Byron Clark

Why We Wiki

Interesting read as always.

The simple answer is, several million volunteers (Wikipedia has over 4 million registered users and unregistered people can edit it as well) finding out exactly who those volunteers are is a little more difficult, in 2005 Wired Magazine ran an article profiling some of the biggest contributors, but most contributors are (aside from their user pages) largely anonymous.

Today Wired is reporting on new software created to find out where the anonymous edits (those from I.P. addresses) are coming from. This software should have no effect on the privacy of individual Wikipedia users, but organizations with fixed I.P addresses are not as anonymous as they once were, the CIA, Microsoft and US Congressional offices have all been found to editing Wikipedia. Using this software you can see that, for example Walmart (that is, someone in their corporate office) is editing its own article including sections like "treatment of employees"

In my opinion this new software is a good thing for the Wikipedia community, we can call out politicians and corporations who try and use Wikipedia as a marketing tool, or try and delete critical information.

"Wikipedia is entirely free. And that freedom includes not just the ability of anyone to read it (a freedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, jstor, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also—more remarkably—their freedom to use it."

From Roy Rosenzweig's "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the future of the past"

I hadn't used jstor, but as I've mentioned citing Wikipedia in anything for my current history class is an automatic fail, so I went to check out jstor. I was naive enough to think that the the only restiction on jstor would be the fact that only academic institutions can afford subscriptions, making it only available to students, but they've decided thats not restrictive enough, heres the other restrictions:

"Access to this resource is restricted to staff and students at the University of Canterbury, using their University usercode and password.
It may be searched and accessed only for the purpose of University teaching, study or research. A reasonable quantity of excerpts may be downloaded for this purpose.
Substantial subsets of data may not be created. Data may not be copied, sold or provided for any other commercial purpose. Data may not be provided to anyone who is not an authorized user." (from here)

Forget reseach for blog posts, writing Wikipedia articles or even just getting some information for interested non-student friends. While we've come along way from just having the slogan "information wants to be free" we're still not there yet.

As I write this Spotless's lockout of its 800 hospital workers, in its 9th day, has been overturned by the employment court. This doesn't mean the dispute is over of course, the union is going to attempt to get back pay for its members, then I guess its back to negotiations as usual.

In the mean time, I've started a Wikipedia article about the dispute, it has the important information but theres room for expansion, so any Wikipedians keen to help out, dive in :-)

As of yesterday I'm back at university, had my first lecture of the new semester yesterday which includes all the basics, what text book to buy, what times the tutorials are, and of course, a stern warning on the evils of Wikipedia, according my history lecturer Wikipedia is not to be trusted, in fact she was adament that if any of us cite Wikipedia we would fail the course.

Not every historian agrees however, scholorly work by people such as George Mason University history professor Roy Rosenzweig has showen Wikipedia to be in general as accurate as other encyclopedias ("Wikipedia, then, beats Encarta...in coverage and roughly matches Encarta in accuracy"). There is some good discussion of Rosenweigs work on the If:Book blog and an interesting essay of his "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" originally published in The Journal of American History Volume 93 is available online.

Another interesting view on Wikis and the new methods of knowledge sharing is given by Mark Pesce a lecturer in the interactive media program at AFTRS, video of a lecture given during the April 2007 Education.AU tour of Australia’s capitol cities with Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) is available on his blog.

One of the first things I've had to do for sociology is ask I question I want to try and answer during the course, after a bit of thinking this is what I've came up with;

Coming to the social sciences after studying information technology my question relates to both these areas; How is the academic establishment reacting (or adapting) to a society where the Internet, particularly the Wikipedia project, but also blogs, Google News etc, have made information ubiquitous? Its a bigger issue than whether or not your tutor will let you cite Wikipedia in an essay, it raises questions like, How do works licenced under the Gnu Free Documentation Licence fit within the concept of plagiarism? How do the students in the Free Culture Movement approach their university work? Is the idea of consensus decision making used on Wikipedia really appropriate for creating an encyclopedia? In the 1990s the cyberpunk subculture declared that information WANTS to be free,and in 2007 much of it is, and as the founder of the Free Software Movement Richard Stallman might say its Free as in Free Speech not free as in free beer this is radically different from any form of information distribution that has existed before. The closest example from history is public libraries, but as the recent controversy over a Telecom commercial shows, public libraries aren't 100% behind the new networks of information distribution. To put my question in a metaphorical way, when the hordes of Internet users storm the Ivory Towers, will they be let in? or will they be turned away?

