Wikipedia vs. Knol: Jimbo Wales edition

Rachel Marsden has posted a Knol on Jimmy Wales (photo at right), the co-founder of Wikipedia. As you may recall, the point of Knol is to provide a more accurate source of information, one that is not subject to the inaccuracies and personal rancor that some attribute to Wikipedia.

Here’s how Marsden, who previously was in a relationship with Wales, describes him in her Knol, titled “Jimmy Wales (Jimbo Wales)”:

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales is the Co-Founder of the online libel board, Wikipedia: The website any loser can use to smear people who are more successful than them.

One might note that this description, while of debatable accuracy, is unarguably suffused with personal rancor. The rest of the article reads:

Unlike Wikipedia, this article will be updated with accurate, relevant, encyclopedic information. The subject can send me information about himself and I'll decide what's worthy of posting here, after debating it vigorously with myself. Certain co-authors who know the subject well will also be invited to contribute. But again, we'll keep this collaboration closed to "respect human dignity". As "God Queen" and "Spiritual Leader" for "Jimmy Wales", that will be my guiding principle.

Based on my reading, I wonder if Marsden will be able to uphold the promise of that first sentence.

The point of all this is that Knol is already falling prey to the Wikipedia problem it puports to correct. As Elinor Mills puts it:

It will be interesting to see how the Marsden-Wales fracas plays out on Knol. Google's response didn't give me any confidence that the system won't be widely abused. And it's likely that people who disagree with my knol will create one of their own with contradictory conclusions.

Google launches Wikipedia competitor Knol

I’m skeptical about Knol. While the idea of adding experts to the Wikipedia model sounds great, as with Citizendium it’s not clear if the site will gather the critical mass necessary to make the whole thing worthwhile. But if anyone can take down Wikipedia, I think it would be Google.

Like Wikipedia, Knol (unlike many other Google products, officially it's just "Knol," not "Google Knol") allows anyone to create a page about any topic. By default, new pages are set to use "moderated collaboration," which means anyone can contribute to them but additions only go live after the page's main author or authors allow the contributions to be added.

It's a nice idea. Potentially, it helps solve issues like vandalism yet allows for a broad group of people to contribute. It also is a chief argument in favor of why Google even needs to introduce a tool like Knol, that it is providing what will likely be a robust authoring tool with a unique set of features.

link

English Wikipedia possibly adding site-wide editing?

The system would be based on a model being used on the German Wikipedia. From the New York Times’ Bits Blog:

The German site, which is particularly vexed by vandalism, uses the system to delay changes from appearing until someone in authority (a designated checker) has verified that the changes are not vandalism. Once a checker has signed off on the changes, they will appear on the site to any visitor; before a checker has signed off, the last, checker-approved version is what most visitors will see. (There are complicated exceptions, of course. When a “checker” makes a change, it appears immediately. And registered users, who make up less than 5 percent of Wikipedia users, will also see “unchecked” versions.)

Employee of NBC partner (possibly) fired for leaking news of Russert’s death on Wikipedia

There are some conflicting reports here, but the current story is that an employee of NBC partner Internet Broadcasting Services (IBS) updated Russert’s Wikipedia page before the official announcement of his collapse, adding his date of death and changing verb forms to the past tense. When this was discovered, someone at the same company reverted the changes. The NYT has reported that the employee was subsequently fired, although this last point is in dispute.

via Silicon Alley Insider

More Wikipeida jokes: Now with substance!

A few days ago I posted a quick Wikipedia joke from 30 Rock with no particular purpose other than I thought it was funny. Over the weekend, I saw another Wikipedia reference, this time on The Simpsons:

I figure that if I keep posting everything I see on TV, I need to add some commentary to make it worthwhile for readers, so here goes.

What is interesting about these two jokes is that they are both reacting to the major criticism of Wikipedia: because anyone can change anything, the information on the site is inherently untrustworthy. In this case, a misinformed person like Homer can change whatever they want to fit their reality, and, in the case of the 30 Rock clip, individuals who don’t like how they are portrayed there can alter the facts to make themselves appear in a more favorable light.

