As Wikipedia turns 25 ....

Two pieces are worth reading, one from Financial Times and one from Josh Benton, an online media friend, at Nieman Lab.

First, a sidebar. Although Benton's piece is about the current status of Wikipedia versus the outside world, it, just like Financial Times, takes a pass on the semi-hardcore Zionism of Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, although it does discuss matters related to that.

With that, let's start with FT. I knew Wales founded Bomis before that, and used money from it to help start Wiki. I also knew he was some sort of Randian, and I'm not surprised. 

Before Wikipedia, FT notes there was Nupedia, and describes the pivot. It notes how this led to major reliability problems at times early on — legends of which are still used to tar Wiki today. It then describes today's much more rigorous process for suggested edits becoming permanent, focused on Musk's alleged Nazi salute on Jan. 20, 2025.

As for the nuts-and-bolts of editing? FT offers this (after giving me an anti-blogging bit of BS about copyright, ignoring fair use, when I copied to paste:

The interruption of the gunman at WikiCon was in protest at ScottishFinnishRadish blocking him eight months earlier (in a public statement, the latter would later criticise the Wikimedia Foundation for, in his view, failing to keep attendees safe). He’s not your typical Wikipedian. New England born and bred, he’s a big guy with a shaved head, beard, khaki cargo pants, heavy boots. He’s a gun owner, hunter and homesteader. He raises his own meat. “I call myself a small ‘l’ liberal,” he told me on day two of WikiCon. In his worldview, “Gays, good; trans, good; guns, good.” People are entitled to their rights, and corporations aren’t people, he says, deep-voiced and jovial. “But on the Wikipedia spectrum, that puts me way over to the right.”

I call semi-bullshit. That starts with Wales himself, per link above, supporting the locking down Wiki's article on the war and genocide in Gaza. (He didn't directly do it himself, but, he didn't not do anything; I think FT is engaging in oversell.)

And, to FT's semi-credit, that's where it heads next. But, it's only semi-credit because it doesn't mention his own Zionism, which goes back to smearing Jeremy Corbyn years ago. FT is British and it knows this, too.

To its more full credit, FT does ask how much Wiki's existence will be challenged by bad-actor individuals and bad-actor nation-states in the future. 

Now, to Benton. His piece, as an old newspaper reporter, is about the newsiness level of Wiki. To the plus side, contra hoary old legends, he notes something I note: How many footnotes a modern longer entry has, how they contain links, and the general quality of the links.

To the piece's detriment, Benton doesn't really even talk about Wales' Zionism, though, and not at all about his putting his thumb on the scale of genocide in Gaza.

Don't get me wrong; there's a lot right about Wiki, including its calling both the Maidan and the 2009 Honduras coups the coups that they are. 

EDIT and UPDATE: I want to touch on a couple of other issues I didn't think about that both pieces missed. Especially on the second issue, I think they both missed them for similar reasons — one is a financial newspaper and the other a journalism analysis site. In other words, they're both news-focused.

The first is site-bombing, but not for hardcore political reasons and goals. Rather, it's something that often happens in sports. Say that Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto had his profile edited to say that he's "the Toronto Blue Jays daddy."

Sometimes, this shades over into politics. Say that the entry for the White House has a latitude and longitude location on it, and somebody changes that to the Gulf of Mexico, or to Greenland, or whatever.

What are Wiki's policies on that, especially on non-political sites?

The second starts with the "non-political."

Outside of current events, Wiki's usually decent to good on pre-1900 history. It's often great on other things. For example, its entry on quantum mechanics does a nice, very nice, job of describing at "extended thumbnail" level of detail what the top different explanatory theories all hold.

In other words, focusing on Wikipedia as a news site shortchanges it.