Considering that my last two posts were more or less about non-coverage of the John Edwards kerfuffle and highly active Wikipedia articles, I can’t believe I’ve so far missed out on the controversy over what to do with said scandal on said politician’s entry on said reference website.

More than 26,000 words (!)* have been expended on the discussion page associated with the John Edwards encyclopedia entry since the National Enquirer posted a story claiming he was seen leaving a hotel room rented for Rielle Hunter (last week), the woman with whom they have alleged he fathered a child out of wedlock (last year). So far, there is no mention of this story in the article — let alone the existence of Ms. Hunter — and because it has been temporarily locked (see above), it doesn’t appear that anyone will. Not just yet, anyway.

I’ve now read about half the debate, which is the whole extent of it before new people start showing up and re-arguing old points. Based on my own knowledge of how Wikipedia works and what I’ve seen in the press, I’ve come to the conclusion that, even though it sure looks like Edwards’ goose is cooked, Wikipedia’s editors are currently doing the responsible thing by keeping it out of the article.

This post is longer than most, so I am tucking the length of it below the fold. If this subject interests you, follow me.

*When I started writing this post yesterday, it was 15,000. Another 11,000 words (!) went up overnight.

Update: This post was featured in a story by Sarah Stirland at Wired.com today, and points out, there are now a couple sentences about the controversy in the article. I left this comment on the story:

When the page came unlocked, it seems that Wikipedia editors previously uninvolved in the debate came onto the talk page, held a formal vote, and now it’s just a few sentences in the 2008 Presidential campaign section. Or it was until I changed it to “2008 presidential campaign” — a Manual of Style thing.

I’ve seen it argued several times that many people will be coming to the article on Edwards for information about the situation — after all, it’s his second Google search result — but, and you’ll have to trust me for a moment, that is not in fact reason enough to include it. Wikipedia rules supersede any supposed “right” to read about it on Wikipedia.

So why not add it?

Though I certainly agree that it looks like the stories about Edwards going back several months now have some real merit and something certainly happened at the Beverly Hilton two Mondays back, the key allegations of infidelity and illegitimate paternity have yet to be reported by a reliable source, generally meaning any publication with a record of accuracy and fact-checking. The Enquirer, which has indeed accurately reported scandals involving politicians but is also known for paying sources, falls short of this standard. And Fox News, which does count as a reliable source, has only corroborated circumstantial details of the story.

This standard is not being selectively applied. When Tim Russert’s Wikipedia article was edited to reflect his passing before there was confirmation, I commended the editor who changed it back:

I’d also like to salute the anonymous first-time editor at 66.187.200.74 in New York City for rolling the page back until the rumors could be verified. … [T]he Verifiability requirement for new information is one of the central tenets of Wikipedia. It’s what keeps the sometimes unreliable website anywhere in the neighborhood of reliable.

As one of the article’s chief defenders pointed out,

Fox confirmed that Edwards was at the hotel. Should we add in a section that says, “Edwards found at hotel avoiding tabloid reporters”? That is all that has been corroborated.

That’s what Alex Pareene suggested at Gawker yesterday, not at all unreasonably:

Wikipedia’s power-mad power-users are immediately deleting any and all mention of the John Edwards lovechild scandal the second any other user adds it. You could go over there and add “In July of 2008, Edwards was confronted at a Beverly Hills hotel by National Enquirer reporters searching for evidence of his participation in an extra-martial affair”—all true and verified by more “reliable” sources!—and it wouldn’t last two minutes.

So the better question is: Regardless of the merit of the central charge, doesn’t the fact of the controversy warrant mentioning? The short answer is: Not yet.

To be sure, many have pointed out that the Enquirer story has been discussed in mainstream newspapers, and the Edwards talk page is in fact hosting two separate lists of traditional media articles covering the dispute.

There are two reasons to proceed with caution, in addition to the truth remaining at large. One is Wikipedia’s strict guidelines for biographies of living persons and the other is that Wikipedia is a reference site, not a news site.

To take the last point first, the simple fact of Wikipedia’s not being a news source means that being up-to-date is just one value in competition with others. One seemingly strong argument for adding the controversy to the article is that it is a major event in Edwards’ career. That will probably be true, but we still do not know how it will play out. As the Wikipedians like to say, Wikipedia is not a crystal ball.

