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Author Archive for William Beutler

All the Rage #17: Holy Wiki Edits, Batman!

Published by William Beutler on July 28, 2008 in Entertainment, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 4 Comments

This week’s edition presents something of a dilemma. As the title of this latest installment indicates, several articles related to the “The Dark Knight” and Batman universe show up in this week’s list of the most-edited articles on the English Wikipedia.

The problem is, you see, I haven’t actually seen the movie yet. (I know, I know.) I do hope to get myself to a movie theater sometime this week, but for the time being I am avoiding spoilers like Ebola. That means I won’t be able to read too closely about anything related specifically to the film’s plot or characters, but I think we’ll manage.

A note: This marks the final bi-weeekly version of All the Rage before we start going monthly in September — but the new, more frequently-recurring Wikipedia section is still in the offing, I promise. And last but not least, thanks again to Craig Wood and Wikirage for making this feature possible, and to the Wikipedia Weekly podcast for the inital inspiration.

  1. Radovan Karadžić via midgard on Flickr.Article: Radovan Karadžić
    Why: The indicited former leader of the Bosnian Serbs (at right with Photoshopped trucker hat), long sought for alleged war crimes against non-Serbs under his rule, was finally captured this past week.
    Detail: Most of the activity here over was focused on keeping the article up to date with current events and general cleanup, but it also seems that much energy was expended keeping Karadžić’s supporters from tilting the page in his favor. The talk page includes at least four debates among editors, one of them very long, about which facts to represent, how to do so, and as happens on the most controversial of pages — what precisely constitutes a fact. And the article history contains a few intriguing edit summaries, such as ths one: “No trivia sections, especially ones which have blobs of text defending war criminals.”

  2. Article: Two-Face
    Why: Née Harvey Dent, from the Batman universe. Not Billy Dee Williams, Tommy Lee Jones or Aaron Eckhart, but the comic book character himself.
    Detail: According to the talk page, it does look like the updates owe something to The Dark Knight. In fact, even before the movie came out, one editor suggested, “Two Face is likely to be receiving lots of attention when The Dark Knight (film) is released. Is anyone interested in working this up to GA [Good Article] level before may?” It doesn’t look like they made it; it’s only rated B-class, which is still better than average.

  3. Article: List of characters from Total Drama Island
    Why: It’s a list of characters from an animated parody of a reality game show.
    Detail: This one came up two weeks ago, and here it is again. The show has 34 characters at present, which I am sure makes for plenty of updates. It still seems an odd entry to keep showing up this high in the list repeatedly; despite being an Adult Swim show I still have not heard of it offline, and even at Television Without Pity the associated forum is all but dead. I’ve often considered the pop culture entries on this list as a barometer of what’s bubbling up below the radar, and I still think that is generally the case — but with this one I’m not so sure.

  4. Article: Joker (comics)
    Why: Where does he get those wonderful Wikipedians?
    The Joker by Sick Sad M!kE via Flickr. Detail: As with the Two-Face article, fans of the Batman comics and films have made an effort to bring this article up to Good Article status, and on more than one occasion. I’m still seeing what I presume to be minor spoilers on the talk page, such as “Following the release of The Dark Knight, does anyone else think ‘ballistics’ or ‘bomb expert’ should be added to Joker’s repertoire of abilities?” But then I did see this in the six-minute preview released to theaters last year, so I’ll survive.

  5. Article: Deaths in 2008
    Why: People died, Wikipedia testified! (Sorry.)
    Detail: Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor who became well-known for his inspirational “Last Lecture”; “Golden Girls” actress Estelle Getty; America’s “Spam King” in a murder-suicide; and the drug trafficker who once hired Woody Harrelson’s father to (successfully) murder the presiding judge of his first trial.

  6. Article: Joe Jonas
    Why: An American pop-rock singer who is in a band with his two teenage brothers. Whether this makes them a Hanson for the 21st century I know not.
    Detail: But I do recognize the Jonas name from various online pop culture periodicals (I mean, gossip blogs) so I guess I’m not totally clueless. They’re contemporaries of Miley Cyrus and the Nickelodeon crowd, which indicates to me that this article is here instead of other articles from the genre which occasionally appear, such as iCarly. The article is currently locked due to vandalism, which may have something to do with the Jonas brothers being on the cover of this month’s Rolling Stone.

