A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
This post has been removed at the request of fellow Wikipedia administrators who are concerned about revealing deleted information. Personally, I disagree with this, and think that when it comes to a major scandal like Bell Pottinger, the public have a right to know as much as possible, so long as it doesn’t breach confidentiality. Until there is community consensus on the appropriateness of such publication, I have removed this post.
Business Insider in 2008:
Google Launches Wikipedia Killer “Knol”
Google in 2011:
Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.
Business Insider, hyperbole much?
In the constant debate about Wikipedia, one trope often brought up is the idea that deletion of articles drives away contributors, and that this may be one cause of the decline in the total number of editors at English Wikipedia. In feedback regarding the current fundraiser, this has been brought up: people say they would support Wikipedia but for rampant deletionism.
There’s only one small problem.
It seems the number of deletion nominations is going down.
In response to the claim made above, I checked the Articles for Deletion log. I checked the same day (the 20th) every month since January 2007. In 2007, every single day log page I checked had over 90 closed nominations, and most had over a hundred. One even had 156. This has seemed to decline: this year, in the eight day logs I sampled (January through August), the highest number of nominations closed in a day has been 90.
This is, of course, an extremely limited study: I picked only 57 data points: I was doing it by hand, and didn’t want to spend more than an hour or so compiling the data.
There are, of course, many other issues here: it may be that we are deleting the same number of articles, but just not doing it through the AfD process: instead, the CSD and PROD process are being used more, and admins might be doing IAR (“ignore all rules”) deletions. To get a full picture, we’d obviously have to factor in CSD and PROD deletes, and to compare these figures to the number of articles created. (It may be we are deleting less articles because there are less incoming articles that need deleting.)
But I think this gives us good reason to lower our confidence in the hypothesis that deletion is the cause of editor retention issues. There are plenty of other potential causes (obligatory link to the Huggle research).
It’s that time of the year again: Wikimedia is raising money. It’d be really great if you could donate: donate.wikimedia.org
Many people express concern about the funding banners, so I should explain purely in my personal capacity what you can do about them if you don’t like seeing them.
There are three ways you can stop seeing the fundraising banners:
As I have been answering e-mails related to the fundraiser, I have a simple compromise: I have been filtering the banners on English Wikipedia but keeping them on Simple English Wikipedia. This way, if I get a question about the banners or the fundraiser generally, I can go to Simple and see them.
If you use Wikipedia enough that the presence of the banners annoys you and you choose to filter them out, be sure to go and donate.
I was source hunting today for Wikipedia, and came across a stunning omission from a printed reference work.
I was reading about the Harlem Renaissance and came across the story of the Afro-American Realty Company. This was set up in June 1904 to buy property in New York City, specifically Harlem, and to then rent it to black people and businesses. They got into a “race war” with another property development company called the Hudson Realty Company. Anyway, I was source hunting through the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, a 2004 publication by Routledge, and was reading their description of this.
Then I read Wikipedia.
Wikipedia says this:
It was not as successful as some stockholders had anticipated, though, and in October 1906, 35 of them brought a lawsuit, charging that the prospectus was fraudulent and overstated the company holdings when it was issued.
This sentence has a source pointing to a October 27, 1906 New York Times article which backs up the statement in the article. (Incidentally, by today’s standards, the language of the NYT story is incredibly racist with lines about how the Afro-American Realty Company was buying and leasing properties “in half a dozen different neighborhoods not previously invaded by colored tenants” etc.)
What does the Routledge encyclopedia entry say on page six?
Payton had trouble managing his own riches, and he dissolved Afro-American Realty in 1908, but opportunities for black migrants to Harlem continued after his company ceased operations.
No mention at all is made of the lawsuit brought against Payton by his shareholders.
That’s a fairly glaring omission.
I’ve been meaning to write a long and detailed assessment of the opt-in image filter debate currently raging in Wikimedia circles. There’s lots of power plays going on and not a lot of good faith.
I’ve been watching from the sidelines: I’m fairly agnostic about the whole thing. My only contributions thus far have been to challenge what I see as bad arguments. If I were pushed, I’d say I’m mildly in favour of the proposal, but if it doesn’t happen, I won’t be too crestfallen. As I said, my primary interest is in the quality of the arguments (there’s a reason I’m a philosophy graduate student…).
One argument I’ve heard over and over again runs something like this…
We shouldn’t have an image filter as the categorisation system that comes with it would enable others to filter Wikipedia.
Basically, to enable an opt-in image filter, we’d build up categories and schemata for the opt-in filter which could then be reused by others who want to prevent others from having access to Wikipedia. It’s basically a utilitarian objection: rather than objecting to the principle of the filter, it is an objection to the probable knock-on effects that creating the filter would have on others.
There’s nothing wrong with the logical structure of the argument, but I do have some very strong doubts as to whether you should accept the conclusions.
First of all, a slight philosophical objection. The argument could go for a lot of reuse. People who create photos or music or anything else and license it as public domain or as CC BY or BY SA run the risk that someone they don’t like ends up using “their” content. I wouldn’t be too pleased if I found that one of the articles I’d written for Wikinews or one of the photos I’d put on Commons turned up on websites affiliated with, say, the British National Party. But that’s a risk I run from licensing stuff freely. I willingly take that risk because the benefit of having things like Wikipedia far outweigh the downside of having politically disagreeable, well, dicks reusing the content. It’s the same risk we take with open source: what if some big weapons giant starts using your code to power their weapons systems? What if someone takes your open source wiki system and starts something as profoundly stupid and anti-intellectual as Conservapedia? The answer: well, that sucks. I don’t see why the same answer shouldn’t apply to this kind of objection.
