Wikipedia Editing for Zionists

Readers Discuss Wikipedia Editing Course That Aims for ‘Balanced and Zionist’ Entries

By ROBERT MACKEY

Since it touched on two subjects of great interest to readers of The Lede, Wikipedia and Israel, it is not surprising that Friday’s post, “Wikipedia Editing for Zionists” — about an initiative to edit entries in the online encyclopedia to make them “balanced and Zionist in nature” — has generated an impassioned debatein one of our comment threads.

While several Israeli readers argued that the initiative was necessary in a part of the world where even the term “facts on the ground” is used as a euphemism — for the dispute over Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land — some readers who take part in the editing of Wikipedia entries objected to the effort to make the encyclopedia conform to an ideological point of view.

Miriam Schwab, a Canadian-Israeli blogger who participated in a seminar last week in Jerusalem teaching supporters of Israel to edit Wikipedia, wrote on Twitter on Monday that the Lede post on the initiative, which included a video interview she had given to an Israeli broadcaster, was “a horrible report” that made the editing course “look like some Zionist conspiracy to take over Wikipedia.”

In a comment posted on The Lede, Ms. Schwab defended the course as an attempt to balance opinions about contested issues in entries in the online encyclopedia. In Ms. Schwab’s words:

[T]he goal of this workshop was to train a number of pro-Israelis how to edit Wikipedia so that more people could present the Israeli side of things, and thus the content would be more balanced.

I personally believe that in many, if not most cases, regarding the Israel-Palestinian issue, Israel is in the right. Pro-Palestinians think the same about themselves, and that’s fine by me. We both have the right to express our opinions online, and in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is meant to be a fair and balanced source, and it is that way by having people from all across the spectrum contributing to the content.

That view contrasts sharply with the comments of a reader using the name Anonymous Wikiperson, who wrote:

Of course there are small, loosely defined groups of individuals who edit Wikipedia in a manner congruent with their own ideological predispositions; no one who has spent any amount of time on Wikipedia can deny that. However, these editorial cliques don’t openly recruit or hold seminars on how they can make Wikipedia conform more closely to their perspective, which is precisely what this article draws to our attention. In my opinion, that is what makes this case newsworthy and, indeed, unsettling. [...]

This belies a larger difficulty in contemporary media, one hinted at by [the] phrase “balanced and Zionist in nature.” There is an assumption that any ’story’ can be approached from two perspectives and that the goal of the media is represent a ‘balance’ between the two, as opposed to attempting to get at the truth. Liberal/conservative, Israeli/Palestinian, science/religion: you’re either with us or against us. According to this binary logic, a story or article that does not reflect one perspective is taken to be sympathetic to the other, which therefore calls for the intervention of the ‘wronged’ party. This is the rationale that has splintered contemporary media into hostile, mutually exclusive camps catering to niche audiences who want their own ideas parroted back at them as news.

This is, of course, completely antithetical to the mission of Wikipedia, which is to provide accessible and accurate information that anyone and everyone can meaningfully contribute to. Indeed, one might even argue that efforts such as the one discussed in this post actively subvert and devalue Wikipedia, as edit wars push articles further and further into conflict between interest groups and away from a consensus-based, democratic approach. [...]

If individual Zionists wish to edit Wikipedia, more power to them. They are welcome to contribute and I’m sure they have interesting information and perspectives to offer. However, to recruit blocs of new editors based on their ideological positions instead of their expertise or commitment to the ideals embodied by Wikipedia is to subvert the site’s very project and ought to be viewed as what it is: an assault on those of us who want to build the most coherent, consensus based approach to information sharing by partisans convinced solely of their own opinions.

Another reader, Mike, wrote that a contest over the facts in a contested part of the world is “unremarkable,” since:

Wikipedia seeks to write from a neutral point of view, but on many issues there is no neutral point of view. We should expect the true story to be contested, because reality itself is contested. We should expect the writing of the story to mirror the reality on the ground that the story attempts to report.

I can’t judge whether someone is being underhanded about the issues, but any time people are fighting for their lives they are going to have subjective views of the situation. You’ll know there is peace when it is possible to write an uncontested neutral story.

Shalom Freedman, a reader in Jerusalem who agrees with the effort to correct what he called “the many distortions presented in Wikipedia entries,” argued:

[T]he first principle of this effort should be to stick to factually accurate information. In other words there should be first and above all a respect for Truth. I believe if that is the case in the struggle between Israeli supporters and their enemies the balance will be in strong favor of the pro-Israeli group.

