William Beutler on Wikipedia

Posts Tagged ‘New York Times’

Direction of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation

How the Apple Watch—and Ted Danson—Can Save Wikipedia

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on May 18, 2015 at 12:31 pm

Ted Danson on Apple Watch by The WikipedianAfter a week with an Apple Watch on my wrist, I’m leaning strongly toward the conclusion that the smartwatch (or something very much like it) is going to be part of our daily lives for a long time to come. Certain simple tasks are in fact more convenient if never more than an arm’s length away, with less fiddling than a smartphone requires. Right now, for me, it’s text messages. Soon, it could be any number of things.

I suspect that looking up basic facts on Wikipedia is a good candidate for this type of in-the-moment (and what-the-hell) information gathering:

What exactly was the Missouri Compromise again?

What is the capital of Bavaria?

What sitcom was Ted Danson on after Cheers?

After all, one of Wikipedia’s most common but least advertised purposes is the settling of bar bets.

If the Apple Watch had an app to facilitate quick information retrieval of this sort, I’d probably use it. And I’m intrigued by the New York Times watch app, for which the paper’s writers actually prepare brief, two to three sentence summaries of stories. If you want to read more, it’s no trouble to open it up on your phone, but you’ve already got the gist. By my count, the Apple Watch comfortably fits approximately 25 words on the screen at a time. Below, what a story looks like on my wrist in this morning’s edition:

NYT Apple Watch app

But Wikipedia sure isn’t set up to deliver information like this. Over time, in fact, Wikipedia entries have tended toward maximalism. To demonstrate the point, let’s return to Ted Danson because, well, why wouldn’t you be curious about Ted Danson? Here are the first 25 words of Danson’s Wikipedia biography as of this writing:

Edward Bridge “Ted” Danson III (born December 29, 1947) is an American actor, author, and producer, well known for his role as lead character Sam

What have we learned?

  1. Danson’s middle name is Bridge and he is a son of a Jr.—uh, I guess that’s some OK trivia
  2. His birthday is two days before New Year’s Eve—quickly, subtract his birthday from the current year!
  3. He is an author and a producer—although if I asked ten friends to describe Danson for me, not one would ever choose to include “author” or “producer”

And we haven’t even got to Cheers yet! (Since you’re slightly forgetful and obviously wondering, the name of Danson’s follow-up series was Becker.) Clearly, the goal here is not to impart information quickly. Thoroughness makes sense on the desktop, and does just fine on most mobile devices (the official Wikipedia mobile apps are quite nice, certainly to read on), but it makes no sense on the wrist.

This sounds to me like an amazing opportunity for the Wikipedia community. One problem in recent years has been the simple fact that most articles which should exist already do (4.83 million and slowing!). The software design and social dynamics of wikis are ideal for rapid collaboration and creation of articles, but maintenance, including updates, rewrites, and debates over specific content is much more frustrating and less obviously rewarding. No wonder editors are drifting away.

Apple Watch by Yasunobu IkedaBecause the wearable platform, to the extent that it has a significant future—and to be fair with you I don’t know for certain that it does, but yes, I am bullish—represents a different mode of information consumption, well, a whole new 4.83 million entries will need to be written. Instead of aiming for scientific exactitude, they’ll need to be informative and concise: topic summarized in 25 words, including as few sentences as possible for more context. Of course, a watch app would need to be created. (And the Wikimedia Foundation would probably develop first for Android Wear, but iOS and Watchkit wouldn’t be far behind.)

It might bring back former contributors, who had left after opportunities to create new things dried up. Better still, it might provide an easy point of access for new, younger contributors, who have never had the point of entry as those who started editing in the project’s early years. At last year’s Wikimania, game designer Raph Koster suggested (only half-joking) an occasional “forest fire” of content deletion, in order to create new tasks for restless editors. For those of us who attended, the appeal was obvious but the reasons it would never happen were even more so. But instead of clearing new land, we might instead have discovered an extensive new archipelago.

So, here’s my suggestion for Edward Bridge Danson III:

Ted Danson (age 67) is an American actor best known for his lead role as bartender Sam Malone for 11 seasons of TV sitcom Cheers.

Note, that’s 25 words exactly.

Danson currently stars on TV procedural CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and before that led the sitcom Becker for six seasons.

Other appearances include the film Three Men and a Baby, TV series Damages, and on Curb Your Enthusiasm (as himself).

