For example, why are relatively junior North American communication professors, Alex Halavais and Jason Mittell, featured in Wikipedia? Whereas more “prominent” academics such as Susan Herring and Steve Jones are not, even though they have published numerous influential books and papers, and are editors of leading academic journals in the field of new media.

I’ll leave aside, for the moment, the fact that by mentioning me, he’s further enshrined my “notability.”

First, let me say that this conflates two issues. The first is notability: neither Steve Jones nor Susan Herring have been deleted from the encyclopedia. At no time has Wikipedia determined that they are not notable and that I am. If that had occurred, it would be a travesty. The second is inclusion: until now, no one has taken the time to add either of these important scholars to the encyclopedia. This is a problem with Wikipedia: although both scholars no doubt have both students and fans (and maybe even students who are fans!), maybe there have not been many Wikipedians among them.

As it is, my fan base has hardly done much with my page. While I have, for periods of time, been noted as a member of NAMBLA (yes, I was thrilled by that) on that page, no one has been kind enough to note that I have new book out, or that I am super-awesome. I’ve stuck with the no-self-editing guideline, which I’ll note that a prominent colleague has not.

Am I notable? Well, as O’Neil argues, it’s a very fuzzy line, but I think a glance through the professorial notability guidelines suggests that prominence outside of academia is one of the key features for inclusion. Of course, I’m biased, but I think I’m notable enough for Wikipedia. But DJ lotu5 thinks she is, too. What makes me notable?

Well, frankly it’s not my academic production or “impact,” it’s my mass media appeal. It’s not that I’ve published a few academic articles, or a couple of scholarly books–who hasn’t? It’s that I’ve been considered an expert by the some of the big-name news outlets; it’s because my name shows up a lot in a Google News search.

The real questions then are two. First, does a reporter’s selection of someone reflect that person’s expertise. One hopes it does at least a little. I like to think I know a bit about the net. But it’s also a matter of whether the person is reachable–I make myself available to reporters. And whether you can explain complex matters in ways that are not particularly jargon-filled or involved; or less charitably, if you talk in sound-bites.

Wikipedia has always effectively put off issues of quality and inclusion by saying: if you can cite it, you’re golden. So the real question may be: what’s wrong with mainstream media’s view of notability? And why doesn’t my sister, who has way more Google News hits than I do, have her own Wikipedia bio?

“Some things get really bad–histories, politics, gets controversial that doesn’t get settled easily,” said Bernard Huberman, author of a study, which determined that increased edits make Wikipedia articles “superior.”

Not everyone is buying the study, and some even did their own research to test Wikipedia as a trustworthy source of accurate information.

Alex Halavais, assistant professor in the interactive communication program at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., inserted 13 errors into various Wikipedia articles, including a false addition to the periodic table and the definition of “longitude.”

I think it’s pretty easy to read that as saying that I don’t buy the Huberman study (which, I presume, is this one). Of course, I wasn’t asked about the Huberman study, and I would be curious who these “some people” are. Wilkinson & Huberman present an argument that the best articles are the most-edited, generally speaking–I’m not sure how one would even take issue with that. But–just to be clear–I am not among those “some people,” and I would never use my caprice (the “Isuzu Experiment”) as anything approaching substantial evidence. If anything, I would be pleased if it spurred more thorough investigations of the quality of the content on Wikipedia and how that content is accumulated.

They begin with “ownership,” which, they are at pains to explain, has nothing to do with property. I believe they are trying for something more like “stewardship.” In any case, their claim is that because they are willing to “stand behind” the product they release, it will be stronger for it. In other words, we can trust their encyclopedia, because we trust them.

There is something to this. I trust my doctor because of where he went to school, where he practices, and in this case, where he teaches. Yes, I also checked his performance, as best I could, but I accept that institutions invest reputation in the people that they choose to affiliate with. This doesn’t mean that reputation is always strong: just because Microsoft “stands behind” or “takes ownership” of WindowsMe doesn’t make it a better product than Ubuntu, which (arguably!) is a product of people standing around together instead. So, basically they are making an appeal to traditional authority: we’ve done well in the past, and we will continue to do well. Wikipedia asks you to trust in the process, not in the producers.

Second, Britannica claims they are different because they value experts. What are experts? That is a really good question.

The plan for the new site goes to great lengths to increase the relationships we have with thousands of our current contributors as well as with new experts recommended or identified by the user community. We are calling this larger group our new “community of scholars.”

They make it sound as if they invented that phrase! Now, let’s play the reversal game. If I gave you the phrase quoted above, would you be able to tell whether it applied to Britannica’s new venture, or to Wikipedia? No, I didn’t think so. On Wikipedia, experts are also established, based not on popular vote of expertise (except in the strange and wild world of biographical entries), but on the utility of the work they present on the wiki. They may well be considered an expert by others in their field, but if they cannot translate that expertise into something useful to the Wikipedia community, they aren’t really worthwhile.

Second, it is worth noting that Wikipedia draws on expertise as well, basically piggybacking on structures of peer-review and expertise vetting in the real world, by requiring citation. It is, in practice, a site for summarizing expertise that has already been expressed in the world. This is at least one definition of what an encyclopedia should do. Is there really a need for experts if the work is essentially summarizing existing publications?

