[Air-L] I Was a WikiWarrior for Barack Obama

[Barry Wellman]

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Students,

Instead of doing real work today, I woke up seized with the desire to writ
this piece.

I hope you like it. And I hope you can tell me where -- and how -- to send
it. Huffington Post?, Slate? NY Times Op Ed? No contacts at any of these.
 Barry Wellman
 _______________________________________________________________________

  S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC              NetLab Director
  Department of Sociology                        University of Toronto
  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388                  Toronto Canada M5S 2J4
  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman            fax:+1-416-978-3963

  Updating history:     http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php

 _______________________________________________________________________

I Was a WikiWarrior for Barack Obama,
Barry Wellman,
November 8, 2008, ver. 1a

"Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president,"
Arianna Huffington asserts ("How Obama's Internet Campaign Changed
Politics" New York Times, November 7, 2008). She mentions blogs, YouTube
videos (Will.I.Am, Obama Girl, et. al), citizen journalists catching
gaffes, online community organizing, and direct email fundraising. But she
doesn't talk about Wikipedia, my field of action.

As a dual US/Canadian citizen living in Canada, I wondered what I could do
to help Barack Obama. Of course, I sent money; of course I sent in an
absentee ballot. But more was needed - for me and for Barack - more than
slogging through the streets of Buffalo (which was in pro-Obama New York
State anyway).

I'm a computer guy, so I decided to become a WikiWarrior. I had become
enthralled with Wikipedia a year earlier, and had done over 1,000 edits to
new and existing articles. I decided to keep my eye on stuff about the
Obamas. I felt that if I blocked non-sense from these articles, and added
a bit of sense, I might help bring some light to curious and
often-ignorant voters.

I shied away from the main Barack Obama article (or the John McCain): too
many people were fighting there about large and small issues. Instead, I
focused on Obama's mother - Ann Dunham - and step-daddy, Lolo Soetoro. I
wanted to edit them honestly in a fair and balanced way and to keep
pernicious propaganda out. I put them on my Wikipedia "watchlist" along
with about 50 others articles, such as "social network", "The Bronx" and
"Barry Wellman". I also "watched" articles about other members of the
Obama family, but they rarely had major issues.

It was easy to deal with one recurring problem with the Ann Dunham
article. Vandals kept inserting gross insults, such as:

"She started sucking his cock. She had never seen colored cock before and
became addicted immediately." (October 8, 2008)

These juvenile gross-outs were always made by unregistered Wikipedia
users, identifiable only by their IP addresses. They were easy to fix by
deletion (what Wikipedia calls "reversion"): I used a Wikipedia tool
called Twinkle to do this in one key click. Often, I - or other editors -
didn't have to bother. Automated program scripts. "Bots" (such as Huggle's
VoABot II in this case), quickly found many gross-outs within minutes and
revert them.

A more subtle problem was that some editors wanted to emphasize that the
presidential candidate was born only six months after his parents'
marriage. After much editing and re-editing, the weary compromise was that
the dates of marriage and birth were left in, but the article leaves it to
readers to do the math. Similar situations happened when some editors
tried to point out the age gap between 2008 Republican presidential
aspirant Fred Thompson (born in 1942) and his second wife, (born in 1966),
and when I tried to insert a sentence into the Sarah Palin article
pointing out that she had transferred among five universities and colleges
in the five years of her undergraduate education.

Some editors also kept wanting to show what they thought was her
sexually-liberated and atheistic persona. These were editors registered at
Wikipedia, usually with an alias name, rather than the hit-and-run
gross-outers. Dealing with these recurrent edits was more difficult, as
those who emphasized atheism were able to find a documented quotation from
her early years suggesting this. (The criterion for including a fact in
Wikipedia is that it be backed by a verifiable document.) However, a
number of editors, including myself, were able to show that Ann Dunham was
generally more broadly supportive of the humanist quality of religion. The
clinching documentation came from her son's book, Dreams of My Father.
There is an entire difference in tone between calling someone a "secular
humanist" and an "atheist".

I kept wondering why some editors worked so hard at inserting such sexual
and religious "facts". Instead of "Assume Good Faith", a key Wikipedia
tenet, I came to "Assume Republican Faith" as the motivation of such
efforts to demonize Obama ("socialist", "traitor") and his family.

This editing process goes on. Right now (November 8, 2008: 1213 EST), the
section that gathers a variety of Ms. Dunham's spiritual beliefs is
located near the end of the article. I just changed the section's heading
from "Religious beliefs" to "Spiritual beliefs". I wonder if my edit will
stick.

The issue with Lolo Soetoro's article was somewhat different. Recurrent
demonizations of Obama by the dark side have asserted that he is really a
Muslim (not that there's anything wrong with that). While the many warring
editors fought this one out on Obama's own Wikipedia article, I faced a
subtle challenge with his stepfather's article. Several editors wanted to
emphasize Lolo Soetoro's Muslim-ness, which might well affect how people
thought about Barack Obama. While there were documentary sources showing
that Lolo was nominally a Muslim, they also showed that he wasn't actively
practicing. That didn't stop several editors from attempting to make his
Muslim religion a main focus of the article. One recurring attempt, still
present, states that Lolo Soetoro is a member of the "Indonesian Muslim"
category. I kept trying to reason with this editor, noting that few
Wikipedia articles about Americans say that they are members of the
"American Christian" category. I don't know if the editor was trying for
anti-Obama propaganda or was just bull-headed. I finally gave up this
skirmish, because the text of the article currently does not emphasize
Soetoro's Muslim-ness, and the category that does mention it is buried at
the end of the article.

In none of these debates (sometimes called "edit wars") did I - or anyone
else - ever say they were acting to help Obama or McCain. All phrased
disagreements in terms of Wikipedian norms: "the article would be tighter
without that," "you're providing undue emphasis," "we need to make the
article more complete," "please document your facts," and "removed
unencyclopedic writing about Sarah Palin" (i.e., too hagiographic).
Without such civil discourse, cooperative editing couldn't take place.
Once a Wikipedia administrator threatened to block me for a day, when I
violated the "three revert rule" by repeatedly re-inserted my topic
sentence about Palin's multiple collegiate hegira. (The sentence is still
not in the article: maybe I'll try again.)

This is not to say that all editorial debates about these articles were
clear-cut. My WikiComrade, Tina Vozick (who edits under the name "Tvoz")
and I disagreed about whether Lolo Soetoro should have his own article in
Wikipedia or be included in the portmanteau article, "Family of Barack
Obama". I argued that a lot of people would go to Wikipedia for
information about Lolo, and that it was important that there be a visible
and accurate article about him. Tvoz argued that Lolo was not notable in
his own right - "Notability" is a key Wikipedia criterion - and therefore
should only be in the Family article.

So far, Lolo retains his own article as well as a cross-link from the
Family article, but I am curious as to what the future will bring now that
the election is over. I predict a lot more detail will arise, more calmly,
about Ann and Lolo, but I will only notice this intermittently. I have
taken Ann, Lolo and the Family off of my watchlist to get some rest. There
were 84 edits of the Family article on a single day (November 7 2008): an
overwhelming volume to track. So, I am taking something of a WikiBreak.
After doing more than 500 edits on Ann Dunham, Lolo Soetoro, and the
Family of Barack Obama in the past few months, I have removed all
Obama-related articles from my watchlist. I need to bask in Obama's
victory and get back to life. However, the dark side is always with us, so
perhaps you could put some key articles on your own watchlist.