Health care coverage, 3 million articles, inkblots, and more

The issue of reforming the American health care system has been the central issue in American politics in recent weeks, and many media critics have observed that the mainstream media have done a poor job informing the public about the nature of the reform proposals that the U.S. Congress is considering. In particular, critics allege that the media have emphasized conflict over fact and allowed public debate to be derailed by distorted ideas (such as the concept of "death panels"). But Megan Garber of the Columbia Journalism Review sees a bright spot in public health care reform discourse: Wikipedia.

In "Health Care and Wikipedia", Garber identifies the article Health care reform in the United States as the antidote to the false balance of recent news coverage. According to Garber, "Wikipedia provides, essentially, what traditional news outlets, both in print and online, have been trying—with varying degrees of success—to create: a thorough, comprehensive, and vitriol-free examination of the health care conversation." In addition to the main health care reform article, she notes the extensive range of related articles that neatly summarize the key political debates and the relevant background information (many of which are collected in the {{Health care reform in the United States}} template).

Explaining why Wikipedia has outperformed the mainstream media on the health care reform issue, Garber writes that:

because Wikipedia is crowdsourced, it has no implicit mandate, ethical or economical, toward ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity.’ It thus has no vested interest in the kind of he said/she said approach that has, to this point, so sorely compromised the mainstream media’s health care narrative.

The creation of English Wikipedia's three millionth article, on Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen, prompted worldwide coverage.^{[itn 1][itn 2]} The Telegraph took the opportunity to list the top 50 articles by web traffic of 2008 and 2009.^{[itn 3]}

The Guardian coverage included repeating the findings of the PARC study that "it is harder for new users to make inroads with the site's powerful group of administrators."^{[itn 4]} The Christian Science Monitor blog repeats an older Guardian assertion that the decline in the rate of article creation is the result of a deletionist-inclusionist battle calling Wikipedia "the upstart social experiment that trusts the online mob to steward world knowledge."^{[itn 5]} Tech sites Softpedia and ReadWriteWeb are less doomsday in their coverage, with ReadWriteWeb noting, "the fact that the number of new articles added is declining may not have to do with the site losing its appeal but with the fact that there is simply less to write about." Softpedia declares, "The studies by PARC are some of the best scientific analysis of Wikipedia's community ever done, but it has led to some rather sensationalist conclusions by media outlets," under a section header entitled "Get it Straight: Wikipedia isn't Dying."^{[itn 6][itn 7]}

The Hindu covered a Wiki-Academy held at St. Aloysius College in Mangalore, India, describing it as a "one-day workshop [that] will focus on the use of Indian languages in Wikipedia, editing and its application in academics."^{[itn 8]} A question at the Wiki-Academy about Mangalore, Victoria in Australia, led to reporting on disambiguation on Wikipedia. The Hindu reported that the organizers of the meeting, N. S. Prashanth (User:Prashanthns) and Hariprasad Nadig (User:HPN) stated that "The profit one gets by being content editor on Wikipedia ... is 'satisfaction.'"^{[itn 9]}

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan is investigating ER physician James Heilman (User:Jmh649) after complaints from two psychologists about his adding images of the inkblots used in the Rorschach test. One complaint states that Heilman's actions "shows disrespect to his professional colleagues in psychology and disparages them in the eyes of the public." Heilman said he had no intention of backing down, saying of his critics, "They are trying to close the doors to scientific discourse. They don’t want anybody other than themselves involved in a discussion about what they do."^{[itn 10]}

• Noam Cohen of The New York Times reports on flagged revisions, which is expected to be rolled out on English Wikipedia soon for use on biographies of living people. (See the technology report for news on configuration testing.)
• CNET reviews Wikipedia Diver, a web history tracker that creates a graphical representation of wandering through Wikipedia pages.^{[itn 11]}
• Lifehacker reports on the ability to download and print articles as PDFs from options in the left column of the site.^{[itn 12]}
• The Herald Democrat reports the vandalism on the page Sherman, Texas, United States, getting comments from a local official ("considering how outrageous and crude some of these changes are, I don't think people would take them seriously") and Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson Jay Walsh.^{[itn 13]}

← Previous "In the news"

Next "In the news" →

In this issue

24 August 2009 (all comments)

News and notes

In the news

Discussion report

Features and admins

Arbitration report

Technology report

+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

== health care quote ==

The quote about the health care reform article seems to say we do well for the same reason as The Economist, for example, by being frank and avoiding a neutral point of view.--chaser (talk) 14:57, 25 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I read those as skepticism marks around the words balance and objectivity. "Balance", on most of the 24 hour news channels, seems to mean taking two people whose primary qualification seems to be rabble-rousing and letting them scream at each other for a few minutes before congratulating themselves on giving the viewer a chance to see the ranting dingbat view of the issue. This is not possible on Wikipedia as the "proportionate/undue weight" clause inherent in Wikipedia:Neutral point of view means either that extremists are disregarded or, if prominent, must be identified as extremists. - BanyanTree 03:25, 26 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

PBS Newshour instead of Crossfire?--chaser (talk) 22:03, 27 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Vandal edits = pretty unusual? LOL!

Thus spake the quote in the newspaper story about the town of Sherman's article.

Typically quickly reverted, yes. Pretty unusual? LOL! Cheers, — ¾-10 03:35, 28 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]