Original Research

Well-known & overlooked Wikipedia essays

2011-04-05T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

To make something, it helps to know what it is

2010-10-01T15:25:00.000-07:00

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

Pending changes: Further thoughts

2010-09-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

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

Pending changes, & how it defines Wikipedia

2010-09-08T10:04:00.001-07:00

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

Oh gosh! There's porn in Wikimedia Commons!

2010-05-14T10:44:00.000-07:00

By now, everyone who cares about the functioning of the Wikimedia projects has heard about Larry Sanger's allegations that he found child pornography -- which is illegal in every country on Earth which aspires to some degree of respectability -- on Wikimedia Commons. And everyone who has investigated has discovered that the materials concerned -- some 27 images -- aren't actual examples of child pornography, but items associated with this shadowy sub-culture: pictures of a number of protests, some logos of pedophile groups, two images of child prostitutes, and some examples of 19th-century illustrations which could be considered child pornography in certain places.

Sheesh, not even one image of the Coppertone girl? She was that toddler in pig-tails with the swimming bottoms pulled down by a frisky puppy. Ignoring copyright concerns, now that could be considered kiddy porn. After all, allegedly it was a favorite decoration of prison cells in the 1960s. (And then there is that scandalous episode of "The Monkees", where one character carries a topless little girl along the beach! And it was broadcast on network television. Disgusting!)

The sad development in all of this is that after a certain conservative misinformation organization masquerading as a news channel ran with this non-story, Jimmy Wales panicked and decided to delete a bunch of images he thought were pornographic. (Story here.) Which only led to Wales relinquishing some of his administrative rights to appease a justly offended community.

Now allegedly there are a lot of images of a sexual nature in Commons which lack any educational or informative use. These include out-of-focus photos of genitalia, and avatars from Second Life doing things most people have only experienced by watching exotic porno videos. Or certain websites which come and go without much notice. Further, it's reasonably accurate to say that most people who volunteer with one of the Wikimedia projects -- or even at Commons itself -- believe most of these should be deleted. But let's put this into perspective.

There are at this moment 6.64 million images, sound files & other media files on Commons.
If 99% of all the media files meet the expected standards -- which is another way to say they aren't sexual images uploaded simply to be used to jerk off with -- that means 66,400 fail the standards. Or might be considered pornographic.
If 99.9% of all the media files meet the expected standards, that means 6,640 fail. Or might be considered pornographic.
If 99.99% of all the media files meet the expected standards -- which more pure than a certain bar soap which used to boast it was so pure it floated -- that means 664 fail. Or might be considered pornographic.
There are 235 Administrators on Commons. These are the folks who do the grunt work of reviewing contributions and deleting inappropriate ones. By my calculation, this is a very small number to monitor a very large collection.

Now in quality control, reaching a 99% success rate is pretty good. Especially if this is done by a bunch of unpaid volunteers who take time from their families, friends and employers to do the work. Reaching a 99.99% success rate is even better. Yet at either rate, there will be some materials which slip through which are undesirable, if not repugnant and illegal like child pornography. So had it actually been true that all 27 images had been undeniable examples of children under the age of 16 being coerced into sexual acts, as disturbing as the results was, the folks running Commons were still doing a fantastic job at monitoring content.

Had that been the case, Jimmy Wales should have written by hand a thank-you letter to each Administrator at Commons for the fine work they had done, not arbitrarily delete images he did not want there. (And no telling how many volunteers at Commons were offended by the act of a "hands-off" manager, and decided to find another use for their time.)

But since we all can agree that 27 images would be 27 too many, what should be done to improve things there? Besides looking for images that most of us really don't want to see and nominating them for deletion?

This blog post is already too long, so I'll have to defer my answer to this question to another post. But the solutions I would propose really aren't that hard to do, and I suspect that some of them have already been implemented on Commons.

Geoff

A thought for spring

2010-04-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

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

After much time

2008-12-11T15:36:00.000-08:00

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

Sitting on an Opportunity

2008-07-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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

Few cults have humor like this

2008-07-09T21:52:00.000-07:00

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

You think Wikipedia's tough on Experts?

2008-06-30T22:58:00.000-07:00

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

Professionals and Amateurs

2008-06-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

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

A step in the right direction

2008-06-22T13:39:00.000-07:00

You may have seen Pete Forsyth's blog post about the Oregon Revised Statutes being proprietary information. In brief, even if you are a tax payer in Oregon you can't put a copy of the laws you pay for on the Internet -- and especially not if don't pay Oregon taxes. Now for the rest of the story: Pete and a few folks went down last Thursday to make a pitch to the Legislative Counsel Committee to change their minds on this, and I'm glad to write that the committee decided unanimously not to enforce any copyright claims.

I could say this is important by making a comparison to Roman history. One of the many conflicts between the classes was over the fact that the laws at the time were not written down, and while the upper classes possessed this oral knowledge, the lower classes did not and for that reason wanted the laws put in written form, so that personal security and happiness did not depend on the whims of the powerful. But, again, there is more to the story than reaching to that ideal -- some of which Pete provides in his blog. People have been sued for putting copies of the laws of their state online: one case happened a few years back when a fellow put the building code for his state online -- but was sued by a third party who happened to own the copyright to the model legislation that his state's laws were taken from. (I think that is the case referred to here.) And copies of building codes are pricey, because selling copies is one way these groups are able to pay their bills -- despite the fact the pricetag limits access to important information.

Geoff

Technorati tags: Free culture, Oregon law

Another unhappy customer

2008-05-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

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

A not-so-ethical Code

2008-03-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

Lately, there's been a lot of talk about "A Blogger's Code of Ethics" -- incidentally about the time when a few of us bloggers associated with Wikimedia have openly wondered about the ethics of some people associated with the Wikimedia Foundation. I didn't comment about it when it was first proposed -- considering how it was introduced as part of a character assassination of Danny -- but I will now. Lao Tzu perhaps said what I think about this proposal best:

When the Great Tao is rejected,
then there is talk of morality and righteousness;
When knowledge and wisdom appear,
then there is great hypocrisy;
When the six filial relations are not in harmony,
there is talk of dutiful sons;
And when the country is in disorder,
there is talk of loyal ministers.

Put less elegantly, or less profoundly, when someone talks about the need for a code of ethics, it's fair to wonder about what his real intent is. His ethics immediately come into question.

The point of writing a blog is to speak one's mind. It's the equivalent of one part of a casual conversation over a cup of coffee, where we can cut through the formalities and explanations and talk one-to-one. When you do this with another person, you get to know that person better: you can judge that person's thought processes; sincerity or hypocrisy become evident. You can tell whether the other actually is able to use language well, or if that person is so inarticulate that every thing or action is "fucking this" and "fucking that".

To repeat one objection raised when Tim O'Reilly first proposed this exact Code of Ethics for bloggers about a year ago, as well-meaning as it was, there is no gain to anyone in adopting it. Unethical people will agree to it without hesitation, while ethical people will refuse, feeling that either this is a veiled accusation about their moral character or that they are setting themselves up for an attack based on the letter, not the spirit, of the document. (Anyone who has thought seriously about the Tao of ignore all rules will understand that last part.)

That's why I think this idea is a bad one. Further, the way it was introduced into the discussion -- as part of a blanket accusation that anyone who questions the actions of Jimmy Wales is an enemy to Wikipedia -- makes it hard for me not to suspect the writer's good faith.

Having contributed to Wikipedia for over five years now, I think I have the right to say what I think is wrong about it without my loyalty being questioned. Because of that long history, believe it or not, I actually think of some of the people involved in this my friends. What I write here is what I believe -- the good, the bad, and the tortured rhetoric. My motives here are simple: I think I know something about what happens there, and I want to show off that knowledge. I also want to understand the reasons for continuing with something I want to succeed, when some of the people involved are not acting with the project's best interest as their first priority.

In that last sentence, I am talking about faith; however the response of many of the members of the Foundation have not given answers that address my questions of faith. Danny Wool, whether right or wrong, has made some very detailed allegations. The Foundation has seen fit to do no better than to make routine -- if not cliched -- denials of his allegations. Faced with a choice between two versions, with no other basis of judgment, the intelligent person is forced to accept the more detailed one, because it is the one that can be more accurately verified. No one invents that wealth of detail if it is not the truth -- unless that person either cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, or is a compulsive liar.

If the Foundation actually respects the volunteers of the Wikimedia projects, then there are three appropriate steps, one of which they should take:

If what he says never actually happen -- that Jimmy Wales did not irresponsibly handle money that he should have given to the Foundation -- make the evidence public and prove him wrong.
If these things did happen but they weren't irresponsible, then prove an explanation.
If these things did happen, then admit it and promise that they will not happen again.

Because what will otherwise happen is not hard to foresee. While there will always be malcontents and gadflies around a successful effort to altruistically help people, there may not always be valuable people who will volunteer their time. The kind of people who can write valuable content, intelligently ignore rules, and can teach others how to do that are also the kind of people who do not accept routine denials, but question everything and ask for proof. While some of these people may lose their faith and quit in a visible protest that explains their reasons, others will simply quietly leave, and many more will simply decide not even join.

And making an edit to one of the Wikimedia project websites is much more inviting than sending money. If they don't care about the morale and quality of their volunteers, perhaps they will care when the donations stop coming yet the bills continue to.

Geoff

Technorati tags: Free culture, Blogger's Code of Ethics, online communities, wikipedia

Visons and reality

2008-03-02T15:51:00.000-08:00

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

We need attention, so let's insult Wikipedia

2008-02-14T18:45:00.000-08:00

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

Piecemeal updates

2008-02-08T12:24:00.000-08:00

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

A thought about advertising on Wikipedia

2008-01-19T14:33:00.000-08:00

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

Is Wikipedia Losing its Potential?

2008-01-17T19:22:00.000-08:00

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,

Another frontier for Free Culture to tame

2008-01-13T12:05:00.000-08:00

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

A grab-bag of links

2008-01-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

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

I wish I had seen this far sooner

2007-12-31T11:54:00.000-08:00

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

Midway in Life

2007-12-31T10:14:00.000-08:00

Saturday was my 50th birthday, and I celabrated it in a number of idiosyncratic ways with Yvette -- which included dropping about $100 dollars on Lego blocks at the local Lego store. (As a contrast, shortly afterwards we stopped by the Sharper Image store and despite the fact we are both nerds, neither of us found the gadgets currently for sale there worth buying.)

I've procrastinated over writing anything about this milestone event. One reason is that I wanted to say something profound and significant about it, but couldn't. Another is that admitting to my age means acknowledging a number of things, many of which would indicate that I haven't ended up where I thought I would be ten, twenty or thirty years ago. Yesterday I confessed to my friends that years ago I thought I would have a number of books published by now, be an established pundit of some intellectual stature, and be busy mentoring a new generation. Finding that my primary intellectual achievements has been a large number of positive, but certainly not important, contributions to Wikipedia and this blog, I can't help but feel that I've failed to fulfill the potential I know I once had, and my time to do so is now undeniably finite.

It would be easy to dismiss this as mid-life angst. Not everyone can be a Jimbo Wales (to name one example), travelling the world to speak to enthusiastic audiences, which would be a hard thing for any bright, ambitious person to accept; for there to be a top 1%, there has to be a lesser 99% who are denied recognition for their contributions.

However, I have my own achievements to be proud of. For example, many years ago I had a hand in defeating the adoption of UCITA in Oregon, which was a good thing that helped many, many people. And reflecting clearly on my past activities, I have to also acknowledge that many achievements are far more difficult than they might appear at first. I encountered a couple of simple, if not trivial, examples of this last night while working on Wikipedia: I spent a couple of hours integrating content into the article on Bonga, a town in southern Ethiopia, yet appears in the contribution history as only a pair of edits; and hours creating a new article on the Germama River which amounted to less than 1200 bytes. The reason both took so long was that my goal was to contribute usable content, integrated with relevant articles in Wikipedia, rather than simply adding text in a way that improves my editcount statistics, or argues a given opinion on a subject.

This insight does make significant achievements all the more impressive, even if careful research reveals that those achievements were accomplished with little effort. Still, I know I worry more now about how productively I spend time than I did when I was younger; I only hope that this worry does not erode either my sense of humor, or my sense of fun.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: achievements, age, writing

Andrew Lih gets quoted by the press again

2007-12-27T13:22:00.000-08:00

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

The next Recent Changes Camp

2007-12-23T11:57:00.000-08:00

I've heard, unofficially, that next year's Recent Changes Camp will be convened to the south in the Bay area. (The link points to where "www.recentchangescamp.org" currently resolves.) But I know little more about it, except that Eugene Kim was in charge, and that Brandon Sanders wants to organize a WikiBus to carry attendees from Portland there -- which made it hard for me to make plans, let alone invite anyone to it.

So I'm happy to share that I've finally found its website, where one can also find a link to its working mailing list. More details as I learn about them.

Geoff

Tags: recentchangescamp, Wiki Technology

Admin burnout

2007-12-20T15:23:00.000-08:00

A copy of an email I wrote to WikiEN-l:

George Herbert wrote:

> It's been a recurring theme, but the point is that we still haven't
> figured out how to detect and head off (talk to, counsel, convince to
> take a stress-break and come back, whatever) flameouts by admins and
> longtime editors.
>
> There's a difference between people chosing to leave the project, and
> a project where the usual mode of leaving for experienced participants
> is an antagonistic conflict incident blowing up.
>
> That we haven't really come up with good solutions doesn't mean that
> we should stop noting incidents as they happen.

"Admin burn-out" is one of those topics that I've been interested too -- especially since at any given moment I post on WP:AN (or related pages) I am the Admin who's been on Wikipedia the longest; I once described myself as starting on Wikipedia back when Jimbo Wales was not even a "God-king" but just an aristocrat who bought himelf a magic book. In some cases, I have been an Admin longer than some Admins have had Wikipedia accounts. (This has been the case since Zoe bailed earlier this year.) And this is a distinction I'm not especially happy to hold.

(Note: there are a number of Admins senior to me still active on Wikipedia; occasionally I'll wonder what happened to someone, look at their contributions page, & see that she or he made a few dozen edits -- often more -- in the last couple of days. However, they keep an even lower profile than me, rarely, if ever, appearing on the Admin Noticeboards & related pages. Why is that if an Admin doesn't burn out, he retreats to an obscure corner of Wikipedia or just limits himself to Wikignoming? Your guess is as good as mine.)

I don't know whether my longevity is because I *don't* try to handle the hard cases, edit controversial articles (at least not after I learn the hard way that they are controversial) or work very hard at fighting vandalism or spam -- in other words, maybe I'm just Admincruft -- or its because I stumbled across the secret at surviving the often vicious atmosphere at Wikipedia. For anyone who's curious, my strategy has been to remember that the problem people always, in the end, get themselves kicked off of Wikipedia, & act accordingly. For example, when I'm in conflict in an article, & I'm convinced that the other person is a (insert here your favorite term of abuse) who is entirely, undeniably wrong (or has been doing most of her/his research with the help of illegal substances), what I do is ... sit back & wait 3 months, then go back & edit the article. Sometimes I make the changes I was originally fighting for, but more often I realize that the section in dispute ought to read another way -- sometimes the exact text what my opponent was arguing for, but for one reason or another I wasn't persuaded. Amazing what a curious mind can learn in three months!

For this admittedly passive attitude towards Adminship (if not Wikiepdia in general) to work, obviously I rely on other Admins to do the dirty work. For this reason, it would be useful to know how I can support the harder-working Admins so they can keep doing what they do. Telling me to "keep an eye on them" is not a good solution, since much of my work for Wikipedia is researching content -- out of 8 hours I might spend on Wikipedia, at least half of it is reading various sources, more often books than webpages, & trying to figure out how to usefully integrate it into the relevant articles. (BTW, even in my most focussed moments of researching, I find that 90% of what I find is not immediately usable for one reason or another -- most often because I don't see how I can add it to an article.) This means I often learn about the latest "blow-up" several hours -- if not several days -- after it appears to be all over, & someone has put a "Topic closed" notice on the thread.

If anything, I find myself more & more arguing with other Admins over how to deal with a perceived troublemaker; either there are an increasing number of people on Wikipedia who think in black-n-white, think anyone who criticizes Wikipedia is more dangerous than _The Register_ (or whoever is this week's most dangerous threat), & are upset that we are "too easy-going" on the troublemakers, or I am far too laid back. Since I have no problem dropping an indef block on people who are clearly troublemakers (anyone can look at my Admin log to see that I have dropped the banhammer from time to time), I don't think it's the latter. Most of the people who claim that Wikipedia's not honest about the claim that "anyone can edit" are, undeniably, the ones who got banned for good & understandible reasons; but I'm finding an increasing number of cases where newbies are getting the bum's rush for obvious newbie mistakes, & end up complaining about how Wikipedia is run by some inner circle.

Geoff

(Sorry, I don't have anything new to say about Carolyn Doran -- except to note that I received around 500 hits on my post "Uh, what?" yesterday, which is not only far more than any other post I've written, but more than any five other posts I've written. I guess this story has legs.)

Technocrati tags: online communities, Volunteerism, wikipedia

More on a vanished Wikimedia employee

2007-12-18T14:06:00.000-08:00

Reading the usual flashpoints where the Carolyn Doran surprise has been discussed -- the WikiEN-L and foundation mailing lists, the Village Pump, Jimbo Wales' talk page, and the Administrator's Noticeboard -- it would appear that the discussion is over, that everything has been said, and everyone (well, everyone whose opinion counts) agrees that the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has handled this incident quite well. Despite all of those words, there has been a lot of talking around the point that most concerns me, a rank-and-file volunteer who honestly doesn't want to bother with keeping informed about Foundation matters. That point, put as simply as I can,
is as follows:

Carolyn Doran was the COO of the WMF for several months, until one day she wasn't. Simple as that: one day her entry on the WMF staff page was there, the next day it was gone, explained by only a terse "-Carolyn" in the comments.
When a few people asked about what had happened to her, they received only evasive and mysterious answers, as well as a statement that everyone who knew anything signed a confidentiality agreement not to talk about it. No one made an issue of this mystery because almost no one outside of the WMF offices knew she existed: Doran had practically no recognition amongst the average volunteers. Her disappearance was something of a mystery, but compared with all of the other drama in the last several months, which involved people whose names other contributors could recognize about, and the fact that the answer might be something entirely prosaic (e.g., she left to take care of an ill relative), the matter was soon forgotten.
Several months later, to the surprise of one and all, we are supplied with shocking evidence about her, all of which argued that Doran should never had been offered the job. Even giving her the benefit of a reasonable doubt (e.g., acknowledging that the legal system makes mistakes), and for the sake of argument agreeing that many of the charges against her were overblown or simply bogus, this evidence still demonstrates that she has a disturbing habit of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no other way to put the matter: she had accumulated quite a few serious encounters with the law -- "felonies", I believe is the legal term.

Reading a bit between the lines of the material that WikiNews has collected, it is clear the first that anyone at the WMF knew about this part of her history was no earlier than the moment she returned to US soil, and was detained by Federal authorities. Further, can anyone doubt that she was let go for cause: omitting to tell your employer that you have one or more felonies in your record is grounds for being either fired -- or told to quit.

The point I want to draw attention to is that while the Foundation was well within its rights to terminate her employment, they handled it in the most clumsy manner possible. There is, we all will admit, the problem that had someone done some kind of a background check, she would not have been hired; you don't want someone with a criminal record of passing bad checks handling money in your business. Now Florence Douvard has pointed out, quite plausibly I'll concede, that it was reasonable to assume that the temp agency which placed her at WMF should have done a background check; lots of temp agencies do this for the simple reason that their credibility is on the line each time they place an employee. Still, to take a bookkeeper who had no management experience and make her a "Chief Operating Officer" is putting far too much faith in an unknown quality. (Why didn't they simply call her job "Office manager"? Except for Jimbo "God-king" Wales, no one involved with Wikimedia has such a grandiloquent title.)

Instead, the WMF handled her departure in such a clumsy manner that until the details came out, no one who hadn't been present at her last interview could be sure whether she was the victim here (for example, she had been subjected to some nasty sexual harassment) or she was a brazen criminal (for example, the Foundation caught her with a large bag of Foundation cash in the parking lot). Now at the time her employment was ended had the Board simply issued a statement that she had left "for personal reasons", when the average Wikipedian learned of The Register's expose I believe she/he would have simply shrugged and said, "So that's why she left" -- and the matter would have been a non-starter. It would have indicated that the Foundation believed they had handled the situation as well as they could have from the beginning, instead of attempting to convince a shocked community five months later that they had.

Note: the phrase "for personal reasons" explanation was just the first that came to my mind. One could indulge in a game of informed speculation, and arrive at reasons -- other than concealing her background -- for why she left. Some of these would include her performance (i.e., it became obvious that she just couldn't handle the job), personal reasons (e.g., she told them she had a sick relative to look after), or that the board had decided to redefine the duties of "Chief Operating Officer" and she was not qualified. However because the Foundation was evasive about why she left, human nature is to assume the worst. Now the unavoidable explanation is that they found out about her criminal past and let her go, and out of embarassment tried to cover this up.

Further, the board is still evasive on this matter: access to their resolution concerning her departure still remains confidential, unlike the one a few months before for Brad Patrick. Since the one for Patrick is so bland -- just an announcement that he is leaving and a polite thank-you for his service -- and they had no reason not to pass a resolution equally as bland, here again it is hard not to see that this cover-up continues. What could this resolution contain that no one outside the Foundation is allowed to see? And if this is personal information, who insisted that it should be included -- and why?

Getting rid of an employee like Doran is a tricky position for any employer. One has to get rid of an embarassment as quietly as possible, with as little trouble as possible -- otherwise, the problem only gets worse. Sometimes the problem employee is given a "carrot or stick" choice: take a nominal separation package and quit, or be fired and face some nasty penalties. In the Foundation's situation, there were few resources to use as a stick, and none for a carrot -- yet, she walked away from the situation far better off than any other party did. The Foundation lost credibility in how it avoided -- or forgot -- to tell anyone she had left, the Foundation raised unneeded suspicion by evading questions when people belatedly noticed she was gone and asked for details -- any details -- and I feel now it is losing more credibility by not stepping up and clearly saying something along the lines of, "We admit that made made these mistakes, we've since made these changes so that this won't happen again, and we've done all of this because we know we are responsible to the Wikimedia community: the volunteers, the donors, and the users."

As I said above, no one is talking about this repeated failure to show that the Foundation can effectively solve a problem -- which would show that the board and staff of the WMF can be entrusted with handling money given for charitable purposes. All I have seen are arguments over whether Wikipedians should even give The Register the time of day, and how the Foundation should cover its ass the next time this happens -- which either trail off into the usual exchange of venomous language between its participants, or with a chorus of Wikipedians repeating that they still have faith in the project.

As much as I believe in the vision of the WMF, this does not mean that I automaticaly believe in any one individual involved in its projects. They have to work at either gaining or keeping my trust. If someone screws up, and doesn't make a sincere effort to fix the mistake, I will begin to lose faith in that person; this is human nature. This also means, if I find that I can no longer assume good faith in large numbers of the people on this project -- by this I mean the people I need to assume good faith in so I can spend my time writing articles -- either I will find another project or simply leave Wikipedia. And I doubt I would be the only one who will contemplate a decision like this.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Carolyn Doran, online communities, trust, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia

Uh, what?

2007-12-14T10:41:00.000-08:00

Like the rest of you, I just read about the fate of Carolyn Doran. And like most of you (except for the few who revel in schadefroh over any mishap involving Wikipedia or its associated groups), I'm shocked.

I've never quite understood just what Doran's role in the Foundation actually was, and never did shake the assumption that she was little more than a glorified office manager -- someone whose duties consisted of ordering supplies, answering the phone, and reminding other employees about their appointments. Outside of one fluffy but friendly message announcing herself to the Wikimedia community towards the beginning of her brief tenure, her presence was otherwise remarkably unremarkable. It could be said that this was a good thing, that her presence didn't harm the Foundation -- but that's just spin. If nothing else, she received a paycheck that could have gone to someone who actually made a tangible contribution -- so her presence did harm the Foundation by squandering scarce and badly needed resources.

Then there is the problem that she was hired in the first place. Not too long ago, we Americans learned from the legal experiences of Martha Stewart that felons could not legally become corporate officers -- so I am puzzled that no one made the effort to determine whether Doran was one. Yes, the Foundation is currently strapped for money, but at the very least they could have asked her, on penalty of losing her job immediately, if she was one. And instead of providing a non-answer when someone belated noticed she had vanished and asked what happened to her, the Foundation could have simply stated at the time that she left "for personal reasons" -- which is true. Those three simple, intentionally ambiguous words would provide enough of an rationale the faithful would accept when the truth surfaced, something that Wikipedia's many hostile critics Wikipedia could be expected to make happen.

Maybe they knew about her past, but hired her anyway -- for skills that she never had a chance to demonstrate. If they did, didn't it occur to anyone that there are a number of restrictions on her ability to travel? A number of countries (for example Canada, and ironically Australia) do not permit felons to legal entry -- there are a lot of places Doran could not go. Then there is the fact that some legal official would expect to be informed when she left the country, if not his jurisdiction -- which is what landed her in jail.

I'd like to hope that this scandal will be handled much better than it has been because I know there are good and intelligent people at the Foundation, but I find this hard to do. In the past year, Jimbo Wales has twice demonstrated a disturbing lack of skill in handling a situation, and I have enough of an inflated sense of self-worth that I half-expect to receive some angry words from him for my frank post. Even if Wales and the board were to avoid the familiar bunker mentality and publicly say something along the lines that they made a mistake, that they learned their lessons and now they want to move forward -- this is not enough.

I have several posts I've been working on but not yet posted; my reason until now is that I have a hard time deciding which is more important. So if I lapse back into silence on this blog, the reason is that I'm still trying to process this latest challenge to my faith in Wikipedia. If I were truly ready to toss in the towel on this important undertaking, I'd instead end this post proposing a pool to see which Wikipedia critic would be first to make a joke about the dangers of inviting Doran to the Foundation Christmas party.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Carolyn Doran, online communities, trust, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia

When a Wiki doesn't work

2007-11-29T13:14:00.000-08:00

Although I am obviously a fan of this kind of software application, the statement "People who want to bring out the best in themselves and their organizations immediately think of Wiki as the best way to collaborate" in this proposed vision statement got me thinking about the flaws in a Wiki. My thinking was based, more or less, on the old precept that "no tool solves all problems", but once I started it was clear to me that this is a question of understanding the problem, evaluating all of the solutions, and determining the best fit -- with the caveat that some unforseen element may overturn this deliberate process and force one to accept a different solution.

There are a number of criteria and concerns I could mention, but I'm limiting myself to just those which I have found to be the most significant. Which are two.

The first is that the distance between author and audience on a Wiki is very close. In other words, the lag time between what a person adds to a Wiki page and any response -- for example, someone deleting or adding to that person's contribution -- is surprisingly short.

Although as an author I like the fact that I can get immediate feedback from an audience over what I have said or written, sometimes this feedback arrives too soon and forces me to respond. Since I'm not as good at thinking on my feet as many people are (actually, not as good as almost anyone), my responses aren't as good as they could be: either I emphasize the wrong points or explain them incorrectly; I get my facts wrong; I lose my temper; or I settle for a quick and unproductive comeback intended just to shut the person up.

I'm not alone in this desire for some amount of lag time: Wikipedia has a chronic problem with edit wars. Someone will add a passage to an article, someone else will read it, disagree, and replace those words with their own. And it continues, blocking the growth or improvement of the article until either one (or both) are blocked from it or (far less commonly, at least as I remember) they discuss their disagreement and come to a consensus.

One could argue that edit wars are a due to a misunderstanding about ownership, but I think the problem is far more subtle. The goal of the Wikipedia project is to create a text, an encyclopedia; however, Wikis best lend themselves to creating conversations. I use this distinction of "text" and "conversation" with care: the first is a product of research, analysis, and creation, all of which require time -- often years -- to produce; the second is a product of two opinions or points of view interacting, which requires a minimum of time or the conversation dies. The point of creating a text is to have a finished, cohesive work, and the dynamics of a conversation work against that: who has not been interrupted in a conversation? This makes one angry, an anger similar to the anger present in most edit wars.

Although I've described these two as opposed to one another, they aren't absolutes, but rather end points of a continuum. Texts range from electronic ones (like email, usenet, webpages) to printed ones (e.g. an article in a magazine or a printed book) which are often, if not always, written in response to an earlier text. This can be seen as a conversation where the responses are separated by years or more; Western philosophy is sometimes described, not entirely as a joke, as an ongoing discussion with the works of Plato, who lived 24 centuries ago -- which makes this a very slow discussion. Further, even in face-to-face discussions, it is not uncommon for one party to pause and research a fact in a reference book or online.

This leads to my second consideration: content on a Wiki is never finished. Some emphasize the positive aspects of this fact: documents on a Wiki never go out of date, because anyone (with the needed permissions, of course) can update them. The problem that a published book has, that it begins to gradually become inaccurate the moment it is printed, is solved with a Wiki!

While this is a good thing, this unfinished quality can also be a drawback. For no matter how much work is done on a Wiki page, it can always be altered -- and sometimes drastically. Content can be replaced with better content -- or with worse; what makes one Wiki page successful can be removed with a careless or badly-considered edit -- or one intended to improve some other aspect of the page. Hence a Wiki is more akin to a conversation, than a collection of texts.

There are ways to deal with this issue. The Wikimedia software, for example, is written to keep copies of earlier versions of the pages in the application -- so nothing is truly lost. Or one can impliment the practice of marking some pages as "stable", "featured" or "finished", and make them more difficult to change. This is simply one of many issues that an adopter needs to think about when considering a Wiki to help with collaboration.

Now I have encountered some people mention that these points make a Wiki a poor application for the business environment, and point to the apparent anarchy that exists around Wikipedia: anyone can -- and does -- edit Wikipedia. How can a Wiki work inside a business? What these people overlook is the power of the community associated with the Wiki application: this community not only nourishes the content on the Wiki, but this community protects it. Look at the countless pages of policy, dispute resolution, and so forth that exist on Wikipedia currently -- there is a great deal of control over the content on Wikipedia; some would say too much. Any successful business already has these controls in place. It currently uses them to encourage its employees to contribute to its profit; if these controls cannot be replicated to monitor edits to a corporate Wiki, then the business is clearly doomed.

Hmm. I started this post by stating that there were two considerations, but find that there are three: how will the collaborative community make use of a Wiki. Some communities will accept it with little or no encouragement; some have already found a way to collaborate without one, and the effort to get this community to accept a Wiki may be a waste of time and resources. After all, why trade in a car that works -- and is owned free and clear -- for this year's model?

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, online collaboration, software, Wikipedia, writing

Notes on Wikidrama

2007-11-27T08:22:00.000-08:00

Wikidrama, noun: (1) an instance of excitement or conflict in a Wiki community, which is often thought to be needlessly passionate by those uninvolved in the instance; (2) pejorative, the normal state of affairs in many Wiki communities.

An interesting comment -- okay, better than what I could write, which may not be saying much -- on one of the recent Wikidramas: Luna Santin on the CharlotteWebb arbitration.

Would it be appropriate to opine that one reason people dislike wikidrama is that no Wiki software currently has an extension to add car chases? That statement occured to me while thinking about an essay explaining my opinion in this discussion: while Wikis are an excellent tool for collaboration, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, Wikipedia, wikis

A Paid Day off!

2007-11-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

Today I enjoy my first paid holiday since New Years' 2001. I lost my last full-time job with benefits early that year due to the tech industry collapse, and have been either working as a contractor or mooching of my wife since then. (Not that I have a full-time job with benefits at the moment -- but as long as I have worked 960 hours in the last six months, my contract house will give me holiday pay.)

I guess there are certain tokens I need to feel that I'm truly a productive part of society -- even though I probably have a better quality of life than most of the world's inhabitants. Next on my list: recovering my access to vacation pay.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Thanksgiving, workplace

One of the Things I hate to do

2007-11-18T12:35:00.000-08:00

Is reverting contributions like this one to Wikipedia articles. But I must, for a simple reason: while it's probably reliable information, I can't verify it. Nor can anyone else until the government of Ethiopia starts doing a better job of making more information -- like simple modifications to their internal administrative structure -- publically available. If this were done in English (because I don't read Amharic or any of the 70-odd languages spoken in Ethiopia), and on one of many websites the Ethiopian government maintains would be great, but as far as I know current information is not even available in print.

At least Wikipedia's articles about the subdivisions of that country -- the Regions or States, the Zones, and the Woredas or local districts -- are much more current than many other sources. It's not uncommon to find materials published in the last few years which still refer to the provinces that existed in Emperor Haile Selassie's time -- about a generation ago.

I well know the reasons why this is the case: the agencies responsible for this are underfunded and understaffed -- as well as a constant brain drain from the public sector to non-governmental organizations, if not out of the country. But alot of these barriers could be overcome with help from volunteer online groups if the information were somehow made available.

Until then, I'm forced to apply the rules in a way that I really don't want to, because the alternative is to do assert no quality control whatever. Better to have information that is reliabbly correct, but out of date, rather than information that may be current and correct -- but not at all reliable.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Africa, Ethiopia, online information, wikipedia

WikiEN-l

2007-11-15T11:06:00.000-08:00

My activities related to Wikipedia involve more than writing articles. For example, I spend probably as much time away from the computer (or at least on the computer, and online, but not at the Wikipedia website) researching information as I do editting. (I have to find content to add to Wikipedia somehow, and its one of the better ways to find reliable information.) Another activity that occupies a sizable amount of time is reading the various discussions on Wikipedia about Wikipedia: Wikipedia:Administrators noticeboards, Wikipedia:Administrators noticeboards/Incidents, fora at the Village Pump (when I remember it exists), the Signpost, talk pages at various WikiProjects, and about once a week I read through the archives of WikiEN-l.

WikiEN-l used to be far more important than it is now, but I still find it useful to read on a periodic basis. Sometimes I find gems like this announcement of another study about the community dynamics of Wikipedia -- but often I read it for the discussion. There are just under half a dozen people posting there whose opinions I respect, many times more people who I don't know but I'm willing to read in any case and allow them to persuade me, and two or three troublemakers. By "troublemakers", I mean individuals who have been banned from Wikipedia and desperate to complain some more about how unfair people are there.

I can't honestly say that the community around WikiEN-l is really any different from other communities around any other mailing list: there are some people worth reading and some who are wasting everyone else's time. It's just that WikiEN-l has a reputation of being a more serious or important forum to discuss issues concerning the English language Wikipedia. So after lurking there earlier this week, spending a few hours reading, I was left with the impression that the mailling list has outlasted its purpose.

Now WikiEN-l has always had a certain degree of venom or bitterness in its communications. People complain or vent there about daily stupidity on Wikipedia. Troublemakers go there to complain that they are misunderstood and should be reinstated -- or that Wikipedia is broken and needs to be fixed. Then, as happens whenever one brings together a large number of people seriously interested in one project, a number of flame wars will break out, and you can have two or more respected Wikipedians calling each other "troll" or "vandal" or worse. However, the atmosphere there has turned far more nasty than can be explained by these causes: its has turned into a cesspit -- okay, maybe I should say "another cesspit" -- where people go to flame each other, everyone and everything. When things calm down a little, someone -- not always one of the troublemakers -- stirs the sewage and another flamewar breaks out.

This is not just a bad day there. I read a week's worth of email, and the last couple of times I've lurked there things have not been much better. I'd read to find the occasional gem that made the effort worth it, but it's gotten to the point where the effort is not worth it any more. One can make a valuable point or win an argument on WikiEN-l, but chances are good no one outside the list will notice as well as few on the list; ideas, both good and bad, are simply being drowned out by accusations, counter-accusations, and more until the original idea is forgotten.

I find this disappointing, if not sad. As I wrote above, there are some bright and articulate people on the list, as well as some people who are eager to show that they, too, are bright and articulate; but all that is happening there is that they are complaining and arguing over...at this point I don't really know, and I'm no longer that interested enough to untangle things. People are unhappy with Wikipedia, but people have always been unhappy with Wikipedia. People make mistakes; good ideas get overlooked; someone who is an asset to the project encounters one failure too many, feels burnt out, and leaves -- sometimes memorably.

Yet if all of this energy led to some goal, served some purpose, maybe it would be justified; as far as I can tell, very few Wikipedians -- even those who might be said to be part of the alleged "inside clique" -- pay any attention to it. It's become one more dynamic in the project community that doesn't further its purpose -- that is, if Wikipedia has a clear purpose beyond "creating an encyclopedia." Even then, what encyclopedia that exists is incomplete and unreliable -- "early beta" as one participant has described its quality. Much -- if not the majority -- of the energy around Wikipedia seems to go into the process of writing an encyclopedia -- fighting vandalism, flagging articles for quality, arguing over guidelines and procedures.

I don't know what the answer is, but I didn't find it reading WikiEN-l. It might be time to simply shut the list down. Doing that won't solve the problem alone, but by removing one outlet for writing about the process of writing an encyclopedia, it might encourage people to simply just write one.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, Wikipedia, writing

Procrastination

2007-11-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

I think I've mentioned how hard it is to keep posting to my blog once I leave off even for a short while. That is the reason why I haven't posted my summary the Portland WikiWednesday last week.

It should have been simple to write. Brandon Sanders had a clear agenda, and this time it wasn't a free-form socializing session. There were two items he wanted all of us to discuss. First was his plan to set up a "Wiki-bus" to take the Portland contingent to next year's Recent Changes Camp. (Eugene Eric Kim wanted to hold it in the Bay area next year, and since he was willing to do the work... ) The other item was to plan the topic for the next Portland WikiWednesday in December: we will invite members of the local politically progressive groups in and show them the power of Wikis for building communities and organizing.

Tak also had the useful idea that we ought to devote some time in every meeting to teaching ourselves about the different types of Wikis. After all, due to the success of Wikipedia many people have the mistaken impression that all Wiki websites run on MediaWiki; they believe that no other maintained Wiki software packages exist. Needless to say, there are many other Wiki software packages out there.

However, I ran into a series of delays. When I got home Wednesday, I didn't have time to do much more than to feed the cat and get ready for bed; I can't function on little sleep anymore, unlike I did many years ago. Thursday and Friday during the day, too many other things kept me from reviewing my notes. Thursday evening, Yvette and I wasted time in front of the boob-tube and Friday night we had to catch a class of at Emanuel Hospital. Then Saturday, Yvette and I spent the afternoon at a friend's house playing Settlers of Catan, and the evening together. Sunday I spent my time on working my way through The Royal Chronicles of Abyssinia for Wikipedia. It's a tediously written book in a mediocre translation; unfortunately, since it's the sole historical source for Ethiopian history between 1770 and 1805 (primary or otherwise, as far as I know), I had to work my way through it.

At any moment during those four days, I could have stopped and wrote a post, but every time I thought about what I should say I just couldn't get the words out. As easy as writing looks, it can actually be quite hard.

And I didn't think this is what I'd be writing about in my 200th post.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: PortlandTech, Wikipedia, Wiki Technology, Wikiwednesday

My Wikipedia first

2007-11-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

Today marked the completion of my first nomination of another Wikipedian for Administrator status. The nomination was successful -- even though there was some weirdness towards the end.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, trust, Wikipedia

Ignite Portland: the Event

2007-10-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

As the blogsphere has documented, last night's Ignite Portland was a surprising success. The organizers expected between 50-100, hoped for more, and were excited to have 300 people sign up. I was one of them.

Weiden+Kennedy was picked as the host, in part because they generously offered to share their facility, but maybe more because their offices provided that cutting-edge, urban hip feel that the attendees expected at IgnitePortland. It was my first inside the building since it was converted from warehouse space, and the interior layout left me admittedly disoriented. Climb one flight of stairs, then climb another, and then one came to the Nike court -- named for Weiden+Kennedy's best-known client -- yet at least three more floor loomed above the visitor, beyond planes of concrete and laminated wood stretching in all three dimensions. I was left with the feeling that the environment was designed to make people to think about the poetics of space within a building, but instead I felt vaguely uncomfortable because I knew this environment would not make me think productively.

The people there were an eclectic bunch, most of whom were not the folks whom I had met or seen at Portland Bar Camp, OSCON, or Recent Changes Camp. Which is I consider a good thing, because it proves that the Portland technology scene is still vibrant and growing; the bleak jobmarket of five years ago is still wel-remembered by those of us who struggled through it. I did see a few people I knew -- but met a few I hadn't, like Mike Lucich (of Return and Kumquat), and Rick Turoczy of the always enjoyable blog, Silicon Florist. It was a thrill for this C-list blogger to talk with a couple of bloggers further up the food chain, and we wondered if Mike Rogoway, the technology reporter at the local newspaper, was there.

As for the presentations, I saw that they were being recorded, and eventually video files should be available; so I won't go into detail about their subject matter. One that I enjoyed were Kevin Tate talking about "Emergence in Business" -- maybe because I'm fascinated with the way, evocative of the language of the Tao Te Ching, that groups, networks and communities form their own environments, or maybe because he alluded to a number of books he recommended to us to read. Another was Scott Huber bemusedly recounting a real-life discovery that, in this time of posting and uploading so much information on the internet, some people inadvertently share too much information. On the other hand, a few presentations were very much contrarian, on such topics as re-wilding our environment, knitting, making cornbread, and a proposal to create an Oregon-style chain of gas stations.

Maybe those contrarian presentations were clearly post-Web 2.0, by forcing us to think about the tension between the context and their subjects in a post-modern way, and therefore examples of Web 3.0 technology. We should think of them ironically, not as open and sincere attempts to share something that the presenters had a genuine interest in; true sophistication has come to Puddletown. Then again, we all know that bloggers will say the most outrageous things just to attract hits, a tactic entertainers have used to drum up an audience for millennia. Is there any point in worrying that a large number of people got together, were exposed to some new things, and had a good time? Learning things and sharing them is one of the joys of being a nerd. And Web 2.0 has brought a new interest to the Internet because it is one more way to bring people together who then share, not because it makes its users more sophisticated.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Ignite Portland, Portland Tech, Web 2.0, Web 3.0

It was bound to happen

2007-10-24T16:51:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, I had a conversation with my high school debate teacher (yes, it was that long ago) about falsifying the research the debate team used. He pointed out that fabricated information has a tendency to be shared by all team members, and mentioned an instance not long before where it harmed someone -- not the person who fabricated it -- in a debate.

I was reminded of this discussion when I stumbled onto a discussion at Wikipedia: Administrators' Noticeboard/Incidents. Someone, to everyone's shock, had managed to insert over the space of two years, a surprising amount of fabricated or misrepresented information, into a number of articles. He evaded notice by being civil, quick to back down in a conflict, and by focussing his attention on a number of subjects that non-experts were not likely to challenge his edits -- especially when he provided what appeared to be, at a casual examination, reliable sources.

As other editors worked their way down his rabbit-holes of his sources and evidence (another phrase that comes to mind is "mares nest"), it became obvious that he had constructed an elaborate collection of unacceptable sources. He would cite works that did not support his assertions; they either contradicted his assertion or were entirely irrelevant. Some were relevant, but clearly outdated. Still others appeared to be peer-reviewed literature, but on closer examination were not; they were published by groups with deceptively similar names, or self-published. And many of these papers and monographs leaned on each other: publication A would cite publication B, which would cite publication C, which would cite publication A.

I'm not mentioning the user name because my I'm not writing about this specific user, but about the problem he revealed. Despite the fact Wikipedians are always reviewing each others' work and challenging each other's conclusions, there is an irreducable level of trust between all of us. If someone makes statements about a given source, we fidn ourselves assuming that they are telling us the truth about that source.

Wikipedia functions on a certain level of mutual trust, and in the most part, people do not violate this trust. Even the troublemakers, the self-promoters, and the tendentious editors almost always honestly report the contents of their sources. Those who don't -- until now -- are also unable to show enough self-control to be effective in the give-and-take that makes up much of the Wiki environment, stop being civil or clearly violate one of the customs of the Wikipedia culture, and are quickly banned from the site and their edits reverted.

However, this affair has pointed out that this level of trust may not work any more; if an editor claims that an uncommon resource -- say a rare book or an article published in an obscure technical journal -- says something, how do we know that this editor is not lying? While this is less of a concern for established editors than new ones, the fact remains that this specific user contributed 8000 edits over two years, before someone noticed.

This is not a theoretical problem; in my own case, I have been using more and more uncommon works on the history of Ethiopia. Not every article in Wikipedia is a reworking of what is posted on the Internet; some of us do use sources printed on paper! This leads to the problem that not all of these printed works are easily accessible. In my case, like many serious Wikipedians, I have gradually accumulated a collection of books on my topic of interest to overcome this problem. Since not everyone using Wikipedia can do this, should I continue to use them because they cannot verify what I report these sources contain?

Maybe this is a just problem that was bound to happen eventually. As a group attracts more people, the chances that at least one person will abuse that trust increases until it happens. We should be glad that Wikipedia went almost 6 years before this became a serious problem.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, reliability, research, trust, Wikipedia

An upcoming Wikipedia event

2007-10-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

Gnome week: an effort to improve articles. Not that Wikipedians should limit themselves to doing this to one week a year, though.

Related to this is Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, Wikipedia, writing

Obsolete Technology never truly dies

2007-10-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

... it just waits out there, having set out a trap for those who have never heard of it.

In 1998, I started a job that involved dumping fiels from 9-track tapes. I didn't think that they still existed.

In 2004, I started another job that involved testing network drivers for SCO UNIX. I needed a job at the time, and while the same could be said of working a sideshow biting the heads off of chickens, I did learn in abundant detail why there are no new customers for this operating system. (Hint: Darl McBride, president of the SCO Group, is not a major reason why.)

Today, one of the projects I worked on involved debugging a collection of batch files. The last time I wrote a batch file -- or to be more correct, tried to write one -- Windows 95 still was in beta. And the bug I found proved that, despite any protests to the contrary, batch file programming still was handicapped with the 8.3 character naming convention.

That is why I still hold onto my O'Reilly books on UUCP and TERMCAP; once every few years, a project takes me to the dark corners where old technology monsters have set out their traps.

Geoff

Technorati tags: DOS, old technology, SCO, UNIX, 9-track tapes

As the message mutates

2007-10-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

Reading the latest Wikipedia Signpost this morning, I found that David Sarno's article on the squabble over the deletion of Mzoli's Meats continues to send out ripples: the Australian newspaper The Age published an article, "Delete generation rips encyclopedia apart". And as a ripple echoes over a pool of water, gradually losing both its original force and indications of its origin, so has this story.

First, I admit I'm peeved that of the three people cited in Sarno's story, I'm the one who is no longer mentioned. Yes, I get jealous over petty things like this. This probably happened because Andrew Lih has the experience to profitably interact with reporters, Kelly Martin can always be counted on to say something worth reapeating -- or both of them write clearer prose with fewer misspellings than me. But what I find ironic is that yours truly is the one who came up with the "generation gap" idea, which is given prominence in The Age article -- yet I'm the one who doesn't get mentioned. Oh well.

But had the reporter from The Age asked me about that idea -- which I created after about 5 minutes of thought -- I would have backtracked from it some, and tried to provide a more nuanced expanation. There are a lot of human dynamics going on here, which I intended to cover with that label. Not all of these dynamics fit under that label.

New Wikipedians, like new members to any established group, exhibit a tendency to conform to the standards of that group, either consciously or unconsciously. For example, people joining the military are likely to start acting more machismo. It's the same with Wikipedia: people who join Wikipedia study the behavior of the most visible members, and act accordingly, and not all of these most visible members are model members.
Smart people who want to excel in their chosen field, tend to look for and follow the easiest path of advancement. It's something of a truism that the more recent volunteers or editors have a greater tendency to spend their time in the Articles for Deletion or Vandalism fora than writing articles; management is always a more preferable gig than working on the assembly line. Yet following this line of reasoning further, wouldn't Peer Review -- the section of Wikipedia where article writers post requests for their fellow editors to critique their work -- attract abou tas much attention as these other two areas? Writing a useful critique is hard work -- far harder than deciding whether to keep or delete an article or identifying troublemakers. That is why new members soon end up making most of their edits at the first two fora, and rarely leave any traces at Peer Review -- despite the fact that part of Wikipedia is arguably more important than the other two.
A last point is that there is a clearly high turnover of volunteers at the English Wikipedia, and perhaps other Wikimedia projects. This means that both expertise and cultural memory is being lost prehaps faster than it is being created. Ten days from now will be the fifth anniversary of having created my user account at Wikipedia, and for at least the last 12 months whenever I post in many of the Wikipedia fora, I am the most senior Wikipedian there. I feel this distinction is unmerited: I haven't been nearly as active in creating or enforcing policy as many volunteers, and I suspect that if I had been, I would have burned out and left Wikipedia long ago. Because I have done so little, I feel that I have now become a community elder with very little -- if any -- wisdom to dispense.

Rather than a conflict between "generations", Wikipedia is faced with a conflict between a large number less experienced members, who find themselves needing to follow the rules more literally and with less confidence, and a smaller number of more experienced ones who understand the rules and know when to break them. Resolving this conflict is a stressful and exhausting activity, which frequently leads to members quitting Wikipedia and leaving angry messages about treating the troublemakers better than the productive members. I have a suspicion that this is a common problem in volunteer organizations, but I don't know where I would start researching how other groups cope with it.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Generation gap, Mzoli's Meats, Wikis, wikipedia

As goes Pennsylvania

2007-10-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

So, it appears, goes New York. While looking for something else on meta, I found a link to the announcement of the organizational meeting for the New York Wikimedia Chapter. I know that Newyorkbrad has been working on building ground-roots support for a chapter in that city, and they had an encouraging turnout at their meetup last August -- or should I just call it a picnic?

I guess things are slowly building towards a United States Wikimedia organization, even though the Pennsylvania chapter has been inactive during the last couple of months; I hope that was due merely to the effects of summer and the start of the school year.

Geoff

PS -- They're scheduled another meetup, and part of the business will be devoted to organizing this chapter.

Technocrati tags: New York, online communities, Wikimedia, wikipedia

Wikimania 2008

2007-10-10T22:44:00.000-07:00

The announcement went out Tuesday: Wikimania 2008 will held at Alexandria, Egypt. But, instead of the possibility of meeting at the site of perhaps the most famous library in the world -- or at least the possibility of taking a tour amongst the ruins of the ancient civilization best known in the West -- the most excitement appears to be over the fact that the state of Egypt is oppressive towards Gays, Lesbians and Transgendered people.

I could make an acerbic comment about how this relates to the reality outside of the hothouse of Europe, and North America, but outside of generating a lot of hate email I'm not sure what it would accomplish.

Jimbo said the right thing: he planned to make this into an opportunity into confronting the problem, to point out not everyone has the same rights as in the West. This is along the lines of the most positive possibilities of Wikipedia. And there is more than simply a lot of pleasant words and good intentions here: there are some opportunites that could make a positive difference in the world.

For one thing, a convention in Egypt does offer a meeting place between the West and the less developed parts of the world, those parts wherein the future lies. I've written a little here about AboutUs.org, who have been developing Wiki technology; they happen to have a branch in Lahore, Pakistan. Let's say that management decides to fly a some of their Pakistani employees to Wikimania next year; this is not an unreasonable idea, seeing how they are hired from one of Pakistan's finest technical universities. A quick query on Expedia shows that (with one exception) it costs half as much for them to travel to Alexandria than to Frankfurt-am-Main Germany; it is twice as likely for them to attend a conference in Alexandria as it would be for them to attend one in Frankfurt (where the first Wikimania was held). We have a chance to engage not only Egyptians, but these intelligent and motivated people as well. Then there is India, with its growing numbers of technology-savvy people, is only a little further away; Israel, with another large technology-savvy population, is much closer.

We have a choice of being politically correct, and refusing to have anything with a country that is repressive -- although far from being as repressive as many -- or being pragmatic and reaching out to not only to the people in this country, but to other non-Western countries, and encouraging them to work towards a less repressive society.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Alexandria, Egypt, Gay and Lesbian, Wikimania, Wikipedia,

Another insightful study

2007-10-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

Although it could be argued this is dangerously self-referential: Dragon's flight performed this statistical analysis on Wikipedia's log files which includes looking at the edit histories for 118793 English Wikipedia articles (~6% of all articles).

(I found this through Dragon's flight's announcement on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list. The resulting thread is also worth a read.)

Although some might disagree with this observation, I find this is evidence against my theory that the slowing rate of new article creation is due to a lack of "low-hanging fruit", instead the slowing rate is due to limits on the number of people joining the English-language Wikipedia: the community is reaching its limit of members. There are just so many people in the world who would consider writing encyclopedia articles as "fun." Another thing to consider, is that as non-English Wikipedias gain viability people for whom English is a second language are more likely either to leave the English Wikipedia for the one in their native language, or never to contribute in the first place.

October is producing a bumper crop of studies and facts to chew on, and it's not even half over.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Online communities, Outreach, Statistics, Wikis, wikipedia

Another interesting Wikipedia study

2007-10-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Kathering Panciera, Loren Terveen, John Riedl. "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia" They attempt to figure out who makes the most useful edits ("useful" defined as a function of persistence -- people are less likely to revert correct or useful information) and the effects, and who makes damaging edits and the effects.

(Thanks to Gregory Maxwell for the link.)

Maybe a little more technical than the curious would like, but I expect this will become another of those widely-quoted or cited studies.

Update: For those of you unable to view PDF files (or even if you can), Ben Yates at Wikipedia Blog has one of the more informative graphs touched up with color.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: information value, vandalism, Web 2.0, wikipedia

WikiWednesday in Portland

2007-10-04T20:10:00.000-07:00

Last night I met up with the usual suspects for the Portland version of Wikiwednesday at the AboutUs world headquarters, where being part of a contemporary start-up means doing without heat. (I hope they fix that problem soon.)

I witnessed two things there worth mentioning:

First was the future of Wiki technology. A few weeks ago, I saw an email from Ted Kubaska asked about "how wikis interact with IM, live podcasts, video, webinars, etc." My sense of his question was that he was wondering if we will ever subject non-text media like, for example, videos to the collaborative power of Wikis. In any case, just the sort of question anyone might ask when he -- or she -- is introduced to a new idea. Then last night, Mr Wiki himself, Ward Cunningham asked the exact same question himself. I felt this was the kind of lesson that everyone who is interested in exploring the limits of technology should keep in mind: even the experts ask the same questions the rest of us ask.

Oh, so you want to know what kind of answers Ted and Ward received? Well, I did throw out the idea that one could resurrect the mid-1990s VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) technology, and use that as a basis to create collaborative videos. Ward himself mentioned how he was fascinated with the phenomena of machinima, where people create their own movies using video capture from such 3-D software like first-person shooter games. Then again, I've heard a lot of technorati remark about how they are fascinated by the machinima genre.

Second was Divid McCabe's impromteau presentation about Liquid Threads, an extention to the MediaWiki engine. He's been funded in this effort by a group called "Commonwealth of Learning" ("So what do they do?" David was asked -- "I really don't know. They pay me to code.")
This new feature offers the following:

Instead of needing to edit a whole section (which contains the string), one only needs to click on "Reply" to write a replay -- just like many forum software packages.
Built-in automatic archiving of threads that have done cold after 14 days. Threads in the Talk space on Wikipedia currently requires either an editor or a bot to archive them.
A usable history record on every thread.
Lastly -- in my eyes, an important feature -- while one can edit any comment in a thread, if any person's comments are altered by another user, that user's name appears on that comment. This makes falsifying other people's comments a little harder to do. (Of course, this has never happened on Wikipedia -- unless you know something I don't.)

Geoff

Technocrati tags: MediaWiki, PortlandTech, Wikipedia, Wiki Technology, Wikiwednesday

Edit wars: an afterthought

2007-09-30T20:41:00.000-07:00

Getting quoted in the LA Times definitely put a spike in my traffic. Unfortunately, I didn't know which one of the many topics I want to write about to write about -- so instead, I focussed my attention on improving a couple of Wikipedia articles: Tekle Giyorgis I of Ethiopia and 1868 Expedition to Abyssinia. I guess my stage fright is rooted in the knowledge that anyone can edit Wikipedia and is left with an impression about the project -- this sincere and heart-felt comment is one such example (the anonymous comment, not Kelly's post) -- but not anyone do it in a productive way. So rather than writing long, overly-rhetorical essays about how people should contribute, I guess I'm more comfortable just trying to do what I say.

However, there is one important thing after all this that I believe we need to keep in mind: talk about encyclopedia vs. community concerning Wikipedia is at best nonsensical, and at worst distracting from diagnosis of the real problems. We need both, because they support the project in different ways. I think of the encyclopedia element, what is being created, is like bone and the community, the group that creates it, like soft tissue: each supports the other, each protects the other, and one without the other will lead to the death of both.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Mzoli's Meats, online communities, Wikis, wikipedia

No more Portland DemoCamps

2007-09-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

One of the things I learned last night was that Raven Zachary decided to put aside his hope for a quarterly Portland DemoCamp, where new startups would have a short slot of time to make their presentations -- without the help of PowerPoint. Instead, this 25 October, the first Ignite Portland session will be held at Wieden & Kennedy (224 NW 13th Ave, Portland, OR). (Have a look at the video on the Ignite Portland website.) This method of presentation appears to have its roots in something called Pecha Kucha.

Would it sound like I'm Yet Another Shill if I were to say this sounds interesting? Well it does sound interesting to me -- and I hope I can at least be in the audience next month.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Ignite Portland, Portland Tech, PowerPoint

Does this mean I'm important, or I just have a big mouth

2007-09-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

You decide: I was quoted in this article that appeared in the L.A. Times about the Mzoli's Meats deletion battle. (At least they quoted one person worth listening to -- Andrew Lih.) As soon as I get over the shock that someone actually takes me seriously, I'll try to form an opinion about the article.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Mzoli's Meats, Online communities, Wikis, wikipedia

But there are sometimes good things

2007-09-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

My last post was probably too negative, implying that Wikipedia is, despite anyone's most heroic efforts, sliding into a quicksand of factionalism. Like most of humanity, I have a tendency to speak out more often to complain about bad things than to say anything about the good things.

One reason that I continue to contribute material to Wikipedia is in the not unrealistic expectation that my contributions will attract contributions from people who know more than me on the subject. It's not an unrealistic expectation, because it's often happened in the past. One example was, due to the effort Yom and I were devoting to Ethiopain articles at the time, when we received a querry from someone who wanted to write an article about the Sof Omar caves in that country, and after a little encouragement he wrote a nice little article, and supplied some images for it. This author just happened to have taken part in a formal British exploration of those caves in the 1970s, so he was undeniably an expert about what he was writing. (Unfortunately, due to the recent jihad against non-free images, one of the images he contributed with his article was removed because he forgot to include some statement needed to keep it in Wikipedia. I need to ask him to upload once again that image with the necessary legal verbage.)

However, a more recent contribution, one of those which encourages me to continue in my selfless and idealistic quest, was one I discovered last night. When I had originally started the article on Onesimos Nesib, who translated the Bible into the Oromo language, I found a mention of a one Aster Ganno, who is said to have actually done much of the work without receiving any credit for her contributions. I didn't think that I would ever find much about her -- women and their work in the 19th century tend to be poorly documented, and documentation on African women moreso -- so I simply mentioned her name in the article and moved on.

When I reviewed recent changes to the Onesimus Nesib article, I saw that several had been made by an editor who had not created a userpage. Often this is a clue that the person is a troublemaker, intending only to stay on Wikipedia long enough to either vandalize some articles -- or to stuff them with a rant for or against some specific point of view on a subject. Other times this is a clue that the person is new to Wikipedia, or not as familiar with computers as with the subject she/he wants to contribute to. It was the later in this case: Peter Unseth, who had co-authored the article on Aster Ganno for the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, a comprehensive reference work on Ethiopian history and culture, generously donated some of his learning to Wikipedia. As I traced the history of his contributions, I felt as if I were sitting at the same discussion with leading experts on Ethiopian history, clearly the same as auditting a virtual seminar -- and perhaps able to contribute my own opinion to the exchange.

Of course I left a thank-you note on his user talk page. It was a far more encouraging message to him than the two templates about improperly-contributed images left there before me.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Ethiopia, expert contributions, wikipedia

If the first time around is comedy, and the second time tragedy, then what is ...?

2007-09-20T21:22:00.000-07:00

It's hard to get back into the rhythm of blogging when one has drifted away. Writing on a regular basis requires not only discipline, but a certain amount of courage -- because one's mistakes in both grammar and logic are put out where everyone can see tehm. Yet sometimes, something happens that makes me willing to forget that I'm not that good of a writer and just post an opinion -- especially when it appears that everyone involved is going at the matter in the wrong way.

The matter I'm thinking of is the ruckus over the Mzoli's Meats nomination for deletion. This is one of those exchanges on Wikipedia that leaves me shaking my head.

Ben Yates spoke up about the nomination, pointing to this post
on WikiEN-l, and tied it to another email in the thread about how the obsession about driving spam from Wikipedia can harm it: marginal articles on worthwhile subjects get flushed from the system before they can be properly reviewed. This is not a bad sentiment: there is a lot of enthusiasm -- often too much -- from some members over fighting spam, vandalism, and giving the troublemakers the bum's rush out. But this story is more complex than what it might appear.

First, there was this question posted to the Wikipedia:Administrators' Noticeboard. Note the identities involved: the question is raised by a veteran Admin who has been around for a while. The Wikipedians who respond are likewise all familiar with the Wikipedia culture. And the advice offered?

"Follow you heart. Look non-notable to me."
"Keep in mind that Jimbo is just another editor (well, at most, just another admin)."
"Looks like touristcruft, based on this. Though this is slightly better. Userfying might be best."

And if you look at the version of the article they were discussing, it's not hard to side with them:

Mzoli's Meats is a butcher shop and restuarant located in Guguletu township near Cape Town, South Africa.

It would have been helpful if there had been a sentence or two at the beginning to explain why this particular restaurant was worth an article in an encyclopedia.

Odd that no one there raised the point expressed in the Article for Deletion discussion:

The point isn't that it was Jimbo, the point is that it was someone who knows the rules. They aren't just adding their favorite restaurant to the Wiki, they're adding an article that they're honestly planning to source later. Most of the CSD tags are by editors who don't have such plans. We need to give our trusted editors a chance to source something they've added; otherwise, it becomes a race to see who can type the fastest, the prodder or the sourcer.

Instead, the original discussion appears to be more concerned about whether Jimbo Wales gets a free pass concerning this article, and I detect an implication that he might have made a mistake creating it. Especially when it comes to articles on restaurants, because the burden of proof is greater: far too often, articles on restaurants are little more than advertising, and the vast majority of restaurants are not worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia.

However, the possibility that Jimbo had simply forgot how important it was to explain the notability of the topic is never explored because another veteran Admin deleted it out of hand. This is the same Admin who returned from a Wikivacation by posting a screed which read, in part:

I don't care what anyone says, the vast majority of administrators are pompous overbearing control freaks. They run around with this attitude that having +sysop is some sort of right, priviledge, or a permission to bully, harras and generally act like a dick, thinking they can get away with it. There IS a cabal, and it makes sneaky back-door decisions such as deletions, vote stacking, blocks, trying to force editors into 3RR, page protections, et cetera almost daily.

Well, his motivation is clear. And I have to respect his following comment in the deletion discussion: "Wasn't Jimbo the one who said we need to stop using {{fact}} and either source it or remove it? As it stands, we've got a non-notable restaurant with almost no sourcing." But why another Admin decided to fight to the death over deleting this article is less clear. Although it was discussed.

Too bad no one thought to discuss why the Admin, the one who had asked about this article back on the Wikipedia:Administrators' Noticeboard, had failed to contribute to the discussion over deleting the article. If I were in that Admin's place, I would have stayed away, too; the argument there soon stopped being about if the article should be deleted, it was about proving someone wrong, and no one was at their best in this argument.

Not even Jimbo, who lashed out with the following: "You can dispute the article on the merits of the notability (though not successfully, I think), but the assumptions of bad faith in this argument are just shocking. Some people should excuse themselves from the project and find a new hobby." Writing this, he failed to acknowledge that many Wikipedians honestly believe that there are groups of people with more influence than others, and treating this belief with contempt does not make it go away -- it only drives the frustration underground where it continues to grow. Maybe if he participated more he would see this sickness in Wikipedia -- but if he participated more, it might harm the ecology his careful laissez-faire strategy has created.

So why didn't I enter this discussion, and share some of these insights and help still the waters? Part of the reason was that I was busy part of the time this transpired undergoing an Alien Abduction special; but most the reason was that I was busy working on some articles. I had just discovered that through Google Books I could get a hold of a number of older, difficult-to-obtain works on Ethiopia, and was reading them. But the larger part of this larger reason was that I really didn't see any point in being part of this discussion: people were going to yell at each other, accuse each other of untrue motivations, and not try to listen to each other and find common ground.

When Wikipedia -- or any wiki -- works, it is truly a wonderful thing. (One example of this can be seen over at About Us, where they are implimenting a system called Consensus Polling. It's a directed conversation where the intent is to arrive at a conclusion that all members either agree with -- or can live with.) It is wonderful because it can get people to actually talk with -- rather than at -- each other, and leads them to form a consensus. But when it doesn't work, it is no different than pulling together any number of people selected at random, and giving them an acrimonious topic to discuss.

However many people remind us that Wikipedia is not an experiment in Wiki-culture, it is a project to build an encyclopedia. So instead of trying to make the Wiki stuff work, I'll take the easy way out and just work on the writing.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Mzoli's Meats, Online communities, Wikis, wikipedia

The power of LinkedIn

2007-08-30T19:53:00.000-07:00

On my LinkedIn Network page, there's a box that informs me about other locations my connections gives me access to -- 568 such locations, for what it's worth. Tonight, it told me one of those was Slough, UK.

So I had a look to see whom my contacts in that city were. Nope, none of them were David Brent. Nor Tim Canterbury. Not even Keith Bishop.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: LinkedIn, The Office

Expanding my vocabulary

2007-08-20T14:53:00.000-07:00

I've just learned a term that explains a condition I experience on a regular basis: Warnock's Dilemma. Until know, I thought I was the only one this happens to.

And I can't imagine how a support group for this would work.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Online communities

More Wikimania transcripts

2007-08-06T18:27:00.000-07:00

From a site that should be on more radars: AboutUs.org. Their series of essays on The Wiki Way are also worth reading.

Seth Anthony's "Analysis of Content Generators" - http://www.aboutus.org/Analysis_of_Wikipedia_content_creators
Erik Moeller's "Sharing information between Wikis" - http://www.aboutus.org/ways_of_sharing_information_between_wikis
Jimmy Wales and Gil Penchina Discuss Wikia
Discussion on the Future of Wikis - http://www.aboutus.org/Notes_from_the_future_of_wikis_discussion_at_Wikimania_2007
Evan Prodromou on "Social networking tools" - http://www.aboutus.org/Notes_from_Evan%27s_talk_on_Social_Networking_Tools_at_WikiMania_2007
Brion Vibber on Single Unified Logon (I couldn't match this to a presentation -- was this from the recap of the Open Hacking session?)
Brian Behlendorf's "Open Source compared with more traditional corporate development projects" - http://www.aboutus.org/WM2007_-_Brian_Behlendorf_on_OpenSource
Jo Ito's Plenary, "On the Sharing Economy"

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Wikimania 2007, Wikimania, Wikipedia

Considering some Wikimania sessions

2007-08-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

Seth Anthony's Wikimania presentation "Where Have All The Writers Gone: The Diversion, Distraction and Departure of Wiki "Content Creators." has been used by some to argue that the core members of Wikipedia (well okay, the English Wikipedia) contribute very little substantial material to the content, and are more interested in arguing policy. While there is some truth to this accusation, I believe the causes for this odd indicator are far more complex than these results of Anthony's studies indicate. Keep in mind that one goal of every committed Wikipedian is the desire to recruit more knowledgable and productive members. I believe that lot of the apparently minor edits Admins make are to further this goal.

But after that presentation, the report of what was shared at this year's conference dries up. Only after clicking at random on one link did I discover a rough draft of a transcript to the panel discussion "The shifting nature of the English Wikipedia community". One could say that this is a continuation of Andrew Lih's post, "Unwanted: New articles in Wikipedia", but there is more to consider here. One point is that this is a fascinating example of how fast the Wikipedia community can move: Andrew posted his comments on the tenth of last month, and it has become a central issue at Wikimania. However, a more important one is one damning comment this transcript records on the state of the English Wikipedia (I have cleaned it up for readability reasons):

from the Hebrew Wikipedia, we have the benefit of learning from some of en's mistakes. Right now on the Hebrew Wikipedia it is considered unfashionable to say 'look, en:wp has this nice process and they have CSD G11...' When someone says that, it usually means he's about to be blocked. From our perspective... there are bigger Wikipedias we can learn from, the German Wikipedia seems to be better; they understand each other better and have less bureaucracy.

I wonder how many transcripts of various sessions, even in such a rough state, await discovery in the Wikimania website.

One example of a session I would like to know more about is Jon Philip's "Wikibiblio: A Community-based Bibliographic System." I like the idea of creating a standardized system to cite sources on Wikipedia, but long experience has taught me that what sounds good in a summary may not be a practical, functioning thing; I wanted to know more about it. The "Discuss" icon linked to "Wikimania:Forum/Technical Infrastructure", which had only a few cryptic notes about the subject. Philip's personal website failed to mention anything about "WikiBiblio". Frustrated, I resorted to Google to find something about this -- but found nothing clearly relevant to the topic. Although it led me to this intreguing proof of a concept created back in July, 2005. I have no idea if this is what Philip intended to discuss.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Wikimania2007, Wikimania, wikipedia

Evening thoughts

2007-08-03T00:08:00.000-07:00

I went to the PLUG meeting tonight (a good presentation by Steve Morris of the Oregon Technology Business Center) and had a few beers with the gang afterwards, so I drove home in the dark of night.

It was a warm night, the kind of darkness that lures people to malinger outdoors, not chase them inside. Time has been flying by so fast this year that I have a hard time accepting that it is August already, and that the kids will be returning to school in only a few weeks. As I count the days of summer, it is more than half over and I haven't had a chance to really enjoy it.

One of the streets I drove on to my home, Ainsworth, has a strip of grass and trees dividing the street into two. This strip is not very wide, and in daylight everything on it is visible to anyone. As I drove down Ainsworth, I passed a pair of people sitting on the grass, talking. For them, the darkness made this piece of the grass dividing Ainsworth into a private place that they obviously felt gave them sanctuary. Well, that's what I might think when I was their age.

When I thought this, I remembered in a few months I would turn fifty. I felt old. When I don't remember my age when I do things, do I behave foolishly?

Geoff

Technocrati tags: age, summer

When the Going turns Surreal, only Criminals will own Librarians

2007-08-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

I think we all know the famous cartoon and its punch-line: on the Internet, no one knows that you are a dog. This leads to the corollary: on the Internet, you can't prove to anyone that you aren't a dog, the posibility that of millions of dogs at computers produced Wikipedia aside. This can lead to a surreal environment.

Last week came Slashdot's "revelation" that Slim Virgin is a spy, allegedly a female James Bond. When I had encountered this story long ago, the allegation was far less exotic: that "Slim Virgin" was the screen name of one Linda Mack, an eccentric college student who lost someone close to her (either a family member or a friend) on the Lockaby air plane crash, and volunteered a lot of her time and energy into finding the people responsible. Because Mack worked with the British MI5, some appraently think this made her a spy -- although what I read never made it clear that Mack did more than obsess over who brought down the plane and bothered a lot of people.

Or "Slim Virgin" is the screen name of one Sarah McEwan, a resident of Canada. That is plausible because Slim Virgin at one time signed her posts with a first name "Sarah" -- assuming that was her given name, and not a nickname or a pseudonym. (This is not just another bit of idle speculation: my grandmother preferred to be called "Roberta" instead of her birth name of "Ethyl", a detail that caused a minor bit of confusion when I severed as administrator for her estate after her death.)

Or that all three women are the same person. At that point, I remarked to myself that all of this was mildly interesting -- and if true, more interesting than any equivalent period in my own life -- and thought no more about it. All of this didn't appear to have any relation to Slim Virgin's behavior on Wikipedia as far as I could discern, and I concentrated on my own projects on Wikipedia -- which she did not participate in.

Let me be clear on this. My involvement with Wikipedia does not spring out of some desire to make the whole project conform to my own image of what it should be, just to share facts and ideas with other people that I find in my reading. As long as other Wikipedians do not interfere with that, I won't interfere with what they do. Periodically I do get involved in matters I don't need to, but often I find that I can't control my anger, which leads me to write or do things that I wish I hadn't. I'm not the skilled diplomat many other Wikipedians are, and often I feel my intervention has only made a bad situation worse. So I'd rather assume that other Wikipedians are doing their jobs well and tend to my own garden within that project.

Besides, so what if she is a female version of James Bond? As long as she doesn't resort to some black ops tactics to resolve disputes (even if that is the only way to settle them), is it a problem? Maybe she can draw on that experience to improve some articles.

However, as Kelly Martin and others have pointed out, the way this has been handled has only made things worse: removing material from article histories only creates more controversy, not less. A simple denial is all that is needed to handle this surreal rumor.

Speaking of surreal, we have the case of Oldwindybear. (No link to his user page because he asked for it to be deleted.) He was made an Admin on the English Wikipedia a couple of weeks ago, then resigned the post and quit the project entirely last week. Apparently he had a couple of sockpuppets -- a claim I still can't get my head around. Here's the evidence, so you can decide for yourself. It's just that from my experience with the guy, I can't think of any reason he would want (or need) sockpuppets: he was well enough liked and respected under his own username to become an Admin. (His nomination carried 66-0 and one neutral.) How would he benefit by doing this? We only saw one part of Oldwindybear, the persona he presented to Wikipedia, and never truly knew what he was thinking.

As a result of this surprise, there was a thread on the Requests for Administrator Talk page about how the process was completely broken, it needed to be changed, et cetera. All this incident proves is that online is not better than face-to-face communication. I trusted Oldwindybear based on my own experience with him; if he had done all of this, then he pulled a successful con, and only a minor mistake gave himself away.

I don't agree with Tlogmer that requiring Administrators to furnish (or use) their real names would solve problems like this. For example, I happen to share the same name as a car dealer in Australia. I don't know how trustworthy car dealers are considered in Australia, but in America they are not well thought of, and I don't need to risk confusing people that I am one. If anyone wonders who is really behind the name "llywrch", a Google search ought to answer that.

All of this agitation over an encyclopedia is confusing. It would make more sense if people fought over a piece of extremely soft Camembert. To quote another Wikipedian, it's just a website. Even if someone like me gained complete control over it and forced articles to contain only one set of opinions (say, adding to the George W. Bush article that he is a war criminal and has inexplicably avoided impeachment), what would be the result? There are thousands of websites who advocate those same ideas, and Bush is still president of the United States.

I'm puzzled how a love for libraries and reading could create the surreal environment Wikipedia is at the point of becoming. While some might argue that Surrealism was a creative movement, even Surrealists lose their muses.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: identity, online communities, wikipedia

A stale Slashdot exchange

2007-07-29T15:53:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time I was a Slashdot regular. (FWIW, my ID is 9023 -- some people think 4-digit IDs are kewl for some reason.) Then for many reasons -- the fanboys, the growing contempt the owners of the site had for their members, a period when I was disillused with the technology industry, Wikipedia proved to be more interesting -- I drifted away. I have since occasionally posted there, maybe half a dozen times, but it's been at least a year since I poked my nose into that forum.

I did so today, because I read halfway through Milos article, "Re: Sounds like Wikipedia needs to study a few ideas" when my curiousity was incited to look once again at Slashdot. Where I found Georgewilliamherbert had an account, which led me to look at my own account. And found this thread concerning Wikipedia. I started out explaining the concept "notability", to which someone named "Anonymous Coward" (he sure makes a lot of posts to Wikipedia) wrote:

'Fess up. You LIKE being a pompous ass.

For a moment, I wished I had seen this much earlier so I could have responded -- even though sometimes I do like being pompous. Then I saw what someone else with the exact same name wrote:

That's what your mom said last night.

If Sean Connery continues to defend me on Slashdot, I might return.

Geoff

Technorati tags: Blogging, Slashdot

An update to my OSCON post

2007-07-28T09:15:00.000-07:00

I saw the answer to my question Tuesday about Jimmy Wales in The Oregonian. Yes, he was at OSCON, where he delivered a keynote speech Thursday, then afterwards he and Ward Cunningham talked with Mike Rogoway. Rogoway's blog links to the electronic version of the article -- which vanishes after 90 days -- and the MP3 version of the conversation -- which might not.

For the Jimmy Wales fans out there, Rogoway also speculates on Jimbo's birthdate, and blogger Robert Kaye offers a partial transcript of the "Art of the Community" Session.

I wonder if Technorati will pick up the fact I've updated my blog this time.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, OSCON, OSCON07, Portland, Wikipedia

Gate-crashing OSCON

2007-07-24T21:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, so far I just attended one session, but it was a good one: "Technology Community leadership Meetup", hosted by Dawn Foster. I had invited Mark Dilley from AboutUs.org in hope we'd meet up with Jimbo Wales. Jimbo wasn't at this session (is he even attending OSCON?) but we did have a chance to be in a group with Chris DiBona and Larry Augustin. (DiBona was just a guy in a black t-shirt; Augustin made an impression on me from the beginning by his story about some guy by the name of "Andre" who claims he can get his emails to Steve Balmer answered within four hours.) And as we waited to get started, a couple of of the people present chatted about some dust-up between Eben Moglen and Tim O'Reilly at the executive briefing on Open Source: apparently many people in the Open Source community think O'Reilly has sold out to corporate interests, but many people who watched Moglen rip into O'Reilly believe he didn't deserve quite that much abuse. I wasn't there, so I'm just repeating what I overheard.

I'm interested in online communities because I believe that Wikipedia can always do this thing better -- but from some of the comments I heard, Wikipedia is years ahead of the other communities. All of the other groups interested in online communities and how to make them work are struggling with many of the same issues and possible solutions that Wikipedia has been: anonymity, evangelism, troublemakers, decision-making, inward-looking versuses outward-looking conversations, a reputation system and the problem of keeping the community conversation in one place. I'm not sure that Wikipedia has better answers than anyone else, only that we're struggling with them on a larger scale than anyone else. They're trying to make their villages thrive: Wikipedia is struggling to keep its city from imploding.

And, as might be expected, the most interesting comments didn't come from the well-known names. (DiBona left half-way through the BoF session.) Mark Dilley talked a bit about a tool used on AboutUs.org called consensus polling, which Mark said had been adapted from the Omidiyar network (now being phased out of existence). And Wm Leler, one of the founders of Zat.com, talked about his research into a new model of for-profit open source businesses, which he described as being similar to the "old-fashioned worker's cooperative." I'll repeat what I said at the session: if he can make it work, not only will it mean the arrival of Web 3.0, but that I want to know his secret.

If I manage to crash another OSCON event -- or event better, Dawn's Thursday session "Art of the Community", I'll try to share it here.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, OSCON, OSCON07, Portland, Wikipedia

I finished reading the Last Harry Potter an Hour Ago

2007-07-21T21:42:00.000-07:00

And here are my spoilers for those of you who haven't read it:

Harry doesn't appear in the first chapter.
The last word in the book is "well."
Almost every scene used in the previous six books appears in this book. Including Platform 9 3/4
Almost every character who appeared in the previous six books appears in this book. Including Colin Creevey.

And having read the last chapter of the book, which Rowling wrote many years ago when she first sketched out the plot for this series, and which she admits she had rewritten because things changed changed as she wrote the books, I wonder how the first draft read. How did she originally plan to end the series, and who did she plan would live?

And Rowling never tells us what happens to the Dursleys at the end of the series. All of the Dursley fans are left hanging, wondering if they survived, and whether Dudley ever found a respectable job.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Harry Potter, spoilers, writing

Thoughts on the Wikimedia Board Election

2007-07-15T12:39:00.000-07:00

Even though we were promised that the results would be announced today, on the 15th, Wikizine announced the results a few days ago. And keeping with my time-hallowed tradition concerning elections, most of the people I voted for were not elected. Since my reasoning was so out of tune with the majority, I'd like to ponder over what this election means. If you voted for one of the three who gained Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) Board seats -- Mindspillage, Eloquence, and Frieda -- you probably know what this election means. But humor this average editor who has been around Wikipedia for probably too many years.

One problem this election faces is that for most of the volunteers, the WMF is a shadowy group. I more than understand this: beyond keeping the servers up and running, this group has very little undeniable impact on how the WMF projects (i.e., Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wiktionary, etc.) actually function. As an example, when I happened to look at the archives of the Foundation-l maillist a few days ago, I found that the topic most passionately debated there was ... whether or not Board members should be reimbursed for day care while travelling on WMF business. My take is that this is just a reminder that despite becoming an organization known throughout the world, the WMF still remains very much a small-scale organization where everyone argues endlessly over every item in the agenda. It may not be professional, but it is who we are.

(On this "day-care-gate" issue, I will add my two cents: I think it's obvious that this affects one specific Board member -- who doesn't need to be named. I also think that the decision should be made in terms whether the contributions of this Board member are vital enough to justify this payment -- not whether it conforms to some other practice or precedent, either real or imaginary. But decisions that may benefit specific people are never made openly on such plain terms.)

Turning to the results itself, I am a little surprised at who won -- and didn't win -- this election. Point by point:

Frieda. I knew nothing about here before the election, and I still know almost nothing about her, beyond a vague and naive assumption that if she is the president of Wikimedia Italy, she must be qualified for the position. I am concerned that she answered so few questions during the election, similar to some of the other candidates, and in a manner that suggested she was having second thoughts about the position -- as it did for many of the ones who failed to be elected. I honestly would like to have Board members who communicate with the rest of us, and explain what the WMF is doing to help the volunteers and the projects.

Michael Snow. Michael had received several endorsements from bloggers, had an obvious track record (okay, obvious to us on the English-language Wikipedia) so I thought he would be elected. So why wasn't he? Was it due to fall-out from Gmaxwell's misunderstood solicitation to vote? (Which obviously failed -- in the end, less than 10% did.) Or perhaps fear of US domination of the WMF Board?

Oscar. Another person I knew nothing about here before the election, and I still know almost nothing about now -- except that he was a Board member.

Mindspillage and Eloquence. Both were re-elected incumbants, so there is no major groundswell of disatisfaction with the Board amongst those who care about the WMF.

However, Danny's and Kate's campaigns suggest that we shouldn't be so complaisant. At first I dismissed Danny's campaign as just the continuation of his personality conflict with one or more people in the Foundation; these things happen in every organization, and because it doesn't necessarily mean one or both people involved are bad, normally I wouldn't concern myself about it. Yet Kate's candidacy suggests that there may be more to this feud than meets the eye. It is unusual for an employee in a quasi-public organization like the WMF to run for office, and is almost always done in response to mismanagement of that organization. Combined with Brad Patrick's unexpected resignation earlier this year, and it's hard not to wonder if something wrong is happening with the WMF. Whether it's financial mismanagement, a lack of vision or a simple case of lousy communication between one or more people, this needs to be resolved either by bringing in a fresh set of eyes or more communication between the WMF and the grassroots.

I've touched on lots of problems and challenges in this post. I wonder which ones the Board will
address -- and work on.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Wikimedia
Foundation, wikipedia

1.8 million articles

2007-07-13T14:57:00.000-07:00

The good news: Wikipedia has over 1.8 million articles. You can find something about practically *any* subject.

The bad news: Wikipedia has over 1.8 million articles. Not every article has been reviewed, perhaps not even most of them. One can't say that Wikipedia is peer-reviewed with a straight face anymore; we're on the verge of re-inventing the World Wide Web in all of its instability and unreliability in Wikipedia.

And Andew Lih once accused me of optimism.

In the last week, a number of us Wikipedia-related bloggers have ranted about dealing with deletion-happy Wikipedians. They include Andrew, Ben Yates, Kelly Martin, yours truly, and most recently Urpo Lankinen. The kinds of people who can quote policy at length, sometimes by the reference or shortcut (e.g. "A7, "WP:NOT") but can't explain what it means or how it applies to save their lives. I regret to say that it's just the tip of an iceberg of a problem -- caused by the challenge of managing over 1.8 million articles.

The problem with so many articles is that people turn to tools to cope with this growing monster. The one tool I've had an excuse to rant about -- but didn't because I honestly didn't want to post that much anger and bile about any one topic -- is using bots to tag images for deletion due to questions over their fair-use status. Yes, there is a problem with abuse of this intentionally narrow exclusion to the general Wikipedia policy of free content, but it is a problem that needs to be solved with a modicum of thought and care -- not with a bot following an algorithm created from if/then statements. However, taking 30 seconds to determine whether a given image is obviously within fair use guidelines, and the problem lies in an easily fixable omission or minor error, means that less images are tagged than if the bot is allowed to make an edit every 6 seconds -- and with hundreds of thousands of images to be tagged, editcount is the important thing. (Augh. I didn't mean to write this much, so I'll stop here.)

In other words, because it is easier to tack a tag or template on an article than to fix it, Wikipedians tend to make these kinds of edits over fixing the article. And if a Wikipedian can create a bot to do the tagging for her or him, these are the kinds of edits that Wikipedian will make to the exclusion of all others. A bot tags -- but a bot won't read the article. So typos and factual inconsistencies, some of which even the newest of all Wikipedians could see and fix with a click some typing and another click, persist for months. I have found simple mistakes like these in articles I wrote months ago, embarassedly fixed them, then wondered if this was evidence that no one reads what I write. Obviously it is not critically read, so any errors in the text are spread beyond just Wikipedia to the countless mirrors, and beyond into the various dark corners of the Internet where they hibernate until someone reintroduces them into the mainstream once again.

But good, critical reworking of an article takes time. Sometimes months, because sources have to be found, read, and understood. I've mentioned in an earlier post that I was trying another tactic of solving this problem -- extracting facts from books as I read them into relevant existing articles -- but this only speeds up the process in some cases. No two articles are structured in the same manner (beyond having a lead paragraph, a body, and sections providing links and sources at the end), even on similar topics. And once I start making one change to an article, I often find that other edits are needed -- typos and grammar fixed, wording tightened, maybe another fact or two added and sourced -- and links fixed. (I have this obsession about making sure that links point to the right article.)

However, I understand the other side of this problem: a newbie discovers Wikipedia, wants to prove that she or he not only belongs but is as good -- or better -- than the current crowd. Every new Wikipedian wants to compete in the marketplace of improving Wikipedia, and being human the newbie will find the most efficient -- or easiest -- way to compete. They tend to make more edits than better ones; and it's always easier to create articles than write Featured ones. They are attracted to policy issues, and try to formulate new ones and rewrite old ones -- okay, so do old-timers like me, but I see it as a break from the writing, not instead of it -- or enforcing policy. Fighting vandals, reverting spam and other bad edits and debating in Wikipedia: Articles for Deletion appear to be very popular for this reason. All of this is valuable work, but policy issues are best handled when one has experience with how Wikipedia works, after one has written a few articles, debated a few changes, followed a few threads about the problems of enforcing policy -- and learned that policy really isn't as important as it might first appear.

If someone joins Wikipedia to write encyclopedia articles, and makes the usual effort not only to conform to community standards (which are described, not legislated, in the policy pages) but get along with people, one really doesn't need to pay attention to what the policy pages actually say.

Another error I've seen these newbies exhibit is in thinking that all of those pages in the Wikipedia namespace are legislated rules, rather than descriptions of processes and considerations. If I could compare the ideal behavior of Wikipedia to a river (both are attempts to go somewhere), the guidelines are not an attempt to turn it into a channel confined between dykes paved with stone, but an effort to remove the worst of the sandbars and snags on one hand, while on the other discouraging people from settling in the floodplain. The first way will always be more efficient than the second, but not only does the first have less charm and often beauty than the second, it is less robust and adaptable than the second. This is something experience teaches, and a good reason why newbies should avoid involving themselves in policy until they gain experience.

(Someone might insist that there are exceptions to that last statement. Some Wikipedians can demonstrate that they possess clue with their first edits, and some of us are still newbies after many years of active participation. In that case, an argument based on reason why an exception should be made is the best way to decide. Perhaps to become a full-fledged Wikipedian, we should insist that candidates write an essay explaining what they believe Wikipedia is -- and convince us that they know. I'm not sure many of us would pass such a test.)

Returning to my point, when people compete it is natural for them to seek the most efficient or easiest way to compete. Competition itself is not always a bad thing; it is how the better eventually wins out over the good. However, this human tendency can sabotage the positive nature of competition; instead of playing the game, people game the rules. Instead of lowering prices and raising quality, both prices and quality are lowered and all players find themselves trapped in a race to the bottom. I see this happening in Wikipedia: far more effort is spent on arguing over things like original research and permitted fair use than improving articles. People may win those arguments, and pervail in their bot-enabled mass deletions, but the average quality of Wikipedia's articles will remain the same.

Yet even if by some act of God, every current editor in Wikipedia were replaced by a group of superhumans, who were endowed with sufficient wisdom and learning to work together harmoniously and write articles of such great quality as to make the Encyclopedia Brittanica look as reliable as the Weekly World News, the problem facing Wikipedia is that it has over 1.8 million articles. Unless this becomes their full-time job, by the time our super-Wikipedians are rewriting the last articles, they will find that the first rewrites will need to be reviewed and updated; human knowledge, natural phenomena and history wait for no one.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, wikipedia

A delayed WikiWednesday in Portland

2007-07-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

I made it to this month's WikiWednesday in Portland, delayed a week due to the holidays, over at the interim offices of AboutUs corporate world headquaters, overlooking the Willamette River. Unfortunately, the office we met in faced the less scenic parking lot.

In attendence were Mark Dilley, Ted Ernst, Brandon Sanders, and a couple of other AboutUs employees whose names I did not catch. Kristin Thompson, whom I met at Recent Changes Camp earlier this year, was supposed to be there but she didn't show before Mark and I closed the offices down.

I heard a lot of Wiki-related news that I'll try to remember to share when I have the time. The most important bit to share is that we've scheduled meetings for the next three months. The August meeting will be centered around a remote link with Wikimania in Taipei, hopefully taking advantage of the Wikimania Lounge. At least that's the plan at the moment; so far, since the rest of the attendees will be in Taipei, I'm the only person who promised to show. Where ever I decide to have it.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Wikimania, Wikipedia, WikiWednesdays

Instead of making useful edits to Wikipedia

2007-07-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

I found myself experiencing the ugly side of the community. And if I didn't enjoy contributing what I read to articles, I'd seriously consider folding my tent and leaving after this experience. Granted, I can sometimes let my anger -- or my admittedly odd sense of logic -- get the better of me, which is why I stay out of a lot of policy decisions; I encounter someone with an opinion or viewpoint opposed to mine, we clash, and I write something I later regret -- so I stay out of those profitless disputes. Yet looking back over today's experience in Articles for Deletion, I'm surprised that no one in the entire exchange didn't make an effort to bridge the differences between what I was talking about -- and the other side, who eagerly quoted policy at me as if it were sacred writ. Having experienced this, and having much experience with Wikipedia under my belt, I can only wonder at how a new editor -- or an outsider concerned about a factual error in an article and motivated to fix it -- might feel.

Today I noticed on the Community Portal page a request for the whole community to participate in a discussion whether to delete an article about "Your Cheatin' Heart". I had thought the discussion was over an article about the better-known song by Hank Williams, so curious why anyone would want to delete an article about that, I followed the link. I discovered that it wasn't about the song, but about an episode to a television show I had never heard of. After a little research, I was about to cast my vote in favor of deletion, when I realized a rather humbling fact: no one had put forth an intelligible reason why this article should be deleted. There was a lot of jargon -- the string WP:EPISODE was invoked several times, as if it explained everything, but never in a way that an outsider would understand -- so in my good-natured naivete, I made a comment about what I thought were the points that should be addressed in this discussion:

(1) Should Wikipedia have an article on every episode of every television series & (2) What is a "notable" television episode?

Oddly, no one bothered to explain how these were covered by the magic words of "WP:EPISODE", something I had to figure out for myself afterwards. Instead, I had policy quoted at me in a manner very similar to a police officer brow-beating a criminal suspect.

Maybe my debate skills are not top-notch, but I had always thought the point of a discussion was to find common ground, explain uncertainties, and attempt to convert the undecided. And if anything, I made it clear (so I thought) that I was leaning towards delete -- if someone help me with my concerns and answer my questions. I guess I was just too muddle-headed for my own good, or ticked off that the first person to respond to my comments proudly boasted on his user page how many USCF points he had (but is correctly called his Elo ranking) as a chess player. (Although a bit of research after the fact shows that he's not as good as I thought he was, stating a number, rather than saying "I'm a strong player, and I have played tournaments", conveyed to me someone who was a show-off know-it-all, rather than an intelligent, logical person.) So my response to him was likely more aggressive than it should have been.

My response is met by someone who decides his best tactic is to
quote policy at me. Lots of policy. Okay, I've been an Admin for a few years now, but I haven't heard of the policy he quotes at me. So I tell him as much (leaving out the part about being an Admin), and encourage him to justify this policy he is quoting as if it were Holy Writ, or the law -- or even a personal email Jimmy Wales sent to him. To which he responds:

AfD is not the place to debate policies and guidelines. That's what policy and guideline talk pages are for. As of now, consensus is that individual episodes need individual arguments for notability. I don't see a reason why I should have to argue against that current consensus."

As I said above, maybe this wasn't one of my better days. I'm coping with the fact that although I have a job a number of people who are smarter than me who kill to hold, I don't really like it, and maybe I should move to another job at a time when they are depending on me -- so I'm not thinking as clearly as I should. Still, either of these clowns could have extended a bit of empathy towards me and explained the matter. Or had a peak at my user page to see if I was just a clueless newbie -- or to discover that I was an Admin, which might lead to asking me whether I considered my acts as being disruptive. Both of them have now given me a good reason to return to Requests for Adminship, just so I can puncture their balloons should they seek the Admin bit.

Right now the vote on this article is a bunch of fanboys for keep, and a muddled argument or two to delete. And a long-term Wikipedian -- me -- lowered himself to their level. The outcome doesn't look promising.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, wikipedia

Another positive development

2007-07-10T15:14:00.000-07:00

I meant to post something last week about it, to encourage people to attend, but time got away from me -- as it seems to on an ever-increasing pattern. Whiteknight helped to host a meetup in Philadelphia where the creation of a Wikimedia Pennsylvania Chapter was announced. Hey, if we can't build momentum to create a US-wide chapter, we might as well start state-by-state.

I was surprised to discover that the first organizing step was in Philadelphia. Back in january, I had thought NewYorkBrad would be the first to make it happen

Good luck to Whiteknight and his fellow founders. The only suggestion I have to offer is that they consider offering associate memberships to those of us who don't live in Pennsylvania, as a means to help encourage other US Wikipedians to organize.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, Wikimedia, wikipedia

Just another link

2007-07-09T19:20:00.000-07:00

to something worth reading. Anthere (aka Florence Devouard) writes about being the head of Wikimedia. I remember enough about my real mother, who I know loved me, to know that she's not joking.

Thanks to David Gerard, who posted a link to a link on WikiEN-l.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Florence Devouard, Wikimedia Foundation, wikipedia

Instead of blogging

2007-07-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

I should have written something about who to vote for in the Wikimedia Foundation Election, especially since I had a lot of free time today, but instead I did the following:
* Read some books that I ordered: I.M. Lewis' A Modern History of the Somali, 4th edition, and David Buxton's The Abyssinians. And as I read these books, I have the dawning feeling that I am building a better collection on the two countries than my public library has.
* Caught up with listening to The Wikipedia Weekly.
* Helped out with adding some sources to articles. That's more difficult than it might appear: I think I know which book to use to cite as an authority, then discover either that the author actually didn't write something useful or relevant or fail to find the passage I know is in the book. (One reason why I tend to just add to articles as I encounter the facts and their sources, and build up articles brick by brick.)
* Left a number of notes on articles pointing out things that need adding or improving on in the article. I hope that qualifies as useful criticism, especially as I suspect many Wikipedians don't have a strong idea what needs to be discussed when writing an article -- and which is the cause of the oddly unbalanced treatments in many articles.

Even though the election is over as I write this, I do believe something must be said to the people who lost their races; as I considered whom to vote for, I found that I had more than three qualified candidates to vote for, and a few more could have made my list had they simply followed a few important steps.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Wikimedia Foundation, wikipedia

I didn't think I was contributing to the Wikidrama

2007-07-05T21:33:00.000-07:00

Last Monday night, I received an email from Gmaxwell urging me to vote. It was a well-written letter, so with his permission I republished it on my blog, and went on with my life. Had I known that it would cause the controversy that it did, I would have made an effort to follow events on Wikipedia; instead, I did such silly things like see Ocean's Thirteen with Yvette. And play a game of Carcassone -- especially since we had bought a couple more expansion modules.

So late last night, I thought I'd make the time to catch up on the always running commentary around Wikipedia, and was surprised to find Berto ed Sera writing that he had never "heard anything about Greg Maxwell and his emails until I read this" with a link to that email. Apparently, a number of people didn't like the fact that Gmaxwell (I call him this, and not as "Greg" or "Greg Maxwell" because I think of him by his Wikipedia user name, not his legal name) took it upon himself to ask people to vote. (The first shot was this letter to the Foundation-L mailing list. From there, you can follow the controversy.)

Gmaxwell was accused of such crimes as (1) spamming a lot of people, and (2) seeking to strengthen an alleged US-centric agenda in Wikipedia. In response to the last allegation, his focus on the English-language Wikipedia does not logically lead to the conclusion that he was promoting a US-centric agenda, despite the fact the majority of English speakers happen to live within the US (according to Wikipedia statistics, about 215 million US inhabitants claim English as their first language vs. a little over 100 million in such places as the UK, Ireland, Canada, the Caribeean, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa; maybe if we include the English speakers in India, the rest of the world might reach parity). With only a username to go by, it is very difficult to determine where a Wikipedian lives in the world. Further, even if his intent was to get more US Wikipedians to vote, this is a good thing: if we go by his guesstimate that only 5% of all eligible English-language Wikipedians vote, right now that tiny number is very vulnerable to being mobbed by a small, organized faction who has decided that they want to elect some notorious vandal to the board. It's not entirely unlikely: based on having stared too long at the statistics, I would say that the English Wikipedia has 2000 members qualified for voting and 5% of which would be 100 -- a number small enough to be vulnerable to this kind of gaming. Hey, rest of the world: you want the crazies here to come out and run things? Then discourage "get out the vote" efforts like this, and you'll find that it allows our true lunatic fringe to take charge -- the folks who make the Shrub look reasonable.

But what bothers me more is the claim that Gmaxwell "spammed" his request for people to vote -- not to vote for this candidate or that one, but simply to vote. Now I clean out about 60-80 pieces of my spam from daily from one of my email accounts, so I think I know what spam is -- and this email was not spam. Further, when I responded to the letter he sent me, he wrote back. When was the last time you had a normal conversation with someone who spammed you? (I don't consider playing with a Nigerian con artist a normal conversation.)

In a humorous note, in this conversation there was one person who begged to be unsubscribed from this mailing list, because she was getting "50 emails a day which does not concern me at all". I wonder if someone wasn't just making a joke here.

Lastly, there was the proposal that only the Wikimedia Foundation should be allowed to encourage people to vote. In the long run, this would be counterproductive. I believe that much of Gmaxwell's success came from the simple fact that he was Just Another Wikipedian -- admittedly, one who's been around for a while -- contacting and connecting with people. Getting an email from a Foundation server asking people to vote would not create that kind of connection, and would have the same effect as a piece of spam -- ignored. Why shouldn't the various local chapters, WikiProjects, and other groups be allowed to encourage people to vote?

Feh, I'm probably thinking like a citizen of the United States. And just because I was born and bred here is no excuse.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Wikimedia, Wikimedia Board Elections, Wikimedia
Foundation, wikipedia

Sharing my email

2007-07-02T22:20:00.000-07:00

I just recieved the following entreaty from Gmaxwell to vote in the current Wikimedia board election. He makes a persuasive argument, and with his permission I am reprinting it below.

Geoff

(P.S. -- As I told him, the only reason I haven't voted yet is that I'm still trying to decide whom to vote for. I'm way behind people like Berto ed Sera, who has written much about it -- for example this essay.)

Hi Llywrch, it appears that you have not yet voted in the current Wikimedia board election, although you appear to be eligible to vote.

There are many reasons why it is very important that YOU vote in this election. The board is responsible for oversight and direction of the Wikimedia projects, including fundraising, defining the mission, and determining foundation-wide policies, so though it does not have direct input into English Wikipedia day-to-day policy, you still are affected by what they choose to do.

The election process is simple, and because it uses approval voting, you don't have to figure out
who is best; you simply need to select all candidates who are acceptable.

You can find out more about the election at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/en

The election closes at 23:59 on Saturday, July 7, 2007 (UTC, don't let the timezone catch you off guard!). That means you still have time to participate, although with thousands of words written in question and answer pages it will probably take you a little time to build a fair assessment of the candidates, so you should start looking now.

You can read the candidate statements at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/Candidates/en and each candidate has a Question/Answer page linked from their statements.

Llywrch, it is critically important that you participate in this process.

As it stands right now substantially less than 16% of all eligible and recently active voters on English Wikipedia have participated in the election process. This is a lower turnout than previous years although enwiki has always had poor voter turnout.

Low turnout makes the election process dramatically more vulnerable to several types of bias; for example, people with strong emotions and potentially unreasonable feelings about the candidates are more likely to participate without encouragement. The impact of sockpuppets, small-POV groups, and parties with any personal or financial interests in the outcome is greater when turnout is low, because these parties will tend to cast a fixed number of votes.

Regardless of the election outcome, low turnout from English Wikipedia also sends the wrong message to the board. English Wikipedia is by far the largest Wikimedia community, and English Wikipedia has, by far, the largest readership. While it is very important that other Wikimedia projects be well supported and understood by the board, the importance of English Wikipedia should not be understated.

There are organized campaigns to increase turnout from some of the other projects, and the result appears that English Wikipedia's influence and interest in Wikimedia is far less than it actually is.

Even if you do not have an opinion on the outcome of the election, even if you think that all candidates are acceptable or that all are unacceptable, you can and should still vote. We use approval voting, and you can cast a vote approving everyone or even a vote approving no one. Neither of these two options will influence the direct outcome of the election, but both will still add to the total count of English Wikipedia voters and both will send the message that our project is important and involved.

Technocrati tags: Wikimedia, Wikimedia Board Elections, Wikipedia,

The barrier to entry at Wikipedia

2007-06-30T20:15:00.000-07:00

You might have seen my response to Andrew Lih's blog entry, "Wikipedia Plateau?". If not, go ahead and read Andrew's essay, and the various responses his thoughts provoked. Somehow, he managed to attract a wide variety of people, not all of whom are the usual voices when it comes to Wikipedia -- which I commend him for, and makes his post all the more worth reading.

I'm not sure we understood each other, but one thing Andrew wrote in reply to my comment got me thinking:

The task of article improvement -- copyediting, fact checking, grammar usage and cross article consistency -- has historically been less popular than the immediate gratificiation of content creation and features addition. The former activities are likely to be less social, and pertain to certain personal pet peeves and hangups. ... Another problem with the "least work" hypothesis is that it takes a lot of work to find that "least work." What that means is you need to be quite adept in navigating to and interpreting the Community Portal to access the queues of pending requests and outstanding tasks that now make up the easiest and most requested ones from the community.

On one hand, I think Andrew misses my point of how the drop in new article creation is related to the idea that "all of the low-hanging fruit has been plucked". For some reason, he believes that newbie Wikipedians make a conscious effort to satisfy the requests of other users when they write articles -- which has rarely been the case. Speaking from my own experience, which has been verified by anecdotal evidence, becoming a Wikipedian is a far more organic, unplanned process. It usually starts by fixing obvious typos or grammatical errors, or maybe supplying a fact or two -- the same actions that Andrew says "has historically been less popular than the immediate gratificiation of content creation." Yes, there have been people who have waded into Wikipedia by creating an article from scratch -- or debating content with another editor -- but it is the simple things that prove to the newbie that Wikipedia has a low barrier to entry that gives her or him the confidence to quickly move from the simpler tasks to the more challenging ones.

But to stand by that alone would be simply a qubbling or trivial details. People write the articles for Wikipedia that they believe Wikipedia should contain -- and there are a lot of topics for articles that Wikipedia does not yet have. I was reminded of this last weekend when I thumbed through my copy of Peterson's Field Guide to Shell of the Pacific Coast and Hawaii, and quickly discovered about 50 species in my Peterson's did not have articles -- not even stubs.

As I reflected on the process that led me into Wikipedia, I began to realize that had I discovered Wikipedia today, and followed the same steps that I had taken almost five years ago, I don't know if I would have stayed with it for more than a few weeks or months. Comparing my experience to the experience I witness many newbies have with joining Wikipedia, I find that it is harder to become a Wikipedian now than it was even 18 months ago. Years ago, the community was more welcoming, and less dogma-driven than it is now. For example, out of all of the articles I created in the first year I was part of Wikipedia, I can only think of two where I supplied sources -- and that only because I suspected that in those cases no one would believe that I hadn't made up the material out unless I supplied some form of sources. In one case, I simply added a couple of scholarly articles I had used to write the article (and within a couple of days, I had to go back and revert the changes another experienced editor had made -- she evidently did not know the proper bibliographic style to quote an article); in the other I quoted a paragraph from a usenet post -- a medium is still considered by some Wikipedians without exception an unreliable source.

I don't mean to make it sound as if the early days was a paradise that fame and popularity took from us. But at the same time, anyone who made a change to an article was not greeted with the stern words

Do not copy text from other websites without a GFDL-compatible license. It will be deleted.

Contributors did not have to worry about biographies they wrote on living people being reduced arbitrarily to a one-sentence stub -- or swiftly deleted because someone thought the article was an attempt to slip some free advetising in. (Hopefully the Business FAQ will reduce this possibility.) Asking a stupid questions did not result with a brusque answer or being branded a troll. And creating an article that was a synthesis of various incidents into a general survey did not bring the risk of having it deleted for being "original research."

I'll admit that I've been on the other side, treating a new Wikipedian with undeserved contempt for a trivial act. And the community has a new problem with people who think they need to have an account on Wikipedia -- but have no interest in writing an encyclopedia, or anything other than editting their user pages and their friend's talk pages. Yet, whenever the words grow heated over the perennial topic of "following process" and "ignore all rules", I can't stop from wondering if the participants consider whether they are providing the wrong examples for new users. Both tools are increasingly abused to claim the existence of a consensus and force their preference upon everyone else -- and requests to slow things down and talk are arrogantly dismissed. (Wikipedia has seen a number of discussions in the last few months that were "speedily closed" -- which only prolonged the discussion and made the parties more acrimonious.)

While I admit I'm saddened by this development, it is not necessarily a bad one. About 10 years ago, the community around developing the Linux kernel was about as flat as the Wikipedia community is now: anyone could present a patch or change to Linus Torwalds, and if he liked the code it went into the next release. Nowdays, kernel development is very hierarchical, and there is the impression that would-be coders should read the Linux kernel development mailing list for several weeks before sending out their first email -- and even then, many are treated brutally. Yet the community produces code that has been favorably reviewed.

Jimbo Wales has often stated that wiki is simply a tool to create an encyclopedia, that there is no permanent commitment to this approach. Because it can be jettisoned at any point if the tool no longer works, there is no guarrantee than in five or 10 years Wikipedia won't adopt a structure similar to the Linux development community. However, I wonder when that comes to happen who will populate the structure of that future project -- and if the peole will have a more favorable proportion of qualified people than other possible models.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, Wikipedia, writing

A proposed venue for the 2008 Wikimania

2007-06-29T22:53:00.000-07:00

If Cippalusi is selected to host the 2008 Wikimania Conference, I could continue a proud family tradition: the first time my Dad visited Italy, people shot at him; going to Cippalusi, people would shoot at me. However, he caught hepatitis drinking from a contaminated water source, and that is one tradition I do not want to continue.

(In case you're wondering, my Dad went to Italy in the 1940s as an employee of the US government, so to speak; after Italy he was scheduled to travel to Japan and work there also, but the government ended the project early and sent him home to Oregon. Which was a good thing, because the working conditions in Japan were not expected to be as good as they were in Italy.)

Geoff

Technocrati tags: humor, italy, sicily, wikipedia

Tonight's BarCamp Get-Together

2007-06-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

I fought the traffic on Sunset Highway for an hour to get to the June BarCamp get-together about a half-hour late. I've been later.

Not much to retell, except John Seechrest's probing questions about how to attract enough computer programmers and other technology workers to meet the demands of the companies in Corvallis. According to John, he met with the management of over 10 growing high-tech businesses located there earlier today, who expect they need to fill in total about 100 openings for programmers with Java, .NET and C++ skills -- but don't know how to attract them to Corvallis to live. A few of us discussed brain-stormed for ideas to meet the need, of what it would take to make Corvallis an attractive place -- like Portland has become, much to my surprise.

One way I can help John in this quest is to mention that there are some cool events happening there. One is da Vinci's Days, which will convene on 20-22 July for the 19th year. OSCON begins the following week in Portland, so one could attend both with not much trouble.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Corvallis, Da Vinci Days, Portland BarCamp

Time and topics

2007-06-26T21:13:00.000-07:00

My silence hasn't been for a lack of topics. Things have been changing at Wikipedia, as they do in any dynamic, thriving community. However, I've had more to occupy my time with than just the need to earn a paycheck in order to keep the cats fed and afford more books. Some of what happened in the last few days:

Last Wednesday came down with a stomach flu. It continued thru Thursday.
Friday was the day Yvette and go out for dinner.
Saturday was spent visiting my parents. We gave my Dad his overdue Father's Day card and a present for his birthday. When I got home, instead of updating the blog I found myself writing a new article for Wikipedia, on the Ethiopian town of Hawzen -- which
wasn't even close to what I had planned to work on that day.
Sunday spent the morning at Yvette's church, at a fare-well party for the old pastor. Spent the afternoon at the Rembrandt exhibit at the Portland Art Museum. Although the exhibit was packed -- which was appropriate for one of the great artists of Europe -- funny how there were many more people for the exhibit of Egyptian artifacts last November. There's a point here, but I'm not quite sure what it is.

Meanwhile, the following notable events happened at Wikipedia:

On 20 June was the first Featured Article put on the front page without an illustration: Final Fantasy VI. The forces against fair-use material got the upper hand in this round: so where are they when an article is being reviewed for Featured Article status, and peers insist on illustrations?
In the last few weeks, there has been an increase in the use of arbitrary edits -- usually assisted by a bot. These include:
- removal of the "spoiler" tag from several thousand articles;
- systematic tagging of all fair use images for deletion by applying without concern for how these fair use images were applied -- or even thought;
- the deletion -- then undeletion -- of a group of pages known as "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense or BJAODN. Supposedly the reason for the arbitrary deletion was over some violation of the GFDL, or that BJAODN is not conductive to the goal of creating an encyclopedia, but anyone who's been around Wikipedia for more than 6 months knows the real reason was that some members of the community simply don't like BJAODN existing;
- and turning articles on living people into single-sentence stubs on the grounds of something called "WP:BLP". We're not talking about a policy or an idea, or even a string of words with a cliched meaning -- the reason often given is simply these six characters, nothing more. And the perpetrators insist that this reason excludes them from offering any explanation -- or even allowing a discussion over the merits of this act. Disturbingly similar to the mindset the allegedly elected leader of a major country has about convicting people he calls terrorists -- only people who would support a terrorist would question whether he -- or his subordinates -- are accurate in their identification of terrorists.
Then there was the reorganization of the #Wikipedia channel on IRC, which brought a different chorus to sing the same complaints that have been sung over the previous three arbitrary changes. I keep wondering about whatever happened to discussing things; yes, it is slow and messy, but when it leads to a decision, the decision sticks -- for example, no one argues over what to call a certain city on the Baltic Sea with a combined German-Polish heritage any more. This emphasis on deliberation was the strength and beauty of Wikipedia -- and I wonder if it is now gone.
After a perpetual barrage of umpteen nominations, articles on the GNAA and Daniel Brandt have been deleted from Wikipedia. Regardless of the merits of these incidents, to everyone except the few who endorsed these acts this process was little more than one group forcing their decision upon the Wikipedia community with repeated nominations. I only hope those support these deletions realize what they have done when one of their cherished articles is subjected to the same battery of repeated nominations.
Lastly, is the beginning of elections for new Wikimedia Foundation Trustees. I need to pay more attention to this, but I am already behind in evaluating this crop of candidates.

I don't want to fall into my usual rut of cynicism, but I can't help concluding that I thought hobbies were supposed to be fun -- or at least provide a sense of satisfaction.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Online communities, Wikipedia

Just another thing, that happens far too often

2007-06-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

When I read Annalee Newitz's post "Wikipedia Activism", where she states that"another entry [was] recently deleted for not being notable enough -- that of Sonia Greene", my first response was to be angry at my fellow Wikipedians. I immediately assumed that another group of well-meaning knuckleheads nominated, debated and deleted a perfectly legitimite article. Something that happens far too often, and always ends up making Wikipedia look foolish.

So I decided to poke into matters -- only to be baffled by the fact that I could not find any record of a debate for the article's deletion. I looked a little further into the history of the article, and discovered that the article had been deleted not for being about a subject that failed the notability criteria, but because it was a copyright violation: it had been copied from another website, without either attribution or obvious permission. Another thing that happens far too often, and while it doesn't make Wikipedia look foolish it's obviously not a good thing.

So Newitz has basically misunderstood (or misrepresented) just what happened on Wikipedia. No one claimed that Sonia Greene was not notable enough to warrant an article about her: someone had merely removed material that had been stolen from another author. I'd think that someone who makes her living from writing would know what a copyright infringement is, but I guess that doesn't make for a good enough reason for writing another criticism about Wikipedia. Just another thing that happens far too often, and while it doesn't make Wikipedia look foolish, it does make someone look foolish.

I would have posted this in the comments to her post, but that would require that I create an account on Alternet first. Since I have this perfectly functional blog here, which I haven't posted to enough times in the last few weeks, this often-repeated story, with the usual plot twists, appears here.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: notability, wikipedia

A practical review

2007-06-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

This morning I happened to be browsig at a local bookstore, when I noticed that they have four unsold hardbound copies of Tom DeLay's book. So I decided to help them move it by moving them to the section the best belonged in -- True Crime.

Geoff

On the depth of the Internet

2007-06-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

It always surprises me -- a surprise that always leads me into hours of wasteful websurfing -- what there is in the Internet that I have never stumbled across before. I don't mean which company, organization, or government agency now has a website full of material to comb through; it's that there are complete, vibrant communities out there, which have been flourishing for years, and whose existence was unknown to me -- even when it shouldn't be.

Case in point is Wiki Wednesdays, an idea with a corny name. (My thanks to Mark Dilley for pointing me to this.) For years, a group of people (with a little help from SocialText) have been trying to encourage people interested in Wikis and their communities to meet face to face.

I haven't been very good about organizing face-to-face meetups -- mostly because I tend to concentrate more on content than social interaction. But the idea of an informal, once-a-month drop in appeals to me. Sometimes I just don't want to leave the house, and attend a gathering like this month's Portland Linux/UNIX Group meeting. But I find that knowing that these meetings will be held every month makes it easier for me. I don't feel guilty if I've had a busy day and need to stay home that night and vegetate.

I'm hoping that Portland will have these get-togethers on a regular basis.

Geoff

Technorati tags: meetups, Wikis

"And so the problem remained"

2007-06-06T21:43:00.000-07:00

Gosh, has it been truly that long since my last blog entry?

At the last Recent Changes Camp, Ward Cunningham pulled me into a conversation and asked me what I thought might limit the growth of Wikipedia. Always eager to pontificate, I said that it wouldn't be a technological problem -- because the Wikimedia Foundation could always buy a few more servers and solve that problem; it's not as if the average Wikipedia page was graphics-laden and required a couple of minutes to download. Rather, the problem lay in the people:Wikipedia could keep growing in size of articles, and in size of membership, until something came along that decisively fractures the community.

I was thinking about that comment this week, as I read about the struggles around the Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense pages (or BJAODN for short). This is a selection of the better examples of the deleted material Wikipedians remove from articles on a constant basis. (Yes, most of it is worse than this.) Some of the items are funny, although I'll admit that I failed to find enough of it to read its content more than once or twice. But some of the editors enjoy either reading or contributing to this collection, and since it doesn't either affect what I contribute or bother me I'm quite willing to let it exist.

Then, as the Signpost reports (well, I thought I saw it in the Signpost -- or
did they update pages on me when I wasn't looking?), Jeffrey O. Gustafson announces that he has deleted all of the BJAODN pages because it violates the terms of the Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL). Actually, there have been a few other reasons given from time to time for deleting all of these pages, but that one seemed to be good enough for Gustafson to act on. As I just said, I don't give a lot of thought to BJAODN, but this seemed like a very callous move, which showed a lot of indifference to just what the rest of the community might think. After all, these pages have been around for as long as Wikipedia has. Further, there have been a number of other unilateral decisions to "tighten up" matters around Wikipedia that have gone unaddressed for "way too long".

After the noise around that act has quieted a little, Sj then decides to undelete these pages. This results in more noise: "Outrageous. Should be taken to ArbCom" says one. "I can see no reason for you not to block him." writes
another. The murmuring resumes, discussions about the matter are opened and immediately suppressed, and WikiEN-l has several long threads on the latest developments.

To repeat what I wrote, I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but looking at just the names of who's involved shows that this is not a case of one identifiable group of editors against another; Wikipedians who have been volunteering for varying periods of time and to varying degrees are lining up on either side of this controversy, and eyeing each other as if considering whether it is time to bring out the knives and guns. As I looked over WP:AN/I earlier today, it looked as if the matter is finding its way to a compromise, but there have been an increasing number of insensitive and unilateral acts on Wikipedia lately, so I wouldn't be surprised if the hostility erupts over something else soon.

Why is it always the silly, trivial matters that lead to conflict?

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, wikipedia, wikis

An essay about Wikipedia worth reading

2007-05-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

Dan Tobias' "Why BADSITES is bad policy". While I agree with his point -- that there are too many websites one cannot link to from within Wikipedia, I don't know if I agree entirely with this essay. I just found it, and I need to think about what he wrote and read his words again.

On the other hand, I am troubled by volunteers to this project who in certain areas argue that Wikipedia is not censored, yet in other areas passionately argue for the removal or suppression of information. (Maybe I'm one of these inconsistent people; that's one reason I need to think some more about his essay.) For example, one cannot create an external link to Encyclopedia Dramatica from Wikipedia due to its track record of making hurtful comments on various prominent Wikipedians -- although I know of at least one well-respected Wikipedian who has an account there.

If Wikipedia is to truthfully reflect the interests of its users, then its criteria for inclusion -- those things that should be considered notable -- will constantly be changing, in directions that neither Jimbo Wales nor I can forsee. Consider which topics the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica felt were important enough to need inclusion -- and those that were unimportant enough to ignore -- and compare them to a list of which topics any educated person today might compile; if we can look back at this serious reference work and consider it prejudiced and incomplete, would the people even ten years from now think the current version of Wikipedia imperfect for similar reasons? I often think about that question, and find myself wondering if I am helping to keep it free of those flaws.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: hyperlinking, notability, wikipedia

Elitism and Wikipedia -- a delayed post

2007-05-27T13:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I spent most of the day in yardwork with Yvette: we pruned back bushes in the yeard which had not been touched for years -- if ever -- then clipped the branches into smaller pieces to be taken away. Yesterday I also received the copy of David Buxton's Travels in Ethiopia, a very readable book full of details I look forward to adding to articles in Wikipedia.

In other words, even on my days off, I have little time to write.

That is why I'm publishing here an essay I wrote several weeks back, but hadn't shared yet. I had almost forgotten about it, otherwise I would have shared it sooner.

Geoff

I think Larry Sanger misses the point in his essay, "Who Says We Know: on the New Politics of Knowledge" (which I found thanks to Joseph Reagle). And if my analysis is correct, then the arguments that Encyclopedia Britannica relies on -- and, as afar as the average Wikipedian responds to them in their thinking, they too -- are similarly flawed.

Sanger's assumption is that experts -- those at the top of the skill level in their fields -- will always produce a better encyclopedia -- or organized collection of knowledge than any larger group of people, but who are as skilled. At least this is what I conclude from statements like: "Professionals are no longer needed for the bare purpose of the mass distribution of information and the shaping of opinion. The hegemony of the professional in determining our background knowledge is disappearing--a deeply profound truth that not everyone has fully absorbed."

Sanger pictures the advocates of Wikipedia (and their Web 2.0 supporters) as endorsing this view of information handling, and composes his argument in response to this egalitarian assumption: that while professionals may not be experts, there are people who are far more informed than others in various fields of knowledge -- who are experts. Sanger might have left himself open to a straw man argument were it not that some advocates do seem to express that very egalitarianism in their statements. So let's move past that and look at the assumption that the success of Wikipedia is due to the wisdom of the crowd being superior to that of the lone expert.

There are three fallacies here: the first is that the crowd is a collection of a great many levels of knowledge. From experience, I would say that this ignores the self-organizing tendencies of any group of volunteers, a process that brings out the skills of its members, increasing and decresing their influence as time proceeds, most commonly through unrelenting competition. Look at the evolution of the Linux community: in the beginning, literally anyone -- expert programmers to raw newbies -- could contribute patches and code to the project, and chances were very good that the contributions would be accepted. As time progressed, acceptance of contributions grew more selective; part of the reason was that "Linus doesn't scale", and he came to rely more and more on trusted lieutenants to filter out the bad submissions from the good, but this was the result that some members of the community were more skilled than others.

Undoubtedly the recognition of experts was influenced to some degree by politics -- but there is no guaranteed way to keep any group of people completely free of politics. We learn to be political animals when we are children in families, and use what we have learned through our adult lives.

As a result, the model Wikipedia is aiming for is not a "crowd is wiser than the lone expert" but "a larger group of lesser experts is always wiser than a smaller group of greater experts". So the problem for Wikipedia then becomes whether its innate social engineering is good enough to attract, recognize and keep the necessary large group of lesser experts who will continue to improve its content. That is a question that I believe the members of the Wikipedia community continues to debate and discuss.

The second fallacy is that in the relationship of the expert to the greater society that society is always a passive group, who accept without question or response the expert's opinions. The truth is that the larger society has always given feedback to the expert, although this feedback has been less direct in some eras than in other. As an example, let's consider the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, when it was considered the ultimate arbitor on truth. Consider the individual priest whose responsibility was to educate the hapless village on dogma, whose members were often either in conflict with it -- or entirely indifferent towards it. This priest, inevitably recognized this problem, and expressed how he would discharge this responsibility in one of three ways: preach on a given subject with the intent to convince; preach, but accept that his message would not be received; or simply ignore this responsibility, and hope that his flock would not be too obvious in displaying their hetrodoxy to the rest of the world.

While there is evidence that a sizeable number of priests accepted the third option towards all points of communicating their credentialized expertise, I think it's safe to say that the majority varied amongst all three options, depending on how their flock responded to the individual topics. A priest might deliver a sermon about how Jesus Christ loved the poor, knowing that it would be well-received; deliver a sermon about the importance of a Crusade, or the nature of Christ, even though none of his flock would respond positively -- or even understand; and remain silent about the various harvest celebrations, despite their apparent pagan elements because his words would be received with hostility, or perhaps even violence.

What Wikipedia does -- as well as what I would consider proper Web 2.0 communities -- is simply allow more of this greater society to directly participate; instead of being only an audience whose options are very limited (e.g., give or withhold applause, heckle, or walk out) they provide immediate commentary and criticisms to what the expert says, and the group's ability to respond gains a broader and more nuanced palette. One response that Wikipedia has allowed the larger society to make -- and I can't help has been overlooked -- is to express exactly what the larger society thinks is true and important. By this, I do not mean the satyrical concept of "Wikiality", but what large sections of educated people who are active on the Internet actually believes is true: the correct, the misperceptions, the urban myths, and even what they are willing to admit they do not know. (This last, I suspect, is expressed by the lack of edit wars around certain technical articles that nonetheless are written in extremely difficult or convoluted prose.)

This fallacy about the nature of group is tied to the third one, also about the group: the ancient fear of the tyranny of the mob. All elites have worried about the restless, unsophisticated and fickle society beneath them, a fear that persists today not only in racist language, but in the connotation of words like "lumpenproletariat", "drug addicts", "white trash", and "lusers". Unless carefully watched (this fallacy holds) this mob will be excited to violence, and unwisely destroy all that is good and refined. This fallacy persists because, there is some evidence to support this: there is an identifiable group of irresponsible people, seen as outsiders, who can harm the greater society. Often these people become outsiders because they have been identified as such, and their destructive actions reinforce this perception. Since this leads to sociological concerns that are irrelevant here, I won't discuss this further.

In other words, this fallacy asserts that the uneducated mob has created Wikipedia, and as a result we cannot trust its contents. The fact that at any given moment some vandal, crank or zealot embracing one point of view can change the contents of any article, continues this fallacy, will keep it from ever becoming even minimally reliable.

This is a problem, and one that the Wikipedia community perennially struggles with. However, I'll admit here that there is only so much that Wikipedia can do: there is no algorythm to reliability determine the difference between good content and bad content. The difference can only be determined by continual debate -- which is the best use of Wiki software. And where experts are needed, not only to educate, but to continue to refine their expertise.

I believe that there is no problem with content that a Liberal education -- and enough time -- cannot solve. The object of a Liberal education, by its name -- "liberal" coming from the Latin word for "free" -- liberates the student, by teaching her or him how to understand things and how to express her or himself articulately. Bad content enters Wikipedia because their authors do not know how to properly do research; and it remains because those who know better do not know how to explain why it is incorrect. I have never encountered any Wikipedian who has shown disdain for either of these skills -- in research or in language -- so I suspect that I am right in this. However, if experts flee Wikipedia for their ivory towers to live unsullied by contest, then instead of teaching the greater society how to be free their inaction will only allow that society to become enslaved.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: elitism, Larry Sanger, wikipedia

BarCamp sessions notes -- part the last

2007-05-23T19:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I felt guilty about not finishing typing up and sharing my notes of the first Portland barcamp. So I looked to the book I had written my notes in, only to be disappointed. I had made some notes during Steve Habib-Rose's presentation "Network Weavers network", but they didn't make sense even to me. So I'm leaving those unpublished in my notebook. (John Sechrest wrote some up during the session, which are at Lokkju.) And I found that was the end of my notes; obviously, I had decided it was a better use of my time to talk than to write.

I had attended only two more sessions at BarCamp. One was about Wikipedia, hosted by Pete Forsyth -- although Ward Cunningham sat in. I was too busy talking and listening, so didn't take any notes during that session; I can only tell you what I remember. One was that Pete is very interested in convincing the State of Oregon to release all of the material it produces either into the public domain -- or under a free license, like the GFDL or one of the Creative Commons licenses. The other is that I asked if anyone wanted to participate in a second Portland Wikimeetup, and somehow became the person in charge of that. I know both Ward and Ray King want to be involved, so I guess I'm committed to making it happen.

The other session was a discussion about the television show Lost, whose season finale is tonight. Raven Zachary and Todd Kenefsky were responsible for that one: both were very involved in the organizing of this unconvention -- so involved that although they wanted to talk about the show, they were constantly postponing their conversation in order to attend to what needed to be done; this session was their way to have a moment to talk about it. Although I had participated in a couple of online fora about the show, this was the first time that I had discussed it with anyone in person. (FWIW, we didn't figure out any of the remaining mysteries.)

One thing I got out of this get-together which doesn't come over in my posts is that here I had a chance to share warstories with other folks in the local computer business -- some of whom I hadn't had a chance to talk with in many years. This might not be networking, or sharing vital scraps of information that a career could be built on -- but sometimes, you just need to prove to yourself that you are a part of this industry.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Portland BarCamp

Thoughts on reading my mail

2007-05-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

By that, I mean my postal mail, not my email.

I received a flyer about the O'Reilly Open Source Conference here in Portland this summer. This year they have a track on people and the community of Open Source. I propsoed a talk about three years ago based on my experience with Wikipedia, but they turned down my proposal. Either I was ahead of my time, or I wasn't friends with the right person.

Also in my mail was a catalog of non-credit classes at the local commumity college. One of the offerings was an online class on Search Engine Marketing, only $1795 (I you're interested, you'll have to do your own search for it; I'm not sharing any more information about where or when it is happening.) I could deliver a well-deserved barb about paying that much money just to learn how to annoy Google and countless other people, but I have a more important observation: this is the real way that spammers make money -- just like Multi-level marketing scams. The money doesn't come from the ads themselves, or from getting businesses to pay you to spam ("Send email to a million people? No problem. I just won't tell you that 999,000 of these addresses are invalid and most of the rest will delete my email unread"), but now it comes from charging people lots of money to learn a dubious skill. This report states that the real money in MLM doesn't come from selling the products or a franchise where people sell them for you; it comes from all of the training and inspirational materials that are sold to the people in the MLM itself.

One thing I've learned in the last seven months of blogging is that it's actually very easy to attract people to a website or a blog; most of the tricks I learned in ten minutes during a BarCamp get-together last November. The hard part is creating something worth reading that keeps people coming back, and I'm not always convinced that I've learned that part yet.

Geoff

Technorati tags: Advertising, Education, Internet, Multi-level marketing,Online communities, O'Reilly.

An Annoyance

2007-05-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

Someone changed something this week in the Wikipedia configuration, that breaks viewing changes in my browser. Whenever I compare two different versions of an article, all I see is the first line of the change. Happy happy joy joy.

Will I report it? No, because I doubt anyone will fix it. When someone rewrote the code to the lefthand navigational frame, and after I found my way to the place this change was being discussed, and pointed out that this change broke in the Classic skin, no one bothered to say more than, "Oh, it does break in the Classic skin. Who cares?" And I suspect that the only answer I'll see to this complaint is a taunting {{sofixit}}.

Sometimes I have good reasons to believe that the interests of Wikipedians "not in the loop" are ignored.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Wikipedia

BarCamp sessions notes, part I

2007-05-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry about not posting this yesterday, like I promised, but I've forgotten just how much time and energy a fulltime job takes. I needed to take Sunday off and be unproductive for a while -- even though I made a lot of changes to Wikipedia. So here's the first part of my notes of the Portland BarCamp sessions I attended.

1. User Experience -- facilitated by Kara

One of the larger meeting rooms, packed & people continued to enter.

Session started by asking everyone for name & one word per person associated with "user experience". People began by throwing out a word, then adding their names -- eventually came to embrace the structure Kara asked people to follow.

Example of pyramid form Web Visions conference. Base represented the simple functionality of the application, middle level was the addition of widgets & other improvements, top was the user experience.

"Don't be afraid to throw something away"
Be sure to explain your choices in the application
Failure in creating applications of the target audience: thinking of an elite who understand technology when the goal is to appeal to general users.
Example of coding applications to the blind
"Has anyone encountered the problem of the CEO-driven design?" In other words, the boss comes in the middle of the design process & insists on adding a feature to the application, complicating the process & design

2. Building online communities -- Dawn Foster

Technology driving the online community
Balance between face-to-face and online interaction
Attracting the non-Geeks, non-technologists to the online community
Case study of the online knitting community -- yarn/yarnporn tag on Flickr
How to translate the thousands of years of civilized customs into online behavior. However, which "civilized customs" -- problem of cross-cultural norms; not everyone online is in the US or Europe.
"Does anyone know of a best practices for finding moderators?" Moderators being people who can regulate behavior & keep interactions civil.
Moderators also needed to not only welcome but to help newbies find the gaps, the opportunites to enrich the online community. "Where can I direct you?"
Practice -- refers to the rules to handle people; tools -- refers to what you handle people with
The need to find champions; & the need of a support structure for the moderators.
Examples discussed ranged from aggregation of the customers of a proprietary product to communities creating their own dogfood -- e.g. Wikipedia
Network weavers -- the drive to make these connections more intentional.
Ability to communicate between the outsiders and the subgroups inside the online community. Chris Messina then commented about inreach (as opposed to outreach) to the subgroups of the community. Example from Souix Fleming: getting the developers to actually believe what the customer advocate told them, resorting to bringing developers & customers together where customers proved it aggressively.
Notion of the community as an ecosystem. However, we don't currently have a business model for it to sustain it financially & allow its members to get by. "I would hope to do more than get by -- that we actually make money & prosper." The challenge of being on the cutting edge is figuring out the business model.
Audrey Eschright: "What do you do when the community is at odds with the individuals running what unifies it?" Sports fans being upset with maangement of their team. I mentioned the example of labor unions: people who want to keep their jobs yet being at odds with management.
The need to build a system/network of backchannels to support an online community.
Related session: Web 3.0 at 5 pm

3. Decline and Fall of Gentoo (not the real title, but I think Donnie liked my wit)

Donnie started by sketching the current situation with Gentoo: a laisse-faire "benevolent dictator", & a community that has mushroomed. (Before the session he talked about problem users on the Gentoo Dev list; one of these has been repeatedly banned, but keeps returning to block any & every change.)

How do online communities arrive at a decision?

FreeGeek is consensus driven -- consensus defined as "Here we have a decision. Does anyone have a concern before we enact it?" Looking for consent -- or at least people willing to live with a decision they disagree with.
Debian works because its decision process is so beauracratic & detailed. This elaborate set of rules and procedures reminded me of Wikipedia's current struggles.
Nature of the Linux kernel project. Its hierarchy eveolved out of the fact that "Linus didn't scale very well." He enforced cultural norms by the fact Linus was the only one with effective commit rights to the source code.
Weiden & Kennedy -- respect plays more of a role than the Org Chart. People who point to the Org Chart are laughed out of the room. Benevolent dictators the ones with the most respect. Also, there is an explicit vision for every project.
Question: Is there a way to restructure Org Charts to emphasize skills over management?
The problem of piecework vs. project. Piecework means no continuity, lack of respect; projects tend to endure -- yet run into people issues.
The waterfall model of Software design -- this points the catalyst. People who don't directly contribute to the project, yet projects work better when they are included. How do you find them?
This led to the topic of "Wiki-Elves" & the writing documentation for software, the part of the project no volunteer coder wants to deal with. However, with the introduction of Wiki technology, the programmers no longer directly know about the quality of documentation or who is responsible for it.
The problem of how to deal with a community that rapidly grows, and may be exceeding the optimal size for its culture. Weiden & Kennedy actually turned down work because it would force them to hire too many people to acculturate. Example of the Marine Corps faced by WWII -- they used Boot Camp to absorb the recruits. Another example given is a mentoring system, but no specific example of this working.

That's what I've typed up so far. But if you look carefully above, you'll see why there were so many knitters at this BarCamp.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Portland BarCamp

BarCamp Portland -- First report

2007-05-12T23:22:00.000-07:00

Since Yvette is out of town in Mississippi, helping to clean up the damage that Hurricane Katrina caused two years ago, I decided to relive my irresponsible bachelor years and called my best friend Phil earlier this week about hanging out this Sunday and drinking some of that fine bourbon I bought for him a few months ago. However I forgot Sunday was Mother's Day, and Phil had other obligations that day -- so tonight was the only night we could indulge together. Thus while I left BarCamp around 7:00pm tonight, I won't be posting a full report until tomorrow.

Despite this, I'm a little surprised that the reports about this gathering are still incomplete. Especially because we had a lot of people stuffed into the rooms at CubeSpace; I'd expect more people would be sharing their experiences and discoveries. So far only Donnie Berkholz has provided notes on the sessions he attended on his LiveJournal page. I guess that means I'll have to post my notes on the sessions I attended tomorrow.

Despite my evening activities, I will record a few immediate impressions. First was that a common theme of the sessions I attended -- maybe this reflects my own interest -- that thiswas a gathering of techies who had become aware of the importance of communities and relationships (both online and in real life), and were applying their analytical skills to them with the intent of understanding them and making them more useful. Another is that at least one participant was surprised at the number and variety of different techical user groups there are in Portland -- we techies need to build more bridges between ourselves. The last is that this had to be the first technical conference where a session was devoted to the craft of knitting; Audrey Eschright gets the credit for that innovation.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Portland BarCamp

BarCamp Portland -- The evening before

2007-05-11T23:22:00.000-07:00

Just got home from the reception and organization meeting for tomorrow's gathering. I had intended to get into the planning, but Ward Cunningham pulled me aside as I was getting another beer, and instead I listened to him and Rich (didn't get his last name -- and BarCamp.org is unresponsive at the moment) talk about the days when Tektronix was the major high tech company in Oregon. Well, I found it fascinating.

There was a point early on this evening when all of the sponsors had a chance to introduce themselves and give a short spiel, an elevator pitch, about themselves. Many added to the end of their spiel "and we're hiring" -- so it got to be a bit of a joke. But it's a good thing, because it's a sign that the industry is definitely making a comeback.

Some interesting notes on the schedule for tomorrow: Bart Massey will be convening a section called "Songwriting for Geeks". I hope someone attends and publishes a transcript. Also, organizer Dawn Foster asked everyone who is convening a section to add their cell phone so to facilitate contact. This led one wag to add to his announcement: "It's been a long time since I wrote my number on a wall ..."

Fun and humor obviously will be the rule tomorrow.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Portland BarCamp

Rant

2007-05-09T20:09:00.000-07:00

Larry Sanger has often criticized Wikipedia's article for gradually falling in quality. I had dismissed this as the disgruntlement of a person who does not get the respect he feels his certification entitles him to. Until tonight.

Many moons ago, I wrote the beginnings of an article for each one of the Dynasties of Ancient Egypt. I'll admit that they weren't great articles; I threw most of them together in hope that someone who actually knew something about the subject would improve on them. Because I knew I did not own them. So I sent them on their way in the world, and never looked back.

So tonight, surprised that two of them were on my watch list, I had a look. And now I knew how Sanger felt: both had degraded visibly in quality. I don't mean that some odd opinions or interpretations were inserted, but that they had become almost unreadable. I cleaned them up, left unavoidably critical remarks in the comment fields -- then stopped because I was about to start flaming the previous editor, who, I had to admit, was doing the best that she/he could do.

Worse was, the previous editor was improving on what she/he had found.

Knowing that I have to watch even more articles to keep them minimally useful does not encourage me to write any more. And I can think of several hundred articles, all of which are notable or worth an entry, Wikipedia needs.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: wikipedia, writing

A true Wikipedian loves books, Part II

2007-05-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

Today's mini-crisis almost made me forget about this paragraph (courtesy of Sage Ross). From the The Chronicle of Higher Education website:

I also find that my book purchasing has probably increased threefold because of Wikipedia. I am often engaged by an entry, then I go to the discussion pages, and then I find myself caught up in debate among contributors. Pretty soon I am locating articles via Project Muse and 1-Click shopping for books on Amazon. Why not teach that way of using the resource to our students? Why rush to ban the single most impressive collaborative intellectual tool produced at least since the Oxford English Dictionary, which started when a nonacademic organization, the Philological Society, decided to enlist hundreds of volunteer readers to copy down unusual usages of so-called unregistered words.

So, in response to those people who criticize me and my fellow Wikipedians for contributing content -- you want us to be ashamed of encouraging people to read and buy more books?

Geoff

P.S. -- I'm also surprised that I still get a lot of hits on this post, "When to cite from an encyclopedia -- even though you're not supposed to." I'm glad I remembered to include the words "ask your professor first."

Technocrati tags: reading, wikipedia

A scary surprise

2007-05-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

(I know, I know, the subject line is probably feeding the trolls, but it is how I feel.)

Four Admins has their accounts hacked. David Gerard sounded the first alarm. More information on Sage Ross' blog (with useful links).

This problem grew out of the common perception that none of us thought Wikipedia would present itself as such an inviting target, so many Wikipedians selected less-than-optimal passwords, ones where ease of remembering outweighs their obscurity. (I've since changed my password to something far more secure.) It's not as if Admin rights gave one significant powers in Wikipedia. Sure, an Admin can delete pages, block users, or protect pages -- but that's the same as being able to beat up your kid brother. Fortunately, none of the crackers thought very hard about what damage they really could do; then again, it doesn't take much brains to damage something useful.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: security, vandalism, wikipedia

Ward Cunningham at the last PLUG meeting

2007-05-06T11:42:00.000-07:00

I delayed over writing up this report for the simple reason that I still don't completely understand Ward's presentation last Thursday night at the last Portland Linux/UNIX Group meeting. It's not hard to conclude that the problem lies with me: after all, he's a well-known software developer ("Mr. Wiki" as someone called him that night), and I'm just a guy who pays the bills by doing things with computers. However, knowing full well what follows is incomplete and likely fails to explain some of what Ward said, I'll try to write about it from my notes.

He was very excited to talk about the portal he helped to build for the Eclipse foundation. Not so much for something an end user might see as a new, attractive feature -- he emphasized through his talk that he aimed to keep the software simple and under tight control. Not because it pushed the boundaries of what one could do with Java -- the portal is written in PHP, and his approach to writing the code was for it to read a line, eval it, and if that resulted in HTML output, print that output. Nothing very exciting there.

His excitement was that the working code at every turn was anchored to the tests that assured the quality and accuracy of each tool in the portal. He did this in a simple manner: every time a user opened a field to add or update information, next to the button that would save the changes there was a link marked "explore". If the user followed this link, it would take the user to those test cases which were used to validate the code. By providing the visuals and the text cases used to verify that the software did what it was expected to do, Ward believed that he and Bjorn had provided the users with everything that they knew about the software. "Well, except for how the code itself worked," he added, "but after dealing with so much code, after a while I stop thinking about the code itself." At another point in his presentation, he made the memorable quotation that doing this exposes "your business model to the people you're inflicting it on."

Because these tests focussed on the business logic of the software -- not the webserver, the browsers or anything else about the CGI mechanism -- it helped keep the development simple. Ward reported that they made 76 breleases to production in the last three months due to this simplicity.

He did spend some time talking about the code itself, but I won't attempt to paraphrase him here; I'm stopping while I'm still behind. Ward has written about this in his blog about this portal. I direct the curious to look at his readable account there.

An addendum: after every PLUG meeting, we adjourn to the Lucky Lab brewpub on the other side of the Willamette to talk shop; the gathering after the meeting is a tradition that started in the first year or so of the user group. Sometimes the conversation is dull, and sometimes it can be more interesting than the meeting itself. This time, I was very lucky: that night two of the most recognizable names in Portland's Open Source community decided to sit down next to me and talk shop: Ward and Randal Schwartz. Well, Randal did most of the talking, specifically about his recent presentaion at the Eighth International Free Software Forum about git -- proud that his talk had been approved by Linus Torvalds himself. Randal complained about how hard it was to pierce the patina of Americanization in foreign countries order to experience their native culture (e.g., Brazilian kids prefer American pop music over their own samba, television channels full of dubbed bad American tv shows). Of more interest to Ward, Randal talked about git, and how much more powerful it was than other kinds of version control systems.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: Eclipse foundation, PLUG, Ward Cunningham

Some short comments

2007-05-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

I've forgotten just how much of the day a full-time job occupies. Then weekends come along, Yvette reminds me of all of the chores around the house that need doing, and I discover I have even less time to do what I love.

Audrey Eschright dropped me a note about her Wiki to create a list of local tech groups in Portland. Please help her by contributing information about your group.

Every time I pass by Cannon's Ribs on NE 33rd (next to the New Season Grocery), I see their sign, "Try our vegetarian fare". I'm still trying to get my head around the idea of a vegetarian rack of ribs.

Geoff

Technorati tags: portland

Libraries and the Internet

2007-05-02T20:59:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, the "Wikipedia Signpost" had an article about the encounter of one college class with Wikipedia. Reading the course blog, I found two items of special interest:

A number of students mentioned that they had trouble finding topics that did not already have articles. This appears to support my observation that there is a limit to the articles in Wikipedia.
Many students appeared to think that their research began and ended with what they could find on the Internet.

The last point troubles me. I have used content from the Internet -- as well as contributed to it -- for almost fifteen years, so I know its strengths and weaknesses. However, I also know libraries -- those collections of books and other print materials, those rich deposits of information -- yet still contain more information than the entire Internet. One of the goals of a college education is learning how to profitably mine those deposits. It is a skill that does not come easy and needs to be learned, especially in this post-modern and electronic age.

One of Wikipedia's undeniable contributions is translating at least some of this printed wealth into an electronic form, making it potentially accessible to further generations. This is nothing new or all that revolutionary: the printing press did much the same thing beginning in the fifteenth century. However, to turn our backs upon libraries when one does research means that the result is impoverished; and risks the loss of the contents of these collections to future generations.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: blogging, learning, wikipedia

I'm back to work

2007-05-01T19:12:00.000-07:00

I haven't mentioned this before today because I didn't want to jinx things -- but I rejoined the workforce today.

I won't mention where I'm working (I'm just a humble contractor) in part because its employees like to comb the internet for discussions about said corporation -- but mostly because by mentioning its name, I feel that I may appear to claim some kind of cachet or expertise that I don't feel I have. I'll just mention that it is well-known in the computer industry, and the largest employer in Oregon.

Almost eight years ago I worked for this company in the exact same building, and it took a month for me to get an account on the corporate intranet. I've returned since to work as a contractor for the same corporation several times, and never had that problem since. Nor did I today.

However when the team lead brought me to my cubicle (my first real desk in six years! I can put a picture of Yvette there, and display my antiquated cubicle toys!), it lacked a computer. That made it hard for me to do my work.

The group administrative assistant researched this omission, found that the request was marked "pending", and gave me a phone number to call to "escalate" the matter. So I called the phone number. The phone at that number rang at least ten times, never rolling over to voice mail. It did the exact same thing the other five times I called it today.

Words fail me at this point. The first day of any new job is never productive, but I've never felt as unproductive the first day as I did today. My lead was able to loan me a laptop that allowed me to access the internet, but not the corporate intranet, so I was able to start studying the public information about the product I'm supposed to support. This work-around will suffice for tomorrow, but I worry about the day after: will the mills of the corporate process eventually grind out the tools I need for my job?

Geoff

Technocrati tags: workplace

My technology update

2007-04-30T15:44:00.000-07:00

Friday night, Yvette and I decided that we had enough of our (well, okay, my) 20-year-old television. When certain noises were transmitted, the sound would drop for a second and the screen would flash. It was getting annoying. So we bought one of those new flat-screen televisions.

32 inches wide, lighter than the old television. The manual was on a CD in PDF format. It took us an hour or so to set it up, mostly because the cable feed attached to one set of connectors, and the DVD player to another; I wasn't sure whether the unit would see input from more than one source. But once that was sorted out, I was impressed with the picture quality.

So now I'm presented with a quandry: I want to play with my new electronic toy -- but all I can with it is watch television!

And now what do I do with the old television? I grew up in a time when a television was an expensive piece of electronics, so I can't just throw it out in the trash.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: television

Last night: not the last Portland BarCamp meetup

2007-04-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

Some notes about last night's BarCamp meetup at Jive Software.

First, despite expectations to the contrary, Dawn Foster announced that because of the usefulness and interest in these monthly meetups, that they would continue at least for the rest of the year. This is a good thing: too often the various tech groups around Portland become insular and inbred, unaware that there are other people in the area who are doing interesting things. (I remember how the PLUG meetings used to fill this kind of need, but since the tech downturn five or seven eyars ago, it has lost some of this ability.)

Both Dawn and Raven Zachary were excited that this BarCamp would be the first to offer "bubble tea". I'm still not sure what this is, but experiencing this alone might be worth attending this free event.

Raven showed some slides about the BarCamp next month, and explained some things about DemoCamp, which will be held in the same place at the same time: DemoCamp will be a form of "speed-geeking", short presentations about companies or new products -- but where PowerPoint presentations will be forbidden.

After this, the floor was turned over to Tara Hunt and Chris Messina of The Citizen Agency, who discussed the origins and culture of BarCamp. These gatherings were created in response to the invitation-only "FooCamp" that Tim O'Reilly held each year in Sevastopol, California: Chris, and three other guys vented that they had not been invited during a car trip together, offended over feeling excluded from this event. However, instead of getting mad, they talked about starting their own fork of FooCamp, called "BarCamp", and a week later, when it still sounded like a good idea, made it happen.

They explained that idea of a BarCamp is to create an open, respectful place where individuals can share their passion for their own technology-related activites. By "technology-related", they meant not simply programming or doing neat things with hardware: some of the most popular sessions were about activities that support technology development such as how to promote blogs or other online communities. This put me in mind of a topic I thought about discussing at this year's Recent Changes Camp -- "About bringing a knife to a snowball fight." I didn't do it then because I couldn't think of what to say about this metaphor except that it is sometimes a useful metaphor to describe conflicts in online communities. With six program tracks in need of material, I might suggest it at the Portland BarCamp.

Tara and Chris provided a number of interesting cases of how BarCamps have successfully connected people not only inside the geek community, but also to people outside of it. Listening to these examples, I can't help but be excited about this coming event in May.

Geoff

Technocrati tags:BarCamp Portland, Portland BarCamp

Wikimania is on for 2007

2007-04-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed Wikimania 2006 in Boston very much, and had a faint hope that I might be able to make this year's conference, but three things are keeping me from attending: lack of money (I'm too old to ask for a scholarship), my passport expired in January, and Yvette said no.

I'm hoping that the Wikimania Lounge proposed by Andrew Lih/Fuzheado and Daveydweeb comes to fruition. That would be a good thing not only for yours truly, but for the rest of us Wikipedians who can't afford to visit Taiwan.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: taiwan, wikipedia

The results of some more Wikipedia research

2007-04-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

Wikipedian Ryan Gerbil10 calculates that "the archives of AN/I plus this page total approximately 9,300,000 words, or slightly more than 16 times the length of the English translation of War and Peace."

According to this table, as of September, 2006 (latest date available), the English Wikipedia contains over 609 million words. I'll leave it to someone else to determine whether we talk about our problems too much.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: wikipedia

Another essay worth reading

2007-04-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

Normally, Ben Yates at Wikipedia Blog is the place to go to find links to those interesting Wikipedia articles. However, this post by Erik Moeller (the same guy responsible for the blog aggregator Planet Wikipedia), is his story about finding one of those gems. Read it, if for no other reason then it's one piece of evidence that Wikipedians are motivated in a desire to learn the truth and share it, not in writing whatever fantasy or libel happens to pop into their heads to see if anyone will fall for it.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: wikipedia

I guess I'm not Web 2.0-compatible

2007-04-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

While following links, I came upon Steve Rubel's post, "The Participation Ladder and Its Impact on Marketing and PR", which was a gushing embrace of a report written by someone at Forrester Research about how online communities function. Obviously I was curious, so I followed the link to learn more.

What I found was an uninformative table of contents, and that a copy of this report cost $279.00. And that there's an intreguing graphic on Rubel's page that uses the metaphor of a ladder to explain depths of participation.

This was the point where I was planning to pontificate about how non-proprietary solutions were created because someone couldn't afford to pay for a proprietary solution. The example I had in mind was Linus Torvalds posting a request to Usenet, asking for a copy of the POSIX standard so he could accurately write his own version of UNIX -- only to discover how much a copy of those standards cost; so he reverse-engineered his own version. (Yes, this became Linux.) Then again, he wasn't entirely on his own in writing his own version of UNIX from scratch: he did have a couple informative books to draw on like Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. And I was going to comment about the graphic being pretty.

But the more I stared at that graphic, the more puzzled it left me.

For example, it stated that 52% of an on-line comunity were "Inactives" -- which I understood meant that they were lurkers, the folks who watched the content being being created, but never made their presence known. Then I noticed that there was a group called "Spectators", who were 33% of the community, and from the definition of that group, they better fit the description of lurkers. So who was this 52%? The type of people who said things like "One of these days, I'm going to read Wikipedia so I can be part of this cool Web 2.0 thing"?

Then I started adding up the percentages of the several groups, and found that not only did they fail to total to 100%, I couldn't figure out a way to juggle the figures so that they would total 100%. By this, I mean maybe each group was a subset of the group immediately below it on the ladder: the 13% who were creators were a subset of the 19% who were critics (because 13 is smaller than 19, and this would imply that 13% of the community both criticize and create, but 6% only criticize) but then I found that the 15% who were collectors didn't fit so nicely inside of 19%. Maybe the groups overlap each other to some degree; I was left with the impression that someone had baked up some conclusions, maybe did some research (or did not), and was glad I learned all of this without having to spend $279.00. (And it's very possible that someone like Ross Mayfield has already stated everything that might be useful in that report in this post, where it can be read for free.) One thing I'm certain about is that I'll hear from someone about my conclusions, demanding that I explain how I could write that a research paper I had never read was worthless.

Geoff

Update: For an example of the kind of diagram I was hoping to find, consider Evan Prodromou's diagram illustrating "crowdsourcing" from his presentation last month at SXSW, which can be seen on Angela Beesley's blog with copious notes and links. I have yet to hear his presentation (or view his slides), yet from that one diagram I know exactly what he has to say.

Technocrati tags: new media, participation ladder,web 2.0

And now he's blocked

2007-04-22T17:08:00.000-07:00

Discovering that Jimbo Wales unblocked Daniel Brandt was worse for me than having someone spike my morning latte with LSD. (I know what to do in that last instance: sit down, enjoy the trip, and when the effects of the drug have worn off hunt the perpetrator down and teach the perpetrator never to do that again with as much physical pain as I can inflict.) I wasn't sure that I really wanted to know -- although Eric Moeller offered a link to this MeatBall Wiki article that's worth considering.

And then there is the challenge of explaining just why Brandt dislikes Wikipedia. In brief, he doesn't want Wikipedia to contain an article about him. Why that article is so offensive to him, why he created at least one website critical of Wikipedia, and why he had a hand in driving at least one Wikipedia Admin off of the project -- well, you'll have to ask him.

So, busy with trying to figure out how to write about all of this (well, actually I spent that time editting Wikiepdia or doing chores around the house) I was a little late to discover that Jimbo Wales rebanned Brandt, apparently at Brandt's own request. I don't understand it. Nor does Jimbo. As one person posted on the Wikipedia: Adminstrator's Noticeboard/Incidents wrote, "This is getting sillier."

At least ~~this important announcement~~ (update: I meant this one) came out of this incident.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: wikipedia

For once I'm not too late in finding something out

2007-04-21T16:41:00.000-07:00

Sage Ross, Wikipedian and blogger, like so many other Wikipedians wanted to become an Administrator. However, his approach is a little different: he is running only on what he has done, and announced that he will not answer any questions submitted on his Request for Administrator page.

Some are upset with his statement, and base their opposition entirely on his refusal. Some praise it as another blow against the tyranny of "process fetishism" (although I think it would be more accurate to say he is flaunting established custom). As for me, although I made a request that he consider answering at least two specific questions, I don't think this matters in his case. Those two questions are:

What are your best contributions to Wikipedia, and why?
Have you been in any conflicts over editing in the past or have other users caused you stress? How have you dealt with it and how will you deal with it in the future?

If another, less well-known Wikipedian refused to answer these two questions, this act might harm their chances to become an Administrator (or Admin); it is an often-demonstrated fact that some people are better able to flaunt custom than others. More importantly, his act leads me to two other observations.

Observation the first. Anyone who seriously wants to be an Admin needs to either answer -- or anticipate -- these two questions. While Wikipedia may appear to be a united community from the outside, from within it is clearly an aggregation of tiny groups and individuals, many of whom have no knowledge of one another. There is a good chance that an experienced Wikipedian may discover the Requests for Admin page for the first time, and find her or himself faced with making a decision with less information than that person would find optimal. Some troublemakers manage to keep below the radar, and except for the few who are able to devote most of their day to Wikipedia (who may not be obvious to the uninformed), may be able to bluff her or his way into an Admin position.

In other words, providing answers to these two questions -- either in the initial statement or in response to questions -- can only help everyone. This can build bridges into those parts of Wikipedia that otherwise feel themselves (correctly or not) isolated from or ignored by the rest of the project.

Observation the second. Answering these questions helps demonstrate just how skilled this Wikipedian is in an area that I now suspect has been taken for granted: ability at using language to explain oneself. This is important because an Admin will often find her/himself needing to explain or defend her/his actions. As I said, this is usually assumed to be a given (if a person is not good with words, then why would that person want to help create an encyclopedia?); however, there have been contributors with good intentions whose command of language is, to put it politely, suboptimal. And I know of one such person who managed to get her/himself appointed as an Admin: Betacommand, whose case is currently before the Arbitration Committee.

I'll admit right now that I have disagreed with him, very passionately. Yet there were other people who disagreed with me in that incident, and who showed that not only were they capable of working with me in that situation, they wrote far more articulately than Betacommand. He has gotten himself into trouble because he failed not only to communicate with other Wikipedians, whenever he managed to do so, his replies were brusque and unsympathetic. What troubled me about him was that when under stress, his command of the English language collapsed and not only did he resort to expressing himself with vulgarities, but he failed to understand why doing so was inappropriate.

So how did Betacommand slip through the cracks and manage to become an Admin? From what I can tell, he established his credibility in fighting spam, rather than contributing content. There's nothing wrong with that: people gravitate to the areas on Wikipedia where they are the most comfortable and have the most positive effect. Further, Betacommand did not nominate himself, so he avoided demonstrating his ability at persuasive language. Only in retrospect can one see the clues in his Request for Administrator rights: there are a lot of troubling ungrammatical sentences in his responses, with several obviously misspelled words. Discussion showed that he relied heavily on automated tools to make changes, and often was careless with those changes. Only Quarl and Alphachimp perceived these weaknesses, pointing out other examples of his work that troubled them, and were ignored. Normally, one or two oppose votes can be safely ignored; but here they proved to be Cassandras.

So to be an Admin not only does one need to have a minimum of experience on Wikipedia (e.g., a minimum of edits and time as an active participant), and to clearly show that one is not a troublemaker, but one must also demonstrate an acceptable level of skill with written English. Obviously this is not a problem for Sage (who keeps a blog and is a graduate student); but for other Wikipedians who do not have such easily verifiable proofs, this can be a fatal barrier to the ceremonial presentation of the key to the janitor's closet.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: wikipedia