Incidentally, Ms. Schwab, the Israeli blogger who is taking part in the editing initiative, is new to Wikipedia but not to online battles over perceived bias against Israel. In addition to writing a blog, she is the chief executive of illuminea, a social media marketing company in Jerusalem. Her profile on that company’s Web site notes that she “was selected out of 900 applicants to participate in the U.S. State Department’s Middle East Entrepreneur Training (MEET) Business Executive Program at the Rady School of Business, University of California in San Diego in 2009.”

It turns out that her involvement in that program was itself part of the struggle against what some Israelis see as bias against them by parts of the American government.

As she explained on her blog, in September, 2007, Ms. Schwab wrote:

I discovered “The Middle East Entrepreneur Training (MEET),” a U.S. State Department-backed program geared towards strengthening leadership and entrepreneurial skills among residents of the Middle East… except Israeli Jews!

I quickly contacted as many people as I could about this blatant discrimination, including reporting this on a mailing list for journalists and writers. This happened last Thursday, Sept. 21, and by Friday morning all of the related web pages had been taken down, and were changed to include Israeli Jews.

After Ms. Schwab’s case was taken up by Michelle Malkin, a conservative American blogger, the State Department accepted her into the program.

AUGUST 23, 2010

Source : http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/readers-discuss-wikipedia-editing-course-that-aims-for-balanced-and-zionist-entries/?pagemode=print

A Case of Mental Courage

By DAVID BROOKS

In 1811, the popular novelist Fanny Burney learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy without anesthesia. She lay down on an old mattress, and a piece of thin linen was placed over her face, allowing her to make out the movements of the surgeons above her.

“I felt the instrument — describing a curve — cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose & tire the hand of the operator who was forced to change from the right to the left,” she wrote later.

“I began a scream that lasted intermittingly during the whole time of the incision — & I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still.” The surgeon removed most of the breast but then had to go in a few more times to complete the work: “I then felt the Knife rackling against the breast bone — scraping it! This performed while I yet remained in utterly speechless torture.”

The operation was ghastly, but Burney’s real heroism came later. She could have simply put the horror behind her, but instead she resolved to write down everything that had happened. This proved horrifically painful. “Not for days, not for weeks, but for months I could not speak of this terrible business without nearly again going through it!” Six months after the operation she finally began to write her account.

It took her three months to put down a few thousand words. She suffered headaches as she picked up her pen and began remembering. “I dare not revise, nor read, the recollection is still so painful,” she confessed. But she did complete it. She seems to have regarded the exercise as a sort of mental boot camp — an arduous but necessary ordeal if she hoped to be a person of character and courage.

Burney’s struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts.

She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.

In the mental sphere, this meant conquering mental laziness with arduous and sometimes numbingly boring lessons. It meant conquering frivolity by sitting through earnest sermons and speeches. It meant conquering self- approval by staring straight at what was painful.

This emphasis on mental character lasted for a time, but it has abated. There’s less talk of sin and frailty these days. Capitalism has also undermined this ethos. In the media competition for eyeballs, everyone is rewarded for producing enjoyable and affirming content. Output is measured by ratings and page views, so much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.

In this atmosphere, we’re all less conscious of our severe mental shortcomings and less inclined to be skeptical of our own opinions. Occasionally you surf around the Web and find someone who takes mental limitations seriously. For example, Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway once gave a speech called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” He and others list our natural weaknesses: We have confirmation bias; we pick out evidence that supports our views. We are cognitive misers; we try to think as little as possible. We are herd thinkers and conform our perceptions to fit in with the group.

But, in general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.

The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so. Many liberals would never ask themselves why they were so wrong about the surge in Iraq while George Bush was so right. The question is too uncomfortable.

There’s a seller’s market in ideologies that gives people a chance to feel victimized. There’s a rigidity to political debate. Issues like tax cuts and the size of government, which should be shaped by circumstances (often it’s good to cut taxes; sometimes it’s necessary to raise them), are now treated as inflexible tests of tribal purity.

To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate. A few people I interview do this regularly (in fact, Larry Summers is one). But it is rare. The rigors of combat discourage it.

Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.

August 23, 2010

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/opinion/24brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print