To the first point, this caution goes double for articles about living people. These articles are scrutinized more than most, because Wikipedia knows that its articles can meaningfully impact the lives of its subjects. Even though Wikipedia does not consider Wikipedia itself to be a reliable source, people will still believe what they read there. And can you blame Wikipedia for not wanting to be sued? Just because Edwards isn’t suing the Enquirer doesn’t mean Wikipedia should run with it. Not to mention, Wikipedia doesn’t “run” stories.

Here’s an example I think Edwards’ critics will respect: Last year, the Enquirer reported claims that George W. Bush had resumed drinking. This story was never corroborated, and unlike this current Edwards situation, that story passed quickly into obscurity. Consequently, you will not find this mentioned on the main article about Bush. Nor should it be. Until the situation is revolved, the two Enquirer stories are more alike than not. But if the media controversy does have a notable or reportable impact on Ewards’ future career, it will be duly noted.

Perhaps it will even warrant its own encyclopedia entry.

Ultimately, the lack of corroboration and uncertain notability of the situation is is all that’s keeping it from inclusion on the Edwards article. Patience. And remember that Wikipedia is best understood as a starting point for research, not as a final arbiter of truth.

Down With Tyranny, one of the least responsible blogs in existence, began its headline with “WHO MURDERED THE DC MADAM?” The Raw Story plays it straight, but the comments do not and the third just says “THEY MURDERED HER.” Pam’s House Blend raises the possibility, but admitted it may be “tin foil hat.” BooMan Tribune and The Reaction skirt the same line. But it’s not just the left: I’ve read Michael Silence at the Knoxville News for years, and I’m appalled to see him outright asking, “was it really suicide?” The commenters are no better.

To be fair, not all are doing this. The Brad Blog, known for relentlessly pursuing even the least plausible of voter fraud theories, apparently had relied upon her as a source, and sends his condolences. And some congratulations are due to Gawker’s Alex Pareene, who turns in perhaps his most cautious blog post ever.

One thing that anyone who wishes to speculate about such matters should think about: If someone was going to kill her, they probably would have done it before she turned over her phone records to ABC News. As Sister Toldjah points out, she was facing imminent sentencing and had recently promised she would not go back to jail. Although this sounds like a futile protest of the convicted, if the conspiratorial guessing leaned in the other direction, no doubt some would be playing this up as a key fact.

It bothers me that few are taking time to think about the unjust nature of prostitution laws. That she was prosecuted where the johns were not, and frankly that prostitution laws in most jurisdictions, the District included, take the same prohibitionary stance toward it that has made the drug war and the 18th amendment such obvious public policy failures. Palfrey’s service was fundamentally the same as businesses which operate legally in Nevada, and certainly a better model for what such a service should look like, compared to streetwalking, which is far more dangerous.

Didn’t mean to get on a soapbox here, but the Palfrey case should be considered a prime exhibit of why the current law is broken. Decriminalizing something does not equal a stamp of approval, only an acknowledgment that prohibition is poor public policy. Thanks in part to Eliot Spitzer, it’s been a banner year for prostitution busts already. The circumstances of his case made it an unlikely point to begin discussing a different approach to the problem of prostitution. Here’s hoping the death of Ms. Palfrey will be different.

Denton has parted ways with titles before, selling Oddjack and shutting down Sploid and Screenhead a few years back. This time he has found new homes for each of his websites. As of today, Wonkette belongs to managing editor Ken Layne. This is the second time Denton has put one of Layne’s blogs out to pasture; he was the sole editor of Sploid during its brief-ish run.

During Wonkette’s existence I have been an occasional reader and loyal critic. I am an approved commenter on the Gawker network, and every once in awhile I swing by to let them have it. Coincidentally, the most recent time was just last night.

Under Cox, I felt the blog leaned too far to the left while claiming to be non-partisan. Under subsequent editors I let go of that complaint and moved on to on the fact that it is simply not written for a Beltway audience. It breaks no news and advances no stories; it merely adds a garnish of cheap snark to the day’s headlines. Gawker matters to New York City (well, Manhattan at any rate) and Valleywag matters to the Silicon Valley (even if they hate it), but Wonkette offers no special insight on Hollywood for ugly people. Outside it’s America, which treats politics like entertainment. Here in the District, Defamer and Deadspin probably matter more, since we don’t want to talk shop after hours. But don’t take my word for it — check out the comments at DCist.

The last time Denton tried to make the site relevant to the actual District which it purports to cover, he moved Alex Pareene from New York to DC. Pareene was very funny (and still is on Gawker, for which he writes now) but these new kids — recent college student Jim Newell and total unknown Sara K. Smith — are bad Xerox copies. Fittingly, Layne doesn’t even live in Washington.

