Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-11-14/In the news

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In the news

By Catherine, 14 November 2005

Who is responsible for Wikipedia content?

On November 9, Internet activist Daniel Brandt (founder of Google Watch and Wikipedia Watch) posted some musings to his site about who exactly is responsible if someone felt they had been libeled in a Wikipedia article: the individual editor(s) or the Wikimedia Foundation. Brandt has been trying to have his own article deleted or edited to his satisfaction; the article went through a second discussion at Articles for Deletion this week, which resulted in an overwhelming Keep decision. Brandt's speculations were also noted by Google technology blogger Philipp Lenssen [1] among others ([2], [3]).

Findability and Wikipedia

Prominent web design author Peter Morville mentions Wikipedia in an interview about his new book (Ambient Findability) in Business Week magazine on November 9, 2005. Morville says, "We can now select our sources and choose our news. And in this era of Google, blogs, and the Wikipedia, we're realizing there are many truths and many versions of the truth."

Tories should be more like Wikipedia?

In an opinion column in The Daily Telegraph on November 11 ("Tories need a folkmoot not a husting"), Danny Kruger uses definitions drawn from Wikipedia to compare current events within the Tory party in the UK to the contrast between Britannica and Wikipedia, and between closed and open source. Kruger says, in part: "I got the definition quoted above from an online encyclopedia called Wikipedia.com. If the Encyclopaedia Britannica is a husting, Wikipedia is the folk-moot. Where the Britannica is written by a closed team of academics, Wikipedia is the product, and the virtual property, of 'the whole people'. It is built by thousands of volunteers working in spontaneous concert, writing entries and checking each others' facts. It is far larger than Britannica, far easier to use, and (because of constant, multiple peer review) just as good." (However, the husting article cited is largely drawn from the 1911 Britannica, and is currently tagged for cleanup.)

College press

The Stanford University student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, describes Wikipedia in a November 8 piece titled "Wary of Wikipedia". In it reporter Mark Kogan discusses the caution but also the increasing acceptance of Wikipedia by professors as a starting point for student research. He quotes Jonathan Hunt, who teaches a course in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford: “I don’t think it helps students to divide the world into approved sources and forbidden sources. Obviously, an article on Wikipedia is not the same kind of source as The Wall Street Journal or a research article in a peer-reviewed journal, but all sources should be regarded with some suspicion.”

“Critical thinking, we sometimes call this,” Hunt adds.

Tax group writes its own articles

Information World Review, a news site for the information industry, published "Tax group has its say on Wikipedia" on November 10, interviewing Professional Contractors Group leader John Kell about the group's addition of new articles to Wikipedia. The articles in question are IR35, S660A and Professional Contractors Group, created by User:John Kell on October 11 and edited by several others since. Kell hasn't been back, these are his only edits, and there has been no edit warring, but it is interesting that the PCG felt the need to give a news interview about the fact that they had created the articles.