Open Wiki Blog Planet

I have been reading the blog of Guillaume Paumier, the project manager for the Multimedia usability project. Reading it, I am of two minds.. it is tagged as his personal opinion but on the other hand, this is the opinion that he promotes. The question is should I analyse and critique it or not and, to what extend and where.

As a blogger, Guillaume is the opposite of me. I do not use bold, I use illustrations. Thinking on projects, I prefer the scrum approach for the Wikimedia Foundation because the WMF has a track record of waterfall projects that have not delivered on time. Main advantages of scrum are more visible results and consequently easier communication with our communities.

In Guillaume's view a project manager decides on what to do when. Having a keen interest in scrum, I have a problem with this, for me it is the customer who decides what gets done when. NB Customer as understood by scrum. There is one KEY problem though; there is nothing in our communities, in our organisation that serves the role of customer. The result is that the WMF may be doing well but it is increasingly seen as an ivory tower.

When I query his blog there are two words missing: language and culture. Given that translatewiki.net supports 327 languages, it is unlikely that anyone can truly appreciate and predict the needs for software that is to accommodate all these languages. I am really looking forward how Guillaume intends to deal with linguistic and cultural issues. This is maybe a good subject for his next blogpost.

The Usability Initiative did a good job by promoting the localisation of its software and setting up test environments for languages in several scripts.

Finally I disagree with Guillaume that there are no people in our community who fulfil a role of project manager. They do not have the title but they have taken the burden of that role.
Thanks,
GerardM

The running joke every time Apple releases a new product, or removes buttons from an existing one, is that the company hates buttons. Cameron Hunt suggests the opposite:

Would you say to someone, “Wow, you must hate dogs. You only have one. You enjoy his company and playing with him, but seriously, only one? What do you have against dogs?”.

The shallow assumption of Apple’s buttons is they hate buttons, the deeper conclusion is they love the shit out of a few important buttons. I bet they obsess over the placement, color, label, push-back and feel of every single button on every Apple device.

• the new Bengali mobile main page has been configured
• a comment in bug 22730: "Though I would care to point out, that I fear that few mobile devices will be capable of the Bengali character set... Unfortunately..."
• I called Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and Google to ask if they can support the languages we support in Wikipedia
• it is not a question to ask when you are located in the Netherlands
• Siebrand twittered two days ago: "One month ago, #Wikipedia #mobile had 88 supported languages (35 90%+). Now 104 languages supported with 59 at 90%+ #translatewiki #L10n"
• as there are only 25 messages, full localisation is called for because all the messages are in your face
• currently there are 52 languages fully localised and 11 languages with one message missing (i.e. 96%)
• the product Wikimedia mobile is read only and currently only works for Wikipedia
• how do you get your preferred script when a Wikipedia has multiple scripts like the Serbian and the Chinese language Wikipedia ?

Sometimes it seems to me that whenever things go wrong in college teaching, the first impulse of the professor is to blame the students. They aren’t prepared for class. They don’t want to grapple with the hard concepts. They don’t want to read what I assign. They do all their work at the last minute.

And now, apparently, laptop computers in class have caused them to stop paying attention.

We’ve all seen it. The student with a laptop who has clearly checked out of lecture. Is he reading his email? Is she chatting with a friend? Is he playing World of Warcraft? And then there are the other students peering covertly or openly at the open screen.

I’m sorry to report that laptops aren’t the problem, nor are students. As Pogo said so many years ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I’m still not sure how it is that people with advanced degrees that require them to develop sophisticated research skills can so casually ignore mountains of research by serious cognitive scientists that demonstrates unequivocally that lecturing is one of the worst forms of teaching (if the quality of teaching is measured by learning).

A simple summary of that research — and I’ve read a lot of it lately — could be called the 20/20 rule. Study after study shows that when students are lectured at their attention drifts very rapidly and that 20 minutes is about all their brains can tolerate. After 20 minutes, these studies show that the majority of students are somewhere else, with our without the aid of a laptop. And study after study shows that students (even the brightest and most attentive) retain, on average, about 20% of what is told to them in lecture. For a good summary of this research, see Lion F. Gardiner, “Why We Must Change: The Research Evidence,” Thought & Action 14/1 (1998): 71-88.

So instead of blaming our students for wandering away on their laptops, I think it’s time we looked a little more closely in the mirror and asked ourselves why they wander off. That, of course, would require us to admit that too often we (me included more than I’d care to admit) follow the path of least resistance and stand at the front of the room and talk while they take notes. Like any addiction, lecturing is a hard habit to break. If it were easy to stop, I’d have junked all of my lectures by now instead of something like two-thirds. But I’m getting there.

Some like to argue that what I’ve just pointed out is rooted in idealism that can’t be matched by the practicalities of teaching to large classes. Nice try, I say, because plenty of talented educators have figured out how to engage students in active learning even in large lecture halls. Perhaps the best example I know of is Dennis Jacobs, a professor of Chemistry at Notre Dame, whose work on active learning in large lecture classes has earned him many awards, not the least of which is the CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year award. If Dennis can do it in introductory Chemistry, I guess I don’t understand why we can’t do it in the freshman History survey.

So let’s take a step back and stop blaming our students (and their laptops). Doing so will force us to think more carefully about our own teaching practice and how we (as opposed to they) might improve.

First of all, the sample size here is to small for me to even consider calling it representative, but going back to the old, what do IP contributors bring to Wikipedia, I went through the last 20 anonymous edits on Wikipedia (I was planning a larger sample, but something came up).  Of these 20 edits, all of which took place at 15:22, 10 (exactly half) were constructive.  9 were destructive, and 1 (vandalizing then reverting it) is best seen as neutral.

Jerry Seinfeld takes on Blackberry users, rudeness, and dunking his wife’s Blackberry in yogurt: “Oh, it said Blackberry. I guess I got confused.”

(The full stand-up routine runs 7:19, and the Blackberry portion starts at 5:03. To start the video right at this point, I used a fine tool called Splicd.com.)

commons.wikimedia.org:

Inachis io Lill-Jansskogen.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Korall

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de.wikipedia.org:

Ise SW.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Bermicourt

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en.wikipedia.org:

El Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Valencia - Jan 2007.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Diliff

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Students at universities all around the world represent an enormous, and greatly untapped, potential.

As we learn, we can do work.

As we teach, we can do work.

As a community we can bring challenges, lessons, opportunities and context.

Together we can have impact.

Thank you to the students and teachers already engaged with Appropedia, and thank you to those communities that have made it possible and worth it.

Today is International Women’s Day, an event celebrated for the first time on March 19, 1911:

More than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination.

However less than a week later on 25 March, the tragic ‘Triangle Fire’ in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This disastrous event drew significant attention to working conditions and labour legislation in the United States that became a focus of subsequent International Women’s Day events.

International Women’s Day is widely-celebrated around the world, and a national holiday in a number of countries, including Bulgaria, China, Russia, Ukraine, and Vietnam. But women’s rights are still hard-won in many places, and I thought I’d share this article on the challenges and hopes of female candidates in Iraq’s parliamentary elections. Jenan Mubarak, on the right in the photo above, campaigning in Baghdad, is one of those candidates:

Ms. Mubark manages a construction company and runs the Iraqi Center for Women’s Rehabilitation and Employment, a nongovernmental organization that she said gave her a base of support, both male and female. In her walkup office in central Baghdad, she described her agenda in language that has become familiar to political campaigns around the world. “This,” she said, “is the first step for change in our country.”

Photo credit: AP Photo/ Karim Kadim

Hoping for a big hit at the gigantic party conference SXSW, location networks having been launching new features and other incentives to get people using their service. That includes Foursquare, which turns checkins at a venue into a game.

Foursquare’s bid for attracting more signups has been adding a richer history. To our eyes, this checkin history seems inspired by the wiki-style RecentChanges or the personal contribution history AboutUs.org (and thousands of other sites) have.

As TechCrunch put it:

As we noted last week, Foursquare has begun revamping the “history” area of its website….another update makes the history area show not only where you checked-in, and the category of the venue, but also who you checked-in with.

For a look at the new history, you can see a screenshot of my personal checkin history below. But why is this important? What does a wiki-style history have to offer a site that’s not a wiki? Again TechCrunch sums it up:

Basically, Foursquare has just turned on a new layer to your location history data. And this layer is very interesting because it goes back in time to show you who you were with at a certain venue when you were there.

No matter what kind of social site you’re on, having a trail of breadcrumbs that show where you’ve been and what you do extremely important. That’s still true, even if a location network like Foursquare is less transparent for privacy reasons.

Digging into contribution histories has provided some of the most interesting and useful information about what happens on AboutUs. That’s why we kept the wiki-style RecentChanges and user contributions, even though AboutUs left behind the “traditional” wiki engine MediaWiki in favor of a custom architecture.

Puzzle 1: Equality and Disability

Daniel Wikler posed to me the following problem he encountered while Staff Ethicist at the WHO.¹ The WHO recommends two principles: first, treat all citizens equally; second, aim to maximize overall quality of life. But imagine two citizens will die without a kidney transplant, one of whom is seriously disabled, but there is only one kidney. The first principle requires that both have an equal chance of getting the kidney. But the second principle requires we give it to the non-disabled person: if the disabled person dies, overall quality of life in the society will be higher, since it will have one less disabled person. (We accept, by definition, that disability lowers quality of life.) What to do?

Response: It seems pretty clear that the first value is simply wrong. We have no interest in promoting the health of the population; the population is simply an abstraction. Our interest is in promoting the health of (the sum of) individual people, who are conscious and therefore have moral interests.

One can see this clearly by looking at the cases where the population changes but people do not: birth, death, exile, and immigration:

Birth: The society has a controlled population growth program and assigns birth permits; birth permits are assigned to parents with the healthiest genes.

Death: The society has a limited number of organs; organs are given to the least-injured.

Exile: Sick people are tossed out of the society.

Immigration: Only healthy people are allowed to immigrate.

In all four such cases, it seems pretty clear to me that the population health position is wrong. (Exile seems particularly cruel.)

Puzzle 2: The Repugnant Conclusion

Derek Parfit poses the following problem. 1: Imagine there are a group of happy people (A). 2: Now imagine that some other people are created in some other completely unconnected place that are happy, but less happy than the previous group (B). 3: Now imagine that both groups are adjusted to be at some equal, but intermediate point of happiness between A and A+. 4: Now imagine these two societies are connected, resulting in C: more people at a lesser degree of happiness.

2 is no worse than 1, since the additional people are happy and do not affect anyone. 3 is no worse than 2, since the people in B are made happier by more than the people in A are made unhappy. 4 is no worse than 3, since we are simply introducing folks to each other. But continue this and you reach the repugnant conclusion: a huge swarm of people who are just barely happy is better than a handful of people who are extremely happy.

Response: The problem is step 2, which is in fact worse than 1. Parfit assumes that simply adding extra people whose lives are worth living cannot make things worse. But that’s ridiculous. Imagine our society, then imagine our society with a bunch more feral people living on the huge island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific, unable to speak except in a growl, with none of the surrounding societies ever noticing. I think the people living in the garbage heap’s lives would be worth living (I wouldn’t want to kill them, nor would they want to be killed), but I distinctly prefer the former society.

Puzzle 3: The Logic of the Larder

Many people say that we shouldn’t eat animals, because that would mean killing them. But for many of these animals, if they aren’t going to be killed and eaten, they would never be born in the first place. What if the animal preferred to have a short, pleasant existence before being consumed as food rather than having no existence at all? Wouldn’t that mean we should breed the animal, give it a nice life, then kill and eat it?

Response: This is a ridiculous hypothetical — you’re suggesting an animal that doesn’t exist yet has a preference about existing. I don’t respect hypothetical creatures’ hypothetical desires to not be hypothetical. If I did, you could get me to do all sorts of absurd things just by hypothesizing them. You could, say, simply hypothesize a utility monster’s very strong desire to exist and I would be morally bound to try to create one. Or perhaps my hypothetical children really want to exist, so I have to hurry to procreate. That’s ridiculous.

I think we should maximize the actual interests of actual people.

Puzzle 4: Addition vs. Subtraction

As a consequentialist, if I support not adding people (as I do in my resolution to 2 and 3), then I must support removing people, since the consequences are identical. If I prefer a society with fewer, happier people, then I must support euthanizing some people to make the rest better off. Sure, there are practical questions with implementing this, but philosophically, I must be in favor of eliminationism.

Response: I am not a consequentialist about societies, I’m a utilitarian: I think we should work toward outcomes that maximize the interests of individuals.

There’s a fundamental disanalogy between addition and contraction. Addition means creating new people with interests that didn’t exist before the addition. Contraction, on the other hand, means getting rid of actually-existing people. I do not respect the hypothetical interests of hypothetical individuals to not be hypothetical, but I do respect real people with real interests right now, who presumably have an interest in not being gotten rid of. Thus, I support not getting rid of people and not arbitrarily creating new ones.

Recently Inc. Magazine published a short but sweet piece with three tips for super productive CEOs. Nearly all three of the tips are useful for anyone (not just CEOs), and we particularly liked the first one.

Garrett Camp, founder of StumbleUpon, said:

“A lot of productivity is capturing ideas. I use a wiki — it’s more valuable than e-mail for running a company — and I have a page for every person with whom I interact frequently.”

That’s great advice. Camp is using his wiki like a personal CRM, and his point that wiki is about capturing ideas is one to remember.

AboutUs.org is a wiki about websites and the organizations attached to them. When you’re editing your AboutUs pages, think about what ideas it captures about you and your business in the description, summary, and tags.

Courtesy Erin Scime, DopeData.com.

(Via Predicate, LLC)

When I write an e-mail in the English language, I invariably start with "Hoi". Hoi is a Dutch rather informal salutation. Given that I am known for being part of the "Wiki world", this informality is accepted. One of the reasons for using this Dutch word that is generally understood is, that it makes clear that I am not a native speaker of the English language.

At the end of my blogs and e-mails I invariably thank for the effort people take in reading what I had to say. In my appreciation this makes my writing both informal and friendly.

Today I learned that Ivan had blogged about the salutation I use in my e-mails. I used Google translate to understand what he wrote..
Thanks,
    GerardM

Erfgoed 2.0 is a Dutch blog about how GLAM's make use of the tools provided by what is called "Web 2.0". Many of the subjects discussed are fascinating and they help me understand what a GLAM is and how GLAM people think and operate.

Often I wonder how it would be when we used "social functionality", gaming or rewards in projects like Wikipedia or Commons. One project I came across was MapIt1418, this website invites people to geo tag pictures of the Dutch National Archive about the first world war.


As people in many countries have an interest in the first world war, it is a sad omission that the software is only available in Dutch. The good news is that the software is available under an open source license, so the National Archive may invest in the internationalisation and, it may end up being localised at translatewiki.net. Alternatively, other GLAMs can collaborate in making the software internationalised.

MapIt1418 invites people to geo tag the pictures and this makes it into a challenge, every month a prize can be won which is a quality print of one of the photos featuring on the website.
Thanks,
GerardM

I've just discovered that Google now allows you to save public domain books into your library. What good are public domain books for Commons, you may ask? Well, in addition to being interesting historical documents, public domain books, by default, are full of public domain images. In other words: Google Books project does not only collect text, but alongside, quietly, it is collecting a vast amount of old illustrations, photos, maps and such. Examples:

[Please note, those images may not be available in full view to users outside of the United States - reason] (PS. And indeed now that I am in Poland I am seeing junk...)




I've saved a few dozens old Polish books into my library, most of them have at least several old illustrations, photos, or maps. I have no idea when I'll have time to move them to Commons, but I wonder if we should create a dedicated project that would catalogue useful books (those that have media) and report on the progress of their assimilation?

It appears Google have scanned lot of duplicates of the same book; they don't seem to have any mechanism on reporting duplicates, and their reports on damaged pages seem somewhat buggy, too. Still, for a free service, it's a great tool!

Some useful tips for working with images from Google Print:
* you can switch to html mode while browsing a public domain book (small link somewhere to the right and middle of a page) and save the resulting image as a jpeg


PS. Surfing the web, I discovered this excellent blog ("Inside Google Book Search") devoted to Google Book Search; note the use of images from Google Book public domain books.

I was always puzzled why people prefer to use Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. Flickr, after all, has litte to offer compared to Commons: Flickr allows you to upload images, set copyright, tag them, comment on them, and is not fully free - Wikipedia allows you the same, plus is completly free, and comes with a community that will actually IMPROVE your images - by adding missing categories, correcting wrong ones, improving/translating description, etc. As far as I can tell, the only feature that flickr offers that seems useful and is not implemented on Commons, is mapping part of the image and commenting on it. And of course, for those strange people who don't like others using their work, flickr allows the use of non-free licenses...