Studies of Wikipedia have shown, however, that the site is fairly robust in that it recovers quickly from malicious edits. So, at least in this regard, the parody of the site on both shows is a little stale.

What I think the writers of The Simpsons joke get right, though, is the attitude of some Wikipedia vandals. In the clip above, when Homer mentions his desire to “change a lot of things” on the site, I believe the malice and sense of offense in his tone might be similar to what would prompt a person to do this.

Wikipedia joke on 30 Rock

30 Rock had a pretty good Wikipedia joke in its last episode, Subway Hero. Here’s the setup: Tracy sticks a screwdriver in his CD player and has a near-death experience. While in the netherworld, Tracy meets Richard Nixon, and the spirit of our 37th president convinces him that a black man can, in fact, support the GOP. The scene below comes after Tracy and Jack preview a PSA that Tracy has recorded for Jack’s PAC, the Committee to Re-invade Vietnam.

The great thing about the joke is that Nixon seems like the kind of person who would have been really, really worried about what was on his Wikipedia page. And, of course, Tracy is the kind of guy who would try to update Wikipedia with a screwdriver.

Written Communication publishes my Wikipedia article

The article, “Patterns of Revision in Online Writing: A Study of Wikipedia’s Featured Articles” is behind the paywall, but you can view the abstract here.

Teaching digital literacy

AcademHacK David Parry has an editorial in Science Progress responding to educational institutions banning Wikipedia. He argues that outlawing sites like Wikipedia robs students of much-needed training in using new media.

we do a fundamental disservice to our students if we continue to propagate old methods of knowledge creation and archivization without also teaching them how these structures are changing, and, more importantly, how they will relate to knowledge creation and dissemination in a fundamentally different way.

I particularly enjoyed Parry’s description of the encyclopedia:

No longer is an encyclopedia a static collection of facts and figures (although some of its features might be relatively so); it is an organic entity. To educational and policy institutions which, for a substantial portion of history, have maintained control over static codex centered archives—think not only academic libraries, but national ones as well—the shift to an organic structure which they no longer control or solely influence represents a crisis indeed. But to train students in old literacy seems to me to be fundamentally the wrong approach. As Howard Rheingold suggests in Smart Mobs, in the future individuals will be divided between “those who know how to use new media to band together [and] those who don’t.”

While Parry might be giving “educational and policy institutions” short shrift [subscription needed], I think he is exactly right about encyclopedias. In fact, when I talk with people about Wikipedia, I like to go further and argue that the encyclopedia—the “static collection of facts and figures” Parry describes, which, I would argue, is held by many to be an objective repository of unassailable knowledge—has never existed, and never could exist.

Despite the protestations to the contrary of some encyclopedia creators, the encyclopedia has never been a repository of objective knowledge but is and always has been a situated cultural artifact that can only be reliably counted on to record what counts as knowledge at a particular moment in history. Subsequently, encyclopedias are as prone to error and crimes of omission as any other text, and criticizing Wikipedia for not being a “proper” encyclopedia—again, a thing that has never existed—is a bit like criticizing a horse for not being a unicorn.

That’s why I think Parry’s description of Wikipedia as an “organic” body of knowledge is a much more workable, accurate definition of the encyclopedia than the received definition. While Wikipedia does represent a shift in what counts as knowledge and how that knowledge is to be archived and accessed, the fact of the matter is that the encyclopedia has always been a shifting, living thing; with Wikipedia the technology has caught up to the reality.

There is a downside to this new approach to the encyclopedia, though. Wikipedia is not merely a living, organic body of knowledge, but it is also a democratized body of knowledge. As Parry notes, Wikipedia doesn’t merely provide the settled opinion on a subject, but it also provides “debate and discourse around” that subject. In the case of heavily debated topics like global warming and evolution, that preference for debate has given non-scientific voices a prominence they probably don’t deserve, making it seem that debate exists where it perhaps does not. However, I believe this democratization—where debate is open to the public—is preferable to the old hierarchy, where the authority of publishing is the final arbiter of which knowledge is approved and which is not, for it lends prominence to the rhetorical positioning of knowledge, making rhetorical tools much more important for those who would have their ideas accepted in the commons.

