark Young. Wikipedia editor Alabamaboy had discovered a blog post by bestselling novelist Michelle Richmond alleging that Young had bragged about having written his “weirdly glowing” biography himself. Alabamaboy went on to delete “a ton of his self promo items” not just from Robert Clark Young’s biography, but from other articles as well which had been linked to Young’s biography. This is in line with the site’s autobiography guideline which strongly discourages biographical subjects from writing about themselves. The Talk page for Robert Clark Young contained other unflattering material: two contributors had suspected that Young was still secretly editing his biography under the user names of Berenise and John Bryson. And while both accounts vehemently denied this, Wikipedia editor Imladros was convinced they were run by the same person, Robert Clark Young:

Does someone here know to which WP authorities people like [[User:Berenise]]/[[User:John Bryson]] can be reported to stop him from making this project a complete joke? You’re so obvious, man, and it just keeps in line with the allegations of anonymous self-promotion and vengeful behaviour made against the subject of this article on various blogs and forums! — [[User:Imladros|Imladros]] 01:31, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Was Qworty’s removal of this embarrassing page motivated by a wish to protect a virtually unknown writer from ridicule – Wikipedia readers do occasionally come across an article’s Talk page – or did he have a different reason? Why was this supposedly new Wikipedia user already familiar enough with the site’s idiosyncratic mark-up language to not just delete the content, but to “archive” it, making it harder to find for future readers? This behavior usually indicates that an experienced user has either returned to Wikipedia under a different name or that he is operating several alternative accounts known as “sockpuppets”. Such accounts have often been used to manipulate consensus in polls where Wikipedia editors decide whether a person is notable enough to have a biography on the site, and what goes into that person’s article.

Qworty and his promotion of Robert Clark Young

Let’s assume, for the time being, that Qworty was a genuine newcomer who simply upheld Wikipedia’s policy on biographies of living persons which forbids adding poorly sourced derogatory information to Wikipedia. Qworty certainly has a lot of love for Robert Clark Young, and has so far made 25 edits to Young’s biography with this account alone. In July 2011, Qworty created an article about director Terisa Greenan. At that time, Greenan was most notable for a web series about her polyandrous lifestyle. In April 2012 she released a documentary called “Someday You”. The subject of “Someday You”: Robert Clark Young. And in August 2012, Qworty created a flattering Wikipedia article on Young’s 2008 essay “The Death of the Death of the Novel”. Sometimes Qworty failed to provide any sources when writing about Young. In more than one instance, Qworty referenced his articles on Young and his projects with mentions on obscure blogs and articles written by Young himself, which are not usually considered acceptable as sources on Wikipedia.

Qworty stands firm against self-promotional edits

Qworty and Robert Clark Young’s critics – a pattern emerges

Qworty’s interpretation of what counts as a trusted reference on Wikipedia is very different when he edits the articles on other writers: In this edit, he removed large amounts of useful information from the biography for novelist Michelle Richmond and left the article in a skeletal, almost unreadable state, dotted with tags claiming “citation needed”.

“Does not play well with others”

Robert Clark Young’s claim to literary fame is founded more on his attacks on other writers than on his only commercially published novel, “One of the Guys”. The book, which appeared in 1999, was only moderately successful and received generally poor reviews. Publishers Weekly criticized the “improbable plot” and called it an “awkward debut novel.” Kirkus Review spoke of the book’s “one-line premise” and clichéd opening situation. Yet Young’s Wikipedia article chronicles his life in great detail, and the lavish Selected bibliography section seems to list every essay and newspaper article Young has produced since 1982.

Yes, a reader happening upon Young’s Wikipedia biography might come away with the impression that Robert Clark Young is quite the prolific writer who overcame his struggles with alcohol addiction, cares deeply about his infirm parents, and fearlessly calls out authors like Brad Vice for acts of plagiarism.

Young’s Wikipedia entry is significantly longer and more flattering than that of far more productive contemporary writers like Richard Bausch, who has eleven novels and eight short story collections under his belt. Coincidentally, Young had once accused Bausch of literary cronyism and of “greasing” Brad Vice’s career. Bausch in turn implied that Young was on a clear personal vendetta and that he felt nothing but pity for him. Coincidentally, the Qworty account subsequently edited Bausch’s Wikipedia entry, and reduced the formerly well-structured biography that contained all of Bausch’s achievements and awards to something far less appealing.

The background to this involves a scathing New York Press article by Young, published in December 2005, accusing Alabama author Brad Vice of plagiarism. Vice’s award-winning short story collection “The Bear Bryant Funeral Train” had been withdrawn from publication after allegations surfaced that one of the stories contained material from a 1934 book by Carl Carmer. Southern writers were divided on the issue of whether Vice had plagiarized or merely evoked Carmer. In Young’s piece for the New York Press, he not only condemned Vice, but also attacked the prestigious Sewanee Writers’ Conference for its hand in advancing Vice’s career, and tore into seemingly anyone who ever had anything nice to say about Vice or his book. Other authors commenting, including Richard Bausch, considered Young’s criticism more motivated by the fact that he had attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and received a less-than-enthusiastic reception after presenting one of his pieces in a workshop led by the late novelist Barry Hannah, a friend of Brad Vice’s. A large section of Young’s New York Press article was dedicated to mocking the friendship between Vice and his mentor Hannah. According to this commenter, nurturing friendships does not rank highly on Young’s list of priorities:

I used to know Robert Clark Young personally, though I ended our friendship some time ago due to his paranoia and other mental problems. Bob is one of the most vengeful persons I have ever met. If you ever managed to cross him somehow, in his estimation–no matter if it was ten years ago–he takes pains to make sure he gets even for it. He lives for it, folks. I have no problem with the idea that something happened between Bob in a workshop at Sewanee–an evening with Bob is a litany on his part of those who’ve “done him wrong.” It’s somewhat satisfying to see him display that in print for a change, but I feel sorry for anyone who’s the focus of Bob’s venom.

By now, it should come as no surprise that Qworty has also edited the Wikipedia biography for Brad Vice, repeatedly deleting passages suggesting that Young’s attack article on Brad Vice contained inaccuracies and was motivated by revenge. Vice’s article was eventually fully protected, which means that only Wikipedia administrators can update or change it.

Qworty has also had his fingers all over Barry Hannah’s biography. Since March 2, 2010, he has repeatedly deleted information on Hannah’s achievements while leaving misleading comments in the “edit summary” field in which Wikipedians explain their actions to their fellow contributors. On January 27, 2013, Qworty removed two paragraphs which illustrated Hannah’s evolution as a writer and mentioned his awards and nominations as “unsourced”. The sources were in fact listed in the extensive External Links/Webliography section at the bottom of the article. A little later, he deleted the list of prizes Hannah won as “unsourced”, which was again untrue. Hannah was featured and eulogized in respected publications like The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian, and these articles were all included in the bottom section. In his next edit, Qworty completed the trick by deleting that list of sources as well, as “spam” and “links to avoid”. But Qworty wasn’t done yet. In what appears like petty cruelty rather than improvements to the deceased novelist’s biography, he removed the mention of Hannah as a generous mentor. His most egregiously spiteful “edit” by far: changing Barry Hannah’s cause of death from “natural causes” to “alcoholism”, an untrue assertion not found in the cited source.