English Wikipedia already has the “bad image list”: a list of shocking images that can only be included in the article it is listed for on the list. If you want to use it elsewhere, an admin has to update the list. It’s basically to prevent that delightful image “Autofellatio6.jpg” from being inserted into My Little Pony articles and other amusing bits of vandalism. Does the bad image list enable censorware? Yes. But it has kind of an important and useful function: preventing vandalism. Similarly, the doctrine of double effect can be called into play here: yes, we may be building up a list of categories that could be reused by censorware sellers, but that’s not our primary intention.
Anyway, the major objection is a lot more major than this charge of inconsistency. The major objection is simply that the sort of filtering is different enough for it not to matter.
The nature of an opt-in image filter is very different from a filter that isn’t opt-in.
Imagine you wanted to build Net Nanny or one of the other brands of what Wikipedia calls content-control software. The goal is simple: there’s a bunch of bad, evil, no good content out there on the Wild West Web that you want to prevent little Bobby in Missouri (or Manchester or Minsk or Matsumoto or Mangaung) from getting to. Some of it is images, some of it is particular websites, some of it is specific pages, whatever. You build up a big old list of URLs and other factors such that you can give the system a URL and for a given set of categories, it can say yes or no. If you get it right, little Bobby doesn’t have to see Tubgirl or 1man1jar… ever.
But if you get it wrong, there are problems. If you have false positives, that’s fairly bad. People laugh at you for your false positives. They make snarky blog posts saying “har har har, you can’t look up ‘Same-sex marriage’ on Wikipedia because this shitty censorware thinks the word ‘sex’ means it must be pornography”. And, yes, that’s a real example: my university has (or at least did a few years ago, things may have changed) a censorware system that blocked the article on English Wikipedia for same-sex marriage. Or you’ll get censorware that blocks websites about breast cancer or testicular cancer because, well, breasts and testicles are naughty. And if you are a government that implements it on publicly-accessible wifi hotspots in places like libraries and airports, you may get angry civil libertarian types laughing at you on BoingBoing.net… which due to the censorware used by the government, you probably won’t be able to read. So false positives are bad for your public image: a few are okay, but go too far and you end up being the corporate equivalent of the prudish philistine who tries to put some boxer shorts on Michaelangelo’s David because why would that nice ninja from Teenage Mutant NinjaHero Turtles be spending his time making nude sculptures of the important moral figures of our Judeo-Christian heritage rather than fighting crime!?
But false negatives are much, much worse for the censorware makers. Because once a false negative sneaks through the censorware, it’s game over. If little Bobby does see Tubgirl, he need only copy it onto a USB flash drive and stow that away somewhere his parents can’t find, with a filename like “homework”. And maybe little Bobby will share said picture with his friends at school. And maybe in return one of his classmates who doesn’t have prudish parents who install software with Orwellian names like ‘Net Nanny’ will download him some better pornography and some lovely images of self-inflicted chainsaw suicides or whatever it is the kids are into this week. And, as I said, it’s game over. Once you peek behind the veil of censorship, all those things you wanted to keep little Bobby away from start finding their way in. First it’ll be sex with farm animals, and then the Communist Manifesto, then he’ll want to go to college, and then he’ll want to edit Wikipedia! Pass the smelling salts!
So, if you wanna make censorware, it’s gotta be pretty damn strict. And you’ve also got to keep the false negatives down for PR purposes because otherwise snarky people will relentlessly mock you. Oh, and you’ve got to keep your lists secret because this is capitalism and competition requires secrecy. And if you leak the list, people will start poking around on those websites.
Making an image filter is a lot simpler then because the requirements are different. The goal of the proposed image filter (and a large number of different variants on the same theme one could conjure up to answer different objections) isn’t to prevent access at all. It’s to enable individuals to opt-out of displaying some images. It doesn’t need to be a comprehensive list of all things that meet the criteria for potentially controversial, nor does it need to work as hard as the censorware manufacturers to keep false positives low. If I decide that I don’t want to see bums and willies and boobies and so on (because I’m at work or on the train or in a public library or whatever), it doesn’t actually matter to me much if the filter isn’t 100% comprehensive. It isn’t trying to stop me from seeing any images of a particular class, it’s just giving me the option to view them or not. If one slips through (a false negative), it’s not game over either. It just means that the filter wasn’t as good as it could be. Whatever. If, while anti-vandalism patrolling, I get to see 90% less shocking images, great, sign me up. If I get to see 25% less shocking images, great, whatever. Anything better than zero is just fine.
And what about false positives? Okay, I wouldn’t necessarily want 100% false positives, and 50% would be pushing it a bit, but really, if all I have to do is click the image and it pops back in, the cost to a false positive is damn near negligible.
The sort of categorisation system that would flow from this is very different because the costs of inclusion or failure to include are so much different from in the Net Nanny type of case. Could the Net Nannies of the world use the lists and categories that get generated from an opt-in image filter? Sure. But why would they bother: they would still need to go over them to check for false positives and false negatives, because of the costs of both.
Back in 2008, I built something called the nsfw profile. It’s a GRDDL profile for defining certain links as not safe for work. (Don’t worry about what a GRDDL profile is.) The idea of the thing is that you could add nsfw as a class on links and then attach custom behaviour or maybe some kind of nice browser trick that would warn you about the not safe for work link. It didn’t take off because, well, for whatever reasons, but imagine if it did. The whole world started adding descriptive markup to their links so that browsers could work out what links are NSFW and so on. Could you build Net Nanny on top of this? Of course not. Again, false positives would be too high and the false negatives would be even higher.
Now, for the reasons I’ve given, I don’t think that it would be very likely that censorware firms would be very likely to use the resulting categories and lists from the image filter as part of their listings.
