Original Research

Everyone who studies the phenomenon of Wikipedia knows about Raul's Laws. Everyone who writes about Wikipedia quotes from them as if they are the authoritative commentary on how Wikipedia works, something I noticed as I read Joseph Reagle's Good Faith Collaboration. Many of the chapters in his book begin with a headnote drawn from this collection.

It is well-known because it was the first collection of observations compiled, & a number of other Wikipedians contributed their own "Laws". So one could conclude that it this collection of essays is an authoritative statement on Wikipedia.

But I consider anyone who cites "Raul's Laws" guilty of considering only one vision of Wikipedia. There are other, IMHO more insightful, personal essays. One alternative I consider the counterpoint to Raul's Laws is Antandrus' observations on Wikipedia behavior. Where Raul's Laws is full of statements added by people eager to be part of the spotlight (& yes, that comment could be applied to me), & for that reason this collection often appears flashy & superficial, I often think of Antandrus' list as quiet & profound. One goes to Raul's Laws to add a witty comment for others to see; one goes to Antandrus' list to read & wonder if anyone else has seen it.

I don't have any desire to criticize Raul's list; there are a number of valid insights there. I simply believe that Antandrus' list is too easily overlooked by people -- both pundits & Wikipedians -- who want to understand what is going on there. Often something is better explained in the latter's list than in the former's.

I am often amazed at how many essays on Wikipedia can be found in the personal spaces of many users, many yielding far more insight than those in the public "Wikipedia" name space. Wikipedians often are reluctant to put their essays in public spaces because then they will lose control over what is often a personal reflection on their own experiences. Unfortunately this means the best writing on & about Wikipedia is the hardest to find.

Geoff

Labels: wikipedia, writing

Instead of doing something productive like folding clothes or writing Wikipedia articles, I spent a slice of my free time this afternoon looking at the links in the Navibox of Essays on building Wikipedia. It links to a number of interesting essays; not "interesting" in the sense of encouraging me to be a better writer of Wikipedia articles, but "interesting" in the sense of making me wonder about the mindset of my fellow editors.

Take, for example, this passage from the essay "Wikipedia:Bare notability", concerning research from non-web sources:

Look off the web: Visiting your local library may help. But sources found on the web are more likely to be trusted than those that are not simply because they are accessible to more people. So if an off-web source is used, try to make it as detailed as possible to increase the chances of verifiability.

The first thing I thought when I read that second sentence was, "But it must be true: I read it on the Internet." In a sarcastic tone, of course.

Of course, I changed it. My version might be considered too harsh, and might be severely rewritten by the time anyone reads this, but dammit when did it become common knowledge that the resources of your local library was always a poor second to the results of a Google search?

I wish my concerns ended there. I read a few more essays, some better thought-through than this one, until I found myself looking for a specific one, which was not there: How to research and write an article for Wikipedia. Actually, after "Wikipedia:Bare notability", I'd be happy to find an essay on only how to research an article; but essays on both would be useful.

My first thought was to consult my copy of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research papers, sixth edition, and use that to fill the need. The MLA Handbook has a useful chapter at the front on how to research and write a research paper, and after all the average Wikipedia article is a research paper. But after reading the first five pages of that book I had to put that idea aside, partly because to use it as an authority I'd have to deal with the author's assumption that a good research paper will include an idea or interpretation which has not been expressed before -- which violates Wikipedia's policy on no original research -- and explaining that away would effectively negate the MLA Handbook's value as an authority. (BTW, the major reason I had to put the book aside was that I had to get my daughter Rachel to lie back down to her nap. The joys of children!)

More importantly, I believe we would not have many of the problems over content had a definition over what is an encyclopedia. Instead we have Jimmy Wales' assertion, "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." So instead of creating an encyclopedia, an introduction to a subject with clues to learn more about it, we have a website with the authoritative statement on practically every conceivable subject, which means a great many people have a vested interest in what it says. Not only topics about which people have killed and died over (like Israel and Palestine), or people have argued about for centuries (like any religious belief or creed), but even something like the aorist conjugation.

But this is an understandable oversight: in the early days of Wikipedia, everyone involved knew what an encyclopedia was, and knew what a satisfactory encyclopedia article should look like. However with the passing years the community around Wikipedia has changed, and I can't help but suspect a large number of Wikipedians have never seen an actual encyclopedia in book form. They have an unrealistic assumption of an encyclopedia, which is often far more serious or stodgy than the ones I used in high school were. So that horse has escaped the barn long before anyone could close the door.

But at the least, could someone write an essay on how to research a subject for an article? It would benefit both Wikipedia's reputation for reliability, as well as the new contributor who might not know about the resources available, both online and off. I would write that essay, but on one hand I suspect my reputation on Wikipedia has suffered greatly and on the other my own interest in the project has likewise suffered greatly.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Wikipedia, writing

Labels: encyclopedias, research, speculations, wikipedia, writing

Thanks to Jospeh Reagle (here's his blog) for pointing me to Wikipedia:Pending changes/Metrics/Preliminary Analysis. I hadn't seen it before my last post, and I appreciate the work that Howief into quantifying this.

However, my first impression of reading Howief's good-faith attempt here reinforces my suspicion, voiced here and elsewhere, that Pending Changes is something no one who supports it actually has a rational reason for adopting it. Most of his analysis is devoted to simply getting a handle on what happened, which is borne out by his statement at the beginning: "This analysis is meant to serve as a starting point to help focus the data for community discussion." No one began this test with expressed assumptions of what would happen, and now that it is over no one can say whether the test succeeded or failed -- and why.

Chris.urs-o's criticism of the analysis is very insightful, better than what I wanted to say. The one point Chris did not raise, which I'll make here, is that no data was provided for just how long did it take for a change caught by the Pending changes software to be processed. This is an important piece of information for considering just how far will pending changes scale. No matter how well this change might work, only so many editors will review and act on the edits Pending changes affects; if not enough editors participate, pending changes will break at some point.

