Jimmy Wales Interview James O'Brien Aug 2014
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BBC Newsnight interview from 2014, a one-on-one with Jimmy Wales during the 2014 Wikimania, by guest presenter James O'Brien. (O'Brien's article was created in 2006 by Kittybrewster, see British Isles naming dispute, and is a regular target of vandals. Some very hostile vandalism[1][2] directly resulted from this Wales interview.)
As mentioned on a Wikipediocracy blog post:
- "On August 6, James O’Brien interviewed Jimmy Wales on BBC’s Newsnight about Google’s objections to the “right to be forgotten”, an issue where Wales, as a member of Google’s advisory board, now obviously differs sharply with several notable Guardian journalists. This includes technology editor Charles Arthur, who, along with Andrew Orlowski and others, has pointed out that despite the appearance Google is aiming to create, the company is in fact not required to remove links at all, as it can simply bounce requests up to the relevant country’s information commissioner to let them take the decision.
- "The ebullient O’Brien told Wales mockingly that he spoke as if Wikipedia were a “sacrosanct institution, an inviolate portal” in which “everything posted is true”.
- "“I could go on Wikipedia now and describe you as believing in fairies and a man whose – I don’t know – favourite drink is the blood of freshly slaughtered kittens. That’s neither history nor truth, but it could be on Wikipedia,” O’Brien said.
- "“Not for more than a few seconds”, Wales replied, laughing heartily. But O’Brien was not in a joking mood. He countered, “You say that. I have personal experience of …”, and then changed tack when Wales would not stop laughing: “It’s not funny, if you’re sort of an ordinary person and you have a degree of public profile, and people have deliberately altered your Wikipedia page. I have spoken publicly about my children having been born as a result of fertility treatment. And my Wikipedia page, which I didn’t even know existed, contained a phrase along the lines of ‘he wasn’t man enough to impregnate his own wife’. That was there for weeks, months possibly, until my wife found it. Shouldn’t that be your priority?”
- "He added, “That’s neither truth nor history, and it’s on Wikipedia.”
- "Reference to the edit history of James O’Brien’s Wikipedia biography shows that the sentence in question was indeed present on the site, remaining unchallenged for a period of more than three weeks, and was reinserted several times after that (along with numerous other violations of Wikipedia’s biographies of living persons policy) without being promptly reverted.
- "In response, Wales suggested that biography subjects should keep an eye on their own articles and notify Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation in case there were any problems. In doing so, he essentially conceded that Wikipedia’s own quality control mechanism is impotent, and tried to shift part of the burden for ensuring that facts are accurately represented in Wikipedia to the biography subject.
- "O’Brien seemed unimpressed."
(Emphasis added.)