Yet:

Flickr popularity on Alexa: 33 most popular site online

Wikimedia Commons popularity: 186 most popular site online

What gives? I think that the flickr is more popular because it looks more "cool", and with the snowball effect, it reaches more people. It's also slightly more user friendly, and better integrated with popular networking sites like Facebook. Wikimedia Commons is not that popular outside the Wikipedia crowd. Yet with Commons "wisdom of the crowd" approach, its steadily improving quality of images, and drive to move useful and freely licensed images from Flickr to Commons, while Flickr keeps accumulating more and more crap, I'd predict that in few years, time, Flickr will be relegated to a repository of porn, non-encyclopedic images and copyright violations.

For a while now I wanted to showcase some interesting images deleted from Wikimedia Commons due to copyright paranoia. For those unfamiliar with our modern copyright laws, not only a lot of photos on the net are copyrighted and you cannot reuse them - but a lot of objects CANNOT BE LEGALLY PHOTOGRAPHED. For example, almost the entirety of modern art, even if it is on public display, cannot be photographed.

First case:

1) Three photos of mine of a decorative sculpture in the foyer of Phipps Conservatory & Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, US.

Photos:





Commons deletion discussion: here

Summary: modern art is copyrighted by artists (in this case, Dale Chihuly), that includes photos of it. There is no freedom of panorama in United States. This means that you cannot take pictures of Mr. Chihuly's works and share them with others, no matter how much you'd like to advertise his wonderful creations.

Outcome: photos will be deleted from Commons collection, which will entitle their removal from various articles, such as on Mr. Chihuly and Phipps Conservatory. Note how the copyright that is supposedly protecting the artists is in fact hurting them, in this case limiting the informative content of the primary reference work about them.

Current use examples:





Expect them to disappear soon.

Solution: wait 70 after Mr. Chihuly's death (unless copyright is retroactively extended, again...). Or contact him and ask for permission (assuming he is still the copyright holder and haven't sold the rights to that particular sculpture to the Gardens). Unfortunately, this is quite time consuming, and few Wikimedia volunteers take care of that, when so many other tasks need doing. I have done it myself a few times in the past, and on occasion managed to save an image or two, but it is a time consuming task (communicating with real person, with no guarantee they'll bother to reply, and then having to convince them to give permission to release the photos under a free license - which is likely a concept they've never heard of - and then have fun explaining why Wikimedia needs the commercial-use-allowed one... (because our ethics requires we explain to them what the free license we need entitles in detail...)). Compared to that, categorizing some images or translating descriptions is so much easier... sigh.

So Mr. Chihuly's article on Wikipedia will soon be gutted of all images of his works. Feel free to tell me how this benefits him :)

Note: This blog post is by no means intended as a jibe against Mr. Chihuly (who is almost certainly unaware of how the law is "protecting him"), nor against Wikimedia Commons (which being a non-profit organization on a donation budget cannot really risk being sued by somebody, with all the costs it incurs). It is however intended a a jibe against the current copyright system, showing how it is hurting all of us - artists and the public, both of which it claims to protect.

In the coming months, I intend on covering other media deletions from Commons (and maybe a few examples of when images were saved). Stay tuned,

Analysing linguistic diversity on the Internet is like and unlike measuring Wikipedia traffic. It is like Wikipedia because its "big" languages have an overwhelming presence and it is unlike Wikipedia in that the smaller languages are hardly noticeable because they are not clearly marked.

A language like Picard is recognised as a language however, software that is in common use, be it proprietary or open source is not configured to establish a document as being in that language. The language recognition software of a Google is not yet able to recognise it by its characteristics. And as a bug keeps the Picard Wikipedia out of the Wikipedia traffic statistics, it can be argued that Picard does not exist on the Internet at all.

Evolution of percentages of English speaking Internet users and web pages

When research is done about linguistic diversity on the Internet for an organisation like UNESCO, the question is what such research is to achieve. UNESCO aims to preserve and promote linguistic diversity and, the technical ability of languages to manifest itself on the Internet is a key enabler.

The UNESCO research documents the issues measuring linguistic diversity from a traffic perspective on the Internet for a few languages but it does not look into what enables such traffic. It does not explain why it is so hard to extend the research to the long tail of the Internet traffic.

Part of the meta-data of document on the Internet or elsewhere, is an indication what language a document is in. Typically software only knows about a subset of the recognised languages. So one valid metric is, what languages do software allow you to write in. For OpenOffice for instance it is essential that the locale data is known in the CLDR. The CLDR data is public and, statistics can be created from its development. As you can imagine, there is no data for the Picard language ...

When UNESCO includes such statistics in its linguistic diversity report, it will become clear how much needs to be done in order to make support for linguistic diversity a reality.
Thanks,
GerardM

commons.wikimedia.org:

Inde bondo8658a.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Yves Picq

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de.wikipedia.org:

Esna 30.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Oltau

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en.wikipedia.org:

Aedes aegypti.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Muhammad Mahdi Karim

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Not just Obama – this woman was also selling John McCain and Sarah Palin condoms in Union Square today.  Yes it was her: the Obamacondoms.com lady.  All images licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution.

Possibly related posts

• New York City – water shots 3 (0)
• Celebrities and downtown denizens salute 25 years of Michael Musto (2)
• Snowicane New York City 2010 blizzard photos (2)
• Paul Auster 2009 portrait for his new book Invisible (1)
• Tracy Morgan – a photographic essay for I Am the New Black (1)

If you are able to go to the Maroon exhibition, please consider it, it is well worth it. If you are unfamiliar with marronage like I was, it is one of those uncomfortable subjects that turn out to be completely and utterly foreign. It is however utterly fascinating and the subject grows on you.

I spoke with Peter Weis about a picture and the Maroon. He found me this video.


Intro Marron exhibition from Jurgen Lisse on Vimeo.

We were talking about a digital restoration of this famous picture of John Stedman. His book about a "Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam" is a classic and was very influential in changing the British public opinion against slavery.


Preparing this blog post, I found yet another video new to me about the exhibition. It gives a nice impression of this major exhibition, an exhibition you really should see :)



Thanks,
     GerardM

At present, the mobile main page for the Swedish Wikipedia is the gold standard. It has this distinction because it is where Hampton and Petter came up with the original best of breed example of how it is to be done.

I like the design; no garish colours, things are where you expect them to be. All in all, being able to copy this is a step in the right direction and, where better for me to do these first steps then on the Dutch Wikipedia


It should be easy; take the design copy it across and you are done. Sadly I am not that good at it because I have no clue why my picture moves to the top.


It is not only ugly, it waists space on a mobile phone. Given that it uses the same templates as the main page, it is likely that some surgery is needed on the Dutch templates ... hmmm This gets me in template hell with templates within templates. In my understanding it ends here for the Dutch Wikipedia and here for the Swedish Wikipedia.

I need support from someone knowledgeable, someone who has the right bits to get this right. My objective; when I can create a mobile page, I may be able to create a mobile main page once a day and thereby get more traffic for Wikipedia. As I prefer to be lazy, I will document what I learn and be pleasantly surprised when there is nothing for me to do.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Several friends of mine play Guitar hero. Their skill level in the game is high.. sadly it is a skill that leads to nothing. When I read that the game can be played with a difference ... actual strings, gaining you an actual skill ... I became enthusiastic, people learning to play the guitar for real.

It looks good too.
Thanks,
     GerardM

commons.wikimedia.org:

Fomes fomentarius inside 2009 G1.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by George Chernilevsky

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de.wikipedia.org:

LatzfonserKreuz.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Cactus26

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en.wikipedia.org:

Gephyrocapsa oceanica color.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Richard Bartz

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New York Times reporter Claire Cain Miller explains five of the most popular uses of Twitter:

At its best, the social medium is a perpetual, personalized news service about topics of your choosing — whether health care reform, tech news or the latest episode of “Gossip Girl” — filtered and served to you by people who care a lot about what you care a lot about.

The other examples – a place to ask questions, organize the people you follow by topical lists, monitor the output of conferences, and get local updates, like a bridge closing or traffic delay – burst the tired stereotype of Twitter as a TMI-laden place to tell everyone the most mundane details of your daily life.

Below are three shots that I think remind the viewer of two things:  the immensity of New York City; and that it exists on a series of islands.  It’s such a large city that it’s easy to forget those.

All shots taken by David Shankbone and licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution.  All photos taken with the Samsung Memoir cameraphone.

The famous financial district in lower downtown with the Hudson River.  Taken from Jersey City’s Exchange Place train station.

Downtown Brooklyn with the East River seen from Pier 11 in Downtown Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Bridge with the Manhattan Bridge behind it, and the South Street Seaport in the foreground, taken from Pier 11 in Downtown Manhattan.  That’s one of the historic boats docked at the seaport’s museum.

Possibly related posts

• Paul Auster 2009 portrait for his new book Invisible (1)
• Tracy Morgan – a photographic essay for I Am the New Black (1)
• Obama Condoms in Union Square (1)
• Celebrities and downtown denizens salute 25 years of Michael Musto (2)
• Snowicane New York City 2010 blizzard photos (2)

Museums and the Web is an annual conference that brings together the world’s best in this fascinating crossover field. This year, it will be in April in Denver, Colorado. To my great delight, Wikimedia will be playing a big part of the conference - with the entire first day being dedicated to looking at how the two communities can and should work together.

“Wikimedia@MW2010 is a workshop for exploring and developing policies that will enable museums to better contribute to and use Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, and for the Wikimedia community to benefit from the expertise in museums. It will bring together leaders in both communities to examine the opportunities for greater synergy between the museum sector and the Wikimedia community and the current barriers to collaboration. Specifically it will address rules, guidelines and examples that can be clarified to order to promote active engagement between the two communities.”

Keynoting the day will be Maxwell Anderson, CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art - one of the most forward thinking GLAMs in the world in terms of information openness. Don’t just take my word for it, check out their Dashboard (that I’ve previously blogged about), public deaccessioning process, and the new ArtBabble project.

Attending from the WMF staff will be Erik Möller, Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation and Guillaume Paumier, product manager of the multimedia usability project. The WMF’s Board of Trustees will be represented by Samuel Klein, director of content for the OLPC and Kat Walsh, WMF executive secretary and policy analyst for the American Library Association.

And from across the wonderful wiki-verse, attendees will be:

• Mathias Schindler, project manager at Wikimedia Deutschland
• Phoebe Ayers, reference librarian at the university of California, Davis  and author of How Wikipedia Works
• Mark Pellegrini, PhD candidate in Electrical and computer engineering and director of Wikipedia’s Featured Article processes
• Richard Knipel, president of Wikimedia New York City and instigator of several innovative Wikimedia outreach projects
  
• Adrianne Wadewitz, graduate student specialising in eighteenth-century British literature and prolific featured article writer.
• Maarten Dammers, from Wikimedia Nederland and the technical whiz behind many Wikimedia multimedia projects.
• and of course, me.

Furthermore, at least four people from the list of museum-sector attendees are active Wikipedians in their own right so they could potentially sit on both sides of the table.

• Richard McCoy and Jennifer Geigel Mikulay respectively from the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Indiana University  who together run the WikiProject Wikipedia Saves Public Art
• Thomas Tunsch, from the National Museum of Berlin who presented MediaWiki for a museum at last year’s edition of the conference
• Jonathan Bowen, visiting professor at Kings College, London, runs museums.wikia.com and presented Museums and Wikipedia at the 2006 edition of the conference.
  

Join in the discussion! Even if you aren’t attending Museums and the Web, you can still participate in the discussion. The conference’s web forum is where all preliminary discussion is being held. So if you have a question or opinion about Museum-Wikimedia interaction, please join in: http://conference.archimuse.com/forums/wikimediamw2010

Every month Siebrand prepares the group statistics in time. These statistics show how five key categories for MediaWiki localisation are doing in time.

This month we added support for one more language; there are now 327, one more language achieved over 98% coverage for the "most often used languages", for the 90% of the core messages things stayed level at 82 languages, and for both the 90% of the "extensions used by the WMF¨ and the 65% of the "extensions" there was one language less that achieved this goal this month.


These statistics show how we are shooting at a moving target; in the project:news and on twitter you will regularly find a message of new messages that became available for localisation. They are one explanation why these numbers grow ever so slowly another is that when a language is added, it becomes harder to raise a percentage.


In the group statistics you find details like the languages who can boast an effort that keeps their language completely localised. You can also find the 165 languages that are still struggling to complete the "most used messages".

These statistics do not really tell the story of translatewiki.net. It does not tell how happy we are with the recent Swati, Yoruba and Hausa effort, we think that this reflects in the traffic statistics for these languages. It does not tell you that on the first day of the localisation for WikiReader it was translated in 19 languages in 17 hours and that currently over 39 languages are completely localised for Wikimedia mobile.

These numbers do not tell you what is most important; in translatewiki we have a vibrant, hard working community that makes a difference in other projects.
Thanks,
GerardM

"In 1978, Handel faced another scandal, when one of his laboratory assistants died under suspicious circumstances. Handel never faced any charges in connection with the event, but the tragedy showed, at the very least, that the safety precautions taken in his lab were inadequate, and other, more sinister rumors circulated about the event.  The death took place late at night, after 11 PM, at a time when labs are normally closed, leading to suspicions that Handel and the assistant may have been lovers, and opening the possibility that Handel had killed her in order to keep the affair quiet." (Wikipedia) (WebCite).

That paragraph remained in the Wikipedia article Mike Handel for more than three and a half hours last night.  Some readers will undoubtedly respond, so what? Vandalism happens all the time on Wikipedia, and much of it is not cleaned up promptly.  Well, this one is just a little different.  For those 3.5 hours, that article was linked from the main page of Wikipedia, one of the ten most-visited sites on the web (WebCite).  During that period, it was almost certainly viewed by a thousand people or more.  Second, that lovely paragraph wasn't the only BLP disaster in the article, which also labeled Handel a "murderer" and a "Nazi", and implied that he had been pressured into leaving Israel by Western intelligence agencies.  Third, Mike Handel doesn't even exist except in my imagination (and now on Wikipedia).

I created Mike Handel as a test and a demonstration.  Wikipedia has a BLP (Biographies of Living People) problem, but many Wikipedians are altogether too happy to ignore it.   It would be terrifically unethical to accuse a real living person of murder while he or she was featured on Wikipedia's main page, so I created a hoax to provide more proof (as if more proof is needed) of Wikipedia's BLP problem.  This is going to be a long post with a great number of links and details, so if you're not interested in the particulars of the story, you can skip to the section entitled "Successes and Failures" below.

I created the article on February 19 (Wikipedia)(WebCite).  At that time, it didn't have the paragraph on the murder, but it did have a few problematic bits.  Even in the early draft, Handel was depicted as leaving behind chemical weapons-related research in Israel "reportedly under pressure from the British and American governments" and reports that he had been labeled a "murderer" and a "Nazi" by animal rights groups were included.  The sources cited were weak at best: two articles from The Magdalen College Record, the annual newsletter of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Two minutes after the article was created, Wikipedian MuffledThud appeared to categorize it (Wikipedia)(WebCite).  Immediately thereafter, MuffledThud applied the "Unsourced BLP" tag to the article, which was not strictly correct; the article had references, though no footnotes (Wikipedia)(WebCite).  2 minutes later, he removed some of the more serious BLP issues in the article, which was an entirely appropriate response (Wikipedia)(WebCite).  In other words, for the first five minutes or so, Wikipedia's response was the best that you could hope for under current conditions.

Then, I came back and removed the unsourced BLP tag.  It had been incorrectly applied as the article did have sources, so my action was consistent with Wikipedia's policies (Wikipedia)(WebCite).  Three minutes later, MuffledThud applied the "refimprove" tag, which was somewhat more appropriate (Wikipedia)(WebCite).  I let the article sit for a few minutes before returning again to add back in the problematic material that he had removed earlier (Wikipedia)(WebCite).  In return, I received a BLP warning template on my user talk page (Wikipedia), and he took the material out again.  The system, it seemed, was more or less working.
Unfortunately for Mr. Thud, while he was busy (and before I actually even received the BLP warning), I began to up the ante.  I appended a footnote to the section calling Handel a "Nazi" with a reference to an article in the Oxford Times,  a reliable source, to be sure, but one of which there is no digital archive anywhere (Wikipedia)(WebCite).  What could he do now?  It was referenced to a "reliable source" and therefore untouchable, never mind that no such article had ever been published.

