Open Wiki Blog Planet

Pictures of the Day - July 04

2009-07-04T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

Wildpferde Tripsdrill.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Brackenheim

de.wikipedia.org:

Stadtmauer (Berching).JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Journey234

en.wikipedia.org:

Declaration independence.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Panoptik

كوريا الجنوبية أول بلد في سرعة التنزيل من الإنترنت

2009-07-04T00:37:49+00:00

كنت أقيس سرعة التنزيل و الرفع لدي في موقع SPEEDTEST.NET (بصراحة الإنترنت يزداد سوءا كلما إقترب موعد تجديد الإشتراك!) المهم رأيت بالصدفة أن الموقع يوفر إحصائية لسرعات التنزيل و الرفع للبلدان و القارات و حتى بعض المدن. و في الحقيقة الترتيب كان جدا مدهش بالنسبة إلى لأن أعلى متوسط سرعة تنزيل هو في كوريا الجنوبية حيث تبلغ سرعة التنزيل أكثر من 19 ميجابايت في الثانية (و هذا متوسط السرعات الموجودة و ليس أعلى سرعة) و أعلى متوسط سرعة هو رفع هو في ليتوانيا بسرعة رفع تبلغ أكثر من 8 ميجابايت في الثانية.

بالنسبة للقارات فقارة أوروبا تحتل المركز الأول تليها أمريكا الشمالية فأستراليا و آسيا و أمريكا الجنوبية و أخيرا أفريقيا, يمكنكم الإطلاع على هذه الإحصائيات بالتفصيل عبر صفحة الإحصائيات في موقع إختبار السرعات.

http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20090702

2009-07-03T14:28:14+00:00

enwiki-20090702-pages-articles.xml.bz2

Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?

2009-07-03T12:36:18+00:00

Another "guest" post, this time from Evolving Trends.

Author: Marc Fawzi

License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0

Forward

Two years after I published this article it has received over 200,000 hits and we now have several startups attempting to apply Semantic Web technology to Wikipedia and knowledge wikis in general, including Wikipedia founder’s own commercial startup as well as a startup that was recently purchased by Microsoft.

Recently, after seeing how Wikipedia’s governance is so flawed, I decided to write about a way to decentralize and democratize Wikipedia.

Versión española

Article

(Article was last updated at 10:15am EST, July 3, 2006)

Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?

The Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) promises to “organize the world’s information” in a dramatically more logical way than Google can ever achieve with their current engine design. This is specially true from the point of view of machine comprehension as opposed to human comprehension.The Semantic Web requires the use of a declarative ontological language like OWL to produce domain-specific ontologies that machines can use to reason about information and make new conclusions, not simply match keywords.

However, the Semantic Web, which is still in a development phase where researchers are trying to define the best and most usable design models, would require the participation of thousands of knowledgeable people over time to produce those domain-specific ontologies necessary for its functioning.

Machines (or machine-based reasoning, aka AI software or ‘info agents’) would then be able to use those laboriously –but not entirely manually– constructed ontologies to build a view (or formal model) of how the individual terms within the information relate to each other. Those relationships can be thought of as the axioms (assumed starting truths), which together with the rules governing the inference process both enable as well as constrain the interpretation (and well-formed use) of those terms by the info agents to reason new conclusions based on existing information, i.e. to think. In other words, theorems (formal deductive propositions that are provable based on the axioms and the rules of inference) may be generated by the software, thus allowing formal deductive reasoning at the machine level. And given that an ontology, as described here, is a statement of Logic Theory, two or more independent info agents processing the same domain-specific ontology will be able to collaborate and deduce an answer to a query, without being driven by the same software.

Thus, and as stated, in the Semantic Web individual machine-based agents (or a collaborating group of agents) will be able to understand and use information by translating concepts and deducing new information rather than just matching keywords.

Once machines can understand and use information, using a standard ontology language, the world will never be the same. It will be possible to have an info agent (or many info agents) among your virtual AI-enhanced workforce each having access to different domain specific comprehension space and all communicating with each other to build acollective consciousness.

You’ll be able to ask your info agent or agents to find you the nearest restaurant that serves Italian cuisine, even if the restaurant nearest you advertises itself as a Pizza joint as opposed to an Italian restaurant. But that is just a very simple example of the deductive reasoning machines will be able to perform on information they have.

Far more awesome implications can be seen when you consider that every area of human knowledge will be automatically within the comprehension space of your info agents. That is because each info agent can communicate with other info agents who are specialized in different domains of knowledge to produce a collective consciousness (using the Borg metaphor) that encompasses all human knowledge. The collective “mind” of those agents-as-the-Borg will be the Ultimate Answer Machine, easily displacing Google from this position, which it does not truly fulfill.

The problem with the Semantic Web, besides that researchers are still debating which design and implementation of the ontology language model (and associated technologies) is the best and most usable, is that it would take thousands or tens of thousands of knowledgeable people many years to boil down human knowledge to domain specific ontologies.

However, if we were at some point to take the Wikipedia community and give them theright tools and standards to work with (whether existing or to be developed in the future), which would make it possible for reasonably skilled individuals to help reduce human knowledge to domain-specific ontologies, then that time can be shortened to just a few years, and possibly to as little as two years.

The emergence of a Wikipedia 3.0 (as in Web 3.0, aka Semantic Web) that is built on the Semantic Web model will herald the end of Google as the Ultimate Answer Machine. It will be replaced with “WikiMind” which will not be a mere search engine like Google is but a true Global Brain: a powerful pan-domain inference engine, with a vast set of ontologies (a la Wikipedia 3.0) covering all domains of human knowledge, that can reason and deduce answers instead of just throwing raw information at you using the outdated concept of a search engine.

Notes

After writing the original post I found out that a modified version of the Wikipedia application, known as “Semantic” MediaWiki has already been used to implement ontologies. The name that they’ve chosen is Ontoworld. I think WikiMind would have been a cooler name, but I like ontoworld, too, as in “it descended onto the world,” since that may be seen as a reference to the global mind a Semantic-Web-enabled version of Wikipedia could lead to.

Google’s search engine technology, which provides almost all of their revenue, could be made obsolete in the near future. That is unless they have access to Ontoworld or some such pan-domain semantic knowledge repository such that they tap into their ontologies and add inference capability to Google search to build formal deductive intelligence into Google.

But so can Ask.com and MSN and Yahoo…

I would really love to see more competition in this arena, not to see Google or any one company establish a huge lead over others.

The question, to rephrase in Churchillian terms, is wether the combination of the Semantic Web and Wikipedia signals the beginning of the end for Google or the end of the beginning. Obviously, with tens of billions of dollars at stake in investors’ money, I would think that it is the latter. No one wants to see Google fail. There’s too much vested interest. However, I do want to see somebody out maneuver them (which can be done in my opinion.)

Clarification

Please note that Ontoworld, which currently implements the ontologies, is based on the “Wikipedia” application (also known as MediaWiki), but it is not the same as Wikipedia.org.

Likewise, I expect Wikipedia.org will use their volunteer workforce to reduce the sum of human knowledge that has been entered into their database to domain-specific ontologies for the Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0) Hence, “Wikipedia 3.0.”

Response to Readers’ Comments

The argument I’ve made here is that Wikipedia has the volunteer resources to produce the needed Semantic Web ontologies for the domains of knowledge that it currently covers, while Google does not have those volunteer resources, which will make it reliant on Wikipedia.

Those ontologies together with all the information on the Web, can be accessed by Google and others but Wikipedia will be in charge of the ontologies for the large set of knowledge domains they currently cover, and that is where I see the power shift.

Google and other companies do not have the resources in man power (i.e. the thousands of volunteers Wikipedia has) who would help create those ontologies for the large set of knowledge domains that Wikipedia covers. Wikipedia does, and is positioned to do that better and more effectively than anyone else. Its hard to see how Google would be able create the ontologies for all domains of human knowledge (which are continuously growing in size and number) given how much work that would require. Wikipedia can cover more ground faster with their massive, dedicated force of knowledgeable volunteers.

I believe that the party that will control the creation of the ontologies (i.e. Wikipedia) for the largest number of domains of human knowledge, and not the organization that simply accesses those ontologies (i.e. Google), will have a competitive advantage.

There are many knowledge domains that Wikipedia does not cover. Google will have the edge there but only if people and organizations that produce the information also produce the ontologies on their own, so that Google can access them from its future Semantic Web engine. My belief is that it would happen but very slowly, and that Wikipedia can have the ontologies done for all the domain of knowledge that it currently covers much faster, and then they would have leverage by the fact that they would be in charge of those ontologies (aka the basic layer for AI enablement.)

It still remains unclear, of course, whether the combination of Wikipedia and the Semantic Web herald the beginning of the end for Google or the end of the beginning. As I said in the original part of the post, I believe that it is the latter, and the question I pose in the title of this post, in this context, is not more than rhetorical. However, I could be wrong in my judgment and Google could fall behind Wikipedia as the world’s ultimate answer machine.

After all, Wikipedia makes “us” count. Google doesn’t. Wikipedia derives its power from “us.” Google derives its power from its technology and inflated stock price. Who would you count on to change the world?

Response to Basic Questions Raised by the Readers

Reader divotdave asked a few questions, which I thought to be very basic in nature (i.e. important.) I believe more people will be pondering about the same issues, so I’m to including here them with the replies.

Question:
How does it distinguish between good information and bad? How does it determine which parts of the sum of human knowledge to accept and which to reject?

Reply:
It wouldn’t have to distinguish between good vs bad information (not to be confused with well-formed vs badly formed) if it was to use a reliable source of information (with associated, reliable ontologies.) That is if the information or knowledge to be sought can be derived from Wikipedia 3.0 then it assumes that the information is reliable.

However, with respect to connecting the dots when it comes to returning information or deducing answers from the sea of information that lies beyond Wikipedia then your question becomes very relevant. How would it distinguish good information from bad information so that it can produce good knowledge (aka comprehended information, aka new information produced through deductive reasoning based on exiting information.)

Question:
Who, or what as the case may be, will determine what information is irrelevant to me as the inquiring end user?

Reply:
That is a good question and one which would have to be answered by the researchers working on AI engines for Web 3.0

There will be assumptions made as to what you are inquiring about. Just as when I saw your question I had to make assumption about what you really meant to ask me, AI engines would have to make an assumption, pretty much based on the same cognitive process humans use, which is the topic of a separate post, but which has been covered by many AI researchers.

Question:
Is this to say that ultimately some over-arching standard will emerge that all humanity will be forced (by lack of alternative information) to conform to?

Reply:
There is no need for one standard, except when it comes to the language the ontologies are written in (e.g OWL, OWL-DL, OWL Full etc.) Semantic Web researchers are trying to determine the best and most usable choice, taking into consideration human and machine performance in constructing –and exclusive in the latter case– interpreting those ontologies.

Two or more info agents working with the same domain-specific ontology but having different software (different AI engines) can collaborate with each other.

The only standard required is that of the ontology language and associated production tools.

Addendum

On AI and Natural Language Processing

I believe that the first generation of AI that will be used by Web 3.0 (aka Semantic Web) will be based on relatively simple inference engines that will NOT attempt to perform natural language processing, where current approaches still face too many serious challenges. However, they will still have the formal deductive reasoning capabilities described earlier in this article, and users would interact with these systems through some query language.

On the Debate about the Nature and Definition of AI

The embedding of AI into cyberspace will be done at first with relatively simple inference engines (that use algorithms and heuristics) that work collaboratively in P2P fashion and use standardized ontologies. The massively parallel interactions between the hundreds of millions of AI Agents that will run within the millions of P2P AI Engines on users’ PCs will give rise to the very complex behavior that is the future global brain.

Relying on non-specific reputation can be deadly

2009-07-02T23:03:17+00:00

Openly peer-reviewed journals would never be able to mislead the way Elsevier can. And there would be no slipspace for them to be tempted to misbehave.

Publicly authored works, with public drafts showing the stages of development (appropriate for anything but creative art, where the illusion is part of the package, don’t you think?), would never be able to imply original research and fact-checking the way Chris Anderson can.

Year: 2009 Week: 27 Number: 110

2009-07-02T23:33:20+00:00

Technical news

[Michael Jackson Kills WP] - Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop", died this week and nearly took Wikipedia down with him (as well as many other websites). Wikimedia sites were unresponsive for a whole due to the large number of page hits. The Michael Jackson article got nearly 6 *million* hits on June 26, more than the Main Page.

In the evening of the 2th July (UTC) Wikipedia&Co was virtually down because of power outage of the European servers. The remaining servers choked on the additional traffic routed to them.

http://stats.grok.se/en/200906/Michael_Jackson -- page hit statistics
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/current-events/ -- techblog explanation of issues
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/News_of_Michael_Jackson's_death_overloads_Internet_sites_and_sparks_hoaxes -- wikinews article
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/power-outage-in-wikimedias-european-servers/ -- wiki down

[Usability] - the Usability team has released its first set of usability improvement (the "acai" release) for testing. As of press time, the new "vector" skin has been made available on all wikis for users who select it from their preferences, please help test the new features!

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/first-usability-release-is-coming-up-soon/ -- blog post
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Releases#Acai -- "acai" release description

[Usability BIS] - one aspect is already live by default; the new design of the search results. Just use the internal search and see.

http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Designs#Search_Results

Request for help

[Fundraising 2009] - the Wikimedia Foundation is preparing for its next fundraiser and would like feedback from the community on some of the pages it has developed so far. In addition to the creation of a new survey that they would like comments on, the Foundation is also trying to enhance the visibility of the donate button. The new buttons will be placed on the skin and will be viewable on every page. There are also several design proposals that need community input!

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/25/would-you-press-this-button/ -- blog post about it
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade -- buttons
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Survey -- survey

Foundation

[Licensing] - The "licensing update" changes have now been rolled out to all languages and projects, with the new license being featured in the footer and new interface items to translate for your wiki.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/30/licensing-update-rolled-out-in-all-wikimedia-wikis/ -- blog post
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2009-June/000959.html -- translation steps
http://tinyurl.com/LU-interface-trans -- betawiki trans interface

[Board election] - Once again an election for the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation is coming up. It is for 3 seats this time. But before there can be elections there must be someone to vote for. Submissions of candidacy are open between 6th and 20th July.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009

[New grant: Commons] - the Wikimedia Foundation was just awarded a US$300,000 grant that will research problems with and design new tools/fix current tools for uploading files to the global Wikimedia image repository, the Wikimedia Commons.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/02/ford-foundation-awards-300k-grant-for-wikimedia-commons/ -- blog post
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Ford_Foundation_Grant_July_2009 -- press release
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:WMF_Ford_Multimedia_Participation_Project.pdf -- full grant proposal

[Job: "Bookshelf"] - as a further development from the "Scribus operator" volunteer position noted in Wikizine a few months ago, a new job opening has been posted for project manager of the "Bookshelf" project. The "Bookshelf" project strives to develop a slate of basic educational materials (print, online and video) to attract new authors and editors to Wikipedia.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Project_Manager_Bookshelf -- job opening
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_outreach/Get_involved -- volunteer position, scribus operator

Community

[David Rohde] - it turns out that Wikipedia, along with tons of other media outlets, kept the kidnapping of journalist David Rohde out of its article on him. This has caused a few Wikipedians and Wikipedia critics to note this and either scream censorship or just point out the fact that it was unsourced information that could help save someone's life by erring on the side of caution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/technology/internet/29wiki.html?ref=media -- nytimes article
http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/06/29/was-wikipedia-correct-to-censor-news-of-david-rohdes-capture/ -- blog post about censorship
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/06/29/2120257/Wikipedia-Censored-To-Protect-Captive-Reporter -- slashdot discussion

[A reliable article?] - A new tool tries to help make scholars feel better about using Wikipedia by telling how reliable an article seems to be by using "wikibu-points". These points are based on statistical criteria and represent only possibilities, the creators hope that warnings will help people think to look at the discussion pages or article history. Wikibu is only available on the German Wikipedia at this time.

http://www.wikibu.ch/ -- site/tool
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2009-July/000833.html -- mailing list post

[EN Wikibooks] - is now using Meta's unified "user language" template. It will enable greater collaboration on the textbooks that teach foreign languages.
[enwp AFD] - An interesting AFD (deletion discussion) on the English Wikipedia was recently closed -- it resulted in the deletion of 4077 articles, probably the most ever from a single AFD on enwp!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Anybot's_algae_articles -- deletion discussion

Media

[No tourists] - an article by a New Zealand newspaper tells that "references to gang violence and crime on Palmerston North's Wikipedia page have seen overseas investors and professionals shy away from the city"!

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/2516472/Wikipedia-entries-slag-off-Palmerston-North

Stats

[bn.wp] - The Bengali Wikipedia (bn) has reached 20,000 articles.

http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/আন্তর্জাতিক_প্রকৃতি_ও_প্রাকৃতিক_সম্পদ_সংরক্ষণ_সংঘ -- 20,000th article

Other news

[Who owns transit schedules?] - Only marginally related but interesting nevertheless, the subject of a recent battle has been pretty simple: who owns the copyright to bus arrival times? Public transportation agencies are trying to assert that they own the times and stop people from making iPhone apps (and similar items) off of the content, so that they can do it themselves and charge people. Not very FOSS of them!

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090628/1419595382.shtml

[Wikizine@Foundation-l] - Wikizine will now be featured on foundation-l too! Thanks to Milos for proposing it and the list members for agreeing.

http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation

[Firefox 3.5] - ... is finally out. This main stream browser supports natively Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis, the media file formats our projects are using.

http://www.mozilla.com/

Quote

"Programming languages are like cats. It is easier to get a new cat than to get an old cat fixed." -- Douglas Crockford

Editor(s): Casey, Walter , Corrector(s): Alex , Thanks to: Rand, Steve Bennett, Brion, Domas, Nando, Erik, Belayet, Naoko, Chad, Kul, Jay, Signpost, Adrignola, rainman-sr , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Power outage in Wikimedia’s European servers

2009-07-02T20:51:16+00:00

This seems to be a power outage at our European proxy caching cluster; we’ll see if we can give more details later.

European traffic has been rerouted to our US servers, but the extra load may cause the sites to be a little sluggish for now. (If your DNS is still seeing the old entries, you can manually configure your browser to use the US proxy: rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org port 80. You should only do this temporarily, as you won’t be able to access anything *but* Wikipedia and our sister projects. :)

Update 21:13 UTC:

European servers are coming back online, we should have this cleaned up pretty soon.

Update 21:26 UTC:

We’re starting to switch traffic back to Europe. Should be better in a few minutes… In the meantime, amuse yourself reading the Twitter panic. :)

Update 21:40 UTC:

You can also use the SSL interface to Wikipedia, which doesn’t have the proxy overload.

Cloud Camping

2009-07-02T17:59:06+00:00

In March I posted about dipping our toes into cloud computing.

CloudCampPDX, to my knowledge the first CloudCamp here in Portland, was Tuesday night and I was glad to be in attendance. I have been curious where the other cloud folks are in town and it was comforting to see that there are local companies doing cloud magic also. It seemed like everyone was really curious to see what was working and not working for others.

I hope it becomes a regular thing. There is some information about the CloudCamp community here. I may have missed somebody mentioning it, but I did not hear that there is a user group here at the moment. If not, I would like to propose that we start one, so get in touch with me if you are interested. (Lyric at AboutUs dot org)

Some other folks in this ’space’: The Cloud Appreciation Society

لافتات إعلانية ليوم ويكيبيديا العربية الخامس

2009-07-02T18:05:15+00:00

قمت بتصميم لوحات إعلانية (Banners) ليوم ويكيبيديا العربية الخامس الذي لا يفصلنا عنه إلا 15 يوما (أي أنه سيكون يوم السبت 11 يوليو 2009), اللوحات مصممة بمختلف الأقياس ليستطيع الجميع إستعمالها في مواقعهم و مدوناتهم, للإطلاع على اللافتات الجديدة في ويكيميديا كومنز إضغط هنا. و أخيرا أرجوا أن تنال هذه اللوحات على إعجابكم.

Improving Wikimedia’s Discussion System

2009-07-02T15:27:58+00:00

Hi all,

Some of you might have already seen my blog posts about LiquidThreads, Wikimedia’s in-development discussion system.

For those who haven’t, this is a quick primer on what LiquidThreads is, and what it’s going to do for Wikimedia’s communities.

Currently, Wikimedia’s discussion system sucks. Here’s why:

It’s not easily usable by the average user. It isn’t obvious how to leave a comment on a talk page, or how to reply to a comment. The indenting we use now is ad-hoc and unsustainable for long discussions.
Signatures are done manually and we have to jump on poor unsuspecting newbies who don’t know this (or write bots…)
Archiving is done unevenly by bots, which are maintained by users and therefore of very uneven quality. Archives are something of a black hole — they aren’t searchable, easily maintainable or easily accessible. You can’t resurrect an archived discussion easily, nor can you view its history.
It’s stored as plain wikitext, which is opaque to any sort of automated process.
You can’t move a thread to a different discussion page and preserve its history.
There’s no encouragement, mechanism or incentive for quoted, point by point inline replies like we’re all used to with e-mail.

Imagine being a new user and trying to figure out how to add your comment to this.

Enter LiquidThreads. LiquidThreads is a system that makes MediaWiki’s discussion system behave like a forum or comments thread, while still maintaining the unique refinements that make wikis work. It was originally designed by a Google Summer of Code student, David McCabe, and I’ve been making incremental improvements to make it work for Wikimedia.

Overview of the new LiquidThreads interface

So, what’s changed?

Comments are separated from each other in the wikitext, so there are no more edit conflicts in discussions, and the usability is vastly improved.
Instead of indenting, each comment is in its own box, along with its replies. It makes it much easier to follow each post and its replies, and it’s much nicer on the horizontal whitespace. Hopefully, it will be the death of the ‘arbitrary section break’!
Each post has its own history page, making it easy to see what’s going on with individual threads without trying to navigate the history of a whole page.
It’s easy to move threads between pages, preserving the page history.
Discussions are never ‘archived’. Instead, older discussions fall to the bottom of the page, and eventually they drop off entirely, to hit a new page. If you missed the chance to have your say, just reply to a discussion and it’ll be bumped right up to the top of the page again!
Discussions with recent changes are at the top of the page. Discussions that have fallen dormant fall to the bottom. It’s easy to find out what’s happening!
You can watch individual threads of a discussion, and even get an email when they’re replied to.
It’s easy to link to a discussion, and the links are permanent unless the discussion is deleted. There’s no need to point to an archive or to an old revision ID.

