Hola, muchachos. What's shaking? We know it's been a few weeks since Wikify last rapped at ya, but there's been some political drama going down at our favorite encyclopedia involving a big kahuna on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. We'll explain the whole thing in a minute. First though, we want to address a question we hear a lot: Can you just email Wikipedia when there's something wrong with your article? The short answer is… sort of yes? The long answer is spelled out below. We also explain how you can set up a watchlist on Wikipedia to monitor your favorite articles.
It's Grade A content all around, amigos. Let's dive in!
Something's wrong with my article. Can I email Wikipedia to fix it?
There are two main options for getting help with your Wikipedia article: (1) using Wikipedia's edit request system and (2) emailing the Wikimedia Foundation.
Before you get too excited about the email option, we need to state upfront that what you definitely cannot do is email, call, or otherwise badger an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia's parent organization). The WMF does not involve itself with the content of Wikipedia. The encyclopedia is structured in such a way that all editorial decisions are left to the site's volunteer editor community to oversee. So even when using the email option you're not actually directly engaging with WMF staff.
All support emails to the Wikimedia Foundation are answered by a select group of Wikipedia editors who are part of the "Volunteer Response Team". These editors are vetted to make sure that they have a very good history on all Wikimedia sites. They also have to sign paperwork to say that they won't disclose any confidential information that might be shared with them by those emailing the contact email. The VRT will answer emails asking to fix issues on articles, including corrections and copyright infringement. The VRT may also take steps to confirm that the person emailing them is in fact who they say they are (because sometimes, they aren't, like the time a banned former Wikipedia administrator pretended to be a singer-songwriter).
The VRT is able to help with certain sensitive issues, like correcting inaccurate biographical details based on sources that can't be shared publicly (e.g. divorce paperwork). They can also help with legal concerns about what is written in your article, although you shouldn't email them to threaten to sue Wikipedia or any Wikipedia editor. They're not obligated to help with everything, and if your request could be completed via an edit request, it's likely they'll ask you to go ahead and do that.
So how does this "edit request" option work? In short, this system involves you posting a message to the relevant article's Talk page (the discussion page attached to each article) in which you:
Note your connection to the subject of the article ("Hi, I'm Person X, the subject of this article")
Explain the issue ("I was not actually born in 1976" or "my middle name is not actually 'Oliver'—it's 'Onion'")
Provide links to sources with the correct information ("Politico's Playbook newsletter got my birthdate correct" or "This article in Fortune provided my correct full name")
Ask the site's volunteer community to fix the issue ("Can you help me with this problem by correcting my DOB / middle name?")
This is the most transparent way to seek corrections to article inaccuracies, and as such it's the one that Wikipedia would prefer you use. Again, the email option is limited to narrowly applicable scenarios where sources supporting corrections cannot be publicly disclosed.
Zestimating and legislating
The evolution of a politician's Wikipedia article can get pretty hairy. Every lawmaker, whether popular or despised, has many constituents who believe them to be inept, malignant, lunatic, and/or launching a plot to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. And at least a few of those people know how to use Wikipedia.
This is the case with Dean Preston, one of 11 members of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, whose home value is currently listed on his Wikipedia page at $2.5 million. That figure is pretty obviously there because Preston is the city's only Supervisor affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, who represent the leftward edge of mainstream American politics. Use your best Sinister Political Ad Voice for this: He claims to fight for the working class, but when Dean Preston punches out, he retires to a $2.5 million estate. And then maybe a black-and-white photo of Preston gets stamped with an all-red HYPOCRITE.
The $2.5 million figure isn't standard encyclopedic information but it's far from the strangest or most invasion of privacy-flavored thing we've seen in a public figure's Personal life section. More interesting is that, for a while back in February, Preston's home value was mentioned in a passage about a vacant housing tax he advocated for, and it was pegged at "more than $3 million." As an editor named Coffee & Crumbs pointed out in a Talk page discussion, the vacant housing tax had nothing to do with the taxes Preston pays on his home, the cited source's basis for the "more than $3 million" claim was a Redfin estimate.
The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported that while Preston's article has been edited an absurd number of times over the past year, there has also been a noticeable uptick in edits to several other SF Supervisors' Wiki articles. At Wikify press time the article for Aaron Peskin, who's considering a run for mayor, is embroiled in an edit war. Increased edit activity like this could be the result of an organized effort by political actors, or it could just be random folks imbibing the news and updating articles as they see fit.
Regardless, this story is an important reminder that while Wikipedia aims for neutrality, that's more of an ideal than an achievable reality. Everyone who participates on the site, whether they respect its mission or not, inhabits a certain point-of-view that informs their editing. Does a left-leaning pol's estimated home value belong in his article? There's not really an answer to that, only edits and counter-edits, Talk page arguments, endless revision. Word to the wise, though: if your source for a claim is a real estate company's price calculator, you might want to dig a little deeper.
Wikify Glossary: Watchlist
Here's a problem you might have encountered in the past: You want to stay up-to-date on a Wikipedia article, whether that's because you're an employee of a company, it's your page, or you're a fan of a specific subject or topic—but you don't want to have to keep returning to this page directly to check the article's edit history and see what you might have missed. Luckily, Wikipedia has an underutilized feature that can be incredibly handy for those (like us) who enjoy monitoring the edits to articles they're keeping an eye on.
A Wikipedia watchlist is like having a personal assistant who keeps an eye on those specific articles for you. Whenever someone makes a change to one of the articles on your watchlist, no matter how big or small the change may be, the watchlist alerts you. This way you can stay updated on the topics you care about without having to constantly check each article manually. It's a useful tool for keeping track of changes to articles you're interested in or that you've contributed to.
As an example, let's consider the Wikipedia article about The Cold Vein, the 2001 debut album from rap duo Cannibal Ox. If you're a fan of the early 2000s backpacker scene, you might be interested in following this article so you can be alerted whenever someone comes along and adds new information. To do so, you just need to log in to your Wikipedia account and then click on the star on the top right of the page (as shown in the screenshot below).
By clicking that star, Cannibal Ox will now appear on your watchlist, which you can access from the navigation bar (see screenshot below). The watchlist will track in chronological order all the changes to the articles you've added.
If you don't have an account, you cannot create a watchlist, so you'll have to sign up and create an account on Wikipedia to start loading up your watchlist. If you've been struggling with juggling following multiple pages, setting up a watchlist should help quite a bit.
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