Bloggasm

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. The American Journalism Review wonders how many journalists use Wikipedia as a source, and whether it’s becoming acceptable.

2. Poor people use Yahoo. Educated people use Google.

3. NYT Makes Comma Error Inside Semicolon Article. The irony!!

4. “Sometimes I read old articles from the National Review and I think, where did that spirit of frank, open racism go?”

5. The background story on how and why the New York Times published its silly hit piece on John McCain yesterday.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is launching Wikia Search, a new search engine, on Jan. 7. Like Wikipedia, it’ll draw from crowd wisdom to produce its results. Not much has been released on how this will work exactly.

It has an advantage over Wikipedia, however, in that it won’t have to start from scratch. The site will no doubt receive a deluge of links on its launch date, and this will be a good chance for us all to be early adopters. I’m going to try my best to give it a month-long test run, though I have a feeling I’m going to resort to using Google from time to time.

It’s not that I’m against Google or anything, I think it’d just be cool to be one of the early influencers of what could potentially be a major search engine. And who knows, maybe it’ll stick.

So who’s with me?

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Related posts:
1. An area of Search Engine Optimization often overlooked: Google News
2. Google’s employees transported to work in their own buses
3. The politics of Wikipedia

Rough Type’s Nicholas Carr reports that Google has created a semi knockoff of Wikipedia called Knol. “The big distinction with Wikipedia is that Knol relies on individual authors rather than ‘the crowd,’” Carr writes. “Each article, or ‘knol,’ will be signed and owned by the person who writes it, and articles on the same subject will compete with one another for viewer’s eyes. In contrast, Wikipedia builds a single version of each article in a communal way with many edits by anonymous contributors.”

This won’t be as successful as Wikipedia because it doesn’t cater to the long-tail editors.

For instance, I’m what you would call a casual Wikipedia editor. Every now and then I’ll be reading a Wikipedia article about something I actually know something about, and if I see an error or I have a quick sentence to add, I add it. This separates me from the hard-core Wikipedians who create entries from scratch and contribute to them heavily. I would argue, though, that the long tail editors are just as important.

With Knol, only the hard-core editors will contribute, while people like me, who don’t really have any interest in putting a lot of work into the entry, won’t be able to contribute at all.

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Related posts:
1. The Google-fication of Facebook
2. Why newspapers might actually be in trouble
3. The politics of Wikipedia

Citizendium was created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger as an attempt to replace “Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online.”

The project officially launched about a month ago, and Read/Write Web has a long analysis of the progress thus far, and whether the new encyclopedia is living up to its hype.

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Related posts: Wikipedia as a news source, How journalists keep secrets, A Wikipedian’s fake “authority”

I’ve seen several articles like this one taking special note that during a major news event, Wikipedians constantly update Wikipedia articles with new information. Several media analysists are now arguing that Wikipedia is no longer just an encyclopedia, but also a news source as well.

I think there are several things wrong with this notion. To list:

1. Wikipedia articles are mostly in chronological order, while news articles use an AP style with their lede, putting the most important information on top and then working its way down. Essentially, most news articles ruin the ending in order to provide the most pertinent information first.

2. There’s no original reporting. Because of citation rules, Wikipedians have to rely on other news sources to break the news first. So you won’t learn anything from a Wikipedia article that you didn’t see on CNN first.

3. There’s no effective way for the site to alert readers that there’s breaking news. Sure, in the V. Tech shooting, people were linked to the page and more readers piled on. But when it comes to more obscure news, most people wouldn’t even be aware for awhile that the page is being updated.

As Rough Type reports, a New Yorker article last year that profiled Wikipedia doted on a particular Wikipedian who supposedly had a PhD in theology and taught classes, bringing a laptop to his classroom to check Wikipedia in his spare time. This Wikipedian, known as Essjay, was high up in the Wikipedia hierarchy, “one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse.”

According to a recent correction issued in the New Yorker, all this information was fake:

Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia’s management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user page … Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia – a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia – as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”

Before, the main debate over Wikipedia’s credibility was centered around the question; “What is authority?” Now, it seems we can’t even get a handle on a person’s credentials enough to even move on to that question.

Nicholas Carr has a poignant post about the two dividing parties in the Wikipedia debate. On one side, we have the “deletionists,” who think that Wikipedia should be monitored for irrelevant material that should be deleted, while the other side is made up of “inclusionists,” who think that anything is fair game to be included in Wikipedia.

The rules that govern how the popular online encyclopedia works are set by its community of contributors – the so-called wikipedians – through a process of argument and consensus-building. But the community has begun to split into two warring camps with contrary philosophies about Wikipedia’s identity and purpose. On one side are the deletionists; on the other are the inclusionists. Between them is not a middle ground but a no-man’s-land. As one Wikipedia observer recently put it, “The inclusionist versus deletionist debate is as firm and strong as the abortion debate, gun control debate, or the death penalty debate.”

If I had to pick a side I’m on, I’d say I’m an “inclusionist,” simply because we’re talking Wiki here, and being an inclusionist seems to be the very heart of what a wiki is. Also, what would be the factors involved when considering what we should delete and what we should keep? If we were to go the way of the deletionists, the debate wouldn’t stop, it would just continue to go on over what should be deleted. If we go towards the inclusionists, then the debate theoretically stops, since there is no bar to be set based on imaginary standards.