An excellent study conducted recently by the Wikimedia Foundation and UNU-Merit identified some interesting facts including that only 13% of the respondents were female Wikipedia contributors (meaning that they actually posted content). Speculation on the implications of this fact appeared throughout the blogosphere including this article by Ryan Tate which includes this passage:

MIT instructor and alumni Philip Greenspun has floated a theory as to why women are underrepresented in high-end scientific professions: Science is generally a terrible career choice, but it contains a dysfunctional status hierarchy that tends to appeal the male egos.

“A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Child Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job? …Young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group. [Yet] men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question “is this peer group worth impressing?”…

So it is with Wikipedia. Why invest your free time wrangling with a politicized Wikipedia bureaucracy of infighting editors and bitter story subjects, all for the honor of creating a free resource for other people and paying out of your own pocket to go to high-level meetings for the Wikimedia elite? If you’re a man, for the honor of being near the “top” of something, no matter how fruitless.

To Greenspun’s point, there is a lot of work involved in contributing to Wikipedia. Not so much in actually making the edits, but in defending the changes against people with generally a lot more time to engage in an edit war. In essence, being right isn’t enough if you don’t want to put a lot of effort into convincing people that you are right.

From my personal example (the fact that the topic seems to be banal proves the point), I made an edit on the Frasier page a couple of years ago. It was in regards to a reference that John Mahoney who plays Martin Crane, like many of his colleagues previously appeared on Cheers. No surprise here, of course, the former was a spinoff of the latter and they shared not only the title character but also the same producers. Mahoney’s role on Cheers was a washed-up ad man hired by Rebecca Howe (who had a budget of $50) to write a jingle for the bar. He ended up playing the piano while he sang the jingle “Beer and Pretzels that’s our game…” Because of this someone had described him the character as a pianist. I changed the entry to describe him as an “ad man” because while pianist was correct, it wasn’t completely accurate (the post could have said he played a vertebrate which was equally true). In any case, an edit war occurred and I eventually lost interest. By the way, I checked before I wrote this post and (no thanks to me) the entry now reads the way it should…

Some cast members of Frasier appeared previously in minor roles on Cheers. John Mahoney, who played Martin Crane, appeared in an episode of Cheers, as Si Phlembeck, an over-the-hill advertising executive hired by Rebecca to write a jingle for the bar. In it, Grammer and Mahoney exchanged a few lines.

That episode ended up being incredibly valuable for Mahoney as it certainly led to his casting on Frasier and the ensuing vast riches. There is an interesting story behind how he got the role described here by the writer of the episode. I’d edit the Wikipedia entry to reflect the cool info, but once bitten, twice shy my friend.

Wikipedia goes to great lengths on it’s NPOV (Neutral Point of View) policy page to explain how and when an article can be considered “neutral:”

The neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting verifiable perspectives on a topic as evidenced by reliable sources. The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as “the truth”, in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one.

This sounds great, but I’m concerned that the Wiki system as a whole might have considerable bias built-in. First, consider what Wikipedia is. It’s the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” but not anyone does — instead, most prefer just to read (it’s the 7th most visited site online). Just as visiting the site is an opt-in process, so is editing it; the community that creates and polices content is very much self-selecting. This is where I think the problem arises.Something is only neutral within the context of its community. That is, an issue is neutral (in my mind at least) when it exists perfectly balanced between the centres of gravity of two or more conflicting views. Given that the population of people who edit Wikipedia is necessarily drawn from the people who read Wikipedia — but also have the inclination, be it technological or ideological, to edit the site — there is the concern that the editing community has a different makeup with regards to their opinions on issues than the reader community, and the world at large.

Wikipedia attempts to address this by saying that in order for something to be cited as a reference, it needs to refer to a reliable source — one that has a reputation for fact checking and integrity. There are two problems with this:

1. “Reliable sources” have bias built in too. Al Jazeera is reliable to one subset of people, FOX News is reliable to another. Fans of either source would be offended to hear that the other is placed on the same level as their own.
2. The community gets to decide what sources are reliable (because who else is there to, Wikipedia is a community based effort).

The first problem doesn’t have any easy solutions; individual bloggers may be telling the truth with every word they write, but until they have a sufficient following and track record, there’s not really any reliable metric to decide if what they’re saying is admissible. Wikipedians could do research to bolster one-off claims found on blogs, but this practice would be awfully close to original research, something the site strives to avoid.

The second problem is simultaneously easy and hard to solve. The more people edit Wikipedia, the more accurate the alignment of “neutral” to the Wikipedians and “neutral” to everyone else becomes (unless of course people with a specific agenda flood into the site en-masse to try and shake things up). But this is counterbalanced with the issue of getting people involved. Not everyone wants to edit Wikipedia, and not everyone who wants to knows how.

Interestingly, I read this result as meaning that Wikipedia is consistent from first to last. In principle, the more people edit Wikipedia, the better it gets; similarly, the more people edit Wikipedia, the more its version of neutrality becomes one that reflects the world at large. It’s a fantastic resource, and if we want it to continue to improve, at some point, we’re all going to have to get involved.