But there’s more. Let’s put ourselves back in the position of designing some censorware like Net Nanny. If you wanted to make sure that people could get access to Wikipedia but didn’t get to see, err, Double_penetration.svg, what would you do? Obviously, you can’t block Wikipedia. That’d be stupid. Well, if I were making some censorware, I’d probably just do a recursive category search starting at Category:Human sexuality on enwiki, then I’d hire a bunch of people to poke through each page and mark it as “porn” or “not porn”. Then I’d take the list of all the “porn” pages, scrape each one, work out what images are on there and add those to the list of naughty images. Then I’d ask the MediaWiki API to give me a list of all the inter-wiki links from all those pages to the other language versions. Then I’d scrape those to get a list of all the files they use and add any that aren’t already on the bad images list to that list. I’d pop all the pages on the list too, and then I’d set up a cron job to run once a month to find new images and new pages, run them past our minimum wage porn raters and… there you go, you’ve got a pretty damn good list of the sex stuff you need to filter from Wikipedia to protect the Flanders family from The Simpsons. If you are a repressive regime or a corporate censorware manufacturer, filtering the porn from Wikipedia is the easy bit: it gets a bit harder out there on the rest of the web where there isn’t a volunteer community dutifully sorting pictures into categories with names like Suggestive use of sticking out tongue and Cameltoes.
If you do want to build censorware that finds all the naughty on Wikipedia, the Wikimedia community has done most of the work for you already. You just need a few Python scripts and some minimum wage porn raters (I have a funny feeling that in a recession, there will be plenty of people wanting to get paid to categorise porn).
If we really want to stop censorware companies from reusing a category system for images on the Wikimedia sites, the panopoly of sexual image categories on Wikimedia Commons shows that it might be a bit late for that objection. As with content, we shouldn’t worry too much about how people reuse it, we should worry more about whether we are providing the best service for readers and editors (again, I don’t want to subject my fellow public transport users to some of the stuff I see while anti-vandal patrolling).
Censors may be humourless philistines, but they aren’t total morons. If they want to find the naughty stuff on Wikipedia and block it for their users, they are more than capable of doing so. Worrying about whether they would reuse our filtering categories is a complete red herring. Our non-filtering categories provide what most of what they need already, and I’m betting nobody is going to call for those to be shut down. Objection overruled!
The board resolution specifies a magical flying unicorn pony that shits rainbows. A wide-ranging survey has been conducted on the precise flight patterns and the importance of which way round the rainbow spectrum goes. These tiresome people who keep calling this “impossible” just do not understand that the high-level decision for a magical flying unicorn pony that shits rainbows has been set in stone.
I was asked by David Allen Green, the writer behind the Jack of Kent blog, to write about the situation with Johann Hari who recently apologised for various acts of journalistic malpractice including substituting interview copy with background material, and editing articles on Wikipedia using at least one pseudonymous account (User:David r from meth productions - hereafter ‘David r’). I was going to write various things about it when the story originally broke. I originally had some doubts about some of the evidence that was presented linking accounts on two different wikis with an IP address, but further evidence turned up to show that there indeed was a link.
Instead, I thought I’d give a more general introduction as to how the Wikipedia administrative system works in cases like this. I should first make a disclaimer: I’m just interested in showing the issues as they relate to Wikipedia policies, rather than making a political point about Hari or whatnot. That said, it would be pointless to deny that my politics line up very much with the political views of Johann Hari and indeed David Allen Green.
I’m just using the Hari/David r case to show roughly how these things work out, because behind the scenes at Wikipedia, there’s quite an interesting system for how these kinds of disputes and cases are resolved. There’s a whole hidden iceberg of complexity that the average web user doesn’t see. For those who keep track of things like the Hari case, it’s worth having some background on how it works so they can have a better shot at uncovering wrongdoing in the future.
The first thing to understand about Wikipedia is that there is an important difference between blocking and banning. A block is a technical measure designed to prevent someone from editing Wikipedia. If you turn up and start vandalising pages, adding the typical “Jimmy in year six at Suchandsuch school is gay!”-type vandalism or whatever, they are likely to be warned a few times and blocked. This is normal, everyday practice on Wikipedia: I’ve been responsible for at least 80 or so of these kind of blocks. Blocks are not supposed to be punitive: the first level of justice on Wikipedia is always preventative.
Users are blocked only long enough to stop them from vandalising and no longer. Of course, repeated violations earn one a progressively longer block. But the block is just that: a technical measure. Let’s say you are at Suchandsuch school and someone on your school network goes to Wikipedia and starts informing all the readers of the article on giraffes or whatever that poor Jimmy is in fact a homosexual, and the school gets blocked, there’s nothing to stop you from going home and editing. Or getting an account and editing. That’s all fine and dandy. A block is not necessarily a big deal: it’s more like an ASBO.
David r was banned in July. Banning is a social measure where the community decides that the person’s invitation to edit the site has been rescinded. You can read David r/Hari’s ban discussion: there were fifteen users who supported a ban (myself included), and three who opposed the ban. David r is banned indefinitely from editing anything on Wikipedia. As we now have confirmation that David r is Johann Hari, Johann Hari is indefinitely banned from Wikipedia.1 This means that if he pops up with a new account and someone can confirm that the account is a “sockpuppet” used by Hari, that account will be blocked indefinitely on sight.