Wikipedia and the cost of anonymity – Qworty revealed at last

Is Qworty a neutral Wikipedia editor? Absolutely not. The evidence members of our site collected over the past two weeks suggested that Qworty is either Robert Clark Young himself or someone with an obsessive interest in promoting Young. And an equally obsessive interest in people that Young dislikes. The above is only a small sample of what we managed to find out about Robert Clark Young and his Qworty persona. We passed all of it over to journalist Andrew Leonard of Salon, who told us that when he contacted Robert Clark Young via his Facebook page, Young denied ever having edited Wikipedia. In yet another coincidence, the Qworty account then stopped editing Wikipedia for several days. A few days later, on May 16, 2013, Qworty replaced the contents of his Wikipedia user page with an essay: “Who is Qworty?”

About halfway through the rambling 1,400-word self-justification, Qworty wrote, “I was never much interested in Wikipedia until I was attacked on Wikipedia. People from the real world, who had volunteered to be my enemies, came here to create ‘fictions’ – in ordinary life known as ‘lies’ – about me, so I came here to correct a few things.”

Eleven hours later, after another Facebook exchange with Andrew Leonard, Robert Clark Young conceded defeat and admitted on his Wikipedia talk page that he has been editing Wikipedia as Qworty. And that he intends to continue to do so, especially when it comes to his own article. Far from apologizing to the many writers whose biographies he defaced, Young defiantly states that he stands by the spate of revenge edits he performed, given that they were “in compliance with Wikipedia policies.”

The case of Robert Clark Young aka Qworty demonstrates the cost of allowing anybody to edit Wikipedia biographies anonymously. How many Robert Clark Youngs are there on Wikipedia, chipping away at the biographies of those who have offended them, or merely been more successful? Throughout all these years, Qworty was never sanctioned for his activities. If people like Robert Clark Young and Johann Hari can get away with such clumsy biased editing for years and years, until outside observers decide to investigate their Wikipedia history, how many others have managed to slip under the radar?

Andrew Leonard’s phenomenal piece on Salon.com is here.

Image credits: Wikipedia (1), Wikipedia (2),  CC-BY-SA

Meet Matt Buck

Matt Buck is an admin on Wikimedia Commons, where he goes by the clever pseudonym Mattbuck. He’s not the Matt Buck who is a talented illustrator, or the Matt Buck who is a bodybuilder and fitness model. He’s this Matt Buck, who is a maths PhD student at the University of Nottingham.Mattbuck is very active on Commons and one of the more prominent admins there. When someone believes an image on Commons should be deleted for some reason, they start a deletion discussion. Commons editors will discuss the rationale for deleting or keeping the image and an admin will close the discussion (and delete the image if that is the decision reached). Mattbuck is one of a group of editors who tend to appear at deletion discussions about images relating to nudity or sexuality to offer reasons why the image should be kept. Since he is an admin, Mattbuck also closes a lot of these types of discussions. Mattbuck also keeps galleries of “sexuality” and “nudity” images in his userspace, presumably so that he can spot problem images. These pages are generated by a “bot” which scans selected categories for new additions. (I was using this bot to keep track of newly added snapshots of penises – there are already well over 1,000 images of penises on Commons — but the bot owner was prompted to put a stop to that.) Why am I telling you about Mattbuck? So that when you read what follows, you will understand that Mattbuck should know better.

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Nipple of left female breast of 16 year old. Bra size 38D

On 17 April 2013, a new user account with the name of (User1234567890) was created and 7 images were uploaded. One of those images caught the attention of Mattbuck, perhaps because it appeared in his aforementioned galleries. It was an image of a woman’s breast, pushed out over the top of a purple bra, with a little bit of what appears to be a soccer shirt visible at the side. It was described by the uploader as “Nipple of left female breast of 16 year old. Bra size 38D”. Instead of deleting this image immediately and asking for it to be deleted from the WMF’s servers (because “deleted” images are not actually deleted and can still be viewed by admins), Mattbuck started a deletion discussion, with the rationale of “Low quality ‘pull down your top and take a photo’ type pic”.

Does a picture of a 16 year-old’s breast count as child pornography? Should Mattbuck have considered this an illegal image? He is in England and I believe that English laws about child pornography are similar to those of the US (see Protection of Children Act 1978). I’m sure there is a case to be made that an image of a 16 year-old’s exposed breast is not covered by that law, but recall that there were 6 other pictures uploaded. They were described as “Female pubic hair of a 16 year old from the UK” or, in one case, just “16 year old pubic hair”. Each of those was a close-up shot of a vulva with fingers spreading the labia. Each appear to be of the same vulva, although taken at different times.

Before anyone suggests that Mattbuck was not aware of the other images, let me tell you that he closed his deletion request as “Kept: Sent to another DR” when another user started a deletion request for all of the images uploaded by User1234567890. So Mattbuck was aware of them. When one image by a new user is put up for discussion, the normal course of action would be to look at that user’s other uploads. I presume that Mattbuck did this.

Are images of the spread labia of a 16 year-old girl considered child pornography in England? I believe they are. Are they considered child pornography in Canada, where Rrburke (the user who started the other deletion request) resides? I believe they are. Are they considered to be child pornography in the US, where the Commons servers are? I believe they are. When I saw these images I reported them to a WMF employee (who deleted them as soon as they were able). Why did Rrburke not report these images? Why did Mattbuck not report these images?

Taiwanese People erection 17-year-old 16CM

On 15 February 2013, User:Sn890601, an account that had never previously made any uploads or edits on Commons uploaded 3 images. All were somewhat blurry images of an erect penis. Two of the images were described as “Taiwanese People erection 17-year-old 16CM”; the other as “Taiwanese People erection”. Mattbuck started deletion discussions for two of these images. In one, he wrote ”Low quality penis photo of an under-18″ as the reason to discuss deleting the image. So Mattbuck acknowledges that the person who uploaded the image has identified the subject as being underage. Are images of the erect penis of a 17-year-old considered child pornography in England and the US? I believe they are.