(A special thank you to my friends Danielle, Eve, and Josh, with whom I had the conversation that resulted in this post. Also of note is that XKCD, did, in some measure, address this long before we did.)

Joining me on stage were Webby-winning blogger Neil Pasricha of 1000awesomethings.com, founder of GovLoop.com (the online social network for the US government) Steve Ressler, word of mouth guru and social networker extraordinaire Sean Moffitt, Community Leader of the Globe & Mail Mathew Ingram, and Simon Pulsifer a leader of the Wikipedia community (he has made more than 1000, edits).

It was a wonderful discussion. For highlights, please visit #nGenInsight on Twitter.

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, stay tuned for parts two and three in the coming days.)

I’m new to the Wikinomics blog, so I thought that I’d say a few words about myself.  I graduated from MIT last year with degrees in Political Science and Management, and now I’m a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, a think tank in D.C. 

I recently entered Change.org’s competition to propel ten ideas to the fore of the Obama administration’s agenda.  Although my proposal to establish a global challenges Wikipedia didn’t make the cut (it came in 66^th place out of about 8,000 ideas), it generated a lot of interest amongst NGOs, consulting firms, and policy organizations.  Here’s the short (and kind of wonky) idea description that I submitted to the Change.org team:

There are currently about 20 global challenges (for example, climate change and infectious diseases) and 200 countries.  A “global challenges Wikipedia (GCW)” would empower us to address those challenges efficiently and systematically.  It would have three parts:  

1.  The global challenges repository (GCR) would be a 20 x 200 matrix.  Its cells would contain
   (a) A history of that global challenge in that country;
   (b) An inventory of the players – the international institutions, governments, businesses, NGOs, and individuals – that are addressing it, and how; and
   (c) A profile of the issue, financial, and logistical networks between these players.   Government-commissioned expert teams, one per global challenge, would ensure the accuracy of contributions to the GCR.
    

    

2. The solutions portal would also be 20 x 200.  Its cells would contain
   (a) Descriptions of policy initiatives that have been successfully deployed against that  global challenge in that country in the past;
   (b) A thread on how to address that global challenge in that country; and
   (c) A thread on how the aforementioned players can collaborate without replicating each other’s efforts and wasting resources.  The expert teams would ensure that contributions offer solution-oriented comments. They would evaluate the ability of the solutions that have worked for a given country to be tested in and applied to others [(2)(a)].  They would also monitor the discussion threads [2(b), 2(c)] to identify areas of consensus and accordingly articulate new solutions. 

    

3. The case studies of past successes and write-ups of new solutions would be inputted into a 20  x 200 solutions repository, which would offer a dynamic pool of insights for application to new challenges.

The impetus behind the GCW is simple – one of the main problems that we face in addressing global challenges is that there are too many players in the game.  It seems like not a day passes without the announcement of a new NGO that’s devoted to mitigating global poverty or promoting corporate social responsibility.  This outpouring of awareness, enthusiasm, and effort is, of course, wonderful in theory.  The problem comes, however, when these players start clashing – sometimes because they’re unaware of each other and sometimes because they compete with each other.

A subtler, but no less important problem is the uniformity (or lack thereof) of their objectives.  Global poverty offers a great illustration.  Some players want to tackle it in a specific country.  Others want to address it in a specific region.  Yet others want to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.  Complicating matters further is that there’s often a conflation of goals.  For example, reducing global poverty and promoting global development are often interchanged even though they have very different meanings.  Collaboration is far harder, and far less productive, if the collaborating parties don’t have the same end goal in mind.

Our task, then, is to rein in the chaos and make the problem-solving resources that we have – people, technology, and money being the big three – as efficient and productive as possible.

–

That’s part one! What do you think?  Please feel free to leave a comment below, or contact me at awyne@alum.mit.edu. I look forward to hearing from you! 

On January 22, 2009, Encyclopaedia Britannica president Jorge Cauz announced that they will be releasing new features on Britannica.com that empower users to contribute and edit content. However, all submissions will undergo a strict vetting process, and may not make the cut. As Cauz reported to the New York Times, “We’re not trying to be a wiki – that’s the last thing we want to be.”

Now why would a 240 year old steadfast institution suddenly make such a drastic change in its approach? The answer: the bottom line. Let’s compare web traffic:

Britannica’s Web 2.0 approach isn’t exactly brand new. Back in July of 2008, Britannica launched a new version of its web site that was more interactive and full of new media resources. Members of the community were given an online home allowing them to promote their work and services, publish and share the work that they create outside of the encyclopaedia, and interact with others in the community. The site even features a ‘reward system’ to motivate users to contribute.

I see the reiteration of these ‘new features’ as a marketing ploy to retort Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales’ proposal to review revisions by new and anonymous users before posting them to Wikipedia. This editing change comes after vandals edited the pages of Senators Robert Byrd and Edward (Ted) Kennedy, erroneously stating that both had died. As if Senator Kennedy’s seizure during Obama’s post-inaugural luncheon wasn’t unfortunate enough!

