Why do I share this with you? Well, because it contains such gems as:

That is the dumbest question I’ve ever heard. It was also the exact same question I was going to ask.

Is it necessary to state that George H.W. Bush was in the first generation of american children to have broccoli? that seems fairly meaningless and random.

Shouldn’t there be more on the consumption of broccoli in other cultures, particularly China?

It would be nice if anyone put in this article that George H. W. Bush spoke against broccoli.

And finally…

Seriously now, is it important for someone researching broccoli to know that it was once referenced in an episode of The Simpsons?

… which elicited this response:

If not in Wikipedia, where?

Surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of [Wikipedia's] hundreds of thousands of contributors are women…

Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women.

Her effort is not diversity for diversity’s sake, she says. “This is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be,” Ms. Gardner said…

Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, “Unlocking the Clubhouse,” argues that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?” said Ms. Margolis, a senior researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Margolis’s comments about how Wikipedia is typical in this respect of many offline areas of activity particularly caught my eye because of the parallels with the Liberal Democrats. Whether you look at Lib Dem bloggers, contributors to Lib Dem Voice or comments on Lib Dem Voice (three areas where I’ve been collating some statistics in conjunction with the Hansard Society), there’s a strong male bias.

However, the same is true of the offline world. The majority of voters are women, the majority of Liberal Democrat voters are often women, a small majority of party members are male (c.53% – 47%) and then when you move on to any other more active or higher profile form of involvement, the gender imbalance tips sharply. Whether it’s local party officers, local councillors, Parliamentary candidates or similar, that 53% figure moves sharply upwards.

The same is true outside politics too, such as the male majority amongst writers of letters to newspaper, though it’s not true about blogging in general (see here for more on both of these points).

What’s refreshing about Wikipedia is the acknowledgement that the imbalance reduces the quality of its sites as it means that some topics are far more heavily covered than others which might attract just as much interest from readers. That is similar to a point that used to be mentioned far more in debates within the Liberal Democrats, but has become less frequently mentioned in recent years, namely that aside from the important points about equality for individuals, it’s also the case that better gender balance often attracts more support for the Liberal Democrats. It’s not so overwhelming a relationship that it displaces other factors completely, but nor is it non-existent.

There’s no ‘login with your Facebook or Twitter account’ option – instead it’s got a free-standing registration system, just like everyone used to have.

There are no social sharing links on the pages.

Nor even is there an easy way to tell your friends that you’ve just made some changes to a piece. Depending on who the person was, I can easily imagine clicking on a link in a tweet telling me that person X has just edited page Y on Wikipedia. But you just about never see such messages – in large part because it’s more than just a couple of clicks to send them.

So, special login, no sharing links and no spreading of your activities via social networks. All a bit old school – and perhaps a part-explanation for the tailing off of activity.

Not entirely convinced by this argument. Yes edit wars and holier-than-thou editors on Wikipedia can be frustrating, but frankly, with over 3 million English language articles already written, what is there left for the new novice editor to add?

And yet, and yet. Whilst trumpeting the success of Wikipedia is one of the most commonly used examples in the “social media is changing everything” school of evangelism, so too is the claim that data is being created at an unprecedented rate.

Take these two statements:

In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008. (Harvard Business blog)

and

20 hours of video are now uploaded to [YouTube] every minute (NewTeeVee)

So, dear evangelists – which is it? Is all right and rosy with Wikipedia or is it that record volumes of new data are being created (which in turn would mean no shortage of new things for Wikipedia to document)?

I should emphasise that posing this question isn’t a criticism of Martin, whose own posts are more insightful than most, but rather his post prompted a wider thought of how amongst others there’s often too much evangelism and not enough comparison.

After all, if the people believing the vast amounts of new data flooding through every computer pore story is true and meaningful really believe, then even if Wikipedia was seeing a small growth in its editors that would be crisis stations as that would be nowhere near enough to keep up. And similarly if people really believe the unalloyed positive story about Wikipedia, then they can’t be believing the story about huge volumes of new data.

But how often do you see people disagree on such points? Instead, far too often people hop from positive story to positive story in a spirit of understandable evangelism, but don’t notice that the cases they use are often incompatible.

My favourite example of this is Facebook. It’s equivalent to one of the five biggest countries in the world but also equivalent to one of the five poorest. Yet people who often talk up social media with the example of Facebook’s size then slide over its relative poverty and move on to different examples when it comes to talking about making money online.

A sharp drop in Wikipedians, the volunteers who write and edit the online encyclopaedia, is a disturbing and inevitable trend, the Toronto man who was once their top contributor said Monday.

“Losing volunteers is a sign that things could be better at Wikipedia,” Simon Pulsifer said during a break in his full-time job at a software company…

The core of devoted wikigeeks who spawned the phenomenon in 250 languages is dropping off more quickly than new volunteers are signing on, a group of Spanish researchers reported…

With a shrinking stable of contributors, Pulsifer sees Wikipedia evolving, in the next eight years, into an online resource where “a lot of articles will be locked down. The history of Wikipedia has been one of increasing barriers to changing articles.”

You can read more in the Toronto Star.

Number of active Wikipedians
Red line = English. The other lines are German, Japanese and French.

