Open Wiki Blog Planet

Samuel Klein: 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.

Wikizine: Year: 2009 Week: 27 Number: 110

Walter — 2009-07-02T22:50:20+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/

Wikimedia Technical Blog: 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.

AboutUs: 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

Salah-Eddine Hamana: لافتات إعلانية ليوم ويكيبيديا العربية الخامس

Orango — 2009-07-02T16:22:51+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.

Wikimedia Technical Blog: 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.

Blog on Wiki Patterns: 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.

Pictures of the Day: Pictures of the Day - July 02

2009-07-02T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

Beskid Śląsko-Morawski - panorama 2.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Dmottl

de.wikipedia.org:

European hornet 090621.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Aconcagua

en.wikipedia.org:

Thomas Keene in Othello 1884 Poster.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Adam Cuerden

Wikimedia Technical Blog: 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

Wikimedia WhyGive? Donations Blog: 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

Shankbone: 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

Gerard Meijssen: You can see the future

GerardM — 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

AboutUs: 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!

Wikimedia Technical Blog: 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.

Mark Pesce: Sharing Power (Global Edition)

Mark Pesce — 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.

David Gerard: Wikipedia keeps the truth from everyone.

2009-07-01T15:22:15+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 …)

Samuel Klein: 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.

Andrew Lih: 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.

Pictures of the Day: Pictures of the Day - July 01

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

commons.wikimedia.org:

Mantis Ephestiasula sp Luc Viatour .jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Lviatour

de.wikipedia.org:

European hornet 090621.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Aconcagua

en.wikipedia.org:

Canada WWI Victory Bonds2.jpg from en.wikipedia.org, provided by Durova

Stephen Bain: Arbitration Committee mail traffic

Stephen — 2009-07-01T04:21:27+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.

Blog on Wiki Patterns: 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.

Wikimedia Technical Blog: 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

User:Majorly: Top five tips for writing a featured article

Majorly — 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!

Joseph Reagle: 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."

Samuel Klein: 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.

Domas Mituzas: 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.

WikiVoices: Episode 43: Wiki Takes Philadelphia!

Pharos — 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!

Shankbone: 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

Gerard Meijssen: Firefox 3.5

GerardM — 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