aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Wikipedia’s not open-source. It should be.
Randall Stross suggests Wikipedia should take a cue from the open-source software movement:
By wide agreement, the print encyclopedia in the English world reached its apogee in 1911, with the completion of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s 11th edition. (For the fullest tribute, turn to Wikipedia.) But the Wikipedia experiment need not be pushed back in time toward that model. It need only be pushed forward, so it can catch up to others with more experience in online collaboration: the open-source software movement.
Wikipedia and open-source projects like Linux are similarly noncommercial, intellectual enterprises, mobilizing volunteers who will probably never meet one another in person. But even though Wikipedians like to position their project under the open-source umbrella, the differences are wide.
Jeff Bates, a vice president of the Open Source Technology Group who oversees SourceForge.net, the host of more than 80,000 active open-source projects, said, “It makes me grind my teeth to hear Wikipedia compared to open source.” In every open-source project, he said, there is “a benevolent dictator” who ultimately takes responsibility, even though the code is contributed by many. Good stuff results only if “someone puts their name on it.”
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Capitol Hill Wiki exploits in the WaPo
Growing attention for the latest Wikipedia scandal:
Recent reports about editorial antics taking place on the site—selective erasures of past faux pas, outright insults and dozens of other politically motivated revisions—prompted Wikipedia to block temporarily some addresses on Capitol Hill from being able to edit entries.
At the same time, Wikinews, the affiliated news site about Wikipedia, launched an investigation into changes from Senate offices. Wayne Saewyc, a volunteer Wikinews editor, designed a computer program to match up more than 65,000 possible Internet addresses to offending changes, and it traced them back to various lawmakers’ offices. (A similar gumshoe tactic could not be used on House offices, because those computers share an Internet address, according to Wikipedia and Wikinews).
This crime-scene-style investigation points to staff members of at least five offices: Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).
In all cases the edits removed factually accurate but unflattering descriptions of the lawmakers, and in many cases they added some beautifying language describing awards or glorifying legislative records.
They were caught, exposed and Wikipedia took action. Eventually we’ll understand; that’s how it works.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Wiki lifelines and a game show’s moment in time
Benjamin Vershbow is a fan and thoughtful observer of Wikipedia. 
Apparently he once watched Who wants to be a Millionaire too:
“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” is a simple quiz show, very straightforward, like “Jeopardy” or “The $64,000 Question.” A single contestant answers a series of multiple choice questions, and with each question the money stakes rise toward a million-dollar jackpot. The higher the stakes the harder the questions (and some seriously overdone lighting and music is added for maximum stress). There is a recurring moment in the game when the contestant’s knowledge fails and they have the option of using one of three “lifelines” that have been alloted to them for the show.
The first lifeline (and these can be used in any order) is the 50:50, which simply reduces the number of possible answers from four to two, thereby doubling your chances of selecting the correct one—a simple jiggering of probablities. The other two are more interesting. The second lifeline is a telephone call to a friend or relative at home who is given 30 seconds to come up with the answer to the stumper question. This is a more interesting kind of a probability, since it involves a personal relationship. It deals with who you trust, who you feel you can rely on. Last, and my favorite, is the “ask the audience” lifeline, in which the crowd in the studio is surveyed and hopefully musters a clear majority behind one of the four answers. Here, the probability issue gets even more intriguing. Your potential fortune is riding on the knowledge of a room full of strangers.
In most respects, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” is just another riff on the classic quiz show genre, but the lifeline option pegs it in time, providing a clue about its place in cultural history. The perceptive game show anthropologist would surely recognize that the lifeline is all about the network. It’s what gives “Millionaire” away as a show from around the time of the tech bubble in the late 90s—manifestly a network-era program. Had it been produced in the 50s, the lifeline option would have been more along the lines of “ask the professor!” Lights rise on a glass booth containing a mustached man in a tweed jacket sucking on a pipe. Our cliché of authority. But “Millionaire” turns not to the tweedy professor in the glass booth (substitute ivory tower) but rather to the swarming mound of ants in the crowd.
And that’s precisely what we do when we consult Wikipedia. It isn’t an authoritative source in the professor-in-the-booth sense. It’s more lifeline number 3—hive mind, emergent intelligence, smart mobs, there is no shortage of colorful buzzwords to describe it.
He goes on to predict the demise, or assimilation, of the Encyclopedia Britannica (I just see it as another opportunity to point to Kurzweil on paradigm shifts!) and contemplates Wikipedia’s widespread adoption phase.
