We wrote the book on Wikipedia

How Wikipedia Works is being published in August! My co-authors are:

• A dashing librarian named Phoebe Ayers.
• A mysterious mathematician and Go champion who calls himself Charles Matthews.

And me? I'm a technical writer & demagogue and also good with Illustrator.



Phoebe has a better understanding of wikipedia's nuts and bolts than anyone, Charles has knowledge of the broad forces inside and outside the project, and I have the ability to work Acoustic Kitty into any screenshot. Between us, we've been with Wikipedia for 47 years and made over five hundred million edits.

I'll be posting information all summer.

But if you pre-order it, you will not only be

1. receiving an utterly awesome and informative book in the mail — a physical book that you can
   • hold in your two hands,
   • take away from the monitor,
   • read in the bath,
   • tuck into your backpack to impress cute foreign exchange students, but! you will also!...
2. be supporting Wikipedia Blog, and
3. making me less broke.

Basically, I'm saying you should buy the book or I will shoot this puppy:



Cheers,

Ben


P.S. I won't actually shoot the puppy.

No real PR problems

Tony Sidaway says:

Actually I run a small rss news aggregator that focuses on news about Wikipedia. In my experience our press is overwhelmingly positive. [Emphasis added -- and yeah, tony's right. I've been reading the google news alerts for a couple years. -Ben] Even the gossipier stuff seems to make a much bigger splash within the community and on its peripheries than it does outside--exactly the reverse of my expectations.

Most of the debate outside Wikipedia circles, in the mainstream press, focuses on the reliability of Wikipedia and its appropriateness for various uses. Those are very appropriate topics for debate and we should take it as a huge compliment that a project built completely by untrained volunteers is regarded as comparable in any way to the works of highly educated specialists. We shouldn't lose sight of that utterly remarkable and unexpected achievement.

The fact that we're criticised (and often rightly so) isn't surprising. The fact that we receive so little criticism and have had so few problems, given the open parameters and huge scope of the project, is one of the most amazing facts of Wikipedia's existence. Wikipedia doesn't have any significant PR problems at present.

---

All the ins and outs of the wikinews/moller thing -- about fifty kilobytes so far. That's the mailing list I know :P

Mike Godwin: "The Foundation has no interest in preventing Wikinews from publishing a story critical of WMF. If you are under the impression the stories were censored because they were critical of WMF, then you have your facts wrong."

So, the idea is that this was a run-of-the-mill libelous article removed* like other libelous articles have been, and for the same reason -- fear of being sued.

But in this case, the person doing the suing would have to be foundation employee Erik Moller, right? I find it unlikely that he'd sue the foundation for failing to hush up wikinews. I freely admit not understanding how lawyers think, though.

* With some ambiguous degree of community involvement. And hey, as long as we're running with this broad a definition, isn't it libel to accuse the article's authors of libel?

You don't fuck with wikinews

Score one for information wants to be free.

Basically, the foundation swatted down Wikinews' editorial independence, killing a story about a foundation bigwig's attitudes toward porn. (This isn't going to endear them to the press.)

(Update: It may be more complex than that. Here's the wikinews discussion; decide for yourself.)

You haven't heard of Wikinews, but they take themselves seriously -- they've interviewed heads of state, etc. Godwin should have known better.

That said, I don't want to take too much joy in wikinews's oldstyle prickliness, just because it sort of sucks to have this kind of infighting between wikiorgans. To be honest, I miss Jimmy having a bigger role; he'd have been able to smooth this over.

(Is the foundation trying to push erik out quietly? I'd sort of hoped they were. If they're not...seriously, guys. Your loyalty is admirable as a personal trait. But erik — forget what I think about him — is a millstone around the foundation's neck. His presence makes it a million times harder to address ways to make wikipedia kid-friendly, ways to get it in classrooms, etc. To address anything, really. Wikipedia runs on good vibes. They're its fuel. That's why Jimmy has been an effective leader, and why Moller throws a spanner in the works.)