When I saw these images, I looked to see if there were any Commons admins online. Howcheng seemed to be active. Howcheng is an admin on Commons and the English-language Wikipedia, and he also has access to the private OTRS facility which is used to confirm copyright permissions and respond to user complaints. I used Common’s email facility to alert him to these images, and asked him to delete them immediately. I left a note on his talk page telling him to check his email. Although Howcheng continued to make edits on Commons, he did not delete the images or respond to my email. Are images of the erect penis of a 17 year-old considered child pornography in California where Howcheng lives? I believe they are.

When my first attempt at having these images deleted failed, I contacted a WMF employee. I also told them about Howcheng’s apparent lack of action. I made a point of asking that they tell the WMF’s legal department about Mattbuck’s action. Howcheng may not have bothered to read my email until the images had been deleted, but Mattbuck had no excuse for not deleting the images. The images were deleted almost immediately. Mattbuck and Howcheng are both still admins and, as far as I know, no one from the WMF has spoken to them about their involvement in this case. Clearly, Mattbuck has not changed how they deal with such images.

A known problem

I have reported similar underage images to Commons admins and have had them swiftly and quietly deleted, but there are only a few Commons admins that I trust to do the right thing without drawing more attention to the images. I know that if I report such images to a particular WMF employee, they will be dealt with as swiftly as that employee is able, but they are only one person. There should be an email address that is monitored 24 hour a day, 7 days a week to receive these kind of reports.

The WMF is careful not to get involved with content on its projects, because they might open themselves up to legal liability for that content. On the other hand, it would not look good if they are charged with having child pornography on their servers, so they need to take action to remove it when they are notified. What about when they are not notified? Who is keeping Wikipedia and Commons free from child pornography? Volunteers. Volunteers are supposed to bring this to the attention of admins, who then deal with it. And admins are just volunteers who have the ability to do a few more things, but no training in the law, copyright, or anything else. They can delete an image, but will they report it to the WMF? Will they report it to the police? Will they make sure the image is actually deleted from the servers or just “deleted” so that normal users can’t see it but admins can? There are over 270 admins on Commons. Some of them are under 18. In some countries, they are breaking the law by looking at some of the images on Commons, even ignoring the occasional upload of child pornography. And how would the law deal with someone viewing child pornography because they have a volunteer admin position (which doesn’t let them actually delete the images)?

In April 2010, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger wrote a letter to the FBI asking them to investigate the presence of child pornography on Commons. Fox News quoted the WMF’s response as saying:

Our community of volunteer editors takes action to remove illegal material when such material is brought to its attention. The Wikimedia Foundation is proud of the Wikimedia editors who zealously work to keep the projects free of illegal material. If and when we are informed by law enforcement agencies of illegal content that has not already been removed through self-policing, we will take quick action to delete it.

Jack Stuef referenced Sanger’s letter in an April 2012 article on Buzzfeed entitled “Wikipedia’s Kiddie Porn Problem“. Stuef recounted his experiences identifying probable child pornography on Commons and asking for it to be deleted. Another year on and you can see that the Commons volunteer system still leaves a lot to be desired. The unpaid “editors”, “administrators” and “bureaucrats” that the WMF is proud of are people like Mattbuck, Rrburke, Howcheng, and others. The volunteers that the WMF relies on have received no training regarding child pornography legislation. Having dealt with this problem for years now, I am sure that some of them disagree with the laws and are unlikely to delete images that they feel are acceptable even if the law states they are not.

Time for Mattbuck to go

If a volunteer admin on Commons fails to act when they discover child pornography, are they not placing the WMF in legal jeopardy? Mattbuck not only fails to act, but actually exposes more people to these images by starting public deletion discussions for images which he should know are in violation of the applicable laws. For the time being I will continue to report such images to the WMF, but if there is no indication soon that they are working to address the obvious shortcomings in how uploads of child pornography are being dealt with, I will start reporting these images directly to the appropriate authorities. I am sure that they will, in turn, contact the WMF.

Image credit:   © kaex0r / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Amanda Filipacchi’s New York Times article about Wikipedia’s ghettoization of female novelists finally shone the spotlight on some of the rampant sexism that pervades almost every corner of the online “encyclopaedia”. Filipacchi said she had “noticed something strange on Wikipedia”:

It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too. The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men.

So in Wikipedia, US-born female writers were no longer listed in the “American novelists” category, but instead confined to a pigeonhole labelled “American women novelists”. Until Filipacchi’s article appeared, there was no corresponding category for “American men novelists” – although one was then hastily created. At the time of writing, it contained links to a proud 104 biographies of male writers, but was also nominated for deletion.

The controversy received a new impetus a few days later, when Filipacchi published a follow-up in the New York Times, noting that her Wikipedia biography had suddenly come in for “special attention”:

As soon as the Op-Ed article appeared, unhappy Wikipedia editors pounced on my Wikipedia page and started making alterations to it, erasing as much as they possibly could without (I assume) technically breaking the rules. They removed the links to outside sources, like interviews of me and reviews of my novels. Not surprisingly, they also removed the link to the Op-Ed article. At the same time, they put up a banner at the top of my page saying the page needed “additional citations for verifications.” Too bad they’d just taken out the useful sources.
In 24 hours, there were 22 changes to my page. Before that, there had been 22 changes in four years.

Andrew Leonard’s article for Salon, “Wikipedia’s shame”, went so far as to state that rather than sexism, Wikipedia’s “real corruption is the lust for revenge”. He quoted a bizarre rant from a Wikipedian named “Qworty” who had begun to edit Filipacchi’s biography, as well as articles on her novels:

The bloody p.o.s. New York Times supposedly employs fact checkers, but they have allowed this incompetent woman to libel Wikipedia not once, but two times. They owe Wikipedia two separate retractions. They have no journalistic integrity whatsofuckingever. They are nothing better than a blog, a barrel full of dog feces offered to the world as the “truth.” [...] The New York Times has a vested interest in trying to undermine Wikipedia. For one thing, the Times has only 600,000 digital subscribers, which makes it a piece-of-shit website in terms of numbers. On Sundays, its biggest day, the Times adds another 1.4 million readers in its paper edition, for a total of 2 million. Meanwhile, HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE are reading you and me on Wikipedia EVERY DAY. You can see why the Times feels it has a very very short and stubby and ugly little penis compared with us. This is the real reason why they want to run baseless articles slamming us. Because we are the future and they are already the distant past.

(Our Wikipedian seemed to have forgotten that all of Wikipedia is only an aggregation of “reliable sources”, like The New York Times, and that without such sources, there would be no crowdsourced Wikipedia.)

Of course, female American novelists are not the only notable women writers on the receiving end of Wikipedia’s demographic peculiarities.

