Up front: I respect McCandless and like what he does, which includes some interesting and thoughtful work, especially his print of Left vs. Right (U.S. and Rest of the World editions) that is better than most professional political analysts could produce. Separately, I am collaborating with friends on a Wikipedia visualization project of our own, so call me an interested observer, but note also that I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing lately.

I have reproduced only the top section of “Articles of War” below, for the purposes of commentary (click through to see the full thing on McCandless’ site):

The first thing to know about “Articles of War” is that it was based on an essay to be found in the recesses of Wikipedia called “Lamest edit wars” that is specifically kept in the site’s intra-wiki space because, as it states at the top: “This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous.” McCandless & Co. do give credit where it is due, but that Wikipedia page surely does not and never did intend to be definitive — it’s just a series of cheekily-written paragraphs about various arguments occurring over time, so there is nothing like meaningful numbers to be gleaned from it.

Instead, McCandless and his researchers decided to generate data to visualize these edit wars by counting the total number of edits over each article’s lifetime, counting not just the edits specifically related to that particular dispute (a difficult and time-consuming thing to research, it goes without saying) but every single edit, ever, thereby giving a grossly distorted view of each article’s history. I’ll give them the fact that if one looks to the legend in the top lefthand corner, it indicates that the number listed (and I presume the size of each box) relates to the “Total no. of edits” but even if readers do notice that, it is at best confusing.

Likewise, the articles’ relative position on the chart accords to their creation, not when the described dispute took place. If you think 2,000+ edits were expended on a photograph in the Cow-tipping article in the middle of 2001, that’s too bad, but you were reasonably misled. Nor would would you know that the article did not include a photograph until several years later.

What you are left with is a decent visualization of how frequently edited some randomly selected articles — some popular, some timely, some but not all controversial — happen to be. Why not simply show that? Focusing on this alone we can see that the following articles have attracted tens of thousands of edits over years:

• The Beatles
• Jesus
• Wikipedia
• Christianity
• Ann Coulter
• Star Wars
• Wii

That’s not linkbait enough for you? Then please do the research.

Meanwhile, the infographic is also a little too snarky for its own good, especially toward its chosen subject. Color-coding is used to categorize certain types of edit wars; one is labeled “American Cultural Superiority” and exists mainly to identify debates between U.S. and British spellings. Which I find a little… superior itself, but hey, I suppose it’s a misdemeanor violation. Worse is that edit wars involving Wikipedia and site co-founder Jimmy Wales are coded as “Religion.” Too cute. Or maybe just an oversight?

Another oversight concerns an on-wiki debate about whether the most famous Palin was, at the time of its occurrence, Monty Python’s Michael or Alaska’s former governor Sarah. (Since then, I believe the one with decades of contributions to comedy has been definitively usurped by the mavericky one’s more recent, er, contributions.) According to “Articles of War” this happened in 2003. But if you think about it, this makes no sense at all — of course this happened in 2008, when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. And the Lamest edit wars essay itself mentions that this happened in 2008. Pure oversight to be sure, but I have to wonder what other mistakes the research team made.

To their partial credit, they have opened their Google Spreadsheets for public inspection, so it’s clear they at least intended to impart real information. And there you can see that they are indeed using the total number of edits over time and that their “Palin” error was made early on. That seems to put the responsibility on the researchers, rather than McCandless himself, but of course it’s a total package.

I hold McCandless to a standard that I don’t the jokers at Cracked* or Something Awful because their job is to make you laugh, while McCandless’ job, according to his website’s own tagline, is to take “issues, ideas, knowledge, data” — and make it easier to understand by visualizing it. There are certainly issues and ideas to be found in “Articles of War” — but knowledge and data, not so much. And though I am getting a little more rant-y than usual about this, I do aim to be constructive, so I would very much like to see this infographic re-done with some extra research. This blog post may serve as a guide if they so choose. I hope they do.

P.S. The Gizmodo thread — where I found it — on this is hilarious, with many people re-fighting the same disputes that once arose on Wikipedia. However, only one that I saw came anywhere near noticing the fact that the methodology was suspect.

P.P.S. Am I being nitpicky to add that “Articles of War” appears to convey that Wikipedia’s articles about The Beatles and Jesus were created prior to 2001? That is to say before Wikipedia itself began? I don’t actually think so.

