David Gerard

Paper is all very well for pictures of young women in a state of undress, but proper research mandates Wikipedia.

PECKHAM POLYTECHNIC, Saturday (UNN) — A lecturer has criticised students for relying on “books” and “journals” to do their thinking for them.

Tara Raboomtiyay, Professor of Reflexive Perspectives on Post-Modern Verbosity at the University of Bumsonseats, said too many young people around the world were taking the easy option when asked to do research and simply repeating the first things they found in library searches.

She has dubbed the phenomenon “The University of Dead Words On Paper.”

“The education world has pursued new technology with an almost evangelical zeal,” she said. “Too many students don’t use their own brains enough and just cite something they see in a ‘book’ or a ‘journal.’ We need to bring back the important values of critical reading and net forum discussion. Young people are finishing education with shallow ideas and need to learn interpretative skills before starting to use technology.

“Thousands of students across Britain are churning out banal and mediocre work by stringing together references to what ‘libraries’ provide them. I don’t think students come to university to learn how to use ‘books,’ they can all do that before they get here. It is an easy way out for tutors to let them work to their own devices using ‘literature searches,’ rather than active participatory discussion on phpBB. People have to pay to come to university now and what they are paying for is the knowledge, experience and guidance of forum moderators like myself.”

She will be giving a lecture on the issue, called Britannica Is White Bread For The Mind, at the Alan Dubious Lecture Theatre on Wednesday at 6.30pm.

• Cassandra Doomvoice “I warn you, if you keep doing this ‘writing’, you’ll lose your memory!“. Journal of Publication Credits, January 12, 2008

The 7th London Wikipedia meetup has been announced for this Saturday, at the Pembury Tavern in Hackney. Just next to Hackney Downs train station, a short walk from Hackney Central train station. Real beer in many varieties cheap, does food. Holding a wikimeet at the Pembury makes sense in terms of how many Wikipedians I know who are regulars …

I won’t be there this time, as I have a prior booking (getting drunk with perverts. Other perverts). But it should be good!

Is anyone actually using the Semantic Web? Does anyone know of working sites that anyone not already in the cult cares about? Is this anything more than vapourware?

I know of no examples whatsoever that anyone beyond Semantic Web geeks themselves care about. Zero.

I am not asking for responses of “I’m doing research in this area, let me show you it” or “SemanticFooWiki will be the coolest thing ever, you heathen, as soon as we get the code written” — I’m asking for examples of sites presently existing, that people are interested by the semantic web functionality of, without having to know or care what “the Semantic Web” is. Anyone?

I was wrong. Congratulations to the Citizendium Foundation on choosing a free content licence (CC by-sa 3.0 unported) for Citizendium!

Free content, like free software, is about freedom — the freedom for anyone to use, study and apply, change and redistribute the work, for any purpose. “Non-commercial” isn’t free enough to be called free. “No derivatives” isn’t free enough to be called free. As Brianna Laugher notes, “The right to fork that is created by free content licensing keeps the parent organisations honest.”

The big news here is that the choice of a free licence furthers the public expectation that educational content (Wikipedia, Citizendium, Encyclopedia of Earth, Open Site) will be under a proper free content license. Scholarpedia and about.com need not apply. Google needs to think carefully.

(I also get a thank you at the end of the Citizendium license essay. Any help I provided in making this choice happen, I’m extremely pleased to have provided.)

Citizendium and Wikipedia, or at least the more foolish members thereof, have their periodic pissy bitchfights. But we’re on the same side in deep and important ways.

(Is Citizendium good for anything? Well, their history of the BSD Daemon is the best article I’ve seen on the subject. There’s excellent stuff there worth linking people to.)

If Google floated a trial balloon to see what ideas they could get everyone else to come up with for them, they’ve succeeded fabulously. It’s a Rorschach blot the tech press sphere has spent the weekend projecting all its hopes and fears onto. Like Citizendium was this time last year.

One thing about the mockup graphic: the Creative Commons CC-by 3.0 logo. Remember that the point of Wikipedia is not in fact to run a hideously popular and expensive website, but to create a body of freely-reusable educational content. IF, I say IF, Google require Knols to be under a proper free content licence, that’ll be a big win for everyone, same as Citizendium is basically on the same side as Wikipedia. Making free content normal and expected. And I think we will go so far as to lend our good name to publicly saying very nice things about this exciting new source of free content. IF they do this.