Danson is married to actress Mary Steenburgen. In the 1990s, he was famously involved with comedian Whoopi Goldberg.

Note, each of those paragraphs is 20 words or fewer. Now, you may disagree with some detail selection. I haven’t told you he was born in San Diego, or about his early TV appearances, or about Three Men and a Little Lady, but that’s really not necessary and, besides, I think you’ve got a pretty good idea who Ted Danson is. Would you like to know more? Follow a link back to the full version on your phone.

Ted-Danson-Navigtation-PopupHow would this actually be implemented? I’ll be honest, someone more technically inclined than myself would have to figure this out. But it would minimally require the creation of a new parameter or sub-page associated with every public-facing article. A second step would be creating a user-friendly interface; perhaps a project page on Wikipedia that provides links to random articles needing the creation of short entries. It might be something to integrate with Wikidata, but I wouldn’t be the first to confess my ineptitude with Wikidata.

Does WMF’s engineering team have the wherewithal to make this happen? Good question! And one I cannot answer. However, with a staff including seven people on the mobile app team, plus eight more focused on desktop and mobile web experience, I’m going out on a limb and saying a new article sub-page, editor-facing project page, and watch app could be added to the workflow. (What’s that about Flow? Nothing… nothing…)

Isn’t this what navigation pop-ups and hovercards do? No, not really. The pop-ups are nice enough but are pre-populated from the intro to each entry itself. Perhaps the hovercards and pop-ups should actually display text from the wearable version instead, but perhaps not. They also are not enabled automatically, so most of you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

Isn’t this what Simple Wikipedia does? Sort of, but not quite. Simple Wikipedia indeed provides shorter versions of Wikipedia entries. Its target audience is supposed to be children and ESL students, although I suspect its primary use is Wikipedians amusing themselves. Twelve years into its existence, it only has about 113,000 entries. One of them in fact is Ted Danson, but his biography there was only visited about 70 times in April 2015, whereas his biography on the main English Wikipedia was accessed almost 35,000 times. Also, about that entry:

Screenshot 2015-05-18 11.03.45

Et tu, Simple Wikipedia?

Imagine: a project to write Wikipedia short! And to write part of Wikipedia that hasn’t been done yet! It wouldn’t require too much back end work, it would have Wikipedia boldly making a small bet on the big potential for a new platform, and it might even create a “new gold rush” of content creation across Wikipedia, both in English and its many foreign language projects.

And so I turn the question to the Wikipedians in my audience: what’s the next step?

Photo illustration by The Wikipedian; Apple Watch image by Justin14; Ted Danson photo by Rob Dicaterino; Apple Watch by Yasunobu Ikeda; Wikipedia images via Wikimedia Foundation and ⌘-⇧-4.

Deletion debates, Wikipedia in the news

Wikipedia’s Struggle with Self-Reference Amid the Passing of One of Its Own

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on April 22, 2014 at 11:54 am

Wikipedia intends to be a passive observer of world affairs and recorder of knowledge, so as a community and ruleset, it usually prefers to avoid referencing itself in its own articles. But Wikipedia too makes the news, so it’s unavoidable that sometimes Wikipedia has to write about Wikipedia—and you may not be surprised to find that Wikipedia has rules governing these circumstances. But sometimes this becomes a more sensitive issue, and more difficult to work through. This week is one of those times.

The current disagreement surrounds the recently-created article about Adrianne Wadewitz, a much admired Wikipedia veteran and Occidental College literature scholar, who died in a rock climbing accident earlier this month. A non-famous person in life, Wadewitz was subsequently the focus of an article by Noam Cohen, who writes about Wikipedia for the New York Times. Other obits appeared as well, from BuzzFeed and Jezebel, among others.

Yet the article was nominated for deletion on the same day this article was created—in fact, within four edits and 30 minutes of its creation. The nominating editor cited a plausible argument: Wikipedia’s guidance not to include articles about “People notable for only one event”—in this case, tragically, her death. The next editor to comment also pointed to a guideline advising that “Wikipedia is not a memorial site”. And so the early “voting”—strictly speaking, Wikipedians weighing in are not voting (or “!vote” as they like to call it) but this is a tricky concept so I’ll leave it for another time—ran toward deleting it. Then a string of editors made the case for keeping it. Here is a selection of thoughtful arguments on either side:

  • Delete This is a difficult time to have this [Articles for Deletion debate], and a hard position to take. My reasoning for voting delete is based on the context and encyclopedic value of her biography – years from now. Those who cite NYT piece as the sole test for notability should consider that she was described and considered notable as a wikipedian – which leads back to Wikipedia being the original source for notability. I know this vote is soon after her passing, probably not a good time to go through this – even if it is kept now, it’s likely it would be voted against in an year, or two or five. It’s sad but the encyclopedic value of her article is not going to change. This has nothing to do with sexism, her activism, opinions or her prolific output – purely about notability. General activism and prolific output have little to no correlation with notability. Besides that, it’s sad to lose one of our own, and she seemed like a great contributor.