Wales’ proposed new system, called Flagged Revisions, would mark a significant change in the ethos of Wikipedia, which in eight years of existence has become one of the top 10 sites on the Web and the de facto information source for the Internet-using public. Used by German Wikipedia since last May, flagged revisions provides only ‘reliable users’ with the liberty to have their material appear immediately to the general public. Other contributors can edit articles, but their changes will be held until registered, reliable users have signed off on them.

Due to a massive backlash from editors stating that the proposal is unfeasible and unmanageable, Wales is offering a compromise, asking those opposed to the changes make an alternative proposal within the next seven days, to be voted upon 14 days after that.

The convergence of the two processes is, in my opinion, long overdue. Regardless of whether or not the Nature article back in 2005 has been debunked or not is somewhat irrelevant. The point remains – everyone makes mistakes, be they accidental or intentional.

As first quoted by Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism, and later expanded upon by the Farmers’ Almanac in 1978, “To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer. The fact that both knowledge bases have come to their senses and have realized that a screening process is necessary is vital to the accuracy of both publications.

The convergence of these processes will hopefully also result in the convergence of error rates. However, if this does occur, and Wikipedia and Britannica will hold the same veracity, why exactly then would I pay to read one over the other? Besides, isn’t researching an encyclopaedia simply a secondary point of research to start from? If I really care about a topic, I’ll continue researching from different sources, both primary and secondary. Britannica’s attempt at finally jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon may provide them with a few more page views for now, but I highly doubt that it will be it’s saving grace.

Every so often in my adventures on the Internet, I come across something pretty far out there, and I do what I can to spread it around. This is one such discovery. A small disclaimer, this relates to TV from the ’80s, so if I missed the boat and this is old news, my apologies.

Earlier today a friend was telling me about a TV show from the mid-’80s, St. Elsewhere. In the final episode of St. Elsewhere, it is revealed that the entire show took place in the imagination of a minor character, Tommy Westphall, a young boy with autism. Here’s where it gets good: with the TV crossovers.

Some of the characters from St. Elsewhere once visited the Cheers bar, that means that the Cheers bar was also just a figment of Tommy’s imagination. Since Frasier was a spin-off of cheers, everything that happened on Fraiser was also imaginary. On Fraiser, Niles and Daphne read the comic strip from Caroline in the City, so Caroline & company are also imaginary, and on and on and on. This is just one avenue, and it continues and branches and expands beyond all reason:

In a 2003 article published on BBC News Online, St. Elsewhere creator Tom Fontana was quoted as saying, “Someone did the math once… and something like 90 percent of all television took place in Tommy Westphall’s mind. God love him.”

The Internet, true to form, has an index of all such cross-overs, and has mapped out the entirety of the universe that exists inside of Tommy’s mind:

Click for the full sized PDF

The final count is 282 shows that exist in this imaginary universe, all tied together in some sort of bizzaro social-network. If you’re a real trivia buff, you can read the index of how all the shows are related. Hit ctrl+f and search that page for the name of your favorite show — it’s probably in there. They even tied Firefly (and therefore Battlestar Galactica) via the Weyland-Yutani corporation! In it’s own way, this is the kind of peculiar, off the wall thing that you really could only find on the Internet, I don’t think this would have seen a wide publication in print.

If there’s anyone who’s hanging in to see if there’s a Wikinomics angle to this after all, how’s this: what is described above is a great example of how links in a bunch of seemingly seperate entities can, when examined from a suitable distance, tell us something (debatably profound) about the much larger collection.

While connections in tv shows are as trivial as you can get, as more and more devices become intelligent Internet enabled, and more information about how we go about our lives becomes aggregated, and links between data of every type are discovered and catalogued, what sorts of emergent observations will we then be able to make, again of course, from a suitable distance?

It appears (sample of 2-3 random articles) that these banner ads are now atop most of the entries in wikipedia.

On one hand I think it was rather noble of Wikipedia to refrain from commercial advertising on its site (because as Lawrence Lessig mentioned at a recent event of ours: commercial income might cause us to question motivations of contributors).

Yet on the other hand, I find it ironic that wikipedia’s “supported by donations” model has lead to banner ads on every page anyway. I’m guessing I’ll be flamed for saying it – but I say why not go the whole way. If we have banner ads on the top of every page, I suggest opening them to the highest bidder.

Done right, perhaps there is a way ads could actually keep wikipedia pure. Instead of hundreds of companies trying to quietly and subtly weave their agendas into wikipedia entries on the sly – why not give this commercial activity a proper and transparent place on each page and call it what it is – marketing!

Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.

In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE.  Friendly reminder: the Wikinomics Roundup has a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features.

“In the past few weeks I’ve been invited to several legal sessions with different law firms and in-house counsel discussing the potential of Web 2.0 technologies. Many of the concerns addressed are similar: IP, privacy, copyright, trade secrets etc. For the most part, many of these issues are easily addressed. Many organizations already have policies in place to address many of these issues such as simple terms of service, disclaimers and employee blogging, social computing guidelines.”