MuffledThud, though, is apparently someone who actually does care about BLP issues (give the man a barnstar) and he removed the sourced material, taking it to the talk page to "discuss verification."(Wikipedia)(WebCite).  On the talk page, he let me know that he wanted an archived version online.  As that was impossible, he asked for a scanned version of the article. (Wikipedia)(WebCite).  He did say "please", so I gave him one.(Wikipedia)(WebCite).  It was a quick forgery, but, still, the average vandal probably isn't willing to forge to a 1970s era newspaper clipping, so I paused to think if I was compromising the experiment.  I decided that I wasn't really, the serious BLP problems was still to come (and would not be supported with fake clippings).  These were just the warmup BLP issues, and I did have to guard the article against charges that it was a hoax.  So far as notability went, the article's survival was guaranteed.  Handel, the article claimed, had held a named chair at Oxford, making him inherently notable under Wikipedia's guidelines for academics.

The fake clipping more or less sealed the deal.   There were a few more changes to the article, but they were mostly aesthetic.  The die had been cast, and by February 24 we were looking at a fairly final version of the article.  "All right, Mr. Demille, I'm ready for my close-up" the article proclaimed with its tidy, though entirely faked references (Wikipedia)(WebCite).

1. A fake BLP made it onto the main page
2. A BLP included libelous defamation for more than 9 hours, and was not reverted until an OTRS complaint was filed.
3. During 4 of those hours, that BLP was featured on the main page, receiving a large number of page views (a final number will not be available for a few more hours).
4. Even after an OTRS complaint was filed, false, negative information remained in the article.
5. Even after an OTRS complaint, the article still remained prominently in the main page's DYK section.

OmegaWiki is for the moment off line. Our host forgot that OmegaWiki was on their server. It will be available again soon I have been promissed.

It does however mean that we are looking for hosting elsewhere.
Thanks,
     GerardM

• right to left support sadly does not work yet for the mobile main page.. 
• maybe it needs a (div dir="ltr"> blablabla (/div>
• it does work properly for any other page
• WikiReader is based on Open Moko. Open Moko also produces the FreeRunner mobile phone
• how is OpenMoko's support for the languages Wikipedia supports?
• The Japanese are known for their love of gadgets.. I wonder if they use the optimised mobile page.. I think they don't.

• Praveen Prakash send me annotations on the screen shot of the Malayalam mobile main page taken on an Apple iPhone
• Praveen says: "If this happen to Malayalam, then all Indic languages are affected. Our languages and scripts are different, but very similar in script writing rules. Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada may be affected more"

Red underline: broken ligatures Green underline: misplaced vowel symbols Blue underline: New unicode 5.1 chillu character

Thanks,
      GerardM

Some of the best news of the last week was the news of the continuation of the efforts to make MediaWiki more usable. It is now called "UX" or User eXperience.. and a significant part will be based on "community health recommendations".

When the original Usability Initiative comes to an end, the restriction imposed by the original grant will fall away. It will no longer be restricted to improving the usability of the English language Wikipedia; it can now work on improving MediaWiki in general.

In the comments on his announcement, Erik answers ¨Mobile development is one of our strategic priorities, so expect more interesting things coming down the pipeline. :-) " This is welcome news because it becomes aparant that there are a lot of issues to be resolved. Even high end smart phones are not able to render our languages properly and, we want great functionality for less sophisticated systems as well. It may help that several actors in the mobile market are supporters of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Waray-Waray Wikipedia, started in 2005, welcomed its 15,000th article recently. It had to do with Possibly The End of Life As We Know It.

commons.wikimedia.org:

William Holman Hunt - The Scapegoat.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Dmitry Rozhkov

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de.wikipedia.org:

LatzfonserKreuz.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Cactus26

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en.wikipedia.org:

Granny smith and cross section.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Fir0002

---

Recently, a friend of mine asked : Why does the struct list_head in the Linux kernel has no data field ?

In other words, what he means is this:

The way we are introduced to linked lists in high school is
struct linked_list
{
void *data;
struct linked_list *prev *next;
}

And assume, we have a user defined data structure:
struct user_data
{
int a;
char b;
}

The approach we usually use to create a list would be :
struct linked_list head;
struct user_data mydata1;
head.data = (void *)&mydata1
head.next = NULL;
head.prev = NULL;

And to add another node to the list :
struct linked_list newentry;
struct user_data mydata2;
newentry.data = (void *)&mydata2
newentry.prev = &head
newentry.next = NULL;

and so on..

However in the Linux kernel, a linked list structure is defined something like:
struct list_head
{
struct list_head *next, *prev;
}

and to do the same thing as we did above, we do something like :
struct user_data
{
int a;
char b;
struct list_head new_list;
}

/* Create head */
struct user_data head;
head.new_list.prev=NULL;
head.new_list.next=NULL;
...
/* Add a new node */
struct user_data newentry;
newentry.new_list.prev=&head.new_list;
head.new_list.next = &newentry.new_list;
...

So, in one case we have the data embedded into the linked list (high school style) and in the other, we have the linked list embedded into data. So, what's the advantage of the second over the first ?
I actually couldn't find any documentation justifying this design but these obvious reasons come to my mind.

One advantage is that the kernel programmer is relieved from the additional care he has to take during typecasting if she chooses the first approach. As we all know, typecasting is a necessary evil in C, but using it for linked lists that's invariably used almost everywhere in the kernel is likely to double the number of kernel bugs!

Second, with the first case, with each node created, we end up using more space compared to the second approach. This is because struct linked_list has an additional void *data defined thereby making the node larger in size. This is definitely an important issue in embedded systems if not on x86.

Last but not the least, an important advantage that this design offers is flexibility in list walking. For example, if you have the address of newentry (see above example), you can access newentry->new_list and then go back and forth. Then, using the container_of() macros, any of the associated user_data for any node could be accessed! Even if we just have the address of list_head somewhere in the middle of a linked list, we could jump to the associated data structure. With the first design, in order to do list walking and modifications, we always need the address of any of the node. This means that you always have to pass struct linked_list pointers even if all you really wanted to do is manipulate struct user_data.

read more

Eric Karjaluoto has written a book called Speak Human. It’s all about how to be small and personal in your approach to business. He laments the outsize presence of the very largest corporate brands:

Odd as it may sound, I want Finnish gas stations in Finland. I don’t want a Starbucks in the Forbidden City (others felt similarly, which seemingly influenced its closure in 2007). I dread the notion of boring, homogenized Budweiser being equated as the “king of beers.”

And explains how the quick decision-making in a small company can outmaneuver the bureaucracy likely to slow down large one:

Let’s say you have a little software company that competes with one of Microsoft’s products. Along comes a new innovation that you choose to implement in your application. All you have to do is get down to work. Sure, Microsoft has nearly 90,000 people to do the same, but do you think it’s really that easy? How many meetings, proposals, surveys, and assessments need to happen before a single line of code is written? It’s like arranging a get-together: a dinner for two is easy, a gathering of 12 friends is no big deal, but planning a wedding for 100? That’s a kind of torture.

But what about big companies? Karjaluoto says thinking small can work for them too, but they have their work cut out for them, especially if they need to change negative perceptions.

Buy the paperback or read online for free (a new chapter is published every few weeks).

After it was brought up on his talk page, Jimmy Wales responded to the Mike Handel story thusly (link)

Fascinating and sad. I'm really proud of some aspects of the saga, and obviously not at all happy with others. I think one of the key things that can be done here is a ramping up of the courage of the OTRS volunteers and others who are enforcing BLP policy. I'd like to emphasize that those who did good work here could have been much more firm without any fear of harm coming to them, because they will have my full and complete support up to and including summary desysopping for anyone standing in the way of good BLP work.

Next week I will be running a second round of the informal poll that I started about the German version of Flagged Revisions - I think that's an important piece of this puzzle. But it is worth noting that this particular hoax, because it was deliberate and staged over a long period of time, would not have been prevented by Flagged Revisions.
Empirically, though, I think that most problems of this sort would be caught by flagged revs. The fact that a sophisticated and dedicated person who understands sourcing and is willing to lie and manufacture fake news articles, etc., can hoax people is interesting but likely to be extremely extremely rare in any circumstances. My point here is that we need to think about how to deal with stuff like this (mostly through strong strong support from the "machinery of state" which means admins, ArbCom, and me in defense of BLP enforcers) AND not let this distract us from serious problems that are empirically much more common, which is random driveby attacks that don't get caught quickly enough.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:41, 3 March 2010 (UTC)
 
I'd like to say that there's some good material in what he had to say, but I'd like to draw attention to an error in it: "But it is worth noting that this particular hoax, because it was deliberate and staged over a long period of time, would not have been prevented by Flagged Revisions."  Yes, FlaggedRevisions would not have done anything about the hoax as such, but the point of the experiment was never to show that a hoax could make it into DYK.  We knew that already.
 
The point was to look at what happened to the unsourced murder allegations.  The answer?  Absolutely nothing until the OTRS ticket.  So, there was a second test here.  What would happen to a BLP containing libelous defamation and linked from the main page.  Wikipedia failed this test.  It also failed the BLP hoax test, but that's relevant, and Wikipedia was at a disadvantage there (the faked sources, etc.).
 
With regard to the murder allegations, however, Wikipedia faced a fairly normal situation.  I added the allegations without a source, and the article went into DYK in that form, apparently without anyone checking (though I did later provide a weak source  
 
So far as I am concerned, this is the most significant finding here.  Not that a hoax went onto DYK, but rather than an article, which so far as everyone knew was about a real, living person, was linked from the main page while it contained unsourced allegations of murder.  My other trickery played no role in this.

• there were 11,598,131 mobile page views on the third of March
• multiply this by 28 (number of days for Februari) and you can compare it with the traffic statistics for Wikipedia
• mobile would be slightly smaller in traffic then the Polish Wikipedia
• it is 0.0278% of the total Wikipedia traffic
• the Malayalam mobile Wikipedia looks like this on the Apple iPhone

• as you can see the Unicode support is not great (the little blocks)
• Apple can help by providing adequate fonts
• Wikimedia Foundation can provide an adequate solution by providing web fonts for its mobile customers
• This is the bug requesting a Bengali mobile mainpage

Thanks,
      GerardM

During the past few weeks, I have been thinking about a more structured way to manage software and product development within the Wikimedia community. The result is a list of ideas and recommendations I have compiled and submitted to the relevant staff members at the Wikimedia Foundation. I am also publishing them here in order to allow for a wider feedback. This article is the fourth and last of a series dedicated to this topic.

Disclaimer: The content of this article reflects only my personal opinion and is not an official plan or communication of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I have previously explained why the current setup of the Wikimedia bug tracker is not ideal. I have also advocated for a more managed & scientific software development strategy. This article aims to discuss an appropriate tool to support this strategy, and at the same time fix what is broken.

Software lifecycle & Project management

Right now, there is little project management of the technical activities at the Foundation. When someone does manage projects, they often use personal desktop applications that don’t allow collaborative work. There isn’t any real development roadmap or product requirements. If we want to be serious about structuring our activities, we need a project management strategy & the appropriate associated tools that allow us to manage things such as project scope, schedule, budget & financial resources, quality assurance, human resources, communications, risks & opportunities, procurement and coordination.

I asked around to see what the needs of the various members of the team were. Naoko Komura, who has been project-managing the Wikipedia Usability Initiative, and is now overseeing all UX programs, is particularly interested in the integration of the Project management platform with calendars & issue tracking. Operations staff members also said they were interested in Project management features such as time and task tracking.

I think it is way past time to have a more organized development process & software lifecycle management. The recent hiring of a new Chief Technical Officer is a step towards a more structured organization of technological activities. Of course, changing our bug tracker alone won’t automatically structure our activities, but it is a step in this direction.

Recommendation: Use tools that allow a better management of, and integration between, the different stages in our product(s) lifecycle.

Requirements

A few months ago, I asked Priyanka Dhanda (our new Code maintenance engineer) to explore open-source collaborative project management platforms that could be easily integrated with bugzilla (or that included a bug tracking system of their own). The Wikimedia tech community was invited to list requirements of such a tool, as well as possible solutions.

From the feedback we received, we can summarize what the required features for an issue tracker are: integration with our Version control system, being FLOSS, multiple projects support and ability to separate between “tasks” and other items such as bugs and feature requests. Additional, “nice to have” features include: ability to import data from existing Bugzilla instance and fined-grained e-mail subscription options

Similarly, the required features for a Project management tool are: being web-based to facilitate collaboration, multiple projects support, calendar/scheduling and roadmap, assignments & resource management and time tracking per task/user/project. Additional, “nice to have” features include: Gantt charts, public/private projects, fine-grained access to projects by user, basic accounting & budget management and requirements management.

Redmine

I haven’t found many Project management softwares that can be easily integrated with Bugzilla. However, I have discovered alternatives to Bugzilla that include project management features like those we’re looking for. Redmine seems to be a good project management software and provides an advanced issue tracking system as well. It supports multiple projects, public/private projects, calendars & Gantt chart, and a lot of other neat stuff. It also offers the ability to distinguish between features/improvements and bugs; this would be particularly useful to prioritize development efforts. We are now considering using Redmine as project management software and taking this opportunity to move our Bugzilla setup to Redmine. Initial research shows that a lot of people seem to praise Redmine compared to Bugzilla; there are migration scripts to import an existing Bugzilla setup into a new Redmine one.

Major projects such as TYPO3 are using Redmine. The software seems to benefit from a dynamic community of developers and it is also possible to sponsor custom development. There are many plug-ins to extend the default core features; popular plug-ins are usually included into the core software at some point.

Priyanka set up a local test instance of Redmine to let us play with it a bit; a public test platform was later made available for wider testing and the Wikimedia Tech community was invited to pitch in. So far, I personally like it and it fits my needs perfectly. Wider testing is now necessary to see if it fits the needs of the tech community.

Because the time I can devote to this change is limited, I haven’t reviewed other alternatives than Redmine, and don’t plan to unless another major alternative is suggested.

Recommendation: Move from Bugzilla to Redmine after careful preparation, especially regarding the organization of the platform.

Read also in this series

• Wikimedia & MediaWiki bugs, issues and requests
• Wikimedia User experience programs: a systematic approach
• Scaling up Software development for Wikimedia websites (Part I: Human resources)

Last evening, about two miles south of the office building where I work, a crazy guy named John Patrick Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon Metro station, wounding two officers before being killed by return fire. While police are still sorting through his motives, bloggers are combing through the trail of his Internet activity. One thing we know already: Bedell was a contributor to Wikipedia.

The website Media Elites was the first to locate his user account, which has since been suspended (reason given: “User is deceased”). The user page for Bedell’s account has been shielded from public viewing; no public explanation was given, but this is almost certainly to prevent Wikipedia from becoming a posthumous soapbox for Bedell’s views (Wikipedia tolerates unorthodox beliefs, but not when they become the impetus for attempted murder). However, Media Elites thought to copy and republish the full text before Wikipedia’s administrators stepped in. Here is an excerpt:

I apologize for the graphic content of some of my contributions, but detailed evidence is sometimes necessary to address important matters. I am very disturbed by the fact that Col. Sabow’s civilian superiors and their successors have been able to continue their narco-mercantilism. For historical comparison, I might resemble the odd German still complaining about the murders of the Night of the Long Knives in 1938(?). Of course, Wikipedia didn’t exist in 1938!

While his User page is gone, Bedell’s Talk page and Edit history remain. From these vestiges of his editing activity, we can learn much about his interests and some about his personality:

• As declared in his former User page, Bedell was focused on adding information related to the late Marine Col. James Sabow, whose apparent suicide is apparently believed by conspiracy theorists (which Bedell clearly was) to have been a murder covered up by the U.S. government. Bedell created an article about Sabow on more than one occasion. Said page was deleted on more than one occasion — the deletion debates are still available, here and here — partly for containing original research.
• Bedell was an occasional but occasionally very active editor. His edits span 2006 to 2009, although he did not edit (at least from this account) even a single time during 2008. While much of his activity was related to advancing his views, this was not the sum of his activity. His first contribution was in November 2006 with a minor edit to the Bureaucracy article. His last was in August 2009, creating a redirect from one page to another, about the company Inslaw Inc.
• Bedell was familiar with Wikipedia conventions, probably as a consequence of being thwarted in his efforts by other editors. Rather than giving up, Bedell studied up on the community, making for what I can best describe as sophisticated weirdness. Here he is commenting on an obscure project page, making a “confession” that only kind of makes sense. Here he is on Jimmy Wales’ Talk page, challenging Wikipedia to approve his Sabow article and “create an environment where wikitruth, wikijustice, and wikilove may prevail.”
• Bedell joined a few subcommunities within Wikipedia’s ranks. He listed himself as a member of WikiProject Military History and WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology.
• Many of his edits were minor changes, constructive in nature, frequently on esoteric or offbeat topics: Khalistan movement, Basilar skull fracture, Human penis size, Joseph Stalin, David Icke, Vince Foster and so on.
• Although his articles on Sabow were deleted twice in February 2007, other articles that he created remain, most prolifically about U.S. government and military officials. Some of these include William G. Thrash, Peter D. Williams, Roger E. Combs and Tony L. Cothron. The article Air Intelligence Officer is also his. In February 2007 — by far his greatest period of activity, he created the article September 11 demolitions. It has since been redirected to World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories.

