Is it just me, or has the administration recently owned up to how offensive it is being? Seems like a great drinking game: every time an administration or GOP official says “on the offensive,” take a very small sip.
I don’t know who is doing their strategy, but “turning a corner” (Daily Show translation: “I really think we’re starting to get the hang of this”) and a military on the “offence” seem to me to be dubious rallying points.
Fine. Great. I get about a comment a day through the summer and then the first day of classes, when I have no chance of keeping up, I do something that brings a boatload or two of people to my blog. So, with apologies for the shotgun response…
1. You killed Wikipedia. You bastard!
Well, not really. I did waste the time of a few editors, but in the case of the only one I’ve heard from, they didn’t really mind. Why are they so sanguine about having to clean up after me? First, because I was a tiny blip on their cleanup screen.
For whatever reason, I had in mind a roving pack of browsers who might check the Recent Updates once in a while, or keep up on their own pet areas. In fact, it seems there is an army of people watching an RSS feed of that page, just waiting for the error they can pounce on. It shouldn’t surprise me: I keep a reasonably tight lid on my own wiki (that half of China seems to consider their own personal advertising venue), but I guess I thought the content-to-watcher ratio would be much higher than it is.
So, anyway, now some people have something to point to that shows that errors really do get corrected, and it cost just a few corrections. It is important for anyone to be ethically reflective, and that the question at hand is important enough to counterbalance any potential harm. In this case, I think that the balance was well struck. I am happy, however, that there is an interest in the ethical use of community projects, and I welcome the criticism, even if I don’t agree with it.
2. If you really wanted to mess up Wikipedia…
Yes, yes, it seems everyone is wanting to tell me about how dumb it was that I not only made the changes from the same IP, I even attached them to a user name. And furthermore, I actually admitted to making the change on my blog, which no doubt has a readership to rival the New York Times and would quickly give me away to the careful Wikipedia police.
I realized this the moment I was “caught.” If I had it to do over again, I might have settled for less changes and restricted myself to the less traveled articles (e.g., my Hesston, KS change). But, you have to remember that I thought I was going to get away with it. I didn’t realize I needed to be that sneaky. I suspect that changes made to the obscure pages might last a bit longer, but I am convinced that there is a reasonable amount of rapid fact-checking going on at Wikipedia.
(And I think the marginal return on redoing the experiment is not worth more time wasted by reviewers.)
Update (9/4): Looks like a more subtle approach does indeed yield less satisfactory results. All the more reason to have an “endorsed” page (or an informal endorsement on talk pages).
3. Because of your 14m3 attack, you have proven nothing!
I don’t think there is any way to “prove” the effectiveness of Wikipedia to such a degree that it will satisfy everyone (see #4, below). I have, to quote a commentator, provided “one more data point explaining how the system works to people that aren’t familiar with it, and one more data point to use with naysayers who think that having a resource be freely editable means that by definition it can’t also be authoritative.”
4. Do you know how many 4th graders you misled in those two hours? Any error on the site, left for any length of time, calls into question its validity.
This is just silly. I have both written for a “real” ink-on-dead-trees encyclopedia, and refereed for two of them, and I would trust these publications about as much as I trust Wikipedia. It rates a “pretty darn good,” in my book, and that’s good enough for me. Anyone who takes Wikipedia for gospel truth (hell, anyone who takes the gospel for gospel truth) deserves whatever they get, and that’s equally true for those who believe that Britannica is 100% error free. If it was, there would be little need for new editions.
In other words, this doesn’t prove anything, but to my mind it refutes the assertion by a librarian that Wikipedia is a site that appears authoritative but is not. One would think that there are < partisan dig > plenty of other websites < /partisan dig > that could better exemplify this.
5. When is a preprint available?
This was some Sunday curiousity, not part of an NSF-funded project. You’ve seen the write-up. I did take some preliminary notes, but they basically say why I picked particular pages on which to make changes. The Syracuse page was an obvious reflection of the question that spurred the effort. I also intentionally left an error on an article linked to the main page, to see if it was discovered more quickly (it was). The rest were a result of “random page” results, and included adding chunks of information or adding new pages from stubs. Most the changes can be found here (note that two new pages: one for the chemical element Alexium, the other for the Middle Earth Dwarf Gamil Zarik were deleted from the site and do not appear on that list now), and the early responses from alert readers are on the talk page.
Update (9/5): Please don’t do this: vandalizing the site is not a good way to test it. If you want to test Wikipedia, please do it non-destructively.
