danah boyd

Looks like a dis­cus­sion thread is occur­ing about the Wikipedia arti­cle on dana boyd, and an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion is tak­ing place about what hap­pens when The media is incor­rect about some­thing and we don’t have any sources that are cor­rect. The dis­cus­sion is inter­est­ing, but some of the premises are false. There are a lot of exam­ples when the main stream media is wrong, that doesn’t mean wikipedia has to be. And just because one edi­tor on a rather iso­lated page has a non-centrist view on our Ver­i­fi­a­bil­ity pol­icy doesn’t mean it’s the wikipedia con­sen­sus. From the pol­icy itself,

Nei­ther online nor print sources deserve an auto­matic assump­tion of reli­a­bil­ity by virtue of the medium they are printed in. All reports must be eval­u­ated accord­ing to the processes and peo­ple that cre­ated them.

If it’s obvi­ous that she is run­ning a blog, and it’s really her, and her legal name is danah boyd, that’s a source, and it’s ver­i­fi­able. Now, on to the bad news, Wiki­Me­dia has a tech­ni­cal prob­lem with arti­cles that start with lower case let­ters, so there is no rea­son we wouldn’t change it other than the fact that it’s cur­rently tech­ni­cally impos­si­ble. I don’t know if the peo­ple that orig­i­nally responded on wikipedia were aware of this, but it’s true, and it is the rea­son we can’t just move the arti­cle. (for other exam­ples see “IPod”, and “EBay”