» Jimmy Wales The Wikipedian

Posts Tagged ‘Jimmy Wales’

Remainders in Light

Tagged as Bangalore, Dan Lewis, Dutch Royal family, German Wikipedia, Google Docs, Jackie Robinson, Jimmy Wales, John Adams, Mike Handel, Murder, On Wikipedia, Political campaigns, Politics Magazine, WikiWars
on April 23, 2010 at 3:54 pm

Because updating The Wikipedian necessarily takes a back seat to my day job — the one that pays me money I need to buy things to stay alive so I am able to keep updating The Wikipedian — I don’t get to write about every Wikipedia story that I might like.

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.

▶ View 2 Comments

Wikipedia in the news

John Patrick Bedell: Pentagon Shooter, Wikipedian

Tagged as Gawker, James Sabow, Jimmy Wales, John Patrick Bedell, Pentagon, September 11, U.S. military, Washington DC, WMATA
on March 5, 2010 at 10:32 am

Last evening, about two miles south of the office building where I work, a crazy guy named John Patrick Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon Metro station, wounding two officers before being killed by return fire. While police are still sorting through his motives, bloggers are combing through the trail of his Internet activity. One thing we know already: Bedell was a contributor to Wikipedia.

The website Media Elites was the first to locate his user account, which has since been suspended (reason given: “User is deceased”). The user page for Bedell’s account has been shielded from public viewing; no public explanation was given, but this is almost certainly to prevent Wikipedia from becoming a posthumous soapbox for Bedell’s views (Wikipedia tolerates unorthodox beliefs, but not when they become the impetus for attempted murder). However, Media Elites thought to copy and republish the full text before Wikipedia’s administrators stepped in. Here is an excerpt:

I apologize for the graphic content of some of my contributions, but detailed evidence is sometimes necessary to address important matters. I am very disturbed by the fact that Col. Sabow’s civilian superiors and their successors have been able to continue their narco-mercantilism. For historical comparison, I might resemble the odd German still complaining about the murders of the Night of the Long Knives in 1938(?). Of course, Wikipedia didn’t exist in 1938!

While his User page is gone, Bedell’s Talk page and Edit history remain. From these vestiges of his editing activity, we can learn much about his interests and some about his personality:

As declared in his former User page, Bedell was focused on adding information related to the late Marine Col. James Sabow, whose apparent suicide is apparently believed by conspiracy theorists (which Bedell clearly was) to have been a murder covered up by the U.S. government. Bedell created an article about Sabow on more than one occasion. Said page was deleted on more than one occasion — the deletion debates are still available, here and here — partly for containing original research.

Bedell was an occasional but occasionally very active editor. His edits span 2006 to 2009, although he did not edit (at least from this account) even a single time during 2008. While much of his activity was related to advancing his views, this was not the sum of his activity. His first contribution was in November 2006 with a minor edit to the Bureaucracy article. His last was in August 2009, creating a redirect from one page to another, about the company Inslaw Inc.

Bedell was familiar with Wikipedia conventions, probably as a consequence of being thwarted in his efforts by other editors. Rather than giving up, Bedell studied up on the community, making for what I can best describe as sophisticated weirdness. Here he is commenting on an obscure project page, making a “confession” that only kind of makes sense. Here he is on Jimmy Wales’ Talk page, challenging Wikipedia to approve his Sabow article and “create an environment where wikitruth, wikijustice, and wikilove may prevail.”

Bedell joined a few subcommunities within Wikipedia’s ranks. He listed himself as a member of WikiProject Military History and WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Many of his edits were minor changes, constructive in nature, frequently on esoteric or offbeat topics: Khalistan movement, Basilar skull fracture, Human penis size, Joseph Stalin, David Icke, Vince Foster and so on.

Although his articles on Sabow were deleted twice in February 2007, other articles that he created remain, most prolifically about U.S. government and military officials. Some of these include William G. Thrash, Peter D. Williams, Roger E. Combs and Tony L. Cothron. The article Air Intelligence Officer is also his. In February 2007 — by far his greatest period of activity, he created the article September 11 demolitions. It has since been redirected to World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories.

While political bloggers argue over whether Bedell was a member of the far-left or the far-right, such arguments are really less about Bedell and more about the participants. As Gawker put it, Bedell was “clearly intelligent” but “nonetheless a certifiable wackjob”.

Likewise, I can imagine some who would depict Bedell as a typically obsessive Wikipedian, although as Media Elites notes, his Internet activity included Facebook, YouTube and Amazon, although it seems not Twitter. Believe me, I have known obsessive Wikipedians, just as I have known people on the far-left and far-right, and they haven’t shot anybody. Bedell’s participation in Wikipedia was as incidental as his politics; the content of his madness and platform for its expression are less important than the fact of it.