  • Strong keep — obituaries in multiple reliable sources, including the NYT, convey notability by themselves, and she’s been featured in other articles published by reliable sources during her life. The content of the obits are largely about her achievements on Wikipedia, which clearly the NYT and other [reliable sources] cited consider significant, even if the commenters above do not.

  • Delete. I believe that awadewit was an incredibly valuable Wikipedia editor, and I cried buckets when I learned of her death. However, her academic career was in its youth and was not that remarkable. Her primary claim to notability is as a Wikipedia editor and activist, and I believe it is an inherent [conflict of interest] for Wikipedia to put up articles recognizing its prolific contributors. The sources may quote her, but they are not really about her. The exception is the obituaries, which were driven from Wikimedia sources. Even if we consider Wikimedia a reliable source, this is incredibly circular – Wikimedia talks lots about a topic, a third-party source picks it up, and now it is all of a sudden notable? I don’t agree. I do not agree that Wikipedia editing is grounds for conferring notability, whether multiple sources confirm that one was an editor or not. I do not agree that Wikimedia activism is grounds for notability, whether multiple sources confirm that fact that one was an activist or not. With all due respect to awadewit’s memory, I do not believe she was notable….and I don’t think she would have considered her life to be worthy of an article here either.

  • Keep – Defective nomination in the first place: BLP-1E [the guideline related to people notable for one event] is for living people. Passes GNG through sources already showing in the piece.

Interestingly, it’s those arguing “Delete” who offer the more carefully argued, more detailed cases. Perhaps it’s because they are motivated more by interpretation of guidelines than conviction that Wadewitz is deserving of an entry. Perhaps it’s because they don’t wish to offend those who have this conviction. Meanwhile, editors who knew her in life have taken both sides of the issue. One thing is clear: there is no consensus among Wikipedia editors whether this article should remain or not. And this leads to an obvious conclusion: when no consensus is met, Wikipedia guidelines default to “keep”. That’s what I expect to happen once the standard week-long discussion period has elapsed, and then I expect it to be re-argued again at some point in the future.

Recently, a biographical entry about a former Wikimedia Foundation employee was successfully nominated for deletion, partly upon her request, after she was publicly fired and this came to represent a disproportionate part of the entry. As it turned out, her eligibility for an article was at best “on the bubble” and hadn’t previously been scrutinized—in part, one imagines, because she is a well-liked member of the community. But once the article turned sour, and the subject wanted it gone, Wikipedians finally thought about it and decided: yeah, she didn’t really deserve one in the first place.

This situation is not even that simple. As one editor says above, I’ve heard that Wadewitz would not have wanted an article about herself. Unfortunately, she isn’t here to comment. In her place, a consensus of Wikipedia editors as influenced by their own self-determined guidelines will settle the matter definitively. Eventually.

Direction of Wikipedia, First Versions, Wikipedia in the news

The Earliest Known Record of Wikipedia Journalism

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on October 12, 2010 at 6:56 am

I’d gotten to wondering, recently, what was the first time Wikipedia was mentioned by a media source? The project began in January 2001, but I’m sure I wasn’t aware of it until sometime in 2003 at the earliest. I have no memory of first learning about it — only a recollection that sometime in the middle of the last decade, I was spending hours and hours, and entire days on some weekends, reading Wikipedia. I wasn’t too curious about where it came from then, but over the last few years, I clearly have been.

So I did what anyone with access to an online news database would do: I looked it up. And the winner appears to be a July 1, 2001 article in the Australian edition of PC World, by one Aldis Ozols. Here it is, in its entirety:

Roll-your-own fount of knowledge: www.wikipedia.com.; editor’s choice.

