Whatever

I guess the only information that wants to be free is information other people control.

Lovely.

I was looking at entry on one of CJ Cherryh's books today and wondering if I should try and fix it. But the more I hear about editing Wikipedia the less I want to do with it.

The entry now shows his death on June 29, 2007.

Well, good. Let's see for how long that sticks.

heh, gone now.

Oddly enough, I just started reading my very first Saberhagen book the other day. I'm rather enjoying Berserker.

I thought it rather odd that in order for the SFWA to be a reliable source, they must put info on their front page. Also, I saw no "links" proving Saberhagen's birth either. Perhaps his birth was faked as well.

Done again. I can revert his edits all damn night if need be.

Two completely unrelated things, stuck here 'cause I couldn't find a better place:

1) John, your posts are coming up in my RSS reader as authored by 'anonymous'... apologies if I'm the 3,465th person to point this out, or if you DGARA.

2) Have you been pointed to Bologna Cat yet?

For some people, Ellison is just that guy mentioned at the end of the Babylon 5 credits.

Obviously, Wikipedia has had a lot of trouble with spurious updates by essentially unknown (in the "you can verify they exist and they are who they are" variety) people. The purpose of the reliable sources doc is to make it easy for random strangers to verify entries.

This is one of the inherent weaknesses of the Wikipedia model. Traditional encyclopedias often have sections written and/or edited by authors (or committees) that make it their business to be somewhat informed about the specific subject matter.

The Wikipedia model means relying on a loose cadre of people sifting through mountains of updates, many of them complete garbage, looking for real, verifiable facts on subjects they may have little understanding of.

At least this dude took your rather spirited objections in stride.

I'm not surprised that this person rejected the edits out of hand for not qualifying as verifiable (based on the document tiresomely provided over and over). I imagine that /any/ doubt at all about the verifiable fact of a specific person's death is probably taken pretty seriously. It was all too easy to spread the rumour of death via an entry in the bad old days.

I mean, look at it from another angle: if this editor has no direct knowledge of fandom (what a word!), Ellison (dropped as a name like it means something to the greater masses of people out there!) or the SFWA (the what with the who now?) then your comments could end up sounding like any hysterical assertion. I mean, who is this Ellison guy you keep going about? Anyone can create a web presence that asserts some fact.

At least, this is the sort of the conservative editing you find now that Wikipedia is /trying/ (with mixed results) to be a lot more critical of the sources of their information.

All they have to go, then, on is their "reliable sources" doc.

And remember: this is Wikipedia. Isn't the flamewar over boat anchors /still/ going on?

Was reverted but I just fixed it. Interesting to see how long it lasts.

Chances are the news will hit somewhere else soon, and that will be the end of it. Still, I'll grant you that it's a foolishly narrow interpretation of "WP:RS" (the Wikipedia rule about reliable sources), since Harlan can reasonably be deemed an expert in the field of well known sf writers and whether or not they're dead.

Love your new user page, by the way. I am amused.

Mark Kelly over at www.locusmag.com has also posted the sad news. He also notes:

The family will announce a date for a Memorial Celebration later this year. Donations would be appreciated to Doctors without Borders, Catholic Relief, SFWA Emergency Medical Fund, and John 23rd Catholic Church in Albuquerque.

Well... all the Wikidiocy aside...

It's sad to hear of Mr. Saberhagen's passing. R.I.P.

I think I'll pull one of his paperbacks off the shelf and enjoy his visions this eve.

I gotta side with Quatloo on this one, despite that being about the nerdiest handle ever. The site is WikiPedia, not WikiBreakingNews. It looks like they've selected ISFDB as their reliable Internet source for SF information.

I tried re-adding with a reference to Locus Magazines posting. Hopefully that sticks.

I do understand the policy of not letting unsourced information be added to biographies of living persons, but the individual seems to be taking a bit too much glee in doing so. And while I know that Harlan Ellison and Wikipedia aren't best buddies, I don't see why he wouldn't be a valid source.

More importantly, I'm sorry to hear of Mr. Saberhagen's passing.

I thoroughly enjoyed his Beserker works, and some of his lesser known writing.

