The NYTImes discovers Urban Dictionary in the courtroom:
… Slang has always been a challenge for the courts in cases that involve vulgar or insulting language. Conventional dictionaries lag the spoken word by design. That has lawyers and judges turning to a more fluid source of definitions: Urban Dictionary, a crowdsourced collection of slang words on the Internet.
The online site, created by a college freshman in 1999, has found itself in the thick of cases involving everything from sexual harassment to armed robbery to requests for personalized license plates, as courts look to discern meaning and intent in the modern lexicon…
It can take years for slang terms to be included in traditional dictionaries, whose editors want to be certain that the words have staying power. By contrast, some new words rush into Urban Dictionary in less than a day. As a result, the site has cropped up in dozens of court cases in recent years, according to a Lexis database of federal and state cases, although the outcome rarely rests solely on a definition.
This trend is likely to accelerate, according to Greg Lastowka, a professor of law at Rutgers specializing in Internet and property law. “If it is Urban Dictionary or hire some linguistic expert to do a survey, it seems like a pretty cheap, pretty good alternative for the court,” he said…
Urban Dictionary’s move into the legal arena surprises no one more than Aaron Peckham, its founder, who has continued to run it like a homegrown business. Mr. Peckham, who is 32 and lives in San Francisco, has never taken venture capital money and still runs the entire site from his laptop. For revenue, he contracts with others to put advertising on the site and to make merchandise — like T-shirts and mugs printed with some of the site’s more interesting definitions. He has no paid staff members, though he does contract for help with things like advertising and design….
Andrew Leonard has a long narrative in Salon about “Revenge, Ego, and the Corruption of Wikipedia“:
In the wee hours of the morning of January 27, 2013, a Wikipedia editor named “Qworty” made a series of 14 separate edits to the Wikipedia page for the late writer Barry Hannah, a well-regarded Southern author with a taste for the Gothic and absurd.
Qworty cut paragraphs that included quotes from Hannah’s work. He removed 20 links to interviews, obituaries and reminiscences concerning Hannah. He cut out a list of literary prizes Hannah had won…
Taken all together, the edits strongly suggest a focused attempt to diminish Hannah’s legacy. But why? Who was Qworty and what axe did he have to grind with Hannah?
The answer to this question is on the one hand simple, almost trivial: Qworty turned out to be another author who had a long history of resenting Hannah. The late night Wikipedia edits are certainly not the first time that a writer’s ego has led to mischief. But the story is also important. Wikipedia is one of the jewels in the Internet’s crown, an amazing collective achievement, a mighty stab at realizing an awesome dream: a constantly updated repository for all human knowledge. It is created from the bottom up, a crowd-sourced labor of love by people who require no compensation for their work but also don’t need to jump through any qualifying hoops. Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Just create an account and start messing around!
Qworty’s edits undermine our faith in this great project. Qworty’s edits prove that Wikipedia’s content can be shaped by people settling grudges and acting out of spite and envy. Qworty alone, by his own account, has made 13,000 edits to Wikipedia. And Qworty, as the record will show, is not to be trusted…
BGinCHI
Is this where TNR goes to hire writers?
Contrarianism at its finest.
2liberal
death to qworty !!
Hawes
Fucking qworty. That asshole.
Hawes
How soon can we get “to qworty” into the Urban Dictionary?
To the Internets!
David in NY
Recent Facebook comment from an Assistant Federal Defender: “You know you’re old when you have to keep urbandictionary.com open in order to decipher your [client’s] wiretap conversations.”
Suffern ACE
I wonder how long before paralegals are hired to like or dislike urban dictionary definitions. “I call your attention to the most accepted definition of ‘skull fuck,’ which means “a romantic candlelit dinner for two, with Gershwin in the background a a fine chianti. Hardly a provocation, now is it?”
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I would suggest banning qworty, but that would actually be as useful as banning trolls here. On the other hand, Andrew Leonard needs to get over his “shaken our faith in Wikipedia” crap. Were someone to write crap at Slate, it would get published. At Wikipedia, it gets caught and fixed, and everyone knows about it. This is only a weakness to people like Andrew Leonard.