*Actually, about Cracked — a.k.a. Digg’s favorite website — as I have seen a prominent Wikipedian point out elsewhere, it often does a pretty good job using information from Wikipedia responsibly. Among their articles about Wikipedia, the title of “5 Terrifying Bastardizations of the Wikipedia Model” alone gives away that it’s implicitly pro-Wikipedia, as does “5 Celebrity Wikipedia Entries they Clearly Wrote Themselves“. Even “8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries” knows what’s good about Wikipedia, even when it isn’t. Cracked writers clearly know their way down through a history page — like say, Corey Feldman’s — but it doesn’t appear that McCandless and his researchers looked as closely.

demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: “Failure to comply may result in further legal action. We appreciate your timely attention to this matter.”

But the Foundation won’t budge:

The problem, those at Wikipedia say, is that the law cited in the F.B.I.’s letter is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal, and not about posting images on noncommercial Web sites. Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal.

Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. “While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version” that the F.B.I. had provided.

The relevant statute, helpfully linked by the New York Times, states:

§ 701. Official badges, identification cards, other insignia

Whoever manufactures, sells, or possesses any badge, identification card, or other insignia, of the design prescribed by the head of any department or agency of the United States for use by any officer or employee thereof, or any colorable imitation thereof, or photographs, prints, or in any other manner makes or executes any engraving, photograph, print, or impression in the likeness of any such badge, identification card, or other insignia, or any colorable imitation thereof, except as authorized under regulations made pursuant to law, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

I do find it ironic, considering that Wikipedia and other projects administered by its parent organization are among the most scrupulous on the whole of the Internet about respecting copyright law.

In most circumstances, Wikipedia requires that images used on the site be in the public domain or released under a free license explicitly permitting such use. Only in circumstances where there is no hope a suitable alternative may be available does the site allow copyrighted images, and only then under very limited circumstances. If you want to use the Nike swoosh on your user page or the article about Michael Jordan, no such luck but you will certainly find it on the company’s corporate profile.

The FBI seal, as a work of the United States government, falls under the first category — it is considered public domain — but its use is nevertheless limited to pages about certain FBI-specific subjects. And the photo’s page on the Wikipedia server even includes this helpful advisory:

With no sources inside The House J. Edgar Hoover Built, I’m puzzled as to why they would do this. Perhaps they got the site confused with WikiLeaks?

When the classified documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers were first revealed in June 1971, the first stories about it ran in the New York Times, and only following an internal debate about the legal propriety of doing so. When the U.S. government predictably sued, the Washington Post started its own series based on the documents, and quickly faced the same injunction. By the end of the month — and we think things happen quickly these days — the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the injunctions were unconstitutional, and the rest is history.

What the Afghan War Diary lacks in public drama it more than makes up for in zeitgeist, with its decentralized, asymmetric, non-state method of publication. Rather than going to the press, the leaker gave them to WikiLeaks, a website based in Sweden, supported by anonymous donors and run (or at least repped) by a somewhat unusual fellow named Julian Assange.

But I’m compelled to point out, as the title of my post indicates, that despite running on the same software as Wikipedia and using the word “wiki” in its name, WikiLinks is not a wiki. This screen cap below, featuring just a portion of the website’s front page, illustrates my point:

Click on image to view full-size

If you’re familiar with Wikipedia (and I suspect you are) then you’ll notice the website is based on the same MediaWiki software. Unlike Wikipedia, it does not acknowledge the fact. Although it’s free software, the terms of its Creative Commons license are such that one needs to give credit where due. At least WikiLeaks is consistently mysterious, not to mention contraband.

More to the point, look at the tabbed links to pages above the site banner. On Wikipedia, this is where you would see the following links: Page (article content), Discussion (where to talk about the article), Edit (what it sounds like) and History (a list of all edits to the article) and a few others, including a link to log in or create an account. WikiLeaks is a bit different: there are only three such links. Most strikingly, there are no options to contribute or create an account. The discussion page is there, but you aren’t invited to participate. (Note that on Wikipedia, in most cases, one need not even register to contribute.) And for what it’s worth, there isn’t even a history page available, so there is no way to see what changes may have been made to the page since it was first posted. That’s a wiki? Yes, there is a link to submit documents for review, but that’s the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) model. I suppose ILDb just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Just in case you’re rusty on the concept, or are the sort of person who wouldn’t know Ward Cunningham from Larry Sanger, here are a few handy definitions:

• Dictionary.com: A collaborative Web site set up to allow user editing and adding of content
• Simple English Wikipedia: A wiki is a type of website that lets anyone create and edit its pages.
• Wiktionary: A collaborative website which can be directly edited using only a web browser, often by anyone with access to it.

