User talk:Jimbo Wales

Pompeo

On 1 December, 2016 an IP added this to Mike Pompeo:

As a teenager, he enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He graduated first in his class from West Point in 1986 and then served as a cavalry officer patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also served with the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the Fourth Infantry Division. He served his last tour in the Gulf War.

with no sources. The claim that he served in the Gulf War has been widely repeated since then. That claim was challenged by Ned Price yesterday on Twitter and then debunked by the CIA in an email to splinternews.com. I've been unable to find an instance of this claim anywhere prior to 1 December, 2016 - using Google web, scholar or book search. So, I think we're responsible for this. (Though Pompeo has surely seen and heard the claim on numerous occasions and has not corrected the record.) --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 13:58, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Confirmed in this Quartz article.

The situation shows how much major media outlets have come to rely on Wikipedia, a crowd-sourced encyclopedia run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit that employs less than 300 people.

--Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 00:22, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

It is rather scary. According to Quartz, mainstream media that repeated the fake news included the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Washington Post and the Globe and Mail. My feeling is that there must have been another source. All these news organizations wouldn't have just followed Wikipedia IMHO. Where else would it have come from? Perhaps from Pompeo or his staff? maybe from the CIA? A Pompeo related source makes sense in that Pompeo never corrected the mistake. Either way whether it came from us, Pompeo, the CIA, or really anybody else it makes the concerns over fake news seem understated so far. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:54, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

We are the only publication to make the claim before the Washington Post - six days before them. I don't see why you feel there must have been another source. If it were Pompeo or his people who fed it to WaPo, WaPo would be saying that now - Pompeo is facing Senate confirmation right now. As for the CIA seeding it: huh? "All these news organisations" are not following Wikipedia. One followed Wikipedia; the rest followed WaPo and then each other. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 02:13, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Why not the Kremlin? 174.16.108.221 (talk) 04:22, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Well, he was nominated at the time to be Director of the CIA. They have occasionally been said to do propaganda and secret operations. As far as I know, Pompeo has never been nominated to be director of the Kremlin, FSB, or KGB. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 12:39, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Also, please see Reuters about Wikiscanner and CIA and FBI edits and CNN October 19, 2017 on Capitol Hill editing here. There's a lot of evidence that this type of thing is happening. For "Kremlin editing" see Trolls from Olgino. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 13:16, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I concluded it was most probably just an IP misreading a 2014 Wichita Eagle article, as did the authors of the Quartz article. It could have been the Queen, the Pope, the Russians, the CIA or you but it actually looks like a simple good-faith mis-reading. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 02:55, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

What the hell happened to "Trust, but verify"? This smacks of journalistic malpractice. —Jeremy v^_^v ^Bori! 04:56, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Never trust Wikipedia. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 02:55, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

What the Quartz article doesn't say is that in this edit on 2 December 2016, Rms125a@hotmail.com added an unsourced template to the section, so it was flagged as unsourced very quickly. What is described here is covered in WP:BLPGOSSIP, which says "Also beware of circular reporting, in which material in a Wikipedia article gets picked up by a source, which is later cited in the Wikipedia article to support the original edit." Since the claim that Pompeo served in the Gulf War isn't libellous or completely implausible, it may have gone unnoticed that it wasn't correct. If it had said something like "Mike Pompeo is a *%$!" it would have been reverted much more quickly. It's well known that some people make Walter Mitty-esque claims about their military service, so claims in this area need to be checked out and not allowed to go unsourced for any length of time. The Quartz article appears to be suggesting WP:COI here rather than vandalism. "In the Gulf War" could be read as meaning that he was in the Gulf at the time, rather than the period of time of the Gulf War. The CIA said that he "was in the Army during the Gulf War, but he didn’t deploy to that theater." I don't think this is the greatest disaster in the history of BLPs as there have been bigger cock-ups than this. Nevertheless, it shows that material has to be checked and verified. It also shows that the mainstream media often uses Wikipedia articles as a crib sheet, but we know this already.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 06:03, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