Writing while black

Take Dr. Maya Angelou. Her Wikipedia biography is a “featured article”, an honour bestowed on a tiny percentage of the over four million entries on the site. Yet Dr. Angelou is not categorized among “American poets”, but appears in the categories for “American women poets” and “African-American women poets” (the latter of course a subcategory of “American women poets”). According to the logic espoused by Wikipedia contributors such as John Pack Lambert, a student and devout Mormon who took a leading role in initiating the exodus of women novelists’ biographies from the American novelists category, this type of double categorization is actually wrong: by his and others’ logic, Angelou should only be in the most narrow subcategory, “African-American women poets”, i.e. a double ghetto twice removed from the main category, “American poets”, which is populated by such luminaries as Walt Whitman. Being white and male, Whitman of course is in no danger of forced exodus to a subcategory.

It’s different for black writers: James Baldwin for example, one of America’s most highly regarded novelists of the 20th century, is categorised among “African-American novelists” and various other “African-American” categories, but fails to make the cut to “American novelists”. Perhaps to make up for that, he is categorised among “American socialists” and “American tax resisters”, where his race seems to present less of an obstacle to top billing.

Another example of how poorly female African-American intellectuals are covered on Wikipedia is the biography of Dr. Geneva Smitherman, an expert on language rights and racial politics. For well over a year and a half, her three-sentence Wikipedia article, which has knocked all more comprehensive sources about her off the top spot in Google, listed none of her books and other publications but included the following hoax statement, inserted by a Wikipedia editor with a special sense of humour: “In Honor of her work, Michigan State University has a statue set outside of the Library of her holding a book.”

Wikipedia: reams of discussion

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Filipacchi’s article, and the resulting avalanche of press coverage strongly and unanimously agreeing with her, had the desired effect in that Wikipedians started discussing, at great length, whether the category “American women novelists” should be kept or canned. The discussion began badly: new editors who had come to participate after having read about the controversy elsewhere were quickly put in their place and had their votes struck. And then the Wikipedia colossus lurched into motion, if motion is the correct word to describe endless discussion without any actual result. To date, that particular discussion – only one of several on the topic in Wikipedia – comprises approximately 20,000 words. That is at least the length of a novella, if not an actual novel.

Several journalists commenting on the categorisation controversy have noted that the whole situation would probably never have arisen if Wikipedia had a healthy demographic balance. Who writes Wikipedia is important: the site is dominated by young white males, with the median age estimated to be somewhere in the low to mid-twenties. White male thoughtlessness can be as effective at instituting bias, sexism and racism as actual malice.

Woman defined by man

Wikipedian and academic Adrianne Wadewitz describes this well in a piece on the website of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), an initiative associated with Duke University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute, giving the example of Sandra Fluke:

Every edit on Wikipedia is political. While Wikipedians pride themselves on remaining objective and neutral, it is impossible to remain so and the presentation of contemporary events puts this into high relief. In February 2012, Sandra Fluke testified before Congressional Democrats about women’s reproductive rights, for which she was viciously attacked by Rush Limbaugh. Within four days of her testimony, a Wikipedia article was created for her. This is one of Wikipedia’s strengths – its ability to be up-to-date. However, within five minutes of being created, the article was nominated for “speedy deletion” for “no indication of importance” (this process allows Wikipedians to delete obvious spam articles). It remained an article, passing this test, but was nominated two hours later through a more rigorous deletion process, in which Wikipedians would debate the merits of the article for a week. Fluke was considered non-notable or notable only because Rush Limbaugh had attacked her. In the end, her biographical article was merged with the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke controversy article. For three and a half months on Google, the first Google hit for Sandra Fluke’s name was Wikipedia’s article on the controversy. At that time, the Sandra Fluke article was recreated and she was deemed notable enough to have her own article.

Wikipedia’s rules are not neutral or objective, however much Wikipedians may wish them to be – they have very real political consequences. For three and a half months, Wikipedia allowed Sandra Fluke to be defined by Rush Limbaugh’s wildly inappropriate and derogatory comments, rather than by her own life story, and helped fuel an irrelevant news story. This is one small example of how every choice Wikipedia editors make on the encyclopedia shapes the world’s knowledge and thus who is editing the encyclopedia is of paramount importance.

According to a more recent piece by Wadewitz in response to the categorisation controversy, many women’s biographies in Wikipedia are below par. To her, Charlotte Lennox exemplifies the Wikipedia biography of a woman writer:

This is a typical biography of a woman writer – it has an unreferenced “Life” section and a “Works” section that consists only of a list. While the article does – surprisingly for Wikipedia – describe the relationship between Lennox’s economic status and how she made her way as a woman writer with some detail, it does not explore the themes and styles of her works at all – a reader will not come away from this article understanding what kind of writer Lennox was. Also, much of Lennox’s life and works are discussed in terms of male writers. While their role is important in her life, Lennox’s own life almost disappears in this article.

In World of Wikipedia, the only good woman is a dead woman

If the above has failed to convince you that women are given a raw deal on Wikipedia, try the biographies for female journalists. Most of the young men responsible for writing the bulk of Wikipedia’s high-visibility articles would not want to be seen dead generating content about women who shape our understanding of the world in more accomplished ways, at least not while these “female biographical subjects” are alive. However, the site has a number of contributors who specialise in scouring the obituaries in order to create what is known in Wikipedia parlance as “stubs”, i.e. minimalist biographies, of the recently deceased. Thus, it comes as no surprise that renowned war correspondent Marie Colvin did not have a Wikipedia biography until she was killed on 22 February 2012.

Similarly, you may be forgiven for thinking that eminent Canadian rocket scientist Yvonne Brill would have been notable enough to qualify for a Wikipedia biography while she was alive. You may be wrong. Brill’s Wikipedia entry was created the day after she died. Currently referenced to just nine sources, Brill’s biography is shorter than that of Wikipedia insider Sarah Stierch, whose lavishly referenced article even mentions Stierch’s pioneering early work as a local DJ and make-up artist. At least Wikipedia is able to look after its few female power players. Stierch is one of five women whose biography is featured in the category Wikipedia personalities – yes, that exists.

The Nazi hunter not worthy of her own Wikipedia biography

Those of you interested in how Nazi war criminals were brought to justice will undoubtedly have heard of Beate Klarsfeld, the fierce German-born activist who gained international recognition for tracking down monsters like Klaus Barbie. But while Klarsfeld, who was nominated to run for the German presidency in 2012, has her own biography on the French, Hebrew, German and numerous other international versions of Wikipedia, the English Wikipedia chronicles her life in a joint biography for her husband and herself. Add to this that English-speaking readers unfamiliar with Klarsfeld’s achievements will be treated to a biased piece which includes a section proclaiming that the highly-decorated activist is “unpopular in Germany” and that “Not everyone agrees that the wartime events should be prosecuted in the way that Klarsfeld pursues.” Both statements, by the way, are completely unsourced.

Sexyst time!

