William Beutler on Wikipedia

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My Wikitinerary: Day 3 at Wikimania DC

Tagged as on July 14, 2012 at 6:22 am

Wikimania logoWe have arrived at the last day (of official events) at Wikimania, which begins shortly with an opening plenary by the Wikimedia Foundation’s executive director, Sue Gardner. As expected, my Wikimania attendance yesterday was limited on account of other obligations; today I’ll be around for most of the events. Here are a few of the panels and presentations I’m interested in today:

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10:30 – 11:50

Title: Getting elected thanks to Wikipedia. Social network influence on politics.
Speaker: Damian Finol
Category: Wikis and the Public Sector
Description: Wikipedia and politicians is a contentious topic—one I wrote about for Campaigns & Elections in April 2010. This seems to be a bit different: it will be focused on Venezuelan politics, but the question: does having a good Wikipedia page help win elections? is one I’d like to hear how others would answer.

Title: Iterate your cross-pollinated strategic synergy, just not on my Wikipedia!
Speaker: Tom Morris
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: Like any small community focused on a unique project, Wikipedia and its Wikimedia sister projects have developed a kind of jargon all its own. This talk will focus on the language used on WMF and how it can be simplified for clarity, especially to encourage participation of new editors and non-native English speakers.

Title: Wikimedia on social media
Speaker: Jeromy-Yu Chan, Tango Chan, Slobodan Jakoski, Kiril Simeonovski, Guillaume Paumier, Naveen Francis, Christophe Henner
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: As I tweeted the other day, English-speaking Wikipedians are often disdainful of Facebook, for reasons that would take some time to unpack. Twitter too was disfavored for the similar service Identi.ca—the latter is open source, a plus for many—although I think the Twitter has gained a share of acceptance by now. Indeed, the proceedings of Wikimania have been heavily tweeted, just like any conference. So: “The goal of this panel is to share experience on the use of social media throughout the Wikimedia movement, and to share best practices to collectively improve our use of these communication channels.” What are best practices now?

12:10 -13:30

Title: What does THAT mean? Engineering jargon and procedures explained
Speaker: Sumana Harihareswara and possibly Rob Lanphier or additional members of the engineering staff of the Wikimedia Foundation
Category: Technology and Infrastructure
Description: Speaking of jargon, this is supposed to be a non-techie explanation of the technical aspects of Wikimedia. As a non-techie, I could stand for someone to explain how Wikipedia uses squids to me again.

Title: The bad assumptions of the copyright discussion; Blacking out Wikipedia
Speaker: James Alexander; panel
Category: Wikis and the Public Sector
Description: January’s Wikipedia blackout in protest of proposed U.S. legislation tightening copyright and intellectual property enforcement on the web (SOPA and PIPA) was very controversial, and remains so. Jimmy Wales, in his opening plenary, addressed the issue, suggesting blackouts would be considered only for similar issues. The first talk is shorter and appears to be on the issue of copyright. The panel is longer and will discuss the decision to blackout, and how the blackout worked, how the blackout page was designed and the media’s response.

14:30 – 15:50

Title: 11 years of Wikipedia, or the Wikimedia history crash course you can edit
Speaker: Guillaume Paumier
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: Exactly what it sounds like, a history lesson on the last 11 year years of Wikimedia/pedia history. This is a 70 minute talk. Having read Andrew Lih’s “The Wikipedia Revolution” and Andrew Dalby’s “The World and Wikipedia” there is probably not much here I won’t know about already, but I still find it interesting nonetheless.

Title: The end of notability
Speaker: David Goodman
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: Notability, on Wikipedia, refers to a widely-discussed guideline which recommends whether a given subject deserves a standalone Wikipedia article or not. It is very contentious, it is the inspiration for the ideological split between inclusionists and deletionists, and was a key focus of John Siracusa in the “Hypercritical” podcast episode I wrote about earlier this year. This talk will focus on the topic of notability guidelines and how we can’t always find two reliable sources providing substantial coverage for some topics that probably should have articles. Goodman seems to be suggesting that we have articles on topics people want information about regardless of standard notability, but with a twist: should there be a “Wikipedia Two” to satisfy the many non-notable college athletes and politicians whose fans and supporters would like to create articles about them. Plus, Goodman (DGG on Wikipedia) is a bit of a character, so that should be interesting, too.