Finally, they attack what I think is probably one of the week points of Wikipedia, its NPOV standard, and propose an even worse one: “objectivity.” I wonder if they considered chatting with their “experts” before making this claim. Experts take on an informed and experienced view, but there is rarely a claim that this is somehow an “unbiased” view. To quote from the Britannica article on biology:

This emerging social and political role of the biologist and all other scientists requires a weighing of values that cannot be done with the accuracy or the objectivity of a laboratory balance. As a member of society, it is necessary for a biologist now to redefine his social obligations and his functions, particularly in the realm of making judgments about such ethical problems as man’s control of his environment or his manipulation of genes to direct further evolutionary development.

There are some 50 further mentions of “objectivity” in other articles, but none that provide an unproblematic description of what that word really means. Does an expert married to her topic really provide an objective summary? Does Kropotkin’s article on Anarchism, for example, represent the average expert’s view, or does it provide an impassioned perspective?

Unfortunately, and like Wikipedia in some ways, it is not clear which experts are writing the articles, since the “ownership” is by EB, and not the expert, these days. Particularly, for some articles–say, for example, on “chiropractic” or on “abortion”–if they are providing an objective commentator, I really want to know who that commentator is. Transparency, here, is a friend of evaluation.

In sum, if I understand correctly, Britannica is adopting the plan that Nupedia had, lo, so many years ago. Maybe they will be able to make that work, and as Weinberger suggests, it can’t hurt to have a variety of different approaches in play.

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a community of researchers interested in discussing the manifold challenges and potentials of knowledge acquisition from the social web.

With the advent of the “Social Web”, a new breed of web applications has enriched the social dimension of the web. On the social web, actors can be understood as social agents – technological or human entities – that collaborate, pursue goals, are autonomous, and are capable of exhibiting flexible problem solving and social behavior. By participating in the social web, both technological and human agents leave complex traces of social interactions and their motivations behind, which can be studied, analyzed and utilized for a range of different purposes. The broad availability and open accessibility of these traces in social web corpora, such as in del.icio.us, Wikipedia, weblogs and others, provides researchers with opportunities for, for example, novel knowledge acquisition techniques and strategies, as well as large scale, empirically coupled “in the field” studies of social processes and structures.

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a diverse community of researchers interested in the social web by seeking submissions that are focusing on understanding and evaluating the role of agents, goals, structures, concepts, context, knowledge and social interactions in a broad range of social web applications. Examples for such applications include, but are not limited to social authoring (e.g. wikis, weblogs), social sharing (e.g. del.icio.us, flickr), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) and social searching (e.g. wikia, eurekster, mahalo) applications.

Deadline has been extended to May 16. Hopefully folks will blog it!
(via Anjo)

* Jupiter is the 9th planet from the sun.

* George W. Bush is the worst president in US history.

* Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

Truth Talking

There is a video up on YouTube by IJsbrand van Veelen called “The Truth According to Wikipedia,” which quotes Andrew Keen as saying that in the Web 2.0 internet the “truth gets personalized.” Which, to put it simply, is nonsense. If anything, changes in the knowledge society have uncovered a dangerous assumption that we know what the word “truth” means. I am not a philosopher, and don’t claim even to be well read in epistemology, but I think folks are talking at cross-purposes, and tempests are brewing in teapots.

Has “truth” changed? I don’t think so. I think that there is some sort of nostalgic view that at some point we knew some core truths, and that we are losing grip on that certainty. The problem is that certainty itself is the enemy. Wikipedia, I think, plays an important role in distributing knowledge, but it may turn out that its greatest gift to the information society is a spur toward skepticism. Wikipedia encourages a skeptical reading, not just of Wikipedia, but of Britannica, of scientific journals, of religious texts.

Authority of Experts

Do experts have special access to “truth?” No. I suspect that many people who argue otherwise haven’t met many experts. Experts tend to be suspicious of accepted truths.

I suppose I would be considered an expert in certain areas. I have read extensively books and articles written by other experts, and other experts have read a little of my work and, in some way, certified my own expertise. Peer review is a structure intended not to arrive at truth, but at some sort of reliable, useful knowledge. It recognizes the infinite fallibility of the individual, and the necessity of social structures the help to discover and distribute useful knowledge. It suggests that we should be skeptical of individual authority, and therefore open to the possibility that everyone can be the source of knowledge. It is this process of social acceptance, development, and application that makes it worthwhile.

Is there truth? Only in a virtual sense. In pure math, a statement can be shown to be true. In real life, we have evidence supporting opinions. Experts have the experience and training needed to reliably (repeatably) generate evidence that works for a large number of people. That makes them useful. Perhaps past performance in such discovery is a decent predictor of future success. However, there is no guarantee of this, and it is dangerous to assume otherwise. Like investments, diversification is key.

Useful Knowledge

There is a realm in which truth reigns supreme: pure mathematics. When you divide any circle by its diameter you arrive at the same constant, no matter what. If all men are dogs, and I am a man, I am a dog–no matter what.

And, those truths from the virtual world tend to be useful to us in the real world as well. Though a perfect circle may not exist in real life, geometry approximates life to such a degree that we can apply it to the useful arts, and count it as valuable. The number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin–not very applicable to pin design or communicating with angelic beings, and left behind as a conversation not really very helpful to have.