I could ask for more analysis, but I suspect that the fix is in: love it, hate it, or just don't care, Pending changes will be foisted upon the English Wikipedia. According to this story in the latest Signpost, Jimmy Wales was asked by the Wikimedia Foundation to interpret the discussion on Pending changes. Despite the general belief that voting is not a viable resolution for disputes, Wales states that it is "clear that there’s absolutely no consensus for simply turning the system off and walking away."

As I have written, Wales is not impartial on this matter: he has advocated for Pending changes in the past. Noting the straw poll has been closed at a 65% to 35% vote in favor of Pending changes, he claims "that there’s absolutely no consensus for simply turning the system off and walking away." This is in disagreement with a far more thoughtful interpretation by Cenarium. Cenarium concluded that, despite C's own views on Pending changes, there was no consensus to keep it in place; however, this did not mean Pending changes could not be adopted in the future, rather that it was time to build on consensus and "calmly analyze the trial, the merits of PC, and discuss of possible new implementation proposals which would have to acquire consensus for adoption". But in the end, it appears when Wales is in favor of something, although over one in three people are opposed to it, he believes their opinions are irrelevant. I always thought that "consensus" was something that all participants could agree to; I guess I was wrong.

I don't mean to sound cynical in that paragraph; as I type this I actually feel closer to sadness and disappointment. I don't consider Pending changes to be something so critical to Wikipedia's survival to justify overriding the desires of such a large group of people who respectfully disagree. If it's a good thing, it will eventually be adopted; if it isn't, then we shouldn't be in a hurry to adopt it. Approaching this disagreement in this way, those who work to develop and refine policy will gain the confidence of the rest of the Wikipedia community, who would rather work on its contents than engage in the bitter, and often inconclusive, disputes over the policy. I know I would rather be able to have faith and trust in them, but despite my frequent displays of cynicism I am probably incredibly naive.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online information, wikipedia

Labels: wikipedia

Well, the English language Wikipedia I mean.

For those of you who aren't that familiar with the latest conflicts at Wikipedia -- which has now come to include a large share of active Wikipedians -- probably the most important is the deadlock over whether or not to continue a test of the "pending changes" feature.

The proposed feature is simple enough. For certain groups of editors -- those editting anonymously or with a new account -- their contributions are sent to a queue where they must first be approved before being made visible to one and all -- such as people who are simply reading Wikipedia, who make up over 90% of its users. Otherwise, the edit is deleted.

This is something that Jimmy Wales has long advocated for (see here for one example), and as a result many Wikipedians consider it a good thing. And maybe it is; I'm undecided only because after a two month test, no one has presented any factual evidence that it solved any problems. I haven't seen any in the lengthy, at times bitter, and for the moment deadlocked discussion over its adoption. But what I have seen are examples of long-existing tensions that exist over the ideals of Wikipedia, but which have not been adequately discussed. (For all of his supposed experience with Wikipedia, I haven't seen Jimmy Wales even acknowledge their existence.)

One of these tensions is presented quite clearly on Wikipedia's front page: "the encyclopedia anyone can edit". This is both the strength and the weakness of Wikipedia -- that anyone can, and does, edit its articles. The fact that something useful has resulted -- let alone a reference work which is as useful as it is -- has been pointed out so many times to become banal. When critics pointed out that allowing "anyone" to edit, this included vandals and malicious individuals, the response was to point out that bad edits were almost always promptly reverted. And one could say it was part of the price for creating an otherwise invaluable resource; after all, when dealing with experts and powerful people, one must put up with their eccentricities to benefit from them.

However, the steady trend since its inception has been to limit the meaning of "anyone" with more and more exceptions in order to improve its quality and usefulness. Some of these exceptions are quite reasonable: vandals, kooks and cranks, people who simply can't play nice with others. Others fall into a more difficult category, such as those who want to advocate for a specific political agenda or for their own economic gain. One can't do the simple thing and exclude them all because in many cases, they are the exact experts Wikipedia needs in order to be a useful reference. So Wikipedians are forced to develop essays such as Tendentious Editting or Civil POV pushing to define the problem and help each other confront it.

And then there are some policies which came about in a quick, knee-jerk reflex whose rationale have never been adequately explained, such as denying anonymous and new editors from creating articles. This came about because of the Seigenthaler incident, where an anonymous editor made a libelous allegation about John Seigenthaler which remained undetected for four months. This denial has remained mostly out of inertia: denying anonymous editors all editting rights is a perennial proposal which, although always rejected, has strong support. And if one creates an account then waits a few days, one will be able to create articles -- so no one sees this as anything more than an inconvenience for new editors. On the other hand, it is not an effective security fix: determined troublemakers need to simply create an account and wait for it to age before abusing it to wreak havoc. This change is only a speed bump, which may discourage more new editors than it justifies in dissuading vandals; no one really knows.

Now keep in mind that I'm not criticizing putting limits on just who edits; all of us want Wikipedia to be as accurate and useful as possible. My point is that there is a tension here, between allowing anyone to edit and creating reliable content, which fails to be considered in these decisions. And when I tried to participate in the discussion on whether to continue this test, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that no one had provided the needed information to show whether this test actually improved content or not. Instead a lot of anecdotes, first impressions and opinions were being tossed around. I don't know whether to be discouraged or just sad at this.

Before I continue, I'd like to also point out that I'm not saying that these tensions are not a weakness; they are simply a fact of Wikipedia's nature. Further, by identifying the existence of these tensions I am not consciously forcing a Hegelian dialectic upon Wikipedian dynamics; rather, I am picturing a statics diagram with opposing forces in an equilibrium. In other words, this is a situation where modifying one force in the tension without sufficient care or information can destroy the existing equilibrium and lead to everything falling apart.

A second tension illustrated in this debate is an old one: the clued versuses the clueless. This tension has existed either explicitly or implicitly since practically the beginning of Wikipedia. Larry Sanger's notorious emphasis on credentials was simply one extreme version of this tendency. Most Wikipedians, whether they are professional experts, serious amateurs, or just individuals with a desire for learning, tend to be elitists; we spent our spare time reading or tinkering in order to understand something better, while everyone else was watching television, playing games, or otherwise frivolously occupied. And we often did this both at our own monetary expense, and at the derision of our peers. So, yes, Wikipedians can be elitist in how they respond to new editors; it's an assumption experienced editors often find themselves fighting against.