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OK, I’ve got to race down to the GWU campus now if I’m to catch Gardner’s talk. Look for me on Twitter as @thewikipedian, and I’ll write more here soon!

My Wikitinerary: Day 2 at Wikimania DC

Tagged as on July 13, 2012 at 2:19 am

Wikimania logoWikimania Day 1 is on the books, and it was a busy one. Mary Gardiner’s keynote delivered on the mostly-male Wikimedia community’s promise that they care about female participation (and as many noted, the female presence at Wikimania is very strong) while Jimmy Wales fulfilled his role as the conference touchstone, while adding a dose of levity, or two.

Although, did anyone else notice he was credited as “Founder” of Wikipedia and not “Co-founder”? Well, I did.

My coverage of the first day of the conference was doled out in 140-characters-or-fewer bursts on Twitter as @thewikipedian, and so it will be on subsequent days.

As to the first subsequent day ahead: as much as I’d like to give my full day over to Wikimania, regular readers will know that I live here, and Friday I’m still basically on the clock. So I may not get to all the sessions I would like. But here is what I’m hoping to attend:

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9:00 – 10:20

Time will tell if I make it to the first of the breakout sessions. If I do, it will probably be:

Title: Ask the Operators
Speaker: Leslie Carr, Ben Hartshorne, Jeff Green, Ryan Lane, Rob Halsell
Category: Technology and Infrastructure
Description: Just what it sounds like, a chance to ask the people who keep Wikipedia up and running about how it works, their jobs, and apparently… unicorns? I doubt this session will actually be dominated by bronies, but if it is, then I concede I have been sufficiently warned.

I may also attend:

Title: Giving readers a voice: Lessons from article feedback v5
Speaker: Fabrice Florin
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: I missed his presentation on new tools yesterday, and I’m intrigued by this as well. Good feedback is hard to come by, as a Wikipedia editor, and I’m curious to find out how those most involved think the current feedback tool is working. When I wrote about it last year, I was skeptically optimistic.

10:50 – 12:10

If you’re keeping score at home, it seems that I am most interested in the “WikiCulture and Community” sessions, and why shouldn’t I be? The Wikipedian tries to be about making Wikipedia’s goings-on understandable to the non-editor, so this track is a natural fit.

Title: Wikipedia in the Twitter age
Speaker: Panel moderated by Andrew Lih
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: How does Wikipedia handle the fast pace of information in the Twitter age? Can Twitter be a reliable source? (I think the correct answer is: generally, no.) The role Twitter played with Wikipedia in the 2011 Egyptian revolution and other breaking news events will be discussed here. And I’m always a fan of Andrew Lih’s take on Wikipedia.

13:10 – 14:30

One of the panels I wanted to see yesterday was rescheduled last-minute for this time period, and I very well may still try to check that out. But I’m also fascinated by this one:

Title: Eternal December: How awful arguments are killing the Wiki, and why not to make them
Speaker: Oliver Keyes
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: For good or ill, Wikipedia is a place that many people go to argue about all kinds of things—some very important, and others not so much. This talk will cover the resistance and curmudgeonliness of “Power Editors” and how they prevent the implementation of new developments on Wikipedia and discourage newbies from contributing.

There are other good panels in this time slot, so room-hopping again is a thing I would like to try, although on day one I found it a challenge. If I manage, I like:

Title: Hey, its trending! Let’s update that Wikipedia article!
Speaker: Arkaitz Zubiaga, Taylor Cassidy, Heng Ji
Category: Research, Analysis and Education
Description: This one is a discussion of a possible system that suggests revisions for Wikipedia based on Twitter activity; much Wikipedia editing activity is driven by the news, and Twitter often breaks news before the media has had a chance to write a full story. The panelists will outline goals, details of the system and progress of this research project.