How are emerging Web 2.0 technologies viewed through the eyes of the legal guardians? Find out @
Is Law 2.0 possible?

“Whenever users are given the freedom to create what ever they want, it is clear that they will do just that. This is always a risk when initiating an open source project. Luckily an open source community is just that: a community. Community members monitor the content, and keep the environment enjoyable for all. This is why Wikipedia and YouTube have been so successful. Administrators are necessary to have the final say in what content stays and what goes, but it is largely a community affair.”

It’s not porn, it’s SPORN. Interesting and work safe discussion @
The Underbelly of Open Source: SPORN

“On the other hand, Wikipedia struggles with the issue of censorship and bias. You just can’t trust Wikipedia because its edited by a bunch of conservatives/liberals/people-I-don’t-agree-with. They aren’t telling the whole story. Of course that argument can be made with the mainstream media as well. But when a major network or newspaper is biased or commits censorship, people complain and/or go somewhere else for their news, they don’t solve the problem. In this case, Wikipedians thoughtfully discussed the issue, reached a compromise, voted democratically, and solved (or at least moved towards a solution for) the problem.”

What makes news trust-worthy?  Join the debate @
Wikipedia: More Reliable and Balanced than the News?

“If each person is their own brand … then your online identity is a large, integral part of that brand. But how do you manage all of the content, yours or otherwise, that becomes attached to your name?”

How do you manage the brand called you?  Take a look @
Brittany Creamer TM

“Seeing this led me to ponder a simple question – what about everyone else? What about that staggeringly large group of people that are neither mavens nor connectors (and particularly those one might call anti–social) – are their social media appetites distinctly different, and if so what are the implications for companies pursuing a social media strategy? More pointedly, will this great mass of people slowly get in line with the adoption curve that mavens and connectors are setting in social media, or might they do something totally different – something that would put some of the prevailing theories regarding cohort behavior into question? To begin looking into this issue, I wanted to start with a particular application where I sense line is being drawn in the sand – Twitter.”

Consider how people of different levels of connectedness fit into the life cycle of emerging technologies @
Social Media for the Anti-Social

Check back next week for more original Wikinomics insight.  Until next week…

My argument goes like this: as Will argued a few days ago, Wikipedia, by virtue of it’s nature, could be more fair and balanced than any news network. The John Edwards article he discussed was pulled back and forth by differing viewpoints until finally an equilibrium of compromise was agreed on. While the article may or may not paint a true-to-life picture of things, it paints a picture that, in general, people find truth in — that is to say, an article on wikipedia is a snapshot of our current concensus about the state of the world.

Because Wikipedia tracks every change made on every page, ever, future historians will be able to look at the evolutionary histories of various topics, as they are filtered by the public eye of whoever makes up the current public. Events of the past that were controversial at the time they occured will be reported as being less and less inflamatory as future generations update the collective account of history to be in line with their current view of things. While I don’t expect a wholesale change of content, even compounded shifts of adjectives in an article over time could greatly change the meaning of articles. But, this shift can be clearly and explicitly tracked: a degree of honesty-over-time is built into the process.

I just hope that the integrity of the servers remain, I can just imagine future schoolchildren debating whether or not lightsabres actually existed: “but if they didn’t exist, why is the article 10,000 words long?”

The National Enquirer claims that Edwards fathered an illegitimate child with his web video producer, but without any substantive evidence to back it up, it seems that none of the US networks (except truth-crusader Fox News) have covered the story.

The Wikipedia entry on Edwards was locked after a 37,000-word debate concluded that the scandal, and the sources that reported on it, did not meet Wikipedia’s standards of reliability. Yesterday, however, users voted to unlock the article and include a compromise statement that references the scandal, but only in regards to its influence on Edwards’ chances for the vice presidency.

To me this illustrates how Wikipedia and social media have the potential to provide far more reliable and balanced sources of information than traditional media.

An ongoing criticism of Wikipedia is that it is unreliable. You just can’t trust it. Who knows where that information is coming from. Well call me crazy, but this story shows that Wikipedia is applying a higher standard of reliability than the US’s most-watched cable news network (not that that’s saying much).

On the other hand, Wikipedia struggles with the issue of censorship and bias. You just can’t trust Wikipedia because its edited by a bunch of conservatives/liberals/people-I-don’t-agree-with. They aren’t telling the whole story. Of course that argument can be made with the mainstream media as well. But when a major network or newspaper is biased or commits censorship, people complain and/or go somewhere else for their news, they don’t solve the problem. In this case, Wikipedians thoughtfully discussed the issue, reached a compromise, voted democratically, and solved (or at least moved towards a solution for) the problem.

In a media environment that seems increasingly unconcerned with factuality, biased, and obsessed with scandal, Wikipedia seems so … mature!

The probable new owners will manage the club, voting online to choose match lineups and buying new players. To help run the team, the fans will be able to view all the matches online and, after the game, receive statistics on how each player has performed. They will also get weekly updates from the team’s head coach on how each player is doing during practice.