“A wiki is a collection of interlinked Web pages which can be visited and edited by anyone” goes the definition by Wikipedia. Rising to the challenge, I edited the page on which this statement was made, and behold, my contribution (all two words of it) became part of the Wikipedia.

This is a collaborative project intended to produce a usable encyclopedia through the efforts of many volunteers who surf in from the Net. While this makes it superficially similar to Everything2 (see June issue), there are differences. For instance, Everything2 seeks to be a live, interactive community as well as a reference, whereas Wildpedia [sic] has a more modest goal: to create a freely distributable 100,000 page encyclopedia online. In addition, where Everything2 has a complex system of user ranking and moderation which attempts to grade contributions and their authors, Wikipedia is wide open. Anyone can rock up and modify existing entries, or create new ones as I did.

Astonishingly, the result is not a pile of chaotic nonsense, as one might expect. Perhaps that’s because the project is still small, with only 6000 pages of text and a few dozen contributors, but something more seems to be at work here. Evidently, articles that start off with a one-sided viewpoint are edited and re-edited until they settle into a kind of consensus with which most people are satisfied. In anycase, this is an interesting experiment containing some surprisingly accurate articles.

Surprisingly prescient, if you ask me. Or perhaps just lucky — many a website that garners positive reviews in its early going nonetheless still folds, or descends into chaos. In any case, I’m surprised to find this article is not online — if I’d been first to report on Wikipedia, I’d want to take credit for the fact.

Looking a little further, it seems that most of the Anglosphere reported on Wikipedia before anyone in the U.S. had anything to say about it: England (London Free Press), Canada (Edmonton Sun), Wales (Wales on Sunday) and Northern Ireland (Irish News) all got there first.

Stateside, the first press mention of Wikipedia was in the Gray Lady herself, the New York Times, by someone named Peter Meyers. This story is online, so I will simply quote the lede (sorry, non-journos) and call it good:

Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You

FOR all the human traffic that the Web attracts, most sites remain fairly solitary destinations. People shop by themselves, retrieve information alone and post messages that they hope others will eventually notice. But some sites are looking for ways to enable visitors not only to interact but even to collaborate to change the sites themselves.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) is one such site, a place where 100 or so volunteers have been working since January to compile a free encyclopedia. Using a relatively unknown and simple software tool called Wiki, they are involved in a kind of virtual barn-raising.

Their work, which so far consists of some 10,000 entries ranging from Abba to zygote, in some ways resembles the ad hoc effort that went into building the Linux operating system. What they have accomplished suggests that the Web can be a fertile environment in which people work side by side and get along with one another. And getting along, in the end, may ultimately be more remarkable than developing a full-fledged encyclopedia.

For the curious, here is what the ABBA entry looked like on the day the story ran, and here it is today. And here is something close to what the zygote article looked like then, and what it looks like now. One wonders what it will look like in another ten years.

Update: In the comments, Graham87 locates the exact zygote entry, from the so-called Nostalgia Wikipedia (a topic worthy of its own post, at some point).

Biographies of Living Persons, Direction of Wikipedia, Flagged Revisions, Wikipedia critics, Wikipedia in the news

Flagged Revisions Come to the English Wikipedia

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on August 26, 2009 at 6:39 am

Earlier this week, New York Times web reporter Noam Cohen, who does some of the best Wikipedia reporting this side of The Register, broke the news about a decision by Wikipedia’s parent organization to instate tighter controls on some articles. Wrote Cohen:

Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.

The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.

It’s worth pointing out early on, as Cohen’s story unfortunately did not, that these changes will apply only to biographies of living persons. In Wikipedia, that is a proper noun: Biography of Living Persons (BLP) is one of Wikipedia’s most strenuously enforced policies; earlier this year, Wikipedia veteran Newyorkbrad explained this in a series of posts on Volokh Conspiracy, which The Wikipedian previously discussed.

Blogosphere reaction has been much more widespread than any Wikipedia story that comes to mind from this past year. I think this is because everybody who uses Wikipedia has some opinion about the website’s curious balance between openness and reliability — and now the balance has shifted. I’d say reaction is 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. Here is a walk-through:

Among those who feel that Wikipedia’s openness is key to the site’s success, count Judd Antin at TechnoTaste, who is studying Wikipedia as part of his PhD work:

As part of my dissertation research I’ve been interviewing less experienced Wikipedians about their perceptions of the site. One constant theme has been the perception of a class system in Wikipedia. Casual editors worry that their edits aren’t good enough, and that they’ll be rebuked by Wikipedia’s upper-classes. They perceive a mystical group of higher-order contributors who make Wikipedia work. … This latest move is troubling in that it seems to represent a lack of faith in crowdsourcing and the wisdom of crowds, in the model that made Wikipedia what it is today. This change will also remove another of the important social-psychological incentives that draw new people into the Wikipedia fold: the instant gratification that comes from seeing your work reflected on a Wikipedia page.

