No, founder Jimmy Wales isn't talking about passing the hat, at least not just now. He told the AP Thursday ("Wikipedia Says It's Losing Contributors"), during the website's annual conference in Haifa ("attended by some 650 Wikipedia contributors and enthusiasts from 56 countries," including "contributors . . . from Venezuela and Indonesia, though neither country has diplomatic relations with Israel"):"We are not replenishing our ranks. It is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important."
Administrators of the Internet's fifth most visited website are working to simplify the way users can contribute and edit material. "A lot of it is convoluted," Wales said. "A lot of editorial guidelines ... are impenetrable to new users."
Wikipedia has more than 3 million entries but has been marred by subjective entries and pranks. Even so, Wikipedia cites studies that compare the website's accuracy favorably to more conventional encyclopedias, while other studies give it lower marks.
Despite Wikipedia's wide-reaching popularity, Wales said the typical profile of a contributor is "a 26-year-old geeky male" who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website. Other contributors leave because, 10 years after the website was launched, there are fewer new entries to add, he said.
By March, Wikipedia had about 90,000 active contributors. The goal is to tack on another 5,000 by June of next year, said Sue Gardner, executive director of the nonprofit that runs the website.
Among its steps, Gardner said the nonprofit is expanding a program that encourages university professors to assign the writing of Wikipedia entries to their students, particularly in India, Brazil, Canada, Germany and Britain.
Wikipedia needs to get cool again, somehow. When Wikipedia launched in the early naughts it was attractively subversive -- it pissed off your teachers, journalists and any square over 40, basically. Idealistic young nerds flocked to the site with that early web 2.0 communitarian fervor. But new editors aren't showing up at the same rate. After years at the top result on practically every Google search, Wikipedia has lost its urgency. Kids who were in 8th grade in 2004 have gone through their entire high school and college careers consulting (i.e. plagiarizing) Wikipedia; to them, Wikipedia is a dull black box—editing it seems just a bit more possible than making revisions to Pride and Prejudice.
And Twitter and Facebook have sucked up all the cognitive surplus younger internet users might have once devoted to building up Wikipedia and shattered it into a million fleeting hashtags. Wikipedia should try to somehow harness the new fickle hive mind: Remember when hordes of Beliebers descended on Esperanza Spalding's Wikipedia page and ravaged it after she beat out Justin Bieber for the Grammy? All you've got to do is get 15-year-old girls as interested in, say, Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Good luck with that, Jimmy Wales!
But maybe Wikipedia's inscrutable "editorial" policies and procedures raise problems other than the interest level of 15-year-olds. Our friend Dave Johnson, one of the sanest as well as smartest people we know, calls attention to a post he wrote for HuffPost in March 2009: "Watch Out for Wikipedia."
Try this: start or edit a Wikipedia article that includes information that might be unfavorable to conservative corporate interests, perhaps in the area of tort reform (incl medical malpractice, etc) or trade/protectionism, etc. Try adding citations to studies that show that tort reform is a corporate-funded effort to keep people from being able to sue companies that harm them... I tried it and it was removed in a few minutes. . . .
Try editing entries covering other issues around trade, economics or corporate issues. See how long it takes before a pro-corporate viewpoint is returned to the article. Or add an article about a progressive organization. I added an article about the Commonweal Institute, and it was immediately removed, so I put another up and it was immediately flagged for removal. (I am working to save it...) An article about me -- put up and edited by others -- was also removed twice. The circumstances involved a professional "leading tort-reform advocate" -- while I'm the person who wrote this report about how the tort reform movement is involved with the corporate/conservative movement. Go figure.
The lesson, clearly, is that there are cadres of right-wing zealots, possibly on someone's payroll, standing "guard" over Wikipedia, pumping it as full as they can get away with with their lies and delusions and making sure that any contrary truths are whipsawed. ("I know of one corporate-funded conservative movement insider who spends much of the normal workday and evenings editing Wikipedia," Dave wrote.)
So it seems the Wikipedia organization may be unable to sufficiently police the site to keep this from happening, and to keep new people from having unpleasant experiences and being shouted down and driven away. There are so many areas of political life where conservatives shout down or intimidate everyone else until they give up and go away. Wikipedia is fast becoming one more.
This has real-world implications. Wikipedia shows up at the top of many if not most Google searches, and people tend to believe this means it is a reliable source. This positioning implies a public-interest responsibility for accuracy and objective presentation of material. On non-controversial topics Wikipedia is a very reliable and possibly the best source for information because over time the "wisdom of crowds" effect brings increased expertise to bear.
