Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia: On Founder Access and More Importantly, Digital Literacy
This post is more a digital literacy case study as oppsed to a report on the latest at Wikipedia. As you read we think you'll see many opportunities where good digital literacy skills are essential in relationship to the media and in attempting to understand what is going on even from traditional, well-established sources.
One week ago, The Register reported that the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, was going to be giving up his "founder's rights" (basically some editing privileges) as part of his role at Wikipedia. Since then the story on The Register has been updated and the portion about Wales relinquishing his founder's rights was removed from The Register story. A day and date of when this was done is not provided.
Last Monday, the BBC picked-up on the story here. As of 5/16 at 10:00pm EDST no change to the BBC story or link from it to a corrected story has been posted.
On Tuesday, another well-known UK source, The Telegraph also published a story about Wales giving up his founder's rights. But once again, those who read it or noticed it while searching online aren't given any update (one way or another), at least five days later.
Now, toss in PCWorld/ComputerworldUK (May 11); UPI (based on BBC story) (May 10th); The Inquirer (May 11); The Week (May 11); and finally The Huffington Post (May 11) all mentioned that Wales was giving up certain "rights." We would continue with more but we've made are point. None of those stories (except The Register piece) have been updated with any changed or additional info.
Now, let's take the rest of the week off until Friday (May 14) when FOXNews.com reported an "exclusive" that:
After much pressure from within the Wikipedia community, co-founder Jimmy Wales has relinquished his top-level control over the encyclopedia's content, as well as all of its parent company's projects.
That leads to today when CNET reported a few minutes after 4pm PDST what had been reported last weekend by multiple news sources. About 27 minutes later, CNET recast and reposted the story, "with comment from members of the Wikimedia Foundation and to clarify multiple points they say Fox News reported inaccurately."
CNET was not alone. VentureBeat also reported the story today but it has been updated with a link to a report from TechCrunch saying the story is false. The VentureBeat report also notes that the reporter requested some form of contact with Mr. Wales and/or the Wikipedia Foundation. He also points to this Wikipedia page as source for his story.
We have many questions with most of them aimed at the Wikipedia Foundation media relations people.
Here are some of those questions.
1) Last week The Register updated their story. Did you contact them? Did they contact you?
2) When other stories were published by major news organizations like the BBC, PCWorld, and The Huffigton Post did Wikimedia contact these groups and those organizations refused to update with your views?
3) Why did you respond to the Fox story but not the others?
4) Why didn't Wikimedia post their views and corrections to the Wikimedia Blog last week or even today? Its been three hours since a correction was made on a news site. Couldn't your organization take just a few minutes and make an official update?
OK, that's enough questions for now.
What digital literacy issues does this story raise. Here are a few of them.
1. One source is usually not enough. You've got to review several and then make a judgement. That's a positive about the Internet of course a negative is that it takes more time. It's also a good idea to run your news search on more than one engine.
2. Is there a protocol in place to help make some sense of a story that is being reported differently by various organizations?
3. You should check your sources for a few weeks after a story "breaks" to see if any changes have taken place. We know, MUCH easier said than done but setting alerts for certain keywords and sources can help.
4. How do you judge credibility of a news source in the web age? How does a news organization lose or gain cred. What about weblogs? Does credibility mean anything anymore? What does it count for?
5. Should organizations make "official responses" as soon as a big story breaks where they want/need to share their views. Google is brilliant at doing this.
6. In this time of super instant info, is it a must that if someone tweets a news item and then sees updates and/or corrections they must tweet those updates?
7. What about search engines? Users must understand that in many but not all cases they work autonomously. Understanding how to determine a date of publication is very important. In fact, search engines should require that a time and date be included next to the article and the webmasters have a method of pinging the search engines for an instant recrawl once a change to a story has been made. However, multiple versions should be made available.
8. These are just a few examples of why digital literacy skills are a must and that it's essential they be taught from a child's earliest days in school.
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