Journalists take shelter, Wikipedia is offline

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. The Golden Latrine has taken to his Anderson shelter and advises you all to do the same, for today the apocalypse has hit. Yes, that's right, Wikipedia is down for the day.

This seemingly minor inconvenience will hit the journalistic profession with the force of a meteor strike. Forget all the other issues bedevilling the profession - the Murdochs, phone-hacking, the loss of advertising revenues, dishonest journalists - this is, as political types like to say, a game changer.

Newsrooms across the globe will come to a standstill. Puzzled journalists are, right now, sitting and scratch their heads, starring bereftly at their half-eaten sandwiches, wondering where the hell they are going to find out the GDP of Gambia, that actress's credits or an explanation of a basic scientific concept. It's almost as if they're going to have to start doing genuine research.

But there is a serious point behind Wikipedia's temporary snooze. Their 24-hour blackout has been decided upon by their community to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. Anyone trying to log on will be confronted with this:


There is a reasonably clear explanation of the two bills here on the BBC website. Essentially they are entertainment industry-backed bills designed to crack down on music and film piracy and illegal downloading. And the punishments they are looking to impose are suitable draconian: anyone found guilty of streaming copyrighted content without permission 10 or more times within six months may face up to five years in jail.

The recent case of Sheffield-based Richard O'Dwyer, the 23-year-old student threatened with extradition to the U.S. for running TV Shack, a site linking to pirated TV shows, proves that simply not being a U.S. citizen isn't going to save you. Those free South Park episodes may soon be a thing of the past.

The two bills also ban advertisers/search engines from linking to file-sharing sites, effectively rendering them invisible. So why are Wikipedia (and other internet giants like Google, Yahoo! and Facebook) so strongly against these bills? Well, you can read Wikipedia's full statement here, but it boils down to the fact that the wording of the bills is so open-ended that if passed it would be, in their words, "devastating to the free and open web". The battle for the internet has well and truly begun.

Is Wikipedia accurate?

When Wikipedia announced the blackout, there was a lot of snarky online comments along the lines of "Quick, we'd better stockpile inaccurate information". Amusing, yes, but research has continually shown that the myth of Wikipedia's inaccuracy is just that, a myth. A 2010 study showed that cancer information on Wikipedia was just as accurate (if less well-written) than on the National Cancer Institute’s peer-reviwed Physician Data Query.

EDIT: For anyone still puzzled, I've just found this nice little animation on the Guardian website which clearly explains SOPA.

Somalia is starving...but what's that on the horizon? Is it a bird? Is it an aid parcel drop? No, it's...the Daily Mail's Liz Jones

The Golden Latrine almost choked on his crunchy nut cornflakes this morning at the news that the Daily Mail is sending Liz Jones to cover the Somalia famines.

For those not in the know: Jones is a former editor of Marie Claire, now in the lucrative employ of the Daily Mail. Her deeply confessional columns about her eating disorders, her failed marriage, her facelift , and lately, the running of an animal sanctuary reveal a woman so self-obsessed that her ego has developed its own gravitational field, sucking everything else into its orbit. So self-parodic are some of her columns that I have often wondered whether if she isn't just some journalistic in-joke.

To try and search for an equivalent, sending Jones to Somalia is like sending Rod Hull to cover the House of Representatives' debate on the US debt-ceiling or, um, Lindsay Lohan to explore child-trafficking in India.

Jones announced her latest assignment in the most obnoxious way possible in a piece for the Mail entitled 'The caring professions? They just don't seem to care at all' (read it here). Starting with the blindingly obvious ("I don't scrape and scrabble at the coal face of the NHS very often" - hardly a surprise for a £200,000-a-year columinist), she rails against the injustice of her local GP refusing to give her the numerous jabs she needs to fly out to the Horn of Africa. Despite the fact she's given them no notice. And she's not registered with them, so they don't have her notes.

If there's one person who could make the Somalia famine about herself, it's Jones. As she tells the GP's receptionist: "'I mean, it's a global crisis. Millions of people are dying and you won't put yourself out to allow me to be seen by a nurse, not even a doctor, for five minutes?'" The correct response, we are told, would have been: "'Sod the protocol – everyone needs to know about this famine, Miss Jones, so I am going to speak to the GP and see what we can do.'"

Throughout the whole piece there's the reek of entitlement and a hysterical sense of self-importance. The cherry on the cake comes when Jones compare the receptionist's shocking rudeness (i.e. completely understandable inabilty to help) to the abuse at the Winterbourne View care home in Bristol, revealed by Panorama in their recent shocking expose. I am a talkative man, but sometimes even I am lost for words. (For those are interested, there's a more extensive, point-by-point demolition of Jones's piece by doctor and Sirens author Brian Kellett here).

While Jones's belief in the importance of her vocation is touching, let's be clear - Liz Jones is not a medical practioneer or an aid worker, she's a journalist. She can write what she sees, raise awareness of Somalia's suffering and, who knows, maybe inspire a few Mail readers. But the suspicion remains that for Jones, this is "misery tourism" - a "cheap holiday in other people's misery," as the Sex Pistols put it. As Ros Cowards says: "I've noticed some journalists and travellers seem to seek out places of extreme suffering almost as a way of trying to quell discomfort about their own personal dissatisfactions and unhappiness. And as we know, Jones is very, very unhappy."

To given Jones her due, she's a talented prose writer and, hell, I'm all for people spreading their journalistic wings. But I'm just not sure she's got the political savvy or the empathy needed to report on Somalia. Read this sympathetic interview with Deborah Ross, and you're left with a portrait of a woman hopelessly lost in self-absorption. In the past Jones has covered Bangladesh, but this famine deserves our best reporters, not our best paid.


Edit: Thanks to @nickrowan27 for pointing me in the direction of the sublime spoof Twitter account @LizJonesSomalia, which offers frequent updates on Jones's progress in Somalia. Sample tweet: "I'm not trying to be crass - I know there's a water shortage, but wetwipes cost about 17p a pack. I'd offer to share mine but I need them."