Punchy
Urban Dickshunary was once a reasonable and accurate source of contemporary slang. Then, a few years back, nearly every word seemed to rep a sexual connotation, even when it didnt make sense. Unless its been cleaned up, its a fuckin disaster.
Petorado
@Hawes:
Should qworty be a verb or a noun? Is this name the description of a type of internet troll, or is it the type of action certain internet trolls engage in? Either way, qworty has “asshole” written all over it.
Robert
There have been Wikipedia entries that cite my website as a reference or further resource. That’s when I knew not to trust Wikipedia any longer. The New Yorker I ain’t. I’m a loud mouth who has a way with words and an obsession with genre entertainment as high art.
MikeJ
@Punchy:
Usually coprophilic.
eemom
fwiw, mentioning Urban Dictionary in front of my kids inevitably elicits a 9 on the eyeroll scale.
IOW, just cuz lawyers use it don’t mean it’s cool. Duh.
BGinCHI
@eemom: Increase the beatings until morale improves!
You can kill more flies with sticky tongues.
I have other analogies I don’t use. Let me know.
NotMax
Open Thread?
Normally don’t go out of the way to recommend new titles for reading, but going to do so this once.
Evil Men by James Dawes. Info
“Fascinating, original, and moving… We probably won’t solve the problem of evil by thinking about it. But we certainly won’t solve it by not thinking about it—and that is a good reason to read this remarkable book.”
—Douglas Kerr, The South China Morning Post
Lengthy excerpts I’ve had offline access to thus far are both chilling and compelling.
BGinCHI
@NotMax: Is that a Rumsfeld biography?
Chapter 1: Banality
Chapter 2: More Banality
dance around in your bones
Fucking Bill O’Reilly on The Daily Show AGAIN. Jon Stewart has been so disappointing for such a long time….lately I am muting him until Colbert comes on.
P.S. B O’R thinks he is funny, He is not.
Culture of Truth
new bombshell documentary film reveals Qworty is petty internet obsessive troll JD Salinger.
Culture of Truth
@dance around in your bones: Conveniently the ball game is in OT
MattR
@dance around in your bones: Jon did nail the Apple taxes thing. It took him a while to get there, but he at the end he did point out that the reason the tax code is so complicated is because the rich keep carving themselves exemptions. And he did a pretty good job of comparing Noonan’s criticism’s of Obama with her defense of Reagan. But generally speaking, I do agree. Jon has been very hit or miss lately with far too many misses.
Suffern ACE is a Basset Hound
So thinking that Andrew Leonard didn’t just discover how Wikipedia worked last week, what could possibly interest me about the true identity of one of its editors? It’s like worrying about whether some poster here is really a sock puppet.
Terry Chay
This is weird. I joined Wikimedia (Wikipedia) last year and now see this article. (BTW, the fact that Qworty was caught shows Wikipedia working instead of its deficiencies–of which there are many).
I’d probably have something meaningful to contributed but you’d all ignore it. Given that when i worked at my last gig, Automattic (WordPress) not once did anyone take up my suggestion of contacting WordPress VIP (which would be a sweetheart hosting deal for this blog because of the way their rates work) to deal with the FYWP issues.
Note, I’m not some fly-by-night and I’ve suggested this for many years. I’ve been on here since 2004. Back then people would actually respond to my comments because there were less trolls (or more… Since back then we were all trolling john cole). :-P
Redshirt
Down with QWERTY also too!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@eemom: It’s YOU MENTIONING Urban Dictionary, not you mentioning URBAN DICTIONARY. It’s never cool coming out of a parent’s mouth, even if, in my case, you introduced some of the stuff to them.
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
It sounds like Dawes is doing for Imperial Japan what Christopher Browning did for Nazi Germany. It’s probably about time (if not past due).
dance around in your bones
@Culture of Truth:
Shit, nowadays I’d rather watch a curling match or a wife-carrying match in Norway than Jon Stewart. Oh well – here comes Colbert!
Hill Dweller
@dance around in your bones: Stewart sat there and let O’Reilly say the IRS incompetence was actually a WH plot to eliminate the Tea Party.
Why would Dems want to eliminate the Tea Party? They’ve been a political gift.
Also, too, Stewart has been milking the “scandals” for the last 6 or 7 shows. He continues to pretend they are actual scandals.