If you’re interested, I’ve put together a test setup for you to play with it.

As always, questions, comments and suggestions are more than welcome, in the comments or elsewhere.

Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate: #3 Chaotic Group Input

2009-07-02T15:22:49+00:00

This is the third in a twelve-part series exploring Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate.
The full research report is available for Download.

Question

How many of the emails you receive require your direct input or feedback on the contents of an attachment?

Survey Comments

Almost all require my input. I am the editor for all the member and provider communications that are generated from our department. I also respond to RFPs on behalf of our department.
If I do get attachments, the sender usually wants my opinion on something before that sender does the official ‘mass mailing’.
Those that don’t require my direct input or feedback often need to be available as references and so need sorting and tracking to keep up with updated versions.
I myself have discovered that a useful way of obtaining feedback when I have specific questions about an in-process project is to attach an excerpt of a PDF with Acrobat comments embedded. This gets me excellent results — much better than if I simply point the recipient to the PDF and indicate which pages I want them to examine.

First usability release, Acai, is now available.

2009-07-02T02:44:53+00:00

The first usability release, Acai, hit Wikipedia and sister projects this afternoon. The new skin, Vector, and the enhanced toolbar can be turned on from the user preference under “Appearance” and “Editing”. Search result page now has a new layout with less daunting information. Vector is only available for left-to-right languages at a moment due to IE6 incompatibility. However, the enhanced toolbar can be selected from all languages and the new search result page is enabled globally. We could not roll out two features we had planned. First, warning messages for unsaved changes when a user switches away from the edit tab did not work properly thus they are disabled. So please be careful when you switch away from the edit tab. Secondly importing language specific configuration for special characters were not graceful, so we disabled special character function from the toolbar. We are working on the fixes and plan to roll them out as soon as we have stable solutions. The usability project wiki has Vector and the new toolbar as a default, so if you prefer to check them out without changing your preferences it is a good place to visit first. Let us know what you think. We would love to hear from you.

Best,

Naoko

Ford Foundation Awards $300K Grant for Wikimedia Commons

2009-07-02T01:46:16+00:00

I’m very happy to announce that the Ford Foundation has awarded a USD 300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve our interfaces and workflows for multimedia uploading. See the press release and the grant proposal as submitted (PDF).

This should give you a good idea about what we can do within the scope of this project. Wikimedia Commons , the multimedia repository shared by Wikipedia and all other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, has been a wonderful success story, having grown to more than 4.5 million educational, freely usable media files since its inception in 2004. But the combination of the complexity of free content licensing and the integration of Commons into the experience of contributing to a project like Wikipedia or Wikibooks can make for a very daunting experience for new contributors.

We want to begin to change that, and make sure that everyone who has useful educational media to share can do so easily. As part of our partnership with Kaltura, Michael Dale has already done some great work on external repository searches and transfers, and on integration of uploading into the editing interface, so we’re hoping to build on top of this to really get the workflow for licensing/upload/review/embedding of media files nailed.

We’ve also been having initial discussions with some of the Wikimedia chapters about possible models for working together on the execution of this project. For example, we want to make sure that we can facilitate fruitful face-to-face meetings with Commons practitioners, and there is plenty of technical work to be done that can be decentralized and shared. Exciting projects like Wikimedia Germany’s investment in multilingual search (German link; see Google Translation) are already underway, so hopefully over the next year, we’ll see lots of useful activity culminating in genuine improvements for Commons and beyond.

Big thanks to Sara Crouse and Naoko Komura for their work on this grant proposal, and of course we’re enormously grateful to the Ford Foundation for funding it. Wikimedia Commons deserves to grow to many more millions of free educational media files, and hopefully this strategic investment will help us to get there.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Boycott Macy’s in NYC

2009-07-01T23:36:32+00:00

Out of all the anti-New York City things to do, Macy’s quietly announced last week that it had moved the 4th of July fireworks show off the East River to host it on the Hudson. Supposedly this is in honor of Henry Hudson, but really it’s a slap in the face to New York City. The East River is the most New York City river that there is, touching the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. The Hudson is partially New Jersey’s, and they can get their own fireworks show.

Macy’s just told the other boroughs that the only one that counts this year is Manhattan. And…New Jersey. So to all you people in Queens and Brooklyn who were planning rooftop parties, here’s what to do:

Boycott Macy’s during the month of July, New York City, and show them how much you appreciate them taking away our fireworks. Make sure they don’t do it again.

Spread the word!

Possibly related posts

You can see the future

2009-07-01T23:04:00+00:00

There has been a lot of talk in the last year about the usability of the MediaWiki software. Today, the new functionality created by the Usability Initiative has been rolled out. Have a look at today's English Wikipedia main page..

It not only looks good, it also makes it easier to understand what you can do. Given the large percentage of people who just do not appreciate that they can edit a page, it is a big improvement.

When you want to be part of the future of Wikipedia today, you have to change to the "vector" skin. Another neat feature is the "enhanced editing toolbar" that you can enable on the "editing" tab of the user preferences.

At this stage the usability improvements are available for all the "left to right" languages. Because of incompatibilities in IE-6, some more work is needed before it will become available for languages like Arabic and Hebrewl.

All in all, it is a happy day because you can see the shape of things to come for all of us and you can experience it now. When you find any issues, this is where they are happy to leaarn about it.
Thanks,
GerardM

CamelCase WikiWednesday – Your Website Identity

2009-07-01T20:51:21+00:00

Seeing this post last week about the 11 Unitentionally Hilarious Domain Names reminded me that I wanted to write about that from the AboutUs angle.

First of all, we have a bot who gets public, fair use information from a website that we haven’t heard from. Then the bot tries to CamelCase the domain name – which usually results in a successful event. When it doesn’t the results can be hilarious, as noted from Identity Woman a couple years ago.

When the bot gets it wrong, it gets it really wrong. As noted by RunningAsRoot last year. (No we don’t think they are trafficking marijuana.)

Please, for a good time, check out some of our bot’s best-miss-hits, AboutUsBotGoneBad

Come join us at WikiWednesday 5:30 – 7:30 tonight (107 SE Stark) to discuss these wiki ideas and more! (like the new Wikia bliki option and SocialText’s new offering)

Oh, by the way, even the Cub Scouts get this idea!!

props to Vartan for the fancy bot graphic!

Open Translation Tools 2009 report

2009-07-01T20:24:58+00:00

With six projects in over 250 languages, multilingual communication and content translation are big priorities for us. That’s one reason I was excited to go to the Open Translation Tools 2009 conference and be in the same room with 80 other translators, content providers and developers all working in the open translation space. Another reason is that the conference was held in Amsterdam in the old city center, in a beautiful venue right by one of the canals.

We have some amazing opportunities to collaborate with folks on other projects, from translation memory based systems like that in use by the World Wide Lexicon to source code string repository interfaces like Transifex. As one person put it, the perfect testbed for crowd-sourced translation is Wikipedia; if we can’t make it work there, where can it work? I also had a chance to talk with Gerard Meijssen and Siebrand Mazeland about new ways to facilitate tighter integration with translatewiki.net and to encourage more projects to make use of the translatewiki facilities. It should be a really productive year.

Folks told me to go visit the Van Gogh Museum, so I was dismayed to find that they don’t allow photography. However, the Wiki Loves Art NL project, organized by the NL Wikimedia chapter, had reached an agreement with the museum to allow two small groups in for photographs, during the week I happened to be there! So, come Tuesday morning, I was one of 20 lucky Wikimedia community members and photojournalists to be given private access to the Van Gogh collection. Some photos from the group are already available on the flickr group from which they will be uploaded to the Commons.

Right after the conference I went to the first two days of the OTT book sprint, which had as its goal the production of a comprehensive manual for beginner volunteer translators of open content with open tools. Once again we were in an awesome venue (see the picture; we were in one of the turrets!) and under the expert guidance of Adam Hyde we got a huge amount of content generated in just a few days.

On the last day I skipped town to go visit a colleague on one of the Wikimedia projects; we’ve worked closely together for over two years and had never met face to face. Perhaps that was the most important part of the whole trip: bringing our virtual community into the real world one person at a time.

Sharing Power (Global Edition)

2009-07-01T20:10:11+00:00

My keynote for the Personal Democracy Forum, in New York.

Introduction: War is Over (if you want it)

Over the last year we have lived through a profound and perhaps epochal shift in the distribution of power. A year ago all the talk was about how to mobilize Facebook users to turn out on election day. Today we bear witness to a ‘green’ revolution, coordinated via Twitter, and participate as the Guardian UK crowdsources the engines of investigative journalism and democratic oversight to uncover the unpleasant little secrets buried in the MPs expenses scandal – secrets which the British government has done everything in its power to withhold.

We’ve turned a corner. We’re on the downward slope. It was a long, hard slog to the top – a point we obviously reached on 4 November 2008 – but now the journey is all about acceleration into a future that looks almost nothing like the past. The configuration of power has changed: its distribution, its creation, its application. The trouble with circumstances of acceleration is that they go hand-in-hand with a loss of control. At a certain point our entire global culture is liable to start hydroplaning, or worse, will go airborne. As the well-oiled wheels of culture leave the roadbed of civilization behind, we can spin the steering wheel all we want. Nothing will happen. Acceleration has its own rationale, and responds neither to reason nor desire. Force will meet force. Force is already meeting force.

What happens now, as things speed up, is a bit like what happens in the guts of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Different polities and institutions will smash and reveal their inner workings, like parts sprung from crashed cars. We can learn a lot – if we’re clever enough to watch these collisions as they happen. Some of these particles-in-collision will recognizably be governments or quasi-governmental organizations. Some will look nothing like them. But before we glory, Ballard-like, in the terrible beauty of the crash, we should remember that these institutions are, first and foremost, the domain of people, individuals ill-prepared for whiplash or a sudden impact with the windshield. No one is wearing a safety belt, even as things slip noticeably beyond control. Someone’s going to get hurt. That much is already clear.

What we urgently need, and do not yet have, is a political science for the 21st century. We need to understand the autopoietic formation of polities, which has been so accelerated and amplified in this era of hyperconnectivity. We need to understand the mechanisms of knowledge sharing among these polities, and how they lead to hyperintelligence. We need to understand how hyperintelligence transforms into action, and how this action spreads and replicates itself through hypermimesis. We have the words – or some of them – but we lack even an informal understanding of the ways and means. As long as this remains the case, we are subject to terrible accidents we can neither predict nor control. We can end the war between ourselves and our times. But first we must watch carefully. The collisions are mounting, and they have already revealed much. We have enough data to begin to draw a map of this wholly new territory.

I: The First Casualty of War

Last month saw an interesting and unexpected collision. Wikipedia, the encyclopedia created by and for the people, decreed that certain individuals and a certain range of IP addresses belonging to the Church of Scientology would hereafter be banned from the capability to edit Wikipedia. This directive came from the Arbitration Committee of Wikipedia, which sounds innocuous, but is in actuality the equivalent the Supreme Court in the Wikipediaverse.

It seems that for some period of time – probably stretching into years – there have been any number of ‘edit wars’ (where edits are made and reverted, then un-reverted and re-reverted, ad infinitum) around articles concerning about the Church of Scientology and certain of the personages in the Church. These pages have been subject to fierce edit wars between Church of Scientology members on one side, critics of the Church on the other, and, in the middle, Wikipedians, who attempted to referee the dispute, seeking, above all, to preserve the Neutral Point-of-View (NPOV) that the encyclopedia aspires to in every article. When this became impossible – when the Church of Scientology and its members refused to leave things alone – a consensus gradually formed within the tangled adhocracy of Wikipedia, finalized in last month’s ruling from the Arbitration Committee. For at least six months, several Church of Scientology members are banned by name, and all Church computers are banned from making edits to Wikipedia.

That would seem to be that. But it’s not. The Church of Scientology has been diligent in ensuring that the mainstream media (make no mistake, Wikipedia is now a mainstream medium) do not portray characterizations of Scientology which are unflattering to the Church. There’s no reason to believe that things will simply rest as they are now, that everyone will go off and skulk in their respective corners for six months, like children given a time-out. Indeed, the Chairman of Scientology, David Miscavidge, quickly issued a press release comparing the Wikipedians to Nazis, asking, “What’s next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?”

How this skirmish plays out in the months and years to come will be driven by the structure and nature of these two wildly different organizations. The Church of Scientology is the very model of a modern religious hierarchy; all power and control flows down from Chairman David Miscavidge through to the various levels of Scientology. With Wikipedia, no one can be said to be in charge. (Jimmy Wales is not in charge of Wikipedia.) The whole things chugs along as an agreement, a social contract between the parties participating in the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia. Power flows in Wikipedia are driven by participation: the more you participate, the more power you’ll have. Power is distributed laterally: every individual who edits Wikipedia has some ultimate authority.

What happens when these two organizations, so fundamentally mismatched in their structures and power flows, attempt to interact? The Church of Scientology uses lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits as a coercive technique. But Wikipedia has thus far proven immune to lawsuits. Although there is a non-profit entity behind Wikipedia, running its servers and paying for its bandwidth, that is not Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the machines, it is not the bandwidth, it is not even the full database of articles. Wikipedia is a social agreement. It is an agreement to share what we know, for the greater good of all. How does the Church of Scientology control that? This is the question that confronts every hierarchical organization when it collides with an adhocracy. Adhocracies present no control surfaces; they are at once both entirely transparent and completely smooth.

This could all get much worse. The Church of Scientology could ‘declare war’ on Wikipedia. A general in such a conflict might work to poison the social contract which powers Wikipedia, sewing mistrust, discontent and the presumption of malice within a community that thrives on trust, consensus-building and adherence to a common vision. Striking at the root of the social contract which is the whole of Wikipedia could possibly disrupt its internal networks and dissipate the human energy which drives the project.

Were we on the other side of the conflict, running a defensive strategy, we would seek to reinforce Wikipedia’s natural strength – the social agreement. The stronger the social agreement, the less effective any organized attack will be. A strong social agreement implies a depth of social resources which can be deployed to prevent or rapidly ameliorate damage.

Although this conflict between the Church of Scientology and Wikipedia may never explode into a full-blown conflict, at some point in the future, some other organization or institution will collide with Wikipedia, and battle lines will be drawn. The whole of this quarter of the 21st century looks like an accelerating series of run-ins between hierarchical organizations and adhocracies. What happens when the hierarchies find that their usual tools of war are entirely mismatched to their opponent?

II: War is Hell

Even the collision between friendly parties, when thus mismatched, can be devastating. Rasmus Klies Nielsen, a PhD student in Columbia’s Communications program, wrote an interesting study a few months ago in which he looked at “communication overload”, which he identifies as a persistent feature of online activism. Nielsen specifically studied the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign in New York, and learned that some of the best-practices of the Obama campaign failed utterly when they encountered an energized and empowered public.

The Obama campaign encouraged voters to communicate through its website, both with one another and with the campaign’s New York staff. Although New York had been written off by the campaign (Hilary Clinton was sure to win her home state), the state still housed many very strong and vocal Obama supporters (apocryphally, all from Manhattan’s Upper West Side). These supporters flooded into the Obama campaign website for New York, drowning out the campaign itself. As election day loomed, campaign staffers retreated to “older” communication techniques – that is, mobile phones – while Obama’s supporters continued the conversation through the website. A complete disconnection between campaign and supporters occurred, even though the parties had the same goals.

Political campaigns may be chaotic, but they are also very hierarchically structured. There is an orderly flow of power from top (candidate) to bottom (voter). Each has an assigned role. When that structure is short-circuited and replaced by an adhocracy, the instrumentality of the hierarchy overloads. We haven’t yet seen the hybrid beast which can function hierarchically yet interaction with an adhocracy. At this point when the two touch, the hierarchy simply shorts out.

Another example from the Obama general election campaign illustrates this tendency for hierarchies to short out when interacting with friendly adhocracies. Project Houdini was touted as a vast, distributed GOTV program which would allow tens of thousands of field workers to keep track of who had voted and who hadn’t. Project Houdini was among the most ambitious of the online efforts of the Obama campaign, and was thoroughly tested in the days leading up to the general election. But, once election day came, Project Houdini went down almost immediately under the volley of information coming in from every quadrant of the nation, from fieldworkers thoroughly empowered to gather and report GOTV data to the campaign. A patchwork backup plan allowed the campaign to tame the torrent of data, channeling it through field offices. But the great vision of the Obama campaign, to empower the individuals with the capability to gather and report GOTV data, came crashing down, because the system simply couldn’t handle the crush of the empowered field workers.

Both of these collisions happened in ‘friendly fire’ situations, where everyone’s eyes were set on achieving the same goal. But these two systems of organization are so foreign to one another that we still haven’t seen any successful attempt to span the chasm that separates them. Instead, we see collisions and failures. The political campaigns of the future must learn how to cross that gulf. While some may wish to turn the clock back to an earlier time when campaigns respected carefully-wrought hierarchies, the electorates of the 21st century, empowered in their own right, have already come to expect that their candidate’s campaigns will meet them in that empowerment. The next decade is going to be completely hellish for politicians and campaign workers of every party as new rules and systems are worked out. There are no successful examples – yet. But circumstances are about to force a search for solutions.

III: War is Peace

As governments release the vast amounts of data held and generated by them, communities of interest are rising up to work with that data. As these communities become more knowledgeable, more intelligent – hyperintelligent – via this exposure, this hyperintelligence will translate into action: hyperempowerment. This is all well and good so long as the aims of the state are the same as the aims of the community. A community of hyperempowered citizens can achieve lofty goals in partnership with the state. But even here, the hyperempowered community faces a mismatch with the mechanisms of the state. The adhocracy by which the community thrives has no easy way to match its own mechanisms with those of the state. Even with the best intentions, every time the two touch there is the risk of catastrophic collapse. The failures of Project Houdini will be repeated, and this might lead some to argue that the opening up itself was a mistake. In fact, these catastrophes are the first sign of success. Connection is being made.

In order to avoid catastrophe, the state – and any institution which attempts to treat with a hyperintelligence – must radically reform its own mechanisms of communication. Top-down hierarchies which order power precisely can not share power with hyperintelligence. The hierarchy must open itself to a more chaotic and fundamentally less structured relationship with the hyperintelligence it has helped to foster. This is the crux of the problem, asking the leopard to change its spots. Only in transformation can hierarchy find its way into a successful relationship with hyperintelligence. But can any hierarchy change without losing its essence? Can the state – or any institution – become more flexible, fluid and dynamic while maintaining its essential qualities?

And this is the good case, the happy outcome, where everyone is pulling in the same direction. What happens when aims differ, when some hyperintelligence for some reason decides that it is antithetical to the interests of an institution or a state? We’ve seen the beginnings of this in the weird, slow war between the Church of Scientology and ANONYMOUS, a shadowy organization which coordinates its operations through a wiki. In recent weeks ANONYMOUS has also taken on the Basidj paramilitaries in Iran, and China’s internet censors. ANONYMOUS pools its information, builds hyperintelligence, and translates that hyperintelligence into hyperempowerment. Of course, they don’t use these words. ANONYMOUS is simply a creature of its times, born in an era of hyperconnectivity.

It might be more profitable to ask what happens when some group, working the data supplied at Recovery.gov or Data.gov or you-name-it.gov, learns of something that they’re opposed to, then goes to work blocking the government’s activities. In some sense, this is good old-fashioned activism, but it is amplified by the technologies now at hand. That amplification could be seen as a threat by the state; such activism could even be labeled terrorism. Even when this activism is well-intentioned, the mismatch and collision between the power of the state and any hyperempowered polities means that such mistakes will be very easy to make.

We will need to engage in a close examination of the intersection between the state and the various hyperempowered actors which rising up over next few years. Fortunately, the Obama administration, in its drive to make government data more transparent and more accessible (and thereby more likely to generate hyperintelligence around it) has provided the perfect laboratory to watch these hyperintelligences as they emerge and spread their wings. Although communication’s PhD candidates undoubtedly will be watching and taking notes, public policy-makers also should closely observe everything that happens. Since the rules of the game are changing, observation is the first most necessary step toward a rational future. Examining the pushback caused by these newly emerging communities will give us our first workable snapshot of a political science for the 21st century.

The 21st century will continue to see the emergence of powerful and hyperempowered communities. Sometimes these will challenge hierarchical organizations, such as with Wikipedia and the Church of Scientology; sometimes they will work with hierarchical organizations, as with Project Houdini; and sometimes it will be very hard to tell what the intended outcomes are. In each case the hierarchy – be it a state or an institution – will have to adapt itself into a new power role, a new sharing of power. In the past, like paired with like: states shared power with states, institutions with institutions, hierarchies with hierarchies. We are leaving this comfortable and familiar time behind, headed into a world where actors of every shape and description find themselves sufficiently hyperempowered to challenge any hierarchy. Even when they seek to work with a state or institution, they present challenges. Peace is war. In either direction, the same paradox confronts us: power must surrender power, or be overwhelmed by it. Sharing power is not an ideal of some utopian future; it’s the ground truth of our hyperconnected world.

Wikipedia keeps the truth from everyone.

2009-07-01T15:38:14+00:00

WIKICITIES, Helmand, Monday (NNN) — The kidnapping of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist David Rohde in Afghanistan was suppressed not only by almost all press syndicates but also by Wikipedia, on the direct command-and-control orders of Jimbo Wales, who is personally responsible for every word in the popular web-based encyclopedia.

Conservative commentators were appalled at the suppression. “Would they have protected HITLER like this?” thundered Michelle Malkin. Wales pointed out that the encyclopedia’s biography of Hitler had already been appropriately edited and cited per the Biographies of Living Persons policy:

Adolf Hitler is the Chancellor of Germany^{[citation needed]}. He is noted^{[citation needed]} for his work on the moral fibre of German society^{[citation needed]} and stimulating the economy^{[citation needed]}, notably through the Autobahn construction programme^{[citation needed]}. Some^[who?] have criticized aspects of his policies^{[citation needed]}.