But like so many things today, in areas where corporate resources can be focused, the subject matter increasingly reflects the viewpoint that serves the interests of the few at the top. Wikipedia's prominence is the likely reason this conservative information-purging occurs. It is also the reason Wikipedia has a responsibility to do something about it.
Would you guess that the situation has gotten better since 2009? I tend to use Wikipedia mostly for those "non-controversial topics," but even I notice that anytime there's material that could be interpreted as not calculated to gladden the heart of a right-wing zealot, there's controversy -- and that doesn't include situations where there's no visible controversy, where the right-wing moles have calmly and quietly performed their surgeries.
By the way, I found the cartoon at the top of this post (by Wilcox for Australia's The Age, apropos of a scandal in which the Australian PM's office and cabinet were caught scrubbing Wikipedia entries) from a post on the Brisbane Grammar School Library website, "10 Reasons Not to Use Wikipedia for Assignments."
10 good reasons why you should never trust Wikipedia as an accurate source of information: 10. You must never fully rely on any one source for important information
9. You especially can’t rely on something when you don’t even know who wrote it
8. The contributor with an agenda often prevails
7. Individuals with agendas sometimes have significant editing authority
6. Sometimes “vandals” create malicious entries that go uncorrected for month
5. There is little diversity among editors
4. The number of active Wikipedia editors has flat-lined
3. It has become harder for casual participants to contribute
2. Accurate contributors can be silenced
And the number one reason:
1. It says so on Wikipedia
"Wikipedia says, "We do not expect you to trust us." It adds that it is “not a primary source” and that “because some articles may contain errors,” you should “not use Wikipedia to make critical decisions.”
Furthermore, Wikipedia notes in its “About” section, “Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start: they may contain false or debatable information.”
Like many people I know, I held my nose in 2008 and voted for Barack Obama, a junior senator with a voting record I kept warning people meant we were electing an untrustworthy conservative. No, not a reactionary and not as untrustworthy or even as conservative as John McCain, but, to be charitable, nothing to write home about. Other than the symbolism of electing an African-American and an intellectual. But, like almost everyone I knew, I was aware we would be getting-- at best-- another spineless, status quo drone like Bill Clinton. As you may have been able to discern from my comments Monday on Frank Rich's New York piece, I have no intention of holding my nose and voting for Obama again. If he can't win in California without my vote, he has no shot whatsoever.
Last year it was strongly suggested Blue America endorse Obama and raise money for him. I laughed-- and then made some changes to the PAC in response. If there was no chance of Blue America asking our contributors for money for Obama in 2008, there's even less of a chance that we'd consider anything like that for 2012 now that he's proven all of our worst fears to be completely founded. In 2007 I explained my reluctance over and over again, like here, discussing environmental reform. Obama, I insisted at the time, was certainly no better than Hillary Clinton.
A consistent and craven compromiser on almost every progressive value or principle he's had to confront since being elected to the Senate (from Republican "tort reform" to legalizing credit card usury), Obama's environmental record has clearly been "one of accommodation to big corporate interests" and "his 'new kind of politics'" is nothing more than a charismatically delivered sham: "the old kind of influence peddling, caution, and smallness that most Democrats [at the grassroots level] reject." His environmental record is nothing Bush Republicans need to fear.
He is the Senate's leading Democratic supporter of "coal to liquid," a technology that can make gasoline out of coal. Only problem: it produces double the global warming pollution that regular old dirty oil does. As if that wasn't bad enough, Obama actually voted for George Bush's energy bill despite more than $27 billion in subsidies for the oil, nuclear and coal industries, its weakening of clean air and water laws, and the fact that it gave electric companies the power to charge consumers high rates while doing almost nothing to tackle global warming or increase consumer protections.
Why is Obama so willing to "trim his sails" so often-- despite the consequences to working and middle class Americans and the environment? It's not just that he apparently believes accommodation-- even of right-wing extremists-- can be both right and politically useful. It's something deeper. In his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, Obama admits he has a hard time feeling a truly pressing sense of urgency about the great issues of the day.
He's not the leader America so desperately needs to clean up after the worst presidential regime in history, no more than Hillary Clinton is. It's not enough to drive Republicans out of government, even if that is a well-deserved and worthwhile first step. It's just as important to find BETTER Democrats.
That's still what Blue America is dedicated to and what we ask our supporters to help with. And, on top of Obama's all too predictable colossal cave-in-- or worse-- to the Republicans this week, that work takes on an even greater urgency.
President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.
At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.
As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.
“Obviously, there will be some Democrats who don’t believe we need to do entitlement reform. But there seems to be some hunger to do something of some significance,” said a Democratic official familiar with the administration’s thinking. “These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by.”