His closing comment on the double-edged sword of authority is worth contemplating:
Authority, after all, is a double-edged sword, essential in the pursuit of truth, but dangerous when it demands that we stop asking questions. What I find so thrilling about the Wikipedia enterprise is that it is so process-oriented, that its work is never done. The minute you stop questioning it, stop striving to improve it, it becomes a museum piece that tells the dangerous lie of authority.
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Wikipedia: A third way
Commenting on the Times story quoted here earlier, Susan Crawford writes:
We have this idea that there are only two ways to do anything—either you create and sustain artificial monopolies so that people will have incentives to create (that’s the copyright story), or you open the doors so that competition will emerge (that’s the market story). But here, in Wikipedia, we have something not driven by market competition (as we usually understand it) or enhanced by artificial property incentives.
Wikipedia, like so many other beloved online resources, is a group-"owned" and created thing. The group has no boundaries except shared interests in particular pages. It’s doing very well.
We don’t have to constantly choose between security and freedom—we have a third way to do things, and this way involves shared values and collective activities. Only networks that allow groups to form and people to post things can make this new form of governance and action possible.
Now that we have this network, this self-governed resource, it’s very apparent that it is a pre-existing ecosystem (like the ocean) that no one can claim to own except the constantly-changing group that created it. This makes cable/telcos into nothing but owners of beachfront property.
In the US, you’re not allowed to block people from walking across your beach near the waterline.
Britannica v Wikipedia revisited
The Times looks critically at the Nature study that blind-compared Britannica and Wikipedia - “The question is whether to trust an encyclopedia that evolves like an organism or one that was designed like a machine.” - and concludes:
Whatever their shortcomings, neither encyclopedia appears to be as error-prone as one might have inferred from Nature, and if Britannica has an edge in accuracy, Wikipedia seems bound to catch up.
The idea that perfection can be achieved solely through deliberate effort and centralized control has been given the lie in biology with the success of Darwin and in economics with the failure of Marx.
It seems natural that over time, thousands, then millions of inexpert Wikipedians - even with an occasional saboteur in their midst - can produce a better product than a far smaller number of isolated experts ever could.
Meanwhile the competition has some catching up to do. While Wikipedia includes a good, balanced article on the history of Britannica, Britannica has not a word to say about Wikipedia, as it rapidly becomes one of the most significant phenomena on the Net.
SEE ALSO: My post Whose Faith-Based encyclopedia?
Friday, December 30, 2005
Wales on journalism’s future
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder and foundation head, in the UK Times Online today:
“In my vision of the future of the newspaper industry and of journalism in general, people who think that traditional media organisations are going to go away are just kidding themselves,” he says. “That doesn’t make any sense to me. On other hand, people who think that journalism can just stay the way it is are also just kidding themselves.
“What we will see is a set of hybrid models with an increasing amount of citizen participation in the gathering of news and in feedback and in reporting and analysing the news. And at the same time, we’ll have professional organisations managing the process - basically being the core framework.”
He drives a Hyundai:
The “outlaw” Jimmy Wales, it turns out, is a very reasonable revolutionary. A finance graduate, he ended a six-year spell as a futures trader in Chicago in 2000. According to one report, he earned enough money in the commodities markets to “support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives”.
Mr Wales says that is true - but only because he “lives in a normal house and drives a Hyundai”.
Mine is about to turn over 100,000 miles and has only ever needed one tune-up and a thermostat…
Ads on Wikipedia?
I’d have no problem with ads on Wikipedia, it’s the ad policy I’d be interested in:
Jimmy Wales told Times Online that despite widespread “resistance to the idea” of advertising on Wikipedia, “at some point questions are going to be raised over the amount of money we are turning down.”
Wikipedia would be in a prime position to exploit the current boom in online advertising. It expects to record around 2.5 billion page impressions this month and traffic volumes are doubling every four months. According to figures released this month by Nielsen/Netratings, it was the ninth-fastest growing site on the web in 2005.
However, “wikitopeans” - the members of the public who create Wikipedia’s articles on a voluntary, unpaid basis - are likely to oppose any suggestion of commercialisation of the site.
Via BoingBoing.
UPDATE from the BoingBoing update noting a Wales clarification:
I personally remain opposed to having ads in Wikipedia. It’s just that a serious NPOV discussion of the matter necessarily would involve us being really serious about what we are turning down and why. This is exactly what I’ve been saying for years. If you know why the press likes to run inflammatory headlines every few days, well, please let me know. I find it all a bit baffling to be honest.