(Read more …)

Arbitration Committee mail traffic

2009-07-01T14:56:12+00:00

Some brief traffic statistics on the Arbitration Committee's mailing list:

a total of 14692 messages were received by the list from January through June this year
an average of 81 messages were received each day
this is more than foundation-l (4473), wikien-l (4015) and wikitech-l (2924) combined over the same period, with change left over

Conclude from this what you will.

Zeal is zeal is zeal

2009-07-01T13:44:53+00:00

Jeremy and I were discussing climate dynamics and related brinks claimed in countless debates around the globe - from academic journals to political and economic forecasts to doomsday prophecies.

We disagreed about whether the truth of the importance of the matter was obvious. As someone who still has no idea what the real fundamentals are, I don’t find this obvious. Some clever scientists doubt the brinks. Some dedicate their lives to explaining that this is the defining crisis of our times. It offends me deeply as a scientist that the opinions of scientists fall strongly along political lines. What the hell is wrong with our scientific community?

Jeremy and I noted that some very smart people are convinced that human contributions to climate change will change and effectively destroy life on Earth within short order. They put their careers on the line with projections of environmental and economic catastrophe with low error bars within 30 years, and work to convince everyone, in science, art, media, policy, business, and planning, that this is the essential crisis of our time. Others put their careers on the line insisting that there is no such crisis and everyone should stop wasting effort even investigating it.

Or do these zealots put their careers on the line? It’s acceptable as a scientist to tilt at windmills, even drawing many others along with you, and then to end up having been wrong. There are certainly scientists who are make a good living holding forth a minority theory, and I can’t think of any active mechanism to censure someone for mere ‘innocent’ deception and misguided analysis if they don’t stoop to plagiarism or data forgery.

I reckon our society hasn’t moved passed the stage where playground challenges and antics are acceptable discourse, and where shouting “Fire!” on the global stage evokes more than a raised eyebrow. Scientific disciplines should be the first to change this.

It would be nice to live in a world in which this sort of ruckus signals real consensus and indicates a focused field-wide annealing of research and analysis which, neutrally and from specific perspectives, steadily refines our understanding of the fundamentals and possibilities involved. Instead this seems to play out like almost any zeal-on-zeal controversy : people caught in their own emotional cycles, and professional and social circles, come up with bold ideas, become attached to them, get into edit wars and public fights, and come to represent caricatures of their own analyses on teevee. There’s not much scientific purity and valor that makes it through that awkward human noise.

Some of this can be blamed on laziness on the part of fields themselves. We have strong ethical or guild codes within academic disciplines, but in ways they could be stronger. In mathematics, there is a compulsion to take unsolved problems very seriously. If someone has a wild idea that they insist revolutionizes all of math, you can go to any card-carrying mathematician and get their take on a neutral assessment - or a pointer to someone who can offer the same. It is hard to find yourself in the middle of a turf war, with Italians dismissing the French topologists’ wacky methods, or a group of set theorists attacking the credentials of a Quinian or hinting she is funded by the NSA (? who are the big corporate baddies in good math-conspiracy fiction?) to suit their ulterior motives.

The same is often true of physics and engineering - it’s hard to get people to put dogma ahead of making sure a result is strong, resiliant, and doesn’t fail. But somehow I don’t see people taking environmental, energy, or medical scientific studies as seriously - there is a willingness to be sidetracked by entrepreneurial business ideas, political and economic overtones, and a desire for personal recognition. There is less open research and more done behind closed doors or with conflicted funders.

Maybe this is inherent to the topics involved and the difficulty we now have in immediately testing hypotheses, but I think not. We should be tackling climate analysis the way we tackle searching for supernovas and Higgs bosons : with coordinated global research efforts funded by dozens of interested groups, gathering billions and trillions of data points, and funding hundreds of the world’s best scientists to work together on what is recognized as a project of extraordinary public importance.

GreenDam postponed

2009-07-01T11:59:54+00:00

It’s July 1, and in China the ominous deadline to implement the Green Dam/Youth Escort internet filtering software has been postponed, to much rejoicing by Internet users in the country.

To outsiders, this must seem quite puzzling. Why would China’s “totalitarian” system need to back down on this?

This should be seen as a case study on how the complexities of China’s decision system is much more nuanced than what a “Communist” regime would suggest, and the role of citizen deliberation in a new, upwardly mobile, aspirational, IT-savvy China.

While the outside world sees the PRC government in absolute control, in reality the heavy handed, top down authoritarian system rides on a delicate balance of, bottom up public consent that supports the state’s legitimacy.

Here’s why Green Dam illustrates this quite well.

China’s Internet filtering is by far the most advanced in the world in terms of precision and scale. But until now, it happened in the “cloud,” in far off intangible spaces through two main vehicles:

One is through massive domestic Web site content regulation through revokable Internet Content Provider licenses (ICP). Operators have to self-censor through technical or human means to please the authorities regarding general guidelines on taboo topics. Keywords are banned and discussion topics are forbidden. In some cases, explicit timely edicts are required, such as for significant June anniversaries, sensitive political meetings (People’s Congress) or poor construction standards in Sichuan earthquake zones. Even with these, China’s netizens have come up with clever tricks and puns to get around many of these automated filtering systems.

The other is the Great Firewall, the blocking of what foreign Web sites China users can surf. The implementation is clever, in that restrictions show up as technical errors (connection reset, site not found/unreachable) and curb behavior through uncertainty and doubt about a site’s reach-ability, rather than fear. You don’t know whether it’s the Internet acting flaky, or whether a site is actually being filtered. Tech-savvy users can trivially circumvent this.

But you don’t need perfect censorship to have effective censorship. Both these systems do quite well for the PRC government in keeping the 3T1F topics outside the mainstream, and ensuring that the government is not embarrassed by reporting on its incompetence.

The key, here is that both the domestic and international filtering activities happened in the cloud, the ether, the machines that comprise the Internet. It wasn’t in your home and it didn’t intrude beyond the cable to your desk.

Green Dam suddenly put the specter of restriction, surveillance and control in your home.

With that one stroke, which probably seemed like the next logical innocuous extension of the censorship regime for PRC bureaucrats, the government took the big miscalculation of crossing into the the private space, and the personal property of China’s citizens. And that’s where the outrage came.

This was the camel’s nose into the private tent of Internet users. A poll on China’s major sites (Sina, Netease, et al) all showed over 3/4 of respondents said Green Dam was not necessary or a bad idea.

(NB: China is not the first or the only government wanting to censor Internet traffic for content. Australia’s Clean Feed proposal to covertly filter out sites at the ISP level has been under fire from their netizens, and was unceremoniously put on hiatus as well. Most public schools and libraries in the United States implement content filtering at some level. This is not a uniquely China issue.)

What the authorities in China didn’t realize was how serious that breach of boundary would be.

I knew it was going to be a tough road for Green Dam when it appeared the MIIT initiative was not a unified effort. Before leaving for my travels, I did commentaries with the Associated Press, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera and others, making the point that even China’s official news outlets were openly questioning Green Dam’s legitimacy. The new Global Times newspaper, which has been rather frank about other issues, led off with serious questions about the software’s safety.

Then came the big one.

China Daily, the official mouthpiece of the government, was publishing criticisms of Green Dam shortly after it was announced, even publishing Photoshop’ed illustrations of netizens mocking the system. (”Outrage over bid to tame Web“, China Daily, June 18, 2009)

One picture it included with the article was a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” multiple choice question describing Green Dam as “spyware” with “systemic flaws” that could be “exploited by hackers.” Another cartoon shows a gray hand of censorship coming from the computer screen and stiff-arming a computer user in the face.

It was clear at this point, the Green Dam initiative was from a smaller portion of the PRC bureaucracy, and not from the highest levels. China Daily would have never published something so critical if it was of the highest-level of agenda pushing.

China’s netizens were speaking, and the media and government were taking notice (and with higher ups looking the other way). So while this was not democracy in action, it certainly was something in action.

At TEDxShanghai last month, I described the phenomenon of Wikipedia and Twitter forming the basis of a new online commons where global netizens come to share and reinforce memes across geographic and social boundaries (SlideShare presentation). For years, enthusiastic faith-based technology enthusiasts hoped the Internet would bring democracy to any place it touched. This has been spectacularly elusive. On the flipside, some viewed the new Web 2.0 social revolution as “socialist”, “collectivist” and at worst, Maoist. That’s been inaccurate as well.

Instead, I describe the new borderless, socially agile, activist associations that crop up on the Internet as a new system of ‘deliberative adhocracy’. Alvin Toffler, and later Cory Doctorow, used adhocracy to describe a new form of rule based ephemeral associations that “capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results.” (Waterman)

Whether it’s as massive as #IranElection to bring global awareness to its politics, or as small as #MotrinMoms to discuss outrage at an insulting advertisement, we now have an online information commons (Twitter) and knowledge commons (Wikipedia) that supports a space for the new distributed Zeitgeist. In China, obviously there are other analogs (Twitter clone Fanfou, Baidu Baike, BBS forums, et al.) but the effect is the same. To see deliberative adhocracy in action look no further than the Human Flesh Search Engine that metes out social justice in the absence of a strong rule of law in China.

Readers familiar with my book will know I described how a Wikipedia Revolution changed forever how we deal with free access to knowledge and its production. I will however, be quite Burke-ian in my pronouncement about the Internet’s effect on China.

Revolutions are sudden overthrows and disruptive repudiations of the status quo. China has a terrible modern history with revolutions, with more of them going bad than good. The rule law is sometimes described as when “reason trumps politics.” To China’s authorities, the Internet is being used in a deliberative process that fulfills that role. It is not perfect, nor prevalent enough to ensure social justice on a large scale. However, it is a huge step forward for a country that is convinced that after a century of turmoil, that any step must take safety and efficiency into account.

The hiatus for Green Dam, is the standard face-saving way for the government to back down. There is a good possibility it may come back in another form, watered down or otherwise. But for now, China’s netizens are having their day.

Wiki: Antidote to Edifices of Unidirectional Communication

2009-07-01T03:29:20+00:00

Aaron Rester explains why web sites that respond to and enable the collective activity of their audience are less likely to become occasionally noticed but little-used monuments:

Just as Lefebvre leads us to see built spaces not as the expressions of a single architect, but rather as the production of the wide variety of human interactions that occur within them, so websites created by cartographers would cease being grand edifices of unidirectional communication and become instead the collective product of the individuals whose lives intersect within them.

The rise of the social web demands that if we are to help shape meaningful online experiences for our users, we must rethink our traditional role as builders of digital monuments and turn our attention to the close observation of the spaces that our users are producing around us.

I think this is even more true for internal websites, i.e. wikis. Most intranets are “grand edifices of unidirectional communication” whereas wikis can be precisely the opposite, if structured and introduced appropriately.

Downtime on en.wikipedia.org resolved

2009-07-01T00:08:25+00:00

We had 52 minutes of downtime on the English-language Wikipedia site today; only en.wikipedia.org was affected. Our master database server was thrown into a funky state in which hundreds of access threads were stuck in the “statistics” state — which seems to be MySQL’s way of saying “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”.

It’s unclear exactly what set it off, but basically nothing works until you restart MySQL. After switching the site to an alternate master database, all has been well.

At 52 minutes from start of event, this took us a bit longer than I’d like to resolve — we had to percolate through a couple levels of alert calls before we finished diagnosing it and getting the DB switch pushed through. (Sorry to wake you up early Tim!)

A similar event in future should be fixable within a few minutes, thanks to Tim’s work on making the master-switch system more foolproof. We’re fixing up our internal documentation so all our site ops will now know how to run the database master switch script next time!

– brion

Top five tips for writing a featured article

2009-06-30T23:17:27+00:00

Well, my latest foray into the featured article candidates process was a surprisingly smooth one, and my article is now featured. It was a long slog, but well worth it. When I started out, it looked like this. A mess, basically. Just over five months of hard work later, it is now a featured article. I learnt a lot during the process, and I'd like to share what I learnt with everyone.

Write about what you know, or what interests you greatly.
In my case I wrote about where I live. I know the area extremely well, and while some might argue this may affect WP:NOR issues, I did not feel it did for me. Additionally, the books I used are not published in great numbers - this is generally the case for local history books. They are, however, available in the local library. Every single book used was from the library, and were invaluable in finding facts to write about. A final point is that I enjoy finding out about my local area. I have been interested in history particular, since a young age, so it was enjoyable to research and write about.
Take your time with it.
This is a good lesson I learned. I wanted to take it to FAC earlier than I did, because I thought it was ready. However, it was clearly not, as I took it to peer review instead and got invaluable feedback. There is no need to rush it; there's no time limit, it'll still be there tomorrow.
Use free images.
It is a free encyclopedia, right? Unfree images don't help the FAC, and take up a lot of time from what I have seen. On my FA, all the images are free ones.
Make use of other people.
I was lucky enough to be working on an article that is part of a very active Wikiproject, with some of Wikipedia's best editors on it. I used them - frequently. There are some sections on the article that I did not even have to author, as someone else did them for me. Working on a FA does not need to be a solo process.
Get it to GA first.
Some may disagree with this, but I think it is a good a way as getting feedback as any. And if it fails you know you have a long way to go. But you still have feedback to work on, which is good.

A final point: make sure you enjoy what you're doing, above anything else. Stuff the MOS, 1a criterion and other minor things while you're writing up the content. Deal with the nitty-gritty bits once you've put what needs saying. Good luck, should you try a FA yourself!

Wikipedia Suppressing News

2009-06-30T19:49:51+00:00

There's been a lot of coverage of the New York Times story "Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia." It's prompted discussion about balancing issues of free speech, safety, and responsibility at the Times and Wikipedia. Within Wikipedia, the discussion has only just begun, but has started off quite constructively as seen in Wikipedian Apoc2400's proposed policy: in the short term, Wikipedia should refrain from spreading information if that information is not widely and reliably sourced, of little public interest, and is "likely to have very severe direct negative consequences."

Government transparency gets real

2009-06-30T19:42:00+00:00

Our fair government, global champion of the public domain, returns to its roots of maverick transparency : with public ‘dashboards’ showing exactly where our $70B of annual IT spending is going, what projects are on or behind schedule, which officials are in charge of each division and which contractors are responsible for each project.

I love it — and I want it for every organization I care about. Mad props to Vivek Kundra - whose quote about “having up to 30 days” to get used to the new system is priceless.

On file system benchmarks

2009-06-30T19:34:35+00:00

I see this benchmark being quoted in multiple places, and there I see stuff like:

When carrying out more database benchmarking, but this time with PostgreSQL, XFS and Btrfs were too slow to even complete this test, even when it had been running for more than an hour for a single run. Between EXT3, EXT4, and NILFS2, the fastest file-system was EXT3 and then its successor, EXT4, was slightly behind that. Far behind the position of EXT4 were NILFS2 and then Btrfs and XFS.

There were few other benchmarks, e.g. SQLite showed ‘bad performance’ on XFS and Btrfs.

*clear throat*

Dear benchmarkers, don’t compare apples and oranges. If you see differences between benchmarks, do some very very tiny research, and use some intellect, that you, as primates, do have. If database tests are slowest on filesystems created by Oracle (who know some stuff about systems in general) or SGI (who, despite giving away their campus to Google, still have lots of expertise in the field), that can indicate, that your tests are probably flawed somewhere, at least for that test domain.

Now, probably you’ve heard about such thing as ‘data consistency’. That is something what database stack tries to ensure, sometimes at higher costs, like not trusting volatile caches, enforcing certain write orders, depending on acknowledgements by underlying hardware.

So, in this case it wasn’t “benchmarking file systems”, it was simply, benchmarking “consistency” against “no consistency”. But don’t worry, most benchmarks have such flaws – getting numbers but not understanding them makes results much more interesting, right?

Oh, and… thanks for few more misguided people.

Episode 43: Wiki Takes Philadelphia!

2009-06-30T19:23:00+00:00

This is our second on-location episode of Wikivoices, recorded "live" at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

At the recent meetup, a couple Wikipedians talked with a Swarthmore University Free Culture activist and a Philadelphia teacher about ideas for a Wiki Takes Philadelphia outreach project.

Listen to Episode 43

Hopefully in future, we can organize more Wikivoices episodes to be recorded live at meetups around the globe.

If folks have thoughts on the discussion and outreach ideas raised in this episode, or just the format of this type of episode, please add them to the comments.

And thanks to Marc for the much improved the audio quality and editing, much better than mine last time!

Al Franken certified winner of Minnesota Senate seat

2009-06-30T19:13:10+00:00

Democrat Al Franken has been certified the winner of the Minnesota U.S. Senate seat by the state supreme court, as expected. Now is the question whether Norm Coleman will continue to hurt his state by continuing this pointless effort to keep his constituents from having two elected representatives. From Politico:

The question now is whether the incumbent Republican senator will petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case — and if Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty would sign an election certificate in the interim — potentially prolonging a final decision for months. Doing so also would force Coleman to raise significantly more funds to keep his court challenge going. In its final line of the ruling, the state Supreme Court said Franken is “entitled” under Minnesota law to “receive the certificate election as United States senator from the state of Minnesota.”

UPDATE: Coleman concedes (finally)

Possibly related posts

Firefox 3.5

2009-06-30T18:21:00+00:00

Firefox 3.5 has become a reality. I have been looking forward to it. I want to use it. I even went for a monment back to Vista just to install it...

As I am running Ubuntu, Firefox is the default browser but the update manager/ does not have the new Firefox available for me. I expected that Firefox would work the same but so far it has not. I would love to see the same usability on Ubuntu.
Thanks,
GerardM

إدعموا غزة يا أصحاب المواقع و المدونات

2009-06-30T14:53:13+00:00

إخواننا المسلمون و العرب يموتون بالمئات و يجرحون بالآلاف في المحرقة الصهيونية الغاصبة على قطاع غزة, و كالعادة لا يوجد من يتحرك لتغيير الوضع إلا بضعة صواريخ أطلقها المجاهدين نسأل الله أن ينصرهم و آل غزة أجمعين.

هذا "الكود" مخصص لأصحاب المواقع و المدونات أرجوا أن يتم وضعه في مواقعم و مدوناتهم و مثال عليه موجود هنا في مدونتي, نسأل الله العافية لأهل غزة:

<div style="direction:ltr;float:top left; position:absolute; overflow:visible; left:0px; top:0px; height:140px; width:129px;">
<a href="http://www.freegaza.ps/" target="_blank">
<img src="http://i42.servimg.com/u/f42/12/22/35/22/18620010.gif" border="0" alt="قفوا مع اهلكم في غزة"></a></div>

حتى الآن 350 شهيد و أكثر من 1500 جريح, ألا متى تستفيق الأمة الإسلامية على جروحها؟!

فيديو أهداف مباراة مصر والجزائر

2009-06-30T14:50:52+00:00

يوم الأحد الماضي إنتهت مباراة المنتخب الشقيقين مصر و الجزائر بفوز "محاربي الصحراء" على "الفراعنة" بنتيجة 3 - 1 في المباراة المقامة ضمن فعالية الجولة الثانية من دوري المجموعات الخاص بالتصفيات المزدوجة لكأس العالم في جنوب أفريقيا و كأس أفريقيا في أنغولا العام المقبل, لهذا أحببت مشاركتم بالفيديو الخاص بالأهداف الأربعة المسجلة خلال المباراة:

سجل للجزائر كل من كريم مطمور في الدقيقة 60 وعبد القادر عزال بعد الهدف الأول بحوالي 4 دقائق ورفيق جبور في الدقيقة 80 أما هدف مصر الوحيد فقد سجله محمد أبوتريكة قبل 4 دقائق من نهاية المباراة. مبارك للجزائر هذا الفوز و "هاردلك" لمنتخب مصر الشقيق.

Twitvid.io, أدرج ملفات فيديو على صفحتك في تويتر

2009-06-30T12:25:38+00:00

تويت-فيد.يو هي خدمة ويب 2.0 تعتبر مساعدة لخدمة تويتر, و الخدمة التي يقدمها موقع تويت-فيد.يو هي إمكانية إرسال وتوتات فيديو إلى حساب المستخدم في تويتر و توفير رابط خاص و ذلك للعرضها على موقع تويت-فيد.يو. يوفر الموقع بعض الخيارات الإضافية مثل إمكانية إرسال ملفات الفيديو عبر رسالة هاتف جوال. بإختصار تكمن فائدة الموقع الرئيسية في نقطتين هما:

توفير مشغل ميديا فلاشي (كما يوتيوب أو أي موقع مشابه) و صفحة خاصة لكل فيديو.
صنع و إرسال وصلة خاصة تربط صفحة الفيديو بصفحة الحساب في تويتر و ذلك لتمكين المتابعين من الإطلاع على الفيديو المستهدف.

بفضل هذه الخدمة أصبح يمكن لمستخدمي تويتر مشاركة ملفات الفيديو المفضلة لديهم بطريقة سهلة و سريعة و بدون تدخلات و تعديلات يدوية إذ أن بوت الموقع يقوم بإضافة الرابط تلقائيا بعد رفع ملف الفيديو.

الويكيميديون يقولون نعم لرخصة CC-BY-SA

2009-06-30T12:23:43+00:00

أعلنت اليوم مؤسسة ويكيميديا عن نتائج التصويت الذي إنتهى في 3 مايو الجاري و الذي يطلب من المستخدمين التصويت على مستقبل حقوق النشر في مشاريع المؤسسة (ويكيبيديا, ويكي الأخبار, ويكاموس.. إلخ.) و ذلك بتحويل الرخصة من رخصة جنو للوثائق العمومية 1.2 إلى رخصة التشارك الإبداعي النسبة-الحفاظ على الرخصة 3.0, كانت نسبة المشاركة في الوسط الويكيميدي معتبرة حيث سجل 17462 تصويت. و قد تمت رعاية التصويت بواسطة مؤسسة SPI.