In this conflict, over whether to turn this experiment into a full-scale adoption, I see this tension playing out on several levels. One level is the change itself: that new and unregistered editors are somehow less clued than the established ones. While a reasonable assumption, it inadvertently insults those new editors who are knowledgeable, forcing them to run a gauntlet to make even trivial changes of spelling or punctuation. But another, and more serious, level can be seen in how the two camps are discussing this proposal: many of the participants seem from their tone to be one step away from responding to their opposite number with something along the lines of "well, if you were smart and actually knew what was going on, the solution would be obvious to you and you'd agree with me."

And, in my humble opinion, I believe that this elitism is more prevalent on the side which wants to adopt this change and make "Pending changes" permanent.

The problem for anyone not invested heavily in this discussion -- like me -- is that I don't see any proof that this will fix any of the problems it is supposed to fix. No one has provided the evidence showing not only that it will solve the problem of incorrect information being inserted into articles, but to what degree. (This feature can be subverted, some times rather simply. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.) And then there is the trade-off of discouraging new editors from further contributions: one of the enticements that is often mentioned by new users is the thrill of seeing one's edit accepted for all to see.

There is the advantage that some articles no longer need to be indefinitely semi-protected or fully protected -- but no one has provided evidence whether applying "Pending changes" to certain contentious articles will work better in protecting content than protecting those articles. However, instead of providing a comparison between these two approaches, those for adopting "Pending changes" simply assert that it is the best approach, and that it should be adopted immediately.

I am all for any change which improves Wikipedia's content, but Wikipedia has grown so large and so complex that I doubt anyone understands how it works comprehensively any more. I used to criticize Jimmy Wales because in many of his responses to its problems it was clear he no longer understood either the community or its dynamics; only those in constant interaction with the community, with editting articles and debating policy would have any chance of knowing. He had been out of touch with the day-to-day activities of Wikipedia for years now. More recently, despite the fact I participate in some way daily on Wikipedia, I've realized that I have grown out of touch. And it is clear that many other core members are too, for people will assume the concensus around a given article or discussion page is identical to its state when they last viewed it, when it may have changed radically in a few months or even weeks.

And here is yet another tension present in Wikipedia: between its constant changing and the need to manage that evolution. Its increasing rate of change, most of the time but not always for the better, has left practically all of its members behind and out of touch. There are no more "clued" Wikipedians -- assuming they existed in the first place. Some may see this as a good thing because it is this uncontrolled evolution which is responsible for Wikipedia's success; but if this true, then why does Wales, a philosophical libertarian, feel compelled to intervene when there is a problem? Wikipedia needs some management, and for management to be successful one needs information.

I like to think that the dynamics of Wikipedia can be controlled, through the same approach which existed in the beginning, through open discussion and building consensuses. It through this discussion and consensus-building that information is shared. The problem is that often, to arrive at a timely decision shortcuts needed to be made. Yes, one last tension that exists in Wikipedia! (I guess now that I've seen a few structural tensions The old shortcuts, however, no longer work; we need to either find and create new ones, or accept the need to laboriously build consensuses at every new change. Because the one thing that will kill Wikipedia is have a single person who makes all of the decisions; Wikipedia has flourished because of its "out of control" nature, not despite it.

Geoff

Labels: wikipedia

The liberal arts is a struggle. It is the unending, yet inevitably unsuccessful, rearguard struggle against ignorance and oblivion. Every day new people are born, who eventually learn to talk, to read, to think. Unless we share with them our experiences, our wisdom & histories, they will never know them. But we cannot share all of these with those who come after us, so every day as someone dies, another battle is lost.

That is why I tell myself I contribute to Wikipedia.

It is one way to transfer what has been preserved in print into the electronic medium, where hopefully this material will continue to survive, & be found & used by those who are not yet alive. However, not all of this material will make the transition; the majority of what has been written has not made the jump into print, & the majority of what has been said, let alone experienced, has likewise failed to make the jump into a more permanent form.

So the best we can do is to keep the number of defeats to a manageable number, & hope that those who are not yet alive will join in this unending, demoralizing rearguard struggle. For if we concede this struggle, the result will be worse than the current status.

Geoff

Labels: speculations, wikipedia, writing

I left a comment on the Talk page to Wikipedia:Don't Feed the Divas, which expresses something that I've been trying to say in a way that didn't sound to me as if I were simply whining. I don't know how many people read that page, so I thought I would reprint it here -- in case anyone is still monitoring my blog.

Geoff

Reading this essay, I wondered if it applied to me; after all, a few months back I grew angry over how I was being treated, threw a fit & went on a Wikibreak. However considering my experience carefully, I saw that it actually didn't. First, anyone who has contributed to Wikipedia for more than a few months will agree that there are some unpleasant people here that make the experience unpleasant: cranks & ruleswankers, for example. Then there is the matter that the most active Wikipedian remains a stranger to the vast majority of other active contributors: we have little or no ability to build up an informal reputation here, even as far as to alert our peers that one is not just another newbie. As a result, as much as any of us -- okay, as much as I would like to receive lots of praise & validation that I'm an important member of Wikipedia, most of the time I'm by far happier if the rest of you just leave me alone to work on my own little corner. I don't want any praise, just a reasonable amount of civility & the assumptoin that I usually know what I'm doing.

Next, my motivations didn't quite match those described in this essay. I had decided to leave for a while first -- yes, in part to see if anyone noticed, but also because I was growing angry with certain users & knew that if I did take a break I might do something I would later regret. But no one noticed; we all think we're more important than we really are & it sucks when we learn the truth. I was about to accept this humbling discovery & move on with my life when, glancing thru the usual places in an admittedly self-centered quest for validation, I found Yet Another thread about a certain borderline contributor. Now that ticked me off & I threw a tantrum, which got me attention, sadly. And I still wonder why the only way I could get any attention was by being unreasonable.