  7. Article: Christian Bale
    Why: Although he’s currently starring in the number one movie in America, Bale made headlines for a different reason this past week, being briefly jailed over a family dispute in which his mother and sister made claims of assault.
    Detail: You can pretty much chalk this one up to “wrong” headlines, and how exactly to represent the incident has been a matter of considerable talk page debate. At one point the incident had its own section in the article, but now it has been folded into the Personal life section. I find it interesting that, after 1900+ words of discussion about the incident on the talk page, the currently approved verision of this is just 49 words. And it’s probably the right one.

  8. Article: Joker’s appearances in other media
    Why: Hey, wait a minute — this just redirects back to “Joker (comics)”.
    Detail: Not being an admin, it is impossible for me to determine when the page was first created, but I can say that it was merged sometime this past week, and most of that content can now be found in this section.

  9. Article: Breakout (album)
    Why: Did I really think I would get out of this edition without mentioning Miley Cyrus again? I shouldn’t have, because apparently her new album came out just over a week ago.
    Detail: As someone whose favorite albums sometimes have very, very little written about them, perhaps this should annoy me. It might, if I didn’t understand how Wikipedia’s biases work — and when it comes to music, Wikipedia is heavily biased toward recordings by famous people garnering lots of coverage, not to mention albums released in the Wikipedia era (if you will). If I want The Decemberists’ debut album Castaways and Cutouts to be anything more than a stub, it’s up to me. Or anyone else who gets there first.

  10. Hurricane Dolly from Coast Guard News via Flickr.Article: Hurricane Dolly (2008)
    Why: There it was. It rocked you like a hurricane.
    Detail: Or didn’t. Dolly is just the second hurricane (and fourth cyclone, hence the D-name) of the (young) 2008 season, and caused modest devastation and relatively few casualties. Nonetheless, hurricanes draw Wikipedia’s serious-minded breaking news contingent, producing a well-written, highly-sourced article (74 citations at latest count) with a talk page more civil than most you will find. Good show.

    11. Holdovers this week: Deaths in 2008

    Falling off the list: All else, including WALL-E

    Recurring themes: Miley Cyrus, popular American movies

    Honorable mention: Had there been an installment of this feature last week, I have little doubt that The Dark Knight (film) would have topped the list. After all, the film appears to be breaking all box office records — so why shouldn’t it be breaking at least a few Wikipedia records? Well, I don’t think anyone is keeping track of these things (at least not yet) so until I can get someone to program that particular tool, research of that sort remains prohibitively time-consuming. But then it may have not been quite that big — after all, WALL-E made topped Wikirage two weekends in a row whereas this film did not.

Images courtesy midgard, Sick Sad M!kE and Coast Guard News on Flickr.

Blogger Rises to Top Job at Los Angeles Times!

Published by William Beutler on July 27, 2008 in John Edwards, Journalism, Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs, Newspapers, Scandal and William Beutler. 3 Comments

Today, the Times of London reports on the John Edwards sex scandal and the awkward non-coverage here in the states, and it includes at least one sentence that will be very amusing to the L.A. blogosphere:

Tony Pierce, editor of the Los Angeles Times, issued an edict to the paper’s own bloggers to stay off the subject. “Because the only source has been the National Enquirer, we have decided not to cover the rumours or salacious speculations,” he wrote.

Wow! Tony Pierce, longtime writer of Tony Pierce dot com + busblog and former editor of LAist, has risen all the way to become chief editor of the fourth-largest newspaper in the United States by reported circulation? That’s incredible!

It may sound credible, but it certainly is not creditable. Pierce is a web editor at the L.A. Times, overseeing about two dozen blogs on the latimes.com website. And except for the part about working for the Times, that sounds like a pretty good job by itself.