تقول مؤسسة ويكيميديا أن التغييرإلى رخصة BY-SA سيؤثر إيجاباً في عملية الإستفادة من المواد الحرة الموجودة في مختلف مشاريعها. أما بالنسبة للنتائج فقد بلغ عدد المصوتين 17462 مُصوِّت أغلبهم صوتوا بنعم لهذا التغيير و قد كانت النتائج التي سجلتها المؤسسة كما يأتي:

13242 قالوا نعم, (75.8%).
1829 قالوا لا, (10.5%).
2391 محايدون, (13.7%).

و بما أن أصوات الحياد لا تحتسب فكانت النسبة المئوية النهائية للتصويت هي 87.9% بنعم و 12.1% بلا, بإجمالي مصوتين عدده 15071 مُصوِّت, و ذلك لعدم إحتساب أصوت المحايدين. و بإختصار شديد فإن أغلبية المجتمع الويكيميدي يؤيدون هذا التحديث.

الإمتحانات..

2009-06-30T12:22:35+00:00

عند الإمتحان (إمتحان نهاية العام) يكرم المرء أو يهان.. لتمر العطلة مثل "الزفت" أو مثل "الفَل" :P أسئل الله التوفيق لنفسي (جيد لقد إنتهى الإمتحان و الحمد لله على توفيقي, لمن لديه إمتحان أرجوا له التوفيق) و أعتذر عن عدم التواصل مع العالم الإنترنتي خلال الأيام القادمة حتى يوم الإثنين القادم أين ستبدأ العطلة الطويلة.

ديبيان 5, الإنتظار القاتل ينتهي

2009-06-30T12:21:47+00:00

رغم أنني حاليا من مستخدمي توزيعة من فصيلة دم أخرى و هي ماندريفا, لكني لا زلت متابعا لديبيان و هي الأم لكثير من التوزيعات الناجحة مثل أوبونتو و مابيس و نوبكس. نعم بعد حوالي 4 سنوات من الإنتظار صدرت أخيرا النسخة 5 (ليني) المستقرة.

و هذه بعض الروابط المهمة لكل من يريد تجربة النسخة 5 و أيضا لمن يريد الترقية:

أخيرا أتمنى لكل من يريد تجربة التوزيعة التوفيق, مواجهة المشاكل سواء في التنصيب أو في الإعدادات أو حصول إنهيارات أمر غير وارد خصوصا و أن هذه التوزيعة من أكثر التوزيعات إستقرارا.

Chess.com: إستمتع بالشطرنج!

2009-06-30T12:20:29+00:00

هذا الموقع مميز! مجتمع كامل للعب الشطرنج على الخط, و ليس هذا فقط! بل موسوعة شطرنج و منتديات و نظام للفرق و للدعوات و دردشة حول الشطرنج! بصراحة الموقع مذهل و خدماته رائعة و تصميمه أروع, و لا أبالغ إن قلت أنه لم يسبق أن وجد موقع ويب للشطرنج بهذه الإحترافية من قبل!

تتنوع الأقسام و الخدمات و وسائل الترفيه فيه و لكني سأذكر بإختصار شديد أهم الخدمات التي وجدتها في هذا الموقع:

لعبة الشطرنج على الخط: و في هذا القسم يمكن تحدي الأعضاء الآخرين عن طريق إضافة لعبة جديدة, الملاحظة أنه هذا النوع من التحدي يأخذ أياما حيث يمكن إستئناف جميع المباريات و بهذا تتاح للاعب فرصة تسجيل الخروج من الموقع دون أن يتأثر التحدي القائم.
لعبة الشطرنج المباشرة: و في هذا القسم يتاح اللعب مباشرة (Online) و لكن يجب توفر جافا في جهاز المستعمل ليتمكن من إستعمال هذه الخدمة.
قسم التنزيل: و في هذا القسم توجد ملفات و برمجيات متعددة, أهم برنامج لفت إنتباهي هو ذلك الذي يسمح بلعب مباريات من برمجية تعمل على الجوال!
الخارطة: و هي تستعمل خرائط جوجل للتبليغ الأعضاء عن أماكن المستخدمين الآخرين حول العالم الذي قاموا بزيارة الموقع.
شيسبيديا: هي موسوعة حول الشطرنج مقدمة مجانا مع الموقع! ليست غنية بالمواد و لكن أظن بأنها جيدة مقارنة ببدايتها.

طبعا لازلت هناك الكثير من الخدمات الأخرى في الموقع و التي لم أتحدث عنها و لكن أكتفي بالقول: زوروا الموقع و سيعجبكم!. ملاحظة أخيرة: الرابط في الأعلى هو للتسجيل عن طريقي فالذي لم يرد أن يمنحني بعض النقاط الإضافية فليدخل من عنوان الموقع العادي :).

86.000 مقال في ويكيبيديا العربية!

2009-06-30T12:18:57+00:00

ستصل مساء اليوم ويكيبيديا العربية إلى 86 ألف مقال, لا تزال الموسوعة الحرة في قسمها العربي تحتاج إلى المزيد من الجهد لتصل إلى 100 ألف مقال و تتجاوز العديد من الويكيبيديات الأخرى. خصوصا العبرية و بعض الويكيبيديات الأخرى التي لغتها لأقليات في العالم.

نظرة على eyeOS, نظام التشغيل عبر الويب!

2009-06-30T12:17:46+00:00

eyeOS هو واحد من أكثر أنظمة التشغيل على الويب تطورا و نضوجا, و هو يدعم الكثير من لغات العام من بينها اللغة العربية, و هو يضم باقة مميزة من برامج عالية الجودة و تلبي كافة الإحتياجات(محررات نصوص, متصفح إنترنت, ألعاب.. إلخ). التسجيل في نظام التشغيل هذا سهل جدا و ستحصل في الحال على نظام تشغيل متكامل يعمل من متصحفك, مثل هذه الأنظمة تساعد الأشخاص غير المستقرين على حاسوب واحد أو لأولئك الذين يتواجدون في الجامعات أو المقرات العمومية.

بالنسبة لمن أراد تركيب مثل هذا البرنامج على موقعه الشخصي, يمكنه زيارة موقع تطوير نظام eyeOS. تحميل البرنامج متاح من الموقع نفسه و بالمناسبة هذا النظام حر و مفتوح المصدر! المجتمع الخاص بالنظام نشيط نوعا و يمكن الحصول على الدعم عبر قناة eyeOS أو عبر المنتديات.

هناك العديد من الأنظمة التي تعمل على الويب مثل eyeOS أهمها Desktop2 المدعم من طرف شركة Sun Microsystems و لكن يبقى eyeOS هو الأفضل في نظري.

Licensing update rolled out in all Wikimedia wikis

2009-06-30T01:33:20+00:00

On June 15, the site-footer and various other messages in the English Wikipedia were changed to reflect the licensing change that the Wikimedia community overwhelmingly approved last month: from the GNU Free Documentation License as the primary content license to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA). Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig tweeted that it was the “first copyright message ever to bring tears” to his eyes, and Mike Linksvayer called it a “free culture win” in the Creative Commons blog.

A few other Wikimedia wikis and projects have followed in a bottom-up manner, but today we standardized the site language to ensure that all our projects in all languages reflect the new terms (see this message for some more internals about the process). Want to translate text from the Italian to the Spanish Wikipedia? Both are CC-BY-SA. Use content from Wiktionary? It’s CC-BY-SA. A textbook from the French Wikibooks? CC-BY-SA.

Perhaps the most significant reason to choose CC-BY-SA as our primary content license was to be compatible with many of the other admirable endeavors out there to share and develop free knowledge: projects like Citizendium (CC-BY-SA), Google Knol (a mix of CC licenses, including CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), WikiEducator (CC-BY-SA), the Encylcopedia of Earth (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of the Cosmos (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of Life (a mix of CC licenses), and many others. These communities have come up with their own rules of engagement, their own models for sharing and aggregating knowledge, but they’re committed to the free dissemination of information. Now this information can flow freely to and from Wikimedia projects, without unnecessary legal boundaries.

This is beginning to happen. A group of English Wikipedia volunteers have created a WikiProject Citizendium Porting, for example, to ensure that high quality information developed by the Citizendium community can be made available through Wikipedia as well, with proper attribution.

The world of free knowledge doesn’t end with Wikipedia, and it shouldn’t. Indeed, license compatibility is just one part of a functioning, decentralized free knowledge ecosystem. Incidentally, with the exception of Google Knol and EOL, all of the aforementioned projects use MediaWiki, the open source collaboration software developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation – so, we are well-positioned to help further develop this ecosystem of knowledge in the future.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Volume 5, Issue 26 - 29 June, 2009

2009-06-30T01:24:20+00:00

News and notes: Jackson’s death, new data center, more
Wikipedia in the news: Google News Support, Wired editor plagiarizes Wikipedia, Rohde’s kidnapping, Michael Jackson
Discussion report: Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations
Features and admins: Approved this week
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation

أحسن مواقع التورنت لسنة 2008

2009-06-29T23:40:54+00:00

تم الإعلان عن ترتيب أحسن مواقع التورنت لهذا العام, و الذي شهد صعود مواقع و نزول فجائي لمواقع كبيرة في الترتيب و إليكم قائمة أفضل 20 موقع تورنت التي تداولتها المجلات و المدونات الأجنبية.

BiteNova: الموقع الأول في الترتيب و هو مفاجئة الموسم, بت نوفا هو موقع تورنت هولندي.
TorrentPortal.
Demonoid: و هو من أشهر و أنظف و أسرع مواقع التورنت عالميا, و للأسف الشديد الموقع يغلق التسجيل في الوقت الحالي.
IsoHunt: حل رابعا هذا العام, ليس لدي معلومات عنه و المشكلة أن الموقع لا يفتح عندي!
BitSoup: أحد المواقع المميزة و الشبيهة بموقع Demonoid, و التسجيل مقيد بعدد معين من الأعضاء و لم يتسنى لي التسجيل في هذا الموقع أيضا.
TorrentScan: و هو موقع تورنت يميزه دعم البحث بطرق عديدة من طريقة الوسوم (Tags).
TorrentMatrix.
YouTorrent: يحاول تقليد موقع Youtube في الإسم! و هذا الموقع لا يزال في مرحلته التجريبية إلى الآن. واجهة الموقع خفيفة و بسيطة و هي عبارة عن واجهة بحث.
Torrentz: موقع تورنت مخصص للأفلام و الموسيقى و الألعاب المقرصنة, و هو ليس نظيفا.
Torrents.to.
FileMP3: هذا الموقع يغلق التسجيل حاليا, و هو ليس مفيدا جدا.
Mininova: و هو عملاق التورنت الذي أدهشنا بسقوطه إلى المركز 12, يحتوي هذا الموقع على مئات الآلاف من ملفات التورنت و هو يعتبر كقاعدة بيانات لملفات التورنت على الإنترنت.
TorrentSpy: لقد تم إغلاق هذا الموقع و ستجدون رسالة الوداع على الصفحة الرئيسية.
TorrentReactor: موقع لأخبار التورنت و توجد فيه بعض الملفات.
TorrentBox: و هو صندوق تورنت و إسم على مسمى!
BTJunkie.
Torrent Typhoon: هذا الموقع متوقف مؤقتا, و أصحابه يعرضونه للبيع. هل تريد شرائه؟!
Yotoshi.
Thepiratebay: و هو واجهة بحث عن ملفات التورنت.
BitTorrent: الموقع الرسمي لمصمم بت تورنت بايثون و يحتوي ملفات تورنت و برنامج التورنت الشهير الخاص بالموقع و الذي يعمل على بعض أنظمة التشغيل مثل جنو/لينكس و مايكروسوفت ويندوز.

هذا بإختصار ترتيب عام 2008 لأشهر مواقع التورنت, ربما ترتيب العام 2009 القادم سيشهد تغيرات من جراء المنافسة الشرسة التي تعيشها المواقع الأوائل في هذا التصنيف.

If the media don't report it, then it didn't happen

2009-06-29T19:53:42+00:00

Wikipedia has deliberately kept news of a New York Times reporter’s kidnap from its site. The reporter had been taken by the Taliban, and by colluding with 35 major news agencies, the Times managed to prevent the information from being disclosed from the general population. This media blackout was initiated with the hope of securing the reporters release by minimizing publicity about his location and reducing the possibility of increased coverage being used to increase in turn the possibility of the reporter being used as a “bargaining chip” by his captors.

There were dozens of appearances of the information, as the detail was reported by a few minor news agencies not privy to the embargo. Eventually, Jimmy Wales himself (after being asked desperately by a Times editor) stepped in by asking an admin to block the page so that the news would never make it live on the encyclopedia. The attempt was successful: all news agencies involved, as well as Wikipedia, managed to keep the news under wraps to a sufficient extent that the reporter was released. Everyone’s happy, right? After all, several competing organizations, as well as a website that has built a reputation as one of the hardest to control on the entire Internet, came together to ultimately save someone’s life.

Well, no. At least, not quite. There is no doubt that the actions taken by the news agencies to save someone’s life were commendable. Even the cover-up by Wikipedia is laudable. However, Wikipedia is an entirely different kettle of fish to news agencies. Newspapers and TV channels have always had bias, and always have – it is an inevitable side-effect of commercially-owned, politically-active companies. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has no such deficiency, and indeed prides itself on supposedly being free of any prejudice or bias point of view, or any particular allegiance to one political party or other. Does this mean, then, that Wikipedia (or more specifically, its founder and main man Jimbo Wales) go against its principles and policies by being part of the cover-up?

Wales’ defence centred on the fact that as the news wasn’t being reported by any of the media news agencies, any news confirming the kidnapping would not have come from a reliable source, thus under Wikipedia rules not having a high enough probability of being accurate information (if you put aside for the moment the fact that Wales himself knew for certain the kidnapping had taken place). Thus, even if there hadn’t been any cover-up on Wikipedia’s end, the information wouldn’t have remained on the site for long anyway. Wales made a point of saying, and indeed he is quoted in the NYT article on the subject, that “[W]e were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source ... I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.” What would Wales have done if it this hadn’t been the case? In my opinion, Wikipedia would have had no choice but to include the news. If it was appearing in reliable sources, then the information would be readily accessible, and there would be minimal further harm in Wikipedia publishing the news.

The point I want to make here is less to do with Wikipedia, but more about the media in general: If the media don’t report an incident, then to all intents and purposes, that incident didn’t happen. As they say, history is always written by the victors; and the same kind of theory applies here. If the media decide not to cover something, then no-one finds out about it, and Wikipedia, the puppydog that trails keenly “reliable sources” is forced into following their lead. NPR reported Poynter Institute journalism ethics lecturer Kelly McBride as saying "I find it a little disturbing, because it makes me wonder what else 40 international news organizations have agreed not to tell the public". I find this comment a little naive: as I have already have said, media agencies are renowned for bias. Sure, this varies from provider to provider, so that information always gets reported in one form or another. But the media in general have been slow to report the takeoff in online journalism, for fear that their own institutions go bust – just one example where media outlets can band together to try and influence public opinion. And there are other instances, too: the government are constantly enforcing media blackouts to protect the safety of its armed forces, for example. So, in short, this incident has highlighted the power of the media, and the inevitability of Wikipedia having to follow suit.

For Wikipedia’s part, other serious issues are raised. If the rules are willing to be bent here, has a precedent been set for their breakage in other areas, at other times? Yes, the cause was a good one, but what is the point of having rules if they aren’t followed? Jimbo Wales has shown, as well as once again his power within the Wikipedia community, that rules can be broken. This can be good thing, as the rules are often criticized, but a rule, once broken, is always broken again.

خدمات مراسلة فورية من الويب!

2009-06-29T19:22:44+00:00

هذا الموضوع كنت قد كتبته سابقا و لكنه ضاع و الله المستعان, سأعيد كتابته من جديد لأني أعلم أن هناك الكثير ممن تهمهم هذه الخدمات خصوصا أنها تتعلق بالمراسلة الفورية.

الجميع تقريبا يستعمل المراسلة الفورية للتواصل عبر الإنترنت فهناك من يستعمل ويندوز لايف ماسنجر و ياهو! ماسنجر و آخرين يستخدمون إيم و سكايبي و محادثة جوجل, على كل سنلقي الضوء في هذا الموضوع حول مواقع تقدم هذه الخدمات عبر الويب.

Ebuddy: موقع رائع! و تصميمه أنيق, تستطيع من خلاله الدخول إلى مجموعة آي-بودي و أيضا إلى لايف و ياهو! ماسنجر و إيم و محادثة جوجل, تم تطويره بشكل كبير مؤخرا حتى أن واجهته أصبحت تشبه واجهة البرنامج الأصلي كثيرا.

Meebo: مثل الموقع السابق و لكنه يدعم المزيد من البروتوكولات (ICQ, Jabber) و هو يستخدم لغة Ajax في ولوجه للحسابات و لهذا تحس بثقله أحيانا, حاليا يقدم الموقع خدمة MeeboMe التي ربما سأتحدث عنها لاحقا.

iLoveIM: مثل الموقعين السابقين و يتميز الموقع بألوانه الباردة!

Mibbit: و هو يقدم خدمة الولوج إلى شبكات آي.آر.سي عبر الويب! و هي خدمة فريدة, يدعم الدخول أيضا إلى ياهو! ماسنجر و لكنها خدمة ثانوية.

Web2Messenger: هذه الخدمة تمكن الناس من أن يرسلوا رسائل إلى ويندوز لايف ماسنجر الخاص بك بدون أن يعرفوا عنوانك! بمجرد التسجيل في الموقع ستصلك إضافة من بوت الموقع و هو الذي يتكلف بإيصال جميع الرسائل إلى حسابك فورا. هذه هي صفحتي في الموقع.

هذه المواقع من أهم الأمثلة في الويب 2.0, الذي شهد تطورا كبيرا في ميدان تصميم و إخراج المواقع بالإضافة إلى تبلور فكرة التفاعلية و بناء الزائر لما يراه.

السلام عليكم يا عالم!

2009-06-29T19:19:04+00:00

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم, أخيرا قمت بإفتتاح المدونة و سأقوم بالكتابة في مواضيع كثيرة.. أرجوا أن تنال على إستحسانكم, شكرا على زيارتكم و الآن ربما سأذهب لأرتب بعض المقالات و التدوينات لمدونتي الجديدة , مشكورين كثيرا على زيارتي هنا!

Why Email Isn’t Ideal for Group Input

2009-06-29T16:49:11+00:00

From an Apple support discussion on why sharing documents online via iWork.com is better than emailing them as attachments:

I don’t need to send to 20 other people, then get 20 mails back and read through those 20 mails. At the same time, each of those 20 has no idea what the other 19 are thinking and thus means there will be many overlapped ideas in those 20 mails I have to go through.

That nicely sums it up.

AboutUs Turns Three! Let Us Buy You a Beer

2009-06-29T16:00:17+00:00

Though it admittedly passed without much fanfare (yet!), last week marked the third year since AboutUs.org went live to the world. Though the ideas and collaborative team behind the site had been percolating for years beforehand, it was on June 20th 2006 that we came in to existence.

Time flies when you’ve got your nose to the grindstone, and since those first days, we’ve grown to become a venture-backed startup of more than 30 employees (and soon to be more!) that has built a site of 14 million pages.

But we didn’t do it alone. AboutUs is a community-built endeavor, and as a way of saying thanks for being along for the ride, we’d like to buy you a beer.

At July 17th’s Beer & Blog in Portland, we’ll be picking up the tab, so be sure to join us at the Green Dragon from 4-6pm. Beer & Blog is a venue where we’ve received much sage advice over the years, and we’re delighted to be its benefactor for a change.

Jim McGreevey’s new mission with Exodus Transitional Community

2009-06-29T15:55:53+00:00

Jean Coaxum, one of the staff members of Exodus Transitional Community, stands outside the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem with Jim McGreevey.

Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, who riveted the nation when he came out as a gay American in 2004, is now the symbol of fallen Governors. When Eliot Spitzer stepped down from the New York governorship in the midst of his own sex scandal, Spitzer and his wife were even charged with copying the McGreeveys’ fashion (it is uncanny).

The comparisons between Spitzer and McGreevey were apt, since they were both active Democratic politicians in neighboring states around the same time, both were frequently mentioned as strong Presidential contenders, and both of their sex scandals were seen as hubris personified.

With South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, whose Argentinian affair is not only hubris but also hypocrisy personified, McGreevey emerged again to offer advice that he should proceed with humility.

“I’m filled with a sense of pain and anguish for him and for his family,” McGreevey said in an interview. “I think it was a very human moment.”

Sanford is only one in a recent list of “Love Govs” who have admitted to affairs. They include the aforementioned McGreevey and Spitzer; Jim Gibbons of Nevada; and David Paterson of New York.

I have known Jim McGreevey since 2007, when I photographed him as part of my public art project that Wikipedia hosts. At the time I was attending Saint Bartholomew’s in Manhattan on one of my many failed quests to find spirituality. St. Bart’s also happened to be where McGreevey, his partner Mark O’Donnell and his daughter Jacqueline attended service. One day I approached him to ask if I could do his portrait. He still possessed the boyish good looks and charm that were evident even at the height of his scandal.

However, he possessed more than that: he also displayed humility and an inner peace. Since that time we have become good friends.

He is in a healthy, happy relationship with Mark as he studies to become an Episcopal priest. He is giving back to others who have made mistakes, often because they were caught up in the circumstances of their lives.

Jim McGreevey and black Jesus at the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem. Click on the image to see more.

Gay people mostly forgave McGreevey for his affair when it came to light five years ago. We are well aware of the many ludicrous situations that occur because men, particularly in McGreevey’s generation, have been forced to live their lives in the closet. That he is living such an honorable and giving life freed from the shame of the closet is testament to the real Jim McGreevey.

McGreevey volunteers at Exodus MinistriesTransitional Community at the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem, New York, which tries to help newly-released prisoners learn life skills and handle the significant challenges that ex-convicts face. It’s not just job-hunting. One of the photographs below shows Jim helping one young man figure out how to set up a free e-mail account on Yahoo. With limited access to computers, the guy had no idea how to do this. This is not atypical. We take this kind of knowledge for granted, assuming everyone knows how to set up free e-mail. They don’t.