Erik Moeller is the Wikimedia Foundation's deputy director and possibly its most powerful member (alongside Sue Gardner, the grownup in residence).

Wikipedia Weekly talked to him last week, but Erik is a fastidiously thorough politician, which makes him a rather boring interview subject. I sat through the whole 40 minutes so you don't have to.

The takeaway: the Foundation seems to be finding its legs. It's paying cheap-ish rent in San Fran, reaching out to the general public (insofar as that exists in silicon valley), and hoping eventually to be known as the Red Cross of information. I'm actually impressed with the way things seem to be going, organizationally. Now get us a stats machine.

Wikimedia receives 3-year, $3,000,000 grant. That's a large fraction of the budget (and it's from the alfred p sloan foundation, in case you're worried).

Two NYT articles this weekend. The first is about the slow death of print encyclopedias, and includes this funny chart.

The second is about Jimmy, mostly, and Wikipedia's growth pains. It's good -- it manages to draw together a lot of issues.

Wikipedians will be most interested in the second half, which talks about how a member of a VC firm arranged big donations to Wikimedia (and mentions selling logo rights to a board game, which might be cool).

Sue and Florence come off as cautious and principled, and the comments section is full of people who like wikipedia. The ship is not sinking.

Former chief scientist at Novell claims Jimmy Wales traded Wiki edits for donations.

When it rains, it pours. Jeff Merkey, the scientist, has been involved in several lawsuits -- he sued slashdot, for example. So this may not be credible, though it's getting press attention.

Sue Gardner (wikimedia executive director) defends jimmy wales on CNET TV:

We don't want to get into a long back-and-forth on somebody's blog [danny wool's]. The foundation -- I don't know if you know this -- we have 12 employees. So if we have one person sort of duking it out on a blog with people, then that's 11 people doing the actual work. We have important work to do.

I don't know if you know Jimmy -- have you met him? He's a good guy; he's a really good guy. I'm feeling sorry for him. He's a modest guy, he's a frugal guy. Jimmy has never done anything wrong.

So, I've been with the foundation since june -- so, for 6, 7 months. And in that period of time I think jimmy's expensed a total of eleven hundred dollars worth of stuff. He took one trip to new york for us to do some media related to our fundraiser just before christmas. And that's it.

He doesn't "live well" -- he doesn't live a lavish lifestyle. And to the extent that he does live whatever lifestyle he does, it's not out of Wikimedia's coffers.

Update: this was over-the-top. I jumped way too fast at the symmetry of two wikipioneers at odds and didn't stop to think whether I was grossly inflating a very minor third-hand remark. Mea culpa, I'm stupid.

The inventor of the wiki (Ward Cunningham) is apparently not too fond of Jimmy Wales. One of Cunningham's co-workers says:

Putting the utter stupidity of discussing Jimbo's sex life at all aside, I will say that this episode rings true for me in one important sense. As an employee of a for-profit wiki [AboutUs], I've had the *entire* 20+ person staff agree unanimously that they love Wikipedia despite Jimmy Wales, emphasis on the "despite". Part of me recognizes that all this hullabaloo is a product of the media's inane focus on the cult of celebrity, but still -- wouldn't we just be better off without him? My moral compass swings to a resounding Yes.

...one of [those staff members] is Ward Cunningham.

Well, Jimmy's troubles have hit the associated press, and trickled from there into places like BusinessWeek.

Erik Moller, Wikimedia's Deputy Director, defends Wales:

When he talks about bringing education to those who cannot afford it, he’s not just trying to impress. Anyone who spends 5 minutes with him will understand that this is his personal life goal.

He’s helped us connect with philanthropists here in the Bay Area — donations like the recent 500,000 dollars from the last fundraiser were only possible because of his outreach efforts. His international network of contacts has helped us to build our Advisory Board, really smart people who have supported us on many occasions.

...

Jimmy not only created an extraordinary project — he decided to base it on the principles of the open source / free software movement, and turned it over to a non-profit organization. This was, by no means, the obvious thing to do: Had events played out a little differently, Wikipedia would today be a dot-com with ads, probably a subsidiary of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.