It sounded really good – and most commentators particularly focused on the ability to vote on line ups as a key driver of participation. This functionality went live recently, but was hardly a resounding success – less than 2,000 of the over 30,000 members voted on the line ups for some recent games, and the vast majority that did bother to vote elected to let the coach decide. This lack of involvement has led to several articles like this one, which sees it not only a hugely negative development, but as potentially foreshadowing the collapse of the entire experiment. But is it really that bad?

Let’s start with the issue of team selection. When MyFootballClub was launched, numerous sports “experts” thought it would be a massive failure because the “crowd” wouldn’t be knowledgeable enough to select the squad. Now that the option is available, most of the crowd is choosing not to vote – opting rather to let the coach decide. While this is now being spun as a “failure” of the model, might it just represent that the crowd is rational enough to realize that the coach is in a better position to select the squad on a day-to-day basis, and they are happy leaving him to do so (until perhaps he proves himself unworthy?).

Connected to this, articles like the twohundredpercent piece make a quantum leap in logic – given that the majority of participants don’t appear interested in contributing to the day-to-day decision making, it appears they are unlikely to renew again next year. Given that these people did opt to purchase the membership, and many have never engaged in the voting process, isn’t it hard to argue that the ability to vote on everything regularly was the reason they signed up? To use an analogy, if I think people are coming to my hotel for the pool, but few of them use the pool, rather than meaning they’re not going to come back to my hotel, it might just mean that the pool wasn’t the reason they came in the first place.

I can’t say for sure, but I bring this up because it represents a common mistake we see in relation to collaboration – presupposing the reasons why people engage in something, and then declaring it a failure when behavior is actually quite different – when the behavior might just reflect the fact they had different reasons than you initially thought. I’d be very interested in a survey of the membership that asks them why they joined – and what they expect.

Maybe a lot of people are just attracted to the democratized ownership, and the ‘joy’ of co-owning a team rather than having it dominated by one person or a large corporation. And maybe many of these people are happy to let the professionals run the team on a day-to-day basis, but will actually demonstrate the wisdom of crowds in the event things seem to be heading in the wrong direction (i.e. demanding a coaching change, etc.).

I’m not saying these things will happen – I really don’t know, and only time will tell. But we should let this thing play out for awhile before it’s declared dead – and let this crowd prove whether it is truly wise, mad, ambivalent, or otherwise. However, I also don’t want to let MyFootballClub off the hook entirely. To quote Joe’s post:

Online communities, like any organisation, are not fully democratised. Various roles are assumed, such as contributors and leaders, to fully utilise the talents of individuals. The likes of MyFootballClub.co.uk would do well to use the community to discover and exploit the pool of resources available rather than a direct democracy. In football terms, this could have very interesting implications.

This is an important point – there are different ways to leverage a crowdsourcing model that aren’t built on purely democratic principles. Joe talks about the potential to engage part of the membership in the scouting process, similar to the “One for the Birds” contest the St. Louis Cardinals rolled out for their baseball team (I wrote about it here). Might there also be an opportunity to engage parts of the crowd in marketing, mashing up video clips for either entertainment OR game preperation (as Joe also suggests), etc.?

It is notable that approximately 3x more people voted on the uniform designs than the roster selection… which I’m sure few people would expect. MyFootballClub would be well served to seriously think about the best way to engage their community in a variety of different ways, and ideally leveraging all of the web 2.0 tools available to them, rather than just relying on democratic voting process as the differentiator.

From the article:

some of Google’s biggest advertisers are growing angry over “piggybacking,” a practice in which smaller advertisers use the trademarked words of big brands in the text of search ads to divert traffic from the sites of bigger advertisers to their own sites.

Now Rosetta Stone — the company that runs print ads about a small-town boy who must learn Italian in time to impress a model — is taking its gripe to court. But rather than going after Google, Rosetta Stone is suing Rocket Languages (and others), the company that it claims is “piggybacking” its Internet advertising on Rosetta Stone’s name.

In a complaint filed in California federal court, Rosetta Stone alleges that members of an advertising program affiliated with Rocket Languages purchase and use, without authorization, the Rosetta Stone trademark, or confusingly similar variations. Rosetta Stone also alleges that affiliates of Rocket Languages use their Web sites to post “comparison reviews” of Rosetta Stone products and competing foreign language software products, without disclosing that the sources of the reviews are paid by Rocket Languages.

Being clever with Google adwords is one thing, but piggybacking in this manner (including fake reviews and calling your competitor’s product a scam) is beyond the ethical line. Rosetta Stone pays a lot for traditional advertising (full page ads in major magazines), kiosks in airports etc. Rocket Languages, in effect, gets auxilliary benefit from these expenditures because it creates demand for the whole market. Not happy with that, they are launching sneaky attacks.

Wikinomics blog readers, what are you thoughts? Is all fair in (Adwords) love and war?

By the way, the  Wikipedia entry for the actual Rosetta Stone is quite well written.

1. the word “free” is gone. While Wales goes on to add it is a “charitable humanitarian effort”, one could hypothesize the “free” part is now of much lower importance to the wikipedia value proposition. When it first started, one might argue that “free” was one of the key differentiators, and now it is just par for the course.