A statement from me “I am personally opposed to having ads in Wikipedia” somehow becomes “Wikipedia chief considers taking ads”.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Probabilistic accuracy v definitive authority
Chris Anderson has a wonderful post on why people are uncomfortable with Wikipedia, Google and blogs. It’s because these systems “sacrifice perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.” He says we’re living in a probabilistic age:
The good thing about probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth. But because they do this by sacrificing absolute certainty on the microscale, you need to take any single result with a grain of salt. As Zephoria puts it in this smart post, Wikipedia “should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts.”
The same is true for blogs, no single one of which is authoritative. As I put it in this post, “blogs are a Long Tail, and it is always a mistake to generalize about the quality or nature of content in the Long Tail--it is, by definition, variable and diverse.” But collectively they are proving more than an equal to mainstream media. You just need to read more than one of them before making up your own mind.
Likewise for Google, which seems both omniscient and inscrutable. It makes connections that you or I might not, because they emerge naturally from math on a scale we can’t comprehend. Google is arguably the first company to be born with the alien intelligence of the Web’s large-N statistics hard-wired into its DNA. That’s why it’s so successful, and so seemingly unstoppable.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
The faith-based book
Scholar Bart Ehrman’s new book explores how scribes—through both omission and intention—changed the Bible. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is the result of years of reading the texts in their original languages.
An interesting show, worth a listen. In the context of our discussion of the accuracy of Wikipedia, dare I point out the huge percentage of folks in this country who read the Bible as technically accurate literal truth?
Now, I’m no Bible scholar, not even an amateur, but I know that the technology of the day required that it came down to us either as oral stories, or it was hand written and copied. Then we toss in the vagaries of translation.
But still today I live in a country where 45 out 50 states prohibit legal recognition of my committed life-partnership based largely on people’s faith in the accuracy of that book.
And we’re upset that Wikipedia is badly written and has errors?
Whose Faith-Based encyclopedia?
Robert McHenry, a former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, calls Wikipedia a faith-based encyclopedia:
A little more than a year ago I first wrote about Wikipedia. In that article I attempted to make two points: that the basic premise of the project is fatally flawed and can only be embraced as an article of faith, and that the project lacks a proper concern for ordinary users, those who are not in on the game.
I’ve already addressed his notion that the word encyclopedia “carries a powerful connotation of reliability.” And disputing the notion that the expert hands down wisdom to the amateur - rather than that it is a process that works the other way around too - is a recurring theme of mine.
Here I’d rather discuss his take on the editorial process:
I was once an encyclopedia editor, but I wasn’t one just because I said so. It’s not like being an artist, after all. When I began I first learned to proofread, then to fiddle about with galleys and page proofs, then to fact-check, then to write clearly and concisely, and so on; at length I learned (so we agreed to say) editorial judgment. Late in my days I took a hand in training others. There really is something to the job—skills, knowledge, experience, and maybe even a touch of talent.
My bottom line is that today we all have to develop our own “editorial judgment;” that technology gives us the tools and we no longer need accept the fiction that there is one definitive authority. In my view, Britannica was the faith-based encyclopedia, and they, steeped in their belief system, are upset that they will no longer be.
I see Wikipedia as part of a welcome return to an oral tradition. In that argument, I say that I won’t miss the lack of technical accuracy. To be clear, I won’t miss it in the oral tradition, or the Wikipedia entry, because I agree with Ray Kurzweil that old paradigms don’t die. We’re not talking about replacing the encyclopedia. We’re talking about an additional information source that can inform the others.
I don’t want one definitive source. I don’t need one definitive source. George Orwell described a world with one definitive source. I want to be empowered to make my own decision. And the freedom to choose the consensus choice or the popular choice or the contrary choice or to propose my own choice!
You know what, I’m wrong. I DO WANT A DEFINITIVE SOURCE. Unfortunately, I can’t have one. I can’t impose mine on you. You can’t impose yours on me. And that’s as it should be. Now given that, I want as much choice - and INPUT - as possible.
Via James Joyner.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Encyclopedic errors
Britannica averages 3 bugs per entry; Wikipedia averages 4
Nature, the renowned science journal, asked scientific experts to blind-compare selected entries in Wikipedia to their Encylopoedia Britannica counterparts. The reviewers concluded that Britannica has a marginally lower error-rate than Wikipedia.
The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three. [...]
“People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica,” Twidale adds. “Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one.”
Hear that Orlowski?
Hawk on Orlowski
Thomas Hawk responds to Andrew Orlowski’s latest Wikipedia screed (and consciously does not link to it; I do, while holding my nose). I will have more to say as I process the piece, for now a few impressions.
I’ve watched the same folks who doubt and quote and criticize Wikipedia continue to link to them. The site is bigger than its critics and should focus on continuing to develop the experiment rather than getting bogged down in a traditional media formulation of a problem.