I think the public is going to be pretty forgiving.

(By the way, Erik brings up advertising revenue and blog incentives. Since I'm not making any money off the google ads -- damn you, non-clicking tech-savvy audience -- I'm going to take them down.)

The Final Wikipedia Article

Wikipedia Weekly is a podcast. (iTunes) It is also the single best source for Wikipedia commentary.

This week's episode is actually the first in several months, but boy is it worth it.

It starts with some reassuring financial news:

The foundation is now audited properly; I think it's doing quite well. They're running around San Francisco drumming up support, drumming up big donors ... it's being run more professionally ... There is enough goodwill out there, there are enough rich people who are willing to fund us if we ask. And the foundation is now going about doing that.

But the really awesome part is this discussion around the 40-minute mark. It was so good I transcribed it:

---

- There's only so many articles you can actually make -- a lot of people see wikipedia as being "finished", in a way. Once you conquer everything, what is left to conquer?

- "All the virgin areas have at least been addressed", right? In terms of the knowledge of humanity. And you're kind of replenishing things on top of it that are current events, and you might be shoring up some parts of it, but the major work has been done. So how does the project survive when most of the work has been done?

- I'll quote that back to you in 20 years, fuzzy, when wikipedia is -- you know, owns its own mountain. Like that famous guy who closed down the patent office in like 1890 and said "oh, there's nothing left to invent; it's just a classification scheme from now on".

- I understand that sentiment, but you have to admit that with 2 million-some articles, most of the sum of human knowledge has been put down on virtual paper in Wikipedia. Right? You can't argue against that. That is a fact!

- No. I argue against that.

- The sister projects also have a big reach that they have to cover -- wikispecies, wikiquotes, wikiversity.

- But I think that's one of the fallacies of the wikiprojects -- that you can suddenly turn to these people who are interested in writing about Pokemon and sex acts and cartoons and Naruto and say "now, take the time that you had, and start making a taxonomy of human life". No -- you just can't do that, because they're not interested in it. Or "come in and write definitions".

- It's because those people who were interested in those things were the first to arrive, the first adopters of Wikipedia. But millions of people out there -- think of the academics in religious studies. They haven't caught on to this yet, they haven't come to this. When the baby boomers all start retiring and have the time to actually edit Wikipedia, and they know it and they're used to the idea, they'll fill out all their stuff. There are whole areas that aren't nearly as covered as Naruto and molecular biology, and we're all aware of that. It doesn't mean that we're nearly finished, and we don't need to take those people who were on Naruto and divert them onto this new topic. There's lots more to be done.

- Well, I think there's more to be done. I'm not sure there's lots more to be done, that's the thing.

- There's heaps more -- we've just scratched the surface.

- No, I think we're 80% done with the surface (laughs). The sum of human knowledge is a finite thing, right? It's growing, but it's finite.

- No! No!

- What about the articles that'll happen about future events, crazy kids who have parties and get themselves arrested and stuff like that?

- But then that becomes current events, keeping up with the headlines. And that's my passion, I love writing articles about current events as a role in history of what's going on, but if we have 2-point-some million articles now, do you see it being 20 million articles in five years?

- Yes!

- You do? I actually don't.

- What else is there to write about?

- We're seeing the top of the S-curve already, Liam! We've already done podcasts about this. We're hitting the top of the S-curve, you can see that in the statistics. You can't make it to 20 million in five years given the curve we see now.

- Tell me in five years. Tell me the same thing in five years.

- Alright; this is a virtual handshake.

- You can't be the patent office man and say, "i know what's going to happen in the future". I can't tell you which articles haven't been made, because they haven't been made yet.

- The difference is that with patents, with creating inventions, that's synthesis. It's creating new things out of elements that you have right now. If you're talking about the sum of all human knowledge, that's a very different enterprise. You're documenting what is known in the known world. It's finite, but it's growing -- but it's not growing at the exponential rate all the time, it's not infinitely growing in exponential ways.