Lastly, I have been troubled by a phenomenon of Wikipedia which has continued for a long time, several years in fact: the steady loss of experienced members. Almost all of the people who made Wikipedia work when I started here back in late 2002 have gone, & I wonder why that is. These people are our institutional history, the ones with experience in the ways of Wikipedia who can prevent us from repeating mistakes. Most of them have gone & the few who haven't operate under the radar, more interested in being left alone to edit articles than to share their experience with newer Wikipedians. It's as if being a Wikipedian means you contribute until you eventually burn out, then either blow up like a supernova or simply fade away like a dimming white dwarf. Neither is a worthy ending for so many altruistic contributions to an important project.

Technocrati tags: online information, wikipedia

Labels: blogging, wikipedia, writing

A couple of weeks ago there was a thread in the Foundation-l list that started with an announcement about the Wikimedia Foundation 2008/2009 annual plan, then led to this comment:

My reaction is motivated by your comment that "it is GOOD when there is some conservative bookkeeping", which I disagree with. Conservative bookkeeping shouldn't be the goal. Rather, we want effective bookkeeping that includes planned contingency funds but is on target more often than not. It is too early to say whether the WMF will ultimately have a good track record, but I would discourage a policy of intentionally overstating likely spending. Being conservative, with the intent of being consistently underbudget, would be a bad thing. It would imply that one is holding too many resources back and misrepresenting your needs to the donor community.

In short, The Foundation has more money than they know what to spend it on -- which is a good place for a non-profit to be at.

So what should the Foundation spend this windfall on? I won't repeat some of the suggestions offered in that thread, I'll just point out that that the discussion never touched on what should be the primary aim: to support the communities which are creating the content that makes the Wikimedia projects so useful. Wikipedia would not be one of the top ten websites (according to the opinion of some experts) if most of the articles were not so useful -- which are written by communities of volunteers. Reading this thread, I can't help but wonder if their vital role is taken for granted by the Foundation.

I think that this attitude -- which assumes that these volunteers will continue to come and donate their time and efforts without any effort from the Foundation -- is what is known as "crowd sourcing." It's an attitude that corrodes communities. Especially since every Wikimedia project is built on a very brittle foundation: tens of thousands of volunteers, who could decide at any moment to stop contributing and find something else to do with their time.

So how can the Foundation support the communities? I have a number of ideas, but an important first step would be for the Foundation to ask the volunteers. I am only one person, with a limited although extensive, experience on Wikipedia: there are a lot of volunteers who have had a different experience with Wikipedia -- or their own Wikimedia projects. I am a little surprised that no one at the Foundation, once the latest batch of generous donations came in, thought of doing this very thing. It can't be all that hard: set up a wiki, send out an announcement to the active members with a known email address, & watch what happens. Yes, there will be flame wars & vandalism -- but that's a problem most of the projects already are coping with, & might even give the staff at the Foundation another idea of what is needed.

As for my ideas:

1. Help wikimedians gain access to information sources. Although there's a lot of information on the Internet, there's a significant chunk which is behind a paywall or restricted to "serious"
   researchers. Why isn't the Foundation negotiating with groups like JSTOR and Springer to gain access for Wikimedians? A simple way to do this would be to negotiate with these groups to provide this access to a certain set of Wikimedians -- call them scholars -- then based on need and excellence of work, make certain Wikimedians scholars for a limited period of time, say six months.
   
2. Actually, access to information sources extend beyond sources like these: even in the First World, there are people without access to public libraries. I had this brought to my attention recently in a discussion with another Wikipedian over access to sources: when I suggested that he look into Inter-Library Loan services at his local library, he replied that his local public had been closed a year ago, and he was hoping that conditions would permit to be reopened soon. I suspect that his situation is not unique -- yet one would not think this from the usual pronouncements from the Foundation, which are far more likely to talk about that idealized child in Africa.
   
3. Here is one idea that makes a lot of sense to me -- yet there might not be any need for it: a mailling list or web forum for the discussion and announcement of content sources. I did not find many of the online resources I have used to write articles about Ethiopia; rather, other Wikipedians with a shared interest in Ethiopia told me about them. However, a current attempt to meet this need -- Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange -- is amazingly underused. I have listed myself there for years as willing to provide access to some of the more useful works in my personal library, yet have never had anyone take me up on this offer. I hope the neglect of this resource is due to ignorance, not because that is how Wikipedians work.
   
4. Promoting the creation or identification of images with free images. One of the nastiest conflicts on the English Wikipedia has been over the use of Fair Use images. Ignoring the ideological arguments, I think it is undeniable to say that there would be a significantly lower use of images under the legal concept of fair use if Wikimedians could find materials in the public domain. However as far as I can determine, there is no organized program to identify and locate these materials; it's all volunteer-driven, with little legal or archival guidance, and the results show this. Faced with the choice of spending countless hours in a possibly unsuccessful search for a public domain or free image, or use an available proprietary image and come up with a fair use rationale, I would tend to do the latter. Writing readable and readable prose is hard enough to do alone.
   
5. Providing resources to fight cyberstalking and online harassment. The case of David Shankbone is not unique: productive editors and Admins are constantly driven off of Wikipedia for simply disagreeing with someone pushing an agenda. Usually the matter is laughably trivial: in Shankbone's case, it was over a phrase in an article about a male porn star. So far, the Foundation's response is to ignore it. Although this matches well the lassez-faire approach the Foundation takes towards the projects, over the long run it is going to harm the quality of the content: the kooks are already using this as a weapon to drive responsible editors from the projects and gain more control over their favored subjects. I believe this problem is more important to the Foundation than hiring a permanent
   
6. Grants or other subsidies to individual Wikipedians. I've thought for a long time about being paid for my work on Wikipedia, and although the idea at first seems to be attractive I believe that it can easily be a bad thing. Simply stated, unless a writer produces a quality article (one of those rated "Good", "A-class", or "Featured") the person or company paying is not getting their full value for their money. Who wants that kind of pressure researching and writing an article? On the other hand, there is a crying need for experienced Admins to put in full-time presences on Wikipedia, not the current part-time, low level most currently do. If the Foundation had a program to hire experienced Admins to act as peace-makers over certain contentious topics (such as ethnic-based ones), it would improve the environment not only at these articles but in general. Many good editors stay clear of these articles because of this hostility, while other editors use the incivility manifested there as a model for how to get their way in other articles.
   