I take Denton entirely at his word in his explanation for selling it:

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did. … As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don’t come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.

So now Wonkette returns to Henry Copeland’s unique Blogads advertising network, which handles a great deal of political advertising (including Blog P.I., on the infrequent occasions that someone wants to do business with us) and is a much better fit than whatever agency handles Gawker’s advertising.

Ultimately, politics just isn’t where the money is. (Don’t think for a moment Mark Penn built that tunnel between his houses in Georgetown with campaign earnings.) But as others note, now is the time to cash out. Traffic is up, likely due to growing interest in the presidential election. And just as you don’t want to sell pumpkin futures the day after Halloween, the day before isn’t any good either. Better do it while your buyers still have some expectation of getting a return on their investment.

Simon is probably far too busy preparing his next HBO project — “Generation Kill,” set for July — to respond this time. But if he reads this, he should know I consider his conflicted love letter to Baltimore not just better than any other television drama, but much better by far. (I am a typical white person in this regard.) I still love “The Sopranos,” but let’s face it — it’s a cartoon, and not as well-crafted.

That said, I find Simon’s smug insult of the blogosphere in a handful of recent interviews rather less enlightening. For instance, take a long e-mail interview published in the Baltimore City Paper following the series finale in early March. Asked why he didn’t include bloggers in his portrayal of the troubled newspaper industry, he volunteered this hypothetical scene:

INT. GARDEN APARTMENT/ANYWHERE – DAY

A white MALE, thirties, unshaven, sits in his underwear typing on a desktop computer. C.U. on computer screen. As he links to Baltimore Sun coverage off the newspaper’s web site, creating a link on his own blog. The MALE scratches his left testicle, then satisfied, begins typing. C.U. on the moving cursor as commentary ensues.

CUT TO: EXT. DRUG CORNER/WEST BALTIMORE – DAY

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but he wasn’t kidding:

The internet is skimming the froth of commentary from the first-generation news gatherers like The Sun. They have parasitically achieved immediacy and relevance by co-opting the debate, the humor, the rage, and the provocation that results from the news product–WITHOUT ACTUALLY INVESTING OR COMMITTING IN ANY SERIOUS WAY TO THE SYSTEMIC ACQUISITION OF THAT NEWS.

And the parasite is killing the host. Is the internet a marvelous tool in myriad ways? Of course. Is it the future? No doubt. But thus far it is not a responsible or viable alternative to a major metropolitan newspaper.

Criminy. This is the mirror image of the kind of blogger triumphalism that died out several years ago. Blogs aren’t killing newspapers (although Craigslist might be) and it’s not far off the misguided rant of Sam Zell, who lit into Google News for supposedly killing newspapers shortly after purchasing the media company which owns… the Baltimore Sun, Simon’s former employer.

Look, Simon is correct that many bloggers depend upon newspapers for stories to comment upon. It’s true that most of them couldn’t do this without the old media’s content. But this is not his unique insight; bloggers themselves have been dealing with this paradox for years. And they are not all sitting around in their pajamas (as another memorable slur had it). Some have set up their own news organizations: Josh Marshall’s TPM empire includes reporters as well as commentators.

Meanwhile, journalists are moving in on bloggers’ turf as well. Reporters such as Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post or my old colleague Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic do almost all of their reporting on the web. This is a genuine ecosystem with much give as well as take. Bloggers who work for free send traffic back to newspapers. And some of those bloggers have bigger audiences than the newspapers.

Of course, bloggers working for free, or very little, is part of what many perceive to be a problem. What bloggers are really doing is taking over the kind of opinion journalism — in politics, music and movies — that were traditionally the province of newspapers. If the blogosphere is killing newspapers, it’s because much of their product is easily done by amateurs who simply didn’t have a platform before the Internet and didn’t have the tools until Pyra Labs cooked up a software program called Blogger while killing time between other projects.

Moreover, Simon is also wrong to portray bloggers as adding nothing to the debate. The signature counter-example is when Republican-leaning bloggers asked questions about CBS’s reporting on President Bush’s National Guard service that major news organizations didn’t. Dan Rather is the most prominent scalp, but before that Trent Lott had to step down from his leadership position because of comments about Strom Thurmond’s legacy that Marshall kept alive.