Title: Bots and Wikipedia: It’s OK to be lazy!
Speaker: Gaëtan Landry
Category: Technology and Infrastructure
Description: Although I lack the technical skills to write a real software program myself, I love me some bots. I.e. automated programs that wander around Wikipedia making changes based on an algorithm—fixing common misspellings, reverting obvious vandalism, and the like. The submission says it won’t be highly technical, which is probably good for yours truly.

15:10 – 16:30

I said above that Friday will have to be a working day for me, and it’s very possible that I’ll cut out in the afternoon to wrap some things up for the week. But if I’m still around, I think I may visit:

Title: Refighting the War of 1812 on Wikipedia
Speaker: Richard Jensen
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: From the description: “This year is the bicentennial of the War of 1812, and my presentation will examine how Canadian and American editors have handled the war in the main article. Sometimes they re-fought the war, as they balanced scholarship/RS and patriotism in a quest to tell the world what really happened.” I can go in for that.

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One last shameless plug: and if you’re not following me as @thewikipedian on Twitter, then you’re missing out on a lot of interesting tweets, including some very smart people that I am dedicating, and some things that I hope other people are smart.

I’ll see you there in a few hours!

My Wikitinerary: Day 1 at Wikimania DC

Tagged as on July 12, 2012 at 5:15 am

Wikimania logoIn a few hours, the first day of general activities at Wikimania—the official annual conference of Wikimedia Foundation—begins right here in Washington, DC. It is a global conference, in fact this is the first time Wikimania is being held in the United States since 2006, when it was hosted on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This year, it just happens to be outside my front door. What’s more, it is being held on the campus of the George Washington University, precisely where I launched this very blog at a (much smaller) conference in March 2009.

So: it’s a big day ahead—big weekend, but I have to focus for now. A review of the official schedule reveals an almost overwhelming number of events. After reading through the various panels and presentations, I think I have a pretty good idea of my day ahead, which I’d like to share here now:

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09:00 – 11:10

The only place to be, indeed the only official event at this time, is the opening ceremony, keynote and plenary. Most of the wider media attention that Wikimania generates will be probably be focused on Wikipedia co-founder and unofficial mascot Jimmy Wales on “The State of the Wiki”, but I’ll be interested to see the opening keynote by Mary Gardiner, an Australian computer programmer who is also a leader in “increasing participation of women in open technology and culture”. Wikipedia editors have long skewed heavily toward men, but in recent years more attention has been focused on how to change that. I am a skeptic—Wikipedia is hardly alone in this fact, particularly among technology tactics—but I am also interested in hearing what she says, on this very high-profile stage for such a topic.

11:40 – 13:00

Here the breakout sessions begin, and it is truly a poverty of riches from a Wikipedian perspective; there is too much to possibly take all in. What follows is an estimation of the panels I am likely to check out:

Title: “This is my voice”: the motivations of highly active Wikipedians
Speaker: Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description:One of the most common questions I am asked about Wikipedia, and also one of the hardest to answer with anything but anecdotal evidence, is why Wikipedians do what they do. Pinchuk and Walling have interviewed some of the most active Wikipedia editors to study the motives behind why they participate. Intriguingly, their submission includes the following teaser: “Note: after this talk, we will be making a special piece of conference swag available to any interested Wikipedians which will let them show off their own motivation for editing.”

Title: Engaging editors on Wikipedia: A roadmap of new features
Speaker: Fabrice Florin
Category: Technology and Infrastructure
Description: This talk will discuss new features on Wikipedia that make it easier to edit and the impact this will have on attracting new editors and retaining current ones. This follows a 20-minute talk so if I leave right after the Pinchuk / Walling’s talk and sneak in quietly I can probably catch most of this. At least, I presume this will work. You can never really tell how a conference will work until one arrives.

14:00 – 15:20

Title: A talk page is a broken message wall: Building a more efficient communication
Speaker: Danny Horn, Tomasz Odrobny
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: These days, I spend more time on Wikipedia’s discussion pages than I do editing the encyclopedia itself, so I am extremely familiar with how these pages work—and how they don’t. This presentation will demonstrate a new talk feature that will make it easier to track conversations you are interested in without receiving watchlist notifications about topics you don’t actually care about. Interesting! Although Wikipedia has put much more public attention on a forthcoming WYSIWYG editor, I think this could actually be a bigger deal. If it works, of course.