The Times of London simply omitted the conditional “an” before “editor,” giving an inflated impression of Pierce’s role. I thought maybe there was a difference between U.S. and U.K. English usage, but after clicking around google.co.uk, I’m pretty sure it’s just a mistake.

So who is editor of the Los Angeles Times? After all the turmoil at the newspaper these past few years, I had to look it up: Russ Stanton, a 10-year veteran of the paper, who was in fact a web editor himself.

So don’t count Pierce out yet. In the meantime, at least there are now thousands of people around the world who think that he is, in fact, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times.

P.S. Another reason why Pierce has a shot? He may have been punk at one time, but from what I’ve heard of the fallout, he’s been fairly humorless about it. I suggest Tony “Keep Rockin’” Pierce as an appropriate nickname.

P.P.S. This leaked follow-up memo from L.A. Times executive editor Meredith Artley gets it right the second time. That’s one memo too late, but it still should have been leaked more widely.

Bush and Batman vs. Bush and Batman

Published by William Beutler on July 25, 2008 in Entertainment, George W. Bush, Seriously, Social Networking, Television, Terrorism, Web video, William Beutler and YouTube. 7 Comments

Batman on the phone with… George W. Bush?Three is a trend in journalism, but two is all Blog P.I. needs, as completely separate but nevertheless intriguing comparisons of George W. Bush with Bruce Wayne (and vice versa) have been flying all across the Internets the last few days.

Making the rounds of the political blogosphere is an op-ed by novelist Andrew Klavan from today’s Wall Street Journal titled “What Bush and Batman Have in Common”:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

It may also be worth noting that comic book writer and artist Frank Miller, author of the graphic novels “300″ and 1986’s “The Dark Knight Returns,” upon which all non-Schumacher Batmans since have been modeled, is working on a new Batman graphic novel: “Holy Terror, Batman!” Yes, it’s Batman vs. al-Qaeda.

The second Bush-Batman juxtaposition, which I first saw on Digg yesterday, is a series of Leno-esque person-on-the-street interviews by Philadelphia sketch comedy troupe Secret Pants. The interviewer has a set of quotes that were spoken either by President Bush from 1600 Pennsylvania or Adam West from the 1960s TV show. Passersby are asked to guess which. It’s definitely worth your 3:35:

Twitter Rapprochement: Personal Democracy Forum vs. Netroots Nation

Published by William Beutler on July 22, 2008 in #pdf2008, Blogs vs. MSM, Charts and Graphs, Democrats, Earned Media, Internet conferences, Netroots, Tech Blogosphere, Technology, Trend Tool, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

While we’re running Twitter mentions of political blog conferences through Flaptor’s Twist, here’s Netroots Nation (#nn08) this weekend with Personal Democracy Forum (#pdf2008) two fortnights ago:

Twitter hashtags #pdf2008 and #nn08 via Twist by Flaptor.

Even at one day fewer (two if you don’t count #nn08’s low-key Sunday) the bipartisan-ish Personal Democracy Forum generated remarkably more Twitter noise than Netroots Nation, and apparently not much less in the rest of Internet news.

Netroots Nation had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivering a speech on the main stage, certain to be covered by political reporters on the beat, but PdF had Arianna Huffington, arguably more Internet-famous than anyone in congressional leadership. The partisan nature of Netroots Nation probably attracted many from the substantial New-Old-New Left netroots movement, more than Personal Democracy Forum’s awkward mix of Obama-emboldened NYC progressives and McCain-indifferent DC conservatives. This despite the minor Twitter scuffle over Huffington’s imperious remarks.

It’s worth noting that NN’s location — Austin, Texas — is the same as SXSW (#sxsw) and its Interactive Festival, the locus of Twitter’s first widespread adoption in March 2007. On the other hand, PdF took place in midtown Manhattan, which by virtue of population and proximity surely has more Twitterinos (also, Tweeps) close by enough to at least tweet about not making it up/down.

But I think the best explanation for PdF’s modest Twitter supremacy is that, like SXSW and unlike NN, the audience it attracts is younger and more reliably tech-oriented. After all, the surveys show that liberal blog readers are older and primarily motivated by politics than the average Valley startup founder. One was first about tech, the other politics.