Who does all this? Volunteers. As I said, I supported the ban when it was proposed in July. I’m not an administrator, just an experienced user of Wikipedia. The blocking is done by administrators, who are sort of the caretakers and cops of Wikipedia. If we wanted to map existing categories of political governance onto Wikipedia, the legislature is everybody (anyone can propose changes to policy, and then we try to use consensus to develop that into a policy or into guidelines). The administrators are really magistrate, policeman and executioner rolled into one. They are the ones who hand out the immediate justice. If you get blocked, you can appeal that by making an unblock request which gets handled by a different administrator. Complex cases end up at the Arbitration Committee, an elected panel of seventeen experienced users who hear cases and then have the ability to determine bans, blocks and other measures.
Bans, of the sort that David r/Johann Hari got, can be given out through three processes: by the Arbitration Committee (as described above), by Jimmy Wales (who still holds the power in a constitutional monarchist type of situation but is generally expected to not use it in the same way as the Queen is expected not to send people to the Tower of London), and a “community ban” (which is what David r got). In the latter, the community is presented with the option to ban someone and then has a consensus-based discussion and provide arguments. These look like votes, but aren’t. On Wikipedia, we hold that polls are evil. If you looked at that ban discussion, it looks like a vote, but you’ll notice that in addition to saying “Support” or “Oppose”, each user provides reasons. Once the discussion has run for a certain period, an administrator “closes” the discussion, sums up all the arguments made for and against, weighs them up and comes to a decision.
That’s how we administer justice, then, but what about evidence collection?
Here there are some other special powers worth knowing about. There’s two in particular: Oversight and CheckUser. These are so-called “advanced permissions” and are held by a very small number of people. Those people have to identify with the Wikimedia Foundation: that is, they have to send proof of their real-life identity to the Foundation. The powers are given only very rarely, and users with those powers have significant levels of community trust. Oversighters have the ability to delete content and wipe it from the historical log. This sounds very much like the “memory hole” from Orwell’s 1984, right? Yes, but it’s a very rare thing. I’ve had to use it only once or twice in the last year. The time that sticks out is when a kid from a school in the United States vandalised a page and inserted the phone number of a schoolfriend along with, of course, the claim that he was gay. Ordinary vandalism, sure. But it is ordinary vandalism that potentially reveals personal information about a minor. That’s kind of a big problem. I fixed the vandalism very quickly and got a admin to block the school’s IP address to prevent them from posting any more. But anyone who checks through the historical log could see this poor kid’s phone number. I e-mailed an oversighter and within an hour or so the edit was wiped from history.
The other power is more important for our purposes: the CheckUser. CheckUsers have the ability to see what IP addresses a particular user has been using for a period of a few months after they used that IP. A CheckUser can see if two users have been using the same computer. The power that CheckUsers and Oversighters have is kept in check by an auditing process. Every time they run a CheckUser on someone or Oversight something, ideally someone from the Audit Subcommittee checks that the use of the advanced permissions is handled well. Here we have the same issues we have with law and police processes in real life: to get a CheckUser to potentially infringe on someone’s privacy, someone from the community needs to present some reasonable suspicion that two users are in fact one and the same. If you’ve watched legal shows on TV, there’s the same kinds of language that goes on with use of CheckUser. CheckUsers aren’t supposed to go on a fishing expedition. I’ve been involved in one or two situations where a CheckUser had to look into something, and the only information you get back is basically a yes or no: they either tell you that your suspicions have been “confirmed” or that the check didn’t turn anything up.
Part of the problem with doing this kind of investigation is that not all of the evidence is always available to all users: if someone has had pages deleted, only admins can see that. If someone has had edits oversighted, admins won’t be able to see that. If they have been misusing multiple accounts, we need reasonable grounds before a CheckUser will do an investigation. Wikipedia’s social processes are interesting here: in ten years, the community has crafted a system that has some elements of a formal legal system.
What are the practical lessons from this that non-Wikipedians should take to heart to help keep powerful people (journalists, politicians and others) from abusing Wikipedia in the same way they often manipulate other media?
Given all of that, you may want to see what is currently going on in the Hari/David r affair: there’s a debate on the Administrator’s Noticeboard for Incidents called Johann Hari sockpuppetry which alleges (although not with much evidence in my view) that there are more accounts belonging to David r/Johann Hari.
If anyone interested in the Johann Hari affair following the published apology have any questions about the Wikipedia side of it, feel free to post a comment or send me a tweet, or post on my Wikipedia user talk page.
P.S. If that wasn’t enough Johann Hari-on-Wikipedia action, you might also want to read William Beutler’s post on the same topic.
P.P.S. I just looked through Velvet Glove, Iron Fist’s post about the Hari/David r affair. One interesting thing: David r made an off-wiki legal threat to someone on SourceWatch. If that had been on English Wikipedia rather than SourceWatch, he could have been blocked under Wikipedia’s no legal threats policy.
Coverage: Adam Tinworth at One Man and His Blog.
If Hari wishes to make the community aware of problems with the page about him, he can still e-mail OTRS, essentially Wikipedia’s confidential volunteer-run customer service department, at info-en@wikimedia.org ↩
There’s currently a massive debate going on in Wikipedia/Wikimedia-land over whether or not there should be an opt-in personal image filter. Basically, imagine each user could hit a little button and up would pop a list of categories of images, and they could choose which ones they don’t want to see. From then on, the images would be replaced with a box saying clearly that the image has been removed. They could then click on the box and the picture would immediately load in place and they could disable the filter any time.
There’s been, as I said, a massive stink about this. I’m not that bothered either way: I probably wouldn’t use it, and so long as it doesn’t affect others, including children, I’m okay. Filtering for yourself is fine, filtering for others sucks. You end up with barmy situations like an academic network I was using a few years ago which banned access to the Wikipedia page for “Same-sex marriage” because it had the word “sex” in the URI. But filtering for yourself is fine: I don’t like seeing adverts or tweets about Justin Bieber.
