Whatever

Ah, John, we all gotta wear that hat sometimes. I've stretched it out for you.

Oh. Kate is angry!

Occasionally, Wikipedians lose their minds and get into edit wars over the most petty things.

How rude and pretentious is that? Last time I checked, death wasn't really a petty thing.

If I ever get famous enough to warrant my own wikipedia page, I'm tempted to record a video that in the event of my death gets sent to Wikipedia.

'Hi wiki-dudes, so like I'm deadzors, k? Could you kindly ammend my record?'

God help them should I get back something like this what they sent you:

'A published source, like, oh, a newspaper. Not a person, not a blog, not a message forum.'

If we ever get the technology to bring Fred back from the grave, who's gonna bet his first order of business will be a wiki bitchslap fest.

P.S. 'Wikipedians' isn't a real word as defined by any notable dictionary. I think they should fix that.

John,

You may the Internet's Locus of Lameness for the first week in July, but remember, you do have Locus-y goodness coming up next month, as well as a precocious (if scary) daughter to spend time with. A pearl of great price! (The daughter, not the Locus-y goodness).

Kate, I don't think the death is what people considered petty here. I think what people considered petty was officious demand for notable sourcing.

That is, the edit war was not over Fred Saberhagen's state of being. No one disputed his death. The edit war was over whether the source John Scalzi cited was notable enough. One wikipedian took it upon himself to decide that a source which has been entirely accurate about authors' deaths for years didn't have enough stature for Wikipedia.

It's pretty clear that the officious wikipedian didn't care if Fred Saberhagen was dead or not. He just wanted a citation that he deemed notable enough. That was what was lame, not the fact of Fred Saberhagen's death.

(And as the quoted passage points out, we now have an article where his death is the only cited fact. This makes the request for a more notable citation seem all the more arbitrary.)

And Francisco Franco is still dead. (Source: Chevy Chase, Weekend Update)

Somehow, I don't think that's going to meet the Wikipedia standard.

JC,

I have to disagree. Fred's death was exactly what was in question as the officious wiki-prick decided to ultimately play God O' the Interweebs.

*Grumble Grumble* You come to me saying Fred has passed. You've confirmed this through multiple sources including close family. Yet, I do not believe it! I shall not post it and for the record, I shall taunt you!

By saying the references were not credible was basically accusing anyone who had made those original statements of being liars.

Regardless if it was eventually settled, the 'I R mightier than thou' tone that was evident throughout the entire argument only perpetuates the 'I've got a bigger e-penis than you, for I work at Wikipedia.' mentality.

My issue is not only with the tasteless rehashing of the subject, but the little disclaimer at the top citing the lame examples were supposed to be humorous and not used in any serious manner.

Somehow I think and please correct me if I am wrong, but the overall tone of John in that article was very serious, as it should have been regarding the subject of one's death.

To be fair to wikipedia editor, 1) wikipedia did have a publicity problem with the prank announcement of the death of Chris Benoit's wife so being skeptical about death announcements wasn't unreasonable, 2) not everyone in the world is familiar with the source and thus would be comfortable trusting it.

Lisa:

"To be fair to wikipedia editor..."

It's worth noting is that the fellow in question ("Quatloo") is no more a Wikipedia editor or official than I am. It wasn't an issue of me vs. Wikipedia, involving a real Wikipedia employee.

Plus, John, you've been Farked, what, twice this past week. That doesn't qualify for lameness in my book.

John: I do know that, but both points are just as valid with a volunteer force. I'm making a guess of what might drive a reasonable person to make that kind of response Quatloo did. This is separate from the question of whether or not Quatloo is reasonable, but I find that even people I violently disagree with usually have some kind of experience that make their actions seem completely obvious and reasonable to them.

Lisa:

I expect Quatloo believes he was helping Wikipedia's factual integrity. I certainly applaud his desire; not so much the implementation.

The things that cracks me up about this is that it's WIKIPEDIA - a site built on the fact that experts and others can pool their knowledge and create something new and useful - that is demanding verification from an established publication. Um, Jimmy Wales? Irony on line 1.

JC: The edit war was over whether the source John Scalzi cited was notable enough. One wikipedian took it upon himself to decide that a source which has been entirely accurate about authors' deaths for years didn't have enough stature for Wikipedia.

The problem was that it wasn't notable enough, because nobody could find it. Seriously. Unless you were already familiar with its location, John didn't give enough info to track it down. (I tried.)

Try to look at it from the perspective of not being within SF Fandom.

As for the taunting, well, John started it. And that was the point where it became lame. That was why it went so far downhill. None of it would've happened had John just calmly provided direct links at the very beginning. (Well... much less of it would've happened anyhow...) It could've been a total non-issue.

Of course I taunted him. He was an officious little twit. And when I did give the officious little twit a reference he could find (which was immediately, incidentally, so I'm not entirely sure why you suggest that I didn't give an alternate and useful source in a timely fashion), he determined it wasn't good enough. At which point in my opinion he fully deserved my scorn and condescension.

...it becomes clear that I, indeed, have become the Internet's Locus of Lameness for the first week of July 2007

You know, Scalzi, not to be a Wiki-prick (my new favorite word of the day) or anything, but I can't buy that claim without some kind of credible citation.

And yet somehow, you didn't expect him to get all pissed off and defensive? What did you expect, that he would say "you're right, I'm a twit and I'll go away now"? Have you ever been in an argument anywhere where it played out like that?

Which citation was it that you gave to him immediately that he could find?

I still don't understand why the info had to be in the article immediately instead of waiting for an obituary.