Meanwhile, the ever more ubiquitous micro-blogging service’s strong showing at the political conference probably bodes well for its long-term mass acceptance.

Assuming Twitter isn’t down, of course.

Twitter Fight: Netroots Nation vs. Right Online

Published by William Beutler on July 21, 2008 in Internet conferences, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Metapost, Netroots, Social Networking, Trend Tool, Twitter and Web 2.0. 3 Comments

This past weekend, Austin hosted two conferences devoted to political blogging: the widely covered and heavily-attended liberal Netroots Nation (née Yearly Kos) and the brand new and under-the-radar conservative Right Online (at which I spoke on Friday).

Both conferences designated hashtags for attendees to use when tweeting their experiences and expoundances. For the Twitter illiterate, a hashtag is a short code word following a pound sign — #hashtag, for example — included in the 140-character message for the purposes of associating that particular tweet with a subject others are using the same hashtag to write about. For the conferences just concluded, the hashtags were #nn08 and #rton08.

Like we always do about this time, here’s a chart comparing their use over the past weekend. This time, we’re using Twist by Flaptor:

Twitter hashtags #nn08 and #rton08 via Twist by Flaptor.

According to the historically-fortunate assigned colors, of course. Also, it’s worth knowing that Netroots Nation ran July 17 to 20, while Right Online was only July 18 to 19. Taking that into consideration, the difference in activity is not especially surprising, considering this was Netroots Nation’s fourth year while being the first Right Online to date.

But the trend lines are still interesting, and I think we can tease out a few observations:

  • Friday late night through Saturday morning was the second-highest period of activity for #nn08 and the lowest for #rton08, at a total number of zero. Perchance the left went out partying while the right went to bed? This can’t be right. In fact, I know it’s not — for example, here’s E.M. Zanotti directing Friday night’s right-of-center bar traffic.
  • A similar thing happens 24 hours later, on Sunday morning, giving the impression that the entire Twittering contingent of each conference slept in with a hangover. While I am sure this was true for many, it’s flatly impossible that nobody tweeted during the late evening and early morning hours. So, I’ve sent an e-mail to the folks at Flaptor, and if I hear anything back, I’ll let you know.
  • Right Online activity is also likely underreported due to some confusion over which hashtag to use, although this probably doesn’t affect the overall trends greatly. Also worth mentioning, Twist doesn’t allow searching for symbols, so my real search terms were “nn08″ and “rton08″ — meaning even if some forgot the hash mark, as most assuredly happened, they’re included here.
  • It’s also possibly notable that #nn08 activity fell off severely on the last day. Is this evidence that four days is just too long for any convention? Or is it lower because people were busy leaving? I’m guessing it’s some of both. [Update: From the comments, it turns out the fourth day agenda included few events, compared to dozens on other days.]
  • Considering the reported attendance of each, the numbers don’t look so bad for #rton08. Local media reports put Netroots Nation at approximately 2,000, which apparently does not include reporters. Meanwhile, I’ve heard 500 showed up for Right Online, and based on the crowds I saw on Friday afternoon, this is plausible. However, with the exception of that curious Fri.-Sat. reporting period, #nn08 at most only quadrupled #rton08. At other times, it only doubled. Not quite a rallying cheer for Right Online, but that may be one to grow on.

See anything else worth mentioning? Feel free to add them in the comments.

P.S. FWIW, I believe I’m the first, as far as Google is aware, to use the word “expoundances.” Or should it be -ences? Again, your commentary is welcome.

Beware the “Net-roots”

Published by William Beutler on July 21, 2008 in Barack Obama, MSM, Netroots, Newspaper Columnists, Rhetoric and Washington Post. 1 Comment

Two previous topics at Blog P.I. have been newspaper journalists’ tendency to hold the word “netroots” at arms length, and the extent to which Robert Novak, so old he built the school, “gets” the Internet.