I read Veils of Azlaroc as a teen and felt that most of it went over my head. I've always meant to reread it as an adult and now I will finally get around to it.

You'll be missed.

.

And yet WikiPedia frequently acts as WikiBreakingNews when any news event occurs or when the ColbertNation gets called up to action. Perhaps they are still a tad touchy after pre-announcing Chris Benoit's wifes death last week (14 hours before she was murdered).

(looks like entry has been updated again with the locusmag reference)

I called down the admins to lock it.

That should hold things off until an obituary or something surfaces somewhere.

I have to say I agree that Quatloo took your profound quantity of "spirited objections" rather well. I say this in as professional a manner as blog commentary can afford, but it seemed overboard to me, Scalzi.

I greatly enjoyed a lot of Saberhagen's work. I particularly liked his revisionist Dracula series, although it was starting to get a bit thin as the sequels rolled on. But that is almost ineivtable with sequels.

OTOH, His book "Love Conquers All" is best avoided, IMHO.

Subspace:

If by "handling it well" you mean "exhibiting an absolute inability to think beyond a poorly-designed Wikipedia policy," yes, he did fine.

I was a Wikipedia contributor for about a year. (I wrote the early major drafts of a bunch of entries for major superheroes, for instance.)

I stopped contributing when I learned that the Wikipedia's moderators are completely ineffectual at, well, moderating. Not only that, they're amazingly slow at failing to moderate, and astoundingly uncommunicative if you try to speed things up.

So yeah, basically unless you have a lot of time and patience, the inmates mostly run the asylum over there. Fortunately there are a bunch of level-headed people who do have the time and patience, which is why it's still a useful resource, but contributing was just too frustrating for me to keep wasting my time on it.

My comment wasn't in reference to Quatloo's opinion on the facts, Scalzi, it was in reference to your usage of insults to convey passion.

Also, are we sure Qualtoo is male?

Wikipedia is a great idea. The basic concept is terrific. Jimmy Wales is vouched for by Cory Doctorow, who is one of my best friends and one of the people who I admire most in the world.

And stuff like this makes me want to rip somebody's head off.

What neither Jimmy Wales nor anyone else owns up to is the sheer exhausting corrosiveness of having to fight with obvious psychopaths like "Quatloo". I've joked that Wikipedia's tagline ought to be "The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, so long as they're willing to devote hundreds of hours of energy to fighting people with autistically long attention spans." Until Wikipedia can figure out some way of reigning in the rule of its Red Guards, it's going to be repellent to an enormous swathe of humanity: the people who are put off by authoritarian pricks.

If you want the genuine output of the whole world's input, you need to stop empowering the volunteer hall monitors over every other kind of human. Jimmy Wales needs to put that in his pipe and smoke it.

I'm tired of hearing that the inside-crowd of sensible Wikipedia administrators agrees that these things are problems and hopes to address them. Either fix it or decide that you like things the way they are. The latter is what your behavior defaults to, and you can't have it both ways.

Subspace:

I don't recall insulting Quatloo. Calling someone a goddamn fool if they don't recognize that Harlan Ellison is a reliable source in this particular context is simply a statement of fact. Also, I wasn't being passionate, I was being irritated.

It's true I'm assuming Quatloo is a he. Quatloo could be a she.

This just basically reinforces that wiki is useless as a reliable source for anything that is either:

a: the slightest bit controversial (usually in a political sense)
b: recent

It's really good for stuff that's neither of the above.

I suspect that you could probably derive a general rule that in any given online community the percentage of trolls and/or pricks will be fairly constant. I know I've found it so going as far back as FIDONET in the 80s and usenet in the 90s.

Calling someone a goddamn fool if they don't recognize that Harlan Ellison is a reliable source in this particular context is simply a statement of fact.

Sorry, John, but that's actually an opinion.

Saying that "Harlan Ellison [or anyone else] is a reliable source" may arguably be a statement of fact, but saying that someone is a "goddamn fool" for failing to recognize this is clearly an opinion. A defensible opinion, perhaps, but an opinion nonetheless.

Hugh57:

"Sorry, John, but that's actually an opinion."

Come on, Hugh. I don't really need to put subtitles under my snark on my own site, do I?