But I had a situation as a Wikipedia editor the other day which might have prompted me to have such a filter. A friend was anti-vandal-patrolling and came across an editor making a big stink about a pornographic image on Wikipedia. They didn’t want it removed, they had concerns about whether the, err, model in the image was complying with the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act (aka. USC 2257). The user was removing the image from the article, and there was a discussion going on about whether bringing up the USC 2257 issue counted as a legal threat under Wikipedia’s No legal threats policy and whether the user should be blocked.
Said friend of mine was asking for a second opinion from me and some other Wikipedians. At the time I was on my laptop on a busy commuter train going home from work on a shaky 3G connection. I don’t have a problem with downloading or seeing a pornographic image, but I’m not sure the guy next to me or any of the other commuters wants to see a picture of what turned out to be a male contortionist pleasuring himself. I actually couldn’t care less about the content of the image, nor the content of the article: the only things I cared about was whether the actions taken and the justifications given in the edit summaries and on the talk page matched up with the metadata of the image on Commons (I can see a Playboy-esque anecdote now: “I read the Wikimedia Commons sex categories for the metadata!”). If I had a simple way to turn off the images or just the pornographic images both in the article, in File: space on enwiki and on Commons, that would actually be quite useful. Because plenty of anti-vandalism patrollers and other assorted WikiGnomes often don’t care about the particulars of the content while involved in those tasks and aren’t particularly interested in going to jail for public indecency if they happen to be gnoming in public.
The Wikipedia Editor Survey 2011 came out recently. Interesting reading. One particular tidbit:
What does this tell us? There’s a lot of dumbphones, feature phones, old phones and just-about-scrapes-by-on-the-‘net phones out there. Most people aren’t using iPhones and Android smartphones… if by definition of ‘people’, you include the whole planet outside of the Western metropolises.
These are editors, not readers.
And really you should be. If you’ve got something to say, put it on the web, make it readable on smartphones and dumbphones, desktops, laptops, Kindles, Googlebots, semantic web agents. Blobs of Objective-C or Java are not a replacement for nice, lightweight, standards-based HTML. There’s a wide world out there beyond latte-drinking hipsters and Tim ‘Nice But Dim’ yuppie business executives on their smartphones.
One of the things I’m proud of about Wikipedia is that the community don’t give priority to rich smartphone owners over people in the developing world with older phones and less reliable connections. Hundreds or thousands of languages and devices, millions of topics, billions of web pages, trillions of bytes every hour but One Web for everyone regardless of browser, device, nation, race, religion, language or ideology. Let’s keep it that way.
I used to find Wikipedia’s legendary Administrator’s Noticeboard/Incidents rather scary and depressing. I now tend to find it hilarious. And today is no exception.
A guy called Ron Knight (check his LinkedIn profile) has threatened a Wikipedia administrator for deleting the self-promotional article about his company, “Knight Mediacom”–not to be confused with the other MediaCom.
The full text of his e-mailed legal threat is up on the ANI thread.
Mr. Schumin;
You have under your actions, pretenses and non-authority, with lack of education and understanding on the history of our firm, deleted the Wikipedia page for Knight Mediacom International, which you state has no other Wikipedia references, nor credible references to exist. If you have done your homework, you will have found countless references to Knight Mediacom International by both ISBN and UPC code, as the only authorized video distribution company to have distributed the works of CCTV and seven leading motion picture studios in China, as well as the USA, Belgium and Brazil, all within the United States, all of which titles may be found on Amazon and countless other film and motion pictures based resource and reference sites.
Further, other Wikipedia links were in fact linked to Facets Multimedia, FAO Schwarz, Archie Comics, Universal Studios and other major media firms in the United States. While reviewing your credentials, which appear collegiate at best and Wiki web based only, I would suggest that the next party can just as easily, with no further credentials, decide to delete you and your respective history and page on Wikipedia, solely for you as just a Web blog, it makes you of no importance nor credential should someone in turn just choose to delete you. You may well be a college student, but you have no professional track record nor any link to be “cleaning up” as a “credible clean up source” for a public Wiki space, and certainly you possess no credible certificate of noteworthiness of linked commercial industry nor brands.
Last, as you have deleted a trail from our time and investment in positioning actions on the web as a basis for stating a protection of trademarked intellectual properties and copyrights, which could be cause for a justified pursuit in the Courts against you, as a principal action to be construed as a case of action in law, this action should we choose can cause you great time, trouble and costs for your rather non well researched decision on such action.
Clearly your action to delete a company file is troublesome, and may well be so for you.
This note is made to be civil. You should return to Wikipedia and Undelete the Page for Knight Mediacom International, with explanation that you had failed to do complete research on all historic links, ties and other references, less aside from a court case filing, you may not wish to find someone simply coming along to delete You and your web based positions.
You have deleted our Intellectual Property as positions using Wiki references as the tool in our pursuits of trademark and copyrights filings and published position protections, and we maintain full rights on these claims of loss and damages. We trust you will take soonest action to return to Wikipedia and Repost to remove the Delete of Knight Mediacom International, with all its linked references within 10 days of receipt of this email notification.
Do what’s right. Awaiting your soonest action and reply.
Respectfully,
Ron Knight President Knight Mediacom International
C.c. Charles Grimes, Counsel at Law, Grimes & Battersby
C.c. Peter Eichler, Counsel at Law, Jennings & Strauss, Attorneys at Law
C.c. Paul Mirowski, Counsel at Mirowski Law, LLC
Apparently, according to this incompetent dickmuncher, it is the legal responsibility of Wikipedia administrators to not delete his content, and presumably it is also the legal responsibility of the Wikimedia Foundation to continue hosting “his” intellectual property, even though when he submitted it to Wikipedia, he presumably saw the bit on the edit page that said:
Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable.