Rather than roughly $2 trillion in savings, the White House is now seeking a plan that would slash more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade, stabilize borrowing, and defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode as the cost of health care rises and the nation’s population ages.
As a liberal, I believe that if Obama comes in and implements a bunch of muddled centrist policies, proposing tax cuts to deal with poverty and an expanded military and entitlement reform along with a weird convoluted health care reform, he will fail because basic liberal ideas like accountability, oversight, and integrity in leadership will not be embedded into our institutions. The rich have left us with a massive bill in the form of an intractable trade deficit, national debt, and oil addiction, and someone's going to pay it. If it's the public instead of the people who ran up the country's credit cards (take a look at the nation's billionaires), it's going to make a lot of people much angrier than they are right now.
This anger will go somewhere; right now anger is going against Bush, but he's out of the picture come 2009, though we can kick his corpse for a few years or so if Democrats act smartly (which they won't). If Obama's centrist policies fail, and he is considered a big government liberal or progressive, the public will reject liberalism and progressivism, as it has for the last forty years. But this will not be a result of disliking progressive ideas, but as a result of believing that bad centrist ideas are progressive ideas.
So, as liberals who believe in a different vision for America than Obama, it's important that Obama's centrist policy sympathies are blamed for what goes wrong when he takes over and screws up the country worse than it is right now, which we'll notice after our honeymoon of hoorays some time after the transition.
Dave Johnson was also quick to realize the danger we were putting Social Security-- and wjat's left of the New Deal-- in by electing a weak, vacillating and basically conservative Barack Obama.
Barack Obama is echoing the right's destructive narrative about Social Security being in crisis. The crisis is that Reagan and then Bush took all the money from the Social Security Trust Fund to use for tax cuts for the rich. (Clinton's surpluses were paying it back, Bush reversed that.) And now the Trust Fund is going to need some of that money back.
The right's line is that this means Social Security is in crisis, is "not going to be there" for the next generation, and "tough choices" are required. The audacity-- they took the money, and now they say this is Social Security's problem, and that we have to fix Social Security! They say this to distract the public from asking for the money back, and to get them to support efforts to privatize the program.
And Barack Obama has joined them in this! Recently an Obama ad reinforced the right's bamboozlement that Social Security is running out of money. speaking on Meet the Press:
Now, we've got 78 million baby boomers that are going to be retiring, and every expert that looks at this problem says "There's going to be a gap, and we're going to have more money going out than we have coming in unless we make some adjustments now." ... I want to make sure that it's there not just for this generation, but for next generations. So that means that we're going to have to make some decisions...
Paul Krugman pleads with him to stop. A few years ago the right tried to go after Social Security and there was:
... a determined defense by progressives in the media, on the blogs, and in Congress beat back one spurious argument after another, while the American people made it clear that they really want a program that guarantees a basic retirement income that doesn't depend on the Dow. And Social Security survived.
All of which makes it just incredible that Barack Obama would make obeisance to fashionable but misguided Social Security crisis-mongering a centerpiece of his campaign.
The American people don't want to see cuts to Medicare and Social Security. They want the rich to pay their fair share and they want tax loopholes for Big Oil and other corporate monsters to be closed. But Obama is playing it like his hand is being forced. It isn't. This is just what he wants. He'll have the Republicans backing him, of course, but which Democrats have the courage to stand up to him? Watch this space.
UPDATE: Can Chris Van Hollen Be Trusted... A Little?
Van Hollen was just on CNN with Ali Velshi claiming Democrats won't vote to balance the budget on the backs of Social Security recipients. Van Hollen is a sneaky, untrustworthy character and if he's what's standing between the New Deal and fascism, we're sunk. Here's most of the transcript:
VELSHI: Do you know anything about the reports the President is prepared to talk about Medicare and Social Security with the Republicans in exchange for their support to raise the debt ceiling?
REP. VAN HOLLEN: Ali, I do not know the details on this. I saw the reports and will hear a lot more from the President around eleven o’clock when he meets with bipartisan group at the White House. I do know that the President has been looking for a comprehensive deal that gets about $4 trillion in deficit reduction. That was along the lines of the proposal from the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission. But with respect to the story that appeared this morning on Social Security I do not know what exactly the President is referring to. And I should be clear that Congressional Democrats are not going to support something that seeks to balance the budget on the backs of Social Security beneficiaries. What we have said is that if the President wants to adopt a separate track, just as Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s, to strengthen Social Security, that’s one thing. But to try and balance the budget on the backs of Social Security beneficiaries would be unacceptable and I’m pretty confident that is not what the President is referring to.