Novak’s column in this morning’s Post, about Barack Obama’s current overseas travel, affords us the chance to put them together. Here he is on Obama’s recent shift centerward:

Since clinching the nomination, Obama has been cautiously executing a Nixonian post-primary pivot toward the center. He weathered the outrage of his “net-roots” bloggers over his vote for the national security wiretapping bill.

Really, “net-roots”? This is even worse than the Washington Post’s habit of hyphenating the term; when I last mentioned this in March 2007, the term didn’t warrant scare quotes. And I’m pretty sure the punctuation is Novak’s, as I think I’ve been told the Post doesn’t hold opinion writers to the stylebook it applies to the news pages.

On the other hand, if you’re part of the netroots, you have to be at least somewhat pleased that Robert Novak recognizes your political clout — to say nothing of your existence.

N.B. Elsewhere in today’s paper, Jose Antonio Vargas’ report from Netroots Nation refers to them simply as “Netroots,” and that of course is sans quotation marks. As long as “Internet” continues to require capitalization, I’m fine with this formulation.

Googling the Conventions

Published by William Beutler on July 14, 2008 in 2008 Conventions, Advertising, Democrats, Google, Republicans, White House '08 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

The Google Adwords “buy your rivals” strategy can be a very effective way of putting your message in front of Internet users who wouldn’t necessarily think about your brand, product, service, candidate, issue, argument, party, or even your party’s nominating convention.

So let’s try Googling the major party political conventions. First up, the least interesting result, searching republican convention:

Google results for Republican Convention

As we can see, the RNC already has the top organic search result, the one that says Republican National Convention 2008 - September 1-4, 2008.” And yet they have also bought the top paid search result, the one against the light yellow background, which might seem like a poor investment. But maybe not, as we’ll see when we Google democratic convention:

Google results for Democratic Convention

It may have pained some in the GOP to put money down for the “ic” version of this word, but at least they have the satisfaction of having the absolute top search result on this page. While Republicans are generally considered to trail Democrats online in organization, infrastructure and overall support, here we can see that someone at the RNC (presumably under the direction of Cyrus Krohn) is thinking about how to overcome this disadvantage. And speaking of disadvantages, let’s see what happens when we drop the “ic” and search for democrat convention:

Google results for Democrat Convention

Now that is most certainly a good investment. It may pain the Democrats to compete, let alone pay money, for the (often) grammatically incorrect non-”ic” variation on their party’s name, but then Google searches don’t necessarily have to be grammatical to be useful. If the DNC or the convention committee have money in the budget — and this may be part of the problem — they’d be smart to get on that ASAP.

O Captain! My Captain! Rise Up and Read the Blogs

Published by William Beutler on July 13, 2008 in Charts and Graphs, MSM vs. Blogs, Relaunches, Site Traffic and William Beutler. 10 Comments

On Saturday, John Fund wrote a story in which he inadvertently referred to a certain well-known political blogger as:

…Ed Morrissey of the conservative blog Captain’s Quarters…

This prompted Morrissey to joke:

I’ll have to get John to update his Rolodex.

On Saturday, a Los Angeles Times op-ed by George Washington University proefessors John Sides and Eric Lawrence began:

Daily Kos. Little Green Footballs. Talking Points Memo. Instapundit. Firedoglake. Captain’s Quarters. These are among the thousands of political blogs that are increasingly a factor in U.S. politics.

If you see where I’m going with this, you are probably someone who is a constant reader of conservative blogs. If you don’t, then you probably are not.

Here’s where I’m going: Twice in two days somebody with access to the mainstream media, from just outside but interested in and conversant with the blogosphere, has failed to recognize that Morrissey shuttered his Captain’s Quarters blog almost five months ago, and has been writing for Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air ever since.

It’s almost the inverse what I’ve said about how MyDD didn’t miss a beat when its top two writers decamped for a new website: as long as it continues to fulfill its mission, many casual readers will barely notice, and will be unlikely to remove it from their bookmarks. In this case it seems that casual observers of the blogosphere are so familiar with Captain’s Quarters that they assume it must be going strong, and it will be ever thus.