The gifts that McGreevey brings to these formerly-incarcerated men and women are vast. He still retains many of the contacts and friendships in government that he had when he was Governor, which has been a Godsend to a program that needs state assistance to function. McGreevey knows how the system works; he knows resources that are available to these people; and he is gifted with an ability to teach and reach them.

Many of these men and women don’t know who McGreevey is; they were not exactly following politics before their imprisonment. Nevertheless, it was obvious that they sensed in Jim that he knows tremendous mistakes, and he knows how to overcome them.

Of course, the tabloids, the Mark Sanfords and the Larry Craigs of the world will probably never forgive him. But who cares. Certainly not the men in these photos below, who see the same McGreevey that I see, and not the caricature who exists in the pages of the press.

UPDATE: The correct name is Exodus Transitional Community. There is a Dallas-based group named Exodus Ministries that does prisoner rehabilitation as well (You may remember Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers served on the Dallas group’s board, which was mistakenly thought to be the ex-gay group Exodus International). I was told they are affiliated with Dallas, but then later told that they are not.

Alvin Williams, one of Exodus’ intake counselors, talks to newly-released men about readjusting to life outside of prison, and the services that Exodus has to offer them.

McGreevey talks to the young men about life skills and how to re-engage society.

McGreevey and an Exodus counselor help a young man set up a free e-mail account. Many of these people have challenges, such as lack of access to computers, that many of us can not fathom.

McGreevey stands in front of James de la Vega’s East Harlem mural of legendary Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri.

These images are licensed Creative Commons and are part of a public art project. Click here to learn more.

Possibly related posts

All Quiet on the Waziri Front

2009-06-29T15:44:05+00:00

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times today on investigative journalist David Rohde - who was kidnapped in Afghanistan last year and who escaped last week from his captors in Waziristan, in northern Pakistan - and the efforts to extend the media blackout on news of the kidnapping to his Wikipedia article.

The blackout was orchestrated by the New York Times Company and was said to have involved forty international news agencies, from NPR to al-Jazeera. NYT personnel "believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde's value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival", the story says, quoting Rohde's colleague Michael Moss as saying "I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be".

Along with staff at other news agencies, NYT personnel contacted Jimmy Wales too, who passed the matter along to a small group of administrators who reverted mentions of the kidnapping and protected the article a number of times over the following months. Michael Moss also apparently edited the article to emphasise Rohde's Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the Srebrenica massacre, as well as his work on Guantanamo Bay, believing that if his captors read the article they might view him as more sympathetic towards Muslims.

Jimbo acknowledges in the NYT piece that the matter was made easier by the lack of reliable sources reporting the kidnapping - a consequence of the blackout - which meant that the biographies of living persons policy could operate to keep any references to the kidnapping out of the article. The policy, of course, was originally intended to keep fabricated material out of articles, but it worked equally well to assist the blackout in this case.

The ethics of the blackout have come into question following Rohde's escape. NPR reported Poynter Institute journalism ethics lecturer Kelly McBride as saying "I find it a little disturbing, because it makes me wonder what else 40 international news organizations have agreed not to tell the public". Dan Murphy at the Christian Science Monitor says that the question of whether the press has a double standard in keeping quiet about their own while regularly reporting on other kidnappings will likely become part of the debate. Greg Mitchell, the editor of industry journal Editor & Publisher, details that organisation's internal debates and ultimate decision to adhere to the blackout. Mitchell raises a potential competing public interest argument, that information about events such as kidnappings in a certain area could, in some cases, help protect the public (though the average NYT reader doesn't hang out near Kabul that often - it might help protect other journalists though).

On the Wikipedia front, this is an interesting biographies of living persons case because every aspect of it involves journalists, who as a profession develop, apply and teach a whole suite of ethical principles governing their work, principles that many have suggested Wikipedia ought to adapt or learn from.

It's regularly true that hard cases make bad policy, and it is so here: the kidnapping was said to have been reported by an unnamed Afghani news agency, and apparently by Italian agency Adnkronos too; the existence of reliable sources on the matter (which I cannot verify due to absent or broken links) throws into doubt the legitimacy of enforcing the blackout on Wikipedia.

This may well put a wedge between two similar but distinct camps of support for the biographies of living persons policy: those who believe that such articles should be written from a "do no harm" perspective, and those who have a similar sympathy but only go so far as supporting a strict, immediatist adherence to ordinary content policy (instead of the typical eventualist stance), and no further.

Why do so many negative people edit Wikipedia?

2009-06-29T15:35:48+00:00

Lately I've noticed a several people around Wikipedia whose only purpose seems to be to criticise and take offence at every single thing that goes on. These people range from new editors, to admins who have been here for years.

For example: there are numerous editors with a ridiculous idea that admins are out to "get them". To them, Wikipedia is an online battle: the fight between the editors and IRC admins... utter nonsense. It is certainly childish playground mentality at best. There are no gangs, for goodness sake.

There are other editors whose purpose is to act like some sort of martyr amongst their friends. Deliberate trolling is stuck up for under the guise of "opinions are allowed", and when the troll is blocked, the troll is made out to be a hero. Madness.

Then there's the infamous requests for adminship page. This is the best place to find negative people - just look at the oppose column on any random RFA! OK, not all opposes are dumb. I actually saw a fairly decent oppose today, based on age of all things. It's fine to oppose people - I've done it myself, numerous times. The problem is, the ideology several people have. They actually come to the RFA looking for reasons to say "no". Unbelievable - it's not like we have a limit on how many admins we can have. What's wrong with being positive, and looking for reasons to say yes? I simply can't understand the negativity of some people. And then, there's the opposes themselves. Let's face it, many opposes are scraping the barrel. But when such opposes are as blunt as "No frickin' way", we have problems. What an insulting way to say no. How completely unnecessary. Yet, people do it.

The negative people on Wikipedia are thankfully a minority. Most of us edit for fun, and have a good time doing it. We don't go looking for fights, or enemies to make, and we get on writing articles or whatnot. I hope these negative people aren't as angry and sour in real life.

The Governance Model of Wikipedia

2009-06-29T13:03:50+00:00

The following is a guest post of sorts: Barry Kort wrote it for a Google Knol. They're his views, and not necessarily mine. Content reproduced under CC-BY-3.0

The governance model of Wikipedia was so anachronistic that it took me over a year to place it in the timeline of historic governance models adopted at various times in the annals of human history.

The thing that stymied me was the prominence of blocking and banning as the primary tool of governance. I simply couldn’t place that among the recognized tools of governance in any historic context.

And then I happened to take a look at the oldest surviving account of secular law — the Code of Hammurabi of 1760 BC.

Of the 282 laws that Hammurabi of Mesopotamia carved into the stone tablets, take note of the very first one:

1. If any one ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death.

Evidently, banning (ostracism) was a common practice in the tribal cultures in the Middle East some 4000 years ago, at the dawn of civilization. Capricious and spurious banning was evidently such a common and egregious abuse of tribal overlords that Hammurabi made it a capital offense to ban someone without proving just cause.

And yet, on Wikipedia, indefinite blocks and bans without due process are a common occurrence. That is to say, the prevailing governance model of Wikipedia corresponds to a pre-Hammurabic tribal ochlocracy that is so anachronistic, it predates the advent of the Rule of Law.

When Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders drafted the US Constitution, one of the provisions they put in Article One was a prohibition against Bills of Attainder. A Bill of Attainder is the technical term in the law for declaring a person to be an outlaw (without respect to having violated any specific law that applies equally to everyone). The Founders excluded Bills of Attainder from the tools of governance because 4000 years of political history had demonstrated that such a toxic practice is corrosive and ridden with corruption, and invariably sinks any government that comes to rely on it.

The irony here is that Wikipedia purports to be the “sum of all knowledge” with an educational mission that reaches out to students, teachers, and scholars around the world. And yet those exercising power in Wikipedia have not yet learned the oldest and most profound lessons in the annals of human history — lessons enshrined in the first written law and in the first article of the US Constitution.

The consequence of adopting such an anachronistic governance model is that Wikipedians are fated to relive and reify the long-forgotten lessons of history. They relive those lessons by reprising the same kind of political dramas that fill the history books since the dawn of civilization.

The anachronistic governance model which Jimbo Wales foolishly and mindlessly introjected into Wikipedia is simply not a sustainable model in this day and age. Summary and capricious banning wasn’t even a sustainable model some 3768 years ago when Hammurabi first singled it out as an unacceptable practice in a civilized culture.

So what to do about it? The answer can be found in the second law of Hammurabi’s Code. As Hammurabi advises, the solution is to tell them to go jump in the lake.

Or as they say in Yiddish, “Nem zich a vaneh!“

Michael Jackson

2009-06-29T12:50:31+00:00

Image by manfrys via Flickr

So apparently some guy called Michael Jackson died the other day. Several questions were inevitably raised from the passing: was the death preventable, and did lawyers’ warnings to stay off the drugs go unheeded? What will happen to the rights of the Beatles music, which Jackson acquired when he bought ATV Music Publishing for $47.5 million in 1985? For the Wikipedians among us, however, there is only one really important question: how did the illustrious online encyclopedia deal with the death?

Answer: not too bad, actually. Whilst it’s true that the site did go down for a while, with several users reportedly encountering 404s and other infamous error messages, it would be unfair to blame Wikimedia for this when the death of such a famous celebrity tested the entire internet to its limits. There are other angles, to analyse though. When the news first broke, the Wikipedia article on Jackson was one of the first sites to spread the information. However (and this will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone even faintly familiar with the way the encyclopedia, or indeed any wiki, works) edit wars broke out. As the news was in its infancy, understandable concerns were raised about the verifiability of the information. After all, there have been several famous incidents in the past where a hilarious prankster has altered a Biography of a Living Person (Wikipedease for an article about a person who’s still alive) to say that said person had in fact died several years ago.

Normally, edit wars are controllable. They are an unavoidable side-effect of real-time collaboration. On the day of Michael Jackson’s death, however, normal rules did not apply. Sentences inserted claiming his death were removed, and then reinserted, and then removed, ad nauseam. At other times, by completely different people, all occurrences of the word ‘is’ were replaced with the word ‘was’, and ‘his most recent album’ changed to ‘his final album’. In short, more than a hundred people, with varying degrees of intelligence, experience with Wikipedia, news of Jackson’s death, and bias towards the man himself (several people who edited the page were simply refusing to believe the news) were attacking the article all within the space of a few minutes. In the majority of cases, huge edit conflicts occurred as multiple people attempted to alter the article simultaneously. All this came at a time when people were understandably turning to Wikipedia for solid, trustable information on what exactly was going on. Wikipedia, as a general rule of thumb, doesn’t report things that aren’t true, right? Unfortunately, the end result for the casual reader was less than ideal: contradictions within the article itself, with opposing phrases only a few sentences apart, and fundamental details about the event changing every time you hit refresh.

So what needs to change, if anything? It’s clear that Wikipedia really isn’t able to cope with sudden news which mostly comes from unreliable sources. One option would be to automatically lock articles which are experiencing an edit meltdown, with the version before the war took place being shown. Alternatively, using the flag system, contributors could draft a new version behind the scenes, and when the facts have been established, this version could be opened up for consumption by the general public. The problem with both these methods, though, is that the public are looking for immediate, but correct, information. At the moment, thought, this simply looks like an impossible feat from Wikipedia.

HDTV and the video look

2009-06-28T18:31:17+00:00

I spent some time last night playing with my parents’ shiny new HDTV, which puts my 2005-vintage 26″ set to shame.

Pretty nice set; 40-something inch, 1080p, 120 Hz whatchamahooie, and you can plug in a USB stick full of JPEGs and force your family to watch your vacation photos. Nice!

It seems to be all the rage on new sets to have motion interpolation which can take 24-frame-sourced content (feature films and most US drama and sitcom TV shows) and smooth out the frame-to-frame motion, making it look more like 60-field video. Lots of higher-end sets advertise 120 Hz or even 240 Hz, which honestly seems excessive to me — the human eye can’t distinguish much more than 60 frames per second.

I’m a bit torn; on the one hand, the faster frame rate makes motion look much more vivid and realistic from any objective point of view. On the other hand, audiences have been trained over the last few decades to associate the video look with “cheesier” programming — soaps, reality shows, etc — while “serious” programs are shot on film at 24fps, making them feel more like a big-budget feature film… even to the point that lots of money was spent developing HD video cameras that could shoot at the slower, less realistic 24fps instead of HD’s native 60!

We stumbled into Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo of all things on HBO, and ran it for a while just to get a feel for the set. At first it drove me nuts seeing a movie I’d already seen on film looking distinctly like HD video, but after a half hour I got quite used to it and rather grew to like it. Of course as a former cinema-television student I’m extra-sensitized to this stuff — my wife immediately took to the more vivid display and commented on how much better it looked than when we’d seen it in the theater!

Looks like the mass audiences are happy to embrace high-motion video… I wonder if the long-standing holdover of the “film look” over the last decade was driven more by the oversensitized film geeks in the industry than any actual audience comparison…

Let’s learn a lesson here with our software development as well — those of us who’ve been nose-deep in web sites and software UI for years aren’t necessarily the most qualified to tell what our actual users are going to be most comfortable with.

More thoughts on book sprints

2009-06-28T11:59:00+00:00

This is my second day that I have been working on a "book sprint". The one thing that I have learned about the process is, that the success is defined by the quality of the people involved. When you combine people like Adam Hyde and Allen Gunn in the mix, there will be something usable at the end.

Having worked for two days with the software used by FLOSS manuals, I am sure that a book sprint can also be done using MediaWiki. The key thing to consider is not so much can you do this, but what is the added value. Writing FLOSS manuals is what FLOSS manuals does and a community has formed around it. Replicating this effort only makes sense when it grows the creation beyond the autonomous growth of FLOSS manuals.

However, when an application is found for writing outside this domain, there might be a point to experiment with MediaWiki.
Thanks,
GerardM

Wiki-Conference New York in July

2009-06-28T00:30:00+00:00

The 1st Wiki-Conference New York will be held over the weekend of July 25-26 2009 (confirmed!) at New York University, and hosted by Free Culture @ NYU and Wikimedia New York City.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will be giving a keynote, and we will also have a second keynote speaker TBA.

Since this is an unconference, participants are encouraged to give your own ideas for topic sessions!

This is also a great opportunity for people who aren't so wiki-savvy to get a fun introduction. All are most certainly welcome.

Oh yeah, and we're having the Central Park picnic again too!

Register here:

http://bit.ly/wikiny

The King of Wikipedia Traffic

2009-06-27T22:42:03+00:00

Michael Jackson’s sudden and shocking death just about blew up the Internet this past week, and Wikipedia was no exception, even getting briefly knocked offline. And as the New York Times’ tech reporter Noam Cohen reported, the stunning news produced another milestone for Wikipedia:

The Michael Jackson entry in Wikipedia Thursday evening appeared to have set the record as having the highest traffic in the eight-year history of the online encyclopedia.

In the 7 p.m. hour alone Thursday, shortly after Mr. Jackson’s death was confirmed, there were nearly one million visitors to that article. (In fact, for that hour more than 250,000 visitors went to the misspelled entry “Micheal Jackson.” Even his brother Randy Jackson had 25,000 visits that hour.)

“We suspect this is most in a one-hour period of any article in Wikipedia history,” said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.

The article goes on to note that this represented about 1 percent of Wikipedia’s total traffic on the day — this may not sound like much, until you recall the English Wikipedia has more than 2.9 million articles. Writing midday Friday, Cohen predicted that the article could surpass 5 million visits on Friday. As it happens, Cohen set his target a little too low:

1.4 million visits is pretty remarkable, but 5.9 million visits in unprecendented. However, there is one discrepancy: yesterday’s estimates from User:Henrik’s Wikipedia article traffic statistics tool (and Cohen’s article) put the figure at 1.8 million visits, which means the numbers where somehow reconciled downward in the interim. I’ll be looking to find out why. And while Cohen names as a point of comparison President Barack Obama’s Wikipedia article, which received 2.3 million visits on Election Day, I know of a page that received more traffic still and offers a better comparison:

That spike you are looking at occurred on the day that Senator John McCain announced Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in the final days of August, 2008 (as previously discussed on Blog P.I.). Between Jackson and Palin we have one well-known but mysterious and one little-known but suddenly very public figure, thrust into the middle of a breaking news story. By comparison, Obama was a highly visible public figure and Election Day was known far in advance. Perhaps that actually makes the 2.3 million that day even more impressive. But it’s hard to read much more into bar graphs such as this beyond acknowledging they represent a sudden and externally-driven interest in the subject.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that the article containing the information people presumably want most, Death of Michael Jackson, has not recorded anything like the traffic of the primary MJ article:

Why is this the case? Part of the answer is the power of Google, which is the overwhelming driver of traffic to Wikipedia. On that note, I don’t know about you, but in the past 24 hours, Michael Jackson’s official site and his Wikipedia article have traded places on Google, with Wikipedia now ranked first overall. Second, the link to this article is found deep in the primary one, albeit of course at the top of the section concerning his death. Still, 527 is a rounding error compared to 5.9 million. Perhaps the Michael Jackson article itself satisfied their curiosity, before clicking over to iTunes and downloading a copy of Thriller.

And one last, somewhat morbid note: it is strange indeed that the King of Pop is no longer covered by Wikipedia’s Biography of living persons guideline.

OTT09 book sprint

2009-06-27T11:45:00+00:00

When you assemble people for a conference, you bring together all the people clued in on a subject. The Open Translation Tool '09 conference brought together many of the people who are involved in translation, localisation, content and technology.

Floss manuals has this brilliant notion of a "book sprint". In a book sprint a group of people write a book in a short period of time like up to a week. At the end of the week the resulting document is published and available either as a PDF or in a printed form.
Thanks,
GerardM

Using your ‘about’ page for dynamic AboutUs content

2009-06-26T21:21:56+00:00

Yesterday, Brian Kerr sent me this great weblog post: On making About Us a real conversation and not static. I personally have a connection to the city, since I moved from Ann Arbor, MI a few years ago to Portland, Oregon – home of the original wiki and the AboutUs wiki.

Part of our vision for AboutUs is that nearly every single website has a static ‘about’ page – and so our wiki is an attempt to give a place for dynamic ‘about’ information.

We now have a small item that could help make an actual ‘about’ page on your site more dynamic: our widget.

Some had originally thought of it as a widget just for blogs, but what we are seeing is that more people are using it on their websites, like these.

I can easily imagine people placing these on their ‘about’ pages – I also have vision of a larger white label AboutUs widget for the ‘about’ page, in the future.

Imagine if every website had a door to an into open, collaborative, transparent, social media website. What excites me is the connections that are possible and the things, relationships and solutions that could come from that.

Let me know what you think!

Update: AnnArbor.com already uses for its ‘about’ page, a wiki page on ArborWiki! Kudos and props to them!!

How to be a Successful Web Worker – A Collection of Tips

2009-06-26T17:52:20+00:00

Meryl Evans wrote a guide for remote workers on Web Worker Daily, and included this tip from me on maintaining strong communication:

Communicating Without Geek Speak

Stewart Mader: A strong ability to communicate about what you’re doing. If you work for a company, you need to be good at using the intranet, enterprise wiki or other social computing tools to keep others up to date on what you’re doing, ask for their feedback and make sure they know you’re available to help them too.

The three week rule

2009-06-26T17:54:17+00:00

When several different people make queries and the same advice needs to be given, it's probably better (or at least less work) to blog the darn thing. So here's one of my little methods for defusing content disputes. Call it the three week rule.

This is one of the reasons why the cases I take to formal dispute resolution almost never relate to my own content disputes.

First, a little harmonious spirit.

Now here's the trick: if you've tried the bold/revert/discuss model and it isn't going anywhere useful, then consider this: walk away for a while. Give it about three weeks. Hang out somewhere else. Chill. Wikipedia has millions of other articles.

Sometimes the person you were locking horns with ain't so bad. In three weeks, if that person has a broader set of references and perspectives to bring to the page then that's plenty of time for them to shine. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Second option: your hunch is correct and that dude's a POV pusher. Let them own the article for three weeks. If that's what they really are then they'll slant the article even further so it's obvious to everyone. Once things reach that stage the problem is easier to correct.

Third option: the individual is a troll (or at least feeds off conflict). So stop acting like an immovable object, and watch the irresistible force wander elsewhere. There's a beauty to the Zen approach.

So give it three weeks. Let the article be wrong. When you return, post politely to the talk page. If nobody objects then go ahead and edit. If somebody does object then don't quarrel; open a content request for comment promptly. If you're really right then uninvolved editors will step forward and agree.

It's surprising how often this turns out well.

----
After

Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate: #2 Where’s the File?

2009-06-26T15:12:07+00:00

This is the second in a twelve-part series exploring Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate.
The full research report is available for Download.

Question

We asked how many of the emails people receive on a daily basis contain attachments.

65% of respondents said a few of the daily emails they receive contain attachments, and 25% said at least half contain attachments. Only 2% said that the vast majority include attachments.

Survey Comments

Usually, the attached file is only a page or two long. The content could easily be put up on a wiki for review/comments/reading.
I have emphasized within those I communicate with to use links to docs on doc server instead of e-mail. In fact, I have an interesting diagram about the problems caused by e-mailing documents (out of synch with master, mailbox full, etc). Many employees at my company ‘get it’.
We generally include the path to network folder locations rather than attaching files.
Too many do not grasp the concept of shared folders.
The government is bad at sending a long chain of emails and responses with an attachment still attached from the original email.

Celebrity death rumors go insane after Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett

2009-06-26T14:02:39+00:00

Yesterday I walked over to one of my favorite mini-restaurants, Snack Dragon, to buy a couple of carne asada tacos. The topic of Michael Jackson’s and Farrah Fawcett’s deaths were already on the lips of the two ladies eating rice and beans. We all started talking about it. Suddenly, one of the women said, “And then Liza Minnelli, too! I can’t believe it!”

“Liza Minnelli?!” I replied, mouth agape.