Consensus

I’m not a dog, literally or figuratively. Why? Because by consensus, not all men are dogs. There may be a vocal minority that disagrees, but because the widely held definition undermines one of the conditions of that syllogism, we don’t have to apply its conclusion.

Gravity, you might say, is true whether or not there is a general consensus about its existence. I disagree. Things tend to fall toward our feet when we are standing, and this is as reasonable a predictive assumption as the sun coming up tomorrow. But the idea of gravity–that massive objects across the universe are attracted to one another by some mystic force–is an idea introduced by many individuals, at different times, and formulated by one dude, whose ideas were considered a bit nutty by many of his contemporaries, but are now considered “true.” (Were they “true” at the time? That’s kind of a silly question, in my opinion.)

NPOV

One of the pillars of Wikipedia is the tenet that articles should take a “Neutral Point Of View.” The word “neutral” is meant as a crutch for “objective.” Journalists are supposed to be “objective,” and not allow their personal opinions to interfere with telling a story. The suggestion is that there is a thin black line between “fact” and “opinion,” which is problematic. “Neutrality” suggests that it’s opinions all the way down, and that the best a reporter can do is sample perspectives from the major camps of observers. If there is a lawsuit, you should hear from both parties, for example.

Of course, there neutrality doesn’t extend to some things. Nowhere in the Wikipedia article on the Holocaust is there a significant expression of the opinion that it is a fabrication, in part or as a whole. (This opinion is segregated off into its own article.) Such an opinion is considered outside of what Dan Hallin (who is an expert) has called in another context the sphere of legitimate controversy. There are certain things that the media doesn’t talk about either because they are too unsettled to be touchable, or too obvious to the regular reader to be assailable. Between these extremes, it is possible to be “neutral.”

Basically, NPOV could be rephrased as “don’t express opinions that you know are not shared by most people.” I think we should establish a settlement on Mars, but I recognize that is an opinion, not a fact. (The “should” is a big tipoff there.) I believe Saddam Hussein had no significant deployable weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded Iraq. I think, based on the evidence I have seen, that this is a “true” proposition, but I also know that there are a large number of people who disagree; or, more to the point, there are a large number of people who frequent Wikipedia who believe this may not be true. And so an NPOV requires that I recognize this, and do not state it as a fact. Whether or not something is NPOV is a matter of discussion, and often ends up replicating the question of whether something is True, without using the “t word.” In other words, NPOV is not an attribute of an article, but an attribute of the process of creating an article.

MPOV

Earlier this year, the question of whether NPOV was appropriate for search engine results came up on a discussion of Wikia search. Jimmy Wales wanted to bring the NPOV standard from Wikipedia to search, and I argued (and still believe), that those using a search engine are seeking not a diversity of ideas, but a particular piece of knowledge most useful and applicable to them. I think finding on a search engine is always some form of refinding. If I am searching for information on Hank Williams, I don’t really want to see pages on why country and western music sucks. The search engine, if it is good, might also know that I don’t want to see pages in French, and that I like pretty pictures. It’s dangerous if it makes these decisions without the user knowing (as all search engines do!), but useful. We turn to search engines often not as a source of diverse information, but as a filter against such diversity. We want “My Point Of View” search.

Does this mean search engines make us too trusting of authorities? I think that tendency is baked into a lot of search engines. But that can be countered by both good search engine design, and educating users. The mistake is to suggest that the search engine is perfectible, that it could lead to a collection of truth. What it can do is help sort and organize and filter knowledge, and a device that allows for sorting according to my own defined desires represents the perfect search engine. It needs to be able to reflect MPOV.

Anti-Enlightenment

Some of the critics of Web 2.0–Keen especially–seem to think that new uses of the internet are anti-intellectual, and against the Enlightenment project. This is misguided. The use of reason over authority suggests that we shouldn’t trust ideas simply because they are presented by the Church, the State, or our other Fathers. It argues that certain kinds of discussion can lead to useful consensus.

If anything, Wikipedia is another iteration of peer review. It isn’t perfect, but it suggests that we must militate against acceptance of current forms of peer review as necessarily the best way of developing useful consensus. They work pretty well: well enough for you to trust that your anti-cholesterol medicine may actually lower your cholesterol, may do so without causing a painful, premature death, and that lower cholesterol is somehow something worth having. But that doesn’t mean we should accept it as gospel. Peer review needs to undergo continual peer review.

The End of Truth

So, the issue isn’t that the nature of truth is changing, or that we are losing hold of our ideals. The issue is that we are becoming more skeptical, and that we are remembering more often that “truth” is little more than a comforting fiction.

Please grant me the serenity to accept the pages I cannot edit,
The courage to edit the pages I can,
And the wisdom to know the diff.

collateral misinformation

When someone alters a Wikipedia article to win a specific argument, anyone who reads the false article before the “error” is corrected suffers from collateral misinformation.

I changed the scientific classification of red foxes last night in order to win an argument with Judy. I hope some stupid High School student didn’t suffer from collateral misinformation.

Lest you think this is an unlikelihood, I’ve been told by at least two students of instances where they have done just this.

Oh, and the dictionary has some other useful Wikipedia-related entries: I like wikipedestrian and wikipedance.