Colbert’s “scandal booth” last Monday was better than anything Stewart had done in months.
MomSense
@David in NY:
I recently had to suffer through hundreds of pages of text messages…fml
kc
@Terry Chay:
Quorty operated with impunity until that Salon article.
? Martin
Proves that Obama is worse than Hitler.
jurassicpork
Tomorrow a PA church will open up a sports camp designed to sweat the gay away and Pottersville mainstay Cyril Blubberpuss weighs in (heavily) with a story out of his family’s past.
MattR
@Hill Dweller: I really think that James O’Keefe could release a new video tomorrow morning and Jon would take it at face value and blast the Democrats on tomorrow night’s show. He used to mock the media, not jump on their bandwagons. (EDIT: And that is what I really can’t understand. He does piece after piece for years about how crappy the media is at reporting the truth in a neutral fashion and then he turns around and buys into their scandal claims without examining if there might be more to it than the MSM is covering or if the media might be framing the facts to push a desired narrative )
dance around in your bones
@MattR: Yeah, he did the Noonan thing pretty well….but that’s a low target to hit, IMHO. She’s such a fluttery-eyed ding-a-ling it’s hard for me to ever take her seriously.
@Hill Dweller: The ‘scandal booth’ on Colbert was hilarious, and oh-so-true. That’s the diff between Stewart and Colbert…..Jon Stewart strains to make some kind of point, often wildly off the mark, and Colbert effortlessly skewers his mark while being hysterically funny.
I was thinking last night – remember when Jon Stewart used to do the hand-over to Colbert? They’d do some happy talk and intro the Colbert Report? I haven’t seen that in quite some time. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, what with TDS being on mute and all.
Hill Dweller
@MattR: MSNBC decided to become FOX-lite earlier this year, and their ratings have collapsed.
If Stewart keeps this nonsense up, people are going to abandon the show.
Violet
@dance around in your bones: I’m looking forward to John Oliver hosting The Daily Show this summer when Stewart takes time off. I love John Oliver.
PeakVT
Wikipedia will always be something of a mess. That is simply part of its nature. Anyone who thinks it is 100% reliable is just ignorant.
BGinCHI
@Terry Chay: I am convinced of your genius and would like to borrow a large sum of money from you.
MattR
@dance around in your bones: Wikipedia says (without citation) the last toss was early 2011.
EDIT: And in 11/2011 a fan asked Jon about it pre show and posted that Jon said the shows taping schedules changed a bit and it disrupted Stephen’s preperations.
Cacti
Jon Stewart is the hip new David Broder. He’s been swallowing the “both sides do it” kool-aid for a couple of years now.
Mark S.
Qworrrrrrty!
Hill Dweller
@Cacti: Stewart continues to claim there are scandals without actually explaining why they are scandals. It’s exactly what the Beltway continues to do. There are “scandals”, because shut up.
dance around in your bones
@Violet: It can only be an improvement :)
@MattR: Hunh. So I’m not insane or stuck on mute. Only moderately attentive!
Cacti
@Hill Dweller:
There are scandals because they are scandalous.
They are scandalous because there are scandals.
Hope that clears everything up.
Suzanne
We got my boss an Urban Dictionary calendar because she kept saying embarrassing things in meetings, such as “I gave him my V-card” and “They have their blue balls out there”.
Suffern ACE is a Basset Hound
@Hill Dweller: it’s too bad, because if the continue on that way, the One True Channel is going to be repurposed. I’ve never been sold on this model of a “news channel” that doesn’t actually have any reporters. Just analysts. I doubt the new owners are going to make that investment. They are running a poor product that may be no more better informed than this blog.
I don’t know if its so much that they are fox lite as much as the liberal version of fox, we might want them to be a little better at their jobs.
kc
@MattR:
Yes, it seems like he’s just completely buying the media narrative. I thought he (and his staff) were … smarter than that.
Redshirt
@Cacti:
Hey, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. It’s the Congress’ job to due diligence over the Executive branch.
Yatsuno
@jurassicpork: BLOGHOOR!!!
Hill Dweller
@Suffern ACE is a Basset Hound:
MSNBC has taken a hard right turn in the last few months. Maddow and Hayes go at Obama from the left, which is credible. But the morning and afternoon shows spend most of their time mindlessly repeating Republican talking points.