“Yeah - you didn’t know about that? They just announced she died today, too.”

“Holy shit,” I said, “the drag queen mascara is going to be running in the streets of Chelsea this gay pride.” We all talked about June 25th, and the deaths of so many amazing people on one day.

I had earlier broken the news about Jackson to my mother. She was floored. When I returned home with tacos in hand, I called her immediately and said, “And did you hear about Liza Minnelli?!”

Of course, Liza Minnelli is alive and well. It was only after I told my mother–”This is starting to feel like a terrorist attack!“–that I looked for information on Google about Minnelli and found nothing.

It turns out that the celebrity death rumor mill was in full swing yesterday, as pranksters preyed on the shock and raw grief of unassuming people. The New York Daily News reported that Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum death rumors were circulating:

The rumors of Goldblum and Ford’s untimely deaths turned out to be false, and were in fact well-known Internet pranks that once made similar claims of Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise.

“Reports that Jeff Goldblum has passed away are completely untrue,” said the actor’s publicist in a statement Thursday night. “He is fine and in Los Angeles.”

According to Snopes.com, these stories are automatically generated with fake scenarios via prank websites. Users simply plug in any name - which in this case were Goldblum and Ford.

For Goldblum, it was suggested he fell to his death while filming a movie in New Zealand. Ford supposedly disappeared while on a boat in the French Riviera.

This kind of prank first appeared online in 2006, and targeted Hanks. Cruise was similarly reported “dead” in 2008.

It’s amazing how the Internet is reshaping our society in such a way that things like pulling pranks in the wake of tragic deaths are now completely common. It’s true: nothing is sacred anymore. We all better learn to live in that kind of world.

Michael Jackson Wikipedia article

This image on Wikipedia was dedicated to editor Realist2, who has worked hard at creating high quality articles on the entire Jackson family. Click on the image to see where it is used on Wikipedia.

The Michael Jackson Wikipedia article is one of the better biography articles on Wikipedia, and it is directly-related to the efforts of editor Realist2. On June 25th, 1.4 million people hit it.

I have no doubt that Michael Jackson knew that this editor was keeping the article as close to the core Wikipedia policy of “Neutral Point of View” as possible. Realist2 is an example of the amazing work that happens on that site. He took an interest in popular culture and turned himself into a scribe of popular culture. That’s pretty cool.

Realist has worked on the articles about all of the Jacksons, and they owe him a debt of gratitude. We all do. I dedicated the image of a Michael Jackson impersonator at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival celebration of the 25th anniversary of Thriller in Realist’s honor. Also pictured are cast members of the television program Step It Up and Dance!, who put on a show at the festival with the original choreographer of the Thriller video.

With its dedication, Realist2 was inducted into the Wikimedia Hall of the Greats, along with other people who have greatly improved the quality and scope of Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Possibly related posts

uncache!

2009-06-26T11:40:50+00:00

this is source code for a tiny program I just wrote that traverses specified directories and removes them from file system cache.

There are few use cases for it. One is for all these people who benchmark stuff and want selective OS cache purges, another is for those who run high performance databases. Remember the O_DIRECT serialization everywhere? Well, XFS does direct I/O in parallel, unless there are cached pages (and they can happen because of any random outside-of-database activity, like ‘file’ command). Once you ‘uncache’ the files, XFS will be very much parallel again \o/ \o/

embarrassment

2009-06-26T08:49:06+00:00

So, we had a major embarrassment last night. It consisted of multiple factors:

We don’t have parallelism coordinator for our most cpu-intensive task at Wikipedia, so it can work on same job in ten, hundred, thousand threads across the cluster at the same time.
Some parts of our parsing process ended up extremely CPU-intensive, and that happened not in our code, but in ‘templates’, that are in user-space. We don’t have profiling for templates, so we can just guess which one is slow, which one is fast, nor their overall aggregates.
Some parts of pages are extremely template-heavy, making page rendering cost a lot (e.g. citations – see this discussion).
In order to avoid content integrity race conditions, editing process releases locks and invalidates objects early, separated from ‘virgin parse’ which populates caches.
It takes quite some time to refill the cache, as rendering is CPU-bound for quite a while in certain cases.
During that short time when caches are empty, stampede of users on single article causes lots of redundant work across the cluster/grid/cloud.
Michael Jackson article on English Wikipedia alone had a million views in one hour

So, in summary, we had havoc in our cluster because stampede of heavy requests between cache purge and cache population was consuming all available CPU resources, mostly working on rendering references section on Michael Jackson article.

Oh well, quick operations hack looked like this:

Index: ParserCache.php
===================================================================
--- ParserCache.php	(revision 52088)
+++ ParserCache.php	(working copy)
@@ -63,6 +63,7 @@
  if ( is_object( $value ) ) {
    wfDebug( "Found.\n" );
    # Delete if article has changed since the cache was made
    // temp hack!
+   if( $article->mTitle->getPrefixedText() != 'Michael Jackson' ) {
    $canCache = $article->checkTouched();
    $cacheTime = $value->getCacheTime();
    $touched = $article->mTouched;

It is embarrassing, as actual pageview count was way below our usual capacity, whenever we have problems is because of some narrow expensive problem, not because of overall unavoidable resource shortage. We can afford much more edits, much more pageviews. We could have handled this load way better if our users wouldn’t be creating complex logic in articles. We could have handled this way better, if we had more aggressive redundant job elimination.

Thats the real story of operations, though headlines like “High profile event brought down Wikipedia” may sound nice, the real story is “shit happens”.

on disambiguation and The Atomization of Meaning

2009-06-25T23:46:52+00:00

Disambiguate has been a somewhat obscure term for ’specify’ for ages. And the noun form, disambiguation, has been used even more sparingly. At some point in the last century, perhaps in the 1950s, it became a popular term in computational linguistics. And before that it was basically only used by one person, writing about logic and semantics in the early 19th century. All of this sprang to my mind because of the tremendous popularity of the word in and through Wikipedia. In the encyclopedia, it is the canonical way to describe the clarification of an ambiguous term, the indication of type used to specify the context of an article title.

A bit of background. The word disambiguation was not popular before the 50s. It is used in quotes in a 1954 federal court case, expressly referencing the earlier work of the one philosopher and author who consciously used it for a specific purpose: Jeremy Bentham. But who introduced it into the jargon of linguistics? And to the original point, who introduced it to Wikipedia?

The dominance of today’s Internet makes the latter question easier in ways and harder in others. We can track revisions of most Wikipedia pages, but the use of this term predates the creation of the new software to preserve all revisions, in August 2001 — so some guesswork is required even there. Certainly the Wikipedia usage was guided by the linguistic usage before it: “word sense disambiguation” and disambiguation in semantic analysis were all the rage across linguistics in the 1990s, as the term had moved out of computational linguistics into the field’s mainstream.

Early uses of the term in the 50s are in the context of ‘disambiguation programs’ and ‘automatic word disambiguation’. Then by 1960 comes Dwight Bolinger, using it boldly and provatively. “understanding presupposes disambiguation. Disambiguation presupposes the processes that make it possible”. This was picked up by literary critics in France, and by other linguists such as Anthony oettinger writing about automatic translation.

Sometime around March 20, 2001, the issue of disambiguating Wikipedia articles comes up. User:Invictus (NB: no userpages back then) creates the article [[RushBand]], following the earlier model of [[NirvanaBand]]. And who should respond with a philosophical note on the right way to disambiguate than Larry Sanger, starting the page Naming_conventions/Disambiguating . Within eight months, Magnus Manske has written new code allowing the use of parentheses in article titles, and the use of the term ‘disambiguation’ to describe appending a parenthetical clarifier at the end of an article name, and pages listing similar titles, has taken off.

I have to say, I do like it better than the alternative name suggested for those lists : ‘jump pages’. So a tip of the dab-hat to Larry, may this be only one of your lasting contributions to encyclopediana.

For following along with me for so long, here’s a special bonus : the original quotation from Bentham’s papers laying out the place of Disambiguation in the heirarchy of Exposition. This is from George Bentham’s 1827 Outline of a New System of Logic, in which he reviews his uncle’s papers and a recent set of writings on logic by one Dr. Whately.

He diagrams the elder Bentham’s 12 modes of exposition (physical designation, translation, etymologization, definition, individuation, paraphrasis, archetypation, description, parallelism including antithesis, enumeration, exemplification, and illustration), and says:

If exposition be considered with respect to its immediate object, it may be divided into Onomatopoea, or the giving a new name to an idea, and into Exposition of existing words.

In following the same principle of division, exposition of existing words may be subdivided into the following operations: —
1. Substitution of a new sense to the one in which a word has already been used, an operation resembling onomatopoea, but attended with much more practical inconvenience, excepting where the use of the word in its old sense be at once disadvantageous, and of rare occurrence.
2. Elucidation—where the object is to give clearness to an obscure term.
3. Disambiguation—where it is to fix the sense of an ambiguous term. This operation has been termed distinction by some Logicians, and erroneously reckoned as a species of division.
4. Ampliation—where it is to extend the sense of a term.
5. Restriction—where it is to restrict the sense of a term.

Extra special nostalgia bonus: note the link-preserving awesomeness buried in the first post to wikipedia-l : that link still works, through a dozen TLD, domain, software and naming changes.

Wikpedia and current events=major traffic

2009-06-25T23:27:07+00:00

Our CTO Brion Vibber offered a fascinating post on the Foundation’s Tech Blog today, highlighting the incredible traffic spike and related problems caused by the news of singer Michael Jackson’s reported death.

Expect the tech blog to be updated as other server developments unfold, and of course the Wikipedia article to go through some fascinating evolution and discussion.

Jay Walsh, Communications

collaboration

2009-06-25T22:22:46+00:00

What are your favorite resources about how collaboration — in a large or small group of people — works?

And yeah, the answer probably isn’t “report Michael Jackson dead and see what happens to the Wikipedia pages.”* Though, that works too.

* Answer: load spike. Slashdot ain’t got nothing on the King of Pop. See: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/current-events/ for fun analysis.

Would you press this button?

2009-06-25T19:14:36+00:00

How would you make this button better?

We have begun exploring ideas for enhancing the visibility of a donate button, not only within Wikipedia and the Wikimedia main template, but also on every page of every Wikimedia project. We hope that enhancement will enable us to better informing our public that we are dependent on their donations as we promote the free and open knowledge movement.

As we saw in the last fundraiser, different messages and visual styles had different outcomes: different levels of gifts, origin of donors, and frequency of donations. We expect that a small change to the Wikimedia design template will result in a big returns in donations — increasing funds we use to keep the Wikimedia movement alive and growing. We expect that in return for a bit of enhanced visibility, we will see a daily increase of up to 20% in donations.

Working with the same designer that worked on last year’s donation page, we have culled his 30+ button ideas into 6 that represent some of the better designs.

We have posted several design options for your comments and input.

Design is only half of this change… words are equally important. We are also looking for input on messaging on the donate button and on most Wikimedia articles. What are the simplest words we can use? Can the text be easily translated into dozens of languages? We need text that will communicate that we are a non-profit and and express the importance of donations in keeping our projects active.

Join the discussions on our donation upgrades page and catch a glimpse of the upcoming improvements to our community fundraising efforts!

Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

Rush Limbaugh and Zicam: when profit is more important than public safety

2009-06-25T13:39:54+00:00

One of Rush Limbaugh’s big sponsors is was Zicam, and was he ever hopping mad that a product he has relentlessly endorsed might damage his followers’ sense of smell. That is, he was hopping mad at the FDA, claiming that pulling this product was an effort by Democrats to hurt him! Stephen Colbert riffed on this hilariously, mentioning that this might be the reason Limbaugh’s listener’s have trouble smelling bullshit. Here’s the video:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Zicam Recall

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Stephen Colbert in Iraq

Possibly related posts

Wikimedia messages to reflect our licensing

2009-06-25T12:55:00+00:00

The "Wikimedia messages" contain messages that are of specific relevance to the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects.

Yesterday new messages were added that will reflect the new reality about the licensing of the WMF. As these messages apply to all Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Commons and Wikispecies, it is really important to get this message out.

Please help us translate these messages at translatewiki.net in all our languages.
Thanks,
GerardM

Year: 2009 Week: 26 Number: 109

2009-06-24T22:44:00+00:00

Technical news

[New "Green" Data Centers] - The Foundation announced a new "in-kind" sponsorship (valued at over €300,000) by "green" (environmentally friendly) Data Center EvoSwitch. EvoSwitch will be Wikimedia's new Internet HUB for Europe. Not only does this provide us with a long-term solution for delivering faster and better traffic in Europe and beyond, it also means that Wikimedia servers are taking advantage of cutting edge green power technology provided by Evoswitch.

[Public repositories for dumps] - A new public repository has been created to host WikiXRay database dumps, containing info extracted from public Wikipedia dbdumps. The image is hosted by RedIRIS (in short, the Spanish equivalent of Kennisnet in Netherlands). These new dumps are aimed to save time and effort to other researchers, since they won't need to parse the complete XML dumps to extract all relevant activity metadata. As of press time, only some of the biggest Wikipedias are available. However, in the following days the full set of available languages will be ready for downloading.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2009-June/000825.html -- mailing list post
http://sunsite.rediris.es/mirror/WKP_research/ -- respository

[Chinese search improved] - the search function for the Chinese and Japanese wiki's are improved due to to a better support of the language structure.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/chinese-language-search-fixes-for-mediawiki/

Request for help

[Spread the word!] - We are very happy with your readership, but the subscriber numbers are not really growing anymore. Wikizine could use some more readers. Maybe are there users on your wiki who do not know about Wikizine? Talk about Wikizine, put a Wikizine banner on your user page or on a community page if approved. Thanks.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/banners

Foundation

[Wikimania] - last year the were missing but now the are back; the hacking days. Those who love to work on MediaWiki & extensions, bot scripts, toolserver stuff, etc.can amuse themselves at Wikimania.

http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Days

Legal

[Plagiarism?] - There's a report that some parts of Chris Anderson's book "Free" were copied from various Wikipedia articles without attribution. This news has been picked up by a few gossip blogs, but has not been confirmed as accurate.

http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/

Agenda

[SF: Mozilla] - Mozilla Labs is holding their monthly meetup at Mozilla's new HQ in Mountain View Thursday (6/25) night. The topic should be of interest to local SF Wikimedians (some members from the WMF office are going too). Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, will talk about the "Open Social Web" initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially-enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. He will be discussing the social web, the underlying protocols that make it possible, and the potential role for the browser to play in this world.

https://labs.mozilla.com/2009/06/mozilla-labs-meetup-thursday-625/

[WMAT] - Wikimedia Österreich (the Austrian chapter of the Foundation) will be holding its second Annual General Assembly on 26 June 2009 at 19:00 at the AKH-Hörsaal Medical Center in Vienna. If you live in Austria, please attend!

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/vereinat-l/2009-June/000049.html (German)

Community

[Wikimedium #2] - Wikimedia Deutschland released its second "newspaper" aimed at (potential) sponsors, partners, friends and fans of Wikimedia, The new edition includes issues 'around the world' (from other Chapters), information about the recent conferences in Berlin (developers, board, and chapter meets), explanation of the Wikipedia structure, and a lot more. The next edition is planned for September. It's definitely worth reading if you know German!

http://wikimedia.de/fileadmin/wiki/images/Downloads/Wikimedium_2009-02.pdf

[New DVD (for Linux)] - Wikimedia CH (in collaboration with openZIM) has released a new edition of the German Wikipedia DVD on LinuxTag 2009. The DVD contains more than 900,000 German Wikipedia articles and a full text search index for phrasal search. The openZIM project develops a file format called "ZIM" to store hypertexts like Wikipedia, or other websites, with search indexes and images in the most efficient way. The data is highly compressed; the Wikipedia articles only take up 1.4 GB on the DVD. A new edition of the Wikipedia DVD, in Spanish, is also planned for the Wikimania conference from August 26th to 28th of 2009 in Buenos Aires.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediach-l/2009-June/001259.html (German)
http://openzim.org/2009-06-23_Wikipedia_DVD -- press release (multiple languages)

[Weather bot] - There's a new bot for the Serbian Wikinews that posts and updates weather information for Serbia. It is planned to increase this to the whole world and all Wikinewses, but help from bot operators is needed. This has brought up questions on how best to incorporate it into the sites (with OpenStreetMaps? a new weather.wikizine.org?).

http://tinyurl.com/wn-weather -- example of weather on sr.wikinews
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2009-June/001535.html -- mailing list post

[PLWP New Main Page] - The Polish Wikipedia is trying to design a new main page ("Strona główna") and is trying to solicit opinions and ideas on what the new one should look like.

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GDJ/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna/Debata (Polish)

[Vandalism survival] - A new study on Wikipedia attempts to determine the distribution of the length of time that vandalism remains on the English-language Wikipedia. This distribution is also known as the survival function for vandalism. The two primary results from this study are: (a) the median time to correction is down to four minutes, and (b) some subtle forms of vandalism still persist for months and even years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-06-22/Vandalism -- study was published in the Signpost

Media

[Interview] - Lichtenstein's "Vaterland" did an interview with German Wikipedia user "Dodo von de Bergen" where "dvdb" talked about his activities within Wikipedia.

http://www.vaterland.li/page/epaper/pdf_download.cfm?seite=09_mapc_01_2009-06-05 -- article (German)

[Video Upgrade] - Technology Review (a publication by MIT) gave an update about some future changes to how Wikipedia will handle searching, editing, and embedding video clips (and other media). This article combined a large number of "mini-updates" that Michael Dale has been giving the community about his work on MediaWiki's video handling (per a grant with Kaltura).

http://beta.technologyreview.com/web/22900/page1/ -- article
http://tinyurl.com/kaltura-pr -- press release
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/06/dotsub.html -- multi language subtitles for video

[Wikisource] - An info/law blog published an interesting post about using Wikisource as an alternative open access repository for legal studies. It turns out the author is actually an admin on Wikisource who works on expanding the texts too!

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2009/06/19/using-wikisource-as-an-alternative-open-access-repository-for-legal-scholarship/

Stats

[Wikt OC] - The Occitan Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.

http://oc.wiktionary.org

[WP Ru] - The Russian Wikipedia has reached 400,000 articles

http://ru.wikipedia.org

[Wp an] - The Aragonese Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles

http://an.wikipedia.org/wiki/

[Wp csb] - The Kashubian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles

http://csb.wikipedia.org/

Other news

[Give us your passwords] - Not exactly related to Wikimedia projects, but a US city tried to request that government job applicants turn over their user names and passwords to Internet social networking and Web groups. A flood of criticism has prompted a Montana city to drop this request, but it still started an interesting (albeit offtopic!) discussion on the Wikimedia mailing lists.

[Berkman files now in Ogg] - The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (a research center at Harvard University) has released its audio and video files in Ogg (and licensed under CC-BY).

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5444

Did you know ...

.... that some articles can make you feel stupid?

One of the articles on Wikipedia is about 1 car and 2 goats. And the probability of these goats and car to be behind a particular door.

If you have no problem to be disillusioned ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

Quote

There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
--- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, almost all versions

Number of subscribers: 729 , Unique Visitors website last week: 192 , Editor(s): Casey, Walter , Thanks to: David Gerard, Eloquence, Nathan, Milos, Wiktoryn, John Vandenberg, Catrin, Brion, Petar Marjanovic, Signpost (fuzheado, Loren Cobb), Jay, MichaelSnow, Felipe Ortega
Special thanks to: The Wikipedia Signpost for publicity
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Wikimedia Foundation Hosted by EvoSwitch

2009-06-24T01:48:09+00:00

As a part of the contract, EvoSwitch will supply over $421,000 of in-kind support for Wikimedia in the shape of bandwidth and hosting services. The free online encyclopedia is solidly ranked one of the planet’s top 5 most visited sites by comScore MediaMetrix with billions of page perspectives each month. The Foundation’s projects are presently hosted [...]

External Data grows again

2009-06-23T23:21:28+00:00

The latest version of the External Data extension now lets you get data from two other sources (in addition to APIs and text files): LDAP servers, and database tables. This is a nice step forward, in that it’s no longer completely necessary to create an API for every data source you want to access from the wiki; which makes the concept of using MediaWiki for data integration potentially simpler and less breakable. Thanks to David Macdonald for this new functionality.

Citizen journalism: New York Times vs. Wikinews

2009-06-23T14:40:49+00:00

The New York Times used Geralyn Shukwit's photos, in addition to local blogs, to cover the collapse of a building in Fort Greene. Click on the image to see this and other images taken by Shukwit.

The recent collapse of a residential building in Fort Greene, a neighborhood in New York City, was a stark example of the New York Times heavily employing the use of citizen journalism on its blogs.

It’s difficult for me to consider citizen journalism without thinking of the failure of Wikinews to become anything that has long-term potential. The model of Wikinews is fundamentally flawed, and there appears to be no desire to fix it. Wikipedia, as Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner herself said, is now fulfilling a role as a mainstream news medium. Gardner essentially crapped on any hope Wikinews would receive much support from the foundation.

The New York Times use of citizen journalism is really the way things will go. Electronic eye-witnesses (aka “citizen journalists”) and the mainstream media are currently undergoing a courtship and eventual marriage. Media organizations have an incentive for this: it makes their product more enmeshed in the communities they cover and serve, and makes those communities more invested in their local papers.

Wikinews has taken the wrong approach: they are little more than an aggregator of rehashed mainstream media stories that are covered in more depth, and updated more quickly, on Wikipedia. A notable exception to this on Wikinews is Mike Halterman’s interviews, amongst a few other stand-outs; however, three or four original reporters aren’t going to save the site. With the mainstream organizations encouraging citizens to contribute to their product more, and the Wikimedia Foundation and community giving up on separating “news” items out of its encyclopedia articles, it’s difficult to see the need for Wikinews as it is now.

It’s too bad. If the Wikimedia community saw the benefits of Wikinews, and if the Wikinewsies themselves were more intent on changing the nature of that project, it would be more relevant. Neither scenario seems likely.