2. “Anyone” can’t edit anymore. While there has always been an editorial process to weed out the bad and/or malicious contributions, and “reasonable person” would hardly be seen as exclusionary by most, it is a subtle movement away from what some might consider a “pure” mass collaboration. In reality it’s just articulating what most organizations have found that have gone down the road of collaboration – you simply don’t want everyone, because there are always some people with bad intentions.

3. “Join us” is far more explicit in highlighting the community element of the wikipedia offering than simply saying “anyone can edit” – it’s not about your individual contribution so much as your connection with the broader group of collaborators. Again, this isn’t a fundamental change, but an interesting little alteration in the positioning statement that highlights the community element.

4. “Any encyclopedic topic”, while still fairly broad, provides a clearer direction on what belongs on the site. Of course, it leads to the question of what exactly is an encyclopedic topic – is it defined in relation to (and this might sound blasphemous) what Encyclopedia Britannica might publish? I find this topic particularly interesting, as it’s similar to a question I brought up in the long tail post a few days ago – how long can you define what’s relevant in a digital context in relation to the “old” world – be it established publishing models or bricks and mortar stores.

Wikipedia is almost always one of the first examples all organizations look to when they start trying to implement the principles of mass collaboration. Not surprisingly, it seems that more of than not organizations start out with a positioning similar to what wikipedia started with – pretty much anyone can do anything. I believe more organizations need to look at the evolution of wikipedia, and see which principles that could apply to their own strategies- particularly in terms of fine tuning the proposition in terms of who you want to contribute, what kind of contributions you want, and why people should want to collaborate with you. This process will be much harder for most companies that have a more ‘narrow’ offering than wikipedia, and is particularly challenging for those that are trying to make money off of mass collaboration. In turn, this makes doing it properly even more important.

So, I’ve got to give credit where credit is due. Yesterday, Moe Berg was featured on the front page. He was an absolutely fascinating person and if you ever have had the misfortune of being around me when I’m into the sauce, you might have heard a lecture about him.

Some highlights:

- high school and college baseball star that had played 16 years in the major leagues

- spoke seven languages (and according to a fellow major leaguer “couldn’t hit in any of them”)

- considered the smartest person ever to play MLB

- was included on a major league all-star team to Japan in 1936 even though he was a light-hitting, second string catcher because he could speak Japanese. He snuck on top of a hospital to film the cityscape. These films were used to plan WW2 bombing runs.

- During WW2 he served in the OSS — possibly accomplishing very little.

 Read about him, he’s cool.

And in the shameless plug department, friend of the Wikinomics Blog, Neil has just started a cool blog where he is describing 1000 awesome things. So far he has listed:

1000. Broccoflower

999. The last, crumbly triangle in a bag of potato chips

998. Getting grass stains

997. Locking people out of the car and pretending to drive away

996. Opening and sniffing a pack of tennis balls

995.  Finding money you didn’t even know you lost.

 Visit the site. He’s funny.

Indeed, under the new Britannica scheme those who wish to contribute will need to create a profile outlining their qualifications and expertise in the area they are commentating on. They will then be able to add comments to encyclopaedia entries, or write their own. This content will then be reviewed by the expert editors of the site, and if any of it is deemed worthy of inclusion, added to the main article with a credit. 

I’ve certainly got an intuition as to which articles will be ‘commented on’ first. While this seems like a sensible move for Britannica, it will be very easy to paint them as hypocrites given how critical they have been of Wikipedia in the past. People want to be engaged, so I think that Britannica’s real challenge will be fine tuning the process: submitting a comment or revision, only to have it disappear into a bureaucratic black hole is not a good way to encourage participation and engagement. At the same time, editorial standards are important to keep useless content to a minimum.

Maybe there’s some nice middle-ground?

Take a look at the Linux kernel, wherein distributions have stable and unstable releases. Normal users use the stable releases, and enthusiasts use the unstable releases. Maybe the ideal encyclopedic-middle-ground (which I don’t exactly expect from either Britannica or Wikipedia) would use a similar approach: users can update pages on the ‘unstable-edition’ site, but for content to make it’s way to the more public facing ‘stable-edition’ site, it has to be vetted for by experts.

But I’m getting off topic… I think that this move by Britannica is, at the very least, a concession that while the facts may well be set in stone, the way we go about presenting them isn’t. That’s good news. If the Encyclopedia industry is waking up to the new world of Wikinomics, I only hope that other industries aren’t far behind.

If you were a historian and you wanted to write a fresh account of, say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II, research was a pretty straightforward business. You would pack your bags and head to the National Archives, and spend months looking for something new in the official combat reports.

Today, however, you might first do something very different: Get online and pull up any of the unofficial websites of the ships that participated in the battle – the USS Pennsylvania, for example, or the USS Washington. Lovingly maintained by former crew members and their descendants, these sites are sprawling, loosely organized repositories of photographs, personal recollections, transcribed log books, and miniature biographies of virtually every person who served on board the ship. Some of these sites even include contact information for surviving crew members and their relatives – perfect for tracking down new diaries, photographs, and letters.

