Listing entries tagged with wikipedia

presidents' day   02.21.2006, 7:33 AM

Few would disagree that Presidents' Day, though in theory a celebration of the nation's highest office, is actually one of our blandest holidays -- not so much about history as the resuscitation of commerce from the post-holiday slump. Yesterday, however, brought a refreshing change.

Spending the afternoon at the institute was Holly Shulman, a historian from the University of Virginia well known among digital scholarship circles as the force behind the Dolley Madison Project -- a comprehensive online portal to the life, letters and times of one of the great figures of the early American republic. So, for once we actually talked about presidential history on Presidents' Day -- only, in this case from the fascinating and chronically under-studied spousal perspective.

Shulman came to discuss possible collaboration on a web-based history project that would piece together the world of America's founding period -- specifically, as experienced and influenced by its leading women. The question, in terms of form, was how to break out of the mould of traditional web archives, which tend to be static and exceedingly hierarchical, and tap more fully into the energies of the network? We're talking about something you might call open source scholarship -- new collaborative methods that take cues from popular social software experiments like Wikipedia, Flickr and del.icio.us yet add new layers and structures that would better ensure high standards of scholarship. In other words: the best of both worlds.

Shulman lamented that the current generation of historians are highly resistant to the idea of electronic publication as anything more than supplemental to print. Even harder to swallow is the open ethos of Wikipedia, commonly regarded as a threat to the hierarchical authority and medieval insularity of academia.

Again, we're reminded of how fatally behind the times the academy is in terms of communication -- both communication among scholars and with the larger world. Shulman's eyes lit up as we described the recent surge on the web of social software and bottom-up organizational systems like tagging that could potentially create new and unexpected avenues into history.

A small example that recurred in our discussion: Dolley Madison wrote eloquently on grief, mourning and widowhood, yet few would know to seek out her perspective on these matters. Think of how something like tagging, still in an infant stage of development, could begin to solve such a problem, helping scholars, students and general readers unlock the multiple facets of complex historical figures like Madison, and deepening our collective knowledge of subjects -- like death and war -- that have historically been dominated by men's accounts. It's a small example, but points toward something grand.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:33 AM | Comments (2)
tags: Social Software , archives , authority , dolley_madison , folksonomy , history , madison , open_access , open_source , president , social_software , tagging , wikipedia

the value of voice   02.03.2006, 9:00 AM

We were discussing some of the core ideas that circulate in the background of the Institute and flow in and around the projects we work on—Sophie, next\text, Thinking Out Loud—and how they contrast with Wikipedia (and other open-content systems). We seem obsessed with Wikipedia, I know, but it presents us with so many points to contrast with traditional styles of authorship and authority. Normally we’d make a case for Wikipedia, the quality of content derived from mass input, and the philosophical benefits of openness. Now though, I’d like to step back just a little ways and make a case for the value of voice.

Presumably the proliferation of blogs and self-publishing indicates that the cultural value of voice is not in any danger of being swallowed by collaborative mass publishing. On the other hand, the momentum surrounding open content and automatic recombination is discernibly mounting to challenge the author’s historically valued perch.

I just want to note that voice is not the same as authority. We’ve written about the crossover between authorship and authority here, here, and here. But what we talked about yesterday was not authority—rather, it was a discussion about the different ethos that a work has when it is imbued with a recognizable voice.

Whether the devices employed are thematic, formal, or linguistic, the individual crafts a work that is centripetal, drawing together in your mind even if the content is wide-ranging. This is the voice, the persona that enlivens pages of text with feeling. At an emotional level, the voice is the invisible part of the work that we identify and connect with. At a higher level, voice is the natural result of the work an author has put effort into researching and collating the information.

Open systems naturally struggle to develop the singular voice of highly authored work. An open system’s progress relies on rules to manage the continual process of integrating content written by different contributors. This gives open works a mechanical sensibility, which works best with fact-based writing and a neutral point of view. Wikipedia, as a product, has a high median standard for quality. But that quality is derived at the expense of distinctive voices.

This is not to say that Wikipedia is without voice. I think most people would recognize a Wikipedia article (or, really, any encyclopedia article) by its broad brush strokes and purposeful disengagement with the subject matter. And this is the fundamental point of divide. An individual's work is in intimate dialogue with the subject matter and the reader. The voice is the unique personality in the work.

Both approaches are important, and we at the Institute hope to navigate the territory between them by helping authors create texts equipped for openness, by exploring boundaries of authorship, and by enabling discourse between authors and audiences in a virtuous circle. We encourage openness, and we like it. But we cannot underestimate the enduring value of individual voice in the infinite digital space.

Posted by jesse wilbur at 09:00 AM | Comments (7)
tags: authority , authorship , open_content , voice , wikipedia

the comissar vanishes   01.31.2006, 11:17 AM

The Lowell Sun reports that staff members of Representative Marty Meehan (Democrat, Massachusetts) have been found editing the representatives Wikipedia entry. As has been noted in a number of places (see, for example, this Slashdot discussion), Meehan's staff edited out references to his campaign promise to leave the House after eight years, among other things, and considerably brightened the picture of Meehan painted by his biography there.

Meehan's staff editing the Wikipedia doesn't appear to be illegal, as far as I can tell, even if they're trying to distort his record. It does thrust some issues about how Wikipedia works into the spotlight – much as Beppe Grillo did in Italy last week. Sunlight disinfects; this has brought up the problem of political vandalism stemming from Washington, and Wikipedia has taken the step of banning the editing of Wikipedia by all IP address from Congress while they try to figure out what to do about it: see the discussion here.

This is the sort of problem that was bound to come up with Wikipedia: it will be interesting to see how they attempt to surmount it. In a broad sense, trying to forcibly stop political vandalism is as much of a political statement as anything anyone in the Capitol could write. Something in me recoils from the idea of the Wikipedia banning people from editing it, even if they are politicians. The most useful contribution of the Wikipedia isn't their networked search for a neutral portrait of truth, for this will always be flawed; it's the idea that the truth is inherently in flux. Just as we should approach the mass media with an incredulous eye, we should approach Wikipedia with an incredulous eye. With Wikipedia, however, we know that we need to – and this is an advance.

Posted by dan visel at 11:17 AM | Comments (3)
tags: Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , congress , flux , meehan , truth , vandalism , wikipedia

what I heard at MIT   01.26.2006, 9:47 AM

Over the next few days I'll be sifting through notes, links, and assorted epiphanies crumpled up in my pocket from two packed, and at times profound, days at the Economics of Open Content symposium, hosted in Cambridge, MA by Intelligent Television and MIT Open CourseWare. For now, here are some initial impressions -- things I heard, both spoken in the room and ricocheting inside my head during and since. An oral history of the conference? Not exactly. More an attempt to jog the memory. Hopefully, though, something coherent will come across. I'll pick up some of these threads in greater detail over the next few days. I should add that this post owes a substantial debt in form to Eliot Weinberger's "What I Heard in Iraq" series (here and here).

Naturally, I heard a lot about "open content."

I heard that there are two kinds of "open." Open as in open access -- to knowledge, archives, medical information etc. (like Public Library of Science or Project Gutenberg). And open as in open process -- work that is out in the open, open to input, even open-ended (like Linux, Wikipedia or our experiment with MItch Stephens, Without Gods).

I heard that "content" is actually a demeaning term, treating works of authorship as filler for slots -- a commodity as opposed to a public good.

I heard that open content is not necessarily the same as free content. Both can be part of a business model, but the defining difference is control -- open content is often still controlled content.

I heard that for "open" to win real user investment that will feedback innovation and even result in profit, it has to be really open, not sort of open. Otherwise "open" will always be a burden.

I heard that if you build the open-access resources and demonstrate their value, the money will come later.

I heard that content should be given away for free and that the money is to be made talking about the content.

I heard that reputation and an audience are the most valuable currency anyway.

I heard that the academy's core mission -- education, research and public service -- makes it a moral imperative to have all scholarly knowledge fully accessible to the public.

I heard that if knowledge is not made widely available and usable then its status as knowledge is in question.

I heard that libraries may become the digital publishing centers of tomorrow through simple, open-access platforms, overhauling the print journal system and redefining how scholarship is disseminated throughout the world.

And I heard a lot about copyright...

