The Dish

Nicholas Ciarelli demystifies the democratic view of Wikipedia:

"The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia is that it's some emergent phenomenon—the wisdom of crowds, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing… like we're a lot of ants, working in an anthill," Jimmy Wales, the site's co-founder, has said. "It's kind of a neat analogy, but it turns out it's actually not much true." Wales examined the numbers several years ago and was surprised to learn that the most active 2 percent of users had performed nearly 75 percent of the edits on the site. […] This clique of users enforces Wikipedia's bewildering list of rules—policies covering neutrality, verifiability, and naming conventions, among other areas. It's not difficult for newcomers to run afoul of these regulations when they try to edit an article.

At the same time, these administrators undoubtedly play a critical role in maintaining Wikipedia's professionalism, volunteering untold hours to clean up vandalism and improve the quality of articles. And their apparent distrust of newcomers is not entirely without merit. "They're reflexively suspicious of everyone from watching people attack Wikipedia over all the years," says Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who sits on the advisory board for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia. "If everyone who works at Britannica were fired, the encyclopedia would become out of date and less useful over time as new articles weren't added, and old ones weren't updated, and would become considerably less valuable over time. But if everyone who really cares about defending Wikipedia didn't log in this week, it would be gone by Thursday."

A reader writes:

"Today on the Dish the coverage our relatively thin."

'Cause it's Friday and you're partying.

You guys keep me sane all week.

Yes, it was the Atlantic Christmas party last night. Chris had a good time. And he had to post at 10.02 pm.

To its credit, National Review once attacked those who refused to accept the prima facie evidence of Barack Obama’s birth certificate as proof of his eligibility to be president of the United States.

The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that a lack of evidence for the theory is taken as yet more evidence for the theory. Indeed, the maddening thing about dealing with conspiracy hobbyists of this or any sort is the ever-shifting nature of their argument and their alleged evidence: Never mind the birth certificate, his step-grandmother said he was born in Kenya! (No, she didn’t.)

Now examine Sarah Palin’s precise point made Thursday night:

I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue ’cause I think there are enough members of the electorate who still want answers.

One might expect NRO to write something – anything – to deal with the fact that the person they wanted to be vice-president has just embraced the conspiracy theory they have explicitly condemned.

You would expect it if the magazine were an intellectually honest vehicle for conservative thought and opinion, as opposed to a largely sophistic harbor for partisan propagandists and cranks.

A reader writes:

You wrote in response to a journalist reader who said that the McCain-Palin campaign simply refused to answer questions:

This is a democracy?

I'd say sure.

I'd argue that the McCain/Palin campaign lost a lot of potential votes because of decisions like their flat refusal to respond to reasonable questions or their announcement that Palin wouldn't do interviews unless the campaign was assured of "proper deference" (in a time of outrages, that one really got me). Proper behavior by candidates isn't what characterizes democracy. The ability of the electorate to hold those candidates accountable for their behavior and policies, as McCain and Palin were in 2008, is.

Slate held a contest. One submission:

"The minute I was on that stage in Florida with all those lights in my eyes and the smell of Alaska still on my fingertips and my family, too, all around out there, I was where I dreamed of all those years on the basketball court and in Alaskas's God given beauty which we must cherish and use as God gave it us to use and in honor of the troops, also."

Another good one:

"Reaching the peak of Igikpak, that majestic mount, feeling the smooth Alaskan wind rustle against my cheeks, watching over this vast yet tender land that epitomized so much of America's resplendent pulchritude, and slowly squeezing the trigger on the wolf cub I'd been tracking through my crosshairs, I suddenly felt in my heart something I had always known to be true: the capital-gains tax must be eliminated."

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 12.43 pm

Johann Hari delved into it last week:

The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or  toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying. In their home country – Bangladesh or the Philippines or India – these workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them, and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were promised. They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police.

Relatedly, James Estrin presents a photo essay of the city's decadent decline.

(Photo: OLIVER LANG/AFP/Getty Images. Hat tip: 3QD)

Matt Bai observes the revolving door between media and public service:

Now it seems that Cronkite’s brief moment as a vice-presidential contender may have been the first inevitable step down a treacherous path. Today we’re not at all surprised to hear names like Chris Matthews and Lou Dobbs tossed around as candidates for higher office. And while it used to be that only political aides of notable talent, people like Bill Moyers and Pat Buchanan and George Stephanopoulos (and, well, Chris Matthews), could make the tricky transition from politics to TV news, now it’s the politicians themselves — Joe Scarborough, Mike Huckabee — who find themselves ensconced as hosts on a cable-TV set. The door between politics and television news now isn’t merely revolving; it spins so fast and so continuously that a fair number of people no longer seem to belong neatly on one side or the other. Is Sarah Palin, at this point, a politician, or is she the star of some “frontier family” reality show? In fact, she seems to realize that the changed environment allows her to be both at the same time.

Continued here.

Damon Linker traces the history of the term:

[Professor of psychology Jonathan] Haidt claims to have found that American liberals and conservatives merely differ on which aspects of common sense they prize most highly—with liberals tending to esteem fairness and care and conservatives leaning toward loyalty, respect, and purity. If this finding ends up being confirmed by further studies, it would show not that one ideological outlook or another is more commonsensical than other, but rather that the content of common sense is somewhat fluid or changeable within certain broad parameters—and that to a considerable extent it mirrors our political opinions and ideological commitments (or vice versa). 

Yglesias spins.