An Analysis of Topical Coverage of Wikipedia

* Alexander Halavais (School of Communications, Quinnipiac University)
* Derek Lackaff (Department of Communication, State University of New York at Buffalo)

Abstract

Many have questioned the reliability and accuracy of Wikipedia. Here a different issue, but one closely related: how broad is the coverage of Wikipedia? Differences in the interests and attention of Wikipediaâ€s editors mean that some areas, in the traditional sciences, for example, are better covered than others. Two approaches to measuring this coverage are presented. The first maps the distribution of topics on Wikipedia to the distribution of books published. The second compares the distribution of topics in three established, field-specific academic encyclopedias to the articles found in Wikipedia. Unlike the top-down construction of traditional encyclopedias, Wikipediaâ€s topical coverage is driven by the interests of its users, and as a result, the reliability and completeness of Wikipedia is likely to be different depending on the subject-area of the article.

The stupidity of this approach is manifold. First, it suggests that the other resources on the web somehow are accurate; that students need not be critical about sources. Second, it encourages not only a lack of media literacy, but a lack of search literacy. Go into any news room in the world, and you will find journalists making use of Wikipedia to get background and help them to find new information. Wikipedia is a wonderful way to start finding out about a topic. A ban also cuts students off from an important new way that people gather to collaborate and educate themselves. There are other reasons this is stupid (just as book-banning is stupid), but this gives us a good start. Frankly, if I had a kid in the Warren Hills Regional School District, I would pull them out of school, and give them a chance to get an actual education. I hate to think how these poor children are going to cope if they make it to college and have to learn how to research a topic–research that will often include going to Wikipedia.

To illustrate, what does a young student do when faced with a report on the city of Kamakura. In my day, the first thing students would do, often with the school librarian’s encouragement, would be to go to the “reference” section of the library where they would encounter an encyclopedia. Of course, you wouldn’t reference the encyclopedia, because your teacher or your librarian would tell you that this wasn’t appropriate: encyclopedias were not meant to be primary references, just a way to get started. Now that you knew the bare facts: that it was near Yokohama, that it was traditionally a producer of lacquerware, that it was the seat of the shogunate for a time, you would search for books or articles on these topics that would give you a more complete and authoritative understanding of the topic.

What does a student at one of these schools do now that Wikipedia is banned? If they search on Google for Kamakura, the first hit is japan-guide.com, which provides tourist information. They might follow that, and if they have been taught to evaluate sources, they might question the amount of advertising, and the purpose of the site. The second hit, Wikipedia, will be unavailable to them, at least until they go home and access it from there. (Here, we see that Warren Hills is doing more than just damaging the education of their students, they are disproportionately damaging the education of students who have limited internet access elsewhere.) Maybe they will go to MSN’s Encarta, a site that not only is (presumably) credible, but actually encourages student use, by having a “homework” link, and providing a citation students can copy and paste into their report. Apparently, unlike Wikipedia, Encarta hasn’t gotten the memo about encyclopedias not being good sources to cite. Even worse, they provide no indication of where their information comes from, or who has written the entry (often temporary student employees), leaving the student to rely on the word of Microsoft as to the truth of the two-paragraph entry.

What about the student who has access to the Wikipedia entry. Certainly, that student might simply trust what is written there, and cite Wikipedia, but only if that student’s teachers and librarians have been woefully inadequate in teaching the essentials of literature and web research. The good student will evaluate the information found. The very first sentence in each entry notes the location of Kamakura with respect to the modern Japanese capitol, Tokyo. One version of Encarta’s article notes that the city is “45 km (28 mi) southwest of Tokyo,” while Wikipedia’s has it “about 50 km south-south-west of Tokyo.” (Another version of Encarta doesn’t provide this distance.) It would seem one of these is wrong. 45 km is “about” 50 km, and from city center to city center it appears to be about 45 km. But as with anything, the truth isn’t black-and-white. Tokyo is a sprawling metropolis: do you measure from city center to city center, or from city limits to city limits, or perhaps in terms of the distance by train. These are the kinds of questions that comparing the two entries raises at the outset.

The Wikipedia article doesn’t tell you how to cite it. In fact, if you go to its “about” page, it pretty clearly spells out the strengths and weaknesses of the resource. Encarta provides no such help in evaluating the work, and provides a citation to use, incorrectly suggesting that it is worthy of citation.

Both articles provide internal links to further information, but the Wikipedia article also provides links to other sources. Of course, the quality of these links differ from article to article. The article on Barack Obama, for example, has 175 links to (generally) authoritative sources, while the article on Unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine has only two links, one to another online encyclopedia. Encarta provides none of its sources for an article on Obama, and (ironically), a search for dimethyl hydrazine points the user to Wikipeida. Paid placement links on Encarta pages, we may reasonably assume, may mislead many students.

We don’t know who wrote articles on either site, nor whether we can trust them, but at least in Wikipedia’s case, we can triangulate some of the sources and determine the degree to which we trust the sources provided. The sophisticated Wikipedia user is also likely to look at the discussion page and history page for an article to determine what statements in the article may be controversial. I fully recognize that Wikipedia is riddled with errors. Thanks to some of my students, a short Wikipedia entry about the ever notable moi, woefully misunderestimates my figjam. Nonetheless, if someone were to look for basic information about me, they could find far worse starting points.