I'm sure other volunteers in the Wikimedian projects could come up with their own lists of worthwhile projects. However, I'm not sanguine about any of these being implemented: few of the people currently in the Foundation have much experience with how the projects actually work, and fewer seem interested in doing more than "spreading the gospel" about how wonderful Wikipedia is. They'd rather sit on this opportunity to fix problems in the communities.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, Wikimedia Foundation, wikipedia

Labels: free culture, wikimedia, wikipedia

Check out WikiSpeak for an example of how the Wikipedia community sees itself.

And if you can find an article that the picture of Susan and Angela clearly fits, you may be awarded a Barnstar. Or not. In any case, you will definitely receive the admiration of a specific group of Wikipedians.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, wikipedia

Labels: free culture, wikipedia

Take a look a look at this exchange on Conservapedia, which calls itself "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia". In short, Andrew Schlafy doubts the findings of a published, peer-reviewed article which presents strong evidence of evolution in bacteria, and decides the best way to question these findings is demand the data the scientist based this article on.

Nothing wrong with a bit of skepticism; by questioning what we are told we come to knowledge. However from this exchange, it appears that Schlafy thinks the scientific method works like tagging statements on Wikipedia articles with {{fact}} or {{verification needed}}: if a statement appears to be questionable, ask for sources. He doesn't realize that dealing with experts in the Real World involves a different approach. Schlafy's correspondent, who I doubt is familiar with Wikipedia's conventions, provides him with an object lesson about how to handle experts -- a lesson Schlafy appears to have failed.

When other Conservapedia editors try to explain to Schlafy just why his approach doesn't work, Schlafy persists in his ignorance. Or maybe this is just one of those parodies that are slipped into Conservapedia, to see if anyone notices; I understand it can sometimes be hard to tell.

We may not be kinder to the experts who donate their time and knowledge at Wikipedia, but I like to think that the average Wikipedian knows to stop arguing when she or he has lost the argument.

If the link above is dead, try this mirror of the exchange. Fair warning: I have commented on this over at Daily Kos, which is where I learned about this.

Geoff


Technocrati tags: Conservapedia, Evolution, online communities, wikipedia

Labels: speculations, wikipedia

I just saw this bit of news: within minutes of newsman Tim Russert's death last week of a sudden heart attack, one of the first things someone at the scene did was...update his article on Wikipedia.

Silly me. I've been contributing to Wikipedia for getting close to six years now, and I figure my first reaction would be to dial 911 or start administering first aid.

Good to know that not everyone who worked with Russert was in such awe of the man that they decided not to wait just a little longer until his family was informed, before being the first to update his Wikipedia article, the new standard of knowledge about everything. If a media professional isn't interested in showing some respect to the family of the recently dead, then why should the folks of the English language Wikipedia bother about the ideals of WP:BLP?

Sorry if I'm sounding a bit off-the-wall; it's hard to be effectively sarcastic when one's mind is still reeling over how a professional would do something truly tasteless and insensitive. But I hope this example of stupidity in the "Real World" shows that when an otherwise well-meaning Wikipedian regular makes a mistake in contributing to an article about a living person, it's not the end of the world. Although it's clear to me now where some of these tactless ideas come from -- outside the Wikipedia bubble.

Geoff

Technorati tags: Corporate media, online communities, Tim Russert, wikipedia

Labels: speculations, wikipedia

I just stumbled across this post about one user's frustration with Wikipedia's increasingly user-unfriendly ways. This case is twice as bad because I happen to know Bart Massey, a professor of computer science at Portland State, has been an advocate of Wikipedia in the past. I gave a presentation on Wikipedia and its culture to one of his classes back in 2005.

To quote part of the response I left him, "Maybe the time has come to simply drop the 'anybody can edit' part from the motto, much as the day once came when Linus no longer accepted patches from just anyone."

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Portland Tech, wikipedia, writing

Labels: wikipedia

Maybe you don't read ValleyWag or Danny Wool's new blog, so you haven't heard about Jimmy Wales and Rachel Marsden. Truth be told, I didn't even know that he had separated from his wife -- but then as far as I know, he's unaware that I have a new woman in my life. And so far, only a small number of serious Wikipedians appear to consider it worth their notice: the folks on WikiEN-l haven't spoken a word about this news, for example.

And as Danny Wool admits, Wales' sexual practices really aren't that important: since he is something of a celebrity, of course he's going have a number of women (or men, if he's interested) want him. Even my nieces in their teens and college years admit I'm sorta cool, despite being fifty and balding, because I've contributed to Wikipedia. And if the drama around this news item proceeds in the usual fashion, people will read as far as the fact that he had an affair with Marsden and either accuse him of being a scumbag -- or defend him as blameless -- on other other grounds. Which would mean that the most important item will be overlooked. (Which is not Marsden's problematic relationship with men.)

As Danny posted, details are emerging which affect "the Foundation's cash reserves, which are derived from donations." Danny continues:

You see, Jimbeau was certainly not frugal in his spending on his endless trips abroad, but when it came to handing in receipts, he could be somewhat careless. At one point he owed the Foundation some $30,000 in receipts, and this while we were preparing for the audit. Not a bad sum, considering that many of those trips had fat honoraria, which Jimbeau kept for himself. (Florence will surely remember his explanation for one of these: "I don’t make any money, and my wife needs a washing machine." Her response was wonderful: "A gold-plated washing machine?")

So Jimbeau cancelled an upcoming trip to Italy, Serbia, and Croatia, and got to work finding receipts. I helped process them. Subway ticket in Moscow: $0.50. Massage parlor in Moscow: priceless. Some were accepted; others were not, like the $650 spent on two bottles of wine during a dinner for four at Bern's — I remember that one because he submitted it twice, once with the tip scratched out.

Pointedly, Danny asks "I wonder if the students who gave up their lunch money to donate to Wikipedia would have approved of that expense." Wales is a smart guy; why didn't he ask the same question before spending the money -- or at least before expecting the Foundation to reimburse him?