I was going to respond to that comment as well until I realized where I was.

Not to be a grammar nazi but...

some git who does not think Harlan Ellison is not a sufficiently reliable source for this information.

...I think you mean "...does not think Harlan Ellison is a sufficiently reliable source for this information."

With any luck, it will take less time for you to make that change (unless I'm missing something) over here than it will for wikipedia to register the info you passed along.

Sorry about that, John. Unlike Subspace, I forgot where I was. I've been reading your blog long enough that I should have recognized your distinctive brand of snark when I came across it. :)

It's just that people confusing opinion with fact are a pet peeve of mine, one I encounter almost daily with people who aren't being snarky.

As with any large community endeavor, change comes slowly, and well-planned and organized, well-thought-out change even slower. It gets worse when there aren't enough people to execute the change, and worse still when those people are volunteers who also have lives and day jobs. As in all things, patience is a virtue.

Quatloo backed off as soon as the Locus announcement surfaced. That's all he wanted to see. If everyone had simply waited for an hour or two for proper references to appear that could be cited, it wouldn't've turned into an edit war. It's an encyclopedia, not a news outlet. The inclusion of his date of death in the article wasn't urgent.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia has a whole slew of IRC chat channels on freenode.net, if people need to get hold of admin attention quickly for something. The people who hang out in them are friendly and helpful.

MWT:

"Quatloo backed off as soon as the Locus announcement surfaced. That's all he wanted to see."

But he also declared that he didn't care how Locus got the information, which I find really problematic. I'd be willing to bet a sum larger than a nickel that Locus got its information from exactly the same place I did -- either the SFWA announcement or from Harlan Ellison's site. He's more interested in sourcing than actual useful data. I understand why Wikipedia wants verifiable sources, of course; I also think Wikipedia needs to be flexible enough take information from credible sources even if they are not a newspaper or magazine.

Actually, I think many of the editors do have that flexibility. Certainly the admins, at least, have been good about doing more than the most superficial Google search when they're digging up verification about something (of the ones I've observed closely).

Quatloo doesn't speak for all of Wikipedia. It's kind of hidden, but notice on the talk page where Chronodm said "Really? To quote WP:PSTS: "Primary sources are documents or people very close to the situation being written about." (Emphasis added.)" With a bit of patience, someone else with knowledge of Wikipedia procedure came along to refute him in a far more effective way than you were doing.

MWT:

"With a bit of patience, someone else with knowledge of Wikipedia procedure came along to refute him in a far more effective way than you were doing."

Well, this assumes that Quatloo would pull his head out enough to acknowledge the notation; it came after the Locus reference was noted and he hasn't responded to it. So it's being more effective is speculation. However, it does establish that Quatloo, for all his officiousness, didn't know what he was talking about. I find that heartening; I wish it had happened earlier.

As a passerby, from your first response to him you came across as someone who felt that their change should be taken because they knew it was true. His first statement is simply requiring a *checkable* reference. It looks to me like you didn't provide a link to the announcement, I think because you must be a member of the association to see the page it's on? Anyway, your first response was IMO incredibly harsh, you attacked his comprehension and then backed up the reference by stating *you'd* seen it with your own eyes.

I know your intent was to insist that you'd provided suitable sources, but you have to wade through a bit too much hostility to get to it. Infact, if I'm reading this page correctly, you never linked to a source, even though Quatloo was (rightly) making it clear that's what was necessary.

From what I've seen of you by reading this blog and how you handle your own dissenters, I'm actually a little surprised. Not that my opinion of you actually matters in any way except to show that I'm not just some stranger taking you to task for abusing some "poor" wikipedia admin. I imagine once tempers have cooled you'll be able to look back and realize where the miscommunication happened and why.

I also agree with the others who are commenting on Quatloo's handling of himself (herself?) I've been in less significant dustups with admins than that and OH BOY did they go bad... horribly horribly bad. Long story, can't really recap it in the space I have left, without turning this into *my* blog. Just... it was BAD. This was all shades of frustrating, but tame.

Majken:

"I imagine once tempers have cooled you'll be able to look back and realize where the miscommunication happened and why."