“God created Arrakis to train the faithful.” Perhaps He created Wikipedia to train the researcher. Teachers who ban Wikipedia miss a massive “teachable moment.” None of the above should be read to suggest that Encarta should also be banned, though when you start banning sites, it is difficult to know where it will end. On the contrary, one wonders why a school would take the new global library and start burning particular books. Students should be wary of Wikipedia, and if anything should carry that wariness with them to other sources of information. We should be teaching our students to be curious and skeptical, not cloistered and credulous.

Yes that’s me at the beginning of the trailer, in pretty good company, even if I still wince at the sound of my own voice on tape. When I saw this today, I figured that if they were going to make me a μceleb, the least I could do was donate a little–and I do mean little–cash to making the film. That means I have now invested in two motion pictures! (I was also one of the early Swarm of Angels contributors.)

Of course, those people making anonymous edits with their IPs showing were either (a) not trying especially hard to hide their manipulations or (b) didn’t know any better. I am guessing that in most cases it is the former. Keeping your identity quiet on Wikipedia is fairly easy. First, anyone can have an account, and accounts (I believe) don’t show the IP. But that’s a superficial layer of protection. You can always make edits from an internet cafe, or through Tor, or both!

Wikipedia Scanner needs to either backstop their servers to handle the flash crowds, or provide the database as a torrent. I suspect they can’t do the latter because they didn’t use open source GeoIP data (doh!).

There are definitely things to like about this approach: it makes use of existing behavior to create the measure, for one thing. But after browsing through some of the articles, it’s clear that the function of the text matters at least as much as the content. If you do some of the wiki-gardening, cleaning up and adding the structural cruft that makes up Wikipedia, you are likely to be judged more trustworthy. Likewise, if you write very broad, general connective sections, you are less likely to be objectionable.

Unfortunately, the most important bits of an article–the ones that really are the most trustworthy–may very well be written back and forth for some time before they reach some level of stability. Likewise, a user may stalk some pretty peripheral parts of Wikipedia and never find herself challenged.

In any case, it is certainly an interesting attempt, worth checking out and thinking about. The demo is here. Just hit “random page” a few times to see some examples of the highlighting.

(via Wikipedia Blog)

More of the Same

As with every new system or innovation encountered on “the internets,” a common claim about blogging is “it’s all been done before.” I kept a blog before they were called blogs: a frequently updated website, an email newsletter, a periodically downloadable file on “the Source,” an early ISP. And before that there was Plato. Isn’t blogging just BBS software / forums in new bottles? How is the blogosphere substantially different from Usenet? These questions are both inevitable and valid. Too often we thrill to the idea of the latest incarnation of the “virtual community,” and are quite willfully able to forget the hyperbole surrounding earlier technologies. And it is difficult not to recognize the kind of buzz around blogging as similar to these earlier collaborative technologies.

I think blogging has a simple answer to this: none of these other technologies captured the public imagination in the same way that blogging has, nor the same number of users. Sure, there are more who use email, brows the web, or communicate via IM, but these are not really the same special type of large-scale discussion technologies that blogs embody. I think that when future historians look back at the earliest years of this century, two of the things that will show up in the history books will be the mass adoption of blogs and wikipedia. I don’t think that these are the most important innovations of the last few years, but I do think that they will have some of the most important social impact. So part of the answer to that question is simply one of size. Usenet, even at its peak, did not (I believe) have a million people writing, and ten times that reading. We don’t have to fall back on hyperbole: if the story of blogging ended today and no one ever blogged again — and I although I don’t think we’ve seen the peak of public blogging, I would not be shocked if this were the case — we would still have to acknowledge this as one of the most widespread examples of user-produced media, and something worth understanding.

But really what people are suggesting when they say this is that the principles that we have already discovered in earlier examples of computer mediated communication are just being repeated in another form in blogs. One answer to that is “yes, but to a greater degree.” That is, there are more people doing it, as argued above. Or, the impediments to presenting to the web have been reduced further, so that creating and maintaining a web page is even easier than it has been in the past, and has been reduced to some critical level at which there are compounding returns. But this “more” change is not something that should be dismissed out of hand. On the other hand, there are some elements of the blogosphere that I think are, if not unique, especially important. Some of these are reflected in the neologisms and specialized services that have arisen to support blogging.

New words for new ways

One of the ways to identify what makes weblogs special is by noting some of the specialized jargon that has grown up around blogging. Unfortunately the proliferation of these terms have made entry into blogging more daunting in some ways. But they also indicate new ideas or techniques that need to be named because they don’t fit well into previous paradigms. Among these:

Trackbacks, pingbacks, reciprolinks, blogrolls.

RSS, aggregators.

del.icio.us, technorati, blogdex, furl.

The blogging factors

What, then, are the salient differences, the principle components of blogging, that we should be concerned with?

Ridiculously easy publishing.

Forging public voices.

Conviviality, conversation, deliberation?

Planned serendipity. While improving the ability to search is an important need on the web, improving our ability to stumble usefully is also important.

The return of a workable push media: now with more mods.

Convergence of exchanged data, personal server. Todo: Onfolio

Ubiquitous media.

