Posts filed under 'wikipedia'
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August 5th, 2008, 11:51am
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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.
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August 2nd, 2008, 06:21pm
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It occured to me that in one hundred, or even one thousand or more years, historians are going to use Wikipedia to figure out what it is that we thought of ourselves. Apparently we like Pokemon.
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. Read More »
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July 31st, 2008, 05:08pm
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Sarah Lai Stirland over at Wired’s ThreatLevel has a great post today about a fight that recently occurred amongst Wikipedia editors over whether the entry for John Edwards should include information about his alleged love affair.
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!
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July 25th, 2008, 08:31am
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Joe Westhead sent me an interesting email awhile ago in relation to the ongoing MyFootballClub experiment (and has an intriguing post on the subject that I’ll come back to later). For those that may have forgotten, MyFootballClub became relatively famous as it sought out 50,000 fans to not only co-own a professional football (soccer in North America) team, but manage it through the “wisdom of crowds” principles. To quote one of the many articles on their plans (wikipedia has a great overview of their history):
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?
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July 8th, 2008, 12:17pm
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Interesting story in the Wall St. Journal about language training company Rosetta Stone suing a competitor who has bought Google Ad words that encourage users to visit sites such as “Don’t Buy Rosetta Software,” and “Rosetta Spanish a Scam?”
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.
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July 2nd, 2008, 11:34am
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I have to credit Nicholas Carr’s blog for pointing me towards this interesting little article by Jimmy Wales, founder of wikipedia. For a long time, wikipedia promoted itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Now, Wales describes it as “the online encyclopedia in which any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing stories on any encyclopedic topic.” While at first it doesn’t appear to be a huge difference, there are a lot of little insights that can be pulled from the subtle changes. Off the top of my head:
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.
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June 27th, 2008, 08:27pm
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I’ve posted before about trouble that Wikipedia gets in when in features lame posts on the front page. See here and here.
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.
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June 9th, 2008, 05:26pm
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PC Pro (via Slashdot) is reporting that the Encyclopedia Britannica is experimenting with a wiki approach to content. Britannica is doing it on their own terms, however:
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. Read More »
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June 3rd, 2008, 04:38pm
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Just wanted to give wikinomics readers a heads up that a little over a week ago Stephen Mihm had a great article in the Boston Globe called Everyone is a historian now. To quote the opening:
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.
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June 3rd, 2008, 09:00am
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A researcher at Trinity College in Dublin has written a program that determines the minimum number of links between Wikipedia articles. This is similar to the Kevin Bacon game, where players try to link actors to Mr. Bacon in either as few moves or in the most creative way. For example, Jeffrey Jones was in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with Edie McClurb (Herb Tarlek’s wife) who was in Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Kevin Bacon (that was Kevin racing for the taxi against Steve Martin in the opening scene). Also, Jones was in Amadeus with Tom Hulce who was in Animal House with Kevin Bacon. But, don’t get me started.
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.
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May 30th, 2008, 10:48am
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A while back I posted about the debates that often occur when articles are featured on the front page of Wikipedia. Basically, each day there are a few dozen entries on the front page including one feature article. Often, there is debate over whether the article is worthy of being on the front page and sometimes whether it should even be a Wikipedia article. Earlier this week, Troy McClure, a supporting character on the Simpsons was featured. McClure (pictured below in his role in Stop this Planet of the Apes, I want to get off) was indeed a fan favorite, but should he be on the front page of an online encyclopedia? Should there even be such a thing as category for Feature Articles about the Simpsons? I doubt the boys at Britannica spend much time debating Sideshow Bob and the human condition.
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)
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May 26th, 2008, 04:30pm
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I was just loading up Google maps to figure out where to meet a friend when I noticed a new feature: community uploaded photos, and Wikipedia location tagging.
Here’s how it looks:
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May 13th, 2008, 08:07am
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Yesterday, The Globe and Mail had a piece about a new company that’s trying to change the way we search online:
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. Read More »
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April 15th, 2008, 10:28am
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Here’s an interesting thesis: Wikipedia is fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information.
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?
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March 26th, 2008, 05:21pm
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Here is a cool idea that is just getting started. The Time Space Map is kind of a combination of Wikipedia and Google Map mashups. It allows people to graph historical events in a temporal fashion. The picture below shows the growth of the Inca Empire. A good description can be found here.
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. Read More »
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March 10th, 2008, 06:25am
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Who’s going to win the battle for Wikipedia’s Soul: the inclusionists or the deletionists?
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. Read More »
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March 5th, 2008, 03:26pm
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The New York Review of Books has posted a fabulous and entertaining editorial about the history behind wikipedia’s rise. Technically, it’s not actually an editorial, but is rather supposed to be a review of John Broughton’s newish book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual… and if you look hard enough you will find some references to Broughton’s work in there. But you have to look really, really hard - if you skim, you will miss it. So I’ll just call it an entertaining and educational editorial on Wikipedia by Nicholson Baker that is well, well worth the read.
