Journalist Mark Anderson, writing this week for the news site IEEE Spectrum, has claimed that Wikipedia has been a bit too quick to dismiss those who doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the works popularly attributed to him. In an article " Wikipedia's Shakespeare Problem", Anderson writes that the consensus process has for a long time worked quite well on the article Shakespeare authorship question, with the Stratfordians (those who believe William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the plays attributed to him) and Oxfordians (those who believe that the works were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) creating an equilibrium that approximated the academic divide between the two camps.
Unfortunately, writes Anderson, more Stratfordians came along and pushed the article towards their point of view, and the mediation process ( Signpost coverage) left the article biased towards the Stratfordian point of view. In this vein, Anderson claims that the push to get the article featured (already protested at the time by a blog dedicated to alternative theories, see previous Signpost coverage) succeeded only in putting on the main page a version that had "as much claim to evenhandedness as does an entry on Libya's history written by Muammar Gaddafi". This claim is fiercely contested; the Wikipedia article in question itself cites a sharply different judgment from a reliable source that described Wikipedia's coverage of the authorship controversy as putting "to shame anything that ever appeared in standard resources". The IEEE Spectrum article itself quotes John Broughton, the author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and WMF board member Ting Chen ( User:Wing).
PC World, a global computer magazine, recently published an article on Wikipedia's 10 biggest edit-wars, documenting the confrontations that occur when Wikipedians disagree about the content of an article and repeatedly overwrite each other's contributions. According to PC World, the subjects of the 10 biggest edit-wars on Wikipedia were Nikola Tesla, Caesar salad, Death Star, Nintendo Wii, Street Fighter game characters Ryu and Ken, Yao Ming, The Eagles, Pluto, the Polar bear, and co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales.
In comparison with PC World's brief of documenting "the most heated, most bitterly contested, and most pointless confrontations over facts in Wikipedia's 10-year history", the English Wikipedia maintains its own list of the lamest edit-wars that have graced its articles. Since the page includes a number of those included by PC World, it is a possible source for the article, which one commentator decried as not having provided "enough verification" of its examples.
Journalist Mark Anderson, writing this week for the news site IEEE Spectrum, has claimed that Wikipedia has been a bit too quick to dismiss those who doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the works popularly attributed to him. In an article " Wikipedia's Shakespeare Problem", Anderson writes that the consensus process has for a long time worked quite well on the article Shakespeare authorship question, with the Stratfordians (those who believe William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the plays attributed to him) and Oxfordians (those who believe that the works were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) creating an equilibrium that approximated the academic divide between the two camps.
Unfortunately, writes Anderson, more Stratfordians came along and pushed the article towards their point of view, and the mediation process ( Signpost coverage) left the article biased towards the Stratfordian point of view. In this vein, Anderson claims that the push to get the article featured (already protested at the time by a blog dedicated to alternative theories, see previous Signpost coverage) succeeded only in putting on the main page a version that had "as much claim to evenhandedness as does an entry on Libya's history written by Muammar Gaddafi". This claim is fiercely contested; the Wikipedia article in question itself cites a sharply different judgment from a reliable source that described Wikipedia's coverage of the authorship controversy as putting "to shame anything that ever appeared in standard resources". The IEEE Spectrum article itself quotes John Broughton, the author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, and WMF board member Ting Chen ( User:Wing).
PC World, a global computer magazine, recently published an article on Wikipedia's 10 biggest edit-wars, documenting the confrontations that occur when Wikipedians disagree about the content of an article and repeatedly overwrite each other's contributions. According to PC World, the subjects of the 10 biggest edit-wars on Wikipedia were Nikola Tesla, Caesar salad, Death Star, Nintendo Wii, Street Fighter game characters Ryu and Ken, Yao Ming, The Eagles, Pluto, the Polar bear, and co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales.
In comparison with PC World's brief of documenting "the most heated, most bitterly contested, and most pointless confrontations over facts in Wikipedia's 10-year history", the English Wikipedia maintains its own list of the lamest edit-wars that have graced its articles. Since the page includes a number of those included by PC World, it is a possible source for the article, which one commentator decried as not having provided "enough verification" of its examples.
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Shakespeare
True banes of the Internet, such as WebmasterFormat himself
More on Anderson and IEEE Spectrum
Why should we worry about what a Shakespearean conspiracy theorist who writes an article in a popular magazine for electrical engineers thinks are the reasons for his inability to get his quirky ideas covered in Wikipedia they way he sees fit? This is a non-issue where a fringe theorist feels slighted because everyone is telling him he's wrong. 128.59.169.46 ( talk) 17:58, 3 August 2011 (UTC) reply
Regarding the value of fringe theories in stimulating research, the benefits are not restricted to Shakespearean scholarship. Our article on SAQ reports that "American cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman won the Folger Shakespeare Library Literary Prize in 1955 for a study of the arguments that the works of Shakespeare contain hidden ciphers. The study disproved all claims that the works contain ciphers..." What SAQ fails to mention, but which is covered in the William Friedman article, is that the Friedmans got their start as cryptologists around 1915 working for an employer who wanted to prove Sir Francis Bacon was the author of most of the plays. In the course of this work, they developed powerful statistical tools that significantly advanced the art of breaking codes. William Friedman went on to be chief cryptanalyst for the War Department and led the group that broke Japanese codes, making a major, if not crucial, contribution to Allied victory in World War II.-- agr ( talk) 07:37, 7 August 2011 (UTC) reply
Edit wars
Including Caesar salad while omitting Global warming is one hell of a big red flag. 76.254.20.205 ( talk) 10:59, 9 August 2011 (UTC) reply