Wikipedia hit counter

This is a little revolutionary. Stats.grok.se shows how much traffic every wikipedia article gets (page views, not edits). We've pretty much been driving in the dark until now.

Note: The graph shows one month at a time (the current month by default). The month selector is the baffling-looking second dropdown -- 200801 is January, 200802 is February, etc.

More generally...

The wrong articles are getting deleted.

There's hemming and hawing about whether to wipe out an article about a restaurant, which was viewed only once last month.

But not so much concern about deleting sleaze rock and mafioso rap, which each get 7000 pageviews a month.

(Thanks, sage.)

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

Danny Wool's blog has been great lately -- he analyzes wikipedia by scholarly metrics of empire decline, evaluates wikimania in alexandria, etc.

Deletion Solution

Okay, I've been railing on for awhile about how bad it is when articles get deleted. It doesn't focus energy on more "serious" articles; instead, it frustrates people, drives them away, and has a chilling effect on the whole project.

The irony, of course, is that "deletion" is the wrong word -- the article's just hidden.

The obvious solution is to move the "deleted" article somewhere off-wiki. It's a shiny happy utopian obama-like solution because it resurrects the thousand-flowers-bloom spirit wikipedia once had, where every action seemed somewhat focused on building an awesome body of work that anyone could enjoy.

Four things prevent it from happening, though:

1. Inclusionists fear wikipedia will lose even more articles because they won't be able to argue "if you delete this, nobody will see it".

This is a bad strategy! It forces people to choose between two opposites (delete or keep); "delete" will eventually win, and that will be that. Plus, it's wrong on principle because it impoverishes the conceptual space and constrains what's possible.

2. There's nowhere else like wikipedia.

Telling someone to move from Wikipedia to Everything2 is like kicking your friend off your living room couch because "I think there's a pillow or something in that alley".

This will only be solved when other places get more vibrant. The more articles are moved, the faster that happens.

3. The interface between wikipedia and the rest of the web is really bad. To put it another way:

(a) There's no easy or automatic way to move an article off-wiki because you've got to move its whole history to preserve the authorship record.

(b) Once the article's been moved, it leaves no trace. The deleted wikipedia article is an ordinary blank page, with no indication that the content is still there, potentially a click away.

4. Over-caution. The best place to move things is Wikia, which is a commercial wiki farm that for all sorts of reasons (taxes, culture, brandt) can't be seen as an appendage of the non-profit wikipedia; it has to be walled off, like the church and state. This adds some friction to the export process and generally makes people shy away from working on it.

The fix is obvious enough: always provide a bunch of different links (to wikia, bluwiki, and wherever else). It would help if other wiki providers knew their shit as well as wikia.

Anyway, the main point is that all of these problems are solvable. There aren't any insurmountable obstacles.

Wikipedia undelete is a script for greasemonkey/firefox. Every time you visit a deleted article, a bunch of links appear showing versions of the page that are cached on archive.org. (Like this one.)

Caveats:

• Needs firefox (duh).


• Only works (for me) when visiting w'pedia as a logged-out user.


• The links only show up when visiting one particular "not found" page -- for example, on /wiki/List_of_fictional_expletives, which is where incoming links will take you, but not /wiki/Special:Search?search=List+of+fictional+expletives&go=Go or /w/index.php?title=List_of_fictional_expletives&action=edit, where internal links and the search field lead.


• Doesn't clearly indicate what content is added by the script and what content was already there, so you're sort of in your own web-browsing universe. This is a common greasemonkey problem.


• The author of the script didn't know that every "deleted" wikipedia article is actually still on the server. If he did, he might have arranged a better system whereby people collaboratively request that deleted pages be moved to their userspace; the script's links would point there (or somewhere else the articles can be edited), instead of archive.org.

A slidewalk is a fictional moving sidewalk structurally sound enough to support buildings and large populations of travelers. Adjacent slidewalks moving at different rates could let travelers accelerate to great speeds.

The act known as Eskimo kissing in modern western culture is loosely based on a traditional Inuit greeting called a kunik.

A kunik is a form of expressing affection, usually between family members and loved ones, that involves pressing the nose and upper lip against the skin (commonly the cheeks or forehead) and breathing in, causing the loved one's skin or hair to be suctioned against the nose and upper lip.

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)

Spurius Carvilius Ruga (fl. 230 BCE) was a freedman living in Rome who allegedly invented the letter G.

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.)

Former foundation insider Danny Wool talks about the audit. Wool's new blog is worth reading if you're interested in internal goings-on -- he knows where his towel is.

The Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997. The source of the sound remains unknown.

The long-awaited financial audit is finally released.

The Talking Statues of Rome were a form of anonymous political expression in Rome begun in the 15th century and continuing until the advent of the modern media.