I'm not stirring the Wikipedia drama pot here. A lot of what keeps Wikipedia going -- not only the altruistic donation of money, but labor -- depends on how the project is perceived. A lot of people, both within and out, believe this is done as a selfless labor of love. So when Wales suggested that Wikipedia consider advertising as a possible source of income, almost the entire Spanish language Wikipedia bolted, and only in the last year was the damage from that fork fully repaired. The story for years has been that Wales travels the world to speak to people on the cheap, flying coach and sleeping on couches; now to find that generous checks for speaking engagements have gone to a decadent life style instead of helping the vision flourish can only create doubt.

Even those of us with the most faith in the vision of Wikimedia -- unhindered access to useful information for everyone -- should not be taken for granted. As a personal example, I fully intended in the last donation drive to contribute some money, but when the primary solicitation for money emphasized how the funds could be used to help people in Africa, I lost my interest: if I wanted to help people in Africa, there are at least a hundred non-profits already doing just that, to whom I could send my money to them and know it had more of a positive effect. However, there is only one Wikimedia, which is currently doing the best job of putting useful information into free access on the Internet. I'm writing content for Wikipedia so that my daughter, her future friends, and their children can use without having to pay money to some corporation that treats facts as part of its manorial customs. And I suspect that there is a core of people who do what I do for the same reasons.

So what should followers do when they question their faith in their leader? One response is to continue to work harder in their trust of the leader, which some of us have been doing. I have no problem with paying the Foundation staff the salaries they have been receiving -- for the most part. As Ward Cunningham once observed many months ago, talking about a recent mention of the Wikimedia Foundation in the news, the chronic friction between the people in the Foundation is because they are overworked, underpaid, understaffed -- and very concerned about the success of their vision. I want to believe that they deserve at least as much as they are paid; and if they don't, they shouldn't be working there.

Another response is to embrace the vision: continue to create content for the Internet that does not have a surcharge to access. So can we continue to use the Wikimedia projects to achieve this? Or will using Wikipedia continue to enable someone to live la dolca vita?

Geoff

Technorati tags: Free culture, Jimmy Wales, libertarianism, online communities, Rachel Marsden, wikipedia

Labels: free culture, speculations, wikipedia

Pete Forsyth posted the well-deserved rant at a local historical society to the Portland Wiki-Wednesday list:

Folks,

Today's Oregonian carried a story about a joint project, http://oregonencyclopedia.org , by the Oregon Historical Society and the Portland State University History Department. In short, they're preparing the site for the state's 2009 sesquicentennial celebration, and soliciting $1 to 2 million to fund the project.

http://www.oregonlive.com/living/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/living/1202865909212180.xml&coll=7

Unfortunately, OHS presented their project in contrast with Wikipedia, in terms that are both unflattering and ill-informed.

In the last week, Wikiproject Oregon got the Oregon Portal, an introduction to Wikipedia's Oregon-related content, to "Featured Portal" status, joining only 98 other portals in the world. Last month, the article on the Oregon State Capitol was featured on the front page of Wikipedia, drawing over 22,000 visitors in a single day. But our proudest accomplishment is the collegial environment we're building, in which diverse Oregonians have collaborated to shed light on innumerable interesting bits of Oregon history. Even including a couple significant corrections to the historical record. All this has been accomplished without a single financial donation (although Wikipedia as a whole does solicit donations worldwide.)

Please check out related discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Oregon#Dissed_by_the_OHS!

We will be working up a press release of our own, and hope to generate some press coverage for our project.

I am also considering buying a few domain names, such as oregonencyclopedia.com or oregonwiki.org, and having them point to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Oregon

As Aboutmovies noted in the discussion on Wikipedia, "I guess having their site up for a few months wasn't working (what 20 entries) so they had to issue a press release. Though I fail to see much of a difference. They want volunteer writers, we have volunteer writers. They want reliable, we want reliable. They just have access to a crap load of good pictures. Otherwise I'm not impressed. Looks like Oregon History Project II, wikistyle."

Sheesh, at least Larry Singer has a reason to be pick on Wikipedia. These folks could have played it smart, put the material under a free license, used the articles in Wikipedia as a starting point and improved them, then encouraged Wikipedia to reuse their content to fix our shortcomings. No, they decided to offend the largest body of the volunteers they need, then start saying that they need money -- and put their content under a restrictive license.

With diplomatic smarts like that, I bet you all that in 12 months the site will be dead.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Oregon Historical Society, Oregon History, Portland Tech, wikipedia

Labels: portland media, portland tech, wikipedia

I've been busy with many things that keep me away from my computer, as well as this blog, so I'm way behind in updating anyone who is still reading. But let me provide a paragraph or two on the most important things.

1. At the age of fifty, I've become a father for the first time. Which is the primary reason why I haven't written any new posts. We adopted Rachel Kendra Claire, to give her the name we selected; her birth mother named her Rachel Lynn. She was born Friday at 5:02 am; we got to take her home Sunday afternoon, and I took the next three days off work to be with my girls. I plan on taking a month off to help in the child-raising when Yvette's stock of vacation time has run out.

To anticipate the next question, you can find pictures of her at burling.myphotoalbum.com. And one of those pictures leads to the next item.

2. First impressions on John Broughton's book, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. My review copy arrived Monday, and in the time between changing diapers, feeding Rachel et cetera, I managed to glance through the first two hundred pages. Although I have some criticisms of the book, overall it is a solid and comprehensive look at not only the technology one uses to edit Wikipedia, but also a levelheaded discussion of the community and how to work with it. Not only would newcomers benefit from reading it, but I believe that veterans like me would be served by keeping it nearby to help with the numerous policies, fora and nifty software tools of Wikipedia.

3. I became a member of the Working Group on ethnic and cultural edit wars. One of the chronic problems of Wikipedia has been to handle the nationalistic rivalries that arise from having both an encyclopedia that is open to all and from following the Neutral Point of View policy. One of my other members is Milos Rancic, with whom I have had many thoughtful discussions on this issue, and I look forward to seeing his input on many more. (A recent example is his post on art and ethnic strife.)