I heard that probably about 50% of the production budget of an average documentary film goes toward rights clearances.

I heard that many of those clearances are for "underlying" rights to third-party materials appearing in the background or reproduced within reproduced footage. I heard that these are often things like incidental images, video or sound; or corporate logos or facades of buildings that happen to be caught on film.

I heard that there is basically no "fair use" space carved out for visual and aural media.

I heard that this all but paralyzes our ability as a culture to fully examine ourselves in terms of the media that surround us.

I heard that the various alternative copyright movements are not necessarily all pulling in the same direction.

I heard that there is an "inter-operability" problem between alternative licensing schemes -- that, for instance, Wikipedia's GNU Free Documentation License is not inter-operable with any Creative Commons licenses.

I heard that since the mass market content industries have such tremendous influence on policy, that a significant extension of existing copyright laws (in the United States, at least) is likely in the near future.

I heard one person go so far as to call this a "totalitarian" intellectual property regime -- a police state for content.

I heard that one possible benefit of this extension would be a general improvement of internet content distribution, and possibly greater freedom for creators to independently sell their work since they would have greater control over the flow of digital copies and be less reliant on infrastructure that today only big companies can provide.

I heard that another possible benefit of such control would be price discrimination -- i.e. a graduated pricing scale for content varying according to the means of individual consumers, which could result in fairer prices. Basically, a graduated cultural consumption tax imposed by media conglomerates

I heard, however, that such a system would be possible only through a substantial invasion of users' privacy: tracking users' consumption patterns in other markets (right down to their local grocery store), pinpointing of users' geographical location and analysis of their socioeconomic status.

I heard that this degree of control could be achieved only through persistent surveillance of the flow of content through codes and controls embedded in files, software and hardware.

I heard that such a wholesale compromise on privacy is all but inevitable -- is in fact already happening.

I heard that in an "information economy," user data is a major asset of companies -- an asset that, like financial or physical property assets, can be liquidated, traded or sold to other companies in the event of bankruptcy, merger or acquisition.

I heard that within such an over-extended (and personally intrusive) copyright system, there would still exist the possibility of less restrictive alternatives -- e.g. a peer-to-peer content cooperative where, for a single low fee, one can exchange and consume content without restriction; money is then distributed to content creators in proportion to the demand for and use of their content.

I heard that such an alternative could theoretically be implemented on the state level, with every citizen paying a single low tax (less than $10 per year) giving them unfettered access to all published media, and easily maintaining the profit margins of media industries.

I heard that, while such a scheme is highly unlikely to be implemented in the United States, a similar proposal is in early stages of debate in the French parliament.

And I heard a lot about peer-to-peer...

I heard that p2p is not just a way to exchange files or information, it is a paradigm shift that is totally changing the way societies communicate, trade, and build.

I heard that between 1840 and 1850 the first newspapers appeared in America that could be said to have mass circulation. I heard that as a result -- in the space of that single decade -- the cost of starting a print daily rose approximately %250.

I heard that modern democracies have basically always existed within a mass media system, a system that goes hand in hand with a centralized, mass-market capital structure.

I heard that we are now moving into a radically decentralized capital structure based on social modes of production in a peer-to-peer information commons, in what is essentially a new chapter for democratic societies.

I heard that the public sphere will never be the same again.

I heard that emerging practices of "remix culture" are in an apprentice stage focused on popular entertainment, but will soon begin manifesting in higher stakes arenas (as suggested by politically charged works like "The French Democracy" or this latest Black Lantern video about the Stanley Williams execution in California).

I heard that in a networked information commons the potential for political critique, free inquiry, and citizen action will be greatly increased.

I heard that whether we will live up to our potential is far from clear.

I heard that there is a battle over pipes, the outcome of which could have huge consequences for the health and wealth of p2p.

I heard that since the telecomm monopolies have such tremendous influence on policy, a radical deregulation of physical network infrastructure is likely in the near future.

I heard that this will entrench those monopolies, shifting the balance of the internet to consumption rather than production.

I heard this is because pre-p2p business models see one-way distribution with maximum control over individual copies, downloads and streams as the most profitable way to move content.

I heard also that policing works most effectively through top-down control over broadband.

I heard that the Chinese can attest to this.

I heard that what we need is an open spectrum commons, where connections to the network are as distributed, decentralized, and collaboratively load-sharing as the network itself.

I heard that there is nothing sacred about a business model -- that it is totally dependent on capital structures, which are constantly changing throughout history.

I heard that history is shifting in a big way.

I heard it is shifting to p2p.

I heard this is the most powerful mechanism for distributing material and intellectual wealth the world has ever seen.

I heard, however, that old business models will be radically clung to, as though they are sacred.

I heard that this will be painful.

Posted by ben vershbow at 09:47 AM | Comments (5)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Education , Network_Freedom , Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , Remix , academia , academy , broadband , conferences_and_excursions , copyleft , copyright , creative_commons , cyberlaw , democracy , economics , economics_of_open_content , film , freedom , internet , media , monopoly , music , network , open_content , open_spectrum , p2p , politics , publishing , scholarship , technology , wikipedia

wikipedia as civic duty   01.25.2006, 10:34 AM

Number 14 on Technorati's listings of the most popular blogs is Beppe Grillo. Who's Beppe Grillo? He's an immensely popular Italian political satirist, roughly the Italian Jon Stewart. Grillo has been hellbent on exposing corruption in the political system there, and has emerged as a major force in the ongoing elections there. While he happily and effectively skewers just about everybody involved in the Italian political process, Dario Fo, currently running for mayor of Milan under the refreshing slogan "I am not a moderate" manages to receive Grillo's endorsement.

Grillo's use of new media makes sense: he has effectively been banned from Italian television. While he performs around the country, his blog – which is also offered in English just as deadpan and full of bold-faced phrases as the Italian – has become one of his major vehicles. It's proven astonishingly popular, as his Technorati ranking reveals.

His latest post (in English or Italian) is particularly interesting. (It's also drawn a great deal of debate: note the 1044 comments – at this writing – on the Italian version.) Grillo's been pushing the Wikipedia for a while; here, he suggests to his public that they should, in the name of transparency, have a go at revising the Wikipedia entry on Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi is an apt target. He is, of course, the right-wing prime minister of Italy as well as its richest citizen, and at one point or another, he's had his fingers in a lot of pies of dubious legality. In the five years that he's been in power, he's been systematically rewriting Italian laws standing in his way – laws against, for example, media monopolies. Berlusconi effectively controls most Italian television: it's a fair guess that he has something to do with Grillo's ban from Italian television. Indirectly, he's probably responsible for Grillo turning to new media: Berlusconi doesn't yet own the internet.

Or the Wikipedia. Grillo brilliantly posits the editing of the Wikipedia as a civic duty. This is consonant with Grillo's general attitude: he's also been advocating environmental responsibility, for example. The public editing Berlusconi's biography seems apt: famously, during the 2001 election, Berlusconi sent out a 200-page biography to every mailbox in Italy which breathlessly chronicled his rise from a singer on cruise ships to the owner of most of Italy. This vanity press biography presented itself as being neutral and objective. Grillo doesn't buy it: history, he argues, should be written and rewritten by the masses. While Wikipedia claims to strive for a neutral point of view, its real value lies in its capacity to be rewritten by anyone.

How has Grillo's suggestion played out? Wikipedia has evidently been swamped by "BeppeGrillati" attempting to modify Berlusconi's biography. The Italian Wikipedia has declared "una edit war" and put a temporary lock on editing the page. From an administrative point of view, this seems understandable; for what it's worth, there's a similar, if less stringent, stricture on the English page for Mr. Bush. But this can't help but feel like a betrayal of Wikipedia's principals. Editing the Wikipedia should be a civic duty.

Posted by dan visel at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , beppe , beppegrillo , berlusconi , blog , grillo , transparency , wikipedia

who do you trust?   01.17.2006, 6:12 PM

Larry Sanger posted this comment to if:book's recent Digital Universe and expert review post. In the second paragraph Sanger suggests that experts should not have to constantly prove the value of their expertise. We think this is a crucial question. What do you think?