MWT, I see what you're getting at. But, timeliness is dependent on who updates the article. Scalzi had the data and the time on his hands to make the update, so he did. There is no established Wiki criteria for timeliness of data that I can find. Putting that aside for a moment, I think my major gripe with the whole incident is the arbitrary application of standards. As was pointed out above, there are no other citations in the article, birth date for example. If the end of life must be cited, why not the beginning? Many articles in the Wikipedia are caveatted with "Citation needed" why did Quatloo not amend Scalzi's input that way, and wait for the obit? Quatloo himself set the tone for the ensuing argument, Scalzi's response was predictable (it says so on the label or at least it used to: act like a jackass and Scalzi will respond the same).

I can think of a way lamer recent edit war on Wikipedia (sorry, John), in which an editor insisted that there be a citation next to the name of the star of a tv show, proving that he's in the upcoming Christmas special. This was despite the fact that the previous episode is a cliffhanger with him in it. In fact, I think I'll suggest that for the lamest edit wars article. I was amused to see that the article also mentions the war over whether you can post a picture of an episode of that same show before it actually airs. (The show is Doctor Who, by the way. I'm not going to link it because that would be lame.)

Heh. Karen, I make no claim that my edit war was the lamest. Merely one of them.

Jim Wright: yes but he wasn't on the Whatever when he was doing the taunting nor being a jackass. Behaviors that are appropriate and sensical in one place are not necessarily appropriate and sensical somewhere else.

The fact that nothing else is cited could be answered by someone slapping a "this article needs tons of citations" tag on it. :p It won't be me, though, because I don't believe in citation tags and ignore them as much as possible.

And as I said before, I think everyone was equally to blame for the ensuing argument. Everyone involved was in the wrong. Which is why it's all so incredibly lame in the first place, and why it was funny enough to Fark. I picture it as Quatloo with a stick, trying to defend himself from crazy screechy monkeys.

Oh well. At the end of the day, it's all just laws and sausages, and the article got minorly improved in the process.

MWT: yes but he wasn't on the Whatever when he was doing the taunting nor being a jackass

True, perhaps you should update Scalzi's Wiki entry to reflect his personal outlook on jackasses (Kidding, I'm kidding. Please crazy screechy monkeys don't fling shit at me).

Oh well. At the end of the day, it's all just laws and sausages, and the article got minorly improved in the process. This I can agree with.

Jim Wright:This I can agree with.

Excellent! Now someone just needs to take that "can has cheezburger?" Scalzi pic and add monkey ears to it. (Which, I think, is our cue to all go out to the bar for beers. Or to the coffeeshop for lattes, or whatever.)

Delurking just to say that your edit war made me look for Fred Saberhagen's work [I had never heard of him before], and I finally found, and downloaded Berserker Throne from Baen books.

And this post means I am dropping other stuff to start reading it.

So it wasn't all in vain, at least for me.

/back to lurking

I would guess (based on some of John's other comments re: wikipedia) that part of his frustration stemmed from the fact that wikipedia's policies and the way some users apply them reflect a larger problem with the site and its basic premise. Wikipedia attempts to democratize knowledge by treating all contributors as fundamentally equal - which sounds nice, but real academic work is hierarchical and meritocratic. And it should be: the truth is that there are good reasons for requiring someone to prove himself before you consider him an expert.

At some level - I'm not sure if it's conscious or if it's some kind of weird manifestation of a group subconsciousness in a social network - wikipedia realizes this fact, and has responded by taking a fierce and irrational pride in being a secondary/tertiary source. Thus, we end up with a situation where someone with personal knowledge of a matter - his own birthday (or in this case, a professional colleague's date of death) - can't share that knowledge without technically violating a policy. Meanwhile, inaccurate information can be echoed as long as it can be cited. (Another absurdity, noted by John at some length in the wikipedia discussion thread, is that someone can't tender their personal knowledge directly to wikipedia, but they can tender it to an "approved" source and then quote the source. So, in the present example, Harlan Ellison can't directly tell wikipedia about his friend's death, but he can tell a magazine and then quote the magazine on wikipedia. And this is simply stupid on its face.)

The result is that wikipedia has become a hotbed of pseudoscholasticism: smart-sounding rules about "research" take the place of common sense and real scholarly standards. (This is where someone is likely to make a hollow protestation that wikipedia doesn't aspire to being scholarly. I'm not sure whether to object to that kind of thing as being patently false (if true, why have any sourcing policies at all?) or anti-intellectual rubbish that is nothing to brag about.)

All that said, there is some place for democratic sharing of knowledge - there are laymen who know interesting and true things and hobbyists who have more time to share their passions than academics with classes and publishing deadlines. But the solution to accuracy issues isn't bubbleheaded policies about "original research" or whatnot. The likely best solution is full-on peer review and editing, something wikipedia has expressed open hostility to incorporating. Consequently, it's unlikely wikipedia will ever be anything more than a quick way to settle bar bets and similar trivialities, which strikes me as a little bit of a waste of human potential.

Sorry for the length. I'm especially windy today.

It seems like the underlying point of the rules on Wikipedia is that anyone should be able to verify that a fact was correctly copied from some other source, preferably on the web so you don't have to leave your chair, or at worst by making a trip to the library. While it's applied very inconsistently, this makes some sense if you think of Wikipedia as being built from anonymous contributions. What more can you trust an anonymous person to do?

It also makes silly hoops like Harlan Ellison having to get himself quoted somewhere make a little bit more sense. Otherwise, the anonymous editor coming later won't be able to check that the fact was correctly copied.

Some contributors seem to make a point of treating everyone as just another anonymous contributor even when they're well known, and the cognitive dissonance this causes seems to be a major contributor to these culture clashes.