By clicking the “Save Page” button, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
And below that:
If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here. All text that you did not write yourself, except brief excerpts, must be available under terms consistent with Wikipedia’s Terms of Use before you submit it.
“Deleting it because it is shit” is definitely included in “edited, used, and redistributed at will”.
Anyway, if you are thinking of hiring Ron Knight of Knight Mediacom International for the wide variety of media-related services he offers, you may wish to take the above into consideration, as he seems to be legally incompetent despite apparently retaining the services of three lawyers. He doesn’t seem to understand that no aspect of American copyright law entitles you to threaten Wikipedia administrators for deleting self-promotional content. Also, do feel free to savour the terrible grammar, sloppy sentence construction and general stupidity of the letter. Ask yourself: do you want this man working for your business?
If you feel you want to share Ron Knight’s legal theories with the world, feel free to link to this page with any link text you feel appropriate.
Or you could learn from Mr Knight’s failings: if/when your Wikipedia page gets deleted, sending a poorly-written, clueless legal threat to a Wikipedia administrator is a terrible way to promote your business or, indeed, getting your Wikipedia page restored. But it will amuse people, or at least the morally bankrupt ANI readers, for a few hours.
Yesterday, at GLAMcamp London we discussed a large variety of things. One of them was doing more ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘gamification’. I don’t like either term much but the general idea works a bit like this.
Currently, a lot of tasks on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects are high-intensity. Think about reviewing a featured article. It requires a lot of thinking, and a lot more typing.
Some people today used the term ‘crowdsourcing’ for what we need to work on, but that’s inaccurate: the issue isn’t crowdsourcing but splitting up high-intensity tasks into lots of small modular tasks that can be done without a great deal of prior context or time investment. ‘Crowdsourcing’ applies to non-modular tasks too: think of all the people who ‘crowdsource’ amateur videos. Producing a TV ad isn’t a modular task. The term ‘crowdsourcing’ is so general as to be useless. What we are actually talking about is tasks with a high degree of modularity (aka. low intensity/low commitment) vs. tasks with a low degree of modularity (high intensity/high commitment).1
The low degree of modularity tasks also happen to be the sort of tasks it is easy to do on a mobile device: a smartphone or tablet device like an iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android device etc.
There will be some tasks which it will be impossible to turn into ultra-modular tasks. Writing a Good Article (GA) review will be hard to do on a smartphone. In fact, most article writing tasks will probably never get any more modular than it currently is.
Speaking personally, two things stand out as a perfect example of tasks on Wikipedia that are low intensity and highly modular:
Both of these tasks are reasonably low intensity: they don’t require a lot of creativity, and can be done without typing. They are the sort of tasks I have done quite successfully on mobile devices.
If we can identify specific places where this kind of modularity can be used, we can build interfaces to help people who aren’t very active on Wikipedia to clear backlogs. Take images lacking descriptions.
Imagine this. After a busy day at work, you pull out a phone on the bus. It downloads a batch of random photos that lack descriptions (from Commons and/or English Wikipedia) and starts displaying them. You swipe to advance to the next one. At the bottom of the screen is a button that says “Identify”. You eventually run across a photo of a cat, tap ‘Identify’, choose what it is from a series of menus, and it places it into a review category with some basic information (‘Cats to check’!) and adds a description to the talk page. Later, an experienced user will check it and copy it into the description.
On English Wikipedia, images needing descriptions has a backlog of over 10,000. Imagine if an iPhone app became reasonably popular and there were a community of 1,000 people doing on average one or two image descriptions a week each. You only need a few hundred a day to be able to start really kicking the backlogs away.
We do some user testing, wrap this in a suitable interface: it may very minimal – getting to see completely random images may be enough of a Pavlovian trick to get a few people to tag some images. Or it may require fancy game mechanics: RPG-style levels, or perhaps a leaderboard. Perhaps just getting out of the way and making it convenient. Perhaps a mixture of things. Whatever. You test it and find out. It’s just like on Wikipedia: some people contribute to get barnstars, some to get high edit counts, some just for the love of the subject, some for the community and so on.
Wikipedia does a great job providing work for high-intensity committed users: there’s a lot more featured articles to write. But there is so much to do that is low-intensity, low-commitment and highly modularised. If the whole community has a think about it, they can undoubtedly come up with tasks that can be done on mobile phones. The specification is clear: set a task that takes no more than three minutes, requires no more than 140 characters of text input and can be done without reading more than one mobile phone screenful of text.
Make it easy and compelling to start doing these low intensity tasks, and it easily builds up into doing more complicated things. Just think about things experienced Wikipedians do frequently with Twinkle. Now imagine that for half the time on-wiki, you aren’t allowed to edit and can only use Twinkle: this is getting closer to the experience for the mobile user.
How does this fit with my views on gamification? Quite easy: I’m reasonably pragmatic. I still think that you will find much more enjoyment in life if you commit to work as part of an engaging community of meaning than you will through gamification. My earlier post is about how individuals act, and more importantly about how individuals should act. I think about things like this in the same way I think about something like needle exchange programmes. Yes, the world would probably suck less if there were less heroin addicts, but while heroin addicts exist, they should be able to get a clean needle, because having a heroin addict getting HIV from a dirty needle is like a real life serious business version of the jwz line about using regular expressions: “Now you have two problems.”
