In Wikipedia, Authority, and Astroturf, I made a guess about the relation between EliasAlucard, who created the Wikipedia entry on SymphonyOS, and esavard, who created the slashdot post about SymphonyOS that Rob Malda added to the front page of slashdot on June 8th.

Michael Snow has followed up on the issue, and I was wrong. Esavard did not know Elias, and was not acting on concert with him. I owe an apology to both Esavard and Ryan Quinn, the technical lead for Symphony. I apologize to you both.

The Wikipedia entry itself is more complicated. Snow notes that there is a vote as to whether to delete the SymphonyOS entry from Wikipedia, and its running strongly to leave it. This, in my view, is the right answer; the fact of a Wikipedia entry on a software project should be tied to its existence, rather than being a referendum on other aspects of the project.

Furthermore, the entry has now been edited to a much more neutral point of view, including, in particular, the deletion of the Trivia section, which was created with a single piece of trivia — that the site had been slashdotted on June 8. There were, in my view, two things wrong with that section: first, if the section really was trivial, it should not, by definition, have been included. If it was not trivial, it should have had another name, but there’s no obvious alternative section for it, since the fact of the slashdotting is unrelated to the technical merit of the effort.

Second, and more importantly, though the entry mentioned slashdot, it didn’t link to the actual slashdot thread on SymphonyOS, surely far more important than the effect slashdot traffic had on its servers. By mentioning the slashdot effect without pointing to slashdot itself, the Trivia section had the look of an advertisement.

There’s a long thread on this issue on the Talk page, which is interesting both for Elias’ declarations of autonomy w/r/t to an article he clearly feels he owns (my favorite quote: “So what if this is an advertisement campaign? What are you going to do about it? Nothing.”) and for the view it offers about how the Wikipedia community works generally, with a kind of measured deliberativeness that is quite rare in online communities.