In a sense, the blog appears to be influential even when unread. More accurately, Captain’s Quarters simply has strong brand equity. Morrissey’s considered, even verbose explications of the latest political developments from a realistic (though not a “realist”) conservative viewpoint maintains a presence in the mind of even very occasional readers, even if the blog itself is no longer maintained, or present.

That’s not to say his impact has diminished: in fact it may be greater than ever. And so this presents a good opportunity to run another site traffic comparison, counting unique visitors, via Compete:

Captain’s Quarters vs. Hot Air on Compete.com

When Morrissey pulled up stakes, he took his entire readership with him. They didn’t have much of a choice, as typing in the old captainsquartersblog.com URL will swiftly deposit you at hotair.com without displaying so much as a redirect page first. In fact, initially it seems Hot Air grew by an even greater number of visitors than were lost at CQ, even counting the growth in traffic Morrissey experienced in his last month blogging solo. This rapid growth has leveled off and even dipped slightly, but it’s clear now that Hot Air is twice as big as it was before. The move appears to have paid off exactly as they hoped.

I confess that back in February I was personally skeptical of Morrissey’s decision, based primarily on the fact that he was giving up such a strong brand to go join a stable of bloggers under someone else’s shingle. I’m glad now that I didn’t write about it then. But even if Hot Air had received only a modest bump in traffic, the joining of forces would probably have still been a good idea, at least for Morrissey.

Now, if the worst that can be said is that some small number of readers are still thumbing through his archives, perhaps under the impression that he is still updating posts as “Captain Ed,” then that’s fine. It even helps us spot the ones who aren’t really paying attention.

All the Rage #16: More Changes Stay the Same

Published by William Beutler on July 13, 2008 in Entertainment, Foreign Policy, Fox News, Sports, Television, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 0 Comments

Simplified Wikipedia logoOur periodic look at the top ten most-edited articles on the English language Wikipedia, made possible Craig Wood’s Wikirage monitoring tool, is back this week. It’s been two weeks since our last installment, the previous week’s edition being canceled on account of travel.

However, it also marks the beginning of a new direction for this recurring feature, or at least a new frequency for its recurrence. When July ends in two more weeks, All the Rage will start appearing on a monthly basis. I think we’ve pretty well established a week-by-week pattern, and here is a brief outline of the kinds of articles that usually make the list:

  • Weekly installments of popular television shows in the U.S. and UK are frequently represented.
  • The highest-grossing film in North America each week almost always makes the list.
  • Pay-per-view professional wrestling events are not unheard of.
  • Other entertainment genres popping up from time to time: Nickelodeon sitcoms aimed at tweenagers, televised elimination-style competitions produced by Simon Cowell, sports playoffs and championship series.
  • Deaths in 2008 is the list-based article most likely to appear in the top ten articles, and prominent passing figures sometimes earn a spot of their own.
  • Those who write the breaking/current news articles — on terrorist attacks, natural disasters and many things government-related — are among the most sophisticated and motivated Wikipedians of all.
  • If an article attains the status of Featured Article, thereby giving it 24 hours on the front page of Wikipedia, the resulting vandalism and reversions thereof can push it into the most-edited articles of the week.

Now that we’re going monthly (and between these three installments, bi-monthly) I wonder what different patterns will emerge. What’s likely is that some or all of the above article types will remain, but they won’t all and their relative chart positions may prove to be different as well. Or maybe the trends will look no different on a month-by-month than week-by-week basis. Stay tuned and we’ll find out.

Also, this is not to say that Wikipedia commentary on Blog P.I. itself will be reduced, and this may also be a good place to announce that I will introduce, in the next few days, a new recurring feature also focused on evaluating Wikipedia articles. The angle will be different and the frequency will be a little more when-I-feel-like-it-and-have-the-time, and I’ll have much more to say about that very soon.

