[WikiEN-l] Improve quality by reviewing all new articles

Sat Dec 17 18:34:44 UTC 2005

On 16/12/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> > I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted
> > were not obvious mistakes.  "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant
> > to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief
> > time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy
> > assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever
> > proven."  "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and
> > returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started
> > one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly
> > thereafter."
> >
> > None of those mistakes are obvious.
>
> Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions.  But frankly, if
> you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find
> another hobby.  Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.

I have to jump in here as well, I confess.

Errors that are "blindingly obvious" are ones which are, at a glance,
clearly untrue or impossible to anyone with only a passing knowledge
of the subject.

eg/ "Seigenthaler shot John F. Kennedy" or "X was implicated in the
assassination of Elizabeth II". We all know who shot JFK, we all know
HM is not dead (at least, not as of the time of writing).

Moved to the USSR and returned to the US is plausible though unusual;
it didn't happen often, but there were isolated cases AIUI. Starting a
large PR firm - well, he'd have had to do something notable, and it
sounds believable enough. So those two down...

Saying "...was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy
assassination" is not _obviously_ impossible; we all know the Kennedy
assassination is a very long-debated thing, was a subject of much
speculation at the time, and so forth. So, "was implicated" is not on
the face of it spectacularly wrong.

Then there's Bobby Kennedy. I know who Bobby Kennedy was, and I know
who shot him, I have a vague inkling of why, and if I tried I might be
able to give you a decent half-page summary of RFK's career. I know
that it would seem pretty odd for someone to be implicated in both
assassinations; they're pretty unconnected, so that would seem a
pretty silly thing to me if I noticed it.

But, I suspect, I am somewhat unusual for a twentysomething Briton* in
knowing that - heck, if I gave my brother that sentence, he'd probably
think for a bit and guess that "uh, Bobby Kennedy was the guy sitting
in the car next to JFK?". And a lot of our good editors are a) young
and b) not American; something that is blindingly obvious to you, or
to anyone with a passing knowledge of American history, is somewhat
less likely to be obviously wrong to someone never particularly taught
it, with a vague memory of a name and an event...

(This is less stupid than it sounds - remember, most people only
remember "current events" starting from about ten or fifteen, and - at
least in my experience - tend to not be taught any "history" more
recent than perhaps the War... so I know the politics of the
Douglas-Home government about as well as I know the politics of the
Grey government...)

*I heard a young lady, I believe in her second year at Oxford,
repeatedly assert the other day that the Berlin Wall fell circa 1995.
I was trying very, very hard not to get up and start correcting her in
the middle of the pub... but it's probably indicative.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk