Original Research

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

Labels: censorship, wikimedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for my ideas:

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

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

Geoff

Technocrati tags: online communities, Wikimedia Foundation, wikipedia

Labels: free culture, wikimedia, wikipedia

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:

1. 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.
   
2. If these things did happen but they weren't irresponsible, then prove an explanation.
   
3. 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

Labels: free culture, speculations, wikimedia

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

Geoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The questions then are these:

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

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

Labels: free culture, wikimedia, wikipedia, writing

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

Labels: speculations, wikimedia, wikipedia

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

Labels: speculations, wikimedia, wikipedia

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

Labels: wikimedia, wikipedia

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

Labels: wikimania, wikimedia

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

Labels: speculations, wikimedia, wikipedia

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

Labels: wikimedia, wikipedia

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

Labels: wikimedia, wikipedia

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,

Labels: wikimedia, wikipedia