Future

No one is good at predicting the future of communication technology; there are just too many variables. That said, a prediction of the future state of technology is really just another way of saying that you have a good feel for what is important in today’s technology. Neal Stephenson claimed that books like Snow Crash were intentionally placed in the now. The degree to which they seem to be prophetic is directly related to how well they discern the contours of the present. So the future of blogging is “more of the same” where “the same” refers to those elements of blogging that are important or unusual. If the list above is correct, we can expect innovations to continue to develop along the lines they already have.

The barriers to entry, and complexity of the process of blogging will be reduced. I suspect we will see WYSIWYG blogging software within the next year, at the outside. When you want to add or edit a message, you click on it and start typing. The RSS of anything that might ever change is already providing a way of quickly making semantic connections that allow for other kinds of rapid updates, and I suspect that this will continue. We are all blogging with kludges for blog software at the moment, and many of the ways that this needs to improve are already clear.

There will continue to be a place for small and large public voices, but I suspect we will see some serious changes in the way some organizations do business, such that they can make use of the transparency that blogging provides. This will have a real effect on how we think about privacy and how we think about who we are. The transparent and networked nature of our public identities is, I believe, reversing some of the the century-long opinions about the nature of personal identity/psyche and the networked (or urban) society. It was assumed that we would increasingly become divided into multiple selves in service to a number of non-overlapping groups. Unlike in the traditional village, the people we work and play with often do not know each other, and they each know a different form of “you.” This leads to something that appears to be akin to multiple personalities, and the purposive construction of new identities for different kinds of interactions. But the transparency that blogging seems to encourage may mean a reversal, or at the very least a complication, of this process. The identity that appears in my blog is one that looks the same to my wife, my students, my doctor, my boss, my mother, and my colleagues around the world. Maintaining any multiple identities I might have becomes far more difficult with my social circles become enmeshed together.

We can at least hope that those newly public voices will also lead to new kinds of discussion, deliberation, and conviviality. I must admit that I am particularly suspicious of this. I suspect that very little gets done in blogs, and that there is not a good framework for distributed conversations. This may change, but at present, the kinds of conversations that occur on blogs feel somehow asymmetric. I have talked about this before, on this blog and in conversations: many bloggers are the inverse of lurkers: they are “mumblers.” Lurkers read without revealing themselves to the authors. Mumblers write without knowing if there is an audience. Mumbling is good for public discourse, I think, but it may not be as good for discussion and deliberation.

While they may not host collaborations, they might enable them. The discussions that do occur on blogs tend to be a little like the pheromone trails that ants leave. Those trails may not, in themselves, represent any form of useful structure. However, they form the support infrastructure that allows for large-scale collaboration. By providing some form of transparent “contrail” on the web of your work, your interests, your ideas, your social networks, you allow for the intersection of such paths. As a bunch of ants wandering around exploring the intellectual space of our world, the likelihood that our trajectories will ever lead to a useful collision is relatively small. But this increases many-fold when we leave behind bread crumbs for others to stubble upon.

I think people are coming to understand this process of encountering trails. You see this a bit in investigations of knowledge management in the real world. More and more, people are abandoning the idea that you can download expertise into a system. If you could do that (and you can’t), you wouldn’t really need the people in an organization. Instead, you need to build tools that enhance the process of leaving a trail, so that when people don’t know what they are looking for, they know who does.

Some of this comes back to a New Yorker article entitled “Know it all: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise” by Pulitzer-winning Stacy Schiff that appeared last summer. I have already praised that article in this blog as being a nicely balanced and readable piece. As much as a black eye as this gives Essjay, and possibly Wikipedia, what I am most struck by is the fact that a well-regarded journalist and magazine failed miserably in checking credentials. Although Wales’s response could have been much better, the truth is that Wikipedia shouldn’t care whether someone has a Ph.D. or not–there are likely people claiming silly things about their own expertise every day on the talk pages of Wikipedia, but given that the resource is designed to draw its credibility from the sources, not the authors, this shouldn’t be a big deal. On the other hand, when I pick up the New Yorker and read that someone is a professor, I expect that they have made at least a rudimentary effort to check this. This is particularly true when the core of her argument is that there is a standoff between traditional sources of academic authority and new forms. Wouldn’t you think knowing which part of that spectrum one of your informants stands on is important? Kudos for appending a correction, but really: too little, too late.

The black eye suffered by Wikipedia is not so much to process as it is to general respectability, and it provides another outstanding piece of ammunition for those who are already critical. As Brock Read writes over at the Chronicle, “the incident is clearly damaging to Wikipedia’s credibility — especially with professors who will now note that one of the site’s most visible academics has turned out to be a fraud.” The Telegraph: “Deep down, though, we all knew it wasn’t that reliable.” Larry Sanger, long a critic of uncredentialed encycloping finds the initial shrug from Wales and Essjay’s “non-apology” to suggest that the moral keel of Wikipedia administrators is a more than a little uneven.

Wales’s initial acceptance of Essjay’s fake credentials, while they may have been spot-on in terms of the content of the site, were particularly tone deaf to the wider community of knowledge. While credentials do not matter to Wikipedia, they do matter to much of the non-Wikipedia world, and faking them suggests to critics and non-users that the core of Wikipedia is rotten. A more measured response would have used this as an opportunity to note that even the worst transgressions of any single editor are put in check by the community. Sure, that may be a simplification of the niceties involved, but as a simplification it does much better than “so what?”

