| Wiki-fatigue |
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The WSJ has an article today (sub required) discussing a new endangered species: the Wikipedia editor. Apparently 49,000 of them disappeared during the first 3 months of 2009 alone. One of the reasons the Journal cites is the Wikipedia’s “plethora of rules” about the editing process, which has led to infighting among editors: “‘People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen,’ says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. ‘Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It’s too many cooks in the kitchen.’” I have 3 comments about this: (1) Mr. Kittur appears to be channeling Fred Brooks. (Coincidentally I ordered a copy of the Mythical Man-Month on Saturday.) (2) “Too many cooks spoil the broth” was yet another of my mom’s pithy phrases. (3) I’m not thinking the Wikipedia’s going away any time soon, despite the dire warnings we read from time to time. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (0)August 31, 2009
| It’ll Be Code Orange For The Wikipedia This Fall |
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Wired Science reports that this autumn the Wikipedia will introduce a feature that color-codes text in order to show its trustworthiness. New text from untrustworthy authors — i.e., those without a track record on the site — is highlighted in bright orange. As more people view the text and leave it unedited, the color will fade to light orange, and then eventually to white. I’ve extracted the following quotes from the article. What do you think about the logic behind them:
IMHO this system is flawed in that it’s based upon the assumption that all editors are going to be fair and impartial, which we all know is definitely not the case. But it’s a nice try, though. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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June 29, 2009
| Silence is Golden |
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Back in 1962, President Kennedy asked members of the press to sit on the story about the discovery of Russian missiles in Cuba. This gave Kennedy about a week to try and defuse the crisis privately with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, without the pressures of intense media scrutiny and public opinion. Though Kennedy ultimately had to go public with the story, we’re all still here, so the 7-day media blackout had to have helped. I’m a big believer in the freedom of the press, but sometimes too much information can be a bad thing. Here’s another example. The NY Times reported yesterday that for seven months it suppressed information about the capture of one of its reporters, David Rohde, by the Taliban. The Times felt that if his situation was made public, Mr. Rohde would become a high-profile case, and his safety would be jeopardized. They asked the Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales to delete information about Mr. Rohde’s capture from his page. Apparently, that took a lot of effort, as several contributors repeatedly attempted to add the information to Mr. Rohde’s page. They didn’t appreciate the censorship. One said, “We can [continue to] do this [for] months.” Mr. Wales and his staff recognized that most of the edits appeared to come from one user in Florida. “We had no idea who it was … There was no way to reach out quietly and say ‘Dude, stop and think about this.’” Finally, when the Times itself broke the story of Mr. Rohde’s escape, the citizen-editor finally got to edit the page and vent his spleen with the following comment: “Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG.” Which reminds me of this comic from xkcd. Someone calls from offstage, “Are you coming to bed?” A guy at the keyboard says, “I can’t. This is important. Someone is wrong on the Internet.” |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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April 1, 2009
| “Wiki” Isn’t Necessarily a Magic Word |
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Yesterday Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that he will shut down his new(-ish, it’s about a year old or so) search engine, Wikia Search: “… our project, Wikia Search, has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped. In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader. But for now, we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project (as of March 31, 2009) and will be re-directing and refocusing resources on other Wikia.com properties …” Personally, I think that most of the next-gen search engines are junk, with the exception of SearchMe. And since many people are using Facebook and Twitter as search tools, we probably won’t see a whole lot of new general-purpose search engines coming down the road any time soon. Link. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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March 31, 2009
| Wikipedia Forces Microsoft To Surrender |
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Ars Technica reports that Microsoft will discontinue their Encarta encyclopedia on October 31, 2009. Here’s what they said: “Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business. Microsoft’s vision is that everyone around the world needs to have access to quality education, and we believe that we can use what we’ve learned and assets we’ve accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions. In doing so, we feel strongly that we are making the right investments that will help make our vision a reality.” Here’s what they meant: “Y’all are just gonna use the Wikipedia anyway, so what’s the point?” I think Encarta was the second CD I got when I finally purchased a PC with a CD drive. The first? Myst. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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September 3, 2008
| Checks and Balances Works Again |
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Wired’s Threat Level blog reports on an asylum case that was almost decided using evidence gleaned from the Wikipedia. Lamilem Badasa of Ethiopia entered the U.S. with a fake Italian passport. She then applied for asylum. As part of her asylum request, she attempted to prove her true identity using a document known as a laissez-passer. The Department of Homeland Security provided a Wikipedia page (!) indicating that a laissez-passer is a one-time, one-way document containing information which is not independently verified by the issuing government. An Immigration Judge (IJ) ruled that Badasa had thus not proven her identity. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), while stating that it did not “condone or encourage” the use of the Wikipedia in immigration proceedings, nevertheless dismissed Badasa’s appeal because it felt that the Immigration Judge’s ruling “was supported by enough evidence to find no clear error.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit didn’t buy that argument, and remanded the case back to the BIA: “[W]e do not know whether the IJ would have reached the same conclusion without Wikipedia, or whether (and, if so, why) the BIA believes that the IJ’s consideration of Wikipedia was harmless error, in the sense that it did not influence the IJ’s decision.” Wired obviously thinks this is yet another example of how dim-witted the Department of Homeland Security can be. We all know that Wikipedia pages can be unreliable — heck, my daughter can’t cite them in her college term papers. But that’s not my point here. My takeaway is that the court system worked properly in this case. It wasn’t pretty, but eventually an appeals court said, “Whoa … you need to show us some hard facts here.” The adult supervision came through when it needed to. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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January 22, 2007
| Mayor Street’s a Clown |
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Don’t look at me. I’m just quoting what a Wikipedia user said about our beloved mayor (see the second paragraph in the “Biographical details and political career” section.) This was reported in today’s Inquirer, btw. This episode demonstrates — to me, at least — how small the world has become. Based on the IP address, 12.198.160.151, the vandal was probably at a hotel in the U.S. Halfway around the world a Chinese writer named Andrew Lih (Fuzheado) repaired the damage less than 11 hours later. To paraphrase Hamlet, “What’s Mayor Street to him, or he to Mayor Street, That he should edit for him?” |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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