David Gerard

• Delete, non-notable terrorist. May be recreated if terrorism successful – ~~~~
• Some people get really disappointed when a fight they’re looking for doesn’t happen.
• The Murdoch organisational war on free: Fox News wants to shut down Illinois libraries.
• I’ve been spending the last while furiously editing on RationalWiki, a place for rowdy sceptics. No-one reads it, but at least we don’t pretend otherwise.

In March 2010, about 90 people made even a single edit to Citizendium. Compare Conservapedia, which has 76 in the last week at the time I write this. The difference is, the latter is pretty much a personal website run by a gibbering fundie lunatic which gets pretty much all its traffic from sceptics making fun of it; the former was a serious project.

This is terribly sad. What went wrong?

• Steven Walling: Why Wikipedians Are Weird is beautiful and true, and you must watch it. (I have been at a pub with a trivia quiz where the table of Wikipedians didn’t enter because “it wouldn’t be fair.”)
• Does Wikipedia Suck? A highly effective assignment to teach students the true value of Wikipedia. (It is what it is, not what it isn’t.)

This is a nice toy from Data Wrangling. So far only covering English Wikipedia, though I’ve enquired as to whether they’ve any plans to cover other WMF wikis (as stats.grok.se does).

Wikipedia is closed to edits now	Encyclopedia Britannica is far superior to Wikipedia	Knol will kill Wikipedia	Wikipedia is public domain	Google owns Wikipedia now
Administrators control all articles personally	Wikipedia thinks Article X should be deleted	Wikipedia is in cahoots with Google for page rank	Wikipedia is a socialist conspiracy	Yahoo owns Wikipedia now
All schools everywhere forbid Wikipedia	Wikia is Wikipedia	FREE SPEECH	Jimmy Wales approves all Wikipedia articles personally	Wikipedia Foundation UK
Wikipedia is a capitalist conspiracy	Wikipedia runs Wikileaks	Wikipedia is dying	Andrew Orlowski will kill Wikipedia	Wikipedia must run advertising or it will die
Wikipedia will destroy civilised writing	Citizendium will kill Wikipedia	Wikipedia contains errors! No-one should use it	Microsoft Bing owns Wikipedia now	Wikipedia is hiring editors

With the invaluable assistance of unnameable contributors from the communications committee. Wait until a media frenzy, take one shot per square. Fill the card and drain the bottle. Post further suggestions below.

• In case you ever wondered: the complete matrix of all Wikimedia wikis.
• Place your entries in the billion edit pool!
• “Is it something like Wikipedia?”
• I am locking the Wikipedia article on our sex life.
• The Wikiman.
• I’ve shifted my fake news writing to NewsTechnica. Enjoy!

Everyone reading this is probably reasonably smart — Wikipedia is a nerd magnet, after all.

So I liked this blog post explaining how people fail to share.

Can you explain the obvious to people it isn’t obvious to? With references?

There are things Britannica can do that Wikipedia will never manage.

Email I just sent to the Victoria and Albert museum:

The family went to the V&A today. I didn’t have cash on me, so I didn’t put money in the boxes. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll donate on the website when I get home, I have my card.” Except I can’t see a way to do that.

I want to give you £20 from my Switch card just as if I came in today and put £20 into the boxes with “suggested donation” on them. I can’t find a quick and easy way to just casually give you money! Do you have one?

I took a few photos, of course, with the insanely-high-ISO F70EXR (and next time I want a DSLR with me). I’ll see how they come out. The V&A asks that photos be kept non-commercial except with permission, but they get along very well with Wikipedia, so it’s worth a try.

Museums: please include a quick, simple and hassle-free “just give us money!” option on your website.

Update: Buried deep in the site they have this form to donate online to one particular funding appeal via RBS WorldPay. I’ll wait on their response as to whether there’s a more general method, though.

Update 2: As of 3rd February, no response from the email and no response from their Twitter. I’ll have to assume the V&A has all the money it needs and doesn’t want mine.

Despite frequent press confusion, Wikileaks is nothing to do with Wikimedia at all — “wiki” is a generic term for “mass-editable website” and they use MediaWiki, but there’s no connection.