"In its first year or two it was very much not the case that Wikipedia "only looks at reputation that has been built up within Wikipedia." We used to show respect to well-qualified people as soon as they showed up. In fact, it's very sad that it has changed in that way, because that means that Wikipedia has become insular--and it has, too. (And in fact, I warned very specifically against this insularity. I knew it would rear its ugly head unless we worked against it.) Worse, Wikipedia's notion of expertise depends on how well you work within that system--which has nothing whatsoever to do with how well you know a subject.

"That's what expertise is, after all: knowing a lot about a subject. It seems that any project in which you have to "prove" that you know a lot about a subject, to people who don't know a lot about the subject, will endlessly struggle to attract society's knowledge leaders."

Posted by jesse wilbur at 06:12 PM | Comments (3)
tags: academia , authority , credibility , digital_universe , encyclopedia , expert , expert_review , wikipedia

meta-wikipedia   01.17.2006, 7:48 AM

As a frequent consulter, but not an editor, of Wikipedia, I've often wondered about what exactly goes on among the core contributors. A few clues can be found in the revision histories, but on a whole these are hard to read, internal work documents meant more for those actually getting their hands dirty in the business of writing and editing. Like choreographic notation, they may record the steps, but to the untrained reader they give little sense of the look or feeling of the dance.

But dig around elsewhere in Wikipedia's sprawl, turn over a few rocks, and you will find squirming in the soil a rich ecosystem of communities, organizing committees, and rival factions. Most of these -- the more formally organized ones at least -- can be found on the "Meta-Wiki," a site containing information and community plumbing for all Wikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia.

I took a closer look at some of these so-called Metapedians and found them to be a varied, often contentious lot, representing a broad spectrum of philosophies asserting this or that truth about how Wikipedia should evolve, how it should be governed, and how its overall significance ought to be judged. The more prominent schools of thought are even championed by associations, complete with their own page, charter and loyal base of supporters. Although tending toward the tongue-in-cheek, these pages cannot help but convey how seriously the business of building the encyclopedia is taken, with three groups in particular providing, if not evidence of an emergent tri-party system, then at least a decent introduction to Wikipedia's political culture, and some idea of how different Wikipedians might formulate policies for the writing and editing of articles.

On one extreme is The Association of Deletionist Wikipedians, a cantankerous collective that dreams (with considerable ideological overlap with another group, the Exclusionists) of a "big, strong, garbage-free Wikipedia." These are the expungers, the pruners, the weeding-outers -- doggedly on the lookout for filth, vandalism and general extraneousness. Deletionists favor "clear and relatively rigorous standards for accepting articles to the encyclopedia." When you come across an article that has been flagged for cleanup or suspected inaccuracies, that may be the work of Deletionists. Some have even pushed for the development of Wiki Law that could provide clearly documented precedents to guide future vetting efforts. In addition, Deletionists see it as their job to "outpace rampant Inclusionism," a rival school of thought across the metaphorical aisle: The Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians.

This group's motto is "Salva veritate," or "with truth preserved," which in practice means: "change Wikipedia only when no knowledge would be lost as a result." These are Wikipedia's libertarians, its big-tenters, its stub-huggers. "Outpace and coordinate against rampant Deletionism" is one of their core directives.

A favorite phrase of inclusionists is "Wiki is not paper." Because Wikipedia does not have the same space limitations as a paper encyclopedia, there is no need to restrict content in the same way that a Britannica must. It has also been suggested that no performance problems result from having many articles. Inclusionists claim that authors should take a more open-minded look at content criteria. Articles on people, places, and concepts of little note may be perfectly acceptable for Wikipedia in this view. Some inclusionists do not see a problem with including pages which give a factual description of every last person on the planet.

(Even poor old Bob Aspromonte.)

Then along come the Mergist Wikipedians. The moderates, the middle-grounders, the bipartisans. The Mergists regard it their mission to reconcile the two extremes -- to "outpace rampant Inclusionism and Deletionism." As their eminently sensible charter explains:

The AMW believes that while some information is notable and encyclopedic and therefore has a place on Wikipedia, much of it is not notable enough to warrant its own article and is therefore best merged. In this sense we are similar to Inclusionists, as we believe in the preservation of information and knowledge, but share traits with Deletionists as we disagree with the rampant creation of new articles for topics that could easily be covered elsewhere.

For some, however, there can be no middle ground. One is either a Deletionist or and Inclusionist, it's as simple as that. To these hardliners, the mergists are referred to dismissively as "delusionists."

There are still other, less organized, ideological subdivisions. Immediatism focuses on "the immediate value of Wikipedia," and so are terribly concerned with the quality -- today -- of its information, the neatness of its appearance, and its general level of professionalism and polish. When a story in the news draws public attention to some embarrassing error -- the Seigenthaler episode, for instance -- the Immediatists wince and immediately set about correcting it. Eventualism, by contrast, is more concerned with Wikipedia in the long run -- its grand destiny -- trusting that wrinkles will be ironed out, gaps repaired. All in good time.

How much impact these factions have on the overall growth and governance of Wikipedia is hard to say. But as a description of the major currents of thought that go into the building of this juggernaut, they are quite revealing. It's nice that people have taken the time to articulate these positions, and that they have done so with humor, lending texture and color to what at first glance might appear to be an undifferentiated mob.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:48 AM | Comments (2)
tags: britannica , editing , encyclopedia , meta , wiki , wikimedia , wikipedia

digital universe and expert review   01.06.2006, 5:09 PM

The notion of expert review has been tossed around in the open-content community for a long time. Philosophically, those who lean towards openness tend to sneer at the idea of formalized expert review, trusting in the multiplied consciousness of the community to maintain high standards through less formal processes. Wikipedia is obviously the most successful project in this mode.The informal process has the benefit of speed, and avoids bureaucracy—something which raises the barrier to entry, and keeps out people who just don't have the time to deal with 'process.'

The other side of that coin is the belief that experts and editors encourage civil discourse at a high level; without them you'll end up with mob rule and lowest common denominator content. Editors encourage higher quality writing and thinking. Thinking and writing better than others is, in a way, the definition of expert. In addition, editors and experts tend to have a professional interest in the subject matter, as well as access to better resources. These are exactly the kind of people who are not discouraged by higher barriers to entry, and they are, by extension, the people that you want to create content on your site.

Larry Sanger thinks that, anyway. A Wikipedia co-founder, he gave an interview on news.com about a project that plans to create a better Wikipedia, using a combination of open content development and editorial review: The Digital Universe.

You can think of the Digital Universe as a set of portals, each defined by a topic, such as the planet Mars. And from each portal, there will be links to the best resources on the Web, including a lot of resources of different kinds that are prepared by experts and the general public under the management of experts. This will include an encyclopedia, as well as public domain books, participatory journalism, forums of various kinds and so forth. We'll build a community of experts and an online collaborative network of independent organizations, each of which has authority over its own discipline to select material and to build resources that are together displayed through a single free-information platform.

I have experience with the editor model from my time at About.com. The About.com model is based on 'guides'—nominal (and sometimes actual) experts on a chosen topic (say NASCAR, or anesthesiology)—who scour the internet, find good resources, and write articles and newsletters to facilitate understanding and keep communities up to date. The guides were overseen by a bevy of editors, who tended mostly to enforce the quotas for newsletters and set the line on quality. About.com has its problems, but it was novel and successful during its time.

The Digital Universe model is an improvement on the single guide model; it encourages a multitude of people to contribute to a reservoir of content. Measured by available resources, the Digital Universe model wins, hands down. As with all large, open systems, emergent behaviors will add even more to the system in ways than we cannot predict. The Digitial Universe will have it's own identity and quality, which, according to the blueprint, will be further enhanced by expert editors, shaping the development of a topic and polishing it to a high gloss.

Full disclosure: I find the idea of experts "managing the public" somehow distasteful, but I am compelled by the argument that this will bring about a better product. Sanger's essay on eliminating anti-elitism from Wikipedia clearly demonstrates his belief in the 'expert' methodology. I am willing to go along, mindful that we should be creating material that not only leads people to the best resources, but also allows them to engage more critically with the content. This is what experts do best. However, I'm pessimistic about experts mixing it up with the public. There are strong, and as I see it, opposing forces in play: an expert's reputation vs. public participation, industry cant vs. plain speech, and one expert opinion vs. another.