What I find peculiar is that the New Yorker is largely getting a pass. Wikipedia doesn’t check credentials as part of its administrative structures–or, rather, hasn’t–but the New Yorker and “professional journalists” are expected to maintain certain standards, and they really fell down here.

The worst possible response: Wikipedia trying to check credentials of those who claim a degree. Someone at Wikimania last year suggested that those with a Ph.D. should be verified, and a little star placed next to their name. I noted then, and still think, that vetting academic credentials is a job left to journalists and fact-checkers, and not a worthwhile project for Wikipedia to engage in. I really hope they back off this position, and instead suggest that decisions not be made by credentialed fiat: “I have a Ph.D., so I must be right.”

* Wikimedia Communities – Interesting projects and particularities within the communities (we explicitly invite you to present your local Wikimedia project’s community!); policy creation within individual projects; conflict resolution and community dynamics; reputation and identity; multilingualism, languages and cultures; social studies.

* Free Content – Open access to information; ways to gather and distribute free knowledge, usage of the Wikimedia projects in education, journalism, research; ways to improve content quality and usability; copyright laws and other legal areas that interfere with Wikimedia projects.

* Technical infrastructure – Issues related to MediaWiki development and extensions; Wikimedia hardware layout; new ideas for development (including usable case studies from other wikis or similar projects).

Wikipedia is built on the idea that good material will rise to the top. It specifically does not ban idiots, ideologues, or conspiracy theorists. Why is it that money should make things that much worse? I think this highlights a larger problem. We don’t care who you are, as long as you are not paid, seems to me to be a fuzzy and difficult line to draw.

I’ve updated Quinnipiac’s Wikipedia page to indicate the development of a new campus. I’m paid by Quinnipiac. That I do not happen to be in the PR department shouldn’t matter that much.

When I was at Buffalo, an email went around suggesting that the School of Informatics should take a significant role in rewriting the social informatics page on Wikipedia. I made my position clear: that it was entirely appropriate for the faculty, staff, and students to edit that page. After all, we were experts in the area, and who better? But I also noted that we needed to be careful to observe the principles of neutrality, and not promote the School directly. In the end, I don’t know that anyone actually made changes. I did, inserting a link to the department at the end of the article, but I don’t believe I made any major changes.

The idea that Wikipedians are disinterested is ridiculous. If they were not interested in the topics they write about, they wouldn’t write about them. Money changing hands should not make a difference. Heck, I would love to see the day when someone offered bounties for Wikipedia articles, providing payment for people to fill in lacking areas. When I provide students with better grades for contributing, is that suspect?

Wikipedia is built on the idea that the community is large enough to root out misinformation or bias and fix it. Why not trust that?

It comes at an interesting time, since we have spent the week in both classes discussing the question of anonymity, pseudonymity, and trust in virtual environments–which is one of the core themes of Cosi. This follows on Reid Cornwell’s attempt to create a virtual crowd of supporters, and discussions over whether anonymity of authorship in wikis like Wikipedia leads to or takes from its credibility. In Cosi, of course, the anonymous act is the common conceit in a lot of farces (leaving aside the question of whether Cosi is a farce): an attempt is to test the faithfulness of two young women to their betrothed by pretending to be someone else and wooing them. In other words, pseudonymity–deception–is employed in order to discover a deeper truth.

One of the arguments that often comes up is that it doesn’t really matter whether a character is “real,” what matters is the reputational capital that person has built. So, even if we do not know the “true name” of someone contributing to Wikipedia, for example, the fact that they have behaved in a particular way in the past represents some suggestion of how they are expected to behave in the future. Their personal integrity is tied not to their body, but to this pseudonym. Arguably, one’s reputation has always been a particularly valuable piece of social capital (“The purest treasure mortal times afford, is spotless reputation”), but it seems that folks have only recently been taking in particularly seriously as something that may be used, traded, and exchanged for other kinds of capital (i.e., selling out).

Does a person who assumes a name enter with no reputation at all? That is not the case. We take on virtual bodies: the way we write, our email domain, the design of our blog (uh oh!). All of these are analogues for ways of stereotyping someone’s character when we meet them in real life. However, the ability to assume a new person’s identity online is, possibly, more easily done than in the physical world. And so, it is possible to take on a persona that may easily be killed off (“Defend your reputation, or bid farewell to your good life for ever”) as a kind of “extra life.”

All of this comes to a head in the discussions over policing Second Life. For those who have not been tracking on the issue, a sort of Philosopher’s Stone has made its way into the virtual world and is playing havock with the virtual economy. (Are all economies virtual? I suppose. The explicit creation of artificial scarsity, however, seems to make the economy in virtual worlds more virtual.) Using a tool called a CopyBot, anyone can retrieve a complete object and store a copy of it for themselves. It’s the equivalent of walking down a street, seeing a nice car, and giving yourself a copy of it. Obviously, Mercedes isn’t going to be happy about this.

The question is “How do you stop it?” If this sounds like a common question, it is. It’s the same question people ask about intellectual property in lots of different forums. There has been some suggestion that Linden Labs would employ the DMCA as a way of seeking out damages from those who violated the rules of the world. But this requires knowing exactly who everyone is, because suing an “extra life,” means that the person merely bankrupts that fictitious identity.