While political bloggers argue over whether Bedell was a member of the far-left or the far-right, such arguments are really less about Bedell and more about the participants. As Gawker put it, Bedell was “clearly intelligent” but “nonetheless a certifiable wackjob”.

Likewise, I can imagine some who would depict Bedell as a typically obsessive Wikipedian, although as Media Elites notes, his Internet activity included Facebook, YouTube and Amazon, although it seems not Twitter. Believe me, I have known obsessive Wikipedians, just as I have known people on the far-left and far-right, and they haven’t shot anybody. Bedell’s participation in Wikipedia was as incidental as his politics; the content of his madness and platform for its expression are less important than the fact of it.

Update: It should come as no surprise, now John Patrick Bedell is the subject of a Wikipedia article himself.

Last Wednesday we had local elections in the Netherlands.. In times of recession it is often that the right radicals do well. This time the name for the party is PVV, "partij voor de vrijheid" or "liberty party".

More people then usual voted in my home town.. Sadly the results were as they are. One bright point that day was the cartoon Sigmund by Peter de Wit. He often includes the "Burkaatjes", they are always good for a chuckle.

Well, she is not wearing a scarf

Today Mr Wilders went to the UK to promote his pov. In a way all this is good; it is democracy in action. He showed his film to an audience of 60 people. Sadly he got a welcome with press conferences, mounted police. Things that make him look relevant. If he was left to stew in his own juices, there would only have been the 60 people..

On a lighter note, I would like an illustration for both Peter de Wit's and Sigmund's article in Wikipedia..

Thanks,
GerardM

Registration for the Developers’ Workshop in Berlin on April 14.-16 is now open: please use the registration form. Registration is required and will be open until March 21., but there are only 50 places available. So, sign up soon!

Wikimedia Germany invites all MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, Gadget hackers, and other people interested in the technical side of Wikimedia projects to come to the Workshop. We have a very nice venue and a cool option for accommodation, details to be announced soon.

For updates and more information, watch meta:Wikimedia_Conference_2010/Developers’ Workshop. You can also get updates via twitter or identi.ca.  If you have questions, please contact us at conference@wikimedia.de.

It’s one of those wonderful times of the year, when we get to branch MediaWiki for a stable release. That’s right, MediaWiki v1.16 has been branched and a release candidate is underway. Those of you following MediaWiki–either as a Wikimedian or for your outside uses–know that 1.16 has been a long time coming. Code reviewing has finally caught up to trunk and it’s high time a release is put forth.

A lot has changed in 1.16 (for the brave, the full RELEASE-NOTES), and I’d like to hit on some of the major things here that I think need mention:

• The Metadata editor ($wgUseMetadataEdit) has been split into a separate extension, MetadataEdit
• Introduced CDB interface for high-performance constant data
• Default output format is now HTML5 instead of XHTML 1.0 Transitional (see $wgHtml5)
• Maintenance scripts got a lot of cleanup and reorganization, AdminSettings.php no longer required
• New hooks
• Major improvements in SQLite support
• Test suite is now at least organized (will see more coming here in 1.17)
• Many many other bug fixes and new features

Hopefully we’ll see a general update to the Wikimedia cluster coming in the very near future, meaning that non-critical bugfixes that have been “Fixed in SVN” will finally see production deployment. The first 1.16 release candidate will be coming soon as well, which I encourage those of you using MediaWiki to download and test it out for us. See what works, what needs tweaking and what’s downright broken. It’s a big release, so we’d like to get as much feedback as humanly possible.

Remember that all bugs goto Bugzilla (recently upgraded and restyled), and more information is always better than less.

commons.wikimedia.org:

CtenosauraSimilis.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Chmehl

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de.wikipedia.org:

Diamant tropfen.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Jutta234

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en.wikipedia.org:

Coles Phillips2 Life.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Durova

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WikiReader is the latest open source application that finds its language support at translatewiki.net.

The blurp on the project page at translatewiki says:

The WikiReader (homepage) is a device that comes specifically designed to facilitate your focus in a world with constant interruptions. With three simple buttons and three million topics, WikiReader brings the iconic Wikipedia to all generations. The WikiReader software is available under the GPL.

There are 32 messages to translate, so if you think of buying a WikiReader, you can not only check out if there is a localisation, it will take you relatively little effort to help yourself.
Thanks,
GerardM

This quick video shows how to insert and edit links within EditMe's browser-based editor. It shows how to link to other pages, pages that don't exist, and to anchor locations within a page.

You are traveling in a strange and foreign country, where you don’t speak the language, when you run into a friendly old man who gestures for you to follow him back to his hut. There he offers you the choice of one of two different kinds of soup that a woman in the kitchen (his wife, you presume) has made. You choose one and he pours you a bowl. It is delicious and you eat the whole thing before bowing deeply and heading for the door. But he blocks you and stares you down. You’re puzzled; what does he want? He removes a coin from his pocket and begins fingering it. He gestures to your own pocket.

You look around and realize you were quite mistaken. This was not a friendly old man inviting you back to his house for supper — this is a barker attracting customers to his restaurant! And now, of course, he wants you to pay.

Now you may pay — perhaps because you feel bad for the old man and woman and don’t want them to be out money on your account, or perhaps because you’ve just noticed the menacing broad-shouldered fellow in the corner with a club — but either way, you pay out of some personal desire: a desire to help the couple, or avoid the club.

Upon return to the States, you relax from your stressful journey by heading to your favorite restaurant. The waiter brings you a menu listing the various options (it is a classy place, so no prices are marked) and you say that you would prefer one. The waiter eventually returns with it, you eat it, and it’s delicious.

Now the situation, despite seeming very similar, is somehow entirely different. You feel an obligation to stay and pay the bill. Not simply because you don’t want to get arrested, or because you want to be able to return to the restaurant later. You have a reason to pay the bill independent of any of your own desires. You must pay the bill because, by sitting down and ordering, you promised you would.

One cannot accidentally promise, which is why the promise didn’t exist in the foreign country, but you knew full well that ordering at the restaurant in the States was a promise to pay full price at the end of the meal. And by promising, you have created a desire-independent reason for action, or, as I put it, a DIRFA.

DIRFAs are surely the most amazing and confounding of all of Searle’s discoveries. It seems crazy to think that there can be some magical realm, independent of any individual human desire, to which we can be called to account. And yet, there it is. We pay at the restaurant not because we want to, or because we want to help certain others, but because we have committed to doing so and that commitment somehow binds us.

In his new book, Making the Social World, Searle shows that, contrary to appearances, DIRFAs (like all social institutions) are merely an outgrowth of language. This is an incredible claim, but Searle makes a convincing case.

Imagine saying, “Barack Obama is president of the United States.” A simple, unexceptional act. But simply by doing it, you have entered into a whole series of social commitments. You have committed that you believe it. If you said it and did not believe it, people could rightly criticize you for lying. And your belief commits you to its truth; if it turned out to be false, people could criticize you for being wrong. You also commit yourself to communicating this belief; if you mumbled and your audience misheard you, you could be criticized for being unclear. If you were speaking to someone who had a friend named Barack Obama and did not know of the other man with the same name who is currently the US President, you could be criticized for being confusing.

A simple statement — the physical act consisting of a few vocal cord vibrations and associated lip movements — has pulled you into a whole web of social attachments and commitments. To communicate presupposes a whole system of social ontology.

It is difficult to overstate the implications. Much of political thought is about why people participate in institutions that do not benefit them. Why don’t the workers rise up and overthrow capitalism if all they have to lose are their chains? Is it because hegemony has persuaded them that the existing order is just and natural? Searle lays the foundations for a much simpler solution.

Kaczynski argued that the left was the result of oversocialization. Leftists took the social constraints they were taught — don’t discriminate on the basis of race, for example — so strongly that they begin applying them much more widely than the others around them. But Searle shows how this is a necessary outgrowth of empathy, the left’s defining traits: social institutions are grounded in a form of collective intentionality, where others count upon you to obey the institutional rules. Someone who can better imagine others’ minds must feel this network of expectations on them to be especially strong.

This book feels like Searle’s last book. It weaves together the entire scope of his career — from speech acts, to consciousness, to politics — in a single, stunning answer to this most vexing question: how can we mere sacks of meat, through brute physical acts, create constructions (like promises, or money, or corporations) that can then turn around and bind us. How glorious to see an entire lifetime of work coming together to answer this question at last.

• Buy the book

• #Wikimedia-mobile has its own IRC channel on Freenode
• the bugs registered on bugzilla can be found here
• One of the new bugs was discovered by the new Malayalam mobile main page
• it resulted in questions to Domas about caching
• I just got the message from Siebrand that the localisation in Hindi was completed
• If you have a profile at translatewiki.net, you can find the localisation for your language here
• if you do not have a profile yet, the people at translatewiki.net are quite friendly and welcoming

Thanks,
GerardM

Edit: this map of actions everywhere is amazing.
The chant of the day here at UCD’s protests and marches — part of the California-based national Day of Public Education protests, held March 4, the locus of a grassroots uprising and protest movement that has quickly gained steam to include all public education institutions affected by California’s massive budget cuts and beyond — the chant has been:

whose university? our university!

as the largest crowds I have ever seen at UCD march around the quad, assembling a kind of street fair on the union patio, and protest against the fee hikes, the corporatization of the university, the growing inaccessibility of college to those who are poor, disenfranchised, struggling — while our administrative structure grows ever larger, glossier, and more focused on private interests. There is also protest against some acts of hate speech that occurred recently on campus — there was a swastika left on someone’s door, and the LGBT center was vandalized — and there is an underlying current of protest at the world we live in, with its brutal recession and heavy movements of global economics and war and environmental and cultural loss that can sweep along an entire generation, unwillingly. These people are protesting for a place and time and space to be young and smart in, a place to act, a place to be.

(And there is a twitter feed, and a few thousand blogs and union sites and news articles, growing by the hour, if you’d like to follow along).

I should add a disclaimer that I’m writing this on my lunch hour. It is a new thing to me to work at a university during a protest — especially in a position where my job is, partly, to spend university money. I have a responsibility to these angry, idealistic kids to do my job well, while living with the consequences of a broken economy myself: our jobs, our book budgets (and in my case) even our buildings are at risk. Without the rights of faculty, staff have to be careful to not violate their union contracts by striking on the one hand, but not disclaim their responsibilities as community members on the other. And at the end of the day, this is about community: building a better educational community, making education more valued in the larger community, making this community accessible to all.

Going forward, I like to think the projects I care about — building open educational resources, building global communities, supporting tools that help people work together, building and sustaining and teaching people how to use information resources — matter, in this larger context of community. If we are to repair our educational economy, we also have to reclaim publishing rights and make research available through open access and open licenses. We have to not wall the fruits of our intellectual labor off, but share them with the world. We have to make sure all kids have a chance, that people far remote from the University of California and its privileged grounds can benefit from our libraries and our work to collect knowledge. Going forward, we have to work on the information infrastructure to support a better, more open world: the infrastructure that will support a university that is truly, our university.

students block the street at UCD

p.s. as of right this minute UCD students are marching out to block the Freeway onramp, and I have no idea why — seems like a terrible idea, and dangerous. With their kind of numbers, they could easily occupy the admin building again. I agree with my friend Mark that a lot of the radical anti-capitalist language that’s being used is alienating to many, and probably not all that helpful: no one’s happy about the current situation. As such, I think protests need to be careful and measured, and with a clear point.

During the past few weeks, I have been thinking about a more structured way to manage software and product development within the Wikimedia community. The result is a list of ideas and recommendations I have compiled and submitted to the relevant staff members at the Wikimedia Foundation. I am also publishing them here in order to allow for a wider feedback. This article is the third of a series dedicated to this topic.

Disclaimer: The content of this article reflects only my personal opinion and is not an official plan or communication of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I am not going to give specific advice about how many developers the Wikimedia Foundation should hire: there are other people more knowledgeable about how many we need, and what they should work on. However, there are other key positions that I think are need to scale up.

Our human resources are currently focusing on what happens after the code has been written: we review it, we try to ensure quality, we try to automate testing, we file bugs, etc. However, there is little preparation before the development is actually done. This has led to a developer-driven design, resulting in an interface based on the implementation model. We need a more systematic approach to User experience and development management if we want to scale up properly.

Product management & Design

In the Software development world, Product managers and Designers are the most common bridges between users and engineers. Product managers identify the needs of users and prioritize features & improvements; their goal is to translate the users’ experience and feedback into explicit requirements to meet the users’ expectations. It is then the role of the designers to create innovative, well-thought solutions to address these issues and meet the requirements. Finally, developers provide feedback about the technical feasibility of these solutions, and implement them the best way possible. This is of course a simplistic summary, but it helps get the point across.

“Designer” can have a lot of different meanings. A lot of people think that “design” is just making things pretty. When I talk about designers, I think mainly of Interaction Designers, i.e. people who design solutions to improve the user experience and the way the product interacts with the user.

The community of MediaWiki users is amazingly large, partly because they include participants from all Wikimedia Websites. Similarly, MediaWiki also benefits from a large base of volunteer developers. Product managers and designers have been the missing piece in this picture; their bridging role is critical, simply because there aren’t any volunteers to take up this task. Admittedly, some users are also developers, and some developers keep themselves informed of the users’ wishes. But without product managers, clear requirements & prioritization are missing. And without designers, the technical solutions created by the developers don’t meet the users’ expectations and mental model.

In my experience, developers prefer to focus on the actual development and rarely enjoy meta-activities related to it. They usually dislike project management and writing product specifications, and rightly so: it is not their job. However, a successful software product strategy cannot rely only on development. We benefit from a large community of volunteer developers, but we lack management & design resources; it is the role of the Foundation to supplement this lack. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expand our development team: our number of paid core developers is ridiculously small. It only means we should also invest where the weakness lies.

Recommendation: Recruit Product managers and Designers to strengthen the development cycle of our technological platform

Research team

The Multimedia usability project has relied heavily on initial research in order to gather as much information as possible about users and their goals. A lot of useful information was already available, but a lot of specific metrics were also missing; collecting and analyzing them took a lot of time and it will still take months to get all the metrics we need. Research is critical in order to make the right decisions, especially about design. Research is the only way know our users in order to make the best design & management decisions. Good research is the best basis on which product managers, designers and developers can then respectively specify, design and build awesome solutions.

Right now the only researcher we have is Erik Zachte as Data analyst, but his job seems to essentially focus on providing operational metrics. While this work is much needed, we also need some more specific data on a case by case basis. I see at least three other positions needed:

• A UX research specialist, who would conduct regular in-house low-cost usability testing, and generally manage UX studies
• A Metrics engineer, who would develop integrated metrics in the software and be able to extract specific information from the database on a case by case basis.
• A Community specialist, with a good knowledge of social psychology and online interaction, who would especially focus on improving the interaction between participants by identifying the community issues and proposing ways to fix them.

Recommendation: Build a Research team to guide design & strategic decisions about our technological platform

Volunteer developers

We benefit from a fantastic community of volunteer developers, but we underestimate their potential; I think we are not doing enough to support their work and engage them into our activities. In 2007, the Foundation hired Cary Bass to try and coordinate the large pool of volunteers willing to help us with meta activities. Similarly, we need a Dev community manager to care for our volunteer developers. We need someone who knows the developer community very well, and knows their strengths and weaknesses in order to find the right person for each job. We need someone who can help orient new volunteers, organize real-life meet-ups and manage projects such as the Google Summer of Code.

Recommendation: Recruit a Community manager to coordinate the efforts of volunteer developers.

Read also in this series

• Wikimedia & MediaWiki bugs, issues and requests
• Wikimedia User experience programs: a systematic approach
• Scaling up Software development for Wikimedia websites (Part II: Tools)

Wired reports on TISC, or Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation, a knowledge sharing website developed by the Department of Defense that has served as an online hub for relief organizations working in Haiti:

The system is designed to be as simple as possible, and is as easy to use as a site like Facebook, says Ty Wooldridge of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii. It uses file-sharing applications, wikis, blogs, and calendaring tools, among other things, to coordinate information and action among people, no matter where they are. Though there are obvious military implications to that kind of network, its first battlefield test is ongoing, on the ground in Haiti.

Without another way of collaborating, the TISC platform has become one of the de facto standards for communication among the relief effort in Haiti.There are more than 1700 different users in Haiti, most of them relief organizations of various size and specialty looking for how to get involved, and to coordinate efforts to maximize results. It’s operating on a larger scale than DISA had originally planned, but it’s scaling well, says Jean Dumay, one of DISA’s leads on the TISC project. “The test came early, and it became very real, but we were ready for it.”

