If a tree falls in the forest without the MSM there to report it, does it make a sound?
Or more to the point, if your name is legally changed but the mainstream media fails to report it, is it still your name? Shelley Powers doesn’t quite ask that question, but it’s what I came away with after perusing the Wikipedia discussion concerning danah boyd.
At issue is the fact that danah’s name is legally spelled in lower-case. Conversely, Wikipedia’s style policies generally dictate that names be capitalized. When danah attempts to sway the Wiki editors on this point, here’s a bit of the response she got:
Unfortunately, you seem to have a misconception of how Wikipedia works. … In a nutshell: Wikipedia is not for placing “the truth”, it is for placing summaries of information that is already published in other credible news sources. If you can’t convince the NY Times, NPR, USA Today, and Fox News to lowercase your name, that makes a really tough case to argue on Wikipedia, since the policy here is to only incorporate information after it’s been published elsewhere. If, however, you can convince the major media outlets to print it differently in future press, then that will make a stronger case to get the Wikipedia article adapted to match. (source)
Shelley digests the point rather well, pointing out the following:
What’s more relevant to a discussion on Wikipedia at large is the direct admission that Wikipedia is not the place for ‘truth’. This, to me, is an extremely honest and important statement to make. I would hope the statement is pasted all over Wikipedia, because this is the ‘truth’ of Wikipedia, of any encyclopedia: what’s contained is less a matter of philosophical truth than verifiable source. Where Wikipedia editors are making a mistake is treating danah’s work as it appears in non-mainstream publications such as the ACM or her own birth certificate as less ‘worthy’ than those that appear in Fox. (source)
I’m not sure why things like birth certificates and diplomas aren’t considered reliable or objective by the Wikipedia community, as if the major news media is provably more accurate than your average birth certificate? Well it’s nice to know that the “new” media is so willfully dependent on the good “old” media.
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