A lot of people have noticed the change. Hence the ratings collapse.
Cacti
@Redshirt:
But only after quadrupling the insurance coverage on the building.
Cacti
@Hill Dweller:
This is the network that canned Phil Donahue for insufficient warmongering.
I’d say the change is just reverting back to form.
terry chay
@kc:
First to disclaim: I am not an admin on English Wikipedia, though I work for the Foundation that supports it and the other language and sister projects. I do not have intimate information about this case, nor do I work in community (I’m in engineering). I barely edit English Wikipedia so on this issue, I’m no more knowledgeable than you. :-)
I can see how you might interpret that, but I have a different reading of the same article.
On reading the article, it seems he did not “operate with impunity” but instead was involved in numerous incidents over the years to the point where even Jimmy Wales knew of his behavior. He is a troll, and certainly not the first, or even one to graduate to being among the most trusted.
In fact, it is that behavior that caused other Wikipedia editors to flag it through a 3rd party site. I believe, but do not know, that the reason they reached out to a Salon writer might be because Wikipediocracy has trouble reaching out to English Wikipedia admins due to a previous iteration of the site becoming a den for people who were blocked from English Wikipedia to grind their axes on the current admins (basically where people like Qworty go when English Wikipedia’s Administrator process finally issues a death sentence like in this case). I don’t know because the Foundation isn’t involved in these things (and certainly not me) as each wiki has their own governance and those communities nominate the stewards to handle issues that escalate beyond them. (In this case, it seems to have not reached beyond English Wikipedia).
Finally, before the article was published the writer note English ArbCom had already took preliminary action.
The final action that culminated in the block happened on the Wikipedia Administrator Notice Board happened after the article was published, but that is part of how the Wiki works. If you look at Robert Clark Young’s actual wiki page, you can see that a reference to the Salon.com article is very prominent.
In this way, Qworty being caught (albeit after 5 years of edits) shows Wikipedia working. The Salon article contributed to it, which is, I believe, how some of the disputes get expedited, especially when an editor has managed to achieve 15k+ edits before getting successfully blocked. A larger issue which the author mentions in passing is how this highlights a long-standing weakness/dispute around allowing editing Bios of living persons. Trying to crack that nut was the reason PendingChanges was written, a piece of software recently in trial on English Wikipedia.
terry chay
@BGinCHI:
Don’t you mean you’d like to give me large sum of money? ;-)
What “genius” are you referring to? Everything I’ve ever said about it is bragged about on their page, and I’ve always disclosed my relationship with WordPress when it was relevant. It’s been over a year since I’ve worked there (and I never worked on VIP), and didn’t realize that they’ve since raised their rates on VIP to a point that I don’t think it’d be doable on John’s limited budget (but it wouldn’t have hurt to ask, especially back then).
If this is your usual lame attempt to be snarky, like you have for the last three years, then my bad, carry on! I’d have thought you’d have better things to do with your time, but I guess having been without a decent night’s sleep for the last year, you can be forgiven for being more than a little short. :-)
terry chay
@kc: BTW, your interpretation* is equally valid also. See the follow-up article on Salon.com.
* I assume you mean that him operating without being blocked for years is “without impunity” points to a deficiency in Wikipedia policy. Jimmy Wales, at least, agrees with your interpretation. ;-) (I agree, that English Wikipedia’s policy of No original research puts it in a weird bind with respect to dealing with these sort of controversies, which is why I linked to it in a previous comment.)
The Other Chuck
Wikipedia is not just “a little bit of a mess”. It’s largely dominated by kooks and cranks with axes to grind and grind them they do. People like Qworty may not be the majority of editors, but the ones cut from his cloth I daresay make for the majority of edits made. There’s a whole weird “inner circle” of senior editors there that talk in insider cultish jargon that would make a scientologist blush, and boy are those folks the most dysfunctional people of all, with ongoing vendettas going back years and years that play out all across the site.
And to top it all off, there’s basically a crew of “reverters” who play wikipedia like it was a MMO, and they grind their edit counts by reverting edits. Any edit. Trolls, defacement, informative content, even spelling corrections. Gets reverted no matter what, all to bump up the edit count. Nothing is ever done. Ever complain about an editor like one of these reverters? Assuming you’re ever even heard, you’ll regret it, because you’ll be drawn into whatever political games are afoot. It’s just not worth it.
