Another milestone for Wikipedia

There has been some suspense beforehand but now it’s official. In under nine years the English version of Wikipedia has created more than three million articles.

The site broke through the 3 million barrier early on Monday morning UK time, with the honours taken by a short article about Norwegian actor Beate Eriksen. (The Guardian)

This is indeed a milestone and also puts other recent news and controversies surrounding Wikipedia into perspective: written about those incidents here, here, here, here, and here.

Truth, lies and politics on Wikipedia

Martin Rundkvist is an unusual combination he is an archeologist and a wikipedia watcher. His recent blog post discusses censorship on Wikipedia in an article Wikipedia Cracks Down On Cult Propagandists. The article b eginning with Wikipedias decision in May to bar all Church of Scientology users from editing CoS articles on wikipedia. But the interesting focus of his article is the struggle over the articles about Falun Gong (a.k.a. Chinese Scientology).

They used to be a battleground between Chinese Communist Party loyalists and Falun Gong devotees, both sides trying to cram as much propaganda into the articles as possible. Then the FGers managed to get the CCP guys banned from editing…it led to a prolonged situation where the articles were entirely taken over by cult propagandists… And now a similar clean-up effort has reached the Falun Gong pages. A swarm of experienced Wikipedians with no pro-FG or pro-CCP agenda has descended on them. Yesterday the nastiest of the FGers (a fellow Scandy, no less) was banned for six months from touching any of the FG articles. And the delicious irony is that this is the very same guy who got the CCP propagandists thrown out!

In the amazing arguments which pop up in academia about whether or not Wikipedia should be used by students or not. The facts of articles is often brought to the fore of the argument. But very rarely is there a initiated discussion about the truthfulness of wikipedia articles. Who is writing and editing them and why?

One of the most obvious censors are the voluntary editors within the system, here is a typical complain from The Register (2007)

Is Wikipedia running a censorship board? John Barberio thinks so. After more than two years as an active contributor to the free online encyclopedia, the 27-year-old Oxfordshire man recently left the project over the behavior of its “OTRS volunteers,” unpaid administrators who act on reader complaints about the site’s content…I dislike using the scary C word, but OTRS are acting as a censorship board,” he says. “And worse, they appear to be acting as an inept, heavy-handed amateurish censorship board.”

This is unfortunately nothing new but what is probably more concerning is the slick group of workers who change or adapt wikipedia to suit there own needs. The Independent in Wikipedia and the art of censorship (2007) have given several examples of such censorship including:

A computer registered to the Dow Chemical Company is recorded as deleting a passage on the Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984, which occurred at a plant operated by Union Carbide, now a wholly owned Dow subsidiary. The incident cost up to 20,000 lives.

A computer linked to the Israeli government twice tried to delete an entire article about the West Bank wall that was critical of the policy. An edit from the same address also modified the entry for Hizbollah describing all its operations as being “mostly military in nature”.

A computer with an Amnesty International IP address was used to delete references accusing the charity of holding an anti-American agenda.

And finally there is the whole problematic issue of Jimmy Wales’ role in the suppression of the David Rohde capture by the Taliban.

What it all amounts to is the freedom of information or the importance of correct information or the dangers of sensitive information – who gets to decide and what the implications of such decisions are. This is a topic which cannot be easily fobbed off and needs to be discussed in much greater detail.

The future of Wikipedia

It’s almost hard to think of a time when Wikimedia was not the source of all knowledge. After having survived the quality wars (is Wiki as good as printed Encyclopedia), amazing growth, lawsuits & legal threats, internal squabbles and international expansion – today Wikimedia seems as permanent and natural as summer holidays.

But Ed Chi at the Palo Alto Research Center is interviewed by New Scientist:

The number of articles added per month flattened out at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by around a third. They also found that the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped growing the following year, flattening out at around 5.5 million and 750,000 respectively. (read more on this here)

The Wikimedia Foundation has bagun a strategic review of Wikipedia to better understand why the changes to Wikipedia are occurring. Chi argues that a main part of the problem is the growing number of Wikimedia “experts”, in other words people who are experts on Wikipedia. They become a problem since experts on a specific topic are unable to compete with wiki-experts time and expertise in an eventual debate. I have commented earlier on the inclusionists v deletionists issue.

Chi thinks that Wikipedia now includes so much information that some editors have turned from creating new articles to improving existing ones, resulting in more disputes about edits. Such disputes are not a level playing field because established editors sometimes draw on extensive knowledge of Wikipedia’s guidelines to overwhelm opposition in a practice dubbed “wikilawyering”.