The difference between Wikipedia and the Digital Universe comes down, fundamentally, to the importance placed on authority. We'll see what shape the Digital Universe takes as the stresses of maintaining an authoritative process clashes with the anarchy of the online public. I think we'll see that adopting authority as your rallying cry is a volatile position in a world of empowered authorship and a universe of alternative viewpoints.

Posted by jesse wilbur at 05:09 PM | Comments (3)
tags: About.com , Libraries, Search and the Web , authority , authors , digital_universe , editors , experts , open_content , trust , wikipedia

wikipedia, lifelines, and the packaging of authority   01.04.2006, 7:37 AM

In a nice comment in yesterday's Times, "The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts," George Johnson revisits last month's Seigenthaler smear episode and Nature magazine Wikipedia-Britannica comparison, and decides to place his long term bets on the open-source encyclopedia:

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.

Reading it, a strange analogy popped into my mind: "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." Yes, the game show. What does it have to do with encyclopedias, the internet and the re-mapping of intellectual authority? I'll try to explain. "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. We've always had lifeline number 2. It's who you know. The friend or relative on the other end of the phone line. Or think of the whispered exchange between students in the college library reading room, or late-night study in the dorm. Suddenly you need a quick answer, an informal gloss on a subject. You turn to your friend across the table, or sprawled on the couch eating Twizzlers: When was the Glorious Revolution again? Remind me, what's the Uncertainty Principle?

With Wikipedia, this friend factor is multiplied by an order of millions -- the live studio audience of the web. This is the lifeline number 3, or network, model of knowledge. Individual transactions may be less authoritative, pound for pound, paragraph for paragraph, than individual transactions with the professors. But as an overall system to get you through a bit of reading, iron out a wrinkle in a conversation, or patch over a minor factual uncertainty, it works quite well. And being free and informal it's what we're more inclined to turn to first, much more about the process of inquiry than the polished result. As Danah Boyd puts it in an excellently measured defense of Wikipedia, it "should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts." Wikipedia advocates and critics alike ought to acknowledge this distinction.

So, having acknowledged it, can we then broker a truce between Wikipedia and Britannica? Can we just relax and have the best of both worlds? I'd like that, but in the long run it seems that only one can win, and if I were a betting man, I'd have to bet with Johnson. Britannica is bound for obsolescence. A couple of generations hence (or less), who will want it? How will it keep up with this larger, far more dynamic competitor that is already of roughly equal in quality in certain crucial areas?

Just as the printing press eventually drove the monastic scriptoria out of business, Wikipedia's free market of knowledge, with all its abuses and irregularities, its palaces and slums, will outperform Britannica's centralized command economy, with its neat, cookie-cutter housing slabs, its fair, dependable, but ultimately less dynamic, system. But, to stretch the economic metaphor just a little further before it breaks, it's doubtful that the free market model will remain unregulated for long. At present, the world is beginning to take notice of Wikipedia. A growing number are championing it, but for most, it is more a grudging acknowledgment, a recognition that, for better of for worse, what's going on with Wikipedia is significant and shouldn't be ignored.

Eventually we'll pass from the current phase into widespread adoption. We'll realize that Wikipedia, being an open-source work, can be repackaged in any conceivable way, for profit even, with no legal strings attached (it already has been on sites like about.com and thousands -- probably millions -- of spam and link farms). As Lisa intimated in a recent post, Wikipedia will eventually come in many flavors. There will be commercial editions, vetted academic editions, handicap-accessible editions. Darwinist editions, creationist editions. Google, Yahoo and Amazon editions. Or, in the ultimate irony, Britannica editions! (If you can't beat 'em...)

All the while, the original Wikipedia site will carry on as the sprawling community garden that it is. The place where a dedicated minority take up their clippers and spades and tend the plots. Where material is cultivated for packaging. Right now Wikipedia serves best as an informal lifeline, but soon enough, people will begin to demand something more "authoritative," and so more will join in the effort to improve it. Some will even make fortunes repackaging it in clever ways for which people or institutions are willing to pay. In time, we'll likely all come to view Wikipedia, or its various spin-offs, as a resource every bit as authoritative as Britannica. But when this happens, it will no longer be Wikipedia.

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. Even those of use who do not take part in the editorial gardening, who rely on it solely as lifeline number 3, we feel the crowd rise up to answer our query, we take the knowledge it gives us, but not (unless we are lazy) without a grain of salt. The work is never done. Crowds can be wrong. But we were not asking for all doubts to be resolved, we wanted simply to keep moving, to keep working. Sometimes authority is just a matter of packaging, and the packaging bonanza will soon commence. But I hope we don't lose the original Wikipedia -- the rowdy community garden, lifeline number 3. A place that keeps you on your toes -- that resists tidy packages.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:37 AM | Comments (3)
tags: Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , authority , britannica , collective_intelligence , credibility , emergence , encyclopedia , game_show , hive_mind , jimmy_wales , lifeline , network , open_source , seigenthaler , smart_mobs , who_wants_to_be_a_millionaire , wikipedia

Wikipedia to consider advertising   12.30.2005, 4:29 PM

The London Times just published an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in which he entertains the idea of carrying ads. This mention is likely to generate an avalanche of discussion about the commercialization of open-source resources. While i would love to see Wikipedia stay out of the commercial realm, it's just not likely. Yahoo, Google and other big companies are going to commercialize Wikipedia anyway so taking ads is likely to end up a no-brainer. As i mentioned in my comment on Lisa's earlier post, this is going to happen as long as the overall context is defined by capitalist relations. Presuming that the web can be developed in a cooperative, non-capitalist way without fierce competition and push-back from the corporations who control the web's infrastructure seems naive to me.

Posted by bob stein at 04:29 PM | Comments (1)
tags: advertising , capitalism , google , open_content , open_source , wikipedia , yahoo

why google and yahoo love wikipedia   12.29.2005, 3:16 PM

From Dan Cohen's excellent Digital Humanities Blog comes a discussion of the Wikipedia story that Cohen claims no one seems to be writing about — namely, the question of why Google and Yahoo give so much free server space and bandwith to Wikipedia. Cohen points out that there's more going on here than just the open source ethos of these tech companies: in fact, the two companies are becoming increasingly dependent on Wikipedia as a resource, both as something to repackage for commercial use (in sites such as Answers.com), and as a major component in the programming of search algorithms. Cohen writes:

Let me provide a brief example that I hope will show the value of having such a free resource when you are trying to scan, sort, and mine enormous corpora of text. Let's say you have a billion unstructured, untagged, unsorted documents related to the American presidency in the last twenty years. How would you differentiate between documents that were about George H. W. Bush (Sr.) and George W. Bush (Jr.)? This is a tough information retrieval problem because both presidents are often referred to as just "George Bush" or "Bush." Using data-mining algorithms such as Yahoo's remarkable Term Extraction service, you could pull out of the Wikipedia entries for the two Bushes the most common words and phrases that were likely to show up in documents about each (e.g., "Berlin Wall" and "Barbara" vs. "September 11" and "Laura"). You would still run into some disambiguation problems ("Saddam Hussein," "Iraq," "Dick Cheney" would show up a lot for both), but this method is actually quite a powerful start to document categorization.

Cohen's observation is a valuable reminder that all of the discussion of Wikipedia's accuracy and usefulness as an academic tool is really only skimming the surface of how and why the open-souce encyclopedia is reshaping the way knowledge is made and accessed. Ultimately, the question of whether or not Wikipedia should be used in the classroom might be less important than whether — or how — it is used in the boardroom, by companies whose function is to repackage, reorganize and return "the people's knowledge" back to the people at a tidy profit.

Posted by lisa lynch at 03:16 PM | Comments (7)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , google , wikipedia , yahoo

holiday round up   12.26.2005, 2:07 PM

The institute is pleased to announce the release of the blog Without Gods. Mitchell Stephens is using this blog as a public workshop and forum for his work on his latest book which focuses on the history of atheism.

The wikipedia debate continues as Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine weighs in that people are uncomfortable with wikipedia because they cannot comprehend that emergent systems can produce "correct" answers on the marcoscale even if no one is really watching the microscale. Lisa poses that Anderson goes too far in the defense of wikipedia and that blind faith in the system is equally disconcerting, if not more so.

ITP Winter 2005 show had several institute related projects. Among them were explorations in digital graphic reinterpretation of poetry, student social networks, navigating New York through augmented reality, and manipulating video to document the city by freezing time and space.