And in the meantime, how about that list for the past week:

  1. Article: Rafael Nadal
    Why: Spanish tennis player Nadal, long the #2 in the world, won Wimbledon 2008 over Roger Federer, long the #1 in the world.
    Detail: This article is very long and well-developed, and was so going into the final two days of the tournament. And while new information has been added to the 2008 section, making it a few paragraphs longer, it is now recognized as being of lower quality. Specifically, the “Playing style” section has been slapped with a warning that says it “may contain original research or unverified claims.” This despite the fact that it’s a paragraph or two shorter and already cited several sources. Among the claims disputed enough to be removed entirely is his being known for “ultra-precise drink bottle positioning on changeovers.”

  2. Roger Federer serves, via Graham Hodgson on Flickr.Article: Roger Federer
    Why: Despite losing to Nadal last week, Swiss tennis player Federer is still the #1 ranking player in the world, for a record consecutive 232nd week.
    Detail: As with the Nadal article, it is very much the same article as it was just a week ago, and the differences are not always apparent on first glance. On second glance, however, we see that the old section “Personal life” — listed above the “Tennis career” section — has been broken up into two constituent parts and reordered. The article now begins with a section called “Early life” containing a basic biographical sketch. Information about his dating life and charitable works has been relocated to the end of the article and is still titled “Personal life.” Meanwhile, context has been given to the “Tennis career” section, which is itself broken into “Junior tennis” and “Career on the ATP.”

  3. Article: WALL-E
    Why: Pixar + robots × space = intense fan interest.
    Detail: Seriously, this is the third week in a row WALL-E is on the list, after consecutive weeks in the number one position. I could be wrong, but that might make it the single most-edited article in the three-plus months I’ve been writing this feature. Based on the discussion page, it looks like much of the recent editing has focused on dealing with the extraneous info added by some editors — an Apple references section existed at one time — and debates over how much a critique of consumerism it represents. In its current form, the “Commentary” section largely focuses on disagreements among conservatives about whether the film is “leftist” or reinforcing of “traditional conservatism,” and whether the culprit is big business or too close a tie of business to big government.

  4. Article: List of characters from Total Drama Island
    Why: Let’s see if I’ve got this right: it’s a Canadian television show modeled on Survivor and Drawn Together, now being shown on Adult Swim.
    Detail: Why not the main article itself? Why the list? Well, the show seems to have a lot of characters, and the show has apparently struck enough of a nerve that fans are compelled to fill out as much information as possible about them. And the place for that has been designated this page, not the main article.

  5. Article: I Love Money: Challenge Show
    Why: This one is about a reality game show, rather than the above article, which is a parody of a reality game show.
    Detail: I must say, this is a terrible article — written by fans and for fans but not giving outsiders any idea what the show is like or why it is interesting or how it works different from other shows. Most edits, so far as I can tell, have gone into meticulous updates of the chart showing contestant and episode progress, with detailed but impenetrable episode summaries. Too much detail. Not enough background. Just goes to show that even highly active articles are not necessarily good articles.

  6. Not quite To Kill a Mockingbird via agentjon on Flickr.Article: Journey’s End (Doctor Who)
    Why: Marking its second week on the list, this is the final episode of the “fourth series” of Doctor Who — after 26 “seasons” that is.
    Detail: To be fair to the fans of I Love Money, I am sure it is much easier to write an “encyclopedic” article about Doctor Who. The show has been around since the 1970s, continuity and the TARDIS-associated universe has a detailed history to explain and even summarize when it gets too long. While there is very little discussion on the I Love Money series talk page, the talk page for this individual episode of Doctor Who is already very long, and fairly sophisticated. And it surely can’t hurt that there is a WikiProject Doctor Who.

  7. Article: To Kill a Mockingbird
    Why: It was the Featured Article (FA) on July 11.
    Detail: Featured Articles are frequently vandalized (sometimes amusingly but more often not), articles with racial components are especially vulnerable, literary disputes can get very contentious, and damage done by these edits will bring people to the talk page complaining about how this terrible article was made, FA by editors who may or may not have a bone to pick with other editors or WikiProjects. That more or less describes what’s happened here.