I suspect that the solution in Second Life, and in many analogous situations, is the creation of explicit social contracts in walled off communities where extra policing is available, and where anonymity is outlawed.

To summarize, Wales has vowed (it seems) to keep Wikipedia completely ad-free. Not necessary–not the only way to do a project–but I think its a good stance both ethically and practically. I know that I wouldn’t feel as good about contributing to a site that was generating $100 million in ad revenues. I frankly think that there is a good chance this would poison the well of good intentions and happy thoughts that seems to make Wikipedia work. Whether the non-commercial aspect of Wikipedia is part of that magical concoction of ingredients that makes it work is open to debate, but I think Calacanis’s claim that Wales is somehow irresponsible for not commercializing the site is crass and closedminded. While it seems a childish refrain, if he thinks he can do it better as a commercial site, he should start his own site, and monetize that.

Perhaps what is most striking is Calacanis’s third note:

Note3: In my mind it is unconscionable to not monetize the Wikipedia when a leaderboard would do NOTHING to take away from the project. Let’s do it people! Even if it’s not with AOL, give the inventory to John Battelle or Google to sell–every day that goes by we lose a million bucks that could change the world.

Advertising and other forms of content have always had an uneasy relationship. There is a reason people don’t expect, for example, Vogue to be an unbiased judge of just about anything. Naturally, major newspapers are also driven by advertising, but this has evolved over a long period of time and, frankly, still compromises the integrity of these organizations to a certain degree.

The point behind advertising is to persuade consumers to behave in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise behave. The expense is justified by the profit they can draw from these changes in behaviors. That’s why companies might be willing to buy (the idea that they would be “donating” is disingenuous) ad space on a site that has drawn attention as a credible source of information. The only currency Wikipedia has is its credibility, and frankly this is not as shored up as it might be. Accepting advertising might well produce a significant short-term profit, but it would be at the expense of the goose laying the eggs.

Sure, you can find ways to clearly differentiate between paid and unpaid content, but given that wikis remain a new idea to many visitors, and there are not yet the clear conventions that allow viewers to make judgments, it would be immensely unwise for Wikipedia to squander what credibility it has gained on a quick short-term sellout. Since I have no reason to ascribe alterior motives to Calacanis, I can only believe that he has bought into the myths that undergird the process of “monetization.” Doesn’t he know that successful drug dealers never sample the product?

But, please do challenge the things I said there and elsewhere. I’ll be part of a an online discussion run by The Chronicle titled Wikipedia: Beat It, Join It, or Ignore It? this Thursday, October 26, at 3pm EST (19:00 GMT). Hope you can join in.

What I would like to do is assemble an editorial board of recognized experts in Internet Studies, Computer-Mediated Communication, and Human-Computer Interaction who would go through the process of finding appropriate peer reviewers and certifying particular versions of Wikipedia articles as being peer-reviewed. This would provide the reader with an additional indication that the work is of high quality and accurate.

To do this, we need to assemble a group of people who have some level of recognition in the field, and who are willing to devote a small amount of time to helping to select a core set of articles and oversee the review process. While we will be looking at a number of ways to make this process more technologically easy, the key issue here is to find a group of people willing to invest a little time and their reputations in an effort to make Wikipedia a more trusted source.

If you are interested in chatting a bit more about the project, drop me a note. If you will be in Brisbane for the Internet Research, perhaps we can discuss the possibilities over lunch on Thursday.

Calacanis defends his offer to pay members of the Digg collaborative filtering system with the following metaphor: There are both people who get paid to fight fires and volunteer firefighters. Paying some fire fighters doesn’t make the volunteers any less valuable or important.

Leaving aside the question of whether he is right (I suspect that there is an interesting history of the professionalization of fire fighting that does indeed introduce some conflicts, but I am too lazy to go and see–if by chance Mark the fire fighter/historian is is reading this, please inform us), this is one of a number of metaphors you could employ.

* Lots of people are voluntary sexual partners: paying some sexual partners in the community (i.e., prostitution), creates no harm for the community or for voluntary sexual partners in the community.

* There are a lot of people who send email for personal, self-motivated reasons. Paying someone to sell something via email creates no harm for non-paid email users or the system as a whole.

* Millions of people volunteer to donate their organs when they die. Paying some people (perhaps the healthiest or those with the largest organs? [heh]) to do this doesn’t have any sort of negative effect on the volunteers or the system as a whole.

I’m sure there are dozens of other examples. For what it’s worth, I tend to think that the effects in the first case would be less pernicious than those in the last case.

I need to see if I can find a good recap of the question and answer, since I find Calacanis’s offer to pay Diggers a stupid “throw money and see if it makes money” sort of approach, but heck, I don’t think he’ll hurt much by trying. (He’s managed to spin this into a lot of free publicity already, so it’s probably worked out well for him.) And I think there is a danger on both sides of making a specific case far too general. Let’s face it, paying Diggers is a bit of an anomaly. I know that neither the original Diggers nor the second wave of Diggers wouldn’t be happy about it! But it is worth trying to figure out the details on the firefighters, prostitutes, spammers, organ donors and Digg-shills cases. I suspect that the real answer is that we don’t know enough about what makes these work, and it’s well worth knowing.