And if they don’t, they’ll just be another about.com or Yahoo Answers. Or Google Answers. Remember Google Answers? I bet Google does.

If they allow multiple competing articles on a given subject, I’m not so sure that’s a win for the reader. Fred Bauder’s Wikinfo also does this and has almost no traction. I consider the Neutral Point Of View policy our most important innovation, far more so than letting anyone edit the site. The view from 20,000 feet, even if it’s as worked out by editors at ground level. People don’t come to an encyclopedia for ten articles, they come for one that provides an overview of the ten. That’s what an encyclopedia is for: the ten-second or sixty-second or five-minute quick backgrounder.

Update: I am apparently the first person in the blagosphere with the initiative to find the Google Code page on Knol. Does anyone recognise this wikitext syntax? Update 2: Apparently it’s the syntax used by their own internal wiki engine. Update 3: They’ve locked it down. Cache here while it lasts.

Gordon Joly posted this to wikimediauk-l, and it just so happens that WMF executive director Sue Gardner is in town that day too. I tried to arrange a meet before I realised the other event was on, and two events is silly, so let’s just have one, eh?

Jimmy Wales has been invited to speak at this month’s event.
London wikiwed 5 December 2007

The event will be hosted by NYK Shipping (thanks to Alek Lotoczko) and SocialText will be footing the bill for - pizzas, beer and wine (thanks to Ross Mayfield and Ross Hargreaves). The address is NYK Line, 17th Floor, CityPoint, 1 Ropemaker Street, London EC2Y 9NY. Nearest Tube is Moorgate.

We aim for people to arrive around 18:15 for a 19:00 formal start.

Please make sure you book your name below so a name badge can be prepared, and if you have any difficulties on the night you can call David Terrar on 07715 159423.

And I am suggesting the same pub afterwards as last time we met at NYK Line: The Globe, 83 Moorgate, London, EC2M 6SA.

Don’t forget to call ahead!

Wikimedia’s shiny new executive director Sue Gardner is in town next week. So we’ll be going to the Shakespeare’s Head, WC2B 6BG, on Kingsway just south of Holborn tube. 7pm sound good? Signup page. Whoops - Jimbo is speaking the same day. Let’s have one event, eh?

Wednesday 5th afternoon is my works’ Christmas party, so expect me to be mostly trashed and sipping Coke and Red Bull.

English Wikipedia Wikicharts for November 2007 (so far). The numbers are a sampling of raw page hit count.

The hits on “Main Page” will be people just going to the site. The hits on “wiki” will not (I would guess) come from a society-wide fascination with editable websites, but because people have typed “wiki” into a search engine. I suspect a lot of the sex-related hits will be disappointed porn searchers.

The question is what “popular” actually usefully means. Raw page hits demonstrably isn’t quite it. “Pages with most hits gone to by people looking for information” (whether starting from Wikipedia, a search engine or a link) is closer to what we’re after, but there’s the question of quantifying intent. When we ask what’s “popular,” what’s the question we’re actually asking?

(At least our charts are harder to rig than Conservapedia’s.)

Update, Dec 2007: I was wrong. CZ has chosen CC-by-sa. w00t! *champagne*

Citizendium looks likely to adopt a Creative Commons Non-Commercial licence, with the Citizendium Foundation having the power to license anything in it commercially to keep the organisation running. Larry Sanger says he hasn’t declared a view, but I think the question wording and his clarifications point pretty obviously. See also the forum thread.

If Citizendium takes its content non-free, it immediately becomes only as interesting as Scholarpedia, for the same reason. (And not to mention contributors who feel they’ve been deceived wanting their stuff back.) Free content, with analogy to free software, does not have usage restrictions. Dr Sanger attempts a reductio ad Hitlerum on the term “free,” but I suspect that’s not going to convince many outside Citizendium.

There’s a complete failure (in the CZ forum or blog threads) to acknowledge “commercial use” as meaning anything other than large corporations in the first world. But a non-profit running a large sales operation falls under “non-commercial”; an individual selling copies and covering costs while not operating under a governmental or non-profit corporate umbrella, however, is “commercial”.

