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Sockpuppeting journalist recants, search dominance threatened, new novels replete with Wikipedia references

British columnist Johann Hari admits to Wikipedia vandalism

Disgraced Independent columnist Johann Hari, whose apology for unethical interviewing practices and surreptitious POV-pushing on Wikipedia was greeted coolly by peers.

Johann Hari, opinion columnist for the British newspaper The Independent, finally admitted to being behind the now-banned user "David r from meth productions", as well as using prior published statements in interviews without proper attribution.

In Hari's published apology, he details the nature and extent of his editing:

The other thing I did wrong was that several years ago I started to notice some things I didn’t like in the Wikipedia entry about me, so I took them out. To do that, I created a user-name that wasn’t my own. Using that user-name, I continued to edit my own Wikipedia entry and some other people’s too. I took out nasty passages about people I admire – like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Deborah Orr and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I factually corrected some other entries about other people. But in a few instances, I edited the entries of people I had clashed with in ways that were juvenile or malicious: I called one of them anti-Semitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk. I am mortified to have done this, because it breaches the most basic ethical rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.

The connection between Hari and User:David r from meth productions first surfaced in a Diary piece for The Spectator by Nick Cohen in July (see Signpost's initial coverage on 11 July), and was quickly followed up investigative work by the lawyer and writer David Allen Green – who has a concluding blog post on the matter at the New Statesman website.

Hari has returned the Orwell Prize he was given and has agreed to take time off and undertake a journalism course. One of the victims of Hari's activities on Wikipedia, Cristina Odone, wrote an article entitled "Johann Hari hounded me for years: all he gets is four months' unpaid holiday from the Independent. But the truth will come out":

I have received no personal apology from Hari; nor have any of his other victims. I have received no direct apology from the Indy, which defends him.

Hari's apology has, of course, been subject to considerable negative reaction (Erik Wemple at the Washington Post asked: "Hey, like, how is a journalism training course going to cure the ills of Johann Hari? A look at his own disclosures shows that his sins are sins of character, not training. Does he really need some instructor to tell him not to libel someone on Wikipedia?"). Hari's activity on Wikipedia has been discussed in a number of media outlets including The Guardian, The Economist and The Telegraph. William Beutler also discussed the story on The Wikipedian.

Is Wikipedia's search dominance coming to an end?

Business Insider caught up with board president of Moveon.org and search guru Eli Pariser for insights into the changing nature of search in an era of increasing personalisation. Pariser had first taken note of the implications when he noticed Facebook had gradually been narrowing down the content it highlighted to him based on the political compatibility between him and the content's authors, part of a trend among websites to profile users based on their past browsing habits and to display content that is likely to appeal more prominently than that which is not.

Pariser's subsequent investigations found that the more websites tried to algorithmically tailor content to what they imagined users were looking for, the less universally oriented sites like Wikipedia featured prominently in search results. As attempts to make content as personally relevant to individual users represent a driving concern of most major websites other than Wikipedia, this could threaten the unparallelled stature of Wikipedia in search (particularly Google search) rankings that has been widely credited for its dominance as a top ten global online resource. This week, the encyclopaedia was reported to have been overtaken by microblogging service Tumblr in Quantcast-measured pageviews.

In brief

An illustrative animated gif image from the John Wall Dance article, which received coverage on the NBC Washington's Capital Games blog this week. The image uploader was accorded kudos by NBC Washington for their "slightly freaky" creation.

















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