That Wikipedia has such a degree of useful content is some kind of accident that can only be in spite of its management.
Death Panel Truck
@Punchy: Most of what’s posted there consists of words and phrases that no one ever uses in real life. It reads like people just sitting around getting wasted and making up shit they think is funny. The dumb asshole who runs the site posts it all anyway, so no one really knows what’s really “urban” and what’s just bullshit.
Another Halocene Human
@Mark S.: Damnit, the original scream was funny but awesome, a pop culture high note. The new one is funny in a we’re laughing at you way. It’s not quite Vader do-no-want scream bad but good grief … it’s so stupid … so embarrassing … Shatner has been mocking this movie since before it came out and for once the envious old fart is right.
Another Halocene Human
BTW, I wish Shatner would just wake up one day and admit to everyone that
he’s bisexual
he’s extremely vain about his physical appearance like everyone in Hollywood
that two out of four, maybe three, of his marriages were marriages of convenience
and that maybe he shouldn’t have been such a jerk to the people closest to him all these years
But that will never happen
Central Planning
My favorite urban dictionary entry has been “lol theory” for quite some time. Actually, it’s the examples that I like:
There’s other good examples on the inter-tubes as well:
John Lennon ‘Give Peace A Chance, lol’
Martin Luther King ‘I have a dream, lol’
Winston Churchill ‘We will fight them on the beaches, lol’
Margaret Thatcher ‘This lady’s not for turning, lol’
Tony Blair ‘Education, Education, Education, lol’
Bob Geldof ‘Just send the &^%*ing money now, lol’
Humphrey Bogart ‘Whatever happens we’ll always have Paris, lol’ or ‘Play it again Sam, lol’
Clark Gable, ‘Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn, lol’
Person with OCD: It’s fine like that, LOL.
Film Director: The first take was perfect, LOL
Windows Vista: An unexpected error has occurred, lol
Tax Man: It turns out that we actually owe you money, LOL
Catsy
@The Other Chuck:
Cite please.
Mnemosyne
@Another Halocene Human:
I don’t know that Shatner is bisexual — he may just be Canadian. I do happen to know that another of the captains is definitely bisexual since I have a reliable eyewitness.
As far as I can tell, the breach between Shatner and Takei has a lot more to do with Shatner being an asshole in general (and particularly in the professional arena) rather than Shatner being specifically homophobic or closeted.
fuckwit
Slang is a funny thing: temporal, regional, and ephemeral.
I remember sitting in a meeting in California the 90s when a gal from the east coast in all seriousness referred to a task deadline as being “do-able”. The whole room fell apart chortling out loud.
Fred Fnord
There are worse things on Wikipedia than this.
An organization I was once affiliated with has a Wikipedia page that calls it out as a communist conspiracy that brainwashes its members, steals money from them, destroys lives, and just in general is awful in every way.
The person who created the Wikipedia page is also the only person who has ever written books on that organization. He is a fevered anti-communist anti-trade-union anti-left wing nut ball with an absolute raving hatred of many things, this organization among them. He found a right-wing nutcase publisher to publish his books, of course. But since it’s a real publisher, and not ‘self-publishing’, it is presumed by Wikipedia to be a reasonable source of information. Because hey, Wikipedia is neutral that way, right?
Because he is the only one who has written any significant books or articles about the organization, aside from the organization itself, he is the only one who is allowed to be cited on the Wikipedia page about it. Any attempts to refute any of his points are contested as ‘original content’ (if they don’t cite anything), ‘not credible sources’ (if the content is added to some other web site and then pointed to), also ‘not credible sources’ if the organization itself tries to dispute the allegations, and so on. There is literally no way to dispute this person’s findings. The best that can be done is to point to some vague local paper mentions of the organization as doing good works, which still seem to get deleted from the page regularly, generally for being too vague (which, let’s face it, they are).
So basically the wikipedia page for an organization dedicated to helping workers get a bigger voice and helping disadvantaged people learn a useful trade is basically 100% propaganda against that organization. And there’s nothing anyone can do, and if you complain about it too much you get banned from Wikipedia.