Head Tale

I’ve got a well-documented love/hate relationship with Wikipedia.

As much as I love the idea of Wikipedia, I’m frequently disappointed by how it runs in practice.  The non-notability issues.  The deletionists.  The scammers (including, recently, a Wikipedia trustee who was discovered accepting payment via his consulting company for ensuring placement of certain articles on the Wikipedia front page.)

My latest checkmark in the “hate” column revolves around the photos for the various Saskatchewan NDP leadership candidates.

Around the time Ryan announced, I went to change the photo on his Wikipedia page to a more recent one.  I knew this process to be a pain-in-the-ass as I uploaded a photo the last time Ryan ran and had it deleted at least once, possibly twice, since I didn’t have “proof” it was a photo I had the right to upload.

Of course the “proof” they wanted were things like an e-mail sent from the photographer’s e-mail (like that was somehow more secure and definitive) or a line of text on the page where I got the image.  Or I could just lie and say the image was in the public domain and hope.  Or send Jimmy Wales a vial of blood from my first-born child.

Anyhow, it got sorted out eventually (without Pace having to donate blood) and that was the photo that remained until a couple weeks ago.  That’s when I uploaded a new one.  And just like three years ago, came back a week later to see that the new photo had been deleted (not even being replaced by the original that had been there.)

I re-uploaded the exact same photo, restrained myself from making a snarky comment but pointing out that Ryan’s web site explicitly makes clear that the photos are made available under a Creative Commons license.

The run-around was almost expected and wasn’t what pissed me off the most.

Nope, that happened when I went to all the other candidate pages to see what they had or didn’t have regarding photos.  And what I saw (and which has remained as I type this) is that Erin has a photo while Trent and Cam don’t.

But guess what?  If you look at the article history for every single one of their pages, you see that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM has attempted to upload a photo and all, including Erin whose photo finally stuck, had those photos deleted – Cam’s back in June without being replaced and Trent’s in early September, again without being replaced.

GRRRR!!!

(Oh, and a funny note from the account histories.  Ryan’s gets called out for its “promotional tone” while editors of both Trent and Cam’s respective pages get called out by Wikipedians for writing the pages as if they were “campaign brochures”.  This comment in Trent’s history is particularly cutting: “This is an encyclopedia, not a campaign brochure; we refer to people by their last name, not their first name, in body text, and we don’t capitalize job titles.)

And Wikipedia wonders why its losing editors?