Just as well that there is one area in which women will always receive ample attention from the Wikipedia boy’s club: articles dealing with sexuality. Take the numerous biographies of female porn performers. As noted in James Gleick’s article covering the controversy for The New York Review of Books, they actually outnumber Wikipedia articles on women poets.* Highly educational entries such as the ones on Facial (sex act) and Tea bag (sexual act) all feature images of submissive women, and women only, although these sex acts are by no means limited to heterosexual couples. The Wikipedia article Gag (BDSM), meanwhile, takes this to new extremes, featuring ten depictions of women, all gagged, versus two of men. And how could anybody possibly object to the Wikipedia articles on sexually transmitted disease and gonorrhea being illustrated with a World War II poster featuring the demure face of an exquisitely-coiffed woman and the caption “She may look clean – but.” Sounds like a wonderful tagline to advertise Jimbo Wales’ male-dominated encyclopaedia.

Image credit: © virtusincertus / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

* UPDATE: Wikipedians investigating this claim have reported that at present, there are 1,193 biographies of women poets in Wikipedia vs. 1,079 biographies of female porn stars, meaning that the claim quoted in Gleick’s piece is narrowly false. However, the claim holds true for American biography subjects: Category:American female pornographic film actors contains 667 biographies, while Category:American women poets and its subcategories contain 416 biographies.

by Roger Hogsky

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UPDATE: There has been a response to this story from the Wikimedia Foundation, which is reproduced at the bottom of this piece.

Many businesses and organizations operate their offices from a central Internet connection that establishes just one IP address for all of its employees (and visitors) to use. However, by doing so, it can lead to situations where one employee or one visitor is up to no good on the Internet, leaving behind the IP address breadcrumbs that incriminate the whole organization.

You would think that an advanced technology juggernaut like the Wikimedia Foundation would be very careful and secure about how it allocates its publicly-viewable IP addresses to employees and visitors to their headquarters, but perhaps this is not the case. Let’s juxtapose some activities taking place within or regarding the Wikimedia Foundation, on some particular days in recent history, shall we now?

April 2, 2008:
Wikimedia Foundation board chairperson Florence Devouard asks the WMF lead attorney Mike Godwin:

Let’s say… if the board was to decide on a dual governance between a “board of trustees” and a “program council”, what would the legal comment you would provide ?

Same day, over on Wikipedia, from the Wikimedia Foundation’s IP address, regarding the Bean (T-H-L) article:

They have a very distinct taste to them. They kind of resemble the smell of cat litter. They are really dark green like a crayon.

July 5, 2010:
Wikimedia Foundation dignitary, Samuel Klein, discusses prioritization of spending:

I agree we should have specific goals for resources, both short- and long-term. The reason to allocate a fund for long-term infrastructure support, is to avoid confusing that with generic reserves (with “no immediate goals”).

Meanwhile, back at WMF headquarters, they’re changing the name of the East Bakersfield High School (T-H-L) sports teams from “Blades” to:

“Masturbaters”

January 6, 2012:
John Vandenberg, the strikingly handsome president of Wikimedia Australia, has an important question for the Wikimedia Foundation:

Canadian public consultation on TPP closes February 14, 2012.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Pacific_Partnership

Is WMF and/or WM-CA intending to submit their views? How can we help!?

Do we have a list of submissions to govt.by the Wikimedia community?

Sorry, John. The Wikimedia Foundation won’t have time to respond to you today. They’re busy editing Dom DeLuise (T-H-L) to say:

Dom Deluise, he used to be a chef on T.V., but now he just sits at home with his ass up his ass!

Also, someone at the WMF was at work on Rob Parker (sports journalist) (T-H-L), which suffered from a days-long campaign to defame the journalist:

In his free time, he enjoys blowing Oriental Sausage and shoving uncooked eggs up his anus.

July 23, 2012:
Cristian Consonni, board member of Wikimedia Italia, is concerned that his questions to the Wikimedia Foundation are going unanswered:

I am sorry to insist on this issue but having received almost no answers in the past week I fear that I was not clear in my request. But I indeed have some questions, so I restate them here:
* Using browser localization capabilities may be perceived as invasive. Would you like to use browser localization tool in Wikipedia? (yes/no, why?)
* Do you think the trade-off between bothering user asking to send position information and potential benefits (more accurately localized messages) is worth?
* Are you happy with the current system ?
* Do you think a deeper study of the issue (i.e. a new survey, conducted on a broader sample and in a more scientifically precise way) would be useful or would help you make a more informed decision?
* Have you any further proposal for the use of the system?

Mi dispiace, Cristian, the WMF is busy with edits like this:

Tom begins his mission by proclaiming his catchphrase “While there’s cum in my knackers!”

July 30, 2012:
Stevie Benton of the Wikimedia UK announces a report covering activities of the previous month:

I’m happy to be able to share with you Wikimedia UK’s report covering June 2012.In the report you can read about meetups in London, Manchester, and Cardiff, get the latest on Train the Trainers and our EduWiki conference, and GLAM activities including our first WWI editathon.There’s also some updates on board activities, fundraising, the recruitment of a Developer and communications.

Meanwhile, back at WMF headquarters, they’re updating Billy Elliot the Musical casts (T-H-L):

from after july 22 zach is still with cast, but isn’t performing because he did something to his leg

August 2, 2012:
Senior director of grantmaking at the Wikimedia Foundation, Anasuya Sengupta makes an important announcement:

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) portal today. The FDC Proposal form is available for all eligible entities to use immediately, and can be created by going to the main portal page and starting at the “I am ready to begin” section.

However, behind Sengupta’s back, someone at WMF headquarters is updating the Wikipedia article about Generation Z (T-H-L):

Members of Generation Z are also the most likely to fight in the inevitable Zombie War.

By now, we’re all familiar with the Wikipedia-faithful line that “vandalism on Wikipedia is usually fixed within minutes”. But how many of us were aware of the volume of Wikipedia vandalism that issues forth from the Wikimedia Foundation headquarters itself? It’s embarrassing, WMF — maybe it’s time you clean house.

UPDATE: Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh has issued the following clarification in response to this story: “The alleged addresses are not WMF office IP addresses (in other words they didn’t take place from within the Foundation). They’re WMF server (the servers that host all of the Wikimedia projects) IP addresses that were assigned to some edits due to a misconfiguration. Under some circumstances, the user’s IP would not be recorded and a server IP address through which they’re accessing the Wikimedia network would be recorded.” Walsh added that the error has since been fixed, but “there may still be rare circumstances under which this does occur”.
 

Image credit: © JD Hancock (image detail) / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Despite the acknowledged shortcomings of Wikipedia’s governance, the strongest argument against reforming it is its apparent extraordinary success. Editing Wikipedia is like making sausages, they say: it’s a nasty process that you really don’t want to see [1]. As long as the end product is nice tasty sausages, does it really matter how it ended up on our plate?