- But you're assuming that the only way wikipedia would grow is by adding new articles.

- Well, it has to, unless you think that the cat article should grow from five pages to ten pages to 20 pages to fifty pages.

- Or we get more loose with our standards and we allow every single thing ever to become an article.

- Quantity does not equal quality.

- I agree with you somewhat and I think there's going to be a new type of article. You already have articles about africa, then you have articles about the economics of africa; and then you're going to have comparisons of african economics to blah blah blah, or "the evolution of african economics through history". So you're going to have some "analysis" articles that are growing --

- -- precisely. Precisely.

- Those type of things might grow, but those are tougher to write. And that's why I think the growth will be somewhat limited.

- They'll be tougher to write and they'll be slower to write, but they're just as important!

- I agree.

- If not more important. We've got the article on africa, and we've got the article on cat, but we haven't got the article on all types of variants in the history of the cat, or the economy of africa, or whatever.

- We'll have a special gambling episode where we all bet on how much we think it's going to grow in the future. There used to be a pool on wikipedia that predicted when we're going to hit 1 million, 5 million, etc. I think it's still around, and we should take a look at that.

- And not just there was a page called the "millionth article pool", which was not just when it was but what that article would be entitled. (laughter)

- There's also the final article pool. (laughter)

- The final article pool. What is the last article in wikipedia going to be about?

- 42!

Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner: "Jimmy has never used Wikimedia money to subsidize his personal expenditures."

Danny Wool: "This questionable use of Foundation funds stopped in 2006, largely because Jimbeau's credit card was taken away. I do not believe, nor do I have any reason to believe, that it is continuing. If Jimbeau is still living the vida loca--and as you can imagine, he hardly keeps me posted--I have no reason to believe that it is at the Foundation's expense."

Wikileaks wins

About Wikileaks. This article indicates that Julius Baer bank is now kind of fucked, and reveals a funny detail: the court ordered that its ruling be emailed to Wikileaks -- but since it had just abolished the wikileaks domain name, no email could have gotten through.

The New York Times has a good article on this Wikileaks business (and editorial) ; the Register has some interesting technical details.

Mother Jones states the obvious: Shutting Down Wikileaks Will Backfire.

Wikileaks is a site that allows whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents. It's broken several important stories and survived censorship attempts by the Chinese and Thai govs.

But now if you try to visit wikileaks.org, you'll get an error message.

That's because Wikileaks had posted documents from a former vice president of the Swiss bank Julius Baer alleging that the company engaged in "stalking, corruption and coercion...according to Elmer he and his family are subject to observation by private investigators working for Julius Baer, to an extent that his 6 year old daughter needs psychological treatment and his life is overall suffering from it."

Since the site posted that information, a fire occurred in their datacenter and Julius Baer successfully convinced a California judge to pull the entire Wikileaks.org domain name off the net! Obviously, any Swiss court cases aren't under California's jurisdiction, so this is a blatant abuse of the legal system.

Thankfully, you can still access the site at its ip address: http://88.80.13.160/

More good coverage at the BBC (though their technical language isn't quite right) at Kos, and at Wikileaks itself (one, two, three)

The petition about removing the pictures of Muhammad? It's up to 160 thousand signatures. That's not a significant proportion of the total population, but the worry is that the muslim street could flare up unpredictably due to network effects.

Here's a moderate muslim response (filled with useful links, too). "Wikipedia has refused to delete the pictures and has released a statement as to why they are not removing the pictures. This statement seems perfectly reasonable to me as a Muslim."

The guy who started the petition has opened an official petition blog.

Here's a list of his Wikipedia edits. On another blog, he writes: "I am proud to call myself a fundamentalist and even your government preach fundamentalism by opposing the gays in few of the states in US." (Update: that's not really a representative quote.)

The long-awaited financial audit is finally released.

NYTimes on the muslim protest thing. Wikipedia comes off really well -- "polite but firm".

Also: "The site considered but rejected a compromise that would allow visitors to choose whether to view the page with images." When was this?