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Angela Beesley

From Wikitruth

Angela Beesley has a problem.

Luckily, her problem is not one of being Jimbo Wales. But it's still quite a problem. And even better, it's an ironic problem, the kind of irony you hear about where someone shoots themselves during a gun safety demonstration, or are crushed by falling debris while giving a tour of a building they designed to withstand earthquakes. An irony where you kind of snort at the headline and then move on to the comics pages.

But maybe you've not heard of Angela Beesley before. Let's set the ironic problem aside and address this.

1 Angela's Beeswax
2 James, get me off this crazy thing
3 If you can't stand the heat, don't run the kitchen
4 See also

[edit] Angela's Beeswax

Bzzzzzzzzz.

Angela is kind of like Jimbo Wales' anal nanny twin. She's been a part of the Wikipedian muckety-muck for a good few years now, getting involved in the Wikipedia-running Wikimedia Foundation in 2003 (serving as a board member for a while), and later co-founding the for-money organization Wikia with Jimbo in 2004. She's had the kind of skyrocketing career within the Wikiworld that would make a lot of people scratch their heads in wonder, or just gaze in dumb amazement.

The Queen Bee has buzzed about the Wikipedian hive for no short time, and make no mistake, she can occasionally out-blast Jimbo with the Wiki-bullhorn. She's given many interviews, written many speeches, and sent out a lot of press releases that paint Wikipedia and the "Wiki Concept" as the be-all end-all of online interaction. Jimbo likes the one-liners, but Angela coughs up the tomes. Speeches she's given are academic in nature, and instead of blowing out quote-chunks like "We make the Internet not suck", she paints Wikipedia as a combination magic bullet and evolutionary next step:

One question that is always asked about Wikipedia is, "can the content be trusted?" I think it can. We have a lot of review process. People say it is not peer reviewed, but in many ways it is constantly being reviewed. We’ve got things like recent changes, which show every single change that is made to the content, and people are constantly checking that. We also have the watch list feature, which allows you to watch particular articles in your area of expertise. So the articles are constantly being reviewed.

— Angela ^[1]

Wikipedia's content and workings are completely accessible. Almost everything is public other than Arbitration Committee discussions, and even then, the outcomes are public. With the Wikimedia Foundation, the situation is different. There's a worrying trend towards hiding from the public and moving discussions and decisions, and even outcomes, to private locations.

— Angela ^[2]

Very few people are truly malicious. Many conflicts can be resolved with patience and kindness alone. When everything else fails, you must be ready to stand up for the principles you believe in. Acting with fairness, consistency and openness ensures that other people will back you up.

— Angela ^[3]

Angela Beesley, in other words, is a cheerleader of the Wiki concept and the Wikipedia-related organizations, with the academic backing and careful description that Jimbo often lacks in his spastic arm-waving publicity runs. She has a weblog, even, called "Wikiangela" ( at http://www.wikiangela.com/blog ) where she talks about how fuckin' fantastic the whole "Wikipedia" thing is going.

So what's her ironic problem?

[edit] James, get me off this crazy thing

Her ironic problem is that she hates having a wikipedia entry about herself.

See, one could argue that if you're on the board of directors of an organization that exists to run Wikis, and are a co-founder of an organization that had commercial wikis, and you travel the globe giving long academic speeches about how incredible Wikis are and how we should be doing Wikis, it would be a natural case that you'd want to be described in the Wikipedia. In the software business, it's called "eating your own dogfood". If you think that having a Wikipedia is a critical part of adding to human knowledge, shouldn't you have your own information up there so people can see how great it works?

But she doesn't want that. Oh, boy, does she not want that.

In April of 2005, Angela Beesley attempted to have the Angela Beesley entry removed from Wikipedia. Yes, that's right, she nominated an article about herself to be removed. This attempt was unsuccessful, with people pointing out that, well, she's kind of helping to run Wikipedia, so she gets an article.

In October of 2005, another attempt was made to remove the Angela Beesley article, mostly because other articles about prominent Wikipedian God-Kings had been successfully nominated and deleted. This attempt, also, was unsuccessful, and Wikipedia continued to consider an article about someone running major shit on the Wikipedia/Wikimedia/Wikia collective deserved to, you know, be mentioned.

In July of 2006, Angela Beesley again attempted to have her article removed. The voting/discussion ended with no consenus reached, but what makes it so interesting is her reasoning for wanting it removed:

I'm sick of this article being trolled. It's full of lies and nonsense. My justification for making a third nomination is that my circumstances have changed significantly since the last AfDs - I have resigned from the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Given that this was previously kept on the grounds I was on that Board, there is no longer any reason for this page to be kept. This has already been deleted on the French and German Wikipedias.

—Angela ^[4]

Votes for deletion on Wikipedia are truly spinning the dial; maybe the groupthink will agree with you that George Washington isn't notable and other times it will decide that giving a listing of the number of fork-tines in the silver collection at Buckingham Palace should be a featured article. The fact that the first dozen "votes" are all in agreement that it should be deleted, even though it has been an article on Wikipedia for over a year and concerns an important historical figure within Wikipedia's administration, and who continues to function as a major advocate for Wikis and Wikipedia... well, that's par for the course.

But the fact that this advocate of all things Wiki can't stand an article about herself being on the very thing she pushes? Yes, that's a mighty dollop of irony, boys and girls. It's as tasty as it gets.

I don’t think anyone will know what a wiki is in 100 years.

—Angela ^[5]

[edit] If you can't stand the heat, don't run the kitchen

Wikipedia's dirty little secret is that it wants everybody dead.

Wait, let's rephrase.

Wikipedia's dirty little secret is that it has a lot of problems with living people who have Wikipedia entries about them, since the people, knowing themselves, go naturally bat-shit when they read all the inaccuracy, misstatements, and wild-assed guesses that populate a standard Wikipedia biographical article. This dirty little secret lays bare to the inherent problem with a project like this: it works best when the subjects being written about can't correct you.

Wikipedia is wrestling with this problem daily; people who are being written about are threatening the Wikimedia Foundation, causing the use of WP:OFFICE (instantaneous, untraceable disappearing of articles) and possibly the use of the Oversight powers (not that we have any record or log of their use) to remove things that people hate.

If you're someone who's somewhat famous but not liked, like, say the erstwhile Wikicritic Daniel Brandt, your requests to have your article removed are met with derision, lockout, and the cold shoulder. Fuck you, old man, eat your inaccurate article!

But if you're someone who's somewhat famous and curry the right favor, have the cute photo, and maybe push the right buttons in the back, you might get lucky and have your entry and the errors removed. Maybe. Depending on the wind. Sorry, ol' girl, won't happen again and all that.

Faced with eating her own dogfood, of having to see the Wiki concept she cheers and promotes used as it was designed to be used to say stuff about her, the Queen Bee has buzzed and will continue to buzz until she's able to sting her own entry out of Wikipedia.

She'll collect her wikichecks, and take her wikitrips, and give her wikispeeches, but somehow she's never gotten around to mentioning the small caveat that these projects should avoid having the words "Angela Beesley" buried in them.

Maybe she should edit that in.