This is not always a good thing; Kate McMillan at Small Dead Animals is an example of someone who is the subject of a Wikipedia article, but is not exactly pleased about the fact. She also isn’t exactly optimistic that things will change:

My own Wiki page was instigated by an internet “stalker”, in fact, the same individual who once authored a blogspot site using my stolen identity. Requests to Wikipedia to delete the page went unheeded, and it’s remained a reliable source of misinformation, false attribution of quotes, and drive-by smears ever since. … It wasn’t until I threatened a Wiki editor personally with legal action for restoring defamatory material to the page, that they began to take tighter control of the content.

Another skeptic is Ann Bartow at Madisonian.net:

I have doubts about how effective this is going to be in improving the reliability of the content of Wikipedia entries, but it is a great PR move by Jimmy Wales, that’s for sure.

From the perspective of a frustrated editor, here is Andy Merrett at The Blog Herald:

As someone not in the Wikipedia “elite”, I’ve long since given up trying to edit entries on the site, having already wasted not insignificant time adding information only to have it reversed. I foresee that Wikipedia will increasingly become a place where only a minority of privileged and “trusted” editors have the keys to the kingdom.

That is a plus to others. Among the critics of Wikipedia’s reliability was Lisa Gold at Research Maven, who nonetheless is a skeptic herself:

I’m glad there is finally some acknowledgment among the powers that be at Wikipedia that accuracy is important. But that’s not enough. If accuracy is important, you have to make it a priority and do things on many different levels to try to achieve it. You have to apply your policies to the entire site, not just some articles. You have to bring in people with knowledge, experience, and qualifications to do real editing and fact-checking. (With all of the unemployed editors, fact-checkers, and journalists out there, why not hire a few and let them work their magic.) This new policy is not really about making Wikipedia more accurate, it’s just about trying to stop the embarrassing vandalism stories that hit the news with disturbing regularity.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Dr. Jim West, who appears to have some experience arguing with an intellectual opponent about Wikipedia content. His reaction to the change:

In a word, duh. Now if you’ll do the same for every entry then perhaps your resource might be worth visiting some day. Until then, I think I’ll continue to abstain. I’m not really interested in reading an article on the Dead Sea Scrolls that Raphael Golb has edited using one of his 200 fake names.

While I understand the concerns of both above, I also think they go too far. Striking a balance and offering a more optimistic view is Ben Parr at Mashable:

[W]e can’t help but feel a bit sad that this change had to happen. Wikipedia was egalitarian in the spread and use of information, and it treated everyone as equal contributors of knowledge. While that may not necessarily be true in the real world, it still was the driving force behind the creation of 3 million articles, more than any other encyclopedia could ever hope to boast.

The move was necessary, but it does mark a new chapter in the Wikipedia information age and the end of an old one.

And here’s another philosophical take from Joe Windish at The Moderate Voice:

There is little doubt the debate will be passionate, but that’s exactly as it should be. Eight years into the incredible success of Wikipedia, long one of the 10 most popular sites on the Web, many of us still don’t understand it. … The thousands of volunteer Wikipedian editors take their responsibility seriously. Flagged revisions may or may not work. What’s best about it is that the Wikipedia editorial community will watch and wonder about and debate it. And if it should not succeed, they will try and try again.

My own take on the situation? I don’t know yet. As Andrew Lih explains in his book, The Wikipedia Revolution, the German-language edition has had this feature for several years, and it seems to work there. On the other hand, the English Wikipedia is much larger, and the possibility certainly exists that some articles will be left unchecked and un-updated for extended periods of time. Will the site grow stagnant? Will the vast majority of people who read but do not edit even notice? These are just a few of the operative questions.

WikiProject Flagged Revisions, which will try to keep articles current, was only established on the 19th of August and as yet has just four listed participants. It’s also worth noting, once the details are hammered out — which they are not just yet — the plan will be implemented on a two-month trial basis. And after that? Well, I’m very interested to find out myself.