Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Samoans, Football, Wikipedia and Dale

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(Cross posted at ETI) It seems more and more mainstream media outlets are turning to Wikipedia as a trusted source. Take this article in today’s Washington Post, for example:

At the start of the season 30 ethnic Samoans were in NFL training camps and according to Wikipedia, the web based encyclopedia, it has been estimated that a Samoan male (either an American Samoan, or a Samoan living in the 50 United States) is 40 times more likely to play in the NFL than a non-Samoan American.

Hmmm…interesting. I think.

But isn’t that a really strange stat to have crop up in Wikipedia? So I did a little more digging. (I have no life.) That interesting little tidbit was added to Wikipedia on November 29, 2003 by someone going by the name of Dale Arnett who most recently has been working on (just today in fact) the Ric Flair entry, by the way. (For the uninitiated, he’s a professional wrestler.) And what do we know about Dale?

I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Chicagoland, both in the city of Chicago and in Berwyn, but I spent my teenage years in Paducah. After a convoluted path from my bachelor’s to my master’s degree, and an excruciating job search, I started working for Union Carbide in South Charleston, West Virginia (living in Dunbar) in 1990. I got “Dow-sized” in 2002, as I was one of the many people let go not long after Dow bought Union Carbide in 2001. After about a year working for a Dow contractor doing much the same work I had been doing, I wound up in law school.

I’m planning to take the Kentucky bar in July 2006.

Hmmm…interesting. I think.

So here’s the question. Do you think the Post reporter knows that he’s included information that is over 2.5 years old and that was contributed by a guy who has created Wikipedia articles on everything from Xenia Onatopp to Chik-fil-A to Kentucky State Highway 3005?

And the even bigger question…should WE care?

Welcome to the crazy world of socially constructed knowledge…

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Comments

  1. Christopher Harris says

    For me, the real question is whether or not the information is correct and can be independantly verified. One of the beauties of the internet (and especially Wikipedia) is that we can rise above judgement of the people behind the information.

    A very quick google for “samoan nfl” returned quite a few hits. Actually the quote from Wikipedia seems to be lifted from the first hit “The Dominican Republic of the NFL” by ESPN.

    “There are about 500,000 Samoans in the world and more than 200 play Division I football. A Samoan boy, according to estimates, is 40 times more likely to make it to the NFL than a boy from the mainland.” http://espn.go.com/gen/s/2002/0527/1387626.html

    If the naming scheme for the URL means what I think it means, then this article was apparently written in May of 2002 – a year and a half before the Wikipedia entry (indeed May 28 WAS a Tuesday in 2002).

    So actually, does the Post reporter know he has “copied” a quote from ESPN from 3 years ago by referring to a a Wikipedia entry from 2 years ago? Should we care? Should we worry that the same google search turned up the Post article from a New Zealand TV station? (http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/536641/656906)

    Dale Arnett probably should have included an attribution to one of any number of articles to back up his statement (that or done the math himself using avaiable raw data from CIA World Factbook and NFL player rosters), but that is another discussion.

    I would be very concerned if we started evaluating information based on the prior work history, their entertainment choices, or favorite eating establishments (Chik-fil-A is a Southern thing, BTW, and has very funny advertising). Seems Dale is exactly what Wikipedia is about. Someone who volunteers their time to contribute knowledge on subjects that they are interested in or have expertise in.

  2. Will Richardson says

    Well, the New Zealand link is because the article was syndicated by Reuters. The bigger question now, Chris, is did you go in and add the reference link on the post in Wikipedia??? ;0) Seems like after doing the research, somebody should!