The WikiLeaks FAQ makes it very clear that no open editing is to be found on this site:

Who writes WikiLeaks leaked document summaries?
WikiLeaks staff, sometimes in collaboration with the submitter. Historically, most summaries were written by Julian Assange.

And another:

Can random people edit WikiLeaks documents?
No. Source documents are kept pristine.

Of course this makes perfect sense, given the website’s stated mission. But it also makes it, you know, not a wiki.

Not only is the name misleading, but it’s my (purely speculative) opinion that the site was so named to borrow from the credibility enjoyed (and earned) by Wikipedia. Being a website created with the purpose of disclosing material previously regarded as secret, frequently concerning the security interests of nation states, WikiLeaks self-consciously associated itself with the only non-profit to be found among the top 10 global websites. The name recalls Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikisource and other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. Let’s be clear: it is most certainly not. I’d think Wikipedia might even have a legal case to make against WikiLeaks, although it would surely be the least of the website’s legal problems.

If there is a silver lining in all this, perhaps it lies in the implication that the word “wiki” has come to denote something like “openness” and “fairness” and “democracy” to a worldwide audience of Internet users. ILDb really wouldn’t be the same. To have your name to become shorthand for such an inchoate but positive concept is obviously a good thing in itself, and quite an accomplishment. But it also means, as WikiLeaks shows, that someone out there is going to bite your style.

Update: In the comments below, a reader suggests that WikiLeaks did, for a time, allow outside contributors as a traditional wiki would. That seems to indicate my speculation above is off-base, although it’s probably still true that WikiLeaks took inspiration from Wikipedia.

Here’s another reason to retain your faith in humanity, and this time not just Wikipedia’s contributors but also its visitors: this month’s traffic to the Wikipedia article about Gen. David Petraeus. He was in the news twice this month, and for very different reasons. First, on June 15, Petraeus fainted while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. It’s just the kind of TMZ DC-ready story that gets attention, including video, which always helps. Indeed, the story caused traffic on his Wikipedia article to spike.

But as the chart below indicates, that was only about a tenth of the traffic to his page once President Obama nominated him to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, following the latter general’s unsolicitous remarks about the Obama administration in Rolling Stone magazine. Perhaps this does not reveal too much, as this is undoubtedly the bigger news story, but it is also a much more complicated one, and at least indicates that no matter how many articles about Pokemon characters Wikipedia may hold, people can still find what’s important.

As for the fact that the top day for traffic to McChrystal’s Wikipedia article this month nearly doubled the traffic on Petraeus’ top day, well, I’ll let you judge that for yourself.

Snapshot of traffic to Wikipedia article about David Petraeus, June 2010.

Traffic statistics courtesy User:Henrik.

The ostensible topic was the new experiment with Pending changes, described by The Telegraph here, although these paragraphs appeared in opposite order there:

“[V]andalism” has been a particular problem for the online encyclopedia in recent years. The pages of some prominent figures, including Senator Edward Kennedy, were maliciously and falsely edited to claim that the subject of the Wikipedia page had died, when in fact they were alive and well. Many Wikipedia pages dealing with controversial topics have also been repeatedly edited by users with a vested interest in promoting a particular view about the incident or event.

…

The new system, known as pending changes, means that users will be able to submit changes for previously locked or protected articles. These suggested amendments will then be reviewed by senior editors before the changes go live.

It’s important to note that the new system only applies to about 2,000 articles during this trial run, and does not apply to anyone who has had an active account for more than a few days (a fairly low barrier to “autoconfirmed” status, if you ask me). I wrote about this last summer, when it was first announced and still called “flagged revisions” and at that time I thought the reaction was

roughly divisible into four quadrants: those who mourn Wikipedia’s openness vs. those who will continue to question Wikipedia’s reliability, with those who are optimistic about the change vs. those who are not.