Further Reading:

• DISA Supporting Haitian Relief – Defense Information Systems Agency
• TISC White Paper – All Partners Action Network

Image courtesy Defense Information Systems Agency

During the past few weeks, I have been thinking about a more structured way to manage software and product development within the Wikimedia community. The result is a list of ideas and recommendations I have compiled and submitted to the relevant staff members at the Wikimedia Foundation. I am also publishing them here in order to allow for a wider feedback. This article is the second of a series dedicated to this topic.

Disclaimer: The content of this article reflects only my personal opinion and is not an official plan or communication of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Investing in UX is a Good Idea™

Over the years, the design of MediaWiki has been solely driven by software developers. This has caused an unfortunate technology-based approach of the front-end and the features (implemented or missing), relying mostly on the implementation model. The consequence is that the interface & features are too far from the users’ mental model. The Wikipedia and Multimedia Usability projects have tried to address the most pressing concerns resulting from this hiatus between the software and the users’ expectations.

For all these reasons, I am really happy to see the Wikimedia Foundation investing further in User Experience (UX). However, I see little added value in having an UX department separate from the main development cycle. There are at least two reasons to keep them as one.

UX should be a systematic approach

A more systematic approach is necessary in order to improve the usability of Wikimedia projects perennially; good, usable design needs to happen before the actual implementation of any feature, in the early stages of the product (or component) development. Otherwise, we will always be running after the train, and never catch it. A separate entity made sense when these UX programs had a specific scope and time frame, but it was because they were tied to specific grants. In a more permanent setup, I see no reason to separate UX programs from the “regular” development processes; targeted actions can be carried out by specific projects inside the development team, rather than by a separate team altogether.

Everything is UX

More generally, all the activities of our Technology department are about User experience; everything we do is UX. Software development aims to fix bugs, develop new features, improve others, and remove hindrances. The sole goal of all of these activities is to improve the user experience by making the software better and closer to users’ needs. Even Operations are about UX: the goal of the Operations team is to make sure the information can be accessed reliably and reasonably fast by an audience as large as possible; in short, the point of Operations is to ensure we actually provide a user experience.

As a consequence, I recommend to make UX a systematic part of the product or component development cycle, not a separate parallel entity.

Read also in this series

• Wikimedia & MediaWiki bugs, issues and requests.
• Scaling up Software development for Wikimedia websites (Part I: Human resources)
• Scaling up Software development for Wikimedia websites (Part II: Tools)

The UNESCO publication "Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet: balance and perspectives" is an update to a previous UNESCO study on this subject that was issued for the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005. It is based on research done from 1996 to 2008.

I browsed this document and I do not like it. It does include some parts that I could use but it seems to me to be a regurgitation of things that others have done. The percentage of languages used on the Internet is based on Google statistics. The problem is that Google only recognises a limited number of languages.

I would expect this report to include information on the things that prevent languages from getting a presence on the Internet; words like Unicode, CLDR even locale are not found. Information on a percentage of documents that accurately flag its language, another relevant statistic are missing.

I do applaud UNESCO for having an interest in linguistic diversity, I am not convinced that the methodology used for this document helps languages find their way to the Internet.
Thanks,
GerardM

In my opinion, a significant problem today is the lack of an outlet for good, solid research and analysis of Wikipedia.  To be sure, a large number of journals have published papers on Wikipedia over the last several years, but most of these papers are not "policy relevant", so to speak, in that they analyze Wikipedia for the profit of a broader discipline or to draw conclusions about computing, information organization, human nature, etc. but do not focus on the issues that are the most relevant to Wikipedia as such.   A second problem with these journals is that they move slowly.  For example, a recent paper on Wikipedia that I submitted to First Monday in early October, was not accepted for publication until mid-February and is still awaiting final copy-editing.  Finally, most Wikipedians seem to not be interested in publishing in these traditional outlets.



To this end, I would like to propose the creation of Wikipedia Studies, an online journal devoted to the publication of interesting research about Wikipedia in a timely manner.  My idea is to assemble a knowledgeable editorial board and group of reviewers and then start accepting submissions as soon as is possible.   Rather than appearing in a monthly or quarterly form, Wikipedia Studies will publish each piece as soon as it is ready.  We will be open to submissions from absolutely anyone, and I hope to highly encourage interesting work from ordinary Wikipedians who would not normally become involved in scholarly publishing.  The result would be more formal than something like a blog, but less formal than traditional journals.

Wikipedia Studies will publish work that is interesting and relevant, but might not fit into conventional journals, and we will do it quickly.  At the same time, I hope to maintain high and rigorous quality standards.  Each piece submitted will be reviewed by two independent referees and held to high standards.

If you're interested in joining this effort as a referee/reviewer, editorial board member, copyeditor, or potential contributor, please let me know at dal46@georgetown.edu.  I don't know at this point if this will actually happen or not, but I think it's a good idea, and if there's enough interest in participating, I'd love to see where this goes.

One of the more interesting GLAM things I learned about is this map of Sydney from 1832. It is part of the dictionary  of Sydney and it is a contemporary map based on an old map.

There are many maps in many museums and, this is one of the best ways of giving objects in a museum a location that is based in time.


Thanks.
      GerardM

commons.wikimedia.org:

Cilician Armenia-en.svg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Sémhur

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de.wikipedia.org:

Karoo P1030687.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Amrum

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en.wikipedia.org:

Thamarai-Namam2.png from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Vaikunda Raja

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This is a few days old now, but if you haven’t already heard, Google gave Wikipedia $2 million dollars to help with its never-sated appetite for bandwidth and “increasing … multimedia needs.” Here are two of the Internet’s most important websites getting together, and I’d have thought it would’ve been worth more than a small roundup on Techmeme.

Reported the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 18:

Google Inc., the Internet’s most profitable company, is giving $2 million to support Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven reference tool that has emerged as one of the Web’s most-read sites.

Good.

Wikimedia Foundation, owner of Wikipedia, said Wednesday that Google has donated $2 million to further develop the popular encyclopedia and other projects.

Awesome. Right.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, broke the news on Twitter on Tuesday, followed by a formal announcement from the nonprofit organization.

Twitter, well played.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in a statement, called Wikipedia “one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet…this vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”

You bet. Of course. But why now?

To some this raises the question of what Wikipedia might do for Google; after all, a sizable donation could be said to create the possibility of a Conflict of Interest. Previous donations, such as that from a conspicuous Silicon Valley VC and partner of Elevation Partners (not Bono), have raised eyebrows. And everyone knows about Jimmy Wales’ occasional willingness to cut special someones (and Google is) a break — at least until the community gets involved.

But this question is probably backward. Wikipedia already helps Google, and by helping Wikipedia, Google helps itself.

Google depends on Wikipedia to provide topical, authoritative results at the top of its search results pages (SERPs, in SEO-speak) on more subjects than any other website. One occasionally-discussed, conspiracy-tinged theory has Google purposefully privileging Wikipedia precisely because it “cleans up” their search results. That’s possible.

But that isn’t needed to explain Wikipedia’s prominence on Google. It guarantees, for a range of topics functionally as vast as Google searches are regularly performed, an end result that is usually informative, free (as in beer, but liberty too) and not-for-profit, “not evil” and reliably neutral in a Switzerland kind of way. From what we know about Google’s recommendations for webmasters, no website is so organized as well around the Google algorithm as Wikipedia, whether we’re talking about software, community or purpose. It’s basically Google’s perfect website.

Yeah, I would give Wikipedia $2 million, too. And even though it’s positively swimming in cash, I’d probably give it some more.

Its been a while since the last post as I have been pretty busy with wikimedia / kaltura development efforts. I wanted to pass along a few links to highlight what I have been up-to.

• First I want to let people know about the html5 video meet-up march 10th at the wikimedia offices.
• TheDj has done a good post outlining recent html5 player work.
• I have been hard at work packaging the html5 video library for reuse in projects outside of wikimedia. This means the html5 video player ( and other components ) can easily be used in other web sites.  More on this in the near future.
• Also I have been working on some efforts to make it easier to contribute videos to wikimedia. More on this in the near future as well

I can’t get over this amazing geographic feature of Quebec. The central km-high peak is now way up on my list of mountains to climb.

During the past few weeks, I have been thinking about a more structured way to manage software and product development within the Wikimedia community. The result is a list of ideas and recommendations I have compiled and submitted to the relevant staff members at the Wikimedia Foundation. I am also publishing them here in order to allow for a wider feedback. This article is the first of a series dedicated to this topic.

Disclaimer: The content of this article reflects only my personal opinion and is not an official plan or communication of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Bugs & Bugzilla

Right now, the bug tracker we use is based on Bugzilla and located at bugzilla.wikimedia.org. Many major free projects use a generic “bugs” or “issues” prefix or suffix in their URL: bugs.kde.org, bugs.gentoo.org, issues.apache.org, www.debian.org/Bugs. Some projects use the “bugzilla” prefix like we currently do, like bugzilla.gnome.org. The latter is an example of a choice based on the implementation model: the name reflects the technical implementation of the bug tracker, not its actual purpose. A better name would be closer to the user model and describe the actual goal of the platform: to report and manage bugs and issues related to a specific project. If we do change our tracker, the current name will have to change too, because it is specific to a given tool.

Recommendation: Use a generic descriptive prefix rather than one based on the tool we use.

Wikimedia & MediaWiki

Another current issue is the confusion caused by the similar names used for the organization (Wikimedia) and the software (MediaWiki). A good example of this confusion is the number of MediaWiki users who join the #wikimedia IRC channel instead of #mediawiki to ask for software support. The confusion is even worsened by the fact that we have a unique bug tracker located at bugzilla.wikimedia.org, dealing with issues related to both Wikimedia websites and the MediaWiki software.

There are obviously strong ties between Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki: all Wikimedia projects use the MediaWiki software, and the MediaWiki software is primarily developed with Wikimedia projects in mind. However, there is also a growing community of MediaWiki users who are not Wikimedia users and we should provide them with tools relevant to them. This might be for instance a support forum dedicated to MediaWiki users.

Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki are separate products and they should be acknowledged as such: as a consequence, the separation between bugs in the MediaWiki software, and Wikimedia-specific operations & configuration requests should be made more explicit. Obviously, we would prefer to have a unique back-end to support both sites, particularly to be able to move bugs and requests from one platform to another, but this is easily configurable. Possible names could be dev.mediawiki.org and tech.wikimedia.org; both are currently unused. They are pretty wide prefixes, because we may host a real project management platform there, rather than just bug trackers.

Recommendation: Offer two different public-facing platforms for MediaWiki- and Wikimedia-related issue tracking.

Read also in this series

• Wikimedia User experience programs: a systematic approach
• Scaling up Software development for Wikimedia websites (Part I: Human resources)
• Scaling up Software development for Wikimedia websites (Part II: Tools)

(aka ‘Axe a TV station instead’)

This whole impending closure of BBC 6 Music has got me thinking. Obviously, I’m very very unhappy about the prospect of it closing - 6 Music offers something that nobody else does. 6 Music’s DJs are a diverse, intelligent bunch, playing a wide range of great music - and I’m constantly scurrying off to t’internet to find out more about the band that’s currently playing.

And, of course, there are the peerless, magnificent, multi-talented, yet self-effacing but always hyper-endearing, song-warring geniuses, the eye-wateringly, stomach-crampingly funny, Adam and Joe.

I can’t understand that, under the rationale to focus on “higher quality” programming, Mark Thompson is proposing to axe 6 Music. Mark, you’ve got high quality right there - on 6 Music - and it seems pretty good value for money too.

So, I’ve done my small bit, joined facebook groups, signed petitions, posted on twitter, etc. And today, I’ve taken part in the consultation process, which I appreciate that the BBC trust have put together to garner the public’s views. This is what got me thinking.

I think that a radio station is a more distinctive entity than a TV station, and if I had to make a cut anywhere on the BBC, it would be to one of their TV stations. (BBC3 I’d say, but, in the sake of neutrality, I’ll keep an open mind.) What I’m saying is that I will channel hop on TV, but I won’t do that to the same extent on radio. I’ll leave the radio on the same channel, and tune my attention in or out depending on what’s playing, or what they’re saying. We consume radio in a different way to television. And more importantly to my point, I believe that we go to particular radio stations at particular times because they fit our current mood, as well as our values (in much the same way as we go to a particular newspaper). I will turn on Radio 4 or 6 Music because that’s the mood I’m in at the time - but I would never say, “Ooh, I’m in a BBC2 (TV) mood now…”.

For what it’s worth, and for the potential interest of anyone out there, these are my thoughts - and I said more or less the same thing in the consultation…

I think, if anything, that TV programming could be cut and consolidated among fewer channels (even though it would pain me to see BBC4 cut, for example). A radio station is more important to have as an *entity* than is a TV station, in my opinion and experience. In other words, I don’t mind tuning into a TV station to watch a specific programme, but I like to be able to turn on a radio station and know that it will be giving me ‘the kind of programming that I know it does, and that I’m currently in the mood for’. Radio 4 and Radio 6 (and occasionally Radio 3) are my go-to stations, covering most of my moods!

#savebbc6music!

#whattheboggins?!

Another quick update from the Wikimedia Usability team — the Foundation team working on user interface and editing system improvements for Wikipedia and the Foundation’s projects.

If you are one of the usability beta users, you might have noticed that dialogues for links and tables, and dynamic collapsible table of contents have been disabled. We regret that we had to take away these features temporarily. The babaco enhancements release which was deployed in February caused text formatting problems. So we decided to temporarily disable these features until we have solid solutions. The plan is to restore at least the dialogue feature mid-March.

The beta opt-in rate in February suffered from challenges as well. It is possible that the decline is related to the formatting issues with the release mentioned above, but we could not pinpoint the correlation. February ended with a total of 571,579 users having tried the beta. Although the monthly retention rate for all projects for the month declined by one percent to 80.4%, the cumulative retention rate since the beginning of the beta in August 2009 across all projects held steady at 79.8% as of February 28. Close to a half million users continue using the beta, so we wish to restore all beta features as soon as possible. The updated beta status by Howie is found here.

Lastly, we have a pretty big release coming up this month. The release nick name is Citron, and it is scheduled in the week of March 15. The main feature of this release is to collapse templates, aka scary double curly brackets in the editor, and provide a form-based interface, so that users do not need to navigate through the templates. Mock-ups, Parul, Hannes, Nimish and Adam worked on, can be found here. Template-collapsing and form-based editing interface will be staged on prototypes soon and we will send out invite for you to play with it. These features are planned to be enabled under user preferences for the gradual rollout.

Naoko Komura
User Experience Programs

Maggie Fox announced today that I’m joining Social Media Group as Director of Enterprise Client Services:

As part of Social Media Group’s continuing commitment to meet the needs of our evolving client base (and recognizing fully that one of the key things that differentiates us as more than “just” social media marketers or a social PR agency is our holistic approach to organizational change) I’m very pleased to let you know that Stewart Mader, author of Wikipatterns, has joined SMG as our Director of Enterprise Client Services and member of our management team.

As one might expect from his title, Stewart will be responsible for leading SMG’s Enterprise Services practice group and will work with clients like SAP, ICANN and others to help develop strategy as well as foster and manage the organizational change that is a core part of effective integration of both collaborative and social media tools inside and outside the enterprise.

More on the SMG Blog, and Enterprise Services page on the SMG website.

I’m excited!

Last night was a star-studded salute to one of the main reasons people pick up the Village Voice:  Michael Musto, who has written for the newspaper for 25 years.  Pick up his new book, Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back, and you’ll be as enchanted by his acerbic wit as is the rest of New York City.

Below are photos from the celebration, all taken by David Shankbone and licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution.

Joan Rivers hosted the party.

Countess LuAnn de Lesseps of the Real Housewives of New York

Irina Movmyga and artist Andres Serrano

Miss Dirty Martini, Michael Urie and Michael Musto

Ronnie Spector serenading Michael Musto

Ronnie Spector of The Ronettes

Joan Rivers enjoying Murray Hill’s performance.

Michelangelo Signorile and Linda Simpson.

Michael Urie of Ugly Betty.

Robert Verdi (center) and artist Robert Richards (right)

Burlesque sensation (and Karl Lagerfeld muse) Miss Dirty Martini.

Lisa Levy and David Shankbone (both of whom fought this People’s Court case for a dog rescue)

Epiphany, Brooke Crescenti and friend.

