Preface
My opinion on the subject of this story comes fromI living with a librarian for 40 years. My late wife not only was a reference librarian but she taught a course in how to do research at a state college located near our home. You don’t live with a librarian without become something of a stickler for accuracy in reference sources yourself. She and I published a controversial website (Cranberry Stressline) about Ocean Spray and the cranberry industry that made the front page of the Sunday NY Times business section and was written about in Forbes. She made certain all of our sources were carefully documented before I put something online.
One of the things she taught her college students was that they shouldn't rely solely on Wikipedia as a reference for their papers. She still recognized that Wikipedia was an excellent resource and for those doing in-depth papers it was best used as a starting point. She tried to encourage students to actually go to the university library, but also taught them how to use Google Scholar and LexisNexus.
Introduction
Love it or hate it, use it or not, there is no doubt that it is the most widely used reference in the world (see for example Can we trust Wikipedia? 1.4 billion people can't be wrong.)
Wikipedia has evolved to become the Encyclopedia Brittanica of the internet era. It went through a lot of growing pains in the early days after it was founded in 2001. It still isn’t perfect as “Wikipedia's Co-Founder Is Wikipedia's Most Outspoken Critic — People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum" from 2015 describes.
If you want to learn about nanoparticles or the Nanjing Massacre you can go to Wikipedia. There are few names of people who have done notable things too obscure not to have a page on Wikipedia. One measure of how well known a person is is whether they have a Wikipedia page. Two of my close childhood friends have them. Alas, while there are entries for the prominent therapists warning about Trump like John Gartner, Bandy Lee, and Lance Dodes, there isn’t one for me. If you look me up on Wikipedia this is who you find.
Wikipedia has long entries about the site itself. You can learn about the History of Wikipedia, read a general entry for Wikipedia, and even one for Criticisms of Wikipedia. All of the pages describe the criticisms leveled at it during its early days until recently. Now most critics consider it to be an excellent resource for information, for example Wired Magazine called it the last best place on the internet. It has also been criticized for having a liberal bias recently (The left-wing bias of Wikipedia — Is Wikipedia’s neutral point of view truly dead?) and going back to at least 2014 (Wikipedia Is More Biased Than Britannica, but Don’t Blame the Crowd).
So what does this have to do with Daily Kos?
If my wife had a student in her class doing a report, say for an online journalism course, ask her how to best research political websites like Daily Kos she might have told them to start with Wikipedia. If that happened today they would find the Wikipedia page for Daily Kos inadequate. That might be a good thing. To write a paper that deserved a passing grade they would have to do a lot more research.
However, for someone who is merely trying to learn more about Daily Kos the currently Wikipedia page is inadequate.
Daily Kos is the most or one of the most popular liberal websites. As such I think the Wikipedia page for it should not only be accurate and up-to-date. This is the first sentence in the Wikipedia entry for Daily Kos:
This is how Wikipedia describes a blog. Note the use of the term diary which is what community member posts used to be called:
A blog (a truncation of "weblog")[1] is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page.
Do you think Daily Kos fits the definition of a blog? I don’t. It hardly consists of a compilation of informal diaries.
This is how Wikipedia defines an internet forum:
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.[1] They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived.
Do you consider Daily Kos to be an internet forum? It has elements of a forum in the comments to the stories, but this doesn’t describe it in its totality.
Somebody, I don’t know if there is a way of determining who it is, has made recent entries. For example:
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the Kos Media received between $1 million and $2 million in federally-backed small business loans from Newtek Small Business Finance as part of the Paycheck Protection Program. The organization said it would help them retain 86 employees.[9][10]
On the bottom of the page it says
- This page was last edited on 29 December 2020, at 03:07 (UTC).
I can’t determine what this recent edit was, but it does indicate someone is trying to keep the entry up to date.
