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.

See also. Why are so many monasteries built on cliffs?

Wikipedia API for ruby. I stupidly learned ruby instead of python, so this might come in handy.

Pediaphon is a web app that turns wikipedia articles into mp3s.

Simulated reality is the proposition that reality could be simulated—often computer simulated—to a degree indistinguishable from "true" reality.

The invention of the cat flap is frequently attributed to Isaac Newton.

However, author Charles R. Gibson, writing about the life of Newton in 1921, recorded that "To this day students at Cambridge are told how there were two holes cut in the door of Newton's chamber: one hole, much larger than the other, for the use of his cat, the smaller one for the convenience of the kitten", but states that this goes in the face of "...a letter written by Newton's assistant [who] gives us the following information, which is direct evidence and not mere hearsay. `He kept neither dog nor cat in his chamber...'"

Epiphany

I was talking to someone about Wikipedia today in person, which I rarely do. And I realized:

I love wikipedia and am constantly intrigued by it. But I really don't give a shit about the Wikimedia Foundation. They only have a limited impact on the nuts and bolts, anyway.

Partly because of the name of this blog, I'd always sort of felt obligated to cover the internal politics -- I wanted it to at least be theoretically possible for someone to get all their w'pedia information from right here (yessir).

Well, screw that. The politics is boring and depressing. It's all the unpleasantness of real life socializing without any of the warm fuzziness.

Remember that study showing that people were more likely to misinterpret email messages, and more likely to ascribe negative emotions to the authors? Something happens with text communication -- the mirror neurons get turned off; the natural social instincts get muted. And when that effect happens at every node of the community web, when a whole bunch of hyperverbal encyclopedists are only connected to each other via letters on screens, things get unmoored. (How else to explain the rise of wikipedia review?)

Anyway. I'm done covering the foundation. My next post will be about generating rock album covers that never existed.

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.)

Whoa.

This year's Wikimania conference is in Egypt (Alexandria, chosen for the poetic symmetry between Wikipedia and the Great Library). The less poetically inclined were worried about muslim extremism, and the foundation bought a custom security analysis.

The results are in. (Paging past the terrifying stock photography...) Aha. The actual findings:

1. Don't worry too much; Alexandria is a very safe city. "Holding a conference there should not pose any significant threat to Wikimedia Foundation members attending the conference."
2. But keep a low profile (i.e. don't rent a Benz?) because Wikimania will draw international attention.
3. And stay out of the Sinai.

Sounds alright.

Marketing, damnit!

The ideas behind the open source movement are very powerful.

How powerful?

So powerful that if a competent marketing team -- people who ordinarily churn out boring beer commercials -- are asked instead to create a commercial for Linux or Wikipedia, they can make something mindblowingly inspiring without breaking stride.

That doesn't happen very often because open source projects are broke. But when it does happen, you get stuff like this 2003 ad:



link, if you can't see the embed

After watching that, I want to marry the open source movement and have its children. This is the kind of power your typical corporation has to shape public perception; usually it's spent trying to get you to increase your detergent consumption.

Now some Texas design students have created a mock ad campaign for Wikipedia, complete with magazine ads, a T-shirt, posters, etc. It so utterly fucking rocks.



The artistic vision:

"Many people tend to view Wikipedia as an unreliable source of information because anyone can edit entries on the website.

Our concept was to present an everyday person as an "expert" on a specific subject in order to show that whether the information comes from a university professor or from an avid gamer, it is still reliable.

Each piece shows a straight view of each persona and a mind map of their thought process. We felt this approach humanizes the experience of Wikipedia."

via

Ohio Country

Hypergraphia, Pyromania, Pyrophilia, Trichotillomania. (Chorus! ♬We didn't start the fire... ♫)

Via this category, via whoever reached this blog by searching for "Pyrophilia wiki". They probably just wanted to find the wikipedia article, but I'd really prefer to believe they were looking for a pyrophilia-themed wiki.

Best name for a logical fallacy ever.

Concharto is a geographic wiki for documenting historical events -- think wikimapia times ten.

It also has a pretty noble goal:

When Leo Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” in the 1860’s, he sprinkled it with whole chapters of rants against the historians of the day. His complaint was that they viewed history solely as a progression of major events precipitated by “great men”. Instead, he argued, history is a much more complicated progression of cause and effect driven by small events. In one of his more philosophical moments, he proposed applying the scientific method to history, asserting that a complete understanding of an event could be obtained by slicing that event into smaller and smaller pieces, in exactly the same way that a math student performs integral calculus.

While not actually creating a calculus of history, Concharto does attempt to slice history into smaller pieces.

But the interface is confusing and cumbersome in the extreme. It's built on top of google maps, and inherits its interface elements in all of their general-purpose bulk. No, no, no, no, no. You want something that looks like this.

As things stand, the interface imposes so much cognitive drag that the application (which should be awesome, and has plenty of functionality) isn't very fun at all. Here's hoping it improves over time.

(hat tip for the russia map)

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.

Origin of water on Earth

I was wondering why Clay Shirky's talk about Wikipedia -- among other things -- has been blowing up the blogosphere. (Because it's fucking brilliant, that's why. Though I don't buy all of it.)