Party-goers

Robin Byrd

Musto and Judy Garland (Tommy Femia)

More party-goers

Possibly related posts

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We all know that Wikipedia is growing.  Just over 2 years ago, on February 14, 2007 there were 1,638,583 articles on Wikipedia.  Today there are 3,204,518 - 95%.  But where is Wikipedia growing?  Is article growth constant across categories or are some growing more quickly than others?  I took a look, and though there are some admitted methodological flaws in my approach, the results are interesting.  It seems that biographies are growing much more rapidly than other sorts of articles. In my opinion, this is hardly a good thing.

• mobile MediaWiki uses caching, an update takes some two hours to become available
• a change to a mobile main page takes these same two hours for it to become visible
• by changing the MediaWiki:Common.js you can adjust your wiki's settings so that all mobile users are automatically redirected to the mobile interface.
• configurations for main pages were also entered
• mobile Wikipedia is now localised for Hausa
• the Hausa Wikipedia main page is however so poor, that we cannot make a mobile main page using the parts
• the mobile main page for the Malayalam wikipedia is now life !!

My brother is in Santiago at the moment, where he teaches architecture. The city has been shaken by the recent disastrous earthquake, but survived.

My brother just finished a survey of how to preserve important structures in Valparaiso, a city more damaged by the disaster. Of course the sorts of preservation that keep urban development from destroying important landmarks rarely covers protection from acts of God… which made me think about how we are preserving our major cultural artefacts in digital form, and through subtle synthesis of the elements that make them so inspiring and memorable.

I can think of few cases in which the exact original of a physical object is needed for most inspiration and transmission of culture and heritage… in an era of 3d printing, cheap fabrication materials, lifelike capture of image and acoustics, and lifelike digital rendering, what does this mean for curation of physical objects and spaces?

David declined to use the post on the Handel affair to put forward too many notions about BLP, but it turns out that the facts don't speak for themselves, so I'd like to respond to some of the things that have been said so far, and issue a few recommendations.

We were very disappointed to see some people descend into ad hominem attacks, one commenter here wrote: "so the moral of the story is, you're a liar, a fraud, and a forger?".  Thanks for the support.  I was also very unhappy to see how many are dismissing this as a one-off event of no significance; a clever hoax perpetrated by insiders.  Most of all, this ignores the real import of the story.  We weren't trying to make the point that a hoax could make it onto the main page.  That's been done many, many times before.  Yes, to solidify the hoax we forged references, etc.  But the really bad BLP defamation, the charge of murder, was completely unsourced when it entered the article (and when the article hit the main page), and received extremely poor sourcing only after the article had been on the main page for some time.  There was absolutely no cleverness or trickery involved in that part, and that is the true failing here.

Other people have thrown up their hands, and said "What can we do?"  This is where my area of interest lies.  David wrote, and I agree, that most of the users involved acted in a way that was appropriate and consistent with Wikipedia policy.  Generally speaking, they tried to do the right thing, but failed, not because they were incompetent or acting poorly, but because Wikipedia policy is wrong.  Here's how the incident could have turned out differently:

1) Flagged revisions: Flagged revisions would not have stopped the hoax from appearing on the main page, but they would have kept out the murder allegations, which were added in without sources by a non-auto confirmed user.
2) Tighter notability criteria: There is literally nothing about Mike Handel on the web (because he doesn't exist), but it's not hard to imagine a real Oxford professor from the 70s and 80s who would have no web footprint whatsoever.  Why? Because by any real world standard someone like that is entirely a private person and is NOT notable.  There should be no BLPs on Wikipedia about people who don't even exist on Google.  It's much harder to defame Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey because good, high-quality sources are readily available for people at that level of notability.  The notability guidelines, however, let you put articles on Wikipedia about people who do not belong there, and when the only record of someone's life is in a few clippings from an obscure newspaper, it's much easier to defame him/her.
3) Keep BLPs off DYK: DYK's quality control process is practically non-existent and, by its nature, it brings new, underdeveloped, and often poorly sourced content onto the main page.  It is simply irresponsible to put articles on living people in that section.
4) (Added) Check DYK articles between approval and when they hit the main page: This is incredibly common sense.  One of the clear problems here is that, apparently, no one looked over the article again once it was in the DYK queue, thus it went on the main page with unsourced, negative information.  A quick check probably could've fixed that.

If Wikipedia made these changes, the Mike Handel affair would have been entirely impossible.  And remember, everything we did to Mike Handel could very, very easily have been done to a real person.  We're nice guys, so we're not going to start defaming real, living people, but we showed just how easily it could be done.  If you want to stick your head in the sand, that's your business, but if this isn't yet another BLP wake up call, I don't know what is.

commons.wikimedia.org:

ISS March 2009.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by 84user

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de.wikipedia.org:

Stilfser Joch 7886.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Varus111

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en.wikipedia.org:

Georges Bizet - Rosabel Morrison - Carmen poster.png from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Adam Cuerden

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Thoughts about change are on my mind today as we shut down our office in Lahore, Pakistan.

We’ve worked with our Lahore colleagues for three years. They are terrific people who have done some really good work for AboutUs, and we’ve enjoyed a great relationship with them.

As a small, venture-backed company, we’re constantly evaluating options and tradeoffs. Sometimes we’re faced with a tough choice about where to focus our resources. The decision to shut down our Lahore office is one of those tough choices. We’re moving fast on new product development, and all our time, attention and resources need to be focused on these efforts here in Portland.

We’re grateful for the work and friendship we’ve shared with our Lahore colleagues. We hope their experience with AboutUs will serve them well in the next chapter of their working lives.

In Wired Magazine’s feature on failure as a (seemingly counterintuitive, but) powerful path to success, Jonah Lehrer explores how thinking outside the mainstream helps solve problems:

Einstein’s Relative Thinking

According to Veblen’s logic, if Einstein had gotten tenure at an elite German university, he would have become just another physics professor with a vested interest in the space-time status quo. He would never have noticed the anomalies that led him to develop the theory of relativity.

Predictably, Veblen’s essay was potentially controversial, and not just because he was a Lutheran from Wisconsin. The magazine editor evidently was not pleased; Veblen could be seen as an apologist for anti-Semitism. But his larger point is crucial: There are advantages to thinking on the margin. When we look at a problem from the outside, we’re more likely to notice what doesn’t work. Instead of suppressing the unexpected, shunting it aside with our “Oh shit!” circuit and Delete key, we can take the mistake seriously. A new theory emerges from the ashes of our surprise.

Temporary Outsiders

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit — researchers solve problems by themselves — Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed.

Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

(Via swiss-miss)

My weekends usually go hibernating copious hours, catching up on lkml, cooking good food, watching a good movie or anything that doesn't make me drive for long hours or take a long flight (well, I used to drive to NYC over the weekends but that was out of sheer necessity). Since my fiancée moved to DC, I persuaded her to do all the traveling while I do the "not very difficult job" of doing nothing. That(persuasion), as everyone knows, is not very easy! So, finally, I decided to give her a break and got myself a round trip shuttle to DC for the (last) weekend.

Now, everyone has their airline horror stories and I tend to take them very seriously. Delta Airlines, fortunately is rarely a part of these stories and I was happy that I was flying with them. And so, with a smile on my face, I took a cab to the Logan airport. Everything was as expected: I had my usual dose of a 3 hour departure delay from Boston. And just like the buses at South Station, I actually saw that the Delta flights were on ground so that they could be filled up with passengers! This may be outright common or may be there was a genuine reason flights were getting delayed but at that moment, nothing seemed like it could be the reason. Finally, my flight took off (and landed in DC) and I was having a good time until Sunday happened. That was the day I took the DC metro to Vienna (suburbs) and had a really terrible motion sickness. My flight back to Boston was on Monday morning and I was optimistic that I would feel better by that time but my body didn't really care for my optimism. It was Monday morning at 8 am, and I had nausea, dizziness and everything unpleasant. That's when the Delta horror story started.

Seeing that I was not in a very good shape to fly, my fiancée called up the Delta customer service asking what it would take to reschedule my flight to Tuesday. She was told that we had to pay a $150 rescheduling fee which was probably fine but at that time it looked like too much for a "little less than" $200 fare. We gave up; still optimistic that I would magically feel better. An hour passed and things were still the same. So, we decided to make the final call and reschedule to Tuesday. Honestly, we still had our doubts that we wouldn't have to pay the difference in fare (which was $650 on Monday for a Tuesday flight!) and so to make sure we know what we are getting into, my fiancée explicitly asked : "Are there any other fees involved that we should know about ?" The answer she received was " No ma'am, you only have to pay a $150 fee rescheduling fee". My fiancée thought that we could probably save a bit more considering the fact that I am actually ill and so wished to talk to the supervisor to ask for a reduction in the rescheduling fee. After explaining the whole story to the supervisor again, what we heard from her completely bowled us over. The supervisor said "We do have to pay the rescheduling fee and *also* have to pay the difference in fair!" And when we confronted her saying that we spoke to two customer reps minutes before her who told us that there was no other fees involved, she didn't really care; in fact, she didn't even offer an apology. All she could offer us were statements like : "The system wouldn't allow such a transaction" or " the customer rep didn't mention anything like that".

At this point, my fiancée was furious and I realized it's probably best to end the call as it was going nowhere! We disconnected the call, and I tried my best to feel better(somehow) and finally took the flight. I actually wanted to feel worse so that I could throw up inside the aircraft but later realized that would be too evil of me and discomfort to fellow passengers. Again, as usual, the flight from DC was late by an hour because of some lame reason, the flight itself was very uncomfortable : my nausea was bad to the extent of being painful and I somehow passed one hour and 12 minutes and finally reached Boston.

So, what exactly am I whining about ?
We spoke to two customer service reps who had no idea that we had to pay the difference in fare along with the rescheduling fee. Does that mean they were irresponsible ? No, that means that Delta doesn't give a damn about customer service (and so is the case with any other airline). Once the ticket is sold, their liability becomes zero. And the way the supervisor handled the misinformation provided by the reps just shows how serious they are about the whole thing.

And Delta, this is what I have to say to you : I will probably fly with you again; because I would have no other option or I would get a really good deal but you really need to pick a role model for yourself and learn what customer service is all about. Here's one for a start.

read more

Reference desk: Wikipedia Reference Desk quality analyzed
News and notes: Usability, 15M articles, Vandalism research award, and more
In the news: Idealizing the Star Spangled Banner, Curious Announcement, and more
WikiProject report: WikiProject Severe Weather
Features and admins: Approved this week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

A friend of mine invited me to the theatre for a tv registration of NotaBene, with text by the Dutch author Willem Wilmink set to music. At the last moment my friend was not able to come so I ended up going with a lady friend of his.

This evening waiting in the row for our tickets, I told enthusiastically of my latest scheme of conquering the world .. Meina was amused and so was the gentleman standing right behind me. We ended up sitting next to each other. When I mentioned the 37,000 pictures of the Tropenmuseum, he interrupted me and told me that it was more then likely that family pictures of his would be among them.

We had a real interesting conversation, we exchanged e-mail addresses and he promised me to send me a picture produced from one of his glass negatives. I asked him to send me the picture he likes best. His grandfather worked for the customs office and consequently he had to move house every two years. This resulted in pictures from all over Indonesia.

This is a family picture I received from Colin.. He pointed out the giant clam shell in the foreground.


What are the chances for something like this to happen? It does however show that many people have material that is worthy of becoming part of a collection like the one of the Tropenmuseum.

Thanks,
GerardM

I just finished an excellent biography of Ayn Rand and her philosophy in the context of American political culture. While reading, I couldn't help think of Wales' expressed interest in Objectivism and the next to the last page actually comments on this issue:

One of the many ironies of Rand's career is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of community. Among her high-profile fans as Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seemed to both embody and defy Rand's beliefs. The website's emphasis on individual empowerment, the value of knowledge, and its own risky organizational model reflects Rand's sensibility. But its trust in the wisdom of crowds, celebration of the social nature of knowledge, and faith that many working together will produce something of enduring value contradict Rand's adage "all creation is individual." (Burns 2009, p. 284)

The process for a krc.wikipedia.org is finished. The krc community is waiting for its conclusion; the creation of its Wikipedia. What do you do when you are waiting? You prepare in any which way.

Consequently we can already show the draft of its mobile page..

Thanks,
GerardM

I’ve read a hundred books a year for the past couple years. Last time I mentioned this, a couple people asked how I could read so many books. Do I read unusually quickly? Do I spend an unusual amount of time reading? I did a simple calculation: The average person spends 1704 hours a year watching TV. If the average reading rate is 250 words per minute and the average book is 180,000 words, then that’s 142 books a year. To my surprise, I wasn’t reading nearly enough books. So I’ve taken some steps to read more:

1. Block your favorite blogs. I definitely have the mental habit noted in this xkcd cartoon: at the first sign of mental difficulty, I tab to a different window and begin typing the URL of a favorite blog. This habit is purely automatic, I do it without even thinking about it. As a result, I spend many, many hours a day reading blogs and following their links.

   To overcome this habit, I added all my favorite blogs to an /etc/hosts file that redirects them to a bogus IP. Now when I type their URLs, I get an error message. I did the same with Hulu and other sites I use to watch TV shows; if you have a real television, be sure to get rid of it too. Now I usually try visiting a couple different blogs before my conscious self realizes what’s happening, but this happens soon enough and, over the past couple weeks, I’ve managed to pretty much train myself out of this bad habit.

   Now I either focus on the problem at hand or think enough about it to take a break and go for a walk, eat something, drink some water, read a book, or take a nap.

2. Order lots of books at the library. Most people think the way you read more books is by spending more time reading. But I’ve found that, like exercise, this is an effect and not a cause. I spend time reading when I have a great book to read. When I don’t, I feel no urge to read and when I do start reading something, I put it down quickly. But if I’m reading a great book, I spontaneously come up with times and places to read it.

   But figuring out which books are great in advance is hard. People’s experiences about which books they find compelling depend somewhat on their interests and finding accurate critics is problematic. So the best way I’ve found to see whether a book is good is to just start reading it.

   My local library system (Minuteman) allows you to request up to 20 books online and then delivers them to the branch library nearest you. So whenever someone makes a book recommendation or I hear about a book that seems interesting, I request it online. Then I go and pick up a stack of books at the library every week or so.

   I begin reading them and finish the ones that are exciting enough to finish and return the ones that are unpromising enough to give up on. Then I return them all and get some more.

   I also find that the due dates and the growing pile of books provides additional impetus to read them. And the habit doesn’t cost me any money this way, so I don’t feel guilty about it. (I’m sure you can come up with reasons I should feel guilty, but the fact remains that I don’t.)

3. Alienate everyone close to you. The biggest consumer of time is undoubtedly other people, in large measure because talking to other people is so fun that you don’t notice time going by. By keeping yourself away from other people (living alone is a good start), you free up an enormous amount of time for reading. I find this is particularly useful in reading books, since books can usually substitute for human company: you can take them with you on the train and to meals and curl up with them at night and so on.

   Getting rid of other hobbies no doubt also helps. (And, unlike people, books don’t encourage you to have other hobbies.) I didn’t have any other hobbies, so this was less of a problem for me, but you may want to think about the things you do instead of reading books and stop doing them.

4. Keep the temperature low. A common problem is falling asleep while reading. But I find it’s difficult to fall asleep when I’m cold (whereas it’s very easy to sleep when I’m warm), so I keep the temperature quite low in my apartment during the day. Even when I’m snuggled up in bed, I’m usually cold enough that I can’t fall asleep.

I suspect few people will take all of this advice, but hopefully some of it is useful to you.

Our new monthly series, which began in December, took a short hiatus as we announced our acquisition of Jyte. But with February now behind us it’s time to get back to rounding up those who have been nice enough to mention us in their blogs, forums, and elsewhere on the Web during the past month.

Lunch 2.0

In mid-February we had the pleasure of hosting Portland’s Lunch 2.0 for the third time. Not only was it our Lunch 2.0 trifecta, but it was the Portland chapter’s second birthday. Be sure to read the recap at Silicon Florist, and thanks again to Jake Kuramoto for founding PDX Lunch 2.0. A special shout out to Robin Catesby (@mizd) and Dave Molner (@chefchopper) for catering the yummy food!

A Little Praise

We’ve used GetSatisfaction for some years now, but in February we got some praise from Matt Stephenson, who uses AboutUs to promote his rental business. Awww shucks Matt, thanks.

ProFollow for Small Business

Along those same lines was a great comment describing us as a method for small businesses to gain some recognition online, and a shout out for our ProFollow policy that gets your site link love.

Threads New & Old

At the Real Estate Forum, a conversation about using AboutUs.org as a marketing tool started way back in 2008 (that’s forever ago in Internet years) was continued. It’s great to see the conversation around AboutUs as an online resource evolve over the years. A new post was made at the free site templates forum concerning how easy it is to use the AboutUs.org wiki.