That is probably still operative, but with the program just rolling out in the past few days, there is a related yet more specific dynamic — a disagreement not about what will happen but what has already: do Pending changes make Wikipedia more open or more closed? An unscientific survey of recent headlines at least tells us which opinion is more pervasive:

• ReadWriteWeb: “Wikipedia to Loosen Controls Tonight”
• Slashdot: “Wikipedia To Unlock Frequently Vandalized Pages”
• Resource Shelf: “New “Pending Changes” System Test Begins on Wikipedia, Will Make It Easier for Users to Edit/Change Controversial Entries”
• Motherboard.tv: “‘Pending Changes’: A Looser Wikipedia”
• ComputerWorld: “Wikipedia confronts downside of ‘Net openness”
• BBC: “Wikipedia unlocks divisive pages for editing”

In this summary, at least, only ComputerWorld comes at it from the “more closed” standpoint. (Did you notice that a good amount of the coverage so far has been from the British press? Yeah, so did I.) In a blog post summarizing the radio segment, Lih gave his view:

[M]y view is that the characterization of “pending changes” is relative. Julia Angwin, who I think is a great tech journalist, is of the opinion it represents an overall more closing-off of Wikipedia, and the move is an affirmation of a more conventional process that created traditional encyclopedias. On the other hand, folks like Jimmy Wales have regarded this as opening up — instead of having articles locked completely using full-protection, or to limit editing to existing registered and “aged” users by semi-protection, pending changes gives a way for anyone and everyone to participate, even if those edits are not completely viewable until later. Relative to full protection, it’s more open. Relative to the Wild West wiki way, it’s more closed.

Meanwhile on Wikipedia, a small group of dedicated programmers has been working to make it possible, the discussion has quieted down over the past few days. Wikipedia, it seems, is taking a wait-and-see approach.

As for the show itself, Lih and Angwin handled most of this material, while I was enlisted to do battle with Siegel. And this was quite an opportunity, given Siegel’s notoriety for having sock-puppeted his own blog in 2006, but in the end I kept it focused on Wikipedia. I still said he lived in a fantasy world, and then he said I lived in a fantasy world. Even so, I still should’ve stuck the knife in. And I even gave myself the opportunity, bringing up comment sections on blogs at one point. The fact of the matter is, few people are as wrong-headed about the Internet’s influence on society as Siegel, whose professional curmudgeonry seems as much personal pique as considered commentary.

So I will use the experience to remember that politeness isn’t always the best policy, and leave you with these thoughts from Denny Green:

Along the way, Wyatt and the British Museum are doing something very interesting: they are offering cash prizes for raising articles to Featured-level status on topics related to the British Museum. From the project page:

The British Museum is offering five prizes of £100 (≈$140USD/€120) at their shop/bookshop for new Featured Articles on topics related to the British Museum in any Wikipedia language edition. Ideally, the topics will be articles about collection items.

This is the first time an organisation in the UK has put out a prize that recognises the value of fine articles on Wikipedia. This is a recognition that Wikipedia work is not only good quality but is consistent with the outreach aspect of the Museum’s mission to engage the public.

It’s an inventive idea, even if some of the rules are a little unclear: it almost sounds like it requires the creation of a brand new article, though that doesn’t seem to be the case. Meanwhile, there are already a dozen or so articles on the English-language Wikipedia currently judged to be Good, B, or C-quality, according to Wikipedia’s internal rating system. Though the prize is pointedly offered in any language edition, most will surely be won in the English, German or French language versions, and at least a few of the aforementioned English articles will be the five ones improved by the winners.

And in keeping with Wikipedia’s “There is no deadline” ethos (related to the concept of “eventualism“), the competition runs until all prizes are claimed. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went fast, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that leads to another interesting situation: most quality articles have several major contributors, as was pointed out on a Wikipedia mailing list this week.

As Wyatt points out, getting an outside organization to care about “the value of good quality articles on Wikipedia in their own right” is a significant achievement, and the first of a kind. Now that the English-language Wikipedia has grown to include far more articles (3 million) than its veteran editors (a few thousand editing on a daily basis) can possibly handle, more ideas will be needed to generate new content for Wikipedia. Perhaps this represents the next step in the development of the human-powered “content management system” for Wikipedia. Wyatt hopes that other museums will follow in the British Museum’s lead; as someone who works with companies, associations and other organizations that are frequently concerned about how they are represented on Wikipedia, I think outposts for representatives to the Wikipedia community from many organizations can be a good idea, though sorting out the conflict of interest issues is likely to be different for each.