Online gathering spots like these represent a potentially radical change to historical research, a craft that has changed little for decades, if not centuries. By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people, “crowdsourcing,” as it’s increasingly called, may transform a discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a single historian toiling in the dusty archives.

It goes on from there, and one of the underlying themes is how easy enabling the collaborative process is – and how much better it makes our collective historic record. To quote again:

Late last year, the Library of Congress posted several thousand of its photographs on Flickr and asked the public for help: What is this? Who is this? When was it taken? Curator Helena Zinkham, who oversaw the program, was stunned to discover how quickly the gaps were filled by amateur enthusiasts – and in some cases, people with firsthand recollections.

This was particularly the case where the images attracted the attention of a particular group of enthusiasts: military aviation buffs, for example, or aficionados of early baseball. One collection depicted early-20th-century boxers, many without vital information – perhaps just a last name, like “Wells.”

“By the time the conversation was done,” Zinkham says, “we were able to tell Matt Wells from Bombardier Billy Wells.”

Other great examples are presented from there – it is well worth your time.

The site has fields where visitors can enter two terms to find out how they are related. For example, Wikinomics is linked to the Inca Trail by four clicks.

The article that is closest to the centre of Wikipedia is the United Kingdom with an average of 3.67 clicks, followed by Billie Jean King and the United States.

By the way, Kevin Bacon is not at the centre of Hollywood. In fact, he is not amongst the top 1000 most linked actors. The person in this position changes as new movies are made, but at various times it has been Rod Steiger, Donald Sutherland, and Dennis Hopper.

A fair number of Wikipedians agree that Troy is not quite feature article material. Here are some highlights from the discussion:

I don’t know why it is a featured article at all, let alone on the main page, and am consider requesting a review. Matt (talk) 08:44, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Troy_McClure faithless (^speak) 09:40, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

the saddest thing is wikipedia deems unnotable several actual people that have contributed to the society, but no, Troy McClure is more important. –Leladax (talk) 09:56, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

What do you expect from an encyclopedia where the most educated editors are still working towards their undergraduate degree? –64.180.226.234 (talk) 18:52, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Lee Brown (talk) 10:27, 28 May 2008 (UTC) Well I want to thank the wiki guys for this article which links to interesting stuff about Troy Donahue amonst others…makes me realise how important wiki is ,if only for stessing the vital part of trivia in our lives. I once had a heated discussion with a friend who works for Encyclopadia Britannica in London and argued that EB was inferior to Wiki mainly because it arrogantly ignored so much of ordinary everyday life and media,almost as it was ‘beneath it’. My friend answered that serious knowledge is not about trivia. I said I thought facts are facts,information is information from whatever source on whatever subject. Ignoring half the world because it does not seem to you ‘serious’ or ‘relevent’ is a very dangerous road to travel.

.You might remember me from such Featuring Articles as today’s!” Haha, amazing work! Lugnuts (talk) 12:42, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Heh, good one. It reminds me of the show when it was good. –Bobak (talk) 15:28, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

True, but I’m beginning to think some of the bitterness regarding Wikipedia’s Featured Article choices stems from the fact that the articles are so good – namely, that people would be more willing to spend time crafting articles on fictional characters extinct for a decade rather than actual important people. But that’s just who they know about more – you’re supposed to write about what you know. Brutannica (talk) 18:18, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I expect that each person complaining here is already doing the research to bring an article on a more important subject up to featured-article quality. Good luck! You’re right, we can use good articles on many different subjects. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 18:57, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree with FisherQuuen, complaining about how unfair it is that Troy McClure is now a featured article despite a large number of actual people’s articles given stub class ratings will do no good. I suggest you focus your energy towards bringing another page up to featured article status. Anyway, I’d say the Simpson’s WikiProject has been pretty succesful so far, after all this isn’t the only article the members have managed to bring to featured article status. Keep up the good work! 72.152.135.75 (talk) 00:17, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Here’s how it looks:

What’s really neat is how well the Wikipedia information syncs up with the map, it also provides a pretty nice summary of nearby notables:

While this kind of mash-up is by no means new, seeing it right on Google’s image search — as opposed to a third party site — is very cool, and is a big step for mash-ups towards mainstream consumption.

Apparently though, my neighborhood is a cultural wasteland, as there’s not a single Wikipedia entry or uploaded photo anywhere to be seen. Hopefully that’s not the case and this feature just isn’t completely rolled out yet.

Probably not, though.

SAN FRANCISCO — Powerset on Sunday unveiled tools for searching Wikipedia that use conversational phrasing instead of keywords, marking the first step of its challenge to established Web search services such as Google.

Powerset’s technology breaks down the meaning of words and sentences into related concepts, freeing users from always needing to type the exact words they want to find.

The idea is that instead of breaking your query down into keywords as you would for Google search, you just ask your question. Powerset will figure out the main concept behind your words, and then compare it to its index of other phrases that mean similar things. This sounds great, especially for the possibilities this software could give us when combined with text to speech to just let us talk to computers. Another neat feature is that Powerset uses its index of meaning to generate a straightforward ‘list of factz’ for every article.