• Not defending inaccuracy because I agree that this incident, in particular, and other such incidents are bad for Wikipedia (and beyond) and by policy should never have been inserted or it should have been removed, but it's arguable, without stronger evidence that there is not a rather more innocent explanation - 'it didn't matter', in the sense that no one was getting into the weeds of what went on 25 years ago - so, as Time and others wrote, 'he was an Army officer during the Gulf War', which could have been elided by whomever the Wikipedia editor was to 'he was an officer in the Gulf War.' Why it's never been publicly corrected by him, if it hasn't, we don't know. (It is almost certain, that his actual CV was made public to Congress, during his last nomination). Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:16, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Articles regarding Trump cabinet members and nominees should be protected indefinitely due to both simple malicious vandalism and attempts by partisans to influence the upcoming midterm elections by inserting untrue, salacious, provocative, speculative, synthetic, etc. text. We cannot, of course, protect the articles of all US Senators and House Representatives but we should be vigilant, especially on those pages in the coming months before the November elections. Quis separabit? 23:44, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Of course we should be vigilant about biased editing in political articles during elections. Perhaps I misunderstood though - did you just propose that only articles on Republicans should be protected? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:46, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

@Smallbones -- Yes, but only to the extent that "Trump cabinet members and nominees" [the pages I suggested protecting, a very small number overall, not all elected officials] would be, necessarily, or at least nominally, Republican. I oppose all forms of political vandalism on all articles, especially if designed to affect upcoming elections, which will likely intensify as we approach November. Quis separabit? 01:56, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

? None of them are in an election. Alanscottwalker (talk) 02:13, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

? And how many current Trump cabinet members and nominees are expected to have the same job in October? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:32, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Jimbo Wales on "stable" articles

I have previously addressed this matter as factor in editorial dissatisfaction and sense of futility. Working on articles where our good faith efforts get trashed is very disheartening:

"Until we start adding some level of stability and protection to GA and FA, we can't make this claim. Editing to those articles should be under semi-protection control: only experienced editors making direct edits, and controversial edits by everyone must be discussed before installation. Unstable content can never be considered reliable." 18:26, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Jimbo Wales has also proposed a similar idea:

"Wales also plans to introduce a ‘stable’ version of each entry. Once an article reaches a specific quality threshold it will be tagged as stable. Further edits will be made to a separate ‘live’ version that would replace the stable version when deemed to be a significant improvement. One method for determining that threshold, where users rate article quality, will be trialled early next year." Source: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, Nature, by Jim Giles, 14 December 2005. "UPDATE 2 (28 March 2006)."

When can this be effectuated? Once an article has reached GA, and especially FA, status, increasingly stringent efforts should be made to limit amateurish and destructive edits. If there was ever a place where WP:PRESERVE should be strictly applied, it's on these articles. We need an increasingly growing number of "stable articles" which are truly reliable.

Wales's suggestion is excellent, and I'd sure like to know if anything ever happened to this idea. This would be a radical quantum spring in the right direction. We should be able to make the claim that certain content is truly reliable, and the world needs to know that. Press coverage of such a move would be welcome and notable. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 22:04, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Flagged revisions. Stephen 23:23, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

User:SandyGeorgia mentioned something along thhese lines recently. From memory, she proposed a level of protection for FAs as well as a link at the top of the FA to a diff showing the reader how the article has evolved since it passed FA. Have I got that right, Sandy? We do have a problem when writers with an interest in a topic take an article through FA and then move on from Wikipedia, leaving the article to languish in the hands of uninterested, uninformed or agenda-driven editors. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 02:40, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Not quite, Anthonyhcole. I wanted an explicit medical disclaimer on medical articles because they are so often so dangerously bad.

Semi-protection of FAs would be a good thing. But I do not support stable versions of FAs, because most of our FAs ... are not-- what do we protect? And these days, with the decline in editing, I am not sure what being promoted FA (on three supports) means-- I've seen plenty that aren't, and would not suggest the promoted version should be considered stable. Featured article review has been moribund since Raul654 was run off; because FAs are being promoted on increasingly less support, but not subjected to regular review and demotion when they fall below standard, my guess is that at least one-third of our current FAs do not meet standard. And possibly even half. If the main authors of an FA move along or lose interest, they tend to fall out of date. Protecting a "stable" version of outdated info would not be a good thing, IMO, and we cannot necessarily consider the promoted version as being maintained to standard.

A worse problem is that we have some really poor medical FAs that are being maintained by good editors, and they are STILL outdated! It might be good to get some outside help

As to GAs, I don't think there is anything stable or worthy of protection, because GA has little meaning; they are one editor's review.

As to seeing a diff of changes since promotion, the promoted version is accessed by clicking on the date in the Article milestones template on the talk page.