The above talk is followed by another one that I find fascinating for exploring the insider-outsider dynamic around Wikipedia, featuring the presenters from the first breakout session:

Title: Welcome to Wikipedia, now please go away? improving how we communicate with new editors
Speaker: Steven Walling, Maryana Pinchuk
Category: WikiCulture and Community
Description: On Wikipedia, veteran editors run across the same kind of activity by new editors so often that they have developed a deep reserve of templated messages—some friendly, many unfriendly. According to the session’s topic page, “On English Wikipedia and many other projects, automated warnings and welcomes currently make up about 80% of first messages to new editors.” Wow. I had not thought about it before, but it makes complete sense. I’ll be curious to see where the state-of-the-art thinking is on this topic.

15:40 – 17:00

For the final breakout session, there is one long sustained discussion of Wikidata that I am awfully tempted to spend my time at, but there is another talk that I find interesting within this period:

Title: How Wikidata fits into the global web of data; Wikidata implementation and integration; Wikidata as a platform
Speaker: Denny Vrandečić; Daniel Kinzler; Jeroen De Dauw
Category: Technology and Infrastructure
Description: What is Wikidata? Indeed, what is it precisely. It is only the most ambitious new Wikimedia Foundation project to launch in recent years. As the first panel description says: “Wikidata’s goal is to move the rich structured data currently encoded in Wikipedia templates into a central repository, which will be available for re-use on all Wikimedia projects, but also to 3rd party services. We will introduce what Wikidata aims to do and how: centralizing language links, centralizing data for the infoboxes, and all of that in the first new Wikimedia project since 2006.” Yeah, that’s not too ambitious. The first talk appears to be more of an overview and the two following it seem to be more technical.
Location: Grand Ballroom
Length: Each talk is 25 minutes

Title: Wikimedia relations with government, lobbying and public relations
Speaker: James Forrester, Philippe Beaudette
Category: Wikis and the Public Sector
Description: If Wikidata gets too technical for me, I’ll be heading over to this panel. In my professional life public relations is one of my primary activities, often involving Wikipedia—as I have written about before—and so I will be very interested to see where this discussion goes. If there is any presentation where I am likely to participate, this may be it, depending on where the discussion goes. Why not come find out?

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And that is the end of the official activities for the day. More events stretch into the evening, but I won’t be at them. Tonight, Roger Waters brings The Wall to the Verizon Center, which I will be seeing with a friend from high school and college in town just for this event. Actually, we’ll be seeing this if StubHub and FedEx combine to deliver these tickets during the day today, which they have so far been rather slow about.

I know… this has nothing to do with Wikipedia. But it’s highly relevant to my day ahead at Wikimania. Fingers crossed everything works out! Meantime, I will be tweeting the day’s activities from my @thewikipedian Twitter account, so please follow! And if all goes well I will post tomorrow’s wikitinerary here soon.

The Electronic Slide: United States Congress Still Editing Wikipedia

Tagged as , , , ,
on March 2, 2009 at 6:39 pm

As I mentioned in the first post, I presented at TransparencyCamp yeserday. As promised, I posted the related PowerPoint deck to my SlideShare account, but you can click through it right here (and if you’re looking at this on the front page yes, it’s too wide, I’ll get that fixed as soon as I can and remove this parenthetical statement once it has been):

If it doesn’t make complete sense, that’s understandable — it’s meant to support a discussion, after all. However, this was the first time I’ve given this particular talk and, like others I’ve given, it will benefit from additional iterations and refinement. I’ll certainly do plenty of that on The Wikipedian — looking more closely at the Wikipedia edits not just of other members of Congress, but of other government agencies.

In the meantime, you can take a look for yourself at the recent edits from the IP address of the U.S. House of Representatives. And if you’re feeling especially adventuresome, try to find the good-faith edit that I cleaned up and cited.