In part some of the more devoted editors of wikipedia (wikipedia experts) are becoming more fascinated with wikipedia, as opposed to the content. The whole point of wikipedia should be it’s ability to easily provide information (preferably expert information) but as many discussion pages show – content is not king. Wikilawyering is definately discouraging participation by experts.

Wikipedia goes Creative Commons

The Wikimedia Foundation board has approved the licensing changes voted on by the community of Wikipedia and its sister sites. The accompanying press release includes this quote from Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig:

“Richard Stallman’s commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture is a critical step towards making this freedom work. The Wikipedia community is to be congratulated for its decision, and the Free Software Foundation thanked for its help. I am enormously happy about this decision.”

Read all about it here.

Wikipedia to vote on change from GNU FDL to CC BY-SA

Sorry for the horrible abbreviations in the title!

Wikipedia is in the process of deciding to go from using the GNU Free Documentation License to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license. One of the reasons for this move is that the GNU Free Documentation License is less flexible to use for wikipedia. More information from the Creative Commons blog:

A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license.

This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.

To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).

licensing update site notice

Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site.

For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:

Here’s a great “propaganda poster”, original created by Brianna Laugher (cited a number of times on this blog), licensed under CC BY. See her post, Vote YES for licensing sanity!

Indeed, please go vote yes to unify the free culture movement!

Vote YES! For licensing sanity!

Unintended but not unexpected

The recent regulations in Sweden created the Pirate Party. The even more recent controversies with FRA (massive surveillance legislation) and ipred (strengthening copyright holders rights) and the Pirate Bay trial have driven the new parties marketing for them. Yesterday the party passed the 10 000 member level.

The Pirate Party is now larger than both the established Left Party and the Environmental Party making it the sixth largest party (counted in members) in Sweden. Swedish wikipedia has a table of party members here.

That the implementation of strickter internet regulation would increase the popularity of the Pirate Party should hardly be surprising. It is possible that few politicians in other parties were aware of the amount of popular anger was brewing under the surface and how this was organised and created into a more organised protest movement. In this way the growth of the Pirate Party is definately unintended but not unexpected.

Random Knowledge

Just found a great way of learning something new in a random way.

Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” (or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random) This is what I got:

G?o Qípeì (???) (1660-1734) was born in Jiangxi to a family with Manchurian connections. He had success as an official in southern China, but is best known today as a painter. He initially gained reputation as an artist who did landscapes and figures in traditional style. By age twenty he became known as an eccentric who preferred using his fingers instead of a brush. This style had precedents as Zhang Zhao also preferred finger painting, but G?o Qípeì went further. He grew his fingernails long to make them more effect instruments and used his entire hand to create a highly individualized style. (wikipedia)

Cool! Interesting guy and a fun way to discover something new.

Not really live blogging…

This is not really live blogging. The Wikipedia Academy is off to a flying start. We began with some housekeeping rules and schedule changes followed by the official welcome from Lund University and an introduction to Wikipedia and Wikimedia given by Lars Aronsson and Lennart Guldbrandsson of the Swedish Wikimedia Chapter. Now the participants have been divided into groups and put in front of computers to attempt to learn Wikipedia skills live… So I found the student cafe and Internet access for preparation and blogging.

Wikipedia Academy

On Wednesday and Thursday I will be attending the first Wikipedia Academy in Lund Sweden. The event will be spread over 1,5 days and deal with many different aspects of Wikipedia as a phenomenon and as a tool for research and teaching. The conference has brought together the Swedish Wikimedia group who will hold practical workshops and several different scholars to discuss issues as far ranging as trustworthiness of the sources, the inclusion debate and legal issues.

It should be a very interesting meeting…

Important changes to license

In what is in the “sounds boring but is incredibly important and influential” category of news: The Free Software Foundation has released the GNU Free Document License version 1.3.

One of the main important changes is in Section 11 which now enables wikis to be relicensed under the from the earlier GNU Free Document License to the more flexible Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (v3.0) license. The condition is that such relicensing is completed by August 1, 2009.

That means, the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license. Check out the FAQ for this change to the license.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of this change to the Free Culture community. A fundamental flaw in the Free Culture Movement to date is that its most important element — Wikipedia — is licensed in a way that makes it incompatible with an enormous range of other content in the Free Culture Movement. One solution to this, of course, would be for everything to move to the FDL. But that license was crafted initially for manuals, and there were a number of technical reasons why it would not work well (and in some cases, at all) for certain important kinds of culture.

This change would now permit interoperability among Free Culture projects, just as the dominance of the GNU GPL enables interoperability among Free Software projects. It thus eliminates an unnecessary and unproductive hinderance to the spread and growth of Free Culture.