One of my favorite part comes early, when Baker likens Wikipedia to a leaf-raking project. In doing so, Read More »
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March 3rd, 2008, 11:59am
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OK, we actually like Nicholas Carr. He is a smart guy, a gentleman and his blog is a must read for thoughtful debate about technology and business models. We just don’t always agree with him.
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
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January 15th, 2008, 05:59pm
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Jimmy Wales’ brainchild Wikia (a search engine modelled after the wikipedia concept of a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way) went live last week, and the search results it offers up absolutely, positively suck. The reason that I know this (beyond a few experiments searching for things like ’sports’ and getting a top hit of something like a box score for an old lacrosse game in a Minnesota high school, that’s already been removed) is that I went to the About Us page, and the third sentence reads:
We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.
You can also find a whole lot of bad reviews in places like TechCrunch, where Michael Arrington called it “one of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever had the displeasure of viewing.” Ouch.
Now if you were in (say) the soap business, and the third sentence you used to describe yourself was “the quality of our soap is low”, and the reviewers were noting it’s the worst soap ever, you might not be in the soap business for much longer. Wikia, of course, is hoping to be different - given that the whole value proposition is search results generated by user feedback, it’s not exactly surprising the site’s not so good when it opens because… wait for it… they don’t have any user feedback yet.
In turn, we are in the early stages of a very, very interesting wikinomics experiment. Can a community come together to create a living, breathing search engine that rivals the all-power Google algorithm? Can the Wikipedia model, which relies on annual donations upwards of $1 million a year to keep going, be successfully replicated in a for-profit enterprise? Can, at minimum, it become something that’s borderline usable?
Various writers (like this one) have noted even Jimmy Wales has said it might flop, but that the hope is it will return results as good as other search engines within a few years. The question, however, is why people would want to put their time into it - what’s the incentive to click on and improve terrible search results?
Wikipedia had the “open knowledge to share with the world” angle which galvanized people, but Wikia doesn’t have anything nearly as inspiring. Wikipedia contributors can directly see their contribution - with Wikia it’s a little more off in the more distant future, maybe, and you might have helped, we think. And while there appear to be a few tools set up to enable a “community”, I’d be hard pressed to find someone right now willing to go to the trouble of engaging in it. Might a facebook app have been better here?
I don’t know - but I do know I signed into Wikia to give it a test run, had a similar reaction to what Mr. Arrington said, and upon checking back in today it sure doesn’t seem too many other people are getting into it either. If I had to bet right now, I’d bet that Wikia isn’t going to go well - but not because the core idea is bad.
My belief is that it’s just a little too late in the ball game to be starting this thing from scratch, and the opportunity lies in integrating the core concept with (say) a social networking platform as part of a broader application development. I also once thought there was an opportunity for Yahoo! to head down a road like this (and push back against Google) by leveraging Del.ic.ous and Flickr technology within their search capabilities. In fact, I think there’s a variety of different ways the Wikia search approach could augment current offerings and be brought to market, but they all involve a bigger collaboration than what we see here.
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December 12th, 2007, 01:22pm
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So, I found myself at a cocktail party abuzz with gossip that the founder of Wikipedia was one of the guests. The bad news is…they were talking about me. Here’s how it transpired. I was on my way to a conference put on by BSG Concours, who just acquired my company New Paradigm. I introduced myself to one of the event organizers, who I met on the shuttle bus from the airport to the resort. She had heard about the acquisition and said “you guys are the Wikipedia folks, right?” I assumed she meant Wikinomics and didn’t correct her. A little of the telephone game later, and I was the “guy that invented Wikipedia.”
Now, I actually know a lot about Wikipedia…and if pressed, could actually do a pretty good job at pretending to be the founder. If you haven’t seen it, rent (or download) Six Degrees of Separation which has nothing directly to do with Kevin Bacon. Will Smith plays a young man that cons some material comforts from Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing by pretending to be Sidney Poitier’s son. The thing is, it’s harder to pull off such a parlor game like that…because someone could check…uh, Wikipedia to discover that Jimmy Wales is the founder (and Sidney Poiter has only daughters).
Similarly, it’s harder to get away with the fling in Cancun without your girlfriend finding out, because the vacation paramour will want to add you in Facebook. Same deal with bragging about fake athletic feats (do you know how many people I met at University that claimed to be finalists in the 100 metre dash at the provincial championships). There’s no viable way about lying about your age (I am ACTUALLY 39 this year; may be a fake 39 for a couple of more) if all of your high school friends are listed on Facebook as being much older. The only way to buy a few years here is if you are one of those creepy seniors that dated freshman girls. Full disclosure: I was on the opposite side of this supply and demand equation, which explains this home video about my first year in high school.
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