War on Wikis: Critical Standards and Standards of Criticism

A Wikipedia article summing up the common objections and answering them.

Also see Wikipedia's article on Why Wikipedia Is So Great.

And, of course, their article on Why Wikipedia Is Not So Great.

Information aside, the interesting thing here is the attempt at honest self-criticism. This is another important difference between the practices of the new media at its best and the way things are done in the old media world.

The standard for the new media is that criticism should be frankly acknowledged and frankly answered. It should not be ignored, dismissed or overborne by claims of expertise.

To say this standard is an ideal rather than universal practice is putting it mildly. A lot of new media practitioners don't do it this way and some of them are pretty scathing in the way they apply the older techniques.

The difference is they suffer for it much more.

The web is in essence a conversation. Communication is two way and neither of the participants has such an overwhelming advantage they can drown out the other party.

This was one of the first things I noticed when I started writing for the web over a decade ago. Articles on web sites drew a lot more comment, especially critical comment, than I was used to in magazines and newspapers.

Personally I thought this was great. While my fear of being wrong in public approaches an obsessive-compulsive disorder -- not uncommon in those schooled in the journalistic paradigm -- I appreciated the fact that I could learn from my readers. For one thing, it meant I could target future articles more accurately to what my readers were interested in. That's very hard to do with a magazine where there is a several-month lag between writing the article and getting the letter to the editor.

If you are writing for the web, or blogging, or social networking you have to accept the fact that your work is exposed to the opinions of others -- and those others have equally powerful channels to express their opinions.

In conventional journalism one party controls both ends of the conversation by deciding what gets into print. While letters to the editor are theoretically welcome, objections and comments are still filtered by the side with the publication.

As A.J. Leibling famously said: Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one.

This produces some unfortunate behavior. Newspapers, for example, tend to alibi their mistakes rather than admitting them.

I remember one occasion when, as energy reporter for a major metro daily, I covered the explosion of a pole-mounted transformer belonging to the local power company. Such explosions aren't uncommon since the transformers can overheat in use. In themselves they're pretty harmless. What made this one newsworthy was that the transformer was one of the old ones whose cooling oil was laced with PCBs. That meant it was a hazardous material spill in a residential neighborhood.

Fine, but how much hazardous material? PR guy at the utility told me it was "several quarts" so that's what I used in the story. The next day I got a call from a reader who informed me the actual amount of oil in such a transformer is about five gallons. After confirming that independently, I told my assistant editor, implying that we needed to run a correction.

His response was that five gallons is the same as several quarts so we didn't need a correction.

It was his call, but to this day I think that story was misleading. However the assistant editor wanted to keep from printing a correction. The prevailing theory at newspapers and magazines in those days was that if you didn't admit a mistake you hadn't made a mistake.

While that attitude is still with us -- witness The New Republic's response to the wildly inaccurate stories from Scott Thomas Beauchamp in Iraq -- it works a lot less well even for the print media. Beauchamp's fables were quickly exposed by bloggers with military experience and The New Republic made itself a laughing stock with its lame and dishonest attempts to defend its position.

(Note: Because I'm rushed for time, and because the material in the blogosphere on this is so extensive, I am not going to provide specific links. For the military blogger's point of view I'd recommend 'Blackfive'. For an series of summaries of the controversy, see Michael Goldfarb's articles in the "Weekly Standard". Not an unbiased source, but a lot of links to blogs and other sources. And of course there's "The New Republic's" own statements. For an example of why TNR is a laughing stock, take a look at the investigation into TNR's "investigation" of whether a Bradley Fighting Vehicle could run over a dog in the manner Beauchamp described. For a summation of the culture at TNR that led to all this, as well as an example of the journalistic CYA mentality at work, see "How The New Republic Got Suckered"

The smart new media folks have learned this lesson already and public reaction is teaching it to the others. If you make a mistake, face up to it and deal with it honestly. Because if you don't it will be thrown back at you with hurricane force.