An Editable Directory

A couple posts from February included AboutUs among a list of indispensable resources for promoting your new website. One was from an Internet marketing perspective, while another was all about important sources for referral links.

New AboutUs Hires (!)

Last but definitely not least, Mike Rogoway of the Silicon Forest blog picked up on three of our latest hires: Welcome Randall, Thomas, and Karl! Be sure to check out our jobs page for positions still open at AboutUs.

My latest project, and the first that I will share with you here is tentatively entitled "Who's On Wikipedia?" This is not a reference to the editors of Wikipedia, but rather its subjects. A tremendous amount of concern has been generated about "Biographies of Living Persons" on Wikipedia (or BLPs as they are commonly known).

There are currently around 428,427 biographies of living people on Wikipedia, and for many critics, they are the most dangerous part of Wikipedia. Wikipedia BLPs have led to a numbr of scandals, most famously the Seigenthaler incident. In all of these scandals, some (generally unknown) person or persons has inserted false, defamatory (and often libelous) material into a Wikipedia biography. Eventually, the scandal breaks when the subject of the biography finds out about the information, or in some cases the damage it has caused. In the vast majority of cases, Wikipedia biographies are the #1 google hit for a person's name, thus defamatory information on the site is often the first thing that someone looking for information will find.

The issues associated with BLPs on Wikipedia make it particularly important to understand just who is on Wikipedia, but to date no one has generated particularly useful statistics on this issue. Thus, the series ahead will examine just who is on Wikipedia. Most of the data I present is based on a random sample, selected using the Random biography of a living person tool, of 223 Wikipedia biographies. For most statistical tests, this leads to a confidence interval of about 6.5% percent at 95% confidence. Naturally, a larger sample would have generated less error, but it is fairly time consuming to compile such data, so I have contented myself with the sample as it stands.

I will begin here with a basic demographic breakdown of Wikipedia biographies (more exciting statistics will have to wait for another day). The categories to be covered in today's post are: Gender and Nationality.

Gender is a fairly straightforward category (there were no transsexuals in the sample) and is simply male or female for each data point in the study. Nationality is somewhat more complex, given that a large number of people might reasonably claim more than one nationality. For each biography in the survey, only one nationality was recorded, corresponding to the nationality by which the person is primarily known. I should note that I have made no attempt to verify the gender and nationality given by Wikipedia and simply accepted them.




So, let's begin with gender. My study found that 80.7% of the living people on Wikipedia are male (and thus 19.3% are female). Combined with the finding that only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are female, this finding does seem to provide support to assertion that Wikipedia is gender-biased. Of course, the fact that less an a quarter of the people on Wikipedia are women does not, in and of itself, prove anything. In particular, it would be interesting to compare the fraction of women in Wikipedia to that in other works.



For comparison, I turned to the Gale Biography Resource Center, which contains biographical entries on hundreds of thousands of living people. It is not directly possible to query the Biography Resource Center for living people, however, by looking at people born after 1909 with no date of death given, I found that 29.2% of the people in the Biography Resource Center are women. This is not, of course, definitive proof of systemic sexism on Wikipedia, but it is highly suggestive. Given the broad coverage of the Biography Resource Center compiles data from more than 100 biographical dictionaries and Who's Whos, it is also entirely defensible to say that, relative to standard biographical sources, Wikipedia covers women at a far lower rate.

Now it's time to get into the somewhat more interesting data. Today, I'll be presenting the data not just on the who, but also, in some sense, on the why. Specifically, we'll be looking at the source of "notability" for the people with biographies on Wikipedia.  For those of you who won't read past the lede here, some takeaway points include: Wikipedia biographies are primarily of athletes.  Nearly half of wikipedia biographies are of residents of the US/UK/Canada.  If you want the rest of the information, including lots of numbers and some nice charts, read on.





I've divided "source of notability" into several general categories:



For the US/UK/Canada, the top 5 are:

The charts make it quite clear that non-US/UK/Canada biographies skew very heavily towards sports (and a certain number towards politics) while US/UK/Canada biographies are much more evenly distributed across categories. Why the bias towards "Sports" among these "other" biographies? In all likelihood, the answer lies in the fact that most Wikipedians are from the US/UK/Canada, and are often exposed to foreign athletes (many of whom play at least part of the time in leagues in those countries or in competitions against those countries). On the other hand, Wikipedians from the US/UK/Canada have no reason to known about media figures, scholars, etc. from these other countries. Naturally, this is somewhat speculative.

It seems worth noting that today marks the 9th anniversary of the launch of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has come a very long way since that time, when it was nothing more than a feeder project for the short-lived Nupedia. The anniversary has attracted surprisingly little fanfare, but I imagine that there will be much more attention next year accompanying the 10th anniversary.

To commemorate this ninth anniversary of Wikipedia, I've been working on a list of nine turning points in Wikipedia's history (one for each year). Such a list is, naturally, subjective, but these are nine central moments in the Encyclopedia's history.

It's our goal to produce a list each week of recent, interesting scholarship on Wikipedia as well as particularly interesting news articles. Here's what we're reading this week.

Even among those who are highly critical of Wikipedia, there seems to be a general belief in the quality of featured articles.  Certainly, a great amount of time and effort goes into writing and vetting these articles, but I have long taken the position that they are not quite as good as commonly believed.  Thus, it is my intention to present from time to time detailed listings of errors in the featured article of the day.  Today we begin with "Solomon P. Sharp".  For clarity, I will be commenting on this version, which is free of obvious vandalism.



To begin, I must say that the "Assassination and aftermath" section of the article is woefully underdeveloped.  There is, however, a second article on those events, so I will consider the shortness of the section a matter of taste and proceed otherwise.

Starting from the beginning:

• Omission: "He was the fifth child and third son of Captain Thomas and Jean (Maxwell) Sharp".  The article fails to mention Sharpe's mother, Jean Maxwell Sharp, a Scottish woman.  (Schoenbachler 14).  
• Error: "The family briefly moved to the area near Nashville, Tennessee, before settling permanently at Russellville, Logan County, Kentucky, sometime between 1798 and 1800."  The family actually settled in Logan County in mid-1795 according to Matthew Schoenbachler (Schoenbachler 15), and "before 1795" according to Dickson Bruce (Bruce 9).  Both of whose accounts are more reliable than those cited in the article. 
• Error/Omission: "Little is known of Sharp's educational background; the schools of Logan County were primitive during his childhood years. " Well, more than just this is known.  Schoenbachler writes of "his intermittent attendance at one of Logan County's academies". (Schoenbachler 22) He was however, quite uneducated and was later attacked on the grounds of his lack of education by political opponents.  Thus, this deserves more attention.  
• Error/Omission: "Nevertheless, he studied law in some capacity, and was admitted to the bar sometime between 1806 and 1809." Once again, more information is available.  Schoenbachler puts the date at 1806, which to be fair, is between 1806 and 1809, but Wikipedia should not give the needless range (24).
• Omission: "He opened a practice in Russellville, but soon relocated to Bowling Green where he engaged in land speculation, sometimes in partnership with his brother, Dr. Leander Sharp."  In Bowling Green, Sharp did not practice alone (as the article seems to imply) but rather partnered with one Samuel Caldwell (Schoenbachler 24).  
• Omission/Error: "Months later, a woman named Anna Cooke claimed Sharp was the father of her stillborn illegitimate child; Sharp denied this claim"  Again, this is needlessly imprecise.  The birth took place in either May or June 1820 (Bruce 10).  
• Error: "He moved the family to Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1820."  Both Bruce and Schoenbachler give this date as 1821 (Bruce 11 and Schoenbachler 67).  The move coincided with his appointment as Attorney General, thus a date earlier than 1821 makes no sense whatsoever.
• Error:  "During the 1811 session, he worked with Ben Hardin to secure passage of a bill discouraging the practice of dueling." The phrasing here is so vague as to be in error.  To quote from Schoenbaclher "The bill required that all state officers and attorneys at law take an oath that they had not issued, accepted, to fight a duel (after a given date) and would not do so in the future." (27)
• Error: "In 1813, Sharp was elected to the Thirteenth Congress as a member of the United States House of Representatives."  Wrong.  Sharp was elected in the summer of 1812 (in August) to be precise.  (Schoenbachler 29).  Interestingly, the Wikipedia article "United States House of Representatives elections, 1812" gets the right date for the Kentucky election.  Sharp, of course, took office in 1813, which may be the source of confusion.  This error also generates a second error in that it implies that Sharp served in the War of 1812 before being elected to Congress which is incorrect.  I should further note that Wikipedia cites for the fact that Sharp was elected in 1813, his Congressional Biography, which makes no so such statement.
• Error: "Sharp recognized the value of a record of military service in Kentucky politics, however, and he eventually was promoted to the rank of captain and later, colonel, although sources do not explain when or why this happened." This is actually pretty far off.  Matthew Schoenbachler clarifies the real story: "But Sharp was no ordinary cavalryman, and everyone knew it - he had just been elected to Congress along with [General] Hopkins himself.  And so it was to no one's surprise that twelve days after his enlistment on September 18, Sharp's fellow soldiers elected him major" (29).  In other words, it was all political - Wikipedia's previous error in the date of Sharp's election Congress makes it hard to understand this.  His promotion to Colonel presumably came from the same political sources.
• Omission: The article briefly mentions Sharp's affiliation with the War Hawks, but does not mention his "passionate denunciation of Federalist obstruction of the war effort" and other very strong anti-Federalist speeches and activities. (Schoenbachler 30-31)
• Error: "He allied himself with South Carolina's John C. Calhoun against the Second Bank of the United States." this sentence is found within the "U.S. Representative" section.  In fact, Sharp's opposition was to the First Bank of the United States in 1811, while he was still in the Kentucky legislature and voted along with the majority of the legislature to advise "the Kentucky congressional delegation to vote against recharter of the First Bank of the United States."  In 1816, when the Second Bank of the United States came up, Sharp voted for it.  John C. Calhoun was also a supporter of the bank, so perhaps Wikipedia, meant to say "for" rather than "against" (Schoenbachler 34). -On a sidenote, later in life, Sharp would again take positions against the Bank.
• Error: "When the next congressional session opened in December 1816, Sharp reversed his position and voted to repeal the law, but the damage was already done; he lost his seat in the House in the next election."  Again, Wikipedia is off on the timing of Congressional elections.  The election took place in the summer of 1816, thus Sharp had already lost his seat by December (the damage truly was already done).  (Schoenbachler 35)
• Error: "Most notably, however, he supported the creation of forty new banks in the state, and proposed a tax on the branches of the Bank of the United States in Lexington and Louisville."  In fact, 46 new banks were chartered, not 40.  (Schoenbachler 40)
• Error (from the lead but this is where it fits in chronologically): "he returned to the Kentucky House in 1817 but resigned his seat in 1821 to accept Governor John Adair's appointment to the post of Attorney General of Kentucky." The actual article text gets this closer to right and is more guilty of an omission than an error.  In August 1819,  Sharp lost in his reelection bid to the state legislature (Schoenbachler 59).  Thus, once he finished his term in 1820, he returned to his law practice in Bowling Green before beginning, in 1821, to seek election to the Kentucky Senate.  He never resigned from the state legislature, though he did drop his campaign for Senate after being appointed Attorney General.

Bruce, Dickson. The Kentucky Tragedy: A Story of Conflict and Change in Antebellum America
Schoenbachler, Matthew. Murder and Madness: The Myth of the Kentucky Tragedy (Topics in Kentucky History)

This is going to be a quick posting as I'm rather busy, but today's part of the "Who's On Wikipedia" series is an interesting one.  Today, I'm looking at the Google rank of our BLP sample.  It won't surprise anyone to know that the BLPs generally are quite high in the google results (though we hope you'll be interested in just how high).  The interesting thing about this fact, though, is that it means very different things to different people.  To the proponent (the wiki-optimist), it is a matter of pride and evidence of Wikipedia's success that it articles appear atop the Google search results.  To the opponent (the wiki-skeptic), the fact that Wikipedia pages do so well on Google is cause for concern as this gives additional prominence to pages that might be full of defamation, error, and bias.

Anyway, without further ado, here are our results: 63.2% of Wikipedia BLPs are the top google result for the name of the subject of the article.  93.3% of Wikipedia BLPs are on the first page of Google results for the subject's name.  Yes, 93.3%.  Less than 10% of Wikipedia BLPs aren't on the first page of Google results.

What about the ones that aren't?  In nearly all cases, none of the top are relevant results for the person we're searching for at all.  For example, one of the articles in our sample was Colin Powell (footballer).  Naturally, if you Google "Colin Powell", all of the top results are for the former General and Secretary of State (and we should note that the first of these is his Wikipedia biography).

So, the bottomline, if you have a Wikipedia BLP, it will almost certainly be one of the first things that someone looking for information about you will find. We'll leave it up to you to judge whether this is bad or good.

Once upon a time, a rival arose to take on Wikipedia.  It was a scrappy upstart led by the same Larry Sanger who co-founded Wikipedia where editors had to use their real names and experts were given additional authority (solving two of the most commonly raised objections to Wikipedia).  Ars Technica proclaimed: "There's no ifs about it: Citizendium is being created to outdo Wikipedia" and Larry Sanger himself declared "Citizendium will soon attempt to unseat Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online."



The earliest days  of Citizendium were accompanied by a certain fanfare.   Within its first year, it drew extensive stories in The Guardian, the Financial Times, the Irish Times (curiously, Citizendium seems to have drawn more press in the UK than the US), but by 2008 Citizendium was already dropping off the map; the press had lost interest.  In the month of December 2008, less than 200 editors made a single edit, and the figure has remained roughly stable since.  The graph below shows the number of editors making at least one edit to Citizendium per month from October 2006 until December 2009:

1. "Belgian Cuisine": Hardly a gem of an article.  It appears to have been taken nearly word for word from on November 17, 2007 from a Wikipedia version dated November 7, 2007.  Since then, the Citizendium article has not changed at all, but the Wikipedia version has at least been supplemented with a few pictures and a citation.  Neither is what anyone would call a "good" article, but the Wikipedia one is at least slightly superior.
2. "Certificate revocation list": A single sentence (which so far as single sentences go is not a bad one), but it cites no sources.  The Wikipedia article does not cite any sources either (to be fair, it uses external links to fulfill a similar purpose), but is substantially longer.  I will not pretend to be an expert on this subject, but the Wikipedia article was more informative, and followed closely with what I was able to find elsewhere.
   
3. "Maple Syrup": A much finer article than the previous two.  The Wikipedia article is longer and conveys more information,  but is not quite as well-written.  On the whole, I find the Wikipedia version superior, though I invite you to form your own judgements.

In two recent posts here, one entitled "Of Featured Article Errors" and one entitled "More on Citizendium" I pointed out some mistakes (of fact and grammar) in a Wikipedia featured article and a Citizendium approved article.  I checked back today to see if any one had responded to what I said.

First of all, my apologies for the great amount of time that has passed since the last part in this series.  Now, without further ado, I present part 5, which is essentially a comparison of Wikipedia biographies to those found in Britannica, Gale's Biography Resource Center, and Gale's Biography and Genealogy Master Index.  There are many ways of interpreting the data that I'll present here, but I'll state the gist of it up front.  The majority of the living people with biographies in Wikipedia are not the subject of biographies in any mainstream, "dead trees" work.

I imagine all of you are familiar with Encyclopedia Britannica, so I won't explain it.  Britannica, of course, contains very few biographies of living people, but I have not been able to find out precisely how many it contains (note: I am using EB Online which includes entries from both the Encyclopedia itself and the Book of the Year).  For Britannica, I have coded data in one of three fashions: "Yes" - which means that the person in question is the subject of a biography in Encyclopedia Britannica, "Mentioned" - which means the person in question is mentioned by name in an article in Britannica or the Book of Year, but is not the subject of a biography (e.g., Tayo Adenaike is not the subject of a biography but is mentioned in the article on Nigerian Art), or "No"- which means that the person is not mentioned in Britannica whatsoever.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the majority of Wikipedia biographies have no Britannica counterpart.  Only 3 of the people in my sample had articles in Britannica (former US Presidential Candidate George McGovern, English actor Ralph Fiennes, and Namibian President Hifikenpunye Pohamba).  An additional 5.8% of the subjects of Wikipedia biographies were mentioned in Britannica, leaving 93% of whom there was no mention in Britannica whatsoever.

On the whole, the articles of people at least mentioned in Britannica are much longer than those who are not (with a mean average of 1330 words vs. a mean of 234 for those mentioned not in Britannica).  They are also much better sourced (a median of 9 inline citations for those mentioned  in Britannica vs. 0 for those not mentioned).   The Wikipedia articles on people mentioned in Britannica also draw many more page views (mean: 21432, median: 1291 for those mentioned in Britannica - this is heavily skewed by two outliers vs. mean: 679, median: 153 for those not mentioned).  As a matter of fact, although only 7% of Wikipedia biographies are of people mentioned in Britannica, these 7% together draw 71% of all Wikipedia BLP page views.