Joi Ito points to an ongoing discussion regarding the authority of wikipedia as a source of information and knowledge. The discussion was prompted by an article in the Syracuse Post-Standard that suggests, in part, that wikipedia “take[s] the idea of open source one step too far” by allowing the user to make corrections.
The article has been correctly ridiculed by many, including Mike at Techdirt. In a later posting, he suggests an experiment: why not go to a certain page, insert something provably incorrect, and see how long it lasts.
No matter which side of the debate you find yourself on, this sounds like an interesting experiment. So, I have made not one, but 13 changes to the wikipedia site. I will leave them there for a bit (probably two weeks) to see how quickly they get cleaned up. I’ll report the results here, and repair any damage I’ve done after the period is complete. My hypothesis is that most of the errors will remain intact.
Does that invalidate Wikipedia? Certainly not! If anything, the general correctness and extent of Wikipedia is a tribute to humankind. It suggests the Kropotkin may be right: that the “survival of the fittest” requires that the fittest cooperate. It means that there are very few Vandals like me who are interfering with its mission.
So it turns out that I launch a very beta version of our new informatics blog server on Software Freedom Day, which makes sense given that we are moving from the MT Server that has been up for about a year and a half to WordPress. There isn’t a pretty blog on the front of it yet (I’ll save that for tomorrow), but I have a setup that installs blogs for students in a new directory.
When I put it that way, it sounds pretty easy. And, in the end, it really was. It took a while to iron out, in large part because I was sort-of learning PHP at the same time. The problem, of course, is that WP notoriously doesn’t do multiple blogs. But the truth is, I didn’t really want multiple blogs. Blogs already have external ways of interfacing with one another (RSS, trackbacks) that to my mind are more interesting anyway.
So, although I didn’t find it until I was done, basically I have automated Burningbird’s approach. A user provides her name, email address, and desired blog url, and the script copies in all the appropriate files, sets up the (shared) database, and emails the user an initial password.
My initial approach was to do a lot of that with symbolic links, but as the (far more experienced ) Ms. Powers has discovered, WP gets a bit freaky when you try it. The only symbolic links now are for the images, and that doesn’t really save a lot of overhead.
The biggest problem with this setup is security. I won’t go into details, but anyone familiar with the setup will quickly see that there isn’t any. These are all grad students using it, and we know who they each are, so hopefully this won’t be a problem. If anyone has suggested solutions, that won’t take three man-years of time to implement, let me know on- or off-blog.
If anyone wants a look at the code, drop me a note. I’m not releasing it openly only because I’m embarrassed by the mess it might be in and because it isn’t ready for public consumption. Anyone foolish enough to make use of my start on it may find that it isn’t much better than starting from scratch.
This was the most important part of the process, since school starts on Monday. I need to add some bits and pieces that will make monitoring and deleting blogs a bit less cumbersome. Also need to do a lot more in the way of user guides.
Remember the movie Strange Days, which was built on the premise of the possibility of sharing another person’s recorded experiences by wearing “squids,” a set of sensors around the scalp? It always hit me that wearable computers could give you something of the same experience. In-car cameras, for example, have made motor racing a much more interesting spectator sport, though attempts to do the same thing with football seem to have died quickly. Think of how cool it would be to have the same thing on a NYC bike messenger, weaving in and out of traffic. Here it is. Large video file, but way worth the wait.
Makes you wonder what other sorts of POV videos are likely to be forthcoming, especially given the diffusion of video-enabled cell phones. It seems like the hundreds of helmet-mounted cameras being worn by DHS agents during the Republican Convention might yield an interesting “in situ” experience of the event. While many are focused on making wearable computing more wearable, it can’t be long before 360 views, high resolution, and 3d sound recording setups are more common.
I will be in Bloomington, Indiana. But if you are here in Buffalo, you may be wondering how you can hook up with events tied into the September Project. Unfortunately, despite some lobbying on my part, neither the public libraries nor the UB libraries decided to participate. However, the Medaille College Library is linked on the site, so I guess they have something going on. (I don’t have more information, though.)
On September 10, there is an event much in the spirit of the project: the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy is hosting a Workshop on Government Policy, Cultural Production, (and) Personal Privacy. One of my colleagues in Informatics, Miguel Ruiz, will be talking specifically about the PATRIOT act. The workshop is free and open to the public. I encourage you to attend—especially if you plan to blog it, since I can’t be there :).
I needed an outline of communication theory issues, so I threw together some stuff and put it up as an article on wikipedia. You can read it over there (where you can also add appropriate changes and follow the links) or see it by clicking “more.”
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