Are you folks under the impression that I'm enraged? No. I thought the initial deletion was spurious; I sourced the information, noting where I found it and what it said. He deleted it because he couldn't find it, but it didn't appear he looked very hard (he only referenced looking at the first page). I gave him an alternate and credible reference; he decided (erroneously, it appears) that it wasn't credible, and later tried to school me in sourcing, which, well, I find amusing.

In short, I think I treated him about as well as he deserved all the way through, and I did it without any particular rage; which is to say I was deliberately condescending. You're of course free to think I was rude or unduly harsh, but I don't particularly care one way or another. I don't claim to be nice all the time.

A quick scan of the SFWA site also brings sad news of the death of Sterling E. Lanier, author of Heiro's Journey and The Unforsaken Heiro.

To be fair to Quatloo, I had trouble finding your sources too. It would've been a lot faster had you linked to the specific part of SFWA that you were referring to, or to Harlan Ellison's forum. In fact I never did find where it said what you said got said on SFWA; not being familiar with the site's layout and having no clue where to look, I eventually gave up and just did Google searches hoping to find Harlan Ellison's board instead, which also took several tries. In the process I also went past Saberhagen's official website, which did not have a note about his death (and it seems to me that making sure Wikipedia notes it ought not to be so urgent if his own website hadn't yet).

Also, Majken: I don't think Quatloo is an admin. He's just another random editor on equal footing as everyone else. That seems to escape a lot of people who aren't familiar with the community - that by and large, the other editors are not special. The people who put up officious looking tags are just regular people too, and you have equal authority to take them back down if they happen to be pointless.

That said, though, it does help to work with the community and learn its ways of doing things. As with any community. I'll be the first to agree that the procedure pages can be complex and convoluted, which could definitely use some streamlining, but they are there to be perused and despite poor organization they still aren't rocket science.

MWT:

"To be fair to Quatloo, I had trouble finding your sources too."

Fair enough. I'll try to do a better job of that in the future.

John;

You don't know me, but we've met a time or two(however, I've surely just been one of the geeks in the crowd).

I know that it's frustrating, and frankly, Quatloo is being a complete freaking ass there (I imagine him saying GO NO FURTHER! in a robotic voice).

The problem is this - many of the editors at Wikipedia believe that:
a) a reliable source such as CNN or Locus will make the confirmations for them
b) if it turns out that they're wrong, but they're just reporting what a reliable source said, they're not liable

I've worked as a journalist, you've worked as a journalist, and we both know those things aren't true. But with half a million editors, its better to insist that everything has to be cited by news organizations, schools, etc. Blogs, regardless of the person who writes them, are still essentially self-publication. I believe we miss out on a lot of things that could be of use to us because we don't link to blogs, be they those of science fiction writers or nanotechnology experts (I found some great stuff about some things going to a juried reading last week, but until that jurying happens, doesn't matter for Wikipedia).

Now, secondly, Wikipedia is reeling right now because of all the coverage last week over the Benoit case. I wrote the Wikipedia Signpost article on it, and there's a lot of reason for them to be reeeeeeeealy touchy right now; for a while it looked like they might need to provide records so a court order could be obtained from an ISP to identify an IP editor. The site is being watched quite a bit, by some of the most insane people on the planet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-02/Wrestler_death

Check the 5th paragraph out; and I only went for the big guns, whose transcripts I can easily get - I have about 30 links to major news columnists DEMANDING THE TRUTH! (which was exactly what the more experienced editors and admins thought it was as soon as it got mentioned on the Admin Noticeboard, but you can't howl for someone's head if it's that simple).

Unfortunately, the timing on this means there's a shitload of editors who are keeping close watch on any declaration of death, and not going to let it stand without the most reliable sources they can find, which they believe can be had by avoiding blogs, even if the information there is correct and timely.

this is a reply to Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

I'm tired of hearing that the inside-crowd of sensible Wikipedia administrators agrees that these things are problems and hopes to address them. Either fix it or decide that you like things the way they are. The latter is what your behavior defaults to, and you can't have it both ways.

One of the biggest issues is there's no system in place for *de-admining* someone; once you have the admin bit, you're golden. Until you do something astonishingly horrific. This seems incorrect to me; there should absolutely be a way of taking their toys away.