One of my hopes, besides reaching out to some of the members of WikiProject Africa, is to post a number of my position papers here, in hope of attracting more input -- or perhaps to explain some of the Working Group's ideals.

Last Wednesday was WikiWednesday, which brings me to my last two points:

4. Pete Forsyth's vision of WikiGovernment. He presented this vision of using Wiki technology to improve popular representation Wednesday night, and although there are many weaknesses, I stand by the first comment I made that night: almost any problem one could envision for this project has been encountered by Wikipedia. In many cases these problems were handled successfully, and in many cases they were handled poorly -- yet studying what Wikipedia did would be the first step to address the problem when it appears in Pete's project.

5. A new map of the World Wide Web Joe Cohen brought a schematic map created by Information Architects, showing the most important Web sites, and based on the Tokyo subway map. Maps always attract my attention, but I could not take mine off of this one. (A more recent one can be seen here).

Geoff

Technocrati tags: John Broughton, online communities, O'Reilly, Portland Tech, wikipedia

Labels: free culture, personal, portland tech, wikipedia, writing

My friend Phil sent me this statement by the founder of PlentyOfFish.com; it came from his welcoming message when he signed up with that website. (This has also been reprinted over at Dating with Children. (BTW, Phil's a responsible, warm and available guy, ladies, so I'll be happy to introduce you to him.) Parts (which I have italicized) are worth considering in the continuous debate over whether Wikipedia ought to accept advertising.

Geoff

My name is Markus and I created plentyoffish.com because I was tired of seeing faceless corporations prey on people looking for love. Now a few years later Plentyoffish is the only major free site around and now happens to be the largest dating site in the english speaking world. Unlike paid dating sites, which have 500 to 800 employees whose jobs are to figure out how to get more of your money, this site is run by me myself and I. There are no employees.

This site is my pet project and runs far differently than a paid site.

1. If you are a jerk, are mean to other users, upload nude images, do not fill out your profile correctly etc you will be deleted and banned.

2. Over a million people use this site per day and I don't type very fast so please don’t get mad if it takes a while to respond to your inquiries :)

3. Cut and paste messages are blocked, be original.

4. Paid sites go out of business if you find what you are looking for quickly. This is because they have to be able to pay for all that mass advertising on TV. For a free site like this to get big we have to give you exactly what you are looking for so we get big word of mouth going.

Technocrati tags: advertising, online communities, revenue sources, Web 2.0, wikipedia

Labels: free culture, wikipedia

It's a familiar story, maybe bordering a little on urban legend: parents go out of town for the weekend, leaving their teenage son at home. Free of parential oversight, he throws a party and invites everyone he knows and more, and trashes the house. Then the parents come home.

In essence, this is why the case of Corey Delaney is notable, and worth a mention in Wikipedia. What many 15-year-old boys talk about doing, what their parents fear they might do, and what has become the plot of countless movies and television episodes, Delaney did. And it was a blow-out of a party: according to one source, this young Australian threw a party that attracted as many as 500 people, and required a platoon of police, supported by dogs and a helicopter to break it up. For a while, he was on the run from not only the authorities, who wanted to serve him with a bill for the damages, but an even more intimidating nemesis: his parents.

When I was his age, over here in the US, my wildest dream was getting my hands on a six-pack of beer and a cute girl to drink it with. As irresponsible as it is to say this, part of me admires him -- even though he looks like an ersatz pimp in his oversized sunglasses and unbuttoned shirt.

Yes, someone created an article about him in Wikipedia. And yes, the article was deleted, someone insisted that the discussion for deletion should be hidden (after all, Delaney is a minor), and the deletion argument continued to deletion review. (For those not in the know about Wikipedia culture, this is a process that, in some ways, is more like asking your dad for something after your mother has said no than appealing a judge's decision to a higher court.)

I didn't get involved in this argument, in part because I discovered it long after the battlelines had hardened and it was clear that the article would stay gone, but also in part because the battlelines over this notable event had been drawn far differently than they should have been. What is notable about this incident is not Corey Delaney himself -- but the wild party itself. In my, perhaps twisted, opinion the story would have been just as notable had this party been thrown by Delaney's best friend -- or the nerdiest guy in their high school class. However when people heard about this incident, their response was to create a new article about Delaney -- who might change his ways, and decide not to continue the path of being famous because he's well-known, and instead become something less notable like a fireman, an investment fund manager, a Microsoft employee, or a Wikipedia editor.

Instead, this was an incident that should have been added to an existing article. There, the entire matter could have been covered in a few sentences, properly sourced, handled and forgotten. (Maybe I'll make that very edit in a few months -- if I remember to.) These kinds of wild, teenager-created parties do happen; I remember reading how these kinds of parties were a chronic nuisence in the Hamburg, Germany area in a German newsmagazine. Further, many years from now when someone, who remembers that this incident did make the news, and wants to now more, the first place she or he will start looking will not be under this kid's name, but under something more generic, like "party".

But there's a more troubling problem here than just a fight over whether we should have an article. It is an amazing lack of imagination, a quality which continues to grow. In some ways, our choice of new articles -- and their treatment -- on Wikipedia betrays a very conservative approach to possible topics. Instead of organizing information in new and intellectually stimulating ways, Wikipedians are instead modeling their approach in the ways most familiar and accessible to them. Jimbo Wales made a call over a year ago to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles; for many, this apparently means making Wikipedia more like a circa-1955 version of Encyclopedia Britannica than the Encyclopedia Britannica!

Not to say that I have surpassed this race towards mediocrity: almost all of the new articles I have recently created are about settlements -- villages and towns -- in Ethiopia. One could say that I'm not writing an encyclopedia, but a gazetteer; I have the notes for writing an account about a religious dispute of the Ethiopian church, a subject I doubt exists anywhere else online or in print. And writing that article and making it available for free to everyone, would doubtlessly encourage someone who is an expert -- in other words, someone who knows something about the subject -- to write a better account.

