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In the news

Consensus of Wikipedia authors questioned about Shakespeare authorship; 10 biggest edit wars on Wikipedia; brief news

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By Tom Morris, Lumos3 and Tilman Bayer

Consensus of Wikipedia authors questioned about Shakespeare authorship

Some leading candidates for being Shakespeare, including Shakespeare.

Journalist Mark Anderson, writing this week for the news site IEEE Spectrum, has claimed that Wikipedia has been a bit too quick to dismiss those who doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the works popularly attributed to him. In an article "Wikipedia's Shakespeare Problem", Anderson writes that the consensus process has for a long time worked quite well on the article Shakespeare authorship question, with the Stratfordians (those who believe William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the plays attributed to him) and Oxfordians (those who believe that the works were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) creating an equilibrium that approximated the academic divide between the two camps.

Unfortunately, writes Anderson, more Stratfordians came along and pushed the article towards their point of view, and the mediation process (Signpost coverage) left the article biased towards the Stratfordian point of view. In this vein, Anderson claims that the push to get the article featured (already protested at the time by a blog dedicated to alternative theories, see previous Signpost coverage) succeeded only in putting on the main page a version that had "as much claim to evenhandedness as does an entry on Libya's history written by Muammar Gaddafi". This claim is fiercely contested; the Wikipedia article in question itself cites a sharply different judgment from a reliable source that described Wikipedia's coverage of the authorship controversy as putting "to shame anything that ever appeared in standard resources". The IEEE Spectrum article itself quotes John Broughton, the author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and WMF board member Ting Chen (User:Wing).

10 biggest edit-wars on Wikipedia

PC World, a global computer magazine, recently published an article on Wikipedia's 10 biggest edit-wars, documenting the confrontations that occur when Wikipedians disagree about the content of an article and repeatedly overwrite each other's contributions. According to PC World, the subjects of the 10 biggest edit-wars on Wikipedia were Nikola Tesla, Caesar salad, Death Star, Nintendo Wii, Street Fighter game characters Ryu and Ken, Yao Ming, The Eagles, Pluto, the Polar bear, and co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales.

In comparison with PC World's brief of documenting "the most heated, most bitterly contested, and most pointless confrontations over facts in Wikipedia's 10-year history", the English Wikipedia maintains its own list of the lamest edit-wars that have graced its articles. Since the page includes a number of those included by PC World, it is a possible source for the article, which one commentator decried as not having provided "enough verification" of its examples.

In brief

  • Imperica covers Wikimedia UK activity: Imperica, "a site which brings together a number of creative disciplines within digital media", recently presented two features covering the work of Wikimedia UK's GLAM efforts. "In the know" discussed GLAM outreach in the UK with User:Fæ; "Quiet realities" explored the use of QR codes by Derby Museums, with Terence Eden, who built QRpedia.
  • Competition to design a Wikipedia search engine: Personal search engine Greplin announced the launch of a Wikipedia "Search design contest". The contest is about redesigning Wikipedia's search experience "from the ground up", to make "using Google to search Wikipedia feel outdated". The competition is independent of the Wikimedia Foundation. The winning designer and runner-up will receive tickets and travel to a talk with Edward Tufte. (Reported in the Washington Post.)
  • How to destroy "the bane of the Internet": A blog posting on Webmasterformat.com described "How to destroy Wikipedia SERP (search engine results page) results". The author called Wikipedia "the bane of the Internet" for disrupting SEO marketers' efforts to promote their own pages for specific search keywords, because Google tends to rank Wikipedia pages higher. The "14 steps to overthrow a Wikipedia page" (in favor of one's own pages) include gradually removing wikilinks to it in other Wikipedia articles, and inserting wrong information, then e-mailing a screenshot of the vandalized revision to webmasters who link to the Wikipedia article ("Describe how important it is that their readers get reliable information and offer your authoritative page as an alternative").
  • Smithsonian Wikimedian profiled in Chronicle of Philanthropy: The Chronicle of Philanthropy has an article on the work being done by Sarah Stierch at the Smithsonian's Archive of American Art (cf. Signpost coverage: "First Wikipedian-in-Residence at Smithsonian Institution"). The benefits of the GLAM collaboration to both Wikipedia and the GLAM institution are discussed, and the article Jacques Seligmann & Company is mentioned as an example of the result of the collaboration's benefits.
  • Wikipedia a rare exception for Google cookies: A new study from U.C. Berkeley of user privacy and tracking reported that "Combined, Google has a presence on 97 of the top 100 websites. This includes popular government websites such as usps.com, irs.gov, and nih.gov. Only microsoft.com, ups.com, and wikipedia.org lacked some type of Google cookie." Wikipedia does not use the proprietary Google Analytics suite that uses cookies to track users between browsing sessions. Last year, a study by the Wall Street Journal found that Wikipedia was the only website in the top fifty (in the United States), by traffic, not to install any type of tracking device (Signpost coverage).
  • A girls night in: dinner, drinks, edit button?: A posting by Piper Klemm, published on the blogs of US feminist magazine Ms. ("Women, let’s claim Wikipedia!") and the Berkeley Science Review, a graduate student magazine at UC Berkeley ("WikiWomen: A new kind of party") described the author's reaction to the "very distressing" finding that only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are female (reported widely earlier this year, cf. Signpost coverage): "I believe that more women would be involved in editing Wikipedia if it were a social activity, rather than an insular one, so I hosted a WikiWomen party at my house to make the experience collaborative." The dinner followed by cocktails was attended by five female graduate students in chemistry, four of them complete newbies, who after "watching tutorials on YouTube and reading Wikipedia editing guidelines" felt "somewhat discouraged at first by the long list of rules", but eventually found the activity enjoyable, making the party a success: "It was fun to expose science and our research to others while relaxing with friends". Klemm is inviting women in the San Francisco Bay Area to get together more often for 'WikiWomen' editing events.
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Shakespeare