But how well does it work?

Not badly, though my biggest challenge was to stop thinking in keywords. Here are some of my searches, some of which went well:

As did others:

Some of the answers, however, seemed to be a bit literal:

By and large, not so bad.

I also enjoyed the ‘factz’ summary of some of the pointless articles a bit too much, it was on the Star Wars lightsaber page that powerset informed me that “lightsaber emits hum”, and that “Sith Lords threw lightning” — niiice.

While those facts are pretty pointless, they are (so far as I know) correct. So the software is capable of, at a pretty rough level, figuring out what words have significance in the context of the article.

At this point I don’t see this as a service that will replace Wikipedia for me, I’m used to breaking things down into keywords, and I think I’m pretty good at it. All the same, this seems to be a pretty crucial step forwards in making computers easier to use and information more useful.

That’s the view held by Deakin University associate professor of information systems Sharman Lichtenstein. In a recent Computer World article, Lichtenstein notes the “reliance by students on Wikipedia for finding information, and acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics, was ‘crowding out’ valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source ‘credible expert’ views even if desired.”

Evidently this is part and parcel of the Wikipedia vs. Britannica debate that has been bandied about for years. Lichtenstein, however, adds that the real crux of the problem is not the masses that contribute but rather the hierarchy of editors that are often veiled in anonymity and thus lack accountability for the final product. Hence why competing products like Google Knol will be, in her opinion, a step ahead.

So what do you think? Is this simply a dissatisfied member of the Ivory Tower attempting to preserve their position’s status as an “authority” on a specific topic? Or is the world of mass produced content a real threat to the depth of human knowledge and expertise?

I’m curious to see how this map of Napoleon’s advance and retreat to Russia (considered by many to be the greatest graphic ever) would look in this application.

It is this question that lies at the heart of a very interesting article in The Economist. The inclusionists argue that Wikipedia should feature as many articles as it’s contributors can produce, so long as even a few users find it interesting. Let’s just call it the “longest of the long tail” strategies. In contrast, deletionists believe the site would be more successful if it “maintains a certain relevance and quality for its enteries.” To read a humourous post about deletionists at their best, see Mike Dover’s post from October.

The bulk of the article seems to push people towards supporting the inclusionists, as it covers the increasingly infamous Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Wikipedia in great detail. The deletionist argument isn’t covered to the same degree, and I believe one particularly important fact is left out – a totally inclusionist approach would likely increase the number of errors and successful troll attacks greatly, as there is a lot more terrain of specialized knowledge to monitor.

So the question is, if forced to choose one side, which would you choose? I think I lean towards the inclusionist side, with the appropriate caveat in regards to intelligent tools being integrated in order to maintain the quality level (etc.)… but to be honest I’m not 100% sure. Anyone else have any thoughts?

One of my favorite part comes early, when Baker likens Wikipedia to a leaf-raking project. In doing so, he creates a vivid picture of both the good and the bad that have evolved along with the site:

It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated. And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it having a wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen anywhere, a world wonder. And then self-promoted leaf-pile guards appeared, doubters and deprecators who would look askance at your proffered handful and shake their heads, saying that your leaves were too crumpled or too slimy or too common, throwing them to the side. And that was too bad. The people who guarded the leaf pile this way were called “deletionists.”

A few other favorite quotes:

Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism—a place for shy, learned people to deposit their trawls.

All big Internet successes—e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component—they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.

The steady influx of top-hat-and-spatted sources elevated Wikipedia’s tone. (comment: I didn’t actually know how much of Wikipedia’s early material was dependent on old Encyclopedia Britannica’s that were in the public domain… interesting).

The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive – Jimbo Wales

‘Notability purges’ are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors – Howard Tayler

And then somebody… a “vandal”—replaces the entire article with a single sentence: “Aging is what you get when you get freakin old old old.”… A minute later, you “revert” that anonymous editor’s edit, with a few clicks… You’ve just kept the aging article safe, for the moment. But you have to stay vigilant, because somebody might swoop in again at any time, and you’ll have to undo their harm with your power reverter ray. Now you’re addicted. You’ve become a force for good just by standing guard and looking out for juvenile delinquents.

There are more great quotes – many more- but I’ll leave it at that. By the way, if you’re interested in actually reading the part that ties to the book that is supposedly being reviewed, it starts around paragraph 22 or so (type “proficiency” into the Find box to be taken to it)…

Carr has built up a nice business for himself as the hero of those who think that technology is mostly hype. He’s making a splash on the speaking circuit and has a new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google to follow Does IT Matter?

The latest honour that Carr has received is an invitation to join the Editorial Board of Advisors of Encyclopædia Britannica. Methinks that this has something to do with his attitudes towards Wikipedia, reflected here, here, and here. With tongues firmly in cheek, we suggest some other extracurricular activities for Mr. Carr:

- director of player development, Washington Generals

- marketing analyst zip drive division, Iomega

- party whip, International Brotherhood of Elevator Operators