Today I gave three Wikipedia presentations in Manhattan. I ought to be spending all of my time out of the office and at universities per the terms of my grant to do outreach to students, but as of yet I have not managed enough invitations to be on campus all of the time. Dorothy has been helping me collect contacts and write offers to partner. We have a list of several hundred people sorted by university, library, conference, or nonprofit health effort, all of these being in New York, and all of these screened somewhat as being not unlikely to benefit from the content distribution which could come from a Wikipedia partnership.
Dorothy joined me this morning for a meeting at Columbia University Medical Center. Last February I when I met Amin he had referred me to a doctor friend of his in San Francisco, and as I recall that person referred me to someone else in California, then that person referred me to someone at Columbia. When I met I was surprised that the meeting was warmer than just a referral – a team of health professionals had actually identified problems with a Wikipedia article in their field and had tried to edit Wikipedia in response. They had been having problems. Their response, as is typical, was to leave the actual health article alone, but to make a Wikipedia article about their organization, and to fill it with content copied from their website. The draft article about their organization had been rejected in the articles for creation process several times, as is entirely typical, and they were wondering why.
We talked about their options. Concerning the article about themselves, Dorothy and I explained that Wikipedia has notability criteria, and that this criteria requires that organizations can have Wikipedia articles when they are made of summaries of information published by multiple sources which were not published by any organization which shares a financial interest in promoting them. All of this is routine from a Wikipedia perspective, but surprising from an organizational perspective, and familiar to me. They accepted my explanation and said that they would find sources about themselves, then make the article based on that. I often hear this, and it has been my experience that even well-established highly funded organizations often have no external media coverage about themselves at all. Wikipedia’s inclusion criteria for incorporating new topics as articles are, in my opinion, rather low, but still most organizations fail to meet them. I wish that it were more common for representatives of organizations to give interviews and support journalism about themselves. Most organizations are media shy, which is unfortunate because traditional journalism is declining in popularity while more localized journalism is coming more in demand. At the very least it would be nice if within universities people doing interesting projects would be reviewed by university journalism departments, or even better, if the journalism departments of various universities could take a more international role in reporting all kinds of projects at all kinds of universities. That is kind of a fantasy – I suppose I really cannot say what the future of journalism might be, except that I wish there were more of it.
Concerning the article about the health condition within their field of expertise and interest, Dorothy and I reviewed with them how they might develop it. We talked about Wikipedia’s verification policy and suggested that every statement they add to Wikipedia ought to be followed by a citation, even if it is a fact that is trivial in the field. We covered the difference between case studies and review articles, and said that the results of case studies should not be extrapolated into general conclusions as sometimes happens in Wikipedia. They asked about institutional guidelines or recommendations, and I appreciated that they had a creative question and said that those should not be absent even if there is no review article covering the concept. We covered how Wikipedians would review their contributions, and I said that while it is fine to make lots of changes in a short period of time, it is better to make them piecewise so that if anyone has comment on one of the changes that they can easily isolate it for discussion, which is not possible in the interface if someone makes lots of changes at once.
That meeting finished. We talked about next steps, then Dorothy and I went on to the next thing.
Dorothy and I met with Richard, Pete, and Jim at WNET, which is the public broadcasting affiliate of PBS in New York. We were expecting to do an editathon for veterans. The occasion was that this is “Small Business Week”, a recognition of locally owned enterprise, and in this case an opportunity to promote various programs to assist members of the US military transition into civilian occupations as they leave military service. Dorothy and I joined this because it was the first proposal for collaboration between Wikipedia and PBS and because it seemed like a promising way to meet potential collaborators. When we arrived there were cameras everywhere and Maria Contreras-Sweet from the US presidential cabinet was there and speaking. It was nice to have a high ranking government official as a guest at a Wikipedia editing event but it was unexpected. We had anticipated that we would have a room full of veterans at the event, with many of those being college students who were considering getting military loans to establish tech startups. I thought this might be a nice population to connect further, including on campuses, but when we got there I saw no one who seemed student aged and everyone was wearing suits.
The speaker was recorded, and Richard spoke also on behalf of Wikimedia NYC, then the editathon began. We were in a full room of suits and after the editathon began, everyone except two people left. I am not really sure who was in the room with us as I did not have an opportunity to talk to many people before they left. The people who stayed did a little wiki-editing but the event hardly justified having five Wikipedians there. I was hoping for around 30 people, as was WNET as they reserved several conference rooms. I am not quite sure where the information breakdown happened but again, this is not atypical for Wikipedia meetups. We do our best to get people to commit to attend but especially in doing outreach to the general public turnout is often a low percentage of the people who commit to come. At least the two who stayed actually wanted to edit Wikipedia and perhaps something could come of what they got. Wikipedia was a headlining part of this event and I only realized that the event was mostly theatre to drum up support for other events in a series of outreach efforts.
After this event in the same building as WNET we visited the WebMD office in the same building. I have two friends who work there and saw them both. WebMD is one of the major competitors to Wikipedia in delivering health information to the public. I was told that they had 1500 employees in New York and more elsewhere. I can only guess their annual revenue must be over USD one billion but can hardly imagine what it means to have a publisher of that scale producing health information. From a Wikipedia perspective, if it happens that they can produce good health information on a general topic, then Wikipedia would seek to adapt it for incorporation into Wikipedia. Likewise I know that they adapt Wikipedia’s content into their own presentations. In talking with people there I found no way to collaborate at this time. They are commercial, and they seek to increase ad revenue and license their content for a fee. I hold the opinion that their content is overall less useful and of lower quality than Wikipedia’s content, and I hear this from others also, but I have my own bias. It is my expectation that someday Wikipedia will overtake WebMD in their field of expertise, but time will tell.