  • Don't know what really to make of Mark Anderson's assessment of the Shakespeare authorship article's neutrality. But comparing the article to El-Gaddafi is a bit far: I don't see anything in the article about Oxfordians being gangs of drugged cockroaches, who ought to be hunted down and killed. —innotata 00:35, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Be fair. He said "... has as much claim to evenhandedness as does an entry on Libya's history written by Muammar Gaddafi". That's about the "claim to evenhandedness", not the content itself. It's as if someone wrote "This article has as much chance of surviving as a snowball in Hell", and an objection was raised "Comparing the article to Hell is a bit far, it doesn't have damned souls screaming in agony over eternal torment". (I'm not taking a position here on the merits itself, just pointing out the linguistics there) -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 02:59, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't quite understand this linguistic comparison (assuming that the cockroaches bit refers to an actual quote be Gaddafi). Regards, HaeB (talk) 00:04, 4 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There is a common construction "As much X as Y", where X is an attribute under discussion, and Y is a colorful way of expressing a very small or very large quantity. For example, "This article has (as much) (chance of surviving == X) (as a snowball in Hell == Y)". Here, Y applies to X, the attribute under discussion, rather than the preceding subject ("This article"). Similarly "This article has (as much claim to evenhandedness == X) (as Gaddafi's history of Libya == Y)". The construction doesn't require the content of the article to follow the forms and rhetoric of Y, but is drawing a comparison on the attribute. Again, it's not that I agree with him, but it's a perfectly valid English statement in terms of expressing his point. Misreading it makes the Wikipedia defenders look silly. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 05:07, 4 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • The article contains an error, misrepresenting Mr Anderson's remarks. We read:'Unfortunately, writes Anderson, an increase in edits by Oxfordians pushed the article towards their point of view,'

True banes of the Internet, such as WebmasterFormat himself

  • It is outrageous that Wikipedia should be vandalised to raise a web page's SEO ratings. The need of the hour is for someone to write a counter article which tells a Wikipedian how to develop a page so that it figures in the top results of a search on that topic. AshLin (talk) 02:48, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • It is, but it's a fundamentally ineffective tactic that will discredit itself just fine. Websites link to Wikipedia articles because they're a good source of relatively unbiased information, which the "official" website is not. Dcoetzee 04:37, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • I hope Dcoetzee is right. And I hope that WebmasterFormat knows that he's playing a sleazeball role with this effort. Of course, if he's one of the many sociopaths of the human species, he won't care; but I hope that he's at least intelligent enough to see that he himself is being a true bane to the Internet. To know and not care strikes me at the moment as being slightly better than to be so harmfully dumb as not to even know. — ¾-10 03:16, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
        • I don't know how much of a problem delinking of articles (their #2) is in reality. Obviously very hard to detect, if it is done intelligently. However, a simple countermeasure would be to program a tool that monitors the number of internal links to each article (and maybe its google rank too) in regular intervals. With this tool, significant changes could be detected automatically and the community could be alerted. --Tinz (talk) 10:04, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