This problem only lends more support to Parry’s argument: that students need to be familiar with this new approach to knowledge ushered in by new media, and scientists and other knowledge workers “will need to posses a new type of collaborative literacy”—one steeped in rhetoric and the techniques for gaining adherence to ideas—in order to disseminate their findings.

‘The Simpsons’ on the death of print encyclopedias

Sunday night’s episode of The Simpsons, “E Pluribus Wigum,” featured a pretty good joke about the irrelevance of print encyclopedias.

(The setup: Ralph Wigum wins the Springfield presidential primary as a write-in, and is subsequently courted by both the Republicans and Democrats.)

P.S. I love Hulu.

Dominated by editors: Wikipedia and traditional publishing

Tim O’Reilly recently posted his thoughts on a 2006 article by Aaron Swartz, Who Writes Wikipedia?. Swartz argues that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s contention that the encyclopedia is not “some emergent phenomenon—the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing—thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content and out of this emerges a coherent body of work” but rather “a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” is flawed. Swartz argues that Wikipedia needs to depend on that faceless mob, rather than the group of editors described by Wales for its content.

O’Reilly disagrees with Swartz, however, suggesting that the Wikipedia model—where numerous contributors supply the raw material which dedicated editors transform into a usable product—is quite similar to the traditional publishing model.

Take O’Reilly’s book publishing operations: we have far more outside authors than we have employees. Many of them are passionate experts rather than professional writers or editors, just like Wikipedia authors. Their work is improved by an editing team and brought to market in the context of brands that we’ve created, but we couldn’t do what we do without them. This is just as true of any publishing company. Did Bloomsbury’s editors invent Harry Potter? No, it was a welfare mom who dreamed up the idea while riding on the train.

I recently presented some research at the SCMLA that I believe offers some support to O’Reilly’s claim. I did a study of the revision histories of high- and low-quality Wikipedia articles, and what I found was that while the high-quality articles’ revision histories were very similar to those of high-quality articles in other contexts, the low-quality articles were quite different from those in offline contexts. (The “offline contexts” here are previously published studies of revision in academic writing.)

While low-quality offline writing in previous studies was characterized by excessive editing with very little content development, the low-quality Wikipedia writing in my study was characterized by very little editing of vast amounts of relevant content.

In other words, I found that while the process for creating good writing in Wikipedia looks very much like the process for creating good writing elsewhere, bad writing in Wikipedia is bad because it is not effectively edited. While my study was small and needs some further investigation, it seems like this result would support O’Reilly’s claim that the Wikipedia publishing model is quite similar to that of traditional publishing.

Update: In a reply to a comment on his post by John H, O’Reilly makes a point similar to mine:

Aaron’s point was that MOST of the articles are written by outsiders. They are then edited and improved by the insiders. The “long tail of articles”, as you put it, aren’t written by a different demographic, but they haven’t benefited from Wikipedia’s *editing* community.

Wikipedia gets real

Wikipedia is bleeding out into the real world.

via Boing Boing

Google Wikipedia-killer in beta

According to the New York Times, Google is developing a web-publishing platform that sounds a lot like Wikipedia.

The project, which is in an invitation-only beta stage, lets users create clean-looking Web pages with their photo and write entries on, for example, insomnia. Those entries are called "knols" for "unit of knowledge," Google said.

The key difference from Google’s offering and Wikipedia will be that individual authors will receive credit for their material.

Google asserts that the Web's development so far has neglected the importance of the bylined author.

"We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content," wrote Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, on the official Google blog

Additionally, users won’t be able to edit each other’s entries.

Based on that last fact, I don’t see how this service is going to rival Wikipedia’s 7 million articles. At this point in the history of the web, I’m surprised that a company as savvy as Google would ignore the clear benefits of distributed publishing. At best, the service will probably get a few thousand decent articles on niche topics.