That said, Wikileaks is well worth supporting. They’re pretty radical about freeing information and will, from what they’re doing, overstep the mark from time to time (as in the case of the pager data release). I know Julian Assange slightly — he was the sysadmin at suburbia.net and he and Mark Dorset tirelessly defended my critic-of-Scientology website against baseless legal threats over several years. He’s got titanium balls, he really has. He’s a personal hero.

And Wikileaks is in trouble. They have less than a month’s operating budget left.

After you’ve donated to Wikimedia, those of you who think Wikileaks are a net win for democracy, as I do, may feel inspired to help keep them alive. I just donated £50. Tell your friends as well: http://bit.ly/savewl

I tweeted the following, in a discussion with someone else:

@jeamland mr landeryou has some history on wikipedia. (i did the sockpuppet investigation.)

Mr Landeryou saw fit to send me a threat for this:

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dgerard@gmail.com

Mr Gerard,

I am told you made reference to me in your musings on Twitter. I don't know
you, would rather not have to become familiar with who you are and what on
Earth possessed you to comment so freely about me or to edit Wikipedia to
say absurd things about me.

Your entitled to your opinion of me but I think it might be best for you to
discuss claims you make about me with me first. If you don't, I'll promise
to return the favour after an investigation into exactly what ails you. And
that really would be a waste of time for me and a very unpleasant outcome
for you, so I urge you to Twit more carefully in future.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Landeryou

I look forward to an exchange involving pie charts.

p.s.: if you don’t want your months-long-running Wikipedia shenanigans remembered, it helps not to have done them. Oops, too late.

If you want to know how Flagged Revisions feels to the casual editor, go to Wikinews and fix typos. I’m not an admin or reviewer on en:wn, and I just fixed the caption on “Geelong win 2009 Australian Football League Grand Final” — check the history.

What did it feel like? Curiously unsatisfying. The fix not going live immediately left me wondering just when it would — five minutes? An hour? A day? It felt nothing like editing a wiki — it felt like I’d submitted a form to a completely opaque bureaucracy for review at their leisure. (That it actually went live in just a couple of minutes doesn’t change this.)

Don’t take my word for it — go typo-fixing on Wikinews and tell me how it feels to you.

I remain a big fan of flagged revisions for those times when we need it — as a less-worse alternative to protection or semiprotection — but, as per its detractors, it really does kill the wiki motivational buzz dead.

German Wikipedia has, of course, had flagged revisions on all articles for quite some time. Can anyone from de:wp tell me how it felt there?

(en:wn statistics; de:wp statistics. en:wp having times like de:wp would be an utter failure.)

The key to Wikipedia’s success is that it gets on with writing an encyclopedia, and doing things that write a good encyclopedia.

Attention paid across the volunteer contributor base to trying to top search engine ranks: somewhere around negligible.

If you focus on giving people really good web pages they want to go to, you’ll get the Google rank Wikipedia has. If you make “SEO” your express goal, rather than actually being, you know, good, you’ll get what you deserve.

(The last occasion I recall anyone at Wikipedia caring about search engine rank was around 2005, when mirror sites of Wikipedia would occupy the first thirty results ahead of the original page; I think someone got in touch with Google and said to them “dude, we should at least rank ahead of our own mirrors.” I presume they decided that automatic sites outranking the human-created originals was silly and did something about that.)

WIKIALITY, The Tenderloin, Saturday (NNN) — The online encyclopedia, knowledge base, social networking site, essay repository, blog, search engine, news aggregator, dessert wax and floor topping Wikipedia has reached its three millionth article and ceased all editing.

Palo Alto Research Center reported that only 1% of edits by random users were kept. “They were all unspeakable shit,” said burnt-out administrator WikiFiddler451. “All of them. No, I’m not exaggerating. Go to Special:Newpages and read a day’s entries some time. You’ll start by deleting the whole database, before you get onto plotting the doom of humanity. Christ, why go on?”

(Read more …)

They’ve turned into a software patent troll.

(They have announced a 2010 edition. Let’s see how many photos in it are from Wikimedia Commons.)

WatchKnow is a fantastically cool idea from Larry Sanger: a repository of CC by-sa educational videos for school children. The official big splash launch is set for autumn — they’re building it up in preparation for then.