I’m not wild about gamification, but I’m even less wild about having 10,000+ images on Wikipedia lacking descriptions. If one solves the other, or many other similar tasks, I’m willing to do a deal with the devil. I don’t like the concept of social media either (for reasons I haven’t explained in a systematic fashion yet, for which I apologise) but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit in the corner and refuse to use Twitter or Facebook to make some kind of point. I’m not that pig-headed.
The important thing is that we need to find ways of not only getting over the stagnating number of active editors, but actively jump into trying to design new kinds of ways for contributors to participate in free culture projects. One of the sources of conservatism in the Wikipedia community is this idea that there is a very limited pool of Wikipedians: ten thousand or so on English Wikipedia, with a limited amount of manpower. This trope has turned up in innumerable discussions over proposals, most recently in the pending changes trials. But what is important to note is that we collectively have power to determine how easy it is to participate in the community. And producing the sort of interactions that those goofy buzzwords “gamification” and “crowdsourcing” point very vaguely towards might help and that we should think about them.
p.s. How does this fit into GLAM? Simple. When GLAM ambassadors are thinking about how to engage the community, think about how to engage the low-intensity community as well as the sort of heroic people who churn out five GAs before breakfast. And if something like a ‘simple image description’ interface were built, it should be possible to make that available for GLAM projects.
p.p.s. User:HaeB told me on IRC about research by Luis von Ahn and also at Google. More information at Google Image Labeler and ESP game.
‘Modularity’ in this sense is discussed in more detail by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks. ↩
Next week there’s lots of Wikimedia-related events going on in the UK.
On Monday night, there’s going to be a meetup in Edinburgh.
On Tuesday night, there’s going to be a meetup in York, the first one in York.
On Wednesday, there’s the National Railway Museum workshop in York.
Then on Friday, in London at the British Library, it is GLAMcamp London where we discuss how Wikimedians and WMUK can work with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (or GLAMs). Hopefully, I’ll be there.
And next Saturday, there’s a meetup in Manchester.
If you are in any of those places at any of those times, please go along. If you can, try and add your name to the wiki. I’ve created Lanyrd events for most of them, so you can also add yourself on there.
Wikimedia UK are doing tons of events: there are events at the Medical Research Council, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Institute of Physics and at TEDxBristol. And lots more which haven’t been announced yet. It’s exciting but tiring.
Here is an interesting thing from the Malayalam Wikimedia community I just saw: Wikisource Offline. Here is what it looks like. You’ll need Malayalam fonts installed to see how it looks. Details of how to install these are on Malayalam Wikipedia.
The Malayalam community has already put out a CD with 500 articles from Wikipedia, but this seems to be the first offline/CD distribution of Wikisource texts.
According to Santhosh Thottingal’s post, the CD contains novels, religious texts, poems and much more. I also read that the Malayalam community are working hard on translating texts from other languages including English into Malayalam. Putting them on CD is a really good way of getting these texts out to schools and the many places that still don’t have Internet access.
Creative Commons + community + decent input support + Unicode + passion = people doing interesting and awesome things in languages you probably haven’t heard of.
Massimo Pigliucci has written a fair and interesting piece on Wikipedia, parts of which I agree with. But I wanted to respond to point out a few things. This would be a blog comment, but it is quite long and has links and quotes and stuff, so it makes sense to put it on my own blog.
What about Wiki’s own self-referential article? Well, I must admit that it was darn useful! It begins with a fair disclaimer to the effect that “The neutrality of this article has been disputed,” as well as a link to an ongoing discussion on a related “talk page.” The dispute has not been resolved yet (my bet is it never will be), so the disclaimer is still there.
One thing about those disclaimers, or cleanup templates as they are called on Wikipedia. They can be placed by anyone, and removed by anyone. They have an in-built problem: they often become out-of-date. If you are editing Wikipedia, you might find an article with a cleanup template like this on there, go to the talk page and find no discussion as to the neutrality of the article. They now tend to have a date on them so you can see roughly how old the complaint is. Cleanup templates are something the community struggles with frequently and nobody is quite sure how to deal with. They tend to have a lot of false positives because they don’t necessarily get removed even when the issue has been resolved.
Surprisingly, the most recent comparative study cited by Wikipedia about itself appeared in 2008 in PC Plus (obviously, not a peer reviewed journal). Though the article concludes that “the vast majority of Wikipedia is filled with valuable and accurate information,” the link is actually to a different article, published at TechRadar.com. Hmm.
The likely reason for that is that the tech press often don’t put their articles online, so sometimes it is necessary to link to another site reporting on that article, just like we might link to, say, a BBC article about a peer-reviewed study in, say, Nature. Obviously, it would be useful if Wikipedia included the citation to the original journal article as well. Wikipedia’s principle of verifiability tends to favour online sources. The problem with printed sources is that people can fake them, and other people can’t check them without having access to a research library. I found this out a while back when I was asked to look up a citation to resolve a dispute on the history of medicine article (see the talk page).
This isn’t a matter of academic snobbism, it’s rather a question of sensibly covering your ass — which is the same advice I give to my undergraduate students (my graduate students better not be using Wiki for anything substantial at all, the peer reviewed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy being a manyfold better source across the board).
Okay, why bother with Wikipedia when there are specialist sources like the SEP around?
The SEP is a great resource and I’m thankful I can read it. But the problem with it is that it isn’t free to reuse and is currently in English only. You can read SEP and IEP for free, and that’s fantastic. But the benefits of reuse are worth considering.
If every philosopher and philosophy student were to go and make the article on their interests on Wikipedia better, that makes it possible for it to be translated into other languages. The article on ethics has 80+ equivalents in other languages. I’ve written stuff on Wikimedia sites, come back a few days later and someone has translated them into Farsi without having to ask my permission or anything: I go back to the page and, bam, there’s a link to a version in Farsi. That’s pretty cool.
