Jimmy Wales in drive-by shooting of Wikipedia (original) (raw)

It seems there are now two memes about the modern net that are gradually becoming embedded in the public consciousness: (a) Twitter is a waste of time (thanks, Evening Standard, Daily Mail, etc - though of course Charlie Brooker would disagree; his bubble wrap description certainly feels apt) and (b) Wikipedia is always wrong in some way or other.

Thus Giles Hattersley of the Sunday Times yesterday regaled us with some of the second, claiming in an otherwise interesting piece that Wikipedia mistakenly said he was the son of Roy Hattersley:

But while howlers such as Kennedy's death are easily spotted, what of the reams of erroneous detail that the site presents as fact? My entry features at least two errors, one libellous (unless my mother has been keeping a dark secret, I am not Roy Hattersley's son).

(Actually, Giles, you overestimed our interest in your family tree, but anyway.)

Of course, as Chris Applegate points out, Hattersley's piece can't have gone through the usual rigorous fact-checking, because there wasn't actually an entry for Hattersley, Giles on Wikipedia until about 3pm on the Sunday afternoon - some time after the piece came out. (Perhaps he was referring to Roy Hattersley's profile - except there's no mention of a Giles Hattersley in the current or earlier version.)

Usually such articles have little long-term effect. Some Wikipedians head over and update the article, and the error (if such there was) vanishes, trapped in the amber of the "previous edits" part of the site. Handy things, versioning databases.

Not this time, however. This time, we were treated to the internet equivalent of a drive-by shooting. Jimmy Wales, Mr Himself of Wikipedia, personally went and deleted the article. He wrote:

I have temporarily deleted this article, and kindly request that no one restore it until we've sorted out all the facts. Giano has been blocked for 24 hours by me for incivility related to this entry. Jay and I are already aware of the situation and I am reaching out to the newspaper for further clarification.

The precise volume of the "WTF?" that went up from the Wikipedians is hard to exaggerate. (And you have to love the extra touch of "incivility".)

"Be careful that Mr. Hattersley does not misconstrue this deletion as an acknowledgment that the article contained the falsehoods that Mr. Hattersley claimed it contained (before the article existed)," one responded.

In terms of an action that will make people on the inside of Wikipedia (if that phrase makes sense) stop for a moment and say "Wait, what just happened..?", there are few things Wales could have done that might have garnered the same reaction. Deleted the article? Without any apparently good reason? Outside the normal rules for deletion (such as irrelevance, which only happens after long and often tedious discussions)? It's bizarre.

One has to wonder too about Wales's choice of words. He's "reaching out" to the newspaper? It's a phrase which sounded a lot more felicitous from the lips of Jimmy Smits in NYPD Blue telling his boss how they were trying to persuade the family of a drive-by shooting victim who he dealt drugs for. ("We're reaching out to the family," as they would say.) To use "reaching out to" when you actually mean "emailing" suggests a strange form of linguistic capture.

Sure, this might seem like a storm in a crowdsourced teacup. But allied to other things that have been happening Wikipedia - widespread deletions, restrictions on world editing - this little drive-by incident indicates something very different in Wikiland.

Sure, Wales had demanded that entries about living people should be more carefully watched for edits, especially after the embarrassment when the site killed off not one but two American senators who were still walking around (yeah, insert your own joke) on President Obama's inauguration day. Wales wrote then

"This nonsense would have been 100% prevented by flagged revisions... This was a breaking news story and we want people to be able to participate [but] we have a tool available now that is consistent with higher quality."

Possibly the Hattersley deletion was the result of a fit of pique on Wales's part at seeing that his wise words hadn't been obeyed to the letter. Wikipedia, it seems, has a god, and occasionally he deletes stuff. The question is: are the people who contribute to it happy with that arrangement?