There are three references from 2020:
"The Founder Of Daily Kos Just Launched A Massive New Polling Project". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved November 25, 2020., ^ Syed, Moiz; Willis, Derek. "KOS MEDIA, LLC - Coronavirus Bailouts - ProPublica". ProPublica. Retrieved July 10, 2020. ^ James Bikales (July 6, 2020). "Here are the major media companies that received coronavirus relief loans". TheHill. Retrieved July 10, 2020.
The Wikipedia page for Daily Kos makes interesting reading for those who want to learn more about its history. That part is accurate.
I was surprised to read these historical tidbits:
In 2008, Time magazine readers named Daily Kos the second best blog.[12] In 2009, Time listed Daily Kos in its "Most Overrated Blogs" section due to the loss of its mission, fighting the "oppressive and war-crazed" Republican administration, during Democrat Barack Obama's presidency.[13] The website ran on the Scoop content management system until 2011 when it moved to its own custom content management system referred to as "DK 4.0". In 2016 and 2017, the Trump presidency brought out huge support for the blog, with over half a million in direct donations being received from their email campaigns.[14]
Daily Kos had previously partnered with Research 2000 to produce nonpartisan polling for presidential, congressional and gubernatorial races across the country. In June 2010, Daily Kos terminated the relationship after finding that the data showed statistical anomalies consistent with deliberate falsification[15] and announced its intention to sue the polling firm.[16]
On November 30, 2010, an agreement to a settlement began as lawyers for the Plaintiff filed a status report indicating that both parties were “in agreement as to the contours of a proper settlement but are still in the process of determining whether the execution of the proposed terms is feasible."[17] In May 2011, The Huffington Post reported that Research 2000 pollster Del Ali agreed to settle the lawsuit and make payments to Daily Kos.[18]
There is a large section in Wikipedia that would seem to need to be updated. For example, are all of those described in the Guest Bloggers section still doing the same jobs?
Daily Kos has obviously changed a great deal since it was created by Markos Moulitsas in 2002. The most recent iteration is a complete redesign. This generated widely read community member posts which were critical of the changes. Many commenters expressed a preference for the previous format. Some of community stories about this had hundreds of comments. I think someone should endeavor to describe these changes and the controversy it generated on the Wikipedia page.
The new version has Civiqs, Liberation League, and Prism, and a comics section. Modestly located on the bottom of the page is “From Markos Desk” which offers the founder’s opinion, kind of a one person version of a “from the editors” column in a major newspaper. There’s nothing about these changes in the Wikipedia entry.
For those community members who post their stories (aka diaries, though few remotely resemble a diary though mine did yesterday) it seems to be glaring omission that there’s no describing of the Recommended List, now the Trending Stories list and how it works, and how important having a story there is to generating a large number of readers.
Also, with a few exceptions like "Bill in Portland Maine" (Bill Harnsberger) who has done “Cheers and Jeers” since 2003, missing from the Wikipedia description is a list of the most prominent current staff writers including but not limited to Mark Sumner, Hunter, Meteor Blades, Gabe Ortiz, Joan McCarter, Marissa Higgins, Aysha Qamar, and of course cartoonists Ruben Bolling and Mark Fiore. It could be noted on Wikipedia that there are a few community members like Teacher Ken and Aldous J. Pennyfarthing who have had their posts make the Recommended, currently Trending stories, list hundreds of times.
Markos Moulitsas has a Wikipedia page about him. That page was last edited on December 4, 2020. I can;t tell what this edit was.
I am have made some updates to a few Wikipedia pages and I know how to do it. It isn't that easy. My edits have been no more than a few sentences updating their articles, and even those took me at least an hour to put in the proper format with the required appropriate footnotes. The current page for Daily Kos has 41 footnotes. An updated would probably have quite a few more. I’m not about to do edit and update the Wikipedia page for the Daily Kos entry, but I think somebody ought to do it. It would take hours but it in my opinion it would be a worthwhile endeavor.
Also, unlike posting a story here, Wikipedia entries have to be perfect and I am just not that good an expository writer. So please, if anybody actually reads this, please don't tell me that if it bothers me so much I should update it myself. It doesn't bother me that much.