Conspiracy theories distract from real questions about grantmaking report
Last week, my colleagues on the Signpost produced a news report covering a minor controversy about a report commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation. Written by the staff of The Lafayette Practice, a French research firm, it proclaimed the WMF as a leader in the practice of participatory grantmaking. In response to an apparently self-promotional WMF blog post heralding the report, an Examiner.com article by Gregory Kohs, longtime Wikipedia critic and founder of MyWikiBiz, alleged that the report, the blog post, and the Wikipedia article on participatory grantmaking—created by WMF staffer Asaf Bartov and since deleted—were a WMF promotional effort that constituted a violation of the conflict of interest guideline.
| “ | My goal was not to promote WMF's practice, or even the general practice, but to document it, in a fair and NPOV way. I still think I achieved that. Indeed, I would welcome concrete criticism of the article text I composed. | ” |
| — Asaf Bartov on the now-deleted Wikipedia article on participatory grantmaking | ||
After a week of reading about article timestamps and speculation about whether Bartov had time to write the text on his lunch break or during work hours, I realized that everyone was making the mistake of taking this matter far too seriously, at least in the aspects they put under the microscope. This is a conspiracy theory, where minor facts are connected to point to a preordained conclusion, where coincidence is evidence of collusion, and where human motives are not fully understood and are only interpreted in the most nefarious way possible. And, as with all conspiracy theories, the time and effort of reasonable people are wasted having to investigate or disprove speculative and fanciful notions. It is not surprising that such a theory emerged from Wikipediocracy, where users spend years nursing and reinforcing each other's contradictory grudges against Wikipedia.
Is it really so unbelievable that Asaf Bartov, a Wikipedia editor since 2003, created a Wikipedia article on this topic of his own volition after hearing about the topic at a conference? That's what Wikipedians do: they create articles on new topics they hear about that aren't yet in the encyclopedia. If this was a conspiracy born out of some half-baked WMF promotional scheme, Bartov and his alleged conspirators could have easily covered their tracks using dummy Wikipedia accounts.
Kohs certainly knows about generating new Wikipedia accounts, as he uses them frequently to comment on Jimmy Wales' talk page and elsewhere – not to mention his use of them to vandalize the encyclopedia. Last year, Kohs bragged on Wikipediocracy about vandalizing Wikipedia articles during a talk at an unspecified college, as if, over a decade after the founding of the encyclopedia, we still needed to remind audiences that people can edit Wikipedia maliciously. After a quick Google search of his speaking engagements, within minutes I was able to find the offending edit; Kohs had made up a fake radio station for Rollins College. This was particularly irritating for me, as Rollins already has a radio station, WPRK, and I have fond memories of listening to it back when I was dating a woman who lived near Rollins. Later in that Wikipediocracy thread, he bragged again about more instances of this kind of vandalism, at other talks at Rollins and elsewhere. This is certainly more damaging to the encyclopedia than anything Bartov is alleged to have done.