Even when you do find mistakes, Wikipedia tells us that it doesn’t matter in the long run. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and so there is a quasi-Darwinian process which ensures that only the fittest edits – i.e. the good ones – will survive, and the final result will be perfect. Wikipedia doesn’t need experts, or an editorial board, any more than natural selection needs a design committee. As Kevin Kelly of Wired once said, the crowdsourced wiki is like an invisible hand which emerges from its ‘very dumb members’. Why then would it need a visible hand? [2]

More sausagemakers, better sausages?

.

The idea that more is better is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia, and is the reason why such a large chunk of the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual budget – probably about $10m of it [3] – is dedicated to combating the decline in the editorial base. The idea underpins the unofficial policy of purging the ‘old guard’ of established editors, on the grounds that their impatience or uncivil behaviour towards well-meaning but incompetent editors is putting off newcomers. A respected member of the Wikipedia military history project, and another long-standing editor of many of Wikipedia’s Featured Articles have recently been driven off as a result of the policy. The survival of Wikipedia, they say, depends not on keeping a small number of skilled individuals, but on attracting large numbers of unskilled ones.

Is it true? It’s hard to test. Yet there is much evidence that this theory is wrong, and that the quality of Wikipedia pages, such as it is, is mostly down to a handful of editors who look after them. I know this from experience. I am a specialist on medieval philosophy and I follow all the articles about it, although I no longer bother to improve them or save them from the gradual deterioration caused by vandals or incompetent contributors. All the evidence suggests that when competent editors or specialists do not look after them, they go off. There is no ‘invisible hand’, and the policy of encouraging more contributors to Wikipedia, without any consideration of the quality of what they contribute, is likely to accelerate the process of deterioration.

Scotus sausages

For example, I keep a close eye on the article about the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. I know a little about Scotus – I am publishing a book about him later this year. The Wikipedia article about him is always in a terrible state, simply because there are no specialists on Scotus who are willing to maintain it. They know it will soon deteriorate, and they will have to watch it like a hawk to stop the accumulation of errors.

Despite myself, I tried to clean it up in August 2012. A vandal had changed his birth date to c. 1250 – an apparently simple error to spot, but Wikipedia’s vandal patrollers focus on obscenities and other forms of crude vandalism, and it was missed. The claim that “Duns Scotus is usually considered the beginning of the formal Scottish tradition of philosophy”, was nonsense. The old myth about Scotus being buried alive had been uncritically recycled. A whole paragraph from the old Catholic Encyclopedia had been incorporated wholesale, even though it was obsolete and incorrect. There was much that was irrelevant, or incorrect, and there was an awful lot that was missing. We don’t know much about the lives of medieval philosophers, yet we have their work, in compendious volumes. The article did not, and still does not, explain Scotus’s work in a way that is accessible and interesting to the average reader, and which shows his importance to later generations of thinkers.

Almost immediately after the cleanup the article began to degrade. Someone replaced the obsolete passage from the Catholic Encyclopedia, without removing my own corrections, so that the article now contradicts itself. At the beginning of March 2013, an obvious hoax was added, still not removed by the end of March.

In 2011, John Duns Scotus was honored by the University of Oxford, his alma mater, as one of its 100 most distinguished members from 10 centuries. Other honorees included Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Saint Thomas More, John Locke, Adam Smith, Christopher Wren, Lawrence of Arabia, Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien and living University members Rupert Murdoch, Bill Clinton, Stephen Hawking and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. For the cover of the 2011 Prospectus, Oxford University named 100 streets in Oxford historical centre after these graduates. Westminster Way was renamed for John Duns Scotus.

The pages linked by the article are also in a poor state. I added in August that “According to the fifteenth century writer William Vorilong, his departure was sudden and unexpected”. This prompted another editor to create an article about Vorilong. It is precisely two sentences long, and says that “William Vorilong (died 1643) was a philosopher”, which is certainly true, but hardly worth a whole article, and that he was ‘a contemporary of Duns Scotus’, which is obviously false, given that Scotus died in 1308, and Vorilong – a biographer of Scotus, rather than a contemporary – died in 1464 (not 1643). The second sentence says that he ‘contributed to influence his views about the square of opposition’. This is blatantly false, given that they lived over a hundred years apart, and in any case Scotus, as far as I know, never wrote anything about the ‘square of opposition’ although, as I discuss in detail in my book, he did have a lot to say about contradictory statements and propositions about non-existent objects, but that’s a different matter.

Professionally made sausages

Jennifer Lopez, John Duns Scotus

To appreciate the difference between the traditional approach to writing encyclopedias, and the Wikipedia ‘crowdsourcing’ approach, you only have to compare any article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, with the corresponding version in Wikipedia, assuming there even is one. On the one hand, you are likely to find a well-written well-researched article by a writer who has a command of their subject. These are produced using traditional method of using credentialed scholars and experts, the kind of method that Wikipedians blame Nupedia for, and it shows. On the other, you are likely to find a jumble of incoherent nonsense. There is no evidence at all that crowdsourcing, i.e. collecting a bunch of non-specialist editors together to write about specialist subjects, works in the way that Wikipedia says it should. Perhaps it does not matter. As one Wikipedian noted last month “When it comes to improving the articles, I would prefer to have 58 clerical errors fixed in mega-article Jennifer Lopez rather than revise article John Duns Scotus to better describe his major works.”

[1] However, see this article about how sausages are really made.

[2] Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, chapter 2.

[3] Based on analysis of the 2012-13 budget, including $4.2m on software to improve ‘editor experience’, and $5m on projects to increase international participation.

Image credits: Sausages: © Paul Keller / Flickr / CC BY 2.0. Lopez: © giorgioerriquez / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0. Duns Scotus: © Renata / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0.

The new Wikimedia project Wikidata is set to become the latest battleground over who controls what is and is not considered part of the “sum of human knowledge” that the Wikimedia Foundation is keen to collect and present.

The idea behind Wikidata is a simple one: to classify and categorize essentially everything in the universe. Well, not everything: with a few exceptions, it must be “notable” according to one or more of the Wikipedias (English Wikipedia, of course, being its biggest – but not exclusive – source.) Don’t expect your plumber or mechanic to become a data point on Wikidata… at least not in Phase 1. The front page of the site describes Wikidata as “a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.”

Unlike Wikipedia, where prose rules and nuances can be explored if the writers choose to explore them, Wikidata is structured in a colder, more robotic fashion: there is either a “statement” (such as “sex = male”) or there is not. There’s little room for nuance on Wikidata.

