Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 27 April 2007 at 10:19
Tags: Journalism, Libel, Wikipedia, Wikis
Press Gazette’s diarist, the shadowy Axegrinder, is becoming more web-savvy. The online version of his column is now a blog, and this week’s installment contains two items that could also have ended up here, and will be of interest to the newsroom geeks who read this blog.
UK libel law and online publication
In one post, Axegrinder notes a spat between Indy columnist Johann Hari and historian Andrew Roberts that is being played out in the US political magazine The New Republic. The dispute leaves Roberts suggesting that had Hari’s article appeared in a British magazine, he might have sued for libel.
As m’learned friend Axe rightly notes, the location of TNR is neither here nor there. Under British law, online “publication” occurs whenever – and wherever – someone reads something. The fact that Axe read about their dispute on the TNR web site while in the UK means that Hari’s screed has been “published” in the UK as far as the British courts are concerned. In fact, if you are in the UK and followed the link above, you just caused it to be published yet again.
Both TNR and Hari are, theoretically, at risk of receiving Roberts’ writs. But don’t hold your breath.
Journalist’s Wikipedia vanity
In another post, Axe pokes fun at Daily Mail columnist Petronella Wyatt, who created her own Wikipedia entry and was then horrified to discover it had been vandalised.
But Axe missed the netiquette angle: Wyatt was probably asking for her comeuppance because she had obviously violating Wikipedia etiquette.
By confessing in her column that she created her own entry, Wyatt was, in fact, boasting about breaking one of Wikipedia’s rules. Autobiographical entries and obvious self-aggrandisement are frowned upon by Wikipedians.
If you look at the entry now, you will find that it has been locked to prevent further vandalism — and is also being considered for deletion because it violates the anti-vanity rule. The matter is currently being adjudicated by expereinced Wikipedians.
Also notable is that Wyatt used the experience to criticise Wikipedia, which led one editor of her entry to add the following paragraph, which has since been deleted again:
On 23 April 2007, Ms Wyatt wrote an article in the Daily Mail about the inaccuracies and practical flaws that Wikipedia suffers from. She created her own entry containing facts about her career. After noticing that her page had been vandalised, Ms Wyatt got in touch with Wikipedia and complained. Wikipedia thereby locked her entry to prevent further vandalism. It should be noted that due to the open nature of Wikipedia, articles can suffer from occasional, or sometimes in the case of popular articles, regular bouts of vandalism, necessitating correction from other users. This can be mediated somewhat by placing articles that are frequent targets of vandalism under varying levels of protection.
Axegrinder as ‘News Sushi’
Before anyone asks, Axegrinder is one part of Press Gazette that I’m not ashamed to be repurposing in what Guardian blogs editor Kevin Anderson wonderfully calls the “news sushi” approach to newspaper blogs.
The Axe blog isn’t really a proper blog. It doesn’t really seek to join an online conversation, and only rarely links to other blogs. But it is published in Wordpress because blog technology is particularly suited to this sort of column.
Diary columns like Axe consist already consist of bite-size chunks of information, which is perfect for the blog treatment. Axegrinder’s new blog cuts the column apart into a number of individual posts. Each post is tagged with the names of the protagonists, meaning that as the blog’s archive grows, there will be a unique (and, in a deliciously evil twist, very search-friendly) page chronicling that individual’s diary-worthy peccadillos.
