Librarians need to take Wikipedia seriously
It's all about citations.
From guest contributor Kathleen McCook on December 10, 2022.
I don't know where else to put this observation. The MSM is not covering the "Twitter Files" well. The MSM are the only sources Wikipedia accepts. The actual Twitter Files page that users of Wikipedia will see is rather anodyne.
I've been working on the "Twitter Files" Wikipedia page — which, after much talk to delete — was accepted as a page.
The problem is that there are so many Wikipedia editors who don't want this news, that they are constantly rewriting it to look as if it is no big deal. Because only Fox News wrote an article on Part Three of the Twitter Files last night no citation was allowed. An editor slapped on the objection that it is not a reliable source.
I tried to include this introductory tweet by Matt Taibbi: "Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech."
It was not accepted on the page.
Here is the "edit history of the Twitter Files" Wikipedia page. It is open to anyone to review, and you can see that people are trying to write about this with fuller explanations, but constantly reverted.
So, the actual page users of Wikipedia will see is this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
All this work that is being done by Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and others will probably be a book but right now the majority of people will see the Wikipedia page and that page is — due to constant reverts — a pale reflection of the content of the actual "Twitter Files."
There is no way to rectify this but to edit the page. Even if reverted from the actual page, all edits do remain on the History page. By comparing the edit history to the page as it exists you will see how the page that users will see has been forced into bland coverage.
Wikipedia is used by the "Alexa devices" — its sources — the “reliable” sources — are the only ones allowed.
You can see the Wikipedia list of unallowable sources here.
What can be done? More people who believe in real news can edit Wikipedia. I do not know why Wikipedia editors (not paid all volunteers) seem to be like Yoel Roth, but they are. And there is no Elon Musk at Wikipedia.
Kathleen McCook is the author of Ebla to E-Books: The Preservation and Annihilation of Memory and other works and teaches library and information science at the University of South Florida, School of Information.
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Very dispiriting to witness the downward spiral of Wikipedia. Thank you for providing a detailed example.
I used to contribute to Wikipedia both financially and occasionally as an editor. I stopped the former when it became obvious from my activities as the latter were always reverted or subverted. One can always argue that I was bad at it or misinformed, but I never touched controversial subjects and stuck to my areas of expertise. What I became aware of was a kind of clique or mafia that had developed within their editing hierarchy. All editors are equal but some editors are more equal than others. My contributions stopped when the political bias of these elites became too obvious to ignore.