Although I believe Google has a point in noting the neglect of attribution for web content, I can’t see how they’re going to succeed when they depend on individual contributors to provide and edit all of their own content. I just don’t think that there is that much individual expertise out there that will be willing to put in the time to write quality articles for the service.

SCMLA presentation: Wikipedia and revision

I just got back from the SCMLA conference in Memphis; the weather was great, and I got to hear some interesting presentations from my panel-mates.

Here is a copy of the slides from my presentation via Google Docs. The presentation reports the findings of a study I conducted on revision practices on the site.

Enjoy.

New Wikipedia study: Zealots and Good Samaritans

Denise Anthony, Sean W. Smith, and Tim Williamson of Dartmouth have released a new study of volunteer help on Wikipedia. In the paper, “The Quality of Open Source Production: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia,” the authors argue that the quality of Wikipedia articles depends on “Good Samaritans,” or infrequent posters who maintain article quality, and “zealots,” dedicated users who spend a great deal of time on the site. Essentially, Anthony et al. argue that Wikipedia maintains its quality through the quantity of its users.

Here’s the abstract:

New forms of production based in electronic technology, such as open-source and open-content production, convert private commodities (typically software) into essentially public goods. A number of studies find that, like in other collective goods, incentives for reputation and group identity motivate contributions to open source goods, thereby overcoming the social dilemma inherent in producing such goods. In this paper we examine how contributor motivations affect the quality of contributions to the open-content online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find that quality is associated with contributor motivations, but in a surprisingly inconsistent way. Registered users’ quality increases with more contributions, consistent with the idea of participants motivated by reputation and commitment to the Wikipedia community. Surprisingly, however, we find the highest quality from the vast numbers of anonymous “Good Samaritans” who contribute only once. Our findings that Good Samaritans as well as committed “zealots” contribute high quality content to Wikipedia suggest that it is the quantity as well as the quality of contributors that positively affects the quality of open source production.

via The Wired Campus

Is interest in Wikipedia slowing down?

According to Robert Rohde, editing traffic on Wikipedia is on the decline:

Since early this year, and for the first extended period in Wikipedia's history, the activity rate of the Wikipedia community has been declining. This can be seen in the rate of editing articles (-17%), the rate of new account registration (-25%), blocks (-30%), protections (-30%), uploads (-10%), article deletions (-25%), etc. Some exceptions are the article creation rate (+25%) and image deletions (+80%), but overall the community appears to be doing less now than it was 6 months ago.

via TechCrunch

Evolution of Wikipedia

Brock Read at The Wired Campus has made the argument that now that Wikipedia has grown to 2,000,000 articles, the site has switched from primarily adding content to policing and editing content. According to K. G. Schneider, Wikipedia has entered its “awkward adolescence” where, Read notes, “‘inclusionists’ (who argue that the site should continue to encourage new entries) and its ‘deletionists’ (who advocate cutting articles deemed fatuous or picayune) are now engaged in a pitched battle” over what kind of content should be in the encyclopedia. Read notes an interesting example where founder Jimmy Wales’s article on Mzoli’s, a butcher shop, was deleted and then reinstated in a flurry of debate.

Inclusionists may take the evolution of the article as evidence that some quality-obsessed administrators are overstepping their bounds. But deletionists could argue just as easily that the site’s rough-and-tumble editing worked: Wikipedians decided that Mzoli’s is noteworthy, so the article lived to see another day. Are Wikipedia’s editing wars signs of a looming crisis, as Ms. Schneider seems to suggest? Or are they just examples of healthy debate?

I would argue that the debate is one over what Wikipedia is, where deletionists are fighting to keep the site in the mold of the traditional encyclopedia, while inclusionists are open to seeing the site evolve into a new kind of information depository. I have a hard time believing that the deletionists are going to win this one, or that the growth of Wikipedia is going to stall for long. When the inclusionists win—as I think they will—the site will continue to add topics covering more informational ground—local information, cultural fads, obscure knowledge—perhaps changing what we think is “ fatuous or picayune.”

Wikipedia vandalism and Dada

Yet another reason to question the Wikipedia naysayers: maybe vandalisms are purposeful.

Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not