If you’re interested in joining the British Museum contest, you might start with one of the articles discussed above, or find your own in the Collection of the British Museum category. And if you’re looking for a curator at the British Museum to work with, here is the page to do that.

And for more information about Wyatt’s residency, see his personal blog posts here: Part 1: Making Wikipedia “GLAM-friendly”* and Part 2: Making Wikipedia “GLAM-friendly”.

Exterior of British Museum by temporalata on Flickr; Great Hall by M.Chohan.

*GLAM stands for “Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum”; I had to look it up, too.

Traffic to Vuvuzela Wikipedia article in June 2010

This tracks pretty well with what Google Insights is seeing at the moment, although it’s interesting to note that Google still shows an exponential curve while Wikipedia’s numbers (which I trust more) have started to fall off a bit:

Searches for Vuvuzela on Google in June 2010

Although the World Cup is not nearly as popular in the U.S. as other countries, I was surprised, upon looking closer at the analytics, that American Googlers do not represent a significant percentage. Given the presumed uptick in U.S. interest in the World Cup this year, the large size of the American search market and U.S. media buzz around the horn (a sound metaphorically not dissimilar from the vuvuzela itself) this comes as some small surprise. In fact, nearly all of the searches are occurring in South Africa — whence they originate and where you’d think most people wouldn’t need to look it up — or Europe, none of them primarily English-speaking countries. Here’s the list:

1. Johannesburg, South Africa
2. Parow, South Africa
3. Pretoria, South Africa
4. Cape Town, South Africa
5. Lisbon, Portugal
6. Amsterdam, Netherlands
7. Hamburg, Germany
8. Rotterdam, Netherlands
9. Cologne, Germany
10. Frankfurt Am Main, Germany

So who is searching for information about the vuvuzela in the United States? Here’s that list, by state / district:

1. Virginia
2. California
3. District of Columbia
4. New York
5. Georgia
6. Massachusetts
7. Washington
8. New Jersey
9. Texas
10. Pennsylvania

If you ever wanted a list of which U.S. states are most closely following the World Cup (assuming that more causally-interested Americans may be Googling “World Cup”) then here you go. As a resident of Washington, DC, I can say that the MLS team D.C. United is sort of the Yankees of U.S. professional soccer and unusually popular here relative to the rest of the country, and California is home to the L.A. Galaxy, where Mr. Posh, David Beckham, plays (I think still?).

Meanwhile, my co-workers and I will keep the games on in the background (currently: a scintillating 0-0 tie between Japan and Cameroon) and we’ll be keeping it on mute.

I’m not sure I quite got this one, so I turned to a website called Toby, Dave & Ian Explain XKCD for their take:

The Author, a well-known fan of Wikipedia, has squeezed yet another joke from its bountiful bosom. This particular joke uses the clever linguistic trick of “word-play” as well as “meta-humor” to derive a new word: malamanteau. Malamanteau is a combination of the words “malapropism” (the substitution of a word for a word with a similar sound) and “portmanteau” (the combination of two words).

The creation of this new word or “neologism” is particularly humorous as the methods used to create it are the very words used in the process. This is called a meta or “self-referential” joke.

That didn’t make a lot of sense to me, either. XKCD Sucks, a similar blog with a somewhat different mandate, stated:

Today’s xkcd comic genuinely mystifies me. I’d like you to try to imagine me writing the following post (the beginning of it, at least) with a more honest voice, not the sarcastic one I usually employ. Today’s comic asks us a question: “Ever notice how Wikipedia has a few words it really likes?” And the thing is, I haven’t. I have never noticed that. Have you? … what word is he even referring to? It can’t be “Malamanteau,” since that isn’t a real word and isn’t on wikipedia (though of course some xkcdicks tried.