Lisa discovered an interesting historical parallel in an article from Dial dating back to 1899. The specialized bookseller's demise is lamented with the introduction of department store selling books as lost leader, not unlike today's criticisms of Amazon. As libraries are increasing their relationships with the private sector, Lisa notes that some bookstores are playing a role in fostering intellectual and culture communities, a role which libraries traditionally held.

Lisa looked at Reed Johnson assertion in the Los Angeles Times that 2005 was the year that mass media has given way to the consumer-driven techno-cultural revolution.

The discourse on game space continues to evolve with Edward Castronova's new book Synthetic Worlds. As millions of people spend more time in the immersive environments, Castronova looks at how the real and the virtual are blending through the lens of an economist.

In another advance for content creation volunteerism, LibriVox is creating and distributing audio files of public domain literature. Ranging from the Wizard of Oz to the US Constitution, Lisa was impressed by the quality of the recordings, which are voiced and recorded by volunteers who feel passionate about a particular work.

Posted by ray cha at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Roundup , audiobooks , gaming , libraries , mass_media , mitchell_stephens , wikipedia

wikipedia and 'alien logic:' the debate gets spiritual   12.21.2005, 1:23 PM

If you like Mitchell Stephen's book-blog about the history of atheism, you might want to compare Mitchell's approach to that of "The Long Tail," a book-blog written by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine. Like Stephens, Anderson is trying to work out his ideas for a future book online: his book looks at the technology-driven atomizaton of our economy and culture, a phenomenon Anderson (and Wired) doesn't seem particularly troubled by.

On December 18, Anderson wrote a post about what he saw as the real reason people are uncomfortable with Wikipedia: according to Anderson, we're unable to reconcile with the "alien logic" of probabilistic and emergent systems, which produce "correct" answers on the macro-scale because "they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers" — even though no one is really minding the store.

On one hand, Anderson's been saying what I (and lots of other people) have been saying repeatedly over the past few weeks: acknowledge that sometimes Wikipedia gets things wrong, but also pay attention to the overwhelming number of times the open-source encyclopedia gets things right. At the same time, I'm not comfortable with Anderson's suggestion that we can't "wrap our heads around" the essential rightness of probabalistic engines — especially when he compares this to not being able to wrap our heads around probibalistic systems. This call for greater faith in the algorithm also troubles Nicholas Carr, who responds agnostically:

Maybe it's just the Christmas season, but all this talk of omniscience and inscrutability and the insufficiency of our mammalian brains brings to mind the classic explanation for why God's ways remain mysterious to mere mortals: "Man's finite mind is incapable of comprehending the infinite mind of God." Chris presents the web's alien intelligence as something of a secular godhead, a higher power beyond human understanding... I confess: I'm an unbeliever. My mammalian mind remains mired in the earthly muck of doubt. It's not that I think Chris is wrong about the workings of "probabilistic systems." I'm sure he's right. Where I have a problem is in his implicit trust that the optimization of the system, the achievement of the mathematical perfection of the macroscale, is something to be desired....Might not this statistical optimization of "value" at the macroscale be a recipe for mediocrity at the microscale - the scale, it's worth remembering, that defines our own individual lives and the culture that surrounds us?

Carr's point is well-taken: what is valuable about Wikipedia to many of us is not that it is an engine for self-regulation, but that it allows individual human beings to come together to create a shared knowledge resource. Anderson's call for faith in the system is swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction: while other defenders of Wikipedia have pointed out ways to tinker with the encyclopedia's human interface, Anderson implies that the human interface — at the individual level — doesn't quite matter. I don't find this particularly conforting: in fact, this idea seems much scarier than Seigenthaler's warning that Wikipedia is a playground for "volunteer vandals."

Posted by lisa lynch at 01:23 PM | Comments (0)
tags: emergent , probabilistic , systems , wikipedia

last week: wikipedia, r kelly, gaming and google panels, and more...   12.18.2005, 4:27 PM

Here's an overview of what we've been posting over the last week. As well, a few of us having been talking about ways to graphically represent text, so I thought I would include a mind map of this overview.

As a follow up to the increasingly controversial wikipedia front, Daniel Brandt uncovered that Brian Chase posted false information about John Seignthaler that was reported here last week. To add fuel to the fire, Nature weighed in that Encyclopedia Britannica may not be as reliable as Wikipedia.

Business Week noted a possible future of pricing for data transfer. Currently, carries such as phone and cable companies are developing technology to identify and control what types of media (voice, images, text or video) are being uploaded. This ability opens the door to being able to charge for different uses of data transfer, which would have a huge impact on uploading content for personal creative use of the internet.

Liz Barry and Bill Wetzel shared some of their experiences from their "Talk to Me" Project. With their "talk to me" sign in tow, they travel around New York and the rest of the US looking for conversation. We were impressed at how they do not have a specific agenda besides talking to people. In the mediated age, they are not motivated by external political/ religious/ documentary intentions. What they do document is available on their website, and we look forward to see what they come up with next.

The Google Book Search debate continues as well, via a panel discussion hosted by the American Bar Association. Interestingly, publishers spoke as if the wide scale use of ebooks is imminent. More importantly and even if this particular case settles out of court, the courts have a pressing need to define copyright and fair use guidelines for these emerging uses.

With the protest of the WTO meetings in Hong Kong this past week, new journalism forms took one step forward. The website Curbside @ WTO covered the meetings with submissions from journalism students, bloggers and professional journalists.

McDonalds filed a patent which suggests that it intends to offer clips of movies instead of the traditional toys in their kids oriented Happy Meals. Lisa pondered if a video clip can successfully replace a toy, and if it does, what the effects on children's imaginations might be.

R. Kelly's experiments in form and the "serial song" through his Trapped in the Closet recordings. While R Kelly has varying success in this endeavor, Dan compared the experience of not only the serial novel, but also Julie Powell's foray into transferring her blog into book form and what she might have learned from R. Kelly (its hard to make unified pieces maintain an overall coherency.)

The world of academic publishing was challenged with a proposal calling to create an electronic academic press. This segment seems especially ripe for the shift to digital publishing as many journals with small circulations face raising printing and production costs.

Sol and others from the institute attended "Making Games Matter," a panel with contributors from The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, edited by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. The discussion covered among other things: involving the academy in creating a discourse for gaming and game design, obstacles in studying and creating games, and the game "industry" itself. The book and panel called out for games and gaming to undergo a formal study akin to the novel and the experience of reading. Also, in the gaming world, the class economics of the real and virtual began to emerge as a Chinese firm pays employees to build up characters in MMOGs to sell to affluent gamers.

Posted by ray cha at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Roundup , academia , broadband , e-publishing , fast_food , gaming , google , google_book_search , internet , mcdonalds , network_neutrality , publishing , r_kelly , video_games , wikipedia

watching wikipedia watch   12.16.2005, 10:37 AM

In an interview in CNET today, Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch — the man who tracked down Brian Chase, the author of the false biography of John Seigenthaler on Wikipedia — details the process he used to track Chase down. I found it an interesting reality check on the idea of online anonymity. I was also a bit nonplussed by the fact that Brandt created a phony identity for himself in order to discover who had created a fake version of the real Seigenthaler. According to Brandt:

All I had was the IP address and the date and timestamp, and the various databases said it was a BellSouth DSL account in Nashville. I started playing with the search engines and using different tools to try to see if I could find out more about that IP address. They wouldn't respond to trace router pings, which means that they were blocked at a firewall, probably at BellSouth...But very strangely, there was a server on the IP address. You almost never see that, since at most companies, your browsers and your servers are on different IP addresses. Only a very small company that didn't know what it was doing would have that kind of arrangement. I put in the IP address directly, and then it comes back and said, "Welcome to Rush Delivery." It didn't occur to me for about 30 minutes that maybe that was the name of a business in Nashville. Sure enough they had a one-page Web site. So the next day I sent them a fax. [they didn't respond, and] The next night, I got the idea of sending a phony e-mail, I mean an e-mail under a phony name, phony account. When they responded, sure enough, the originating IP address matched the one that was in Seigenthaler's column.