I'm also of the opinion there should be a non-removable infobox on everyone's page, and everytime they fight a consensus based on rules and lose (ie, it gets taken to the Admin Noticeboard), and every time they get chastised in an RfC, it should be noted there. There are a number of editors and admins who do not seem to realize that if they piss someone off every month so much that it gets taken to RfC, and every month they're told, 'You broke WP:CIVIL, you violated WP:BITE (don't bite the newbies), etc., there should be consequences, because right now, there aren't.

On Wikipedia, your reputation is all you have; are you a good editor or a bad one? Do you interpret rules well and fairly, or are you rules lawyering? A permanent record on your userpage of all the times you've messed up would act as a shorthand to people to assess just how well you're taking the spirit of Wikipedia to heart, over taking the rules to...well, wherever you take rules to.

Officious pricks are definitely a real problem for wikipedia, but the sky doesn't seem to me to be falling.. And I'm not sure there are any technical solutions to this problem that don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Wikipedian officious prick frequency aside, let me simply note that although idiocy slowed down the process greatly (and made it more stressful) the article DOES now note Mr. Saberhagen's death, and the lag time was only an additional 4 hours. (Unless I am reading the history logs incorrectly.)

And let me just call bullshit on anyone who says that wikipedia isn't the most amazingly useful reference source ever in the history of the world. Because it is. The sheer breadth and depth of it qualifies it as that, and the error rate as measured by Science magazine (or possibly Nature?) was only slightly worse than Britannica. And on top of that, it's FREE. Yes, you should absolutely get another independent source before you trust any fact completely. That is true (as repeatedly noted above) of absolutely any source. Just because wikipedia isn't a shining example of perfection doesn't mean it's not the best thing available, or indeed ever. It could be better, it's true. But there is nothing better available, and it behooves us to remember that.

I also find it deeply regrettable that this stupid kerfluffle is shamefully dominating remembrance of Fred Saberhagen, whom I quite enjoyed as an author. I'll miss him.

"Wikipedia Officious Prick Brigade". I love it.

I'm relieved to see my edit seemed to stop the deletions. Also glad I got it in before the article was locked (it was hard work, every time I hit save the page had been edited at least once).

Adding a citation mid-edit war requires some quick fingers.

I'm certainly not saying Wikipedia isn't amazing. I use it at least a dozen times a day, and I'm pretty confident in my ability to distinguish the reliable stuff from the less so.

What I'm saying is that Wikipedia in its current condition drives away people who lack unlimited patience for dealing with a certain kind of officiousness. Indeed, it's a subculture that positively encourages people to behave like parking-lot lawyers. Perhaps that's fine, and down the line we'll all realize that Wikipedia is the optimal outlet for the energy of nature's born hall monitors. But it's a choice. Wikipedia is choosing: it prefers the Quatloos of the world to the John Scalzis. Let's hope this turns out to be a good choice. I have my doubts.

Fred Saberhagen's passing is sad news for interstellar killing machines everywhere.
As for Wikipedia, I've had my own problems trying to update some information on it where I was the authority, but still could find no way to update the information myself. My current opinion was summed up by the ever excellent Wondermark strip,
http://wondermark.blogspot.com/2007/04/291-in-which-notability-is-determined.html

Excellent. This gives me the perfect place to point to when I am inevitably told that "If you think something's wrong with Wikipedia, the solution is to FIX IT!!!"

I'm sorry you had to put up with the Wikitwit. :-/

By and large, I quite like Wikipedia.

However, there is a serious element of One True Wayism that runs through most of its articles on cultural/fictional stuff. (And for all I know the rest of it, however, I've only tried editing cultural/fictional stuff.)

For instance, "warp fields," "warp engines," and/or "warp space," to most people, are science fiction concepts, not topics in theoretical physics. However, any attempt to write articles on these subjects is quickly deleted or, at best, inserted into an article on "Alcubierre drive." All props to Mr. Alcubierre, but come on.

I only edit Wikipedia for typos and blatant mistakes at this point. I won't be writing any articles or adding to any existing articles. Frankly, they care more than I do. I don't have much of a life, but it's more than some, apparently.