Erik Möller has just emailed this to the communications committee list, and said it can be posted publicly:

“Quick note: The National Portrait Gallery contacted us to see if we can find a compromise regarding the images in question, and we’ve entered good faith discussions with them. Feel free to point this out in relevant places.”

Of course, details on terms, proposals etc. are confidential at this stage. But let’s assume that, interesting as a final verdict might be, neither WMF, the NPG or DCoetzee really want this to come to a legal battle. (The WMF is a charity and broke by definition, the NPG is a government sub-department.) That’s a really good thing. Working with people always beats working against them.

So: what would you like to see in a compromise, that addresses the concerns of all sides? (My initial ideas are here.)

The real problem is funding digitisation — that governments tell galleries they have to make money from copyright on the works in their possession. This was barely workable last century, and is increasingly untenable in this one.

That million pounds the NPG spent on digitisation was taxpayer’s money. We’ve already paid for it. IMO, we should be getting the images at highest resolution completely unencumbered. I don’t hold out hope of this being standard until we get the Ordnance Survey data and the postcode database released, though.

(Also: this blog quoted on the BBC News site.)

(Note: I am on the comcom list, and answer media queries as a WMF volunteer, but opinions on this blog are entirely mine and not WMF’s.)

Erik Möller’s posted to the Wikimedia blog on the issue. Note the correction of the NPG’s claims that Wikimedia never responded to them (rather than responding with “Bridgeman v. Corel, go away”) — Erik assumes good faith and presumes this is in error.

About the best roundup of coverage so far is Dcoetzee’s own link collection — press and blog posts. I liked the WikiNews story.

Other British taxpayers as annoyed at the NPG’s waste of their money as I am have been putting in FOI requests to see just how much money they make from keeping it all to themselves (£378k before expenses — what are the expenses? six staff, what else?), how much they’re spending on legal representation, what proportion of their web hits are from Wikimedia links and so forth.

(One request that should be made: £10-15k annually from web licenses — they need to be asked how much the person handling these licenses is paid. They make more money selling food in the café. Suggest your best prospective FOI requests in the comments!)

I’m suspecting a severe case of bureaucratic empire building here: the bureaucrats honestly think the paintings belong to them rather than to us. Which is what one might see from a private for-profit corporation, but is rather less than acceptable for a government sub-department, not even an independent charity. As Sage Ross notes from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody:

Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to job number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says.

I was going to call NPG this morning first thing as a volunteer, to see what could be reasonably done to avert a public battle — a public battle would really foul up our other museum liaison volunteers’ ongoing efforts. But I was awake all night with a sick child and so I just got up …

Has anyone reading this called yet, as a volunteer? Physchim62, who did a lot to get the American Chemical Society working with us, was going to call. Has anyone else?

(I don’t hold out much hope for this — the NPG’s position has been completely consistent and completely uncooperative for many years. But it’s always worth asking.)

It’s reasonably important to avoid directly going into details of the possible legal case, for Dcoetzee’s sake — but the NPG’s lawyers have effectively written a press release read by ten thousand Wikimedians and a million Slashdot readers. The letter clearly does directly and personally threaten a lot of them. I bet it’s been more widely read than any intentional NPG press release has been.

Ideal outcome: PD everything, they welcome a team of our photographers in.

Plausible good outcome: We put up the hi-res images with notes that they are PD in the US but the NPG claims copyright in Europe and releases them under copyleft, and full credit is requested in either case. (Copyleft is not as ideal as PD, but it’s plenty good enough for us.) We issue press releases lauding the NPG to the skies and say nice things about them forever.

Another plausible good outcome: They welcome a team of our photographers in. Careful supervision, etc. Then we can do stuff like infrared shots as well (which can show interesting things about a painting’s restoration history).

Awful outcome: great big legal and public relations battle. Even if we or they win, we both lose.

Bad outcome: mainstream press about this at all, really. It will hamper our efforts with other museums. The NPG probably doesn’t see it that way.

Any other possible outcomes to list?

Additional data point: the NPG has removed the hi-res versions. Thus, the Wikimedia copies are the only copies currently available. This makes it actually culturally important for us to keep them up!

Meanwhile, here’s an article you must read on this topic: Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility by Kenneth Hamma, Executive Director for Digital Policy, J. Paul Getty Trust. Precis: do your best to get as many of the highest-quality copies out there as you can.