Overall, I'm still having mixed feelings about Brandt's "bust" of Brian Chase — mostly because of the way the event has skewed discussion of Wikipedia, but partly because Chase's outing seems to have damaged the hapless-seeming Chase much more than Seigenthaler had been damaged by the initial fake post. The CNET interview suggests that Brandt might also have some regrets about the fallout over Chase, though Brandt frames his concern as yet another critique of Wikipedia. Brandt claims he is uncomfortable about the fact that Chase has a Wikipedia biography, since "when this poor guy is trying to send out his resume," employers will google him, find the Wikipedia entry, and refuse to hire him: since Wikipedia entries are not as ephemeral as news articles, he adds, the entry is actually "an invasion of privacy even more than getting your name in the newspaper." This seems to be an odd bit of reasoning, since Brandt, after all, was the one who made Chase notorious.

When asked by the CNET interviewer how he would "fix" Wikipedia, Brandt maintained an emphasis on the idea that biographical entries are Wikipedia's Achilles heel, an belief which is tied, perhaps, to his own reasons for taking Wikipedia to task — a prominent draft resister in the 1960s, Brandt discovered that his own Wikipedia post had links he considered unflattering. He explained to CNET that his first priority would be to "freeze" biographies on the site which had been checked for accuracy:

I would go and take all the biographical articles on living persons and take them out of the publicly editable Wikipedia and put them in a sandbox that's only open to registered users. That keeps out all spiders and scrapers. And then you work on all these biographies and get them up to snuff and then put them back in the main Wikipedia for public access but lock them so they cannot be edited. If you need to add more information, you go through the process again. I know that's a drastic change in ideology because Wikipedia's ideology says that the more tweaks you get from the masses, the better and better the article gets and that quantity leads to improved quality irrevocably. Their position is that the Seigenthaler thing just slipped through the crack. Well, I don't buy that because they don't know how many other Seigenthaler situations are lurking out there.

"Seigenthaler situations." This term could either come in to use as a term to refer to the dubious accuracy of an online post — or, alternately, to refer to a phobic response to open-source knowledge construction. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, in the pro-Wikipedia world, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today notes that a group of Wikipedia fans have decided to try to create a Wikiversity, a learning center based on Wiki open-source principles. According to the Chronicle, "It's not clear exactly how extensive Wikiversity would be. Some think it should serve only as a repository for educational materials; others think it should also play host to online courses; and still others want it to offer degrees." I'm curious to see if anything like a Wikiversity could get off the group, and how it will address the tension around open-source knowledge that been foregrounded by the Wikipedia-bashing that has taken place over the past few weeks.

Finally, there's a great defense of Wikipedia in Danah Boyd's Apophenia. Among other things, Boyd writes:

We should be teaching our students how to interpret the materials they get on the web, not banning them from it. We should be correcting inaccuracies that we find rather than protesting the system. We have the knowledge to be able to do this, but all too often, we're acting like elitist children. In this way, i believe academics are more likely to lose credibility than Wikipedia.

Posted by lisa lynch at 10:37 AM | Comments (1)
tags: open , source , wikipedia , wikiversity

nature magazine says wikipedia about as accurate as encyclopedia brittanica   12.14.2005, 3:47 PM

A new and fairly authoritative voice has entered the Wikipedia debate: last week, staff members of the science magazine Nature read through a series of science articles in both Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, and decided that Britannica — the "gold standard" of reference, as they put it — might not be that much more reliable (we did something similar, though less formal, a couple of months back -- read the first comment). According to an article published today:

Entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team. Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

It's interesting to see Nature coming to the defense of Wikipedia at the same time that so many academics in the humanities and social science have spoken out against it: it suggests that the open source culture of academic science has led to a greater tolerance for Wikipedia in the scientific community. Nature's reviewers were not entirely thrilled with Wikipidia: for example, they found the Britannica articles to be much more well-written and readable. But they also noted that Britannica's chief problem is the time and effort it takes for the editorial department to update material as a scientific field evolves or changes: Wikipedia updates often occur practically in real time.

One not-so-suprising fact unearthed by Nature's staffers is that the scientific community contained about twice as many Wikipedia users as Wikipedia authors. The best way to ensure that the science in Wikipedia is sound, the magazine argued, is for scientists to commit to writing about what they know.

Posted by lisa lynch at 03:47 PM | Comments (0)
tags: accuracy , authority , magazine , nature , wikipedia

wikipedia update: author of seigenthaler smear confesses   12.12.2005, 10:14 AM

According to a Dec 11 New York Times article, Daniel Brandt, a book indexer who runs the site Wikipedia Watch, helped to flush out the man who posted the false biography of USA Today and Freedom Forum founder John Seigenthaler on Wikipedia. After Brandt discovered the post issued from a small delivery company in Nashville, the man in question -- 38-year-old Brian Chase -- sent a letter of apology to Seigenthaler and resigned from his job as operations manager at the company.

According to the Times, Chase claims that he didn't realize that Wikipedia was used as a serious research tool: he posted the information to shock a co-worker who was familiar with the Seigenthaler family. Seigenthaler, who complained in a USA Today editorial last week about the protections afforded to the "volunteer vandals" who post anonymously in cyberspace, told the New York Times that he would not seek damages from Chase.

Responding to the fallout from Seigenthaler's USA Today editorial, Wikipedia founder James Wales changed Wikipedia's policies so that posters now must all be registered with Wikipedia. But, as Brandt shows, it's takes work to remain anonymous in cyberspace. Though I'm not sure that I beleive Chase's professed astonishment that anyone would take his post seriously (why else would it shock his co-worker?), it seems clear that he didn't think what he was doing so outrageous that he ought to make a serious effort to hide his tracks.

Meanwhile, Wales has become somewhat irked by Seignthaler's continuing attacks on Wikipedia. Posting to the threaded discussion of the issue on the mailing list of the Association for Internet Researchers, Wikipedia's founder expressed exasperation about Seigenthaler's telling the Associated Press this morning that "Wikipedia is inviting [more regulation of the internet] by its allowing irresponsible vandals to write anything they want about anybody." Wales wrote:

*sigh* Facts about our policies on vandalism are not hard to come by. A statement like Seigenthaler's, a statement that is egregiously false, would not last long at all at Wikipedia.

For the record, it is just absurd to say that Wikipedia allows "irresponsible vandals to write anything they want about anybody."

--Jimbo

Posted by lisa lynch at 10:14 AM | Comments (1)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , seigenthaler , wikipedia

where we've been, where we're going   12.09.2005, 12:54 PM

This past week at if:book we've been thinking a lot about the relationship between this weblog and the work we do. We decided that while if:book has done a fine job reflecting and provoking the conversations we have at the Institute, we wanted to make sure that it also seems as coherent to our readers as it does to us. With that in mind, we've decided to begin posting a weekly roundup of our blog posts, in which we synthesize (as much a possible) what we've been thinking and talking about from Monday to Friday.

So here goes. This week we spent a lot of time reflecting on simulation and virtuality. In part, this reflection grew out of our collective reading of a Tom Zengotita's book Mediated, which discusses (among other things) the link between alienation from the "real" through digital mediation and increased solipsism. Bob seemed especially interested in the dialectic relationship between, on one hand, the opportunity for access afforded by ever-more sophisticated form of simulation, and, on the other, the sense that something must be lost when as the encounter with the "real" recedes entirely.

This, in turn, led to further conversation about what we might think of as the "loss of the real" in the transition from books on paper to books on a computer screen. On one hand, there seems to be a tremendous amount of anxiety that Google Book Search might somehow make actual books irrelevant and thus destroy reading and writing practices linked to the bound book. On the other hand, one could take the position of Cory Doctorow that books as objects are overrated, and challenge the idea that a book needs to be digitally embodied to be "real."

As the debate over Google Book Search continually reminds us, one of the most challenging things in sifting through discussions of emerging media forms is learning to tell the difference between nostalgia and useful critical insight. Often the two are hopelessly intertwined; in this week's debates about Wikipedia, for example, discussion of how to make the open-source encyclopedia more useful was often tempered by the suggestion that encyclopedias of the past were always be superior to Wikipedia, an assertion easily challenged by a quick browse through some old encyclopedias.

Finally, I want to mention that we finally got around to setting up a del.icio.us account. There will be a formal link on the blog up soon, but you can take a look now. It will expand quickly.