The last is just a thought I have when I wonder what I should be working on for Wikipedia.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Corey Delaney, Free culture, Wikipedia, Writing,

Labels: free culture, speculations, wikipedia, writing

The new forum WikBack, where a number of Wikipedia/Wikimedia regulars are meeting, so far has proven to have a very favorable message-to-noise ratio. One of the jems here is UninvitedCompany's post on the proprietary stranglehold on sheet music, which I quote in total below. (Thread here)

Geoff

One of the last frontiers of the open content movement is sheet music, that is, the written form of music that is part of the western musical tradition from roughly the 15th century to today.

Musicians and musicologists have long been the captive of specialized publishing houses who produce sheet music. Initially, that was because of the difficult and specialized skill required to prepare musical works for printing. In current times, proliferation of open content is hindered mainly by the relatively small audience (most people cannot read music) and the difficulty of transcribing music into a grammar which software music typesetting programs can read.

The most successful project still operating is Mutopia, which has a small (1000 or so items), fragmented library of pieces hand-typeset from public domain scores using the Lilypond software, which is open source.

Project Gutenberg, primarily a text-based project, includes a handful of scores in its collection. Progress there is limited by the lack of support for music notation in the Distributed Proofreaders project that serves as the source for nearly all new PG material.

Until recently, a project that aimed to collect and organize high-resolution scans of public-domain sheet music (http://imslp.org) was shut down after receiving copyright complaints from a publisher. The site has been off-line for approximately two months, and while discussion is reportedly under way regarding rehosting the site, no visible progress has been made.

The copyright complaints appear to me and to many observers to be without merit, and involve the web site (which is based in Canada) providing material that is still in copyright in Austria and a few other countries where copyright terms are unusually lengthy.

The IMSLP story is an example of the lengths to which the music publishing industry is willing to go to undermine free alternatives. Over half the volume of sheet music sales in the U.S. are low-end educational materials aimed primarily at teachers and the beginners they serve. These materials are inexpensive, and most are recently written and still under copyright.

The remainder is purchased by churches, performing groups, individual musicians, and teachers who work at college or university levels. These works, by and large, were composed prior to 1910, and music publishers have used a combination of semi-legitimate copyright and scare tactics to prevent an open content market from developing. Since the works themselves are no longer subject to copyright, publishers produce new "editions" which incorporate fingerings, interpretive notes, or graphic design purportedly under copyright. At the same time, industry groups have carried out a "copying is stealing" campaign, and place draconian notices on publications stating that any copying for any reason is a crime (despite the fact that this is frequently not the case).

The legal attack on IMSLP is part of this coordinated effort.

Progress on projects like Mutopia is hindered by the lack of a common grammar for transcription of music scores. Music is traditionally written in a freeform, two-dimensional, position-dependent format. Efforts to come up with a standard machine-readable format for music, like MusicXML, have not received widespread support. The best available formats are specific to individual music typesetting programs, be they commercial or open source. Matters are further complicated by the fact that no format has proven enduring -- both the open source and commercial products routinely invalidate older input when new software versions are released.

Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Commons sheet music content is limited to a handful of sample scores, due in part to a lack of editing support for music in MediaWiki.

The questions then are these:

• What is the way forward on sheet music for the open content community
  
• Should the WikiMedia foundation start a new project or otherwise provide support for the fledgling open-content sheet music community?
  
• What technical initiatives make sense given the fragmented and difficult tools landscape?
  

Technocrati tags: Free culture, music, online communities, Wikback, wikipedia

Labels: free culture, wikimedia, wikipedia, writing

Ignite Portland will have their next event 5 February at the Aladdin Theatre. Some of the proposed talks look as if they'll match the quality of the last Ignite Portland.

Pete Forsyth posted over at AboutUs a list of Wiki success stories. Amazingly, most of the examples he thought of were on Wikipedia -- and within the last few months. With all of the problems that get more publicity, it's nice to be reminded that Wikipedia does work for the most part.

Andrew Chen's post, "Public and private spaces, and why YouTube comments are so awful", could have been written in response to Moulton's comment on my last post. (No, I'm not trying to linkwhore myself here; it's just that Blogger, for some reason, doesn't allow me to link to individual comments.) In brief, Chen reflects on how anonymity and differences affect the culture of online communities. (Thanks to the Daily Buzz over at AboutUs for this one.)

Lastly, Chen's post led me (after a few jumps) to Chris Allen's post, "Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation", which discusses a few studies that look at the problem of why groups functions best at certain numbers of members, beyond the familiar Dunbar number thesis. (His other blog entries on this theme are also worth reading.) What I find fascinating are the dynamics he describes for the chronic problem of managing groups on Wikipedia: to have a functional group with more than 150 members (like the total number of active editors), one must not only have "punishing mechanism" to enforce cultural norms, but (to echo Juvenal's oft-quoted observation) a "punishing mechanism" for the "punishing mechanism" -- although Allen uses the language of "moderation" and "meta-moderation."

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Ignite Portland, online communities, Portland Tech, Web 2.0, wikipedia

Labels: portland tech, wikipedia

A fellow named David Wiley wrote this post, "OERs, Producers, Consumers, and Reuse", on the nature of open source and sharing knowledge. Applied to Wikipedia, it explains why the content on Wikipedia will always be uneven: Wikipedians "scratch their own itches", so we are left with such contradictions that the article on Xena (57,321 bytes) is longer than the one on Cleopatra (39,710 bytes) -- known as Wikigroanings.

This also offers a partial explanation why there are so many content wars on Wikipedia: because people are passionate about their subjects, they are also passionate about their contributions.

I've found a number of other thoughtful posts on Wiley's blog, Iterating towards Openness. Also check out this response to his post, which led me to it.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Collaboration, Open source, wikipedia

Labels: wikipedia

Deletionists vs. Inclusionists in back in the news. Simon Pulsifer, one-time champion of having the most edits on Wikipedia, is also quoted. I find it notable that Simon has adopted one of my tactics in dealing with foolish editors; sometimes a quiet, yet persistent approach is the best tactic.

Andrew has been interviewed on this matter once in the past.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Online communities, Wikis, wikipedia

Labels: wikipedia, writing