I've already had an intereting reply showing I'm not the only student thinking like this. Could turn out to be an interesting class.

From The NY Times: "Karl Marx famously predicted that industrial capitalism’s individualist ethos would engender its opposite: a new collective consciousness that would ultimately fuel the socialist revolution. But the old dialectician would probably have been shocked to see how much collectivism has flowered in the hypercapitalist Internet economy of late. First there was open-source software — large-scale digital engineering projects miraculously executed by groups of programmers contributing their intellectual labor for the sheer reward of participation. Then Google took on the seemingly insurmountable problem of organizing the Web’s information by tapping the collective wisdom embedded in the links between Web sites. Then Wikipedia applied the open-source model to encyclopedia production, and — against all odds — built a genuine challenger to Britannica in four short years."

Nice opening paragraph, the article is about Jaron Laniers essay "Digital Maoism The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" I haven't yet read this essay or its responses, though I expect I will when I have some spare time. I found the discussion about the essay between Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and R.U Sirius on his latest podcast quite interesting.

Interesting article on Ars Technica about developments in the world of Wikis, one project is creating a fork of Wikipedia and bringing peer review and "expert oversight" to articles. As Ars pointed out, since this project will have to be licenced under the GFDL all the peer reviewed articles can be copied back to Wikipedia, so basicly this project will become a fact checking group for Wikipedia, which I think will always be more a popular encyclopedia. I'm sure this new project will find a bunch of academics, but will they find experts to peer review the tens of thousands of articles on pop culture and Internet memes?

Another, Scholarpedia, wants to build a free encyclopedia written only by people with PhDs, don't think this will amount to much, did someboday say Nupedia?

As of today I have made 200 edits to Wikipedia articles, probably a little over 200 by the time you're reading this. The articles I've made the most edits to are 2006 Progressive Enterprises dispute, Rogernomics, and Papanui. My 200th edit was adding a picture to the Dole bludger article

I have well over enough edits to vote in the upcoming arbitration committee elections, none of the candidates really seem to stand out, but I think I'll make the effort to do a bit of research and vote, just another way of helping with the project.

Damn I love Wikipedia, I was freaking out about tomorrows networking theory exam, you see computer networking is based on this thing called the OSI model, which, not unlike hell, has seven layers. Now I could remember say 5 layers, maybe even 6, but 7! and remembering what order they are in? Thanks to Wikipedia, I now have this handy mnemonic.
Interestingly though, on the webiste its refernced from, has salami pizza, rather than sausage, but what do I care, I'm a vegetarian.

So I saw the first bit of controversy related to a Wikipedia article I have edited today, one I started in fact. The article in question is this one on ACT vice president Trevor Loudon, as readers will know I regularly read Loudons New Zeal a) for entertainment and b) because the debate there is more intelligent than Indymeda Aotearoa (I kid, Aotearoa IMC has improved a lot recently, but next to the town of Cheviot, its still my favourite thing to make fun of)

Anyway, I've been stepping up my participaiton in the Wikipedia project lately, but have been to busy to do any serious research, since I read New Zeal I decided to do a quick article on Trevor, as VP of a mainstream polical party with a blog thats been written about in the mainstream media is notable enough for an encyclopedia entry. I did the article based on New Zeal articles and a quick Google search, I created a stub, added a bit more later, and then others procceded to edit it, and thats where the problem comes in, some user decided to use comments from a blog post as sources, Trevor posts on New Zeal that the statements are incorrect, and someone removes them.

Wikipedia works, incorrect information is corrected when it is proved incorrect, constant editing keeps articles on the ball. I was kidding about the controversy.

Anyone who has read this article I wrote for The Spark recently knows that I'm a big supporter of the Wikipedia project, personally I mainly read Wikipedia, having hyperlinks from one article to many others makes for hours of entertainment (not to mention learning) I've made some small contributions before, I wrote most of the article on The Polynesian Panthers, New Zealands answer to the American Black Panthers, a while ago using the small amount of information I found on Google, but only got round to to getting an account yesterday, today I contributed a huge amount of information to the article about my home town, had to to a bit of googling of course, at first just to have a reference for stuff thats common knowlege round here, but then to find out more, its really amazing the amount of history this little suburb has, and now, thats to Wikipedia, that information is going to reach a lot more people.