As much as I enjoy XKCD on occasion, this take made more sense. And indeed, someone did try to create a Wikipedia article for Malamanteau:

The discussion of what to do about Malamanteau ultimately was not about whether to have an article about the term — that was right out — but whether to create a “redirect” so that people who search for the term will find themselves on the Wikipedia article about XKCD. The best argument against creating the term is perhaps the first:

The target article holds no relevant information on the term currently, thus this redirect only serves to confuse. XKCD readers already know this originated there, thus with no relevant information on the target article, the redirect is purposeless. Non-XKCD readers who somehow find the term and search it won’t find any information on it at all, and will only become more confused.

And some of the arguments for keeping the term could be described as willfully encouraging Wikipedia to undermine its own goals:

Wikipedia’s editors are high on their own farts. Comics like the one that led to this redirect make that point, and the ensuing discussion drives it home expertly. Of course it will be deleted - why would the project suddenly have a sense of humor about itself, or allow contributions that encourage everyone’s involvement, rather than that of an elite few who “take the project seriously enough” to be endowed with its protection?

At least some of the votes to delete the redirect are based more on annoyance than anything else: because “Malamanteau” is supported by people who do not have Wikipedia’s best interests at heart, there is no reason to grant such leeway. Hence some editors weighing in to say: “Delete with a vengeance” and “Delete and salt” — as in salting the earth to prevent someone from recreating it again.

But in the end, the redirect stuck. The editor who closed the discussion explained at length; to the lay reader unfamiliar with the finer points of Wikipedia’s guidelines, here are the facts that mattered:

The threshold for a term being a redirect is substantially and intentionally lower than that for a separate article. As several keep !voters pointed out, redirects are supposed to be from any useful search term or likely mistake, to the proper destination. The traffic indicates that, while falling off by as much as 75% a day, the term “Malamanteau” has plenty of search traffic during its short life to establish that it is useful to some people. … Since XKCD maintains past archives of all its strips, it is likely that traffic will continue to seek this term even after this week’s furor has died down.

In fact, this isn’t even the first time Munroe has used his comic strip to poke at tender spots in Wikipedia’s organizing rule structure.

While there are many editors who feel that this only causes unnecessary problems — 19,000 words over a lousy redirect? — I think the better case to be made is that Wikipedia’s long-term success lies in a carefully considered approach to site policies. To the extent that Wikipedia’s policies are explored by outsiders and explained by insiders, this is a good thing. But it’s still a pain in the ass.

Until now, these have languished in a Google Docs file, waiting for me to develop them into full posts with original commentary. And because this sadly will never happen for some deserving stories, it is better to clear the field / room / palate and look toward the future. So here is the first of an occasional series of remaindered post ideas. Let’s open up the file…

• In late February I noticed a new blog about Wikipedia had launched. Called On Wikipedia, it presents a thoughtful take on Wikipedia. Except in early March, one of its contributors decided to make a point about Wikipedia’s unreliability by… adding unreliable information. In fact, they created an outright hoax: inventing a person to create an article about, claiming they were suspected of murder and pushing it through to a fairly prominent spot on the front page (the Did you know? section). The blogger then impersonated the non-existent person and contacted Wikipedia, upset about the murder allegations. They described the whole process in one long post announcing what they had done. All this, though the blogger / editor surely knew about the Wikipedia’s guideline “Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point“. It didn’t take long for Jimmy Wales to get involved, and a lengthy discussion was initiated at the Administrator’s noticeboard. I can’t say I’ve dove deeply into this one, but On Wikipedia wrote about it twice more, here and here.
• On March 21, the German-language Wikipedia’s Featured article of the day was “Vulva” — with a photograph. Jimmy Wales asked for it to be removed, a request that was duly ignored. Wikipedia Signpost covered the story.
• So Larry Sanger, estranged co-founder of Wikipedia, reported the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI over allegations of child pornography. This is an unusual development to a long-running debate about certain images’ propriety — and even legality — for inclusion. Then Sanger decided / realized / found out the images did not depict real people, which apparently presents a different legal case that reminds me of a philosophical argument I had with some friends back in college. The sardonic wiki-trackers at The Register covered the story, and here is Sanger’s original letter to the FBI.
• Which government entity / famous person is getting hostile news coverage for “meddling” with their Wikipedia article this time? It’s the Government Information Service and the Dutch Royal Family.
• Dan Lewis, who has the enviable job of being the new media guy for Sesame Street, recently proposed an interesting concept — the Wikipedia Reading Club. He reads an entry on a topic he should know more about but does not, takes notes and offers thoughts for others to comment upon. His first two are John Adams and Jackie Robinson. Those are both quality articles; he’d do best to stick with top-quality “Featured” articles — now at 2,800+ — to which the Adams article (surprisingly to me) does not belong.
• Teaching Wikipedia in the classroom? Great! Teaching Wikipedia in the sixth grade? Maybe overly optimistic.
• I never did get around to writing about my trip to Bangalore this January for the WikiWars conference, co-sponsored by the Centre for Internet & Society and the Institute of Network Cultures, though my Keynote presentation is on SlideShare. A follow-up conference was held this past week in Amsterdam, and one of the speakers was Scott Kildall, with whom I attended WikiWars. Here is a blog post about that.
• I wrote an article for Politics Magazine, the trade magazine for political consultants and campaign professsionals, titled It’s a Wiki World. Here’s how it begins:
  