Update: It should come as no surprise, now John Patrick Bedell is the subject of a Wikipedia article himself.

▶ View 1 Comment

Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia critics, Wikipedia in the news

Google’s Gift to Wikipedia Probably Not Evil

Tagged as Elevation Partners, Eric Schmidt, Jimmy Wales, Larry Page, Roger McNamee, SEO, Sergei Brin, Techmeme, The Inquirer, Valleywag, Wall Street Journal, Wikimedia Foundation, WIkipedia, Wikipedia Review
on March 3, 2010 at 11:29 pm

This is a few days old now, but if you haven’t already heard, Google gave Wikipedia $2 million dollars to help with its never-sated appetite for bandwidth and “increasing … multimedia needs.” Here are two of the Internet’s most important websites getting together, and I’d have thought it would’ve been worth more than a small roundup on Techmeme.

Reported the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 18:

Google Inc., the Internet’s most profitable company, is giving $2 million to support Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven reference tool that has emerged as one of the Web’s most-read sites.

Good.

Wikimedia Foundation, owner of Wikipedia, said Wednesday that Google has donated $2 million to further develop the popular encyclopedia and other projects.

Awesome. Right.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, broke the news on Twitter on Tuesday, followed by a formal announcement from the nonprofit organization.

Twitter, well played.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in a statement, called Wikipedia “one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet…this vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”

You bet. Of course. But why now?

To some this raises the question of what Wikipedia might do for Google; after all, a sizable donation could be said to create the possibility of a Conflict of Interest. Previous donations, such as that from a conspicuous Silicon Valley VC and partner of Elevation Partners (not Bono), have raised eyebrows. And everyone knows about Jimmy Wales’ occasional willingness to cut special someones (and Google is) a break — at least until the community gets involved.

But this question is probably backward. Wikipedia already helps Google, and by helping Wikipedia, Google helps itself.

Google depends on Wikipedia to provide topical, authoritative results at the top of its search results pages (SERPs, in SEO-speak) on more subjects than any other website. One occasionally-discussed, conspiracy-tinged theory has Google purposefully privileging Wikipedia precisely because it “cleans up” their search results. That’s possible.

But that isn’t needed to explain Wikipedia’s prominence on Google. It guarantees, for a range of topics functionally as vast as Google searches are regularly performed, an end result that is usually informative, free (as in beer, but liberty too) and not-for-profit, “not evil” and reliably neutral in a Switzerland kind of way. From what we know about Google’s recommendations for webmasters, no website is so organized as well around the Google algorithm as Wikipedia, whether we’re talking about software, community or purpose. It’s basically Google’s perfect website.

Yeah, I would give Wikipedia $2 million, too. And even though it’s positively swimming in cash, I’d probably give it some more.

▶ View 1 Comment

Flagged Revisions, Wikipedia critics

Jimmy Wales Weighs in on Flagged Revisions

Tagged as Farhad Manjoo, Huffington Post, Jimmy Wales, Time
on September 22, 2009 at 11:14 am

My post this weekend made a point of separating uninformed Wikipedia criticism from informed Wikipedia criticism. One that I listed as meriting a response was the weirdly-titled article “Where Wikipedia Ends” by Farhad Manjoo in Time. In fact, only a day later Wikipedia co-founder and (these days mostly) spiritual leader Jimmy Wales took on the hype at Huffington Post. Here’s the core of his response:

[M]aybe you read this story on Time.com: “They recently instituted a major change, imposing a layer of editorial control on entries about living people. In the past, only articles on high-profile subjects like Barack Obama were protected from anonymous revisions. Under the new plan, people can freely alter Wikipedia articles on, say, their local officials or company head — but those changes will become live only once they’ve been vetted by a Wikipedia administrator.”

That’s all very interesting, albeit completely untrue.

Imagine if the stories told instead said things like this:

“In a major shift towards greater openness, Wikipedia is taking the first steps towards doing away with controls that kept certain pages ‘protected’ or ‘locked’ for many years. Previously, certain high profile and high risk biographies and other entries were kept locked to prevent vandalism by users who had not registered accounts on the site for a ‘waiting period’ of 4 days.”

“The new feature, long advocated by the site’s founder Jimmy Wales, eliminates that restriction by allowing anyone to edit these pages, even without logging in. The secret to being able to do this is that the new feature creates a queue where tens of thousands of longtime users of the site can approve these changes - changes that were previously completely forbidden.”

What? Really? The solution to the problem of bad speech is actually more speech? Openness and collaboration actually work?

Nevertheless, it is true. English Wikipedia will soon launch a new feature that will allow you to edit, as an inexperienced user, articles that have previously been locked more-or-less continuously for years.

To read more about flagged revisions, see Flagged Revisions Come to the English Wikipedia.