In short, per BullRangifer's suggestion, I don't believe our content, even right out of FA, is "truly" anything that the world needs to know about. Most of our readers have no idea if they are reading an FA, GA or stub ... they don't know how to access that info. What we need is a prominent disclaimer about how dangerously bad our medical info is. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:05, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

I understand the intent, but this sounds uncomfortably similar to Citizendium's "approved articles" which turned out to be a colossal failure. User:HaeB pointed out that the approval process had the unintended effect of locking in errors and not just locking out vandalism and dodgy edits. We might be able to do better because we have so many more editors, and we have Citizendium's experience to learn from. But we'll need to be careful. Shock Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 03:02, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Just a clarification. Neither Jimbo's nor my suggestions involve locking an article or no more editing. Not at all. Real improvement, corrections, and updating can still happen. Currently articles just churn through constant changes and edit warring, with good content being deleted and constantly being replaced. Often no real progress happens for years. It's like watching the clothes churning in the washer; no real and lasting progress.

PRESERVE is generally ignored. If it were respected, we'd be building content, rather than trashing and replacing in an endless cycle toward a different, but not necessarily better, version. When one sees that happening year after year, one begins to realize that much of one's efforts are just wasted time. Editors leave for that reason. The fringe editors are winning this. They wear us down. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 05:45, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Maybe you should focus on articles such as Scarf or Farm, which don't have that problem. Perennial battleground articles are perennial battlegrounds for a reason, bureaucracy is not going to solve that. power~enwiki (π, ν) 05:56, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

For once in my life I agree with power~enwiki! Wikipedia is full of articles on smaller "basic" topics with highish views that have barely changed their text in years, despite ranging in quality from downright terrible to merely mediocre. The edit histories tend to be very misleading; when you look in detail the many edits are all messing with formatting, links and so on, with few or none actually altering the text in a significant way. Johnbod (talk) 13:23, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Very true. Some things are just facts. Once they are defined and described, the article is pretty much finished, unless some event or change in knowledge impacts it, and then we need to update it. That can always happen, even if it's a semi-protected "stable" article. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 14:27, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

No, I don't mean that at all. We have tons of articles on classic encyclopaedic subjects that are very poor and have been completely neglected for years, and are not in the least bit "finished". But very few WP editors look to improve that sort of article. Even at better quality levels few GAs should really be "preserved" in their current state. Johnbod (talk) 16:18, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

My current thinking is that such a scheme would be a very bad idea indeed. I am a supporter of some form of Wikipedia:Flagged revisions but for slightly different reasons. The idea that most new edits to article that have achieved GA or FA status are, on average, destructive, is not backed up by any actual evidence, and in my view is probably false. Thoughtful openness to further improvements is essential, even if it is sometimes unsettling to those who have a stake in the status quo.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:19, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for commenting. FYI, "most" new edits is not a concern, at least not mine. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 22:36, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Jimbo, can we safely assume you have abandoned, or radically simplified, your original proposal? It sounds that way. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 22:40, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't know. The interview with Jim Giles was in 2005 - 12 years ago. I have read how he reports on the idea back then, but I don't recall at this time precisely what I was thinking nor precisely what I said. I think that my general outlook has not changed, certainly not regarding the goal of Wikipedia, but it's important to remember that back then there was still a common idea that we would be working towards a "Wikipedia 1.0" which might be printed or similar. That never really happened, and unless you're going to print, the need for "stability" is a bit lower.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 13:34, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

The WP1.0 and similar curated collections were used for offline media and several generations of stand-alone hardware readers. 174.16.98.178 (talk) 16:44, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Think there is some sense of having historical time versions of WP. For instance. In engineering, the practice goes back many decades. When the first Spitfire fighter aircraft was ready to go into production the engineering drawrings stamped as 'frozen'. Meaning that no alteration could be added. That was for the Spitfire Mark (designation) One. Subsuquent improvments created Mark 2. Then those drawings were 'frozen' and so on. Every Mark/version being better than the last. We/and the World now have a downloadable WP. If the software geeks can find a way to enable us to 'freeze' good articles for download, yet at the same time alow the 'live' versions to get further improved (or trashed). We are more than halfway there already– many talk pages have templates indicating the importance and quality etc of the article on that date. Think this debate should go on further to gain the wisdom of the crowds rather than resting on our laurels. For we don't want to go down in history, in a hundred years time, to be viewed as a quick flash in the pan. Organisations that blossom quickly, often die quickly. Something I think JW appreciates, as he is adding 'fat' to the WMF for any lean times ahead. Although we are not a print encyclopedia it may be worth concidering if we could benifit from clearly declaring 'editions'. Aspro (talk) 16:46, 24 April 2018 (UTC)