Wikidata articles are called “queries” or “items”, and each one has a Q number. The “number of the beast”, fittingly, is listed at Q666, although in general the Q numbers bear no relation to the item itself. But let’s move away from the devil and take a look at Jesus. Here is how Wikidata’s “item” on Jesus appears:

label: Jesus
description: central figure of Christianity
Also known as: Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ, Christ, Yeshua, Yehoshua, The Messiah, God the Son, Son of God
mother: Mary
main type (GND): person
sex: male
place of birth: Judea
place of death: Judea
father: Saint Joseph
VIAF identifier: 38323081
Library of Congress Control Number: n79084784
image: Christ oriental.jpg

Who’s your daddy?

 

 

 

The Wikidata entry on Jesus is interesting for a number of reasons. First, despite the “also known as” fields that list “Son of God”, the “father” property is simply assigned the value of “Saint Joseph”. This is likely to annoy some Christians, who may be minded to “fix” the data by adding “God” as a “father” value. The way Wikidata is currently structured, any data item can have an unlimited number of fathers, so there’s no technical restriction that would prevent such an addition, only an editorial one. Whether the Wikidata administrators will let an editor make such an addition is an open question.

It will be interesting to see who on Wikidata gets to decide who Jesus’s father is. Wikipedia’s December 25 article offers a stern warning for anyone considering adding Jesus to the list of notable December 25 birthdays:

Do NOT add the birth of Jesus here; his birthday is not verified as actually having taken place on December 25.

Will Wikidata need a similar admonishment? Historically accurate or not, Christmas is widely celebrated as “Jesus’s birthday”, but with Wikidata there’s really no place for any mention of December 25 within its data structures. In Wikidata, December 25 and Jesus are entirely unrelated data items. As are Jesus and God the Father. As are God the Father and God. Now, this isn’t to imply that Wikidata editors are doing anything hostile towards a particular faith, but rather that there is just not really a way to express the ineffable in property/value pairs. But, to paraphrase “Douglas Adams (data item Q42), just because something is ineffable doesn’t mean people will stop trying to eff it.

Still, it is an interesting exercise to compare Jesus’s entry to that of the Islamic prophet Muhammad:

label: Muhammad
description: The Prophet who brought Light to this World, sent by Allah to guide humanity
main type (GND): person
sex: male

Much less data, but a much more deferential description. No image, of course, but expect there to be much fighting over that: eventually someone will add an image either as a deliberate invocation of the sacred Wikipedia principal WP:NOTCENSORED (of which there is not (yet) a Wikidata counterpart), or simply because they saw a data item without a corresponding image and decided to fix it. Which image is eventually chosen – and who decides – will also be interesting to see.

Neither Jesus nor Muhammad, however, gets quite as thorough of a treatment as Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales: his item – unlike Jesus’s or Muhammad’s – includes “native language” and “award(s) received”, among other things. It also lists various alma maters and (wrongly) states that his employer is the Wikimedia Foundation (he actually works for Wikia, Inc., the for-profit, ad-based wiki company that the WMF says has nothing to do with them.) It does not (yet) include references to his spouses, although Wikidata editors have made sure that Elizabeth Taylor’s data item lists all seven of her husbands. “Assume good faith”, another of Wikipedia’s sacred principles, requires that we attribute this to a mere oversight rather than an attempt to present a somewhat white-washed resume for the ceremonial head of Wikipedia. That none of Elizabeth Taylor’s many awards show up in her Wikidata item, but Jimmy’s Quadriga award shows up in his, is similarly just an oversight. Probably.

Wikidata is the future: if Jimmy Wales’ dream that every person in the planet have a bio written on them ever comes to pass, it will likely come to pass through Wikidata, not Wikipedia, and it will likely be written by machines, pulling data from various sources from the white pages to the sports pages to the police logs. And if you happen to see your own data item filled with all the traffic tickets you’ve ever received, but without any mention of the kind and thoughtful things you’ve done over the course of your life: well, sorry, some things just can’t be encoded in a property/value pair.

Image credit: © biblevector / Flickr / CC BY 2.0.

 

.

Despite being a world-famous bosomy lad-magazine model, Ms. Milani is not permitted to have a Wikipedia biography. Formerly from the Czech Republic and currently residing in Los Angeles, she is unquestionably notable. Typing Milani’s name into Google gives 10,300,000 results, including links to her personal website and her fan-saturated Facebook with 309,000 followers, as well as thousands of photos of her “assets” online. Yet Wikipedia has declared her a “non-person”. For the manchild-dominated Wikipedia, the contempt for a famous pinup model is inexplicable. Evidently her articles were created by either lovestruck fanboys or by paid editors, thus making them appear to be advertisements, and thus “evil”. Even a beautiful face and a magnificent pair of breasts, plus massive media coverage, is not sufficient to keep Ms. Milani from being consigned to the seekret Paid-Editor Dungeon. Thus making her Wikinvisible. Articles about Milani can be found in the Czech Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, and Portuguese Wikipedia — but not English.

*Every attempt to create an article about Ms. Milani has resulted in an ugly battle. The record shows seventeen deletions, to date. Putting her on a par with Wiki-Enemies like Daniel Brandt, Rachel Marsden, Allison Stokke, Brian Peppers and many others. There may be other deletions/recreations of Milani’s article, not documented due to oversighting. An example of what the article may have looked like is saved in this 2009 personal copy. Compare that to the fr-WP version.

**A September 2007 AFD was extremely hostile.

**A second attempt in December. with a slightly different name, was “speedy-deleted”.

**A third attempt in August 2010 gave similar results.

*Every attempt results in noticeboard posts, usually by the same deletionists. ””Given the highly intrusive personal/private information included in some of the references added by User:Donare24 and others, this article should be a prime candidate for RevDel or oversight. Hullaballoo Wolfowitz (talk) 15:51, 23 August 2010 (UTC)””

*At least one editor of Milani’s bio was an admitted paid editor. ””I am a Official representative of Denise Milani. Current information is irrelevant to subject. Attempted to remove false (or otherwise unproven) information on model Denise Milani. Harmful to reputation, too much going on with lawsuit. Please allow official information to be added by myself.””

Hypocrisy abounds here: many other glamour models are considered “notable” enough (see the Wikipedia categories such as Glamour models or American female models for a long, long list). Evidently the slightest whiff of paid editing is enough to render Milani a non-person. Plus, one of the editors evidently inserted personal or other defamatory information about Milani into one of the articles, which doesn’t help the situation.

