I am a big fan of Wikipedia and for some reason, I chuckle everytime I read the media report about it. The old media appear to often have a negative bias towards the Internet, seeing it as a threat and a corrupter of morals. However, coverage of Wikipedia is always particularly negative.
Amazingly, The Observer deemed it newsworthy to report that Wikipedia had been edited to show Robert Kilroy-Silk (a controversial British MEP) was a member of the Monster Raving Loony Party. Whilst libel is definitely an issue and is wrong, most instances of blatant vandalism like this are fixed in minutes, if not seconds! That, though, doesn’t make a captivating headline or read!
Reporting on Wikipedia’s inaccuracies, libel and vandalism is old news. By now, the public should have realised that ‘WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY’ (to quote their disclaimer). It’s perfectly easy for any journalist to find lies or vandalism on Wikipedia articles through purely clicking on the ‘history’ link on the article and seeing which edits have been reverted.
I found everything from local newspapers to major national news stories criticising Wikipedia (or information within it).
I hope the media begin to move away from blaming Wikipedia and begin to blame the editors who make the misleading edits. People, children and adults, still find it amusing to vandalise articles and it seems to even be considered acceptable amongst the populace.
The beauty of the whole matter is that despite the fact the media criticise Wikipedia’s reliability, they use it for quick research and occasionally even quote it as some sort of definitive resource!
Whilst I’m sure 100s of other blogs have covered this before, something I feel invaluable are Wikipedia user scripts. These aren’t Greasemonkey scripts, but rather changes you make at the Wikipedia end. User scripts allow things ranging from previews of links, provide rich text editors to changing the links of ISBN numbers to your preferred site.
Once you have a Wikipedia account, you can install some pre-chosen user scripts by logging in and going to your ‘my preferences’ page and then clicking ‘Gadgets’ and selecting the ones you want.
An alternative way to install scripts, or scripts which aren’t supported by the automatic installer, is by typing in Special:MyPage/monobook.js in the search box and clicking ‘go’. On this page, go to edit and in a separate window/tab go to the list of scripts at Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts. On this page, choose the scripts you want and follow the installation instructions. To see the scripts, you might need to do a hard refresh by holding shift + refresh in Firefox or control + F5 in IE and/or purging the Wikipedia cache.
Some user scripts are specialised for Wikipedia power editors, but others like Navigation Popups are useful to pretty much everyone and once you’ve installed it, Wikipedia won’t seem right without them!
If you’re not using the Monobook skin, firstly you’re mad and secondly you’ll have to use the .js pages listed at this page as opposed to monobook.js.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation responsible for Wikipedia, are currently holding elections for their Board of Trustees.
Personally, I dislike the Wikimedia Foundation in many ways because I find it overly bureaucratic by furtherly complicating Wikipedia/Wikimedia’s structure, they don’t much (not taking an active role) and quite possibly corrupt (see the Jimbo Wales, our “benevolent dictator for life”, controversies). It’s still arguable that there’s a need for a board, to defend Wikimedia against legal threats and see the administration of donations.
The Wikimedia Community can vote one member to the board for a one year term and this is the time of year we vote. Unless you’re a somewhat active user of a Wikimedia project (such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons or Wiktionary), you probably won’t be able to vote as you need 600 edits on one wiki prior to 1 March 2008 and 50 edits this year on that wiki before 29 May.
This year, there are 15 candidates and Wikimedia are employing preference-based voting using the Schulze method. I have to admit I don’t know any of the candidates, but they generally live in a different wikiworld to users like me!
Many of these candidates are present and active on multiple wikis, which improves their ‘chances’ as they’ll get votes from more and it shows they can communicate across wikis. Some Wikimedians seem to want Wikimedia to be more commercial whilst others seem to want the role of the board reduce.
And do excuse the very boring, very specialist post!