VELSHI: Let's set the stage what here with what kinds of things could you, and Congressional Democrats, with respect to Social Security might support. If we support an increase in the age when you get Social Security for people who are younger at this point so it phases in over some time. Is that the kind of thing we could be talking about?
REP. VAN HOLLEN: I think that would meet with a lot of resistance for this reason. It's easy for people who make a living like you and I do; talking, to retire a little bit later. It’s a lot harder for someone who has been doing back-breaking work. What we could do-- this is something part of the design of the existing system-- you don't take away the option to retire early but if you do retire early you do get a lower benefit over a period of time. That is part of the design in the current system. You could build on that. There are other options that we have discussed, for example, lifting the cap on the payroll tax. That would bring in more revenue, so there are ways to strength Social Security. Obviously, an important issue-- but don’t do that as way to balance the rest of the budget.
VELSHI: Part of the reports coming out that the President would agree to or push for $3 to $4 trillion in cuts over the next ten years. Where do Congressional Democrats stand on that?
REP. VAN HOLLEN: Well, the President's proposal that he laid out just a short time ago at George Washington University called for about a $4 trillion in cuts over 12 years. And while I think you'd find people disagreeing with some of the details, the overall architecture of that proposal is something that certainly I could support because it was a balanced approach. It said we got to close a lot of these corporate tax loopholes. We have to ask the folks at the very top to go back to paying what they did under-- during the Clinton administration. But it also called for significant cuts which we are going to have to do on domestic discretionary spending. But the President was clear that while we make cuts on the domestic side of the ledger we have to look at Pentagon spending and some the bipartisan commission also recommends.
VELSHI: Congressman, you're a leader in the Democratic Party. So, at some point, we know that Republicans have dug in about nothing that looks, smells, or walks like a tax increase or an elimination of a credit. You do have to compromise and you will probably tell me that you and Congressional Democrats have, but the bottom line is what can you do to bring hard line fiscal conservatives over who will not get off of that mantra?
REP. VAN HOLLEN: That is exactly the question I think all of us need to ask and I, frankly, do not have a good answer for you. Because what you've got right now is a dynamic in the Republican Party, especially with the Tea Party movement, that says that we're not going to support closing corporate tax loopholes even for the purpose of deficit reduction. And until the Republican Party is more worried about the deficit than they are about Grover Norquist, and that whole part of their coalition, then we’re going to have a real problem. Now maybe the ice is beginning to break a little bit there. I haven't-- you know, there were some signs yesterday although you have to see it to believe it. I need to see an actual proposal.
Keith Ellison, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, may not have the institutional clout Van Hollen does, but he's far more trustworthy and far more a champion of working families. This morning on Morning Joe he defended Social Security in no uncertain terms-- from both sides. He tried to refocus the debate on the central problem that seniors and the poor are being asked to sacrifice greatly while the richest Americans are being protected by congressional Republicans: "Social Security actually is not contributing to the deficit. Social Security loans us money. So at the end of the day, all this discussion about how we’re going to cut Social Security is very distressing to me because Social Security isn’t the problem… This is inequitable and regressive… We’re asking the poorest Americans to sacrifice. When are the wealthiest Americans going to step up and do the patriotic thing, which is to contribute to deal with this budget deficit."
And Elison's co-chairman, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), was among over a dozen progressive leaders vowing to oppose cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid listed as part of any deficit reduction package combined with a proposal to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit. They signed a letter to Obama that makes the case that “job creation is the most important issue facing the country-- not deficit reduction... [A]ny cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be taken off the table,” the letter said. “Second, revenue increases must be a meaningful part of any agreement.”
Grijalva: “I think we are allowing the conversation to be skewed by the Republican leadership. The demand on these three programs [Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid] is more political than it is fiscal. It’s a political statement they are making. For the president or for the Congress to allow them to make that statement, when there’s no fiscal rationale for it, is something that we can’t support.”
And, over on the Senate side, there's a champion for working families as well, Bernie Sanders: “Let us be clear,” Sanders said. “Social Security has not contributed one nickel to our deficit or our national debt. Social Security is funded by the payroll tax, not the U.S. treasury... I am especially disturbed that the president is considering cuts in Social Security after he campaigned against cuts in 2008." [Obama made his position clear on Sept. 6, 2008, when he said: “John McCain's campaign has suggested that the best answer for the growing pressures on Social Security might be to cut cost of living adjustments or raise the retirement age. Let me be clear: I will not do either,” Obama said.] “The American people expect the president to keep his word,” Sanders said.
Obama isn't the only Democrat supporting Wall Street's dream to end Social Security and privatize Medicare. Predictably, corporate whores Third Way is backing Obama.
