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

[phoebe ayers]

This piece points out that the key principles behind Wikipedia content
-- neutrality, verifiability, and no original research, along with
notability and encyclopedic topics -- are easy to state but often hard
to put into practice, and are often negotiated through painful and
painstaking work and compromises. It should also be noted though that
editing with an agenda to promote something or someone -- whether it's
advertising a product or promoting a political candidate -- is deeply
frowned upon in Wikipedia. There's a fine line to walk here; producing
high-quality factual, neutral content through an open editing process
is harder than it looks!

best,
Phoebe

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 6:34 PM, Barry Wellman <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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