If anything, the New York Times is teaching Wikinews how citizen journalism should be done by websites: search out the citizens who are covering the events and encourage them to contribute. Wikinewsies expect people to come to them. But they don’t. They go to Wikipedia. Now they’ll also go to the New York Times et al. Those organizations are far more exciting for the average citizen journalist to contribute to than Wikinews.

Possibly related posts

☍ Links for 2009-06-23

2009-06-23T14:31:23+00:00

Mako is keynoting LCA (January, Wellington). WOOT.
There was a conference in Portland recently called Open Source Bridge and it looks like it was really freaking cool.
Really cool looking event in Canberra this week, courtesy of Senator Lundy — Public Sphere 2 – Government 2.0 Includes the creation of a Government 2.0 Taskforce which will provide some advice and even some funding! From the event itself, a wiki-based outcomes document is yet to surface.
The P2P Foundation blog is publishing some interview with Wikipedians & ex-Wikipedians this week:
- Michel Bauwens and Axel Bruns (Bauwens is AFAIK the main person behind the P2P Foundation. Bruns is an author and also keeps a blog ; he’s rather fond of the term produsage)
- ‘Cedric’ and Barry Kort (‘Cedric’ is from Wikipedia Review; Barry Kort is from MIT, and was involved in drama at en.wp as User:Moulton and has written a ‘Knol’ called The governance model of Wikipedia)
Wikimania sneak peek! Since no announcement has been made, I’m not sure if we’re supposed to be able to see these yet or not…
There’s an Open Education Conference being held in Canada during August 12-14. The speakers look pretty diverse, so if you’re interested in attending, check out how to apply for one of their travel scholarships.

Well it is conference season…

Watch Out, Laszlo Panaflex!

2009-06-23T04:42:36+00:00

In a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, washed-up movie star Troy McClure — you may remember him from such self-help videos as “Smoke Yourself Thin!” and “Get Confident, Stupid!” — enters a sham marriage with Aunt Selma to squash rumors about his sordid personal life and regain his former screen glory. As he is “romancing” Selma along a Simpsonized version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, McClure declares:

One day, my lady Selma’s gonna have a star right next to mine, so watch out [camera pans right] Laszlo Panaflex!

Like most throwaway Simpsons lines, it has faded from mainstream recognition — the episode’s imagined musical version of “Planet of the Apes” is surely better known — but lives on in offhand references made by those of us who have been watching long enough to remember the controversy over Bart Simpson and those “Underachiever and Proud Of It” T-shirts.

I thought of it again while watching Ghostbusters on TV last night, noticing that the cinematographer was László Kovács. Was Kovács’ the name Simpsons writers were riffing on? Following a well-established routine, I plugged his name — Panaflex’s of course — into Google, hoping for but not really expecting a Wikipedia article to pop up.

It turns out Wikipedia did show up first — but it wasn’t an article. Instead, it was a user page for someone using the fictional lenser’s moniker as a handle. It reads in full:

User:Laszlo Panaflex

On the episode of the television show The Simpsons called “A Fish Called Selma,” actor Troy McClure attempts to revive his career by marrying Marge’s sister Selma. When Troy gets a star on the Springfield Walk of Fame, he says that Selma will soon have the star next to his, “so watch out … Laszlo Panaflex!” — the name on the star next to his.
The name refers to cinematographer László Kovács, who used a Panaflex camera on some of his films. A picture of a movie camera appears under the name on the star.

Simpsons Episode Guide: A Fish Called Selma
László Kovács at the Internet Movie Database

Nice. But this also got me wondering: is this a loophole in Wikipedia policy? Isn’t this a way to get an encyclopedic page on the site even if it would be otherwise deleted by Wikipedia’s relentless arbiters of significance? After, all articles appearing on what Wikipedians call the “mainspace” of Wikipedia are expected to satisfy a handful of core guidelines lest they be removed or radically altered.

First there is the general notability guideline requiring the subject to meet a certain threshhold of importance (often determined by news coverage). Articles failing the requirement are deleted, and relevant content is sometimes relocated to existing articles about the same topic. Laszlo Panaflex, as one joke in one episode, would never pass Wikipedia’s notability requirement because it would obviously belong on the page about the episode (and as of this writing, it is not even there). An example of a Simpsons reference that does meet this requirement is Homer Simpson’s ubiquitous “D’oh!”

Other guidelines it could elide and does in this case: Verifiability and Reliable sources. Sure, it helps to confirm my suspicion that Laszlo Panaflex is inspired by the real cinematographer with the accented name discouraging me from Ctrl-C/V-ing it again. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if it was named for him, but certainly doesn’t offer a citation for the claim. I need more proof, and articles in the Wikipedia mainspace do, too.* User pages have no such requirement.

On the other hand, I think it passes NPOV with flying colors.

But is it a loophole to treat a user page like an article? After all, Laszlo Panaflex ranked right at the top of Google; other articles on semi-obscure subjects could as well. I don’t believe there is a policy, guideline or essay that specifically addresses this, though I fully acknowledge I may be wrong. In that case that I am not, the possibility exists for unworthy (or even “unworthy”) articles to be given a second home on user pages.

I can say for certain — alas, without being able to summon a link (I’ll look) — that there are a number of editors whose user pages are written to resemble a Wikipedia article. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. However, I do think it could make the Wikipedia community uncomfortable if it became a widespread practice, and was seen as a gray hat SEO technique.

In that unlikely event, the first suggestion that comes to me would be requiring a banner on user pages that specifies that it is not an “article”. It would be phrased like the banner I keep atop my own page, included as a disclaimer in case the page is swiped by an unscrupulous mirror site. After all, this non-accusatory template puts even a flawed but useful article about one Laszlo Panaflex in the proper context:

This is a Wikipedia user page.

This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WWB.

*It may be out there. Many other Simpsons-related Wikipedia articles, including “A Fish Called Selma”, are buttressed by citations to the commentary tracks on the official DVD releases. If anybody knows for sure, I’d be happy to help add the citation.

Semantic Bundle launched

2009-06-22T22:05:22+00:00

Announcing Semantic Bundle - a single downloadable file that holds Semantic MediaWiki and 16 other MediaWiki extensions that use it and/or are often used in conjunction with it. The aim is to simplify the confusing landscape of extensions that’s evolved around Semantic MediaWiki, so that users can just get one file instead of having to research and download many files individually to get all the functionality they would want. What we have is a basic super-set of the kinds of extensions people usually end up using on SMW-driven wikis (administrators can choose which of the extensions to include, once they’ve downloaded the bundle.)

Semantic Bundle is similar to the SMW+ package distributed by Ontoprise, although it’s a different set of extensions; both include SMW, of course, but other than that the number of extensions they have in common is surprisingly small - which just goes how to show diverse the set of features has become, and may be another argument for this kind of “curatorial” work.

Semantic Bundle was developed, and is distributed, by Sergey Chernyshev and me.

Evoswitch helps us improve project access in Europe and beyond

2009-06-22T19:30:21+00:00

Today we’re excited to announce a very generous in-kind sponsorship from Amsterdam-based data center provider Evoswitch. This sponsorship, valued at over 300,000 euros has allowed the Foundation to house a large new bank of caching servers in a highly central location in Europe. Not only does this provide us with a long-term solution for delivering faster and better traffic in Europe and beyond, it also means that Wikimedia servers are taking advantage of cutting edge green power technology provided by Evoswitch.

Evoswitch operates a leading, 100% carbon neutral data center. Free culture, global access to free information, and sustainable, green data centers: it’s a tremendous mission-supporting partnership. We’d like to thank the great folks at Evoswitch for working with us to support our mission and for helping millions of internet users gain access to our projects.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Volume 5, Issue 25 - 22 June, 2009

2009-06-22T19:11:39+00:00

[Early edition; some stories may expand in the next few hours]

Special report:Study of vandalism survival times
News and notes: Wikizine, video editing, milestones
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia impacts town’s reputation, assorted blogging
Discussion report: Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations
Features and admins: Approved this week
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Bebe Buell: five questions

2009-06-22T18:05:26+00:00

Click on the image to visit Buell's Wikipedia article, the source for much of this information.

On Wednesday the 24th, Rebecca and I have been invited to see a piece of rock history: Bebe Buell at the Hiro Ballroom.

Some people focus on the giant-sized names I have shot for the Creative Commons, but the people that linger in my mind are the hundreds of others who are not household names but who have successfully created full, interesting lives. The lawyers, academics, economists and artists who shape our world without our ever realizing it.

Bebe Buell is one of those artists.

She is famous in New York City for her ability to throw together–to embody–a scene, and as an accomplished musician in her own right.

In 1981, she recorded an EP with Rick Derringer and Ric Ocasek, and The Cars served as her band on two tracks. The rock band Power Station formed around her in 1984 when then-boyfriend John Taylor (of Duran Duran) pulled some famous friends together to provide backing for Buell.

Her music career is underscored by Buell’s presence for many of the Twentieth Century’s huge musical moments. In Almost Famous, director Cameron Crowe partly based the film’s “Penny Lane” character–played by Kate Hudson–on Buell. Hudson was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won a Golden Globe for the role.

In 1972, Buell began dating rock star Todd Rundgren, which lasted for several years. During and after their sometimes open relationship, she was associated with Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, and Steven Tyler. In 1977, Buell and Tyler had a daughter together, the actress Liv Tyler. After her relationship with Steven ended, Buell began dating Rod Stewart. In the summer of 1978, she began an affair with the recently-separated Elvis Costello that continued on and off until 1984.

All of this shaped Bebe Buell into a piece of living rock history, and as you can see from my 2009 Wikipedia portrait of her above, one of the best-looking. She clearly kept a good head on her shoulders and took care of herself during what must have been some very debauched moments that she witnessed.

On top of it all, she raised an amazing daughter in Liv Tyler, who my friends in Hollywood tell me is one of the nicest, most down-to-Earth actors working today. That’s Bebe’s parenting; she spared Liv from many of the problems that afflicted her contemporaries.

Go to Amazon to hear the Bebe Buell Band’s latest single, Air Kisses for the Masses and find out what all of this influence wrought.

Five Questions for Bebe Buell

Q. What is one thing you think every American should know?

A. That marriage is between two PEOPLE who love each other- a personal vow and contract. God does not care who loves or married whom- only how we treat our fellow man. Love is free- it should not have a gender. Only a purpose- to love.

Q. If you had the option to have been born another nationality than your current one, which nationality would you choose?

A. Alien. Oh wait- I AM an alien!! I believe we are born who we are meant to be so it is hard to imagine. But I have always been fascinated with nomads- people who wander and roam with no real anchor. Kind of like the TV show Kung Fu. So probably Tibetan.

Q. What is one misconception people have about you?

A. That I am sexual or good in bed. I’m really just a “love bug”- not armed with much sexual skill or sexual perfection. It is my heart that boils over with loving energy.

Q. Is there anyone’s death, either in your life or in popular culture, whose passing you were surprised by how profoundly it affected you?

A. John Lennon. I cried for days and days. My 14 year old Chihuahua Chiquita- I was consumed with grief. But she was reincarnated almost immediately and my new “mutt” Chickenburger has a home.

Q. In life we often have goals that we feel as if would just die if we don’t reach them. Sometimes we reach them, sometimes we don’t. The question is, have you ever worked to fulfill a goal, only to find that once you achieved it, the experience was a let down? It meant something to you when you did not have it. Then you obtained it and, after the initial excitement, you thought to yourself, “Is that all there is?” Have you ever had an experience like that?

A. I treat my goals as a desire- a passion. If I am meant to have it, earn it, own it… then I consider it a “gift”, a blessing. A gift from the karma police.

I never take anything for granted.

Especially love. My daughter. My family. My art. My music… my muse…

FIVE QUESTIONS - A SERIES

EVAN WOLFSON - founder of the modern gay marriage movement…I have five questions for you.
JIMMY WALES - Citizen of the world, sage to millions of editors of Wikipedia, which he founded…I have five questions for you.
BILLY NAME - Famous Warhol live-in photographer; silverized the Factory; shot the cover of the Velvet Underground’s eponymous album; iconic portraits of Lou Reed and Edie Sedgwick…I have five questions for you.

Possibly related posts

Defining The New Awesome

2009-06-22T14:03:22+00:00

Every day brings an avalanche of new ideas and novel creations to the web, from witty t-shirts and viral videos to innovative methods of collaboration and powerful new software. The creation of unique and interesting things is not new, but the current surge in individual creative activity and its subsequent high visibility on the web is unprecedented.

The most compelling of these creative products I have been referring to as The New Awesome, and they represent a tiny portion of the total creative output. Historically, the word "awesome" might have been used to describe the power of a tornado or the grandness of a majestic vista. Today, the word is more often used to qualify the ingenious or impressive products of personal creativity, such as using hairspray to launch a potato 200 yards, hosting a talk show in Halo 2, or mocking the Kansas school board’s ruling with an ingenious take on religion.

But there’s more to the New Awesome than merely creative flair. The most interesting and, well, awesome creative products seem to share some common characteristics:

It is novel and non-obvious
Nothing like it has really quite been done before. Whether a clever approach, an unforseen bending of the rules, or just a commitment to excellence far beyond the expected, the New Awesome never fails to evoke surprise and delight.
It emerges from passion, without the prospect of audience or profit
From the first encounter, it's clear that the creator felt compelled to make this. Recognition or revenue is icing on the cake.
It is initially under the cultural radar
The New Awesome invariably emerges from the depths of the long tail. While the creator might be previously known for their creations, your mom has never heard of them.
It captures the essence of the medium, moment, or method
For something to truly stand out in the sea of creativity, the creator needs to tap into something true and magical. Don't ask me to define it, because I can't. In the words of Justice Potter Stewart, you know it when you see it.
It evokes passion, community, like-minded behavior, and the insatiable desire to pass along
The New Awesome is meme fodder. From it springs a thousand remixes, knockoffs, spinouts, and analogs. People gather around the hem of awesome.

An interesting result of this creative surge is the rising importance of effective discovery and distribution of the best creative products. In other words, when there is a rising sea of mediocrity, how do we find and highlight the very best? Alas, this will have to be the subject of a future post.

Iran's End Game

2009-06-21T17:35:38+00:00

So what's next in Iran?

I thought I'd put my predictions here to see if they unfold as I suggest. Reuters has just reported that Iran's air force is holding exercises over the Gulf. I believe that this is a key step in the Supreme Leader's strategy. Since Ahmadinejad can't suppress the protesters he needs to take a radical step. This is the invasion of Bahrain. It is actually a brilliant move.

a. Bahrain is across the Gulf from Iran. Control of Bahrain effectively means control of the Gulf, enabling Iran to block American sea access to Iraq and Kuwait.
b. Bahrain was part of Iran until 1783, and on several occasions the Iranians have offered the Bahrainis a chance to rejoin Iran, the last time I recall being 1970.
c. Bahrain has a Shiite majority but is ruled by Sunnis. There is also a strong Islamist movement in Parliament.
d. The US Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain.
e. An attack on Bahrain would therefore force the US to respond in kind with an attack on Iran. This would, in turn, cause a rift between many of the protesters and the Americans. War creates solidarity with the regime and refocuses attention against a common external enemy.
f. Without sea access to Iraq, the US would be forced to station more troops in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, pissing off local Islamists.
g. A war in the Gulf, no matter how short, could severely hinder the flow of oil and reduce supplies to the West. Prices would skyrocket, which is hardly desirable in the current economy. It would be a replay of 1973, but during a recession.
h. Pakistan would not be happy with the situation, given its current importance in the war against terror. If the US occupies Iran, Pakistan becomes less important to US strategic interests, its own economy takes a hit, and local Islamist factions are strengthened.
i. The Russians would be very unhappy with additional American encroachments on its former (Soviet) border. What results is a replay of the Great Game, this time with the Americans in the role of the British.

All in all, the protesters in Iran are taking a bold step that could eventually lead to real democracy in that part of the world. On the other hand, Ahmadinejad still has some really powerful cards that he can play. It will be interesting ...

Honoring Iran

2009-06-21T16:29:54+00:00

Here's an option if you want to contribute something positive with regard to Iran: help spread appreciation of Iranian history and culture.

At right is a featured picture that appears at the biography of Nezami Ganjavi, who was the greatest romantic epic poet in Persian literature. It illustrates his version of the Layla and Majnun love story.

The Library of Congress hosts hundreds of high resolution scans of calligraphy, and the largest portion of the collection originates from Iran. For selections, see here. They're all public domain, which means they're available for upload and placement at Wikipedia. With restoration, some of these could qualify for featured picture designation. A few of the images from the calligraphy collection are already in use, but many aren't.

By uploading images to Wikimedia Commons, you can make this material available to the various language editions of Wikipedia. With a surf through Google Books you can expand the articles they'll illustrate.

Thinking fondly of North Korea

2009-06-21T10:41:28+00:00

From San Diego, with love.

Infinite Summer

2009-06-21T01:50:21+00:00

I joined what is probably one of the biggest reading groups in history a couple of weeks ago: Infinite Summer. The task? Read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest over the course of three months. A lot of bloggers are going to be posting responses, and we're on a strict reading schedule. (This means I have to be careful about spoilers too. I don't want to mess anything up for any other Infinite Summer-ers.)

In case you didn't already know this (it's probably safe to assume that most readers of this blog are familiar with the book), IJ is a TOME. 1,079 pages including footnotes. It sits on people's bookshelves and nags. For many, it is nothing more than a reminder of something that they never quite got around to. This (along with, I'd imagine, Wallace's recent suicide) is why Infinite Summer happened. A whole bunch of people are ready to check this off the list.

Wikipedia On Dead Tree Redux

2009-06-20T21:31:47+00:00

More than a week ago I posted a photo that’s been making the rounds lately — and even wound up as the basis for a joke on Conan O’Brien this past week — about a student artist who had created a physical book of Wikipedia’s Featured articles, one taking up approximately 5,000 pages. I noted at the time that the explanatory text

Reproducing Wikipedia in a dysfunctional physical form helps to question its use as an internet resource.

wasn’t terribly satisfying to me, and I asked at the time

Would printing all of Google’s search results also question its use as an Internet resource? Would printing an image of a sundial question its use as a physical timekeeping device?

and I resolved to find out more if I could. In fact I did hear back from the book’s creator, Rob Matthews, not long after. When posed with the question above, he responded at first:

I’m comparing the Internet Wikipedia to a traditional encyclopedia, by putting it in the same format, therefore suggesting that Wikipedia is dysfunctional compared to a normal encyclopedia. This is suggested by how I’ve conveyed Wikipedia physically.

I still wasn’t satisfied with this, but after a bit of back and forth, Matthews confirmed that his intention was to point out, compared to a traditional paper-based encyclopedia, it’s less reliable because of its radical openness, or hard to find what’s important among the incomplete and unbalanced articles that exist on the site. Those are my words, but he agreed with this much.

I actually do not agree with this view. Not that I don’t agree there is some truth to the point, because there is, but because I do not actually see how anyone is impeded from finding what they want because of Wikipedia. Moreover, “what’s important” is always in flux, and Wikipedia is a reflection of that.

It’s also nothing new. Those who lament the fact that Wkipedia gives disproportionate coverage to trivial matters — a criticism voiced by none other than Stephen Colbert, who sarcastically riffed on the subject, “any site that’s got a longer entry on ‘truthiness’ than on Lutherans has its priorities straight” — should also recognize that these imbalances are often corrected.

I’ve never been one to take my social commentary from visual art such as painting or sculpture, in significant part because it is rare that an image or an object can convey a subtle point while also succeeding as art. For such a purpose — in this case offering commentary on a subject which is overwhelmingly composed of words — I think nonverbal art is inferior to something like the novel, the essay or even the sitcom.

Even if I thought Matthews had a strong argument about Wikipedia to make, I think this fails as standalone commentary. But if Matthews does actually sell copies of this book, consider me interested (price dependent). Mr. Matthews doesn’t have answers for his questions, but his artwork would make for an excellent conversation piece.

The crud factor

2009-06-20T22:18:45+00:00

Many thanks to Vassyana for opening a page within user space to brainstorm for solutions to Wikipedia's chronic conflicts. This post is related to his excellent drive.

One thing to be alert for within arbitration is the crud factor: disruptive editors fill the case pages with crud. The principle is simple: when the evidence is against you and you don't have a useful rebuttal, clutter the case and make it harder to read. Crud appears at Wikipedia arbitrations across many unrelated topics because crudism is an intuitive strategy. Crud is the noise in the signal-to-noise factor of Wikipedia arbitration. This post describes crudism and how to defend against it.

First, what exactly is the crud factor? A simple example of pure crudism occurred at the Gundagai arbitration of 2006. All of the participants except one substantiate their assertions with diffs, while a single individual makes a long series of aggressive claims backed by no evidence at all. See if you can spot the crudite at this page.

Most of the cases the Arbitration Committee gets in 2009 are more complex than that because the community has gotten more effective at dealing with simple crud at the community level. One well-known example of recent crudism was the John254/Kristen Eriksen sockpuppet team that played both sides of the fence at the Scientology arbitration workshop until the sockteam was identified and banned by the community through independent action.

Community action doesn't stop crud from occurring, though, because John/Kristen was a rare type of crudite. Most crudites are either directly involved in the dispute being arbitrated or else strategically aligned with one or more partisans. Most crudites pursue three goals:

Protection of one or more allied partisans against arbitration sanction.
Aggressive sanction against one or more opposing partisans.
Establishment of arbitration principles that can be leveraged to the crudites' advantage in future disputes.

These days, when a case reaches arbitration it often comes with multiple crudites acting in tandem and subtle forms of crud. Instead of long rants with no diffs they provide cherry picked or irrelevant diffs. Crud expands and migrates across case pages the longer the case remains in evidence phase.

The really damaging thing about subtle crud is that it resembles evidence; other editors may consider themselves compelled to rebut it. If they do, more crud follows. If they don't, exhausted arbitrators might suppose no defense was attempted. The result of this double bind is a negative feedback loop during which the case grows exponentially.