Not all these stories are as prominent, and they don’t all end in firings. More recently, The Smoking Gun fact-checked a Los Angeles Times story fingering Sean Combs for the murder of Tupac Shakur; the story was based on documents that were easily shown to be unreliable, not unlike those CBS relied upon.

It may be that The Smoking Gun is not a blog, but now we’re just quibbling about content management systems. It is also true that TSG is owned by truTV (formerly Court TV), but it began as an independent website, as most blogs are. Speaking of which, Simon gave an interview with a similar rant to Salon — still independent against all odds — and still doing journalism and commentary on a daily basis.

And the competition has also likely caused major news organizations to look closer at their colleagues’ reporting. In the best of cases, it’s forcing news organizations to focus on what they’re best at — where their comparative advantage lies. Obviously that’s reporting, as Simon says. Newsgathering is moving away from newspapers to some extent, but commentary is moving away from newspapers at a rapid clip. In the worst of cases, people like Zell are making bonehead moves that will expedite the shakeout. And the guy scratching his balls in front of his MacBook is just a bit player in a changing media landscape.

I know David Simon isn’t the biggest fan of capitalism, but does he really think that competition is bad? I am sure he can’t really think that more speech is bad.

Image courtesy Brad Searles on Flickr.

Small coincidence, and what a way to return to work* this morning: Approaching my office building for the first time in two weeks, I looked up to the WJLA JumboTron to see:

BHUTTO KILLED IN EXPLOSION

By the time I collected my morning coffee and found my desk, Fox News had revised this to:

BHUTTO SHOT IN NECK

Damn. Well, it’s crazy but not a surprise, except maybe that this attempt succeeded after others failed. As I understand it, Bhutto was hardly a great prime minister — twice-removed from office on corruption charges that I presume are largely true but not the proximate cause of her ousters. Will Pakistan be thrown into further turmoil? Will this resurrect terrorism as an issue in the U.S. presidential election? At the very least, I assume her reputation outside of Pakistan as a friend of the U.S. and a representative of moderate Islam — now, to borrow a phrase, martyred — may grant her a legacy that her actual record doesn’t necessarily warrant.

One last thought: I remember back in high school, one of my junior social studies classmates was Pakistani-American, who as a secular young woman from a family that had presumably left because of the country’s highly volatile politics, idolized Bhutto and wrote her major year-end term paper about her. Her name escapes me at the moment, and I have no idea where she is today, but I wonder what she’s thinking this morning.

Update: Sue Davis, an old colleague from National Journal, writes at the WSJ’s Washington Wire:

Before news of Bhutto’s death was reported, Rudy Giuliani’s campaign unveiled a new ad this morning, entitled “Freedom,” to begin airing nationally tomorrow. … Giuliani was also the first candidate to release a statement on the death of Bhutto.

National security has taken a back seat in the last month or so of the presidential campaign; not coincidentally, Giuliani’s campaign has already received the pre-mortem treatment, even from supporters. If Giuliani has any chance of getting back into this thing, this is it.

*Oh, and if you’ve been wondering at the dearth of posts the past two weeks, wonder no more.

Image via puneetworld on Flickr.

And how are these two stories different?

Simple, really. You see, the first one they grabbed off the AP wire. The second one was written by a Politico staffer, Carrie Budoff Brown.

The first version contains this canned response from Larry Craig spokesman Sidney Smith:

“We’re still preparing as if Senator Craig will resign Sept. 30, but the outcome of the legal case in Minnesota and the ethics investigation will have an impact on whether we’re able to stay in the fight – and stay in the Senate.”

Whereas the Politico’s version contains this canned response from Larry Craig communications director Dan Whiting:

“As he stated on Saturday, Senator Craig intends to resign on September 30. However, he is fighting these charges, and should he be cleared before then, he may, and I emphasize may, not resign.”

Was this worth alerting me twice? I can’t see how. I generally appreciate the alerts they send out. But right now, the only thing separating Politico from Fox News or MSNBC is a sound effect.

Update: Okay, at this point, I kind of just give up.

What I do know is that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s news blog is admirably honest about admitting where they first heard the (possibly) big international news story:

Yes, in fact Perez Hilton is even linked on Memeorandum, instead of just the sister site WeSmirch. Nevertheless, it most certainly is not a “big scoop” of Perez Hilton’s. If it’s anybody’s, it belongs to Babalu Blog. And if it turns out that Castro still está vivo, I guess the scoop goes to South Florida’s NBC 6.

P.S. If my Spanish is off, I trust that someone will tell me in the comments.