Of course, the nature of the project is to listen to critics and respond - admitting problems where it sees them and making reasonable changes to address them - as it did in this case. That’s well and good and as it should be.
On Orlowski, Hawk documents one of his “moral responsibility” problems, which serves to illustrate the-pot-calling-the-kettle-black nature of these critiques.
The MSM - with its vaunted apparatus of editors and ombudsmen and ethics codes and J-school doctrine - has a problematic record of accuracy (to say nothing of moral responsibility) played out daily on cable channels, talk radio, newspapers and newsweeklies (examples chosen at random, and please remember that I am a fan of the MSM).
But, hey, this is their franchise. They set the rules so Wikipedia should live by them.
We can revel in our technical accuracy and still be lying. Politicians do it every day.
When a reporter - whether the Times or the local student paper - quotes our words, they choose the context those words are placed in. That context imparts meaning. Often the wrong meaning. When we tell our stories, we choose the context. With that choice the meaning can be more honest and more complete. Certainly it’s more authentic…
I like to believe that our broadening access to communications technologies means much of our individual rich authenticity can be captured, saved and shared. And if that means a loss of technical accuracy, I’m not convinced that’s a loss of anything worth saving.
So with Wikipedia I’ll stand by my wish for a new emergence of that old oral tradition. And enjoy its honest inaccuracies along with those presented each day by both the “objective” press and the “balanced” press.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Wikipedia false entry author found
Remember, we’re not anonymous on the web:
A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville.
Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Mr. Seigenthaler on Friday that he had written the material suggesting that Mr. Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Wikipedia, a nonprofit venture that is the world’s biggest encyclopedia, is written and edited by thousands of volunteers.
He was being “cornered in cyberspace” by the anti-wikipedian Daniel Brandt, so quit his job and came forward.
Monday, December 05, 2005
Wikipedia, Wikipedia, I still love thee
A Times tech story about an egregious Wikipedia error, and a subsequent change in policy that prohibits anonymous entries, has folks talking about questioning Wikipedia.
None of it dims my hope and respect for the project. Their handling of the situation is a model of how I’d like to see such things handled. They look at it, admit the problem and attempt to make reasoned changes to address it.
Wikipedia is an experiment. And a process. This is part of the process. And as participants in the process - whether readers, quoters or contributors - we must adjust to processing information in this information age just as we had to adjust to how we processed information in the media age.
I wrote recently about this time as a return to the oral tradition. When a spat between bloggers and the White House arose over just exactly what was said at a press briefing, the bloggers had the videotape. Thus they had their truth. But video can be manipulated and interpreted too. We can revel in our technical accuracy and still be lying. Politicians do it every day.
When a reporter - whether the Times or the local student paper - quotes our words, they choose the context those words are placed in. That context imparts meaning. Often the wrong meaning. When we tell our stories, we choose the context. With that choice the meaning can be more honest and more complete. Certainly it’s more authentic. Adam Curry was telling his truth. That’s legitimate.
An oral tradition is less technically accurate, but it is more whole and, I think, equally legitimate. In Alex Ross’s outstanding New Yorker article, The Record Effect: How technology has transformed the sound of music, Ross describes how music once was appreciated for the variations that came from live and more impromptu performance. Now, with recordings heard over and over, what we want and reward in a live setting is the precise technical replication of that recording.
Applying those notions to information, once the stories handed down to us by those who had gone before, those who were actually there, were told with their individual idiom and emphasis. That’s how we got our rich histories. Now those tales may be more technically accurate, but are they still just as rich? And are they any more honest? I don’t think so.
I like to believe that our broadening access to communications technologies means much of our individual rich authenticity can be captured, saved and shared. And if that means a loss of technical accuracy, I’m not convinced that’s a loss of anything worth saving.
So with Wikipedia I’ll stand by my wish for a new emergence of that old oral tradition. And enjoy its honest inaccuracies along with those presented each day by both the “objective” press and the “balanced” press.
UPDATE: CNET roundup of trust and Wikipedia coverage. Video of Jimmy Wales and John Seigenthaler on CNN. if:Book observes that “In a historical moment when there’s so much distortion of ‘official’ information, there’s something peculiar about this sudden outrage over the unreliability of an open-source information system.”
