I was on NewsTalk Dublin at 6:20pm Thursday, on George Hook again, about the WikiScanner thing. Quick four-minute segment. He mentioned his own entry, which spoke of him as a dog-lover — he can’t stand dogs. I said “click on the history tab, you’ll see everyone that ever changed it listed there — the WikiScanner basically indexes all that stuff, so you can look it up.” He liked that. I also mentioned there’d be a lot of employees whose bosses might be a little annoyed at what they’d been doing at work …
And, just now, an 11:30pm call from the Daily Mail. Apparently the Sun is running a piece on vandalism of Gordon Brown from Whitehall IP addresses. She asked a cheeringly clueful question: how long was it up there? I couldn’t find the edits, but did introduce her to the history tab, which she was most excited by. Hear that? That’s a journalistic instinct sniffing out a new source of information.
I also got to note something that’s surprised me: the public’s opinion of what constitutes a conflict of interest is far harsher than even Wikipedia’s.
In other news, have a photo of and interview with me, from the Honda public relations magazine Dream. I came into work to be greeted with an A3 colour photocopy on my desk.
The public’s opinion of conflict of interest, or journalists’/the press’ ?
I think part of it is that Wikipedians realise that some people edit from their workplace without being a mouthpiece for their workplace. Most of the edits shown up by WikiScanner are not authorized by the employers, I suspect.
I mean the blagosphere and news site comment response to it. Journalists often need stuff explained. But I’m surprised how pissed off the response from bloggers and commenters has been – to the point where I think “steady on a bit!”
Heck, look through the edits from parliamentary offices. Guess what, they’re smart, knowledgeable workaholics just like on West Wing! We’ve had some great work on historical and political articles from the UK Parliament range. If they have the good sense not to edit in a conflicted way, it’s a credit to them and their office.