
The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy and Wikipedia - martey
http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/the-institute-for-cultural-diplomacy-and-wikipedia
======
ilamont
The author has been wronged.

However, this unfortunate mess points to problems with various Wikipedia
policies, including the inability of most companies, organizations and topics
to have Wikipedia pages unless they are created by unbiased parties citing
established mass media sources or scholarship.

Regardless of its size or stature, if the organization/company/topic has never
generated press coverage, and if no neutral editors care enough about it to
create an article, then there won't be any article ... or eventually the
Wikipedia police will delete it.

Note that Wikipedia guidelines(1) define allowable press sources as
substantial coverage, not a passing reference. A blog or forum post written by
a knowledgeable user doesn't count, while an article written by a reporter
talking with a company's PR team will.

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources#Some_types_of_sources)

~~~
guard-of-terra
Press coverage is bullshit.

For an internet encyclopedia to require references to dead tree sources is a
failure. For example, my country haven't got any music press that isn't a
joke, should it mean that no music articles should be allowed? Some of editors
behave as if there shouldn't.

UPD: That's nice, somebody just came along and downvoted all our comments. I
bet it was a proud wikipedia editor.

~~~
mjn
If there aren't any good third-party sources, I don't think there should be a
Wikipedia article on the subject. What would it cite? How are we supposed to
know it isn't just music fans writing stuff off the top of their head? The
only reason Wikipedia articles are trustworthy at all is because they cite
their sources, and I can follow up those citations and see what they say for
myself. I have no reason to believe some random Wikipedia editor otherwise.

Overall, it's an encyclopedia with a (very) large but nonetheless delimited
goal: summarizing the existing literature on as many subjects as there is
existing literature. That is a lot of things, and it already seems almost
absurdly ambitious to set out to summarize all of them, without trying to
expand the scope further!

I also participate in projects with different goals, documenting things that
_aren't_ currently documented by existing literature. One of them is a music-
related wiki project documenting an under-documented music scene. I think
those kinds of projects are also worthwhile (or I wouldn't spend my time on
them). But I don't see that as the same job as Wikipedia, which as a tertiary
source should only be summarizing existing secondary literature, not doing its
own independent investigations. I don't actually understand the motivation for
_why_ people want to merge this kind of wiki with Wikipedia, either, since it
seems like a clearly different kind of activity, requiring different standards
and probably a different community. Is it just that there is some cachet
(whether SEO or just general prestige) to having a Wikipedia article, while
there isn't the same cachet to having an article on a music-scene wiki?

I did write something [1] about the main problem area that results: stuff that
is clearly notable, where you'd _think_ sources should exist that Wikipedia
could cite, but then when you look, there just isn't much solid written on the
subject. This is indeed a pain point, but I'm not sure what could be done
about it short of writing un-cited or very-poorly-cited articles, which I
think is worse than not having an article. Not having an article is at least
honest about Wikipedia's current inability to provide a well-sourced article
on the subject.

[1]
[http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...](http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html)

~~~
jholman
> _Is it just that there is some cachet (whether SEO or just general prestige)
> to having a Wikipedia article, while there isn't the same cachet to having
> an article on a music-scene wiki?_

Yes. And that's exactly what's going on in the ICD case ( _assuming that TFA
is honest_ ). You've got a company trying to (ab)use Wikipedia for free PR,
straightforwardly violating the very straightforward policies about
autobiography, getting treated more-charitably than they deserve, and then
resorting to legal threats when they don't get their way. What else can you
say, except that Wikipedia has influence and people want to manipulate that
influence for themselves?

------
guard-of-terra
"In Wikipedia, debates can be won by stamina. If you care more and argue
longer, you will tend to get your way. The result, very often, is that
individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Wikipedia
say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the
encyclopedia to be solid, neutral, and reliable"

That's why I stopped sending them money. That and deletionism.

~~~
lambda
I used to be staunchly against deletionism, but having had more experience
with exactly the above kind of page, where someone who cares a lot about some
organization or topic that really isn't at all notable can go to an awful lot
of trouble to create stuff that just junks up Wikipedia with biased, poorly
researched and poorly cited pages, I am a lot more sympathetic to deletionism
these days.

There are real costs to maintaining pages; editors need to revert vandalism,
fix it to match the style guidelines, look for citations, resolve disputes,
keep it neutral, ensure that it reflects a broad consensus about the actual
truth of the matter, and so on. For small, insignificant topics, an article
can be more trouble than it's worth.

~~~
guard-of-terra
You could always stub and protect such a page instead of deleting it.

I don't care about orgs but when a band or programming language bages get
deleted i'm not happy.

------
DanBC
I'm sorry they had a poor experience with editors for that institute.

Did the author forward the legal threats to the foundation? As I understand it
blocks (bans?) would be put in place.

In other circumstances I'd assume good faith, and I'd suggest that the
baffling maze of essays, guidelines, pillars, rules, policies, noticeboards,
and discussion pages all contribute to new users feeling attacked by WP.

------
CurtMonash
I do all my Wikipedia editing anonymously. That way it's hard for Wikipedians
to tell me I'm doing it wrong. And since my edits are usually good, they
rarely get reverted. :)

By way of contrast, I'm an official DMOZ editor, but it's been quite a while
since I actually edited there. Too much hassle. Even the smallest decision is
apt to turn into an entmoot. And of course, it's unclear whether there's much
DMOZ usage these days anyway, by humans or search engines alike.

~~~
tokenadult
_I do all my Wikipedia editing anonymously._

Most places I go online, I use my real name. I use a screen name here because
I already had a habit of using the same screen name in two other online
forums. I use a completely different, unique screen name on Wikipedia, as I
was forewarned that editing is contentious there.

I've seen some point-of-view-pushers on Wikipedia go to elaborate lengths to
look up personal information about me, to give me harassing phone calls in the
middle of the night, so I guess my screen name there didn't disguise my
identity sufficiently. Over the years, most of those people have been site-
banned in their first and second identities, but they still have plenty of
sockpuppets and meatpuppets, and the administrators are always encountering
new I.P. edits in support of the same skewing of point of view in that series
of articles. (The articles are under ongoing arbitration committee supervision
from a case

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence)

that began hearing evidence just as I formally registered as a Wikipedian.) So
I mostly wikignome on articles I happen to look up for fun, and only rarely
edit articles on the subjects I actually know best and have the most sources
at hand for. Wikipedia's editing atmosphere is lousy that way--the lunatics
are mostly allowed to take over the asylum.

~~~
mjn
Whoa, that is pretty nuts! I've been on Wikipedia for ~10 years, and for a few
years (mid-2000s) was on the arbitration committee, and never ran across
anything like that, either first- or second-hand, not even for the brief
period of time I was somewhat active in editing articles relating to the
Israel-Palestine and Greece-Macedonia disputes. The worst I've gotten is angry
emails, though even those are rare and it mostly sticks to angry talk-page
messages. Perhaps I was lucky; or perhaps "race and intelligence" as a topic
brings out an exceptionally insane crowd? Sounds rather unpleasant.

I mostly edit articles relating to archaeology and (pre-20th-c) history these
days, and I don't really run into trouble. If anything, my main complaint is
not enough other people around; parts of the encyclopedia feel like ghost
towns, where you can write whatever and nobody will comment either way.

------
lutze
This has all the hallmarks of a Scientology operation.

Seriously, is no one else getting the vibe here?

------
RexRollman
Someone should cite this entry on the ICD Wikipedia pages that do exist.