The articles on people mentioned in Wikipedia also draw significantly more interest from Wikipedia editors.  The "Britannica BLPs" have received 56% of non-bot (bots are software tools that edit without close human supervision) edits.

1. The inclusion criteria for athletes are far too permissive.  As a result, Wikipedia has far more articles on athletes than any standard work.  On the whole, these articles are of low quality, are infrequently viewed, and are poorly sourced.
2. Roughly 70% of the people with biographies on Wikipedia are not the subject of a biography in any standard biographical dictionary, Who's Who, or other such work.
3. Those biographies in Wikipedia which are found in other standard works result in the majority of Wikipedia's BLP traffic and edits.

As the final piece in Fact Man's series "Who's On Wikipedia", we'll be presenting today the result of a survey of the people whose biographies appear in Wikipedia (while the rest of this series represents entirely the work of Fact Man, this part was a collaboration, and I agreed to do the writing).   In conducting the survey, we contacted the subjects of BLPs to ask them what they thought about being on Wikipedia.  Initially, we planned to go forward with a large sample, but, on the basis of what we've discovered so far, we've decided to release an interim report and some recommendations.
First, the survey method.  We did NOT work from the same sample for this portion of the survey as we did for our earlier research.  Instead, we compiled a new sample from the random biography tool.  For each biography, we did a quick internet search in an attempt to find contact information.  If we could not find a way to contact a person, we simply moved on.  In total, we contacted 26 people.  15 of them responded to our questions.  These 15, we should note, are not really a "random" sample in the true sense of the word.  Businesspeople and academics are substantially overrepresented as it is much easier to find ways to contact them.  Also, every person in the sample is from an English-speaking country.  On the whole, though, despite these effects, we feel that the results from the sample generalize fairly well.

We asked each person six questions:

1. Were you aware of your Wikipedia biography before we contacted you?
2. Do you think that your Wikipedia biography is accurate and represents you fairly?
3. Would you prefer not to be on Wikipedia?
4. Do you see your Wikipedia biography as a violation of your privacy?
5. Would you want your Wikipedia biography to be the first thing that someone looking for information about you reads?
6. Generally speaking (on a scale of 1 to 10), how familiar are you with Wikipedia?

A recently released article in the British Journal of Educational Technology (abstract)(pdf text) examines the use of Wikipedia by undergraduate medical students in Australia (for our American readers, it is common in Australia to enter medical school directly for a 5-6 year program).  The survey used an interesting method.  Rather than relying on self-reported Wikipedia use (as most surveys on the subject have), it relied on logs from a medical school computer lab, comprising 3707 sessions from 842 students over a one month period.

The findings of the survey are more disappointing than they are surprising.  In 51% of sessions, the students relied on Wikipedia to locate biomedical information.  In contrast, "high quality" sources as defined by the study's authors (including the NIH website and medical journals) were only used in 29.9% of sessions.  No matter what you think of Wikipedia, I think you can agree that this is a troubling development.

There are, however, some more encouraging findings.  The students were also asked to evaluate (via a survey) the reliability of various resources for biomedical information, and gave Wikipedia a significantly lower score than any other resource.  In other words, students use Wikipedia, but they know better.

The authors also found that 3rd year medical students used Wikipedia at a significantly lower rate than did 1st year students (36.8% for 3rd years vs. 70.2% for first years).  The third year students also used high-quality sources at a much higher rate.  So, not only do the students know better than to use Wikipedia, they gradually start to stop using it as they mature academically.  So, the answer to the question which I phrased provocatively in the title is "probably not".

My recent post "On Citizendium" has recently attracted a certain amount of attention among people in the Citizendium community, including the suggestion that my "research methodology ... is pitiful" and that I am an idiot (see here).  I could respond with some snide remark about spelling, but I too am guilty of typos, so I will let that matter slide.  Instead, I will openly acknowledge that my methodology (comparing just three random articles) is indeed pitiful, but my piece was hardly meant as a serious comparative study of Wikipedia and Citizendium quality.  Instead, I simply meant to suggest that Citizendium is not in an entirely different league quality-wise (an assertion that I stand by).

In keeping with my periodic taking apart of Wikipedia Featured articles, however, I decided today to have a look at a Citizendium Approved article, taking a look at Charles A. Beard.  Once again, I do not mean to suggest that this methodology is rigorous.  I have done it primarily out of my own interest, and I share the results with you hoping that they also will interest you.  Here is what I found in a brief examination:

• Multiple grammar errors in just the opening paragraph: "Charles Austin Beard (November 27, 1874 - September 1, 1948) was, (along with Frederick Jackson Turner) one of the most influential American historians of the early 20th century" the comma after "was" is completely incorrect.  "He graduated from DePauw College in Indiana 1898".  A word seems to be missing, probably an "in" in between Indiana and 1898.  "She was an early specialist in women's history".  It is conventional to place punctuation at the end of a sentence.

The article, in general, is so vague that it is hard to pin down errors (omissions abound), making it much harder to identify sharp errors as in a Wikipedia piece.  I present these points, however:

• " Beard's interpretation held sway for 40 years until Robert Brown (1954) revealed its contradictions and Forrest McDonald (1958) showed that Charles Beard had misinterpreted the economic interests involved in writing the Constitution."  This neglects the "rehabilitation of Charles Beard" undertaken through quantitative methods by Robert McGuire and Robert Ohsfeldt in 1984 (here)
• "He graduated from DePauw College".  This should properly be DePauw University as other biographies note (see Charles A. Beard: The English Experience).  DePauw's website confirms that the institution was never known as DePauw College, changing its name to DePauw University from Indiana Asbhury University to DePauw University in 1884).  
• "After resigning from Columbia University in protest at pro-war actions in 1917, he helped to found the New School for Social Research in New York."  It's rather unclear what this means, but it's wrong.  Lawrence Dennis, in his biography, clarifies: "His resignation, in 1917, was precipitated by the expulsion of three professors ... who opposed America's entry into the war, which Beard himself supported.  The heart of the matter seems to have been Beard's growing conviction that the trustees were interfering in academic matters.  So, while the war was involved, the Citizendium rendering is wrong (see p. 149 of  George S. Counts and Charles A. Beard, Collaborators for Change (Suny Series in the Philosophy of Education) 

In general, the article is just woefully short on the short of basic biographical details you find even in a Who's Who entry.  As I said, his education is hardly mentioned.  Of the many institutions where he taught, only two are listed.  Dates are rarely given.  The discussion of his scholarship is incredibly basic and lacks detail.  There is no lack of information on Beard, so this is inexcusable.  Several biographies of him have been published, in addition to numerous articles full of biographical material.

I am really happy to have my friend Martin Benjamin as a guest blogger. He is looking for improving ICT-terminology for the Swahili language.

Maneno Magumu ya Kiteknolojia

We are asking for your help on a quick, important project intended to improve access to computer technology in East Africa. The task is simple: look through a list of English terms that are used in information technology, and vote on the Swahili translations or suggest your own.

Twaomba msaada wako kwenye mradi muhimu unaolenga kuboresha matumizi ya teknolojia za tarakilishi katika Afrika ya Mashariki. Shughuli ni rahisi: tazama orodha ya maneno yanayotumiwa kwenye teknolojia ya habari na mawasiliano, na kupigia kura tafsiri zilizoko za Kiswahili au pendekeza neno lako (unalofikiri ni sawa).

We need volunteers with good knowledge of information technology and the Swahili language. To get started, just visit manenomagumu.

Tunahitaji watu kujitolea ambao wana ujuzi wa teknolojia za mawasiliano na pia lugha ya Kiswahili. Kuanza, tembelea: manenomagumu.

Several efforts have been made to produce Swahili ICT vocabularies, but three big problems remain. First, many terms have been given poor Swahili equivalents because the original concept was misunderstood. Second, many terms have been given different Swahili equivalents in different translation projects; the same English term might have five different Swahili translations, depending on whether you are using Microsoft, Google, KiLinux, Facebook, or Wikipedia! Third, many terms have not yet been translated, and new terms keep appearing as ICT continues to evolve.

Kumekuwepo juhudi mbalimbali za kuandaa istilahi ya teknolojia kwa Kiswahili, lakini matatizo matatu bado yangalipo. Kwanza, maneno mengi yalitafsiriwa vibaya kwa sababu ya maana asili kutoeleweka. Pili, maneno mengi yalitafsiriwa tofauti katika miradi tofauti tofauti ya utafsiri; inawezekana kuwa neno lile lile la Kiingereza kuwa na tafsiri tano, kutegemea ikiwa unatumia Microsoft, Google, KiLinux, Facebook, au Wikipedia! Tatu, maneno mengi hayajatafsiriwa bado, na maneno mapya yanazidi kuvumbuliwa teknolojia inavyozidi kuwa.

The Kamusi Project is working to harmonize the various "localization" efforts, in order to have unified, consistent Swahili ICT terminology as we head into the next decade. Excitingly, we have the encouragement of both Microsoft and Google, usually big competitors, which are both interested in greatly expanding access to their services for Swahili speakers.

Kamusi Project inafanya kazi ya kuunganisha juhudi hizi za "Uswahilishaji", ili kuwa na orodha moja inayokubalika, ya istilahi ya kiteknolojia kwa Kiswahili, tunapoingia enzi ya tarakilishi katika Afika ya Mashariki. Kinachosisimua ni kwamba tunaungwa mkono na Microsoft na Google, ambao kwa kawaida ni washindani, ambao wanataka kuongeza sana huduma zao kwa wanaozungumza Kiswahili.

We have inspected all of the existing ICT terminology lists that we know of, from which we have produced several "packs" of difficult terms. Now we are seeking community participation to help reach agreement on how to express each term in Swahili going forward. The first five packs are available at manenomagumu.

Tumekagua orodha zote zinazopatikana za istilahi ya kiteknolojia, na tumetayarisha mafurushi kadhaa ya maneno magumu. Sasa tunatafuta jamii kuchangia ili kufikia makubaliano ya namna ya kusema kila neno kwa Kiswahili. Mafurushi yapatikana manenomagumu.

A few more packs will be added later this week, but we want to start the community review project immediately so that we can get rapid feedback if we need to adjust the process. This is an experimental project: as far as we know, this is the first time that any linguistic community has invited to help develop the ICT terms that will be used for their language in the future. If the experiment is successful, we will use the experience as the basis for more formal terminology development in the future, for Swahili and other African languages.

Mafurushi mengine machache yataongezwa mwisho wa wiki hii, lakini tunataka kuanza juhudi hii moja kwa moja ili tupate maoni ya jamii wanaochangia, kama ni lazima kubadilisha jinsi ya kuendelea. Bidii hii kweli ni ya majaribio: tunadhani kwamba ni mara ya kwanza kwamba wasemaji wa lugha yo yote wanakaribishwa kusaidia kwenye maendeleo ya istilahi ya kiteknolojia itakayotumiwa katika lugha yao. Majaribio yakifaulu, tutatumia uzoefu huu kama msingi wa maendeleo rasmi zaidi ya istilahi za kisayansi, kwa Kiswahili na lugha nyingi za Kiafrika.

So, for several reasons, it is very important that we have the participation of as many people as possible who (a) have a good understanding of the concepts involved in information technology, and (b) have good knowledge of the Swahili language.

Kwa hiyo, kwa sababu nyingi, ni muhimu sana tukiwa na watu wengi watakaojitolea ambao (a) wanaelewa vizuri maswala ya kiteknolojia, na (b) wanaelewa vizuri Kiswahili.

Please join us, or tell other people who you think might be interested. The project will end on 7 March, so please contribute this week if you want your voice to be counted in Swahili localization! Again, the website is manenomagumu.

Twaomba uungane nasi, au ueneze taarifa kwa watu wengine. Juhudi hii itamalizika 7 Machi, kwa hivyo ni muhimu uchangie wiki hii ikiwa unataka sauti yako ipate kusikika katika Uswahilshaji wa teknolojia. Tena, tovuti ni manenomagumu.

Notice: this project is only for volunteers who are interested in promoting the Swahili language. No payments or prizes are available. This effort is organized by Kamusi Project International and ANLoc, and is NOT officially affiliated with Microsoft, Google, BAKITA, or KiLinux. All suggestions are highly appreciated, and will be given the most serious consideration in the production of a harmonized Swahili ICT terminology set that will be made freely available online within the next few months.

Tangazo: juhudi hii ni kwa watu wa kujitolea wanaotaka kuendeleza Kiswahili. Hakuna malipo wala tuzo. Bidii hii imepangwa na Kamusi Project International na ANLoc, na hauna mahusiano rasmi na Microsoft, Google, BAKITA, au KiLinux. Tutashukuri kwa mapendekezo yoyote, na yatafikiriwa sana wakati wa kuandaa istilahi ya kiteknolojia katika Kiswahili. Istalahi itapatikana bila malipo kwa wote baada ya miezi michache.

Dr. Martin Benjamin
Executive Director, Kamusi Project International

twitter: kamusi

I spend quite a lot of time helping the Mobile Wikipedia become more prominent. I learned a lot from doing this so I consider it time well spend. The number of languages with sufficient localisation has gone up from 20 to 52 or 34 depending on how you count. We created some concept mobile main pages and we requested the implementation of two main pages for two Wikipedias.

The software used is build in Ruby on Rails and it is developed separate from MediaWiki. It is currently useful to read Wikipedia articles, you cannot edit and you can not sign on or set personal preferences.

The MediaWikiWave project proved the concept that it is possible to create a WYSIWYG interface for MediaWiki. We have a functional editor for MediaWiki, the question is will it also work on a mobile phone, the question is will it also work with other languages and scripts.

I expect that for Wave to succeed, it will support both mobile phones and other languages and scripts. We have been told that internationalisation is part of the core MediaWiki functionality, and as I argued earlier, internationalisation and localisation need proper support for bots and gadgets as well. The one thing I am not sure about is mobile telephone support. What I do expect is, if not great then rapidly improving, support in Chrome and on Android and Chrome OS devices.
Thanks,
       GerardM

© 2010 recovering layzholic

commons.wikimedia.org:

Formica high res.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Richard Bartz

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de.wikipedia.org:

Panagia Chozoviotissa entrance.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Phso2

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en.wikipedia.org:

Port Vell, Barcelona, Spain - Jan 2007.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Diliff

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The standard advice for losing weight is to eat less and exercise.

Exercise is almost worthless as a weight-loss strategy: the number of calories you burn through exercise is miniscule and typically more than made up by your instinct to eat a little extra after exercising. Increased exercise is a consequence of losing weight, not a cause — when you lose weight you will have more energy and it will be easier to move, so you will then exercise. You have to lose weight first.

That leaves eating less. I have found three strategies to be effective here:

1. Get rid of all snacks. It used to be when I was hungry, I’d just grab a snack from the kitchen. It got so I basically did this without thinking and, as a result, I ended up eating a lot of snacks. Now the only food I have is unprepared; if I want to eat, I have to consider it and take the time to actually cook something or travel to someplace that sells prepared food.

2. Drink more water. There are lots of reasons to drink more water, but it’s also a great way to lose weight. A lot of what feels like hunger is actually thirst, while having water in your stomach seems to counteract certain feelings of hunger. Furthermore, burning fat requires extra water.

3. Don’t be afraid to be hungry. This is no doubt my most controversial tactic, but I do tend to think the body has a “set point” for the number of calories it’s used to consuming. Lowering that set point may mean ignoring a bout of hunger or two and possibly even going a whole day without eating. But after that, your body gets full after eating much less. Again: I’m not saying more than a day — this isn’t anorexia — but a one-day fast is far from unheard of.

   This may be easier for me since I almost always eat meals alone, making it no big deal if I skip them. People who eat meals with others may need to get used to only eating a side dish or just nibbling at their order.

Losing weight has been better than I ever imagined. Not only am I dramatically thinner, but I have more energy, I waste less time eating, and I now like the way I look. I’m much more flexible and mobile and, most incredibly, I’ve gotten taller — this at the age of 23. (A lot of people are skeptical that I’ve actually grown taller, but the changes are measurable and dramatic and come with all the symptoms of height growth I remember from my childhood (including the strange urge to stretch vertically on a regular basis). I suppose it’s possible the height difference simply results from better posture, but that seems worth counting.)

I do not propose a new diet or some new theory. These are very simple commonsense tips: remove temptation, get enough water, remove obligation. But I’ve found they’ve been enough for me to lose dramatic amounts of weight. I used to be embarrassingly chubby, now people worry I have anorexia.