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The first thing you notice when you look at Neal Schon’s Wikipedia biography is a big ugly warning that “some of this article’s listed sources may not be reliable.” That warning has been there since 2013. …continue reading Wikipedia and Neal Schon: Who’s Sorry Now? 
by Sauna A. Tulip Wikipedia editor Paul Benjamin Austin has had an account since 2002, but started editing in 2001, before most people had even heard of Wikipedia. Back then he was known as PMelvilleAustin or PMA (for Paul Melville Austin). He was an admin, but resigned – twice. Looking over his many contributions, it isn’t hard to spot some of his interests: Dr. Who, Enid Blyton, children’s television programs, child actresses, and, most especially, murdered girls. There is (apparently) nothing wrong with being very, very interested in little girls on Wikipedia, but Paul Austin seems to have engaged in some disturbing behaviour outside of Wikipedia too. Online community warnings In March of 2010, a blogger posted a warning to the Dreamwidth and LiveJournal communities about a troll identified as Paul Melville Austin (and a long list of other names, including Paul Benjamin Austin). He has several behaviors, and a general pattern by which you can identify him: He contacts users via email, IM’s or private messages.He usually presents himself as either a young woman (generally using a stolen icon) or as an older, disabled man.He frequently changes his name with each contact.He will generally start out saying something like “can I talk to you?”He then launches into a story of abuse.Sometimes the abuse will be sexual and sometimes it is disability-related, with either a sexual or humiliation component. The specific details vary from contact to contact.He will often express gender identity confusion and/or dating problems.He is interested in alternate history and fandom and will sometimes try to use this to get close to his new target.He often sets off the “squick-o-meter” when conversing with people. You may get a …continue reading Meet the Editors: Paul Benjamin Austin 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 currently …continue reading Wikipedia: Sources & Methods |
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