Posted by lisa lynch at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Roundup , book , google , search , simulation , wikipedia

more on wikipedia   12.05.2005, 12:41 PM

As summarized by a Dec. 5 article in CNET, last week was a tough one for Wikipedia -- on Wednesday, a USA today editorial by John Seigenthaler called Wikipedia "irresponsible" for not catching significant mistakes in his biography, and Thursday, the Wikipedia community got up in arms after discovering that former MTV VJ and longtime podcaster Adam Curry had edited out references to other podcasters in an article about the medium.

In response to the hullabaloo, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales now plans to bar anonymous users from creating new articles. The change, which went into effect today, could possibly prevent a repeat of the Seigenthaler debacle; now that Wikipedia would have a record of who posted what, presumably people might be less likely to post potentially libelous material. According to Wales, almost all users who post to Wikipedia are already registered users, so this won't represent a major change to Wikipedia in practice. Whether or not this is the beginning of a series of changes to Wikipedia that push it away from its "hive mind" origins remains to be seen.

I've been surprised at the amount of Wikipedia-bashing that's occurred over the past few days. 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. Mostly, the conversation seems to have shifted how people think about Wikipedia. Once an information resource developed by and for "us," it's now an unreliable threat to the idea of truth imposed on us by an unholy alliance between "volunteer vandals" (Seigenthaler's phrase) and the outlaw Jimmy Wales. This shift is exemplified by the post that begins a discussion of Wikipedia that took place over the past several days on the Association of Internet Researchers list serve. The scholar who posted suggested that researchers boycott Wikipedia and prohibit their students from using the site as well until Wikipedia develops "an appropriate way to monitor contributions." In response, another poster noted that rather than boycotting Wikipedia, it might be better to monitor for the site -- or better still, write for it.

Another comment worthy of consideration from that same discussion: in a post to the same AOIR listserve, Paul Jones notes that in the 1960s World Book Encyclopedia, RCA employees wrote the entry on television — scarcely mentioning television pioneer Philo Farnsworth, longtime nemesis of RCA. "Wikipedia's failing are part of a public debate," Jones writes, "Such was not the case with World Book to my knowledge." In this regard, the flak over Wikipedia might be considered a good thing: at least it gives those concerned with the construction of facts the opportunity to debate with the issue. I'm just not sure that making Wikipedia the enemy contributes that much to the debate.

Posted by lisa lynch at 12:41 PM | Comments (1)
tags: adam , authority , curry , jim , libraries , research , wales , wikipedia

the next dictionary   11.23.2005, 12:53 PM

I found this Hartford Courant article on slashdot.

Martin Benjamin heads up an eleven year old project to create an online Swahili dictionary called the Kamusi Project. Despite 80 million speakers, the current Swahili dictionary is over 30 years old. Setting this project apart from other online dictionaries, these entries are created by, not only academics, but also by volunteers ranging from former Peace Corp workers to African linguistic hobbyists. The site also includes a discussion board for the community of users and developers.

It is also important to mention that, like wikipedia, donations and volunteers support this collaborative project. Unlike wikipedia, it does not have the broad audience and publicity that wikipedia enjoys, which makes funding a continual issue.

Posted by ray cha at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Swahili , book , collaborative , dictionary , networked , volunteer , wikipedia

wikipedia hard copy   11.03.2005, 1:18 AM

Believe it or not, they're printing out Wikipedia, or rather, sections of it. Books for the developing world. Funny that just days ago Gary remarked:

"A Better Wikipedia will require a print version.... A print version would, for better or worse, establish Wikipedia as a cosmology of information and as a work presenting a state of knowledge."

Prescient.

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:18 AM | Comments (3)
tags: books , digital_divide , encyclopedia , print , wiki , wikipedia

a better wikipedia will require a better conversation   10.28.2005, 1:04 PM

There's an interesting discussion going on right now under Kim's Wikibooks post about how an open source model might be made to work for the creation of authoritative knowledge -- textbooks, encyclopedias etc. A couple of weeks ago there was some dicussion here about an article that, among other things, took some rather cheap shots at Wikipedia, quoting (very selectively) a couple of shoddy passages. 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 it out of hand. Holding up specific passages for critique is 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.

Instead we should be talking about possible directions in which it might go, and how it might be improved. Dan for one, is concerned about the market (excerpted from comments):

What I worry about...is that we're tearing down the old hierarchies and leaving a vacuum in their wake.... The problem with this sort of vacuum, I think, is that capitalism tends to swoop in, simply because there are more resources on that side....

...I'm not entirely sure if the world of knowledge functions analogously, but Wikipedia does presume the same sort of tabula rasa. The world's not flat: it tilts precariously if you've got the cash. There's something in the back of my mind that suspects that Wikipedia's not protected against this – it's kind of in the state right now that the Web as a whole was in 1995 before the corporate world had discovered it. If Wikipedia follows the model of the web, capitalism will be sweeping in shortly.

Unless... the experts swoop in first. Wikipedia is part of a foundation, so it's not exactly just bobbing in the open seas waiting to be swept away. 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.

The Guardian ran a nice piece earlier this week in which they asked several "experts" to evaluate a Wikipedia article on their particular subject. They all more or less agreed that, while what's up there is not insubstantial, there's still a long way to go. The biggest challenge then, it seems to me, is to get these sorts of folks to give Wikipedia more than just a passing glance. To actually get them involved.

For this to really work, however, another group needs to get involved: the users. That might sound strange, since millions of people write, edit and use Wikipedia, but I would venture that most are not willing to rely on it as a bedrock source. No doubt, it's incredibly useful to get a basic sense of a subject. Bloggers (including this one) link to it all the time -- it's like the conversational equivalent of a reference work. And for certain subjects, like computer technology and pop culture, it's actually pretty solid. But that hits on the problem right there. Wikipedia, even at its best, has not gained the confidence of the general reader. And though the Wikimaniacs would be loathe to admit it, this probably has something to do with its core philosophy.

Karen G. Schneider, a librarian who has done a lot of thinking about these questions, puts it nicely:

Wikipedia has a tagline on its main page: "the free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit." That's an intriguing revelation. What are the selling points of Wikipedia? It's free (free is good, whether you mean no-cost or freely-accessible). That's an idea librarians can connect with; in this country alone we've spent over a century connecting people with ideas.

However, the rest of the tagline demonstrates a problem with Wikipedia. Marketing this tool as a resource "anyone can edit" is a pitch oriented at its creators and maintainers, not the broader world of users. It's the opposite of Ranganathan's First Law, "books are for use." Ranganathan wasn't writing in the abstract; he was referring to a tendency in some people to fetishize the information source itself and lose sight that ultimately, information does not exist to please and amuse its creators or curators; as a common good, information can only be assessed in context of the needs of its users.

I think we are all in need of a good Wikipedia, since in the long run it might be all we've got. And I'm in now way opposed to its spirit of openness and transparency (I think the preservation of version histories is a fascinating element and one which should be explored further -- perhaps the encyclopedia of the future can encompass multiple versions of the "the truth"). But that exhilarating throwing open of the doors should be tempered with caution and with an embrace of the parts of the old system that work. Not everything need be thrown away in our rush to explore the new. Some people know more than other people. Some editors have better judgement than others. There is such a thing as a good kind of gatekeeping.

If these two impulses could be brought into constructive dialogue then we might get somewhere. This is exactly the kind of conversation the Wikimedia Foundation should be trying to foster.

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:04 PM | Comments (8)
tags: Education , Libraries, Search and the Web , Online , authority , encyclopedia , library , open_source , web , wiki , wikibooks , wikimedia , wikipedia

can there be great textbooks without great authors?   10.27.2005, 8:08 AM

Jimmy Wales believes that the Wikibooks project will do for the textbook what Wikipedia did for the encyclopedia; replacing costly printed books with free online content developed by a community of contributors. But will it? Or, more accurately, should it? The open source volunteer format works for encyclopedia entries, which don't require deep knowledge of a particular subject. But the sustained examination and comprehensive vision required to understand and contextualize a particular subject area is out of reach for most wiki contributors. The communal voice of the open source textbook is also problematic, especially for humanities texts, as it lacks the power of an inspired authoritative narrator. This is not to say that I think open source textbooks are doomed to failure. In fact, I agree with Jimmy Wales that open source textbooks represent an exciting, liberating and inevitable change. But there are some real concerns that we need to address in order to help this format reach its full potential. Including: how to create a coherent narrative out of a chorus of anonymous voices, how to prevent plagiarism, and how to ensure superior scholarship.