  8. Article: Atom
    Why: The Featured Article on July 9.
    Detail: More FA vandalism. After watching this list for some time, I would probably be willing to vote for temporary semi-protection of Featured Articles. Wikipedia prides itself on openness and in its site policies prefers not to create barriers for new editor participation (in its behind the scenes clique-ishness, it can be a bit different). However, policing vandalism on these articles seems like a real drain for editors on “Recent changes (RC) patrol”, aka vandal watch. A semi-protect would only apply to unregistered users and very new accounts, and would only last the period on which the FA was front-paged. I am sure this has been proposed before and shot down in a vote or debate, but if I ever become aware of a discussion to implement this, I would certainly weigh in on its behalf.

  9. Article: Deaths in 2008
    Why: The hardiest perennial makes another showing.
    Detail: Passing this week: former White House press secretary and Fox News anchor Tony Snow, medical pioneer Michael DeBakey, the founder of Benihana, a producer of Woody Allen films, and an Indonesian serial killer.

  10. Tony Snow via davidsilver on Flickr.Article: 34th G8 summit
    Why: As mentioned above, the government and news-focused Wikipedians do a damn good job of creating detailed articles about recent events in record time. Editors of, say, I Love Money expended many edits on not that much result. Editors of this article added a great deal of information in fewer edits.
    Detail: It seems strange to me that President Bush’s joking conclusion, “goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” didn’t make the article. I could understand, though, that it may be a little too U.S.-centric given the global scope of the article, although with equal treatment of similar news coverage of leaders’ statements in other countries, it would not be out of place. But then it seems even more curious that the statement was not raised at all on the discussion page. These people mean business.

    11. Holdovers this week: WALL-E and Deaths in 2008.

    Falling off the list: Everything else from two weeks ago.

    Recurring themes: Doctor Who episodes, reality TV, Featured Article vandalism.

    Honorable mention: Tony Snow, the 50th most-edited article for the concluding week. More and more this section reads like an obituary, which I really don’t need to be doing on a weekly basis. But on Saturday morning, as I learned of Snow’s passing from the morning television news, I did what came natural and checked out the Wikipedia page. While the article obviously reflected current events, as a Wikipedia article it was only mediocre at that point. I made a few edits of my own, removing extraneous information. Did his “pay cut” comment upon leaving the White House need to be mentioned in the second paragraph? Did Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan need to be mentioned in the first paragraph? I said no, and on both counts, other editors have since agreed.

Images courtesy Graham Hodgson, agentjon and davidsilver on Flickr.

Brief Interviews with Mike Murphy

Published by William Beutler on July 11, 2008 in John McCain, Journalism, Literature, Mike Murphy, Weekly Standard, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

For no reasons other than my own demonstrated affinity for the works of David Foster Wallace and recent fixation with the alleged pseudonymous works of Mike Murphy, I would like to present an excerpt of a limited panel strip drawn in 2005 by webcomic artist Mike Russell1.

The following is based on one brief passage from “Up, Simba!”, Wallace’s not-so-brief 2000 Rolling Stone article about his time aboard the Straight Talk Express with the “anti-candidate” and the traveling press corps, recently republished as a short book with the dreadful title “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope”2:

Mike Murphy and John McCain star in an unauthorized comic strip based on David Foster Wallace’s “Up, Simba!”

  1. Oh, all right. As long as I’m talking about Wallace, you’ll have to excuse the use of footnotes. Anyway, I asked Russell if I could use this, and he pointed out that because he drew it on spec using copyrighted material, he couldn’t actually make any money off it, so I was free to “go nuts” with it. However, he did want the point made clear that he is “totally unaffiliated” with Wallace or any publishers of the text wherefrom he derived the above-printed comic excerpt. And I’m happy to do so.

  2. Thing is, most of Wallace’s titles are far better than his editors’. For a (very long (and very funny)) comic essay about a week on board a luxury cruise, which of the following sounds like a better title: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” or “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”? Yet the latter is what Harper’s called it, and the former is what Wallace was able to call it once he published the full-length version (approx. 100 pages) in his eponymous (the essay, not his name) first collection of nonfiction.

  3. I don’t actually have a third item, and there’s no corresponding third footnote above, I just thought w/r/t footnotes, three would be a nice round number.