  Few websites present as many potential opportunities and pitfalls to the campaign professional as Wikipedia. Whether a Wikipedia article is friendly or unfriendly toward a candidate, it is going to be highly ranked on Google. But Wikipedia is unique among other influential websites because its content is not under one person’s control: Anyone can—and will—try to change what a given article says.

  I tell a few stories, well-known to Wikipedians, about failed (or questionable) Wikipedia engagement and offer some guidance on a better way to approach Wikipedia.

That’s all for now. Much more to come, very soon.

This new feature has already been compared to Wikipedia, and with very good reason: Facebook has tried to answer the “empty room” problem by pre-populating the Community Pages with Wikipedia entries. Let’s turn to the 1996 David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest again for illustrative purposes — click the link following to visit the Facebook Community Page for Infinite Jest, or see below:

That one can now read Wikipedia on Facebook is quite a big deal. Wikipedia is already one of the world’s top 10 websites (between fifth and eighth, depending) and now its content is being made available on the world’s single-most visited website. Needless to say, the Wikimedia Foundation is quite happy to dispel any reporters’ suspicions that they are unhappy with this development.

But that’s just part of the story. Look up to the right-hand corner for another potentially very significant aspect of this — here, let me zoom in and draw a little red box for you:

That’s right — as the headline on this blog post already gave away — you can now edit Wikipedia directly through Facebook. Or to be more accurate, one can easily access Wikipedia’s editing page through Facebook. Amidst all of the recent discussion of Wikipedia’s alleged participatory decline (very much disputed by Wikimedia) this could be a good thing: Facebook has just created a brand new channel for absolutely anyone who is a member of Facebook (that’s more than 400 million worldwide) to edit Wikipedia. At the very least, it is likely to have more impact on Wikipedia than just its increased visibility on Facebook. Most of these editors are likely to be unregistered “IP editors” — meaning they are identified by their IP address, because they have no user account — and the question of whether IP editors are beneficial to Wikipedia is open to debate. Perhaps the present number of unregistered editors is just fine now, but a new influx of amateur editors (some of whom are surely vandals) could tip the balance. Time will tell.

Time will also bring us a key aspect of the Community Page feature, announced but not yet available:

That is the chance to edit / curate Community Pages themselves. In fact, right now each Community Page features Wikipedia in two tabs: Info and Wikipedia. While the Wikipedia tab appears set to mirror Wikipedia (and this is where the above-highlighted Edit button lives) the Info tab merely uses Wikipedia as a starting point. And this may end up mitigating the impact of Facebook’s direct line to Wikipedia edit pages: the option to edit Facebook will be more prominent, and one expects, less likely to be phased out in future development.

Facebook hasn’t offered many details, and I think they may be in for a nasty surprise. Wikipedia stays as clean as it does in part due to the tireless efforts of the volunteer Recent changes patrol (i.e. vandal patrol) but Facebook is unlikely to gather such a community of watchers. Instead they will have to rely upon individuals who are members of those Community Pages. Yeah, if anyone messes with Back to the Future (or Infinite Jest) I’ll kick their teeth in, but I’m not like most. I’m guessing Facebook hasn’t yet figured out how to make this work without it becoming anarchy — not only is the Wikipedia community a unique thing, the site’s policies and guidelines were not written overnight. Facebook should emulate Wikipedia where they can, and they should probably impose strict controls where they can’t, lest they become a repository for threats, libel and bitter acrimony. It may well become that in any case.