Any suggestions how to get that ideal “steady stream of low-level publicity”? And what do you think about my idea of suggesting a story idea to one of the reporters (I think he tends to write multi-page feature stories)? If he actually took up the suggestion (which I admit, given what Vladimir_M said, is a big if), would that be an overall positive or negative?
(Since nobody said it would be bad etiquette to reveal the names of the magazines, I’ll mention that they are Wired and New Yorker, and I was thinking of making the suggestion to the Wired writer. If anyone thinks this actually is bad etiquette, please let me know and I’ll try to quickly remove this part of the comment.)
(One of the worst things to ever happen to Wikipedia, in my belief, was getting headline publicity—as part of the Seigenthaler affair.)
Did that incident cause a large influx of newcomers to Wikipedia? The article you link to only mentions that Jimbo Wales banned anonymous page creation during that incident, which as I understand was not to handle the newbies drawn by publicity but due to what happened 4 months earlier, when someone anonymously created the fake Seigenthaler biography on Wikipedia.
Any suggestions how to get that ideal “steady stream of low-level publicity”?
I don’t really know. Social news sites and peoples’ blogs seem like good ways to get this steady drip. If we got a link on front pages of Reddit or Hacker News every few days, that might be enough.
And what do you think about my idea of suggesting a story idea to one of the reporters (I think he tends to write multi-page feature stories)? If he actually took up the suggestion (which I admit, given what Vladimir_M said, is a big if), would that be an overall positive or negative?
It depends on the spin. The Seigenthaler incident was so bad because it was completely negative and seemed to traumatize the higher-ups. They ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, doing something, anything to tell the press that ‘we’re fixing things!’ And this lead to a general climate where BLPs are treated extremely harshly by Foundation diktat, which has in turn fostered a general highly negative attitude to new content, content you wouldn’t find in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and anything not impeccably sourced.
(For example, page creation was turned off. Supposedly statistics were being collected to see whether it helped. Wales finally admitted in the Signpost a few years ago that they were lying through their teeth, no statistics were or are being collected, and the decision was never going to be reversed. I don’t know what others think of Wales, but that was a breathtaking example of why I trust him and the Foundation as far as I can throw them and have never donated since.)
If the spin is ‘here’s a great site with lots of fascinating things to read’, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. If it’s more like ‘look at these dangerous low-status techy fantasists’...
How about college newspapers, forums, meetups, talks, casual lunches and what ever else works. Colleges often act as small semi-closed social ecosystems so it is easier to reach the critical number needed for a self sustaining community, or the critical number of people to take an idea from odd to normal.
Yes, that incident did probably result in a lot of newcomers to the English Wikipedia. here is a graph of the number of editors of various Wikipedias. That incident became public in May of 2005. Note how the linked graph shows a take off from that point for the number of editors in the English Wikipedia (the red line). However, the other Wikipedias graphed (German in green, Japanes in yellow, French in blue) do not so such a jump. Those are also some of the largest other language Wikipedias. It is possible that around May 2005 the English Wikipedia hit the point where network effects and related issues caused a severe jump in user base and it is possible that the very large number of people who speak in English allowed that to happen. However, given the timing of the takeoff, the simplest explanation seems to be that the Seigenthaler incident made people pay attention to the project.
Eyeballing that chart myself, I don’t see a “jump” around May 2005. It looks to me like the growth was pretty steady until Nov 2005, where there was a big jump over the next few months.
Ah, looking at the Wikipedia article on the incident more closely, it didn’t become major news until November, so that explains that.
So the next question is, what evidence is there that the newcomers drawn by the incident was overall detrimental to Wikipedia? Again gwern’s linked post does not seem to talk about this. ETA: Never mind, I retract this question after seeing gwern’s other recent comments.
Any suggestions how to get that ideal “steady stream of low-level publicity”? And what do you think about my idea of suggesting a story idea to one of the reporters (I think he tends to write multi-page feature stories)? If he actually took up the suggestion (which I admit, given what Vladimir_M said, is a big if), would that be an overall positive or negative?
(Since nobody said it would be bad etiquette to reveal the names of the magazines, I’ll mention that they are Wired and New Yorker, and I was thinking of making the suggestion to the Wired writer. If anyone thinks this actually is bad etiquette, please let me know and I’ll try to quickly remove this part of the comment.)
Did that incident cause a large influx of newcomers to Wikipedia? The article you link to only mentions that Jimbo Wales banned anonymous page creation during that incident, which as I understand was not to handle the newbies drawn by publicity but due to what happened 4 months earlier, when someone anonymously created the fake Seigenthaler biography on Wikipedia.
I don’t really know. Social news sites and peoples’ blogs seem like good ways to get this steady drip. If we got a link on front pages of Reddit or Hacker News every few days, that might be enough.
It depends on the spin. The Seigenthaler incident was so bad because it was completely negative and seemed to traumatize the higher-ups. They ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, doing something, anything to tell the press that ‘we’re fixing things!’ And this lead to a general climate where BLPs are treated extremely harshly by Foundation diktat, which has in turn fostered a general highly negative attitude to new content, content you wouldn’t find in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and anything not impeccably sourced.
(For example, page creation was turned off. Supposedly statistics were being collected to see whether it helped. Wales finally admitted in the Signpost a few years ago that they were lying through their teeth, no statistics were or are being collected, and the decision was never going to be reversed. I don’t know what others think of Wales, but that was a breathtaking example of why I trust him and the Foundation as far as I can throw them and have never donated since.)
If the spin is ‘here’s a great site with lots of fascinating things to read’, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. If it’s more like ‘look at these dangerous low-status techy fantasists’...
How about college newspapers, forums, meetups, talks, casual lunches and what ever else works. Colleges often act as small semi-closed social ecosystems so it is easier to reach the critical number needed for a self sustaining community, or the critical number of people to take an idea from odd to normal.
Yes, that incident did probably result in a lot of newcomers to the English Wikipedia. here is a graph of the number of editors of various Wikipedias. That incident became public in May of 2005. Note how the linked graph shows a take off from that point for the number of editors in the English Wikipedia (the red line). However, the other Wikipedias graphed (German in green, Japanes in yellow, French in blue) do not so such a jump. Those are also some of the largest other language Wikipedias. It is possible that around May 2005 the English Wikipedia hit the point where network effects and related issues caused a severe jump in user base and it is possible that the very large number of people who speak in English allowed that to happen. However, given the timing of the takeoff, the simplest explanation seems to be that the Seigenthaler incident made people pay attention to the project.
Eyeballing that chart myself, I don’t see a “jump” around May 2005. It looks to me like the growth was pretty steady until Nov 2005, where there was a big jump over the next few months.
Ah, looking at the Wikipedia article on the incident more closely, it didn’t become major news until November, so that explains that.
So the next question is, what evidence is there that the newcomers drawn by the incident was overall detrimental to Wikipedia? Again gwern’s linked post does not seem to talk about this. ETA: Never mind, I retract this question after seeing gwern’s other recent comments.