▶ Comment

Wikipedia Optimization

Searching for Wikipedia Assistance on Craigslist

Tagged as Conflict of Interest, Craigslist, Jimmy Wales, Microsoft, Portland Oregon, Rick Jelliffe
on March 22, 2009 at 4:00 pm

Here’s an interesting request for Wikipedia assistance on Craigslist, sent to me by a friend and former colleague from my hometown of Portland, Oregon — coincidentally, also the birthplace of the wiki — just a few days ago:

some wikipedia help (SW Portland) Date: 2009-03-18, 11:01PM PDT I am looking for help with wikipedia. I could really use a good wikipedia editor willing to help and post what seems reasonable on Wikipedia within the rules. The topic is "string matching algorithms and structured data". You need to have a basic undertsnading of this topic. Your need to be an experienced wiki editor and have credit in the wikipedia community regarding such topics.

I’ve clipped a bit from the bottom, but it also includes this:

* Location: SW Portland
* it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
* Compensation: $25+ depends on qualifications.

With the math knowledge requirement and low monetary offer, I am not surprised that the ad remains at the time of this writing.

The mention of compensation could well raise concerns among editors who are wary of financial interests influencing content on Wikipedia. While I am sympathetic to this point of view for the simple reason that they are often correct — people who are willing to put money against getting something changed on Wikipedia are likely to be willing to pay for edits that satisfy their interests but fall short of Wikipedia’s goals — this is also why the Conflict of Interest guideline specifically states: Where advancing outside interests is more important to an editor than advancing the aims of Wikipedia, that editor stands in a conflict of interest. How serious is the advertiser about following this? I’d say the phrase “what seems reasonable on Wikipedia within the rules” has to be pretty close, but what may seem “reasonable” to someone unfamiliar with Wikipedia guidelines may nevertheless conflict with them.

While this request appears to be small ball, it does remind me of the time when a Microsoft employee offered Australian programmer Rick Jelliffe money to edit a Wikipedia article of interest to the company. Presumably knowing he would be sympathetic, Microsoft instructed Jelliffe to use his best judgment, and the controversy only kicked off once Jelliffe himself wrote a blog post about it. Notwithstanding comments from the likes of Jimmy Wales saying he was “disappointed” in the situation, it is unrealistic to expect that interested parties cannot seek to correct inaccurate or incomplete information — which is what Microsoft says it was doing. Lost in the controversy was the possibility that IBM, Microsoft’s rival, may have had people anonymously weighting the article in question.

Ultimately, Jelliffe’s biggest mistake was not disclosing the arrangement on the article’s Talk page at the time of his edits. This may have meant additional scrutiny on the page, but that comes with the territory. And if anyone takes up this guy’s offer, I’d recommend they do the same.

▶ Comment

Tweeting Wikipedia

Twitter + Wikipedia = How Can I Not Write About This?

Tagged as C-SPAN, Jimmy Wales, John McCain, Nevada, Twitter, Wikia
on March 3, 2009 at 6:57 am

I hadn’t realized that Sen. John McCain was on Twitter as @SenJohnMcCain, but with 127,000+ followers I am going to assume that it’s the real one and @JohnMcCain at ~6,700 followers is just a supporter. Given McCain’s war injuries it’s unlikely he’s typing these up himself (all updates are “from web”) but it’s nevertheless official, and the following tweet was just featured on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal a few moments ago:

I wasn’t familiar with the project, but a quick Google search reveals that he is obviously talking about the Online Nevada Encyclopedia.

Although I tend to share McCain’s skepticism that an encyclopedia of state history is something the federal government should be funding, my Wikipedia-specific thought was: Wikipedia guidelines may well not allow many of the articles the Nevada Humanities organization might want to create. In fact, Wikipedia suggests to frustrated newcomers that if Wikipedia doesn’t fit their goals, then perhaps starting another wiki is the way to go (where Jimmy Wales’ for-profit Wikia is theoretically poised to benefit).

Upon closer inspection, this putative New Mexico “encyclopedia” is not itself presented as a wiki, the writing style is far different and the so are the citation styles. The site runs to perhaps a few hundred articles at most so it’s highly conceivable that many or most could be rewritten and included in Wikipedia. But somehow I doubt Nevada would get a federal grant to do that.

▶ Comment

William Beutler on Wikipedia

The Wikipedian

Posts Tagged ‘Jimmy Wales’

Remainders in Light

John Patrick Bedell: Pentagon Shooter, Wikipedian

Google’s Gift to Wikipedia Probably Not Evil

Jimmy Wales Weighs in on Flagged Revisions

Searching for Wikipedia Assistance on Craigslist

Twitter + Wikipedia = How Can I Not Write About This?

About

Meta

About