(The GFDL is hardly that wonderful, and I’ve posted to the FSFE list that the one thing those of us contributing to the largest GFDL project in existence want is that a future version be completely compatible with a future CC-by-sa. That’s it. That’s what we want.)

Usage restrictions are fundamentally problematic. One of the reasons for making Wikipedia free content without usage restrictions is so that distribution of the content can be encouraged. Erik Möller has noted the problems with NC licences: “marking up regions of content as non-commercial and consistently following these boundaries is almost impossible in a collaborative environment.” Lawrence Lessig agrees he has a point there (though, of course, continues to support -NC for appropriate uses himself). Further from Möller:

Worse still are the effects that -NC licenses can have on people in the developing world, where entrepreneurship represents an opportunity to overcome poverty and the digital divide. People with basic access to freely licensed materials can redistribute them at a small profit using more traditional means such as photocopying or CD burning. In the absence of large scale government programs to broaden Internet access or distribute free content, market forces can play a clearly beneficial role in spreading free knowledge and free culture. Given cultural, language and access barriers, the common argument of -NC proponents that permitting commercial use on request is sufficient to allow for desirable uses, is at odds with reality.

Dr Sanger says he considers the free market useful, but doesn’t speak of commercial use in terms other than large first-world corporations. If that’s what Citizendium want to make sure they get paid for, they need a licence that says that and doesn’t have the collateral damage outside the first world that this approach will. Even those Citizendium contributors apparently driven by bitterness toward Wikipedia would surely have some reluctance to concede most of the world’s population for short-term gain.

Update: Dr Sanger states he really truly hasn’t decided any which way, both here and on the forum.

Update 2: It’s in the Slashdot firehose, apparently adapted from this post. With a link here. INCOMING!!

English Wikipedia may have two million articles, but it’s so far off finished it’s ridiculous.

We had a quite notable recent classroom experiment in assigning students missing Wikipedia articles to write. Dig this first edit!

Writing a new article that will stick really isn’t hard: a few paragraphs, some references and some indication that there’s a reason to care will do the trick. (Go on, stretch yourself beyond web comics.) Anyone with an hour or two can produce something well worth keeping with Google Scholar. If you have access to a university library, it’s ridiculously easy.

Rather than just telling your students “go write something,” set them loose on a list of red links, requested articles, missing articles or the missing articles project. Discussion on WikiEN-L suggested Gaelic footballers, Indian and South African politicians (indeed, politicians from anywhere that isn’t the US or Europe), biographies from before the twentieth century (check any public domain biographical dictionary, particularly ones not in English), every scientist in a prominent national academy …

(Don’t forget to tell the school and university projects list.)

Also: add red links as you potter about the wiki. Red links encourage contributors. We’re now saying so expressly at FAC. And pathological red link haters can always be dealt with.

I answer the phone, she goes to conferences! A lengthy blog writeup, a gratuitously inflammatory headline and a picture she hates from the Guardian and shorter bits on the Press Gazette and another blog.

Durova writes a nice piece for the marketers recruiting more free images. Nice one!

I’m wondering how to do this for entertainers. Bad live shots, snapshots and so forth under a free content licence always supersede something that isn’t free content. (Many have argued the toss on this, but as things stand that’s the way things are.) I’m wondering a useful way to reliably get entertainment industry promo photos to flock to us. I suspect our really crappy examples would be a start. e.g. “Top ten site, our rules. You don’t get to have a good photo under your control. You get a crappy photo that’s under a suitable license, or you give us a good photo under a suitable license. The latter is probably a lot more to your liking and that of your artists.”

The hardest part is publishing that somewhere it would actually get read by the target audience. Ideas?

By the way: if you have decent photos you’ve taken of someone who’s got a Wikipedia article but no good free content photo, we’d love ‘em. CC by-sa and GFDL both require your name staying attached to the image details page.

Ayn Landers is a renowned author, philosopher and hero to millions thousands of nerdy overprivileged dweebs who’ve read too much Heinlein. She writes the famous syndicated advice column named after her. Send your letters to Ayn Landers, Objective Guidance, Uncyclopedia, Wikiality, Florida. Enclose a stamp, you lazy bum.