M

I also edited Fred's Wikipedia site twice yesterday, only to find some of what I wrote deleted.

It's nuts - I sign anything I edit on Wikipedia, and I've had an account on Wikipedia for years. The first time, I forgot to add a link back to the SFF.NET obits, found my edit deleted and re-edited it to include a link back to the SFF.NET obits discussion list.

Now, the listing I added to June 2007 deaths HAS "stayed put."

Wikipedia has been, in the past, a bad source of current information. But I think anyone willing to edit under their own names should be given a little slack.

One weird thing on Fred's death - no newspaper in Albuquerque has an obit for him yet. That's curious. So if they're now using a newspaper as the final arbitor, well...In this case, they'd be wrong.

Piers Anthony once wrote a bio of Stephen R. Donaldson on his site that described how he'd gone to prison and been raped repeatedly.

Sci-fi authors get nutty when they get old, and I wouldn't trust Ellison, either.

Three Oranges:

"Sci-fi authors get nutty when they get old, and I wouldn't trust Ellison, either."

I would suggest there's a difference between PA suggesting prison rape for one of his contemporaries, and Ellison's acknowledgment that a friend of his had died.

John:
Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know anything about Ellison and his relationship with Saberhagen.

You can't fault Wikipedia for applying some basic standards, such as not reporting news from one source as fact. If Harlan Ellison called up the New York Times and told the editor "Fred Saberhagen is dead!" do you think they'd just run the story without doing a little checking?

Give 'em hell, John.

One interesting thing that I found was that Quatloo makes mention of the fact that you aren't patient enough to let news of Fred's death show up on a "reliable source" yet he could've let the edit remain for a few hours to see if it showed up on a "reliable source".

I just can't believe how much time he spent fighting you on the issue.

I went back to make some comments on the way the Saberhagen page has been re-edited, and you can't even edit the meta-discussion now!!

I also tried to find out how to lodge a complaint against the "Q-ster," and can't figure out how to do that. That anonymous twit definitely stepped way over several lines.

Trolls are everywhere. I learned the hard way that the secret to defeating them is not to give in to their pandering ways. They deliberately post inflammatory and condescending comments to push your buttons so they can invoke the commonly-used "Straw Man Arguement" to prove their point.

After reading the tripe that idiot posted all over Wiki, it appears he/she/it was successful in pushing your buttons. Additionally, Wiki is far from "a reliable source" for *anything*, since it can be changed and edited on a whim.

Your best bet would have been to go to, say, CNN or MSNBC, or some other website, and just let that troll lurk under it's bridge.

What neither Jimmy Wales nor anyone else owns up to is the sheer exhausting corrosiveness of having to fight with obvious psychopaths like "Quatloo". I've joked that Wikipedia's tagline ought to be "The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, so long as they're willing to devote hundreds of hours of energy to fighting people with autistically long attention spans." Until Wikipedia can figure out some way of reigning in the rule of its Red Guards, it's going to be repellent to an enormous swathe of humanity: the people who are put off by authoritarian pricks.

Two reasons why this is not going to change soon:

1) Wikipedia is a dictatorship run ultimately by Jimbo Wales
2) Wales is some variety of libertarian/Randroid.

If he notices a problem, anything must be done to solve it, up to and including breaking Wikipedia's own rules But apart from that, "consensus" is the order of the day, no matter how stupid.

Like every other great institution, Wikipedia reflects the biases and beliefs of its original creators/early adaptors, even though these are more broke than right by now.

Just put his bio info up on www.antiwikipedia.com
We won't delete it.

I got word of Fred's passing on Friday, about two hours after he died. I was asked to hold off on announcing at the request of the family so the family would have time to mourn in private. I was given permission on Monday, at which time I e-mailed to SF groups I run, e-mailed SF Signal and e-mailed Locus.

Wikipedia is managed by a bunch of self important twats. I love the concept, but the admins have ruined the site for me.

I'm sure it was frustrating, the more so because of the subject, but I just want to say thanks because that exchange was all kinds of funny.

See? Now *that's* snark (especially the Wikipedia transcript itself). Maybe you should send a pointer to Myers so he can do better next time.