Number of edits per day
Darker colour lines are rolling averages with
same colour scheme as in first graph.

1. More features = better site

It sounds obvious: the more features it has, the better a site is. But is a Swiss Army penknife a better eating implement than knife and fork just because it also has tweezers and a nail file? Would you say of a piece of direct mail, ‘Oooooh, this one has a slogan on the outside, and a return envelope, and a pen, and free postcard, and a scratch’n’sniff section and an elastic band thrown in too. It must be the best direct mail ever.’

Yes, having the right range of features matters – but more doesn’t mean better. More can mean a site is clogged up with unnecessary features that cost money to provide and get in the way of what site visitors actually want to do.

2. Usage rates don’t matter

Closely allied to this mistake is the oft-made assumption that you can judge a website without knowing what the statistics for it look like. An email sign up box may look lovely to you, but is it working? The choice of stories may look wrong, but are they right for its audience? You need either hard numbers or a moderately open discussion with the person / team behind a site in order to avoid make bad misjudgements.

3. Websites are for floating voters and the young

Actually, no. Plenty of political websites aim at different audiences – such as at their own supporters or journalists. There are often very good reasons for this – particularly the repeated experience that your own supporters are much more likely to be interested in finding out more about you via the web than floating voters. Maybe that decision is the right one for a site; maybe it is the wrong one. But don’t assume that just because a site doesn’t appear to appeal to floating voters that it’s therefore a bad site.

4. I like/hate the design – and so must everyone else

I’ve seen feedback from people who hate even the most highly appreciated sites and from people who love sites the vast majority think are unutterably ugly. Preferences vary hugely, so don’t ignore your own views – but neither think that you can make a robust judgement based on just your own views.

5. If you’ve not got lots of user-generated content, you’re a Luddite

The rise of web content provided by users (e.g. Wikipedia, where any visitor can amend and add to the site) has brought huge benefits in many areas. But whisper it quietly: it’s very rare for a UK political site to produce much user-generated content and even rarer for it to be of decent quality. Some zealots assume that therefore everyone in UK politics must be a dolt when it comes to the internet. Personally, I think if something is so rarely successful, then it is foolish for everyone to attempt to do it and expect it to be successful.

6. There is no need to talk

During my time at the Liberal Democrats, I regularly read reviews of one or other of our sites that completely missed what the site is trying to achieve, which bits were most successful or how and why its approach how differed from other parties’ sites. These are easy mistakes to make if you assume you can work out what a site is about, whether it is doing it well and indeed whether it is trying to do the right thing – all without asking anyone behind the site. Don’t gamble on being a psychic – ask instead.

These points may seem obvious now you have read them, but look at most political website reviews and you will see them sneak in. So next time you need to think about sites, dust them off and prosper.

UPDATE: A slightly expanded version of this post is now available as a guide on Scribd: Reviewing political party websites: the top mistakes to avoid.

(Many of the Wikipedia entries for companies do a very good job at making clear what a company is about largely because, I suspect, Wikipedia is generally free of business jargon. So even when written by ‘amateur’ outsiders, text that’s free of jargon makes for a clearer description than text written by expert insiders.)

In an unprecedented effort to crack down on self-serving edits, the Wikipedia supreme court has banned contributions from all IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates.

Closing out the longest-running court case in Wikiland history, the site’s Arbitration Committee voted 10 to 0 (with one abstention) in favor of the move, which takes effect immediately…

Some have argued that those editing from Scientology IPs may be doing so without instruction from the Church hierarchy. But a former member of Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs – a department officially responsible “for directing and coordinating all legal matters affecting the Church” – says the Office has organized massive efforts to remove Scientology-related materials and criticism from the web.

“The guys I worked with posted every day all day,” Tory Christman tells The Reg. “It was like a machine. I worked with someone who used five separate computers, five separate anonymous identities…to refute any facts from the internet about the Church of Scientology.”

Christman left the Church in 2000, before Wikipedia was created.

This is the fourth Scientology-related Wikicourtcase in as many years, and in addition to an outright ban on Scientology IPs, the court has barred a host of anti-Scientology editors from editing topics related to the Church.

An obituary of French composer Maurice Jarre, which appeared in the Guardian on 31 March, began and ended with quotes. It opened with: “My life has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life” – and closed with: “Music is how I will be remembered. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear.” The words, however, were not Jarre’s, they were Shane Fitzgerald’s … He added the fake quote shortly after the composer died and just as writers were working on his obituaries. The Guardian … was not the only one taken in by the hoax – the quote was recycled in several other obituaries published in print and on the web.

This makes my previous blog post “What can you trust on Wikipedia?” seem rather prescient, for I wrote just over a month ago:

Check the history of edits on a page: each Wikipedia page comes with a “history” tab that shows you who has changed what and when on the page. It’s a vital compliment to the information on the main page itself. Is the information you are relying on freshly added? What has been edited back and forth? Is the page a well settled one that has been polished for a long time? And so on.

If any of the journalists who got taken in by the hoax quote had followed this advice, they would have got the warning signs that quote might not be genuine.There’s further advice in the full blog post. It’s always possible to get fooled, even by the most impressive looking of sources, but with a few basic precautions Wikipedia can be an assistance rather than a trap waiting to catch you out.