Report for America funded a community Wikipedia editor at a library | Hacker News Reader

Report for America funded a community Wikipedia editor at a library

niemanlab.org

49 pointsdanso15 comments

Or, y'know, actually employ a qualified librarian to do the role. /smh

Librarians (the real ones, not the trolley pushing assistants) despair at Wikipedia. There have been many reports[1] of Librarians who are subject matter experts correcting the Wikipedia pages of which they are an expert in, only to end up in a edit wars with seasoned Wikipedia authoritarians who revert the Librarians edits because they are wrong(!). As such a lot of Librarians won't give Wikipedia the time of day, which is a real shame as these people are the real authority on their chosen subjects.

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[1] No I don't have links; you'll have to ask my partner.

> There have been many reports

[citation needed]

Here's one (that links a second one): https://twitter.com/cfiesler/status/1201246456599859200?s=20

Thank you - enlightening and disturbing.

I am not very surprised given the initial motivation. She gave herself a quest to do political activism by editing Wikipedia, something with Wikipedia project generally looks at with suspicion and hostility.

I am not sure how well that translate to an librarian fixing errors and lifting decent covered topics with expert knowledge.

"wrong" or "unsourced"? It's an important distinction when playing the Wikipedia game.

It literally doesn't matter. A certain kind of Wikipedia editor only cares about deletionism, and will do any rules lawyering necessary to remove content they think isn't worthy.

Its a bit like law enforcement. Certain kind of police only care about arresting people, and will just summon any law necessary to justify the arrest. The question becomes on how we perceive the majority of cases, if the rule of law still function, and if the amount of energy to defends one own rights is justifiable in order to not leave the community and find a better place.

In the case of Wikipedia I usually find that significant contributions require some energy in order to convince others that it should be added to the project, but in the majority of cases the enforcement is done in good faith (like most of moderation here on HN).

I wish we'd hire a gang of librarians to maintain our internal corporate wiki.

People with actual authority should know better than to try and write simply by asserting their own authority; they should be able to source their statements and give proper references, like professionals. It’s when they don’t do that, and treat Wikipedia like their own private blog, that trouble ensues: Other Wikipedia editor and admins demand proper references, which these people interpret as an affront to their personal expertise, and it goes downhill from there.

Instead, people with actual expertise should realize that for Wikipedia, their expertise is not in the actual subject matter, but their value as experts is instead in knowing where to find proper references to things which most people might know already about the subject. This is where they can really contribute.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors

Did I say not-referenced? Trust me, Librarians are the best people for referencing stuff - it's their job.

This kind of model seems like an excellent way for political groups to push their agenda while staying at arm’s length.

Indeed. Report For America's stated mandate is to fund reporters covering "under-served news issues". It seems like the honest way to spend money on this is to start your own magazine/newspaper/TV-station and talk about the issues you are interested in.

On the other hand, a large amount of the news is already repackaged corporate press releases and similar things, so there's no much further down things can go.

Not so much when it comes to WPedia, IME. Although it depends on how many editorial eyes visit it (which may be proportional to its impact), a WP article is likely to source any expressed opionions, and smooth over biases (because of colliding reality-tunnels).

... Except when it comes to biographies of anyone well-placed and/or notorious. I've watched carefully-researched details about such individuals get scrubbed away. (There are outfits that specialize in this.)

Also when it comes to hyper partisan issues I’m honestly not confident that information can be smoothed out to arrive at something resembling the truth. If anything I would expect those topics to become an amalgamation of facts which are easily interpreted in any way. “Person says X” well obviously it means “A” but 2 sentences later says “Y” so obviously means “B” then in the context of the whole paragraph the meaning is clearly “C” but because of the climate around that time the implication could mean “D” or oppositely “E”.

Basically anything political can be manipulated and twisted to suit whatever ideology a group favors while never misquoting or distorting “facts”. I’m not sure you can ever smooth out bias, and depending on the issue, if one group is more active than the other, it’s just an information and effort war for who can monopolize the page.. and then that’s nothing to say about those who review and decide what edits are more correct/valid. But eh, oh well.

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