Dear Ayn Landers: My corporate masters have whipped up a page on our internal MediaWiki that they intend to publish on Wikipedia in the near future. It’s not terribly embarrassing, but I’m wondering what the attitude over there is regarding this sort of enterprise. — Stultified of Startupland

Dear Stultified: Depends what it is. Mostly it’s a really stupidly bad idea. Look at the reaction to people being caught with the WikiScanner writing about themselves. Whoever puts it up better be absolutely upfront about who they are and where they’re from. And be prepared for it to be zapped unceremoniously with somewhat brusque comments along the lines of “perhaps this will need an article when there’s citable evidence third parties care.” The all too frequent outcome of this sort of bug-on-windscreen impact with people who really don’t care about one’s corporate Kool-Aid is bitter ranting about those evil Wikipedia bastards, arrogant teenage nerds all of them; I’m sure you know the sort of thing. (The arrogant teenage nerds bit is accurate.)

I’ve also sent you three of my handy etiquette guides: COI, AUTO and the wisdom of Durova. We deal with a firehose of spam every day, and writing about yourself puts you at risk of being mistaken for part of it. But be good and all will be well.

When planning a cult, who pays for what? Who stands where? “The Ayn Landers Guide for Landroids” has all the answers. Send a self-addressed, long, business-size envelope and a check or money order for $3.75 (this includes postage and handling) to Collectives, Ayn Landers, Objective Guidance, Uncyclopedia, Wikiality, Florida. (In Canada, send $4.55.) And remember, A equals A!

I was on NewsTalk Dublin at 6:20pm Thursday, on George Hook again, about the WikiScanner thing. Quick four-minute segment. He mentioned his own entry, which spoke of him as a dog-lover — he can’t stand dogs. I said “click on the history tab, you’ll see everyone that ever changed it listed there — the WikiScanner basically indexes all that stuff, so you can look it up.” He liked that. I also mentioned there’d be a lot of employees whose bosses might be a little annoyed at what they’d been doing at work …

And, just now, an 11:30pm call from the Daily Mail. Apparently the Sun is running a piece on vandalism of Gordon Brown from Whitehall IP addresses. She asked a cheeringly clueful question: how long was it up there? I couldn’t find the edits, but did introduce her to the history tab, which she was most excited by. Hear that? That’s a journalistic instinct sniffing out a new source of information.

I also got to note something that’s surprised me: the public’s opinion of what constitutes a conflict of interest is far harsher than even Wikipedia’s.

In other news, have a photo of and interview with me, from the Honda public relations magazine Dream. I came into work to be greeted with an A3 colour photocopy on my desk.

The SOS Children 2007 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is being made available in India on CD and DVD — free for 100 schools, and burnt copies for sale at a small fee for those who can’t download it. A sort of Linux distribution model.

Compare to the German language Encarta, which is no longer doing a physical product.

WIKIALITY, Florida, Tuesday (UnGadget) — An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that socially-crippled geeks are heavily involved in editing entries.

The Wikipedia History Tab shows computer users with little ability to deal with human interaction made considerable numbers of edits to the Wikipedia article base. The tool trawls a list of 5.3 million edits and matches them to the “user name” of the editor and their position on the Eurocentricity of kitten cuteness. And Naruto, which is apparently this year’s Pokémon.

A warning on the “talk page” of one editor reads: “You have recently repelled a new Wikipedia user by making thousands of edits in an arrogant and self-satisfied manner, and as such you are now being asked to run for admin. This is your last warning.”

After many edits from CIA internet address ranges, a spokesman said, “I’d like in any case to underscore a far larger and more significant point that no one should doubt or forget: The CIA has a vital mission in protecting the United States, and the focus of this agency is there, on that decisive work.” When we pointed out that CIA editors had in fact been concentrating on querulous Buffy The Vampire Slayer trivia, he said he’d get back to us.

Earlier this year, Microsoft was revealed to have offered money to people not to edit on Wikipedia concerning Microsoft or, indeed, anything else.

• Durova Watch “It’s not spin, it’s “PR 2.0″“. Search Engine Spammer Optimizer, August 15, 2007
• Gdlennsk Gdanzsigsk “And you thought the article content was lame“. See talk, August 16, 2007

(This afternoon, I’m on BBC Radio Ulster Evening Extra some time between 5:00pm and 6:30pm BST and BBC Radio 2 John Inverdale around 5:30pm 6:30pm BST cancelled. And BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat around 5:45pm.)