There is technical reuse too. The One Laptop Per Child project at MIT can take Wikipedia and load it up on laptops being sent out to kids in the developing world in their native language and in English. There’s the Wikipedia 1.0 project which is attempting to produce a version of Wikipedia on CD/DVD that can be read offline, just like Encarta. Yes, not perhaps useful to the Ph.D student in America or Europe where access to the Internet is relatively cheap and plentiful. I imagine that if approached, the maintainers of the SEP would probably be happy to do something similar, but Wikipedia is actively working on that kind of thing. In terms of the mission of ensuring everyone has access to educational materials, this kind of thing is something academics should be trying to help with. I want it so the kid in Brazil or wherever on a shitty old computer with no Internet access can have access to a decent, comprehensive encyclopedia.
The problem, as is well known, is intrinsic to the very idea of an anonymously edited system based on crowd-sourcing: the anonymity part. While I’m sure that the overwhelming majority of Wiki editors and contributors are conscientious and only wish to help, anonymity virtually guarantees that a small band of political partisans, pseudoscientists, quacks, or just weirdo hackers will chip away at Wiki’s reliability, particularly when it comes to hot spots like the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the entry for G.W. Bush.
This is a problem, but it is mitigated in various ways. For instance, the obvious vandalism seems to be a solved problem. ClueBot NG picks up the majority of vandalism very, very quickly: as much as 70%. There’s a small army of people who patrol the site, using a variety of semi-automated tools to find vandalism and fix it very quickly.
As for the point-of-view pushers and so on, that’s more difficult. For political partisans, there isn’t much of a solution. For quacks and pseudoscientists, that’s a lot easier due to things like the Fringe Theories Noticeboard (or FTN). If someone spots an editor biasing an article towards pseudoscience and other fringe ideas, it can be reported on the FTN and others tend to swoop in and get to work.
Israel/Palestine is a huge battleground, and one most Wikipedians look on at in some despair. I know people who won’t even fix spelling mistakes on Israel/Palestine articles because of the edit-warring and other craziness that goes on there. Despite this, I’m pretty impressed by how well some of these articles end up. Wikipedia seems to work in spite of all this; some say it works because of it.
Be under no illusion: the community is well-aware of this but fixing it is actually quite hard. Which brings us on to Massimo’s suggestion:
Are there alternatives to or significant improvements over the Wikipedia model? Yes, for instance, Scholarpedia. I know, this is probably the first time you’ve heard of it, and I must admit that I never use it myself, but it is an open access peer reviewed encyclopedia, curated by Dr. Eugene M. Izhikevich, associated with an outlet called the Brain Corporation, out in San Diego, CA. Don’t know anything more about it (even Wikipedia doesn’t have an article on that!).
Frankly, it seems inevitable to me that Wikipedia is here to stay and that the rest of us will have to do our best to cope with it. I do think that a major improvement would be to do away with anonymity. Just look at this very blog you are reading: death threats, spam and insulting comments disappeared once I moved from open to moderated comments, but the level of discourse — usually remarkably high — occasionally dips because, I suspect, people feel secure behind their pseudonyms, just like the “Mean as custard” character cited at the beginning. If you take responsibility for what you write by signing your own name to it, you put in play one of the most important assets human beings have ever owned since the dawn of our species: your own reputation. Anyone at Wikipedia willing to experiment with this alternative model? Anyone else wishing to try it and give Wikipedia a run for their money?
Doing away with anonymity is a frequently suggested idea, but all attempts to implement it elsewhere have been… less than successful.
Do real names actually help with civility? To some extent, yes. If you have a name like ‘John Smith’, perhaps not. The John Smiths and Bill Joneses of the world are hardly less anonymous than users with names like “Can’t sleep, clown will eat me” or “Physics is all gnomes” or “Chase me ladies, I’m the Cavalry” or “Department of Redundancy Department” or “Wherethefuckismypasta”.
Where the real name idea stops working is at the moment you are trying to get volunteers. One of the things that makes Wikipedia work is that you can just turn up, hit edit and start working on the article. That is a really good way of getting people to start editing. They may then go on to register formally, but being able to ‘try before you buy’ is a great way for people to learn. Lots of vandalism comes from those IP editors, but 80% of edits from non-registered users aren’t vandalism. That’s pretty amazing.
Most of the people I know who edit Wikipedia do so under a pseudonym. I know some of their real names, and some I don’t. There have been people who have been outed. And most of the time, their behaviour doesn’t change that much. All that real names does is it reduces the number of people good and bad who will participate. For some communities, it might reduce the number of bad slightly more than it does the number of good, and might be a good tradeoff. But it is just that: a tradeoff, not a universal benefit.
The real-name thing has been tried by Citizendium - a project I was very involved with until last November (I’m still a member but I don’t really contribute much anymore as I’ve moved my efforts over to Wikipedia) - and it didn’t seem to work out so good. It hasn’t created a magical utopia: it’s created a bureaucratic nightmare. See the RationalWiki article. Interestingly, Knowino, a principles fork of Wikipedia has kept most of Citizendium’s changes except for real names. Will Knowino succeed where Citizendium failed to take off? Probably not. But it is interesting to see these different attempts.
As for the editor who was got shouted at as part of the Public Policy Initiative. Yeah, that’s a problem. Newbie treatment is something that is really being looked at heavily at the moment with the Wiki Guides project which is trying to gather data and make Wikipedia friendlier to newcomers. There’s lots of work to be done on that front, and data collection is the first step towards resolving that.
One of these days, WikiProject Philosophy will have enough people to really fix up some of the philosophy articles that are lacking.