Sunday, October 30, 2005
A better conversation
Ben Vershbow at The Institute for the Future of the Book blog points to a discussion about how an open source model might be made to work for creating authoritative knowledge, and nicely answers Nicholas Carr’s Wikipedia critique from a couple weeks back:
Clearly, the wide-open model of Wikipedia presents some problems, but considering the advantages it presents (at least in potential)—never out of date, interconnected, universally accessible, bringing in voices from the margins—critics are wrong to dismiss the enterprise out of hand. Moreover, holding up specific passages for critique is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Even Wikipedia’s directors admit that most of the content right now is of middling quality, some of it downright awful. It doesn’t then follow to say that the whole project is bunk. That’s a bit like expelling an entire kindergarten for poor spelling. Wikipedia is at an early stage of development. Things take time.
[...]
If enough academics and librarians started knocking on the door saying, hey, we’d like to participate, then perhaps Wikipedia (and Wikibooks) would kick up to the next level. Inevitably, these newcomers would insist on setting up some new vetting mechanisms and a few useful hierarchies that would help ensure quality. What would these be? That’s exactly the kind of thing we should be discussing.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
On Orlowski
Andrew Orlowski wrote the article critical of Wikipedia that I mentioned earlier. Thomas Hawk notes:
This is the same Orlowski who has in the past misrepresented email correspondence from Robert Scoble and whose lame publication “The Register” will not even respond or admit to their mistake when it’s been pointed out…
I sent an email message to Orlowski’s editor Joe Fay at The Register to ask why they still have not corrected this post where they represent an email as coming from Robert Scoble when Scoble denied ever sending it. I think it’s irresponsible for The Register to behave in this way and it most certainly makes anything they publish suspect in my mind—particularly if it carries an Andrew Orlowski byline.
Hey, at least my article Andrew Orlowski Sloppy Journalist or Bold Faced Liar has remained on the first page search results for the search ”Andrew Orlowski” on Google.
Flawedipedia
A Wikipedia fan, I recognize it is flawed genius.
Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.
Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management to improve its content by befriending, and not alienating, established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who know what they’re talking about.)
In a post critiquing the hype surrounding Web 2.0, Nicholas Carr details the problem:
In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn’t very good at all. Certainly, it’s useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it’s unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn’t depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to a student writing a research paper.
The entry on Bill Gates he calls “garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids...that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts.” The one on Jane Fonda, “worse than bad.”
He concludes:
[T]his emanation of collective intelligence is not just a couple of months old. It’s been around for nearly five years and has been worked over by many thousands of diligent contributors. At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in “collective intelligence” will begin to manifest itself. When will the great Wikipedia get good? Or is “good” an old-fashioned concept that doesn’t apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?
He goes on to critique blogs; grist for a future post. Gary Price at SearchEngineWatch says Jimmy Wales has lots to say, and promises a podcast next month. I’ll be watching for it.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Wikipedia Works
A fan of Jamie Kane, an online alternate reality game from the BBC, posted a Wikipedia entry that others suspected was a viral marketing ploy by the BBC. Within 24 hours Wikipedia’s “hastily self-correcting” nature kicked in and the entry was amended.
Boing Boing tells the story. It includes the game fan’s statement:
Please do not use my edits to slander the BBC. If this were part of a viral campaign, the grammar of the article would almost certainly be better. I suspect the article would have been created at the same time as the game started also. Jamie Kane was mentioned on several blogs on Friday - did not one of you consider it was created by someone who reads such things? I’m nothing more than a student. I’m sincerely apologetic for purposefully omitting the true nature of Jamie Kane.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Wikipedia editorial policy unchanged
Jimbo Wales, guest posting at Larry Lessig’s blog, says:
But a fair amount of my time was spent this morning trying to complain about a rather absurd story published by Reuters which claims that I’ve announced some major changes to Wikipedia editorial policy. It’s a fine story except for the tiny detail of being completely false.
Of course slashdot and a ton of newspapers and websites picked up the story and ran with it, causing a fair amount of speculation based on, well, absolutely nothing.
Here’s the source of his consternation.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
“Wikipedia, Wikipedia, my favorite thing”
That’s what Doug just said. He’s poking around in the site looking up I don’t know what. I’m a fan too, as much for the process (called Wiki) as the product.
Now they’re applying the Wiki process to news:
The Wikinews site follows essentially the same set of rules as the Wikipedia encyclopedia, which allows anyone to create entries or edit and correct other people’s work, so long as each change is recorded. Unlike Wikipedia, however, which is solely a reference work, Wikinews reporters are encouraged to submit original stories and photos. [...]
David Speakman, a Wikinews administrator who posts under the username Davodd, says it will take time for the site to live up to its potential as a news outlet for the masses. Over the last few months, Speakman says the news operation has been gaining new participants at a faster rate than other sites operated by Wikipedia. However, he doesn’t believe the site is generating enough fresh material yet.