The Solution to Crud
Arbitrators can put an effective cap on crud by putting up proposed decisions sooner. Note the time frame of the Gundagai arbitration mentioned earlier:

Case Opened on 21:50, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Case Closed on 18:02, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

In most arbitrations the useful evidence gets posted within about three weeks of opening the case. Occasions when useful evidence gets delayed are usually identifiable because someone has asked for more time due to health, work, or other tangible reasons. By contrast, crud accumulates at a steady trickle according to whenever the crudites have enough free time to generate more crud.

The key defense, from the arbitrators' standpoint, is not to rush the voting upon a proposed decision but to initiate the proposed decision sooner. Once a case moves to voting, crud naturally migrates to the proposed decision talk page--which slows the growth of crud at the evidence and workshop. It is more useful to distract hardened crudites off those pages and to leave the arbitrators somewhat at leisure to sort out the existing mess.

Fred Bauder was brilliant at that while he served on the Committee. Many of the old Bauder proposed decisions are superb demonstrations of crud management.

Remember, the most important response to crud is to identify it, separate it from useful input, and redirect the crudites' attention where they cause less damage until the case closes. For the most part, only arbitrators can achieve this.

Wikisource at a law conference and other ☍ links for 2009-06-20

2009-06-20T15:41:05+00:00

Via Open Access News: a chap called Tim Armstrong at a conference for law school computing called Crowdsourcing and Open Access v2.0: Harnessing the Power of Peer Production to Disseminate Historical Records and Legal Scholarship:

This presentation expands the inquiry [of “[enlisting] anonymous collaborators online to help make legal research materials freely available”] to consider whether crowdsourcing tools can aid in the dissemination of historical records and, of particular interest to law faculty, legal scholarship.

[…] I will use two examples drawn from Wikisource, an open-access library of public domain (or freely licensed) works, to illuminate the power of “crowdsourced” efforts to archive and distribute historical and scholarly works. First, I will highlight the efforts of the Wikisource community to digitize, and make available in full text, the earliest volume of the United States Statutes at Large, a work not freely available anywhere else online. Second, by way of “walking the talk,” I will discuss my recent experiment in disseminating my own legal scholarship by the same means, yielding a product that seems superior in a number of respects to more familiar large-scale scholarly repositories such as SSRN.

Neat, eh? Slides are also available. And Tim also put up one of his own papers that he licensed under CC-BY-SA — it’s called “Fair Circumvention” and you can check it out as a PDF or as a Wikisource document or of course in a side by side comparison. Tim is also an admin on Wikisource.

Wikisource bills itself as an “online library of free content publications”, but that seems to me to be a vast understatement that doesn’t capture what’s special about it.

Wikisource, as far as I know (which is not very far, and I will happily accept corrections here), relies heavily on the file format Djvu (pronounced “deja vu”) and a MediaWiki extension called Proofread Page. “DjVu is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned images, especially those containing text and line drawings. It features advanced technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy compression for bitonal images. This allows for high quality, readable images to be stored in a minimum of space, so that they can be made available on the web.” (So reports this example — Alice in Wonderland.) So Djvu is kind of like a version of PDF that’s been uber-enhanced for scanned text.

English Wikisource seems to lack a help page that explains its basic operations in a single page. Especially with screenshots. Or did I miss it?

Peter Suber pointed out the similarity between this idea and Open Medicine’s idea of simultaneously publishing articles in HTML and “wiki” (previously mentioned on this blog), but I think that is slightly different, as I believe Open Medicine intended to encourage further collaboration on the work, whereas Wikisource transcribes PDFs, but with the intention of staying faithful to the original. If you want to keep editing it, perhaps it’s time to move it to Wikibooks/Wikisource?

I like the idea of using a wiki as a repository, whether or not you intend to allow further editing, but I’m just concerned that MediaWiki syntax is not standardised and you get just getting locked in to another platform. Template proliferation may be another problem.

And, elsewhere:

File sharing has not discouraged creativity. This will be no surprise to many people, including Julie Cohen, who spoke memorably at the Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom conference about “copyright & creativity”.
The Open Video conference is on at the moment in New York. Of course, don’t worry if you can’t make it, because there will definitely be tons of video. :) The schedule looks interesting.
The Global Watchtower blog (‘Globablization in Practice’) has written on LinkedIn’s mishandled attempt to ‘crowdsource’ translations. Essentially they emailed every LinkedIn user who had a word like ‘language’ or ‘linguist’ or ‘translator’ in their profile, and asked them to fill out a survey saying if they’d like to do translation for LinkedIn for free. Unsurprisingly that didn’t go down that well. However it’s great to see Global Watchtower present a nuanced understanding of what they call “CT3” (“community, crowdsourced, and collaborative translation”). I highly recommend this blog for anyone interested in developments in commercial language technology (especially translation technology news).

"Just the shoreline receding"

2009-06-19T23:36:19+00:00

I have been reading some of Debbie's posts about leaving one home and starting a new one (though, for her, the new home is an old one too). I'll be leaving Austin soon, and I've been pre-missing (did I make that word up?) Austin for a while now. J and I have been working our way through a "bucket list" of sorts.

Part of my bucket list involves seeing as much live music as possible, and thanks to my good friend Doug I got to see Okkervil River's taping of Austin City Limits last night.

Gay Porn’s Neocon Kingpin furthers his way into mainstream America

2009-06-19T22:44:06+00:00

If you thought Michael Lucas would land in New York City and stop his conquest of America there, you thought wrong.

The Soviet-born man the New Republic called “Gay Porn’s Neocon Kingpin” will appear in an upcoming episode of ABC’s Ugly Betty.

Will wonders never cease. I first met Lucas after he wrote Wikipedia about issues with his biography. I am not into pornography nor had I written an adult article before, so I appreciated the new topic (I fixed some errors and in the process got stalked).

Lucas liked the idea behind my ceative commons photography project, and invited me to shoot a place he loves: Fire Island (click here for a few of the photographs).

Ugly Betty is filmed on location in New York City, which is where Lucas Entertainment is based. According to Lucas’ PR, his will be the first appearance by a porn star in a major network prime-time show (excluding “reality” television).

On his blog, Lucas wrote the following:

How will ABC deal with a porn star on one of its prime time programs? I am curious to see how this will play out. Now, I am not suggesting that my little walk-on will change the world. But I hope it will be one step taking us out of the privacy of people’s bedrooms and onto a larger stage. And I hope the American public will enjoy seeing a porn star as a real person, not just as a hot body.

Possibly related posts

Ward’s Keynote at Open Source Bridge

2009-06-19T17:59:42+00:00

Yesterday morning, our own Ward Cunningham delivered an awesome keynote in tandem with Mayor Sam Adams to the open source citizens of the first (but not last) Open Source Bridge conference. Be sure to check it out below.

Now on the third and final day, it’s not too late to come by this afternoon (for the $99 one-day price) to participate in the ending unconference sessions that have been going on. Not only are some of the best-and-brightest of the Portland technology community here, but there plenty of cool out-of-towners with open source knowledge to share.

Walter Cronkite is dying [citation needed]

2009-06-19T17:55:24+00:00

The wrangling over the Wikipedia biography of Walter Cronkite and what is apparently his failing health has begun. Wikipedia editors often get this kind of news early, as people rush to update Wikipedia articles the moment they learn something.

Gail Shister at Mediabistro blog TVNewser is responsible for the rumor, quoting unidentified sources inside CBS. The network has officially declined to confirm reports that the news legend is in poor health.

In an interview with Shister in 2006, the now 92-year-old Cronkite was asked if he ever thought about death:

“When you get to be 89, you have to think about it a little bit. It doesn’t prey on me, and it doesn’t keep me awake nights. Occasionally, when I’m upset about something else, I think, ‘My gosh, I don’t know if I should do this or that because I’m not sure I’ll be here that long to enjoy it.’”

This story presages the inevitable “Death of News” stories that will follow when Cronkite passes. He and Edward R. Murrow are the two historical news figures that most symbolize a perceived golden era when American news was there to inform, and not entertain. Yes kids, they predate Fox News.

Possibly related posts

Strange moments at Wikipedia

2009-06-19T18:25:11+00:00

Today's strangeness: finding an article about a magazine called The Bookseller that covers the publishing industry...and tagging it as unreferenced.

ISBN 978-3-03911-799-4

2009-06-19T11:48:00+00:00

Last year I spoke at a conference in Aarhus, Denmark at the Centre for Lexicography at the Aarhus school of business. I was asked to write an article about what I had to say. I did, and with pleasure I received a complimentary copy in the post titled "Lexicography at a Crossroads".

Sadly the publication is not published as an Open Access work so you will have to find a copy when you want to read my essay "The Philosophy behind OmegaWiki and the Visions for the Future". There is always the presentation that I gave at the conference..
Thanks,
GerardM

Wikipédia et référencement

2009-06-19T10:41:27+00:00

Je vais fournir le 10 juillet une formation "Wikipédia et référencement" à Paris (à priori destinée aux entreprises). Je détaille cette offre sur mon site http://www.devouard.com. Evidemment, cette formation n'a pas manqué de soulever l'indignation d'une personne, laquelle s'est imaginée qu'il...

Charles Matthews: What did we learn from "Matthew Hoffman"?

2009-06-19T00:59:38+00:00

This post is by Charles Matthews. Charles was a member of the English Wikipedia ArbCom from 2006 to 2008. His first guest post was On Notability. —Brianna

Some ArbCom (Arbitration Committee) cases on the English Wikipedia can reach the mainstream media: there was a recent decision on Scientology-related editing which did just that. Others are very much for insiders, and the innocuously-named Matthew Hoffman case, the topic of a recent ArbCom statement, is an example. I brought the case, a year and a half ago. This will be part retrospect, and part a meditation on “ArbCom 2009”.

What did we learn, then? The short answer is “not enough”. ArbCom 2009 has come to the view that the case should never have been accepted. I don’t think I’ll hire them as historians: the decision they have recently issued about the case is much the same as saying that in 2009 the case would not have been taken, and if taken would have been handled very differently. I’m not quarrelling with that conclusion since it is probably simply true, and it is well within ArbCom’s remit to reconsider matters and the way they were dealt with in the past. What catches my eye there is that justice was always an issue in the Hoffman case, since User:Matthew Hoffman was permanently banned by two admins on no evidence at all. That is one point, and the new statement changes nothing about it. And the other is that Wikipedia is a dynamic place. ArbCom 2009 is not ArbCom 2007 which accepted the case – only a couple of those Arbitrators are still there – and the whole context changes, particularly since ArbCom is an elected body. Elections also matter in this story, since both admins in the frame ran in the 2007 elections that could have put them on ArbCom 2008, and the case was concurrent with the election period.

The Matthew Hoffman case was brought by me because I thought the ArbCom (of which I was a member 2006-8) should look at how it could happen that two admins at the Adminstrators Noticeboard (AN) could decide on the flimsiest of grounds that the Matthew Hoffman account was a sockpuppet (of some other unspecified account), never think to ask for a CheckUser run to verify this and see what other accounts were involved, and one of them (SH as I shall call him) block the account permanently, with a misleading log entry saying “vandalism-only”. Now, in the light of the Scientology decision, the rationale on the admins’ side can be clarified this way: the class of ‘single-purpose accounts’ (SPAs) brings itself under suspicion, because an SPA edits just in one area. When (as for much Scientology-related editing) there is reason to believe that the editing of a group of SPAs is centrally organized, then worries increase. This argument was brought up in the Hoffman case, with creationism in the place of Scientology. The ArbCom of the time took little notice of this line of reasoning (rightly, in my view). It is still no crime to be an SPA, though it will in practical terms tend to tell against an editor in dispute resolution. Note the distinction, though: Hoffman was blocked by admins not trying to resolve a dispute, because the AN discussion of his case took place while he was blocked for 72 hours. That’s the key problem here with natural justice. Hoffman was locked out of responding on the site to the sockpuppet claim by a short block. (ArbCom found that while the Hoffman account was an SPA, there was no evidence at all that it was a sock. Suspicion is not evidence, but it plays a part in how matters are handled administratively on the site, so that justice is not always served.)

Someone else, before I got there, had put it to SH that the block should be reconsidered, only to be told that “sorry, it was consensus at AN”. Here’s another thing we learned, namely two admins on a noticeboard (meaning an unregulated onsite process) can decide to block someone indefinitely, on no evidence, and then fend off outside interest. That was as of 2007, and I don’t suppose the same uncritical attitude would pass muster now. It took some months for the matter to get to court, and I’ll not rehearse the whole history. The fact is that SH’s block was his personal responsibility, and was so treated by ArbCom when it took the case, which brought forth little general illumination beyond the SPA argument I have mentioned. It was shoehorned into being a case about SH; I (naturally) was recused, and this was not the inquiry I had wanted, but it was all out of my control. For more on the facts see my only extensive onsite discussion ; the matter is in the first two questions, but the joint statement in the blue box at the top of the page explains why I’m not going to cover this ground again, and indeed stopped short then.

I was outraged by the whole business: a culture of admins being unreasonable rather than responsive in this matter just created a fall guy. Let’s hope that has changed. How should it all work, in the big picture? My view: admins should be granted plenty of discretion in using their powers to defend Wikipedia’s content and mission. But admins who make poor discretionary decisions should expect to have to defend those decisions rationally when challenged; and failure to engage and make an acceptable case is a serious question mark over the admin. It’s not the mistake (we all make them), but the attitude to discussing the decisions that make up the admin workload. The admin community is in potential conflict with the small ArbCom (of about 1% of the size of the admin body) that can remove their powers. Some other Wikipedias do without an arbitration process, and so the justice mechanism is the admin body and its self-regulation; but self-regulation can be flawed, too. ArbCom can review ‘community bans’, namely bans upheld by all admins, but this kind of review now rarely causes trouble and it is unusual for a community ban appeal to succeed; this path isn’t really controversial.

The dispute that arose could certainly have been avoided by applying the maxim “thoughtful, not combative”. It was disastrous (all round) that a block discussed briefly at AN was confused with a community ban, with so much muddle. Was Hoffman a vandal, a sock, or a disruptive editor, and did anyone care which? None of the above: it was a bad block being covered up. Perfunctory discussion at AN must not be held up as deciding these matters once and for all. Why would it not have been important at least to know of what other account the Matthew Hoffman account was a sock? Why was he run off the site before being asked whether it was a real name? Those questions are pretty much rhetorical, but let’s not lose sight of natural justice. There has been strong advocacy, and much procedural argument, but let’s also hear it for the facts, evidence, and setting matters straight.

Hoffman hasn’t returned to Wikipedia. Moving on, what do we learn about ArbCom 2009? The ArbCom, as of 2009, seems to be binding itself to operate in a more tightly constrained way, by placing emphasis in its Hoffman statement on procedural rather than evidential matters. We are back to justice, but this is more like the apparatus of the television lawyer drama. In fact the ArbCom was changing as of 2008, accepting many fewer cases than before, and we are now at perhaps 25% of the caseload numerically compared to the peak period in 2006/7. These cases are generally more complex, and take several times as long to close.

The bigger picture is of admins plus ArbCom in tension on the English Wikipedia, as a shifting relationship that went through an uneasy period in 2008. We are certainly seeing some movement at the moment.

Episode 75: Meet Jennifer Riggs

2009-06-18T23:35:44+00:00

An interview with Jennifer Riggs, the newly hired chief program officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. We discuss her background, her introduction to the Wikimedia community and what she sees as first priorities.

The associaton of friendly geezers

2009-06-18T22:57:00+00:00

The association of friendly geezers is a group of Wikipedians over the age of 30 who oppose ageism. One of the joys of Wikipedia is that it allows talented people to demonstrate their true abilities. When young people perform valuable volunteer work for this website that's something to celebrate. Friendly geezers think it's wonderful when young people contribute quality content and perform useful support functions. We're glad to support individuals who demonstrate proficiencies suitable for administratorship or bureaucratship, regardless of age.

Maturity is a factor of inner growth; some people have it at fifteen and others lack it at fifty. Friendly geezers rate fellow editors by how much they help the site. We wish a place like Wikipedia had existed while we were younger, and we pledge to extend merit-based respect.

----
Participants welcome. Geezers (over thirty) sign up as full members. Future geezers (under thirty) sign up as associates. And if you don't think your age is anybody's business, your signature is welcome at 'Friendly independents'.

The history of the future of journalism?

2009-06-18T19:55:11+00:00

In the wake of the Iranian election, lots of the people who focus on the changing journalism landscape have been talking about the significant role Twitter and other social media are playing in organizing and spreading news about the protests. Two of the leaders of the broad journalism discussion are Dave Winer and Jay Rosen, who have a weekly podcast called Rebooting the News. In the latest edition, Winer looks back to September 11, 2001 as the first time when the online social web foreshadowed the kinds of citizen journalism that Winer and Rosen see as a major part of the future of news. As he explains, he had no TV at the time but strictly through the Internet he was just as informed and up-to-date as he would hae been following the events of the day through traditional media.

Around 2001 is also the horizon for historians; for events after that, the archival richness of the internet accellerates from then until now in terms of the experience of ordinary people in major historical events and trends.

In that vein, here's a paper I wrote in 2005 for a course on narrative history with John Demos, about the usenet traces of the kinds of the thing Dave Winer reflects on from 9/11. (I tried to weave in the pop psychology framework of the five stages of grief, to mixed results.)

----------------

We historians like to think that things develop gradually. Yet, in the microcosm, the events of the following months and years were foreshadowed there in the cyberspace of New York City on September 11. All the questions of “why?” and “what now?” were hashed out in the hours following the attacks by net denizens as they struggled to come to grips with the grief of the nation.

After one hour thirty-six minutes of denial, the messages on the NYC General internet discussion group started with a comment calculated to jump-start conversation, going straight to bargaining:

Tues, Sep 11 2001 10:20 am

WTC: Bound to happen

I wonder if this will change our assistance plans to Israel?[1]

Circumspection was the word for the first few replies; questions not answers. Who is sending us this message? Was it “internal” like the Oklahoma City bombing, or was it the Palestinians or someone else? Is it just a coincidence that this is the 25th anniversary of the Camp David Accords?[2] Whoever it was, they were clearly well-organized; they knew they had to use large planes with full fuel tanks to take out the World Trade Center Towers.

Just after noon, they were on to bin Laden as the likely culprit; it seemed like “his style.” Rumors that he had foretold an “unprecedented attack” two weeks earlier, including information from one woman’s unnamed friend from the intelligence community, provided one focus for the rising anger of the discussants. Israel and the celebrating Palestinians on TV were also popular targets of ire. Anger got the better of more than one:

Tues, Sep 11 2001 2:05 pm

Anyone cheering at thousands of Americans being murdered is a declaration of war as far as I'm concerned.

Tues, Sep 11 2001 6:02 pm

Did you all see the Palestinians dancing for joy today?

SCUM. Burn them all.

Calmer voices prevailed quickly, defusing talk of an indiscriminate crusade. But few seemed to doubt that war was on the horizon, even if not everyone had a clear idea of whom (or who) to fight:

Tues, Sep 11 2001 1:51 pm

>>>This must mean war.

>>With who?

>Afghanistan.

Any particular reason, or are you just starting [with] the A's?

The possible complicity of Iraq was mentioned as well, and the failure to capture Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War illustrated how hard it might be to get bin Laden (if he was even the right target) in an Afghanistan war. But waging war on the Taliban, at least, might yield some human rights dividends, considering the way they treated their women.

The depressing, fatalistic seeds of the prolific conspiracy theories that developed in the months and years after the attack were there in the first hours too:

Tues, Sep 11 2001 11:39 am

I would not think (but I'm NOT an expert) that such impact would so weaken the structure as to cause both to collapse, without further destruction at a lower level.

and

Tues, Sep 11 2001 1:22 pm

I am just pointing out that I don't think we can take out Bin Laden because if we could we would have done it long ago.

It would be months before online groups like the 9/11 Truth Movement would spin such speculation into elaborate tapestries of lies and manipulation, in which the strings are pulled by the man by behind the man behind the man (with three U.S. Presidents, at least, in on it), with bin Laden as the fall guy who was working for the CIA all along. But common sense prevailed quickly in this particular cyber niche; the combination of fire and impact would be able to take down the towers, with all that weight above the impact points, they reasoned.

Ultimately, the tension on the internet that day was between anger and acceptance, and with the bombers apparently dead and the looming possibility that there might not be anyone left to blame, the discussants turned on each other:

Tues, Sep 11 2001 8:10 pm

[On the subject of celebrating Palestinians and possible PLO involvement in the attacks]

>>Gosh, you don't suppose the Isreali blockade has anything to do with it, do you?

>And what does this have to do with just buying food???

Don't know how the blockade works, do you?

>>>They aren't feeding their people, giving them housing or water - no

>>As a matter of fact they are, as much as they can. But when Isreal takes their land

> Of, forget it. You're brainwashed.

This is coming from someone who can't tell the difference between the PLO and other arab organizations.

and

Tues, Sep 11 2001 8:31 pm

> I'm not the one advocating bombing anyone.

Ha. So you just want to let them do this and get away with it, eh?

This was the worst of that first 111 message-long thread—tame compared with many of the other virtual shouting matches that developed that afternoon. And ultimately, the feelings of anger won out on NYC General, coming into line with zeitgeist of the rest of the nation as President Bush announced plans to hunt down the terrorists and those who harbor them. But elsewhere on the internet, then and now, every possible response from denial to acceptance has a place. And the stories will still be there waiting for us, for when we are ready to move on.

-------------------------

[1] This and all following quotes come from the USENET archive of nyc.general, as archived by Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/group/nyc.general). This discussion thread was started simultaneously on nyc.general, nyc.announce, alt.conspiracy (where it superseded such hot topics as “Moon Landings: Fact of Fiction?,” but did not change that group’s absurdist conspiratorial tone), talk.politics.misc (which was rapidly inundated with separate posts, preventing any sustained discussion), and soc.culture.jewish (where the endemic Zionist/anit-Zionist rhetoric drowned out this relatively moderate thread), and soon spread to other groups, fragmenting and spawning new discussions. There are probably hundreds of preserved usenet discussions documenting the immediate response of thousands of people on September 11.

[2] Actually the Camp David Accords were reached on September 17, 1978, making 9/11 just shy of the 23rd anniversary.