More on Anderson and IEEE Spectrum

  • Mr Anderson subscribes to the 'steady state' theory of the discursive universe, in which, back in the good old days (illo tempore) everything was in POV equilibrium, with the nonsense of scholarship nicely balanced by the 'truth' of the fringe theory. Nishidani (talk) 07:36, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • I understand that Mr Anderson's next article for the IEEE will be about how Wikipedia fails to give Flat-Earthers a fair crack of the POV whip.--Peter cohen (talk) 10:01, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • It's worth pointing out the obvious - Anderson is not a neutral "journalist". He's the author of of the Oxfordian book Shakespeare by Another Name, a book that has been repeatedly rejected as a reliable source at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard‎ and which is dismissed by Shakespeare scholars. In other words he's grinding the axe with which he carves the chip on his shoulder. Paul B (talk) 13:52, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
        • Which means, of course, that it is the IEEE which discredits itself by giving him a platform. Does it want to be seen as a respectable professional organisation or as a group that will give room to anyone who has a conspiracy theory to push?--Peter cohen (talk) 18:25, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
          • Disagree, Peter. Remember your Voltaire (no need to cite the cliché). Conspiracy theories should be aired, because if they are repressed, they feed the unenlightened view that the 'establishment' is afraid. They also, on occasion, make scholars who take the mainstream view work much harder on the archival evidence, seeing things they might not have otherwise understood. Raul Hilberg made a magnificent case for this, and I think it extends to a case like this as well. One day I hope a scholar will take the time to write a fascinating essay on the incidental gains to Elizabethan scholarship turned up by mainstream historians who, reading some obscure point in the heterodox literature, followed the paper-trial and produced fresh insights into Shakespeare (William of Strat)'s work and life. Nishidani (talk) 19:31, 2 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
            • Not especially apropos of this news piece (I have no position on the Shakespeare question), but just in general, I really like the thought mentioned above—"Conspiracy theories should be aired, because if they are repressed, they feed the unenlightened view that the 'establishment' is afraid." Quite true. — ¾-10 03:11, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why should we worry about what a Shakespearean conspiracy theorist who writes an article in a popular magazine for electrical engineers thinks are the reasons for his inability to get his quirky ideas covered in Wikipedia they way he sees fit? This is a non-issue where a fringe theorist feels slighted because everyone is telling him he's wrong. 128.59.169.46 (talk) 17:58, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I primarily included it because it's both funny and storm in a teacup. —Tom Morris (talk) 21:30, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
And I'd like to thank you for doing so, Tom. It showed good judgement also because wikipedia gave a venue for an attack on itself. We've nothing to fear, we even welcome that. Nishidani (talk) 21:41, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't aware that Anderson has a history of trying to contribute here. Or are you saying that the article was largely written by the topic-banned person who provided the quote?--Peter cohen (talk) 14:56, 7 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's kind of sad that the information about Mark Anderson's completely biased position was not mentioned in the Signpost article. It reads as if, as far as anyone knows, it's just some neutral third party spotting a genuine problem with an article. DreamGuy (talk) 23:12, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, at least "a sharply different judgment" of Wikipedia's coverage was cited, too. But I agree, it might have been worthwhile to point out more clearly that Anderson's position in the Shakespeare debate is not exactly the most mainstream one (even though the venue in which his criticism were published might suggest so). Overall though, I support the decision to feature this in the Signpost's "In the news" section - it can and should feature notable accusations even when they are not well-founded. (I fondly recall crafting the ITN subtitle "Wikipedia controlled by pedophiles, left-wing trolls, Islamofascists and Communist commandos?") Regards, HaeB (talk) 00:04, 4 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That's pretty funny. Some of those are also more of a problem than many Wikipedians would like to admit. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 05:19, 4 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the value of fringe theories in stimulating research, the benefits are not restricted to Shakespearean scholarship. Our article on SAQ reports that "American cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman won the Folger Shakespeare Library Literary Prize in 1955 for a study of the arguments that the works of Shakespeare contain hidden ciphers. The study disproved all claims that the works contain ciphers..." What SAQ fails to mention, but which is covered in the William Friedman article, is that the Friedmans got their start as cryptologists around 1915 working for an employer who wanted to prove Sir Francis Bacon was the author of most of the plays. In the course of this work, they developed powerful statistical tools that significantly advanced the art of breaking codes. William Friedman went on to be chief cryptanalyst for the War Department and led the group that broke Japanese codes, making a major, if not crucial, contribution to Allied victory in World War II.--agr (talk) 07:37, 7 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, well at least WWII is over. The Shakespeare authorship wars never will be, no matter how much proof Friedman or anybody else brings to bear. It is not a rational belief, and so cannot be changed by rational arguments. Tom Reedy (talk) 17:04, 7 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Edit wars

Including Caesar salad while omitting Global warming is one hell of a big red flag. 76.254.20.205 (talk) 10:59, 9 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's your Signpost. You can help us.
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