To illustrate these points, I'm going to pick on a Wikibook called: Art History. This book won the distinction of "collaboration of the month" for October, which suggests that, within the purview of wikibooks, it represents a superior effort. Because space is limited, I'm only going to examine two passages from Chapter One, comparing the wikibook to similar sections in a traditional art history textbook. Below is the opening paragraph, framing the section on Paleolithic Art and cave paintings, which begins the larger story of art history.

Art has been part of human culture for millenia. Our ancient ancestors left behind paintings and sculptures of delicate beauty and expressive strength. The earliest finds date from the Middle Paleolithic period (between 200,000 and 40,000 years ago), although the origins of Art might be older still, lost to the impermanence of materials.

Compare that to the introduction given by Gardner's Art Through the Ages (seventh edition):

What Genesis is to the biblical account of the fall and redemption of man, early cave art is to the history of his intelligence, imagination, and creative power. In the caves of southern France and of northern Spain, discovered only about a century ago and still being explored, we may witness the birth of that characteristically human capability that has made man master of his environment—the making of images and symbols. By this original and tremendous feat of abstraction upper Paleolithic men were able to fix the world of their experience, rendering the continuous processes of life in discrete and unmoving shapes that had identity and meaning as the living animals that were their prey.

In that remote time during the last advance and retreat of the great glaciers man made the critical breakthrough and became wholly human. Our intellectual and imaginative processes function through the recognition and construction of images and symbols; we see and understand the world pretty much as we were taught to by the representations of it familiar to our time and place. The immense achievement of Stone Age man, the invention of representation, cannot be exaggerated.

As you can see the wiki book introduction seems rather anemic and uninspired when compared to Gardner's. The Gardner's introduction also sets up a narrative arc placing art of this era in the context of an overarching story of human civilization.

I chose Gardner's Art Through the Ages because it is the classic "Intro to Art History" textbook (75 years old, in its eleventh edition). I bought my copy in high school and still have it. That book, along with my brilliant art history teacher Gretchen Whitman, gave me a lifelong passion for visual art and a deep understanding of its significance in the larger story of western civilization. My tattered but beloved Gardner's volume still serves me well, some 20 odd years later. Perhaps it is the beauty of the writing, or the solidity of the authorial voice, or the engaging manner in which the "story" of art is told.

Let's compare another passage; this one describes pictorial techniques employed by stone age painters. First the wikibook:

Another feature of the Lascaux paintings deserves attention. The bulls there show a convention of representing horns that has been called twisted perspective, because the viewer sees the heads in profile but the horns from the front. Thus, the painter's approach is not strictly or consistently optical. Rather, the approach is descriptive of the fact that cattle have two horns. Two horns are part of the concept "bull." In strict optical-perspective profile, only one horn would be visible, but to paint the animal in that way would, as it were, amount to an incomplete definition of it.

And now Gardner's:

The pictures of cattle at Lascaux and elsewhere show a convention of representation of horns that has been called twisted perspective, since we see the heads in profile but the horns from a different angle. Thus, the approach of the artist is not strictly or consistently optical—that is, organized from a fixed-viewpoint perspective. Rather, the approach is descriptive of the fact that cattle have two horns. Two horns would be part of the concepts "cow" or "bull." In a strict optical-perspective profile only one horn would be visible, but to paint the animal in such a way would, as it were, amount to an incomplete definition of it.

This brings up another very serious problem with open-source textbooks--plagiarism. If the first page of the wikibook-of-the month blatantly rips-off one of the most popular art history books in print and nobody notices, how will Wikibooks be able to police the other 11,000 plus textbooks it intends to sponsor? What will the consequences be if poorly written, plagairized, open-source textbooks become the runaway hit that Wikibooks predicts?

Posted by Kim White at 08:08 AM | Comments (17)
tags: Education , authority , e-learning , ebook , jimmy_wales , open_source , textbook , wiki , wikibooks , wikipedia

questions and answers   10.25.2005, 10:16 AM

in 1980 and 81 i had a dream job — charlie van doren, the editorial director of Encyclopedia Britannica, hired me to think about the future of encyclopedias in the digital era. i parlayed that gig into an eighteen-month stint with Alan Kay when he was the chief scientist at Atari. Alan had read the paper i wrote for britannica — EB and the Intellectual Tools of the Future — and in his enthusiastic impulsive style, said, "this is just the sort of thing i want to work on, why not join me at Atari."

while we figured that the future encyclopedia should at the least be able to answer most any factual question someone might have, we really didn't have any idea of the range of questions people would ask. we reasoned that while people are curious by nature, they fall out of the childhood habit of asking questions about anything and everything because they get used to the fact that no one in their immediate vicinity actually knows or can explain the answer and the likelihood of finding the answer in a readily available book isn't much greater.

so, as an experiment we gave a bunch of people tape recorders and asked them to record any question that came to mind during the day — anything. we started collecting question journals in which people whispered their wonderings — both the mundane and the profound. michael naimark, a colleague at Atari was particularly fascinated by this project and he went to the philippines to gather questions from a mountain tribe.

anyway, this is a long intro to the realization that between wikipedia and google, alan's and my dream of a universal question/answer machine is actually coming into being. although we could imagine what it would be like to have the ability to get answers to most any question, we assumed that the foundation would be a bunch of editors responsible for the collecting and organizing vast amounts of information. we didnt' imagine the world wide web as a magnet which would motivate people collectively to store a remarkable range of human knowledge in a searchable database.

on the other hand we assumed that the encylopedia of the future would be intelligent enough to enter into conversation with individual users, helping them through rough spots like a patient tutor. looks like we'll have to wait awhile for that.

Posted by bob stein at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)
tags: alan_kay , atari , britannica , encyclopedia , history_of_interactive_media , multimedia , web , web_2.0 , wikipedia

nicholas carr on "the amorality of web 2.0"   10.17.2005, 9:00 AM

Nicholas Carr, who writes about business and technology and formerly was an editor of the Harvard Business Review, has published an interesting though problematic piece on "the amorality of web 2.0". I was drawn to the piece because it seemed to be questioning the giddy optimism surrounding "web 2.0", specifically Kevin Kelly's rapturous late-summer retrospective on ten years of the world wide web, from Netscape IPO to now. While he does poke some much-needed holes in the carnival floats, Carr fails to adequately address the new media practices on their own terms and ends up bashing Wikipedia with some highly selective quotes.

Carr is skeptical that the collectivist paradigms of the web can lead to the creation of high-quality, authoritative work (encyclopedias, journalism etc.). Forced to choose, he'd take the professionals over the amateurs. But put this way it's a Hobson's choice. Flawed as it is, Wikipedia is in its infancy and is probably not going away. Whereas the future of Britannica is less sure. And it's not just amateurs that are participating in new forms of discourse (take as an example the new law faculty blog at U. Chicago). Anyway, here's Carr:

The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

He then has a nice follow-up in which he republishes a letter from an administrator at Wikipedia, which responds to the above.

Encyclopedia Britannica is an amazing work. It's of consistent high quality, it's one of the great books in the English language and it's doomed. Brilliant but pricey has difficulty competing economically with free and apparently adequate....

...So if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia. So those who care about getting a good encyclopedia are going to have to work out how to make Wikipedia better, or there won't be anything.

Let's discuss.

Posted by ben vershbow at 09:00 AM | Comments (5)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , OS , Online , Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , Social Software , Web2.0 , amateur , blog , blogging , blogs , book , books , britannica , collective , encyclopedia , encyclopedia_britannica , internet , journalism , mainstream_media , media , msm , open_content , open_source , publishing , web , web_2.0 , wiki , wikipedia

wikipedia compiles britannica errors   10.03.2005, 11:12 AM

Whatever one's hesitations concerning the accuracy and reliability of Wikipedia, one has to admire their panache. Wikipedia applies the de-bugging ethic of programming to the production of knowledge, and this page is a wonderful cultural document - biting the collective thumb at print snobbism.

(CNET blogs)

Posted by ben vershbow at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Online , britannica , bugs , coding , collaborative , debugging , encylopedia , internet , programming , web , wiki , wikipedia