Deletion histories

Revision history of Denise Milani:
:02:27, 23 September 2007 WikiLeon (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani (DB repost)
:15:53, 19 September 2007 Mailer diablo (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Denise Milani)
:19:05, 18 July 2007 Kingboyk (talk | contribs) restored page Denise Milani (21 revisions restored: Current version is not so bad, so I’ll restore the old A7 edits and let the whole lot go to prod or AFD)
:22:18, 1 June 2007 Kingboyk (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani (content was: ‘{db-bio}”’Denise Milani”’ is the sexy big-boob model.{hangon}’)
:23:06, 25 March 2007 Picaroon (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani (CSD A7, G11)
:07:28, 19 March 2007 Coredesat (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani (CSD A7, no assertion of notability)
:02:29, 17 March 2007 Academic Challenger (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani (sorry, not notable)
:17:51, 15 March 2007 (aeropagitica) (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani ({db-repost})
:17:44, 15 March 2007 (aeropagitica) (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani ({db-bio})

Revision history of Denise milani:
: 01:01, 12 September 2009 Rjd0060 (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise milani (A7: Article about a real person, which does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject)
: 21:46, 15 January 2009 Alexf (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise milani (A7: Article about a real person, which does not assert notability)
: 18:53, 6 July 2008 Deb (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise milani (A7 (bio): Doesn’t indicate importance or significance of a real person)
: 03:34, 2 December 2007 Android79 (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise milani (CSD G11: Blatant advertising: content was: ‘{db|No assertion of notability (WP:CSD#A7), and article appears to be an advertisement (WP:CSD#G11)} — Please do not remove or change this AfD message until the iss)
: 21:23, 8 October 2007 NoSeptember (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise milani (content was: ‘{db-redirnone}#REDIRECT Denise Milani (Model)’)
: 22:19, 1 June 2007 Kingboyk (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise milani (content was: ‘#REDIRECT Denise Milani’ (and the only contributor was ‘Johnny542′))
: 21:26, 1 June 2007 Johnny542 (talk | contribs) moved page Denise milani to Denise Milani (Because it was mispelled.)
: 15:38, 30 April 2007 Fang Aili (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise milani (content was: ‘{db-spam}””’Page under construction……………..””’—-== Denise Milani ==”’Denise Milani”’ is a wonderful model from Czech Republic…’)
: 15:34, 30 April 2007 Enochlau (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise milani (nn bio)
: 15:28, 30 April 2007 Mike Rosoft (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise milani (Patently unencyclopedic content – some exclamations from her fan. Please redo from the scratch.)

Revision history of Denise Milani (model):
: 11:18, 26 August 2010 Courcelles (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani (model) (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Denise Milani (model))
: 05:59, 26 August 2010 GorillaWarfare (talk | contribs) restored page Denise Milani (model) (102 revisions restored: Restoring for AfD discussion)
: 05:58, 26 August 2010 GorillaWarfare (talk | contribs) deleted page Denise Milani (model) (G10: Attack page or negative unsourced BLP: A7)

*Acceptable references are not difficult to compile, especially after the recent Paul Frampton arrest. Milani was unknowingly used by a drug smuggler as a “honeypot”, to entrap Frampton into smuggling cocaine from Bolivia into Argentina.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world … 40525.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article … essor.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magaz … d=all&_r=0
http://jezebel.com/5989667/manti-tenooo … girlfriend

*There are a few usable secondary references, other than the above. Not including the hundreds of fan websites and magazine photo spreads of her.
http://moondogsports.com/2010/06/16/den … ope-media/
http://www.askmen.com/celebs/women/mode … ilani.html
http://www.modelmayhem.com/1707386

*Yet posting this image of her is acceptable, it being a heavily processed copyrighted photograph. Other images of her were repeatedly deleted, as copyright violations.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_ … 283.29.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commo … milani.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commo … lani_files

“The sum of human knowledge”, the famous Jimbo catch-phrase, appears to have some severe restrictions. Bear in mind, this is only one of an unknown number of biographies that are “not permitted” on Wikipedia, for one petty reason or another. The actual BLP policy, regardless of what the official WP:BLP rule says, seems to more closely resemble the following.

“If you’re semi-obscure and not seeking publicity, we can defame you until the cows come home. (See Jim Hawkins.) If you’re famous and actively seeking publicity, we can make you an un-person.”

..

On March 14, Jimmy Wales took his travelling god-king act to the annual convention of the Independent Community Bankers of America at the palatial Wynn Las Vegas Resort. As the final performer on the bill, Jimmy played to a half-filled hall of die-hard community bankers who had managed to resist the siren song of the nearby casino. Many of them seemed impressed by what Jimmy had to say.

Jimmy was there to present Wikipedia as it wishes to be perceived, a magical place where NPOV (Neutral Point of View — a policy intended to prevent biased articles) is embraced by all, where there are no vendettas, malicious bannings, defamation, or plagiarism, where every policy means just what it says and no one is gaming the system.

Much of the presentation followed the format of “What Wikipedia Is Not” (WP:NOT, one of Wikipedia’s most widely ignored core policies.) Jimmy got ‘em chuckling when he said that, for example, there are no “funny pet videos” on Wikipedia, because that wouldn’t be appropriate. The question of whether it is appropriate to have roughly 1,000 images of penises on Wikimedia (think twice before clicking this link) was not addressed in his presentation.

For a moment, it looked as if things might get interesting when Jimbo said,

…it is important to know who the Wikipedia editors are.

 

It stands to reason, for example, that if you were the target of a defamatory Wikipedia article, or you happened upon a propagandistic and misleading article on a controversial topic, you would want to know just who was responsible for putting this material at the top of every Google search. However, as it turns out, that is not the issue that Jimbo wished to address (the one policy that Wikipedia enforces with a vengeance is the one that ensures the absolute anonymity of its editors.) He meant that it is important to know the demographics of the Wikipedia editors.

First Jimmy gave the correct answer: that the demographic is heavily weighted toward male computer geeks, average age 26. He said that he was personally quite comfortable with that, although at Wikipedia they would like to see some more female editors. Having said that, he then showed this video, which presents an entirely different and highly unrealistic image of the typical Wikipedian:

Which version of “Who are the Wikipedians” do you think the audience will remember?

.

Jimmy went on to describe the structure of Wikipedia as a hybrid of different social models, one of them being “monarchy.” As it turns out, he used “monarchy” to describe his own personal role, necessary because sometimes the democratic process is not the appropriate means to resolve a problem or dispute. But not to worry — Jimmy is not an absolute monarch. In fact, he says, he is rather like the Queen of England, “smiling and waving at crowds.” The notion that the Queen is merely a quaint figurehead was recently dispelled when it was revealed that she had vetoed a bill that would have taken the authority to launch strikes against Iraq away from her, and given it to the parliament. The impact this will have on Jimbo’s analogy has yet to be determined.

In conclusion, Jimbo’s presentation was a bit of Madison Avenue razzmatazz couched in the language of the Digital Age. It played well to the sturdy representatives of Small Town America, but the picture he painted for them is false. It’s up to us to set the record straight.

Image credits: Jimbo — © Krustilu Productions / Wikipediocracy; Queen Elizabeth II — Flickr/Titanic Belfast, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.