Betsy Devine talks about “vandal waves,” usually precipitated by mainstream media attention on an article. She looks at how many of the edits are made by registered users and by anonymous users.

She talks about pgkbot, software that blocks inflammatory user names on IRC chats. How can that type of tech be used to block vandal waves, she asks? Not one person who edited Swiftboating on Nov. 29, 2005, not one went on to become a serious contributor (ten or more entries). Typical of a vandal wave: The time between edits by different users shrinks, and there’s a surge in the ratio of IPs to registered users.

She distinguishes vandal waves from spin waves. Spin waves are created by people trying to influence the media. These are harder to identify programmatically because they are paid, professional writers trying to disguise their work. (See paidToComment.com.)

She’d like to see Wikipedia’s anti-vandal tools made more user friendly. [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipediabetsy_devine]

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It’s a Q&A session. This is a very spotty report.

Q: How can we be assured that the elected board is truly representative?
A: (Jimmy) Choose wisely.

Q: The foundation charter is showing its age. Going to revisit it?
A: Yes. We’re having a Board planning retreat.

Q: What about Africa and the African languages?
A: (Jimmy) Thoughtful, slow steps. Talking with people on the ground there.

Q: What do you do about potential board members who can’t afford the travel, etc.? Pay them?
A: We’d cover travel, but this is not a paying position.

Q: Why is Angela leaving the board? She says it’s become less collaborative. How?
A: (Angela) E.g., we vote on a wiki rather than having discussions.

Q: What is the real scope of Wikimedia? “Access to all the world’s knowledge” is too broad and “Build an encyclopedia” is too small…
A: (Jimmy) Big question. Look at operationally at we’re doing. [But what guides decisions about what projects to undertake?]

Q: Upcoming conflict between validating by experts and celebrating the read-write culture. Should the board push a strategy or let it be settled by the community?
A: (Jimmy) The conflict between quality and openness is an illusion. It comes about when our tools won’t let us achieve what we want to. E.g., the stable version will remove almost all the need for semi-protection; we can leave the pages open while ensuring the public sees quality pages. The board shouldn’t get involved in deciding detailed questions such as “What counts as a personal attack?”

Q: Most of us respect the neutral point of view while understanding there’s no such thing as a neutral point of view. Maybe it’d be better to talk about respectful points of view?
A: (Jimmy) One of the great things about NPOV is that it’s a term of art and the community fills it with meaning. It has been filled with the notion of respect. You should propose this on a mailing list…

Q: Will social sharing ever be more powerful than money? Can the Board start the campaign?
A: (Brad) People are more powerful than money or social sharing.

Q: We don’t know much about the finances…
A: (Jimmy) They’re looking good. The audit process is underway.

A: (Michael) For the first time, we’ve had a steady stream of donations from the “Please help” button. We’re not as constrained as we used to be. We have a bit of a buffer in the bank, about $500K. Small donations are coming in at about $30K/month. We’re getting more donations from corporate sponsors as well.

[Tags: wikimania2006 wikimedia wikipedia]

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Florence Nibart Devouard is on the Wikimedia Foundation board. She talks about building in diversity.

She begins by giving a history of the foundation. Wikipedia started in January 2001. The Wikimedia Foundation began in the middle of 2003. She gives a detailed and interesting history.

Resolutions, she explains, need at least two members to approve the draft before it get svoted on. All is done in public.

The Foundation’s original mission statement says it’s about encouraging “the growth and development of open content, wiki-based, and multilingual projects.” It is not Wikipedia-specific. She points to other ways of putting it. E.g., “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” (She accompanies this with a photo of Jimmy Wales as a Jedi Knight.)

The board needs to see the big picture, in addition to specific expertise.

Issues: The organization is US-based but the community is international. The projects are run by voluneers. The organization does not own the content. Solutions: Balance appointed vs. elected board members to make sure that there are enough people who get the big picture. Set up an advisory board. And organize meetings all over the world.

There are also educational issues: The number of contacts to the outside world, other than Jimmy. Limited reporting overall. Only one board meeting in 2006. Solutions: Organize real life meetings, seek help from professionals or academics, study other orgs, require an annual survey by each board member, and require reports from committees.

Third issues: Being a team. Don’t allow a single personality to dominate the board, as happens now. Not all members participate equally. Solution: Expand the board with active members. Term limits. Hire a CEO. Set up committees. Have a conflict-of-interest policy. Share the workload.

fourth: Avoid win-lose situations. The chapters now are not branches but part of a federated oragnization. They don’t have the right to use the logos.

Where to go? Partnering? Does the Foundation lead, create, push, and/or support initiatives?

She ends by pointing to three editors who died recently because we should remain who makes Wikipedia.

[How many organizations are this forthright and transparent?] [Tags: wikimania2006 florence_nibart_devouard wikimedia]

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Wikipedia challenges the assumption that to create good information, someone has to be in charge and it needs certified experts, Mitch says. “The view people have of how the world has to work is just wrong.” People think Wikipedia can’t work because they assume it’s as hard to remove grafitti there as it is in the real world. But, he says, all this is what the attendees here already know. [As always, I am paraphrasing and paying attention to what happens to strike me.]

Now he talks about blogs vs. wikis. “I find blogs, especially political blogs, on the whole to be quite disappointing. To me, they’re the talk radio of the Internet.” The problem is that they’re a series of atomic utterances, one after another. Rather than building on one another, they’re like billiard balls. Blogs are about individual expression. They increase partisanship rather than increase thoughtful reflection. [Mitch’s got to find himself some new blogs to read.] But, with wikis, people work on the same entry and improve it.

“As a technologist, I had some unlearning to do when I entered the Wikipedia community” because the tools weren’t all that good. But, Jimmy Wales taught him that the “secret sauce” isn’t technology. It’s community. It’s the shared values: NPOV, being prepared to be edited, learning to make your opponent’s case. To become a Wikipedian is to internalize those values.

In the early years, he says, there were more articles in Wikipedia about Middle Earth than about Africa because the contributors were writing about what they knew about. This is no longer true. He talks about the importance of inclusiveness. But, he says, things could be better. E.g., the UI that shows you what’s changed in an article is obscure unless you’re pretty deep into it. Wikipedia needs to be easier to edit if it is to be inclusive. It looks ok to those who are already in the tent, but that’s a self-selected group. “If we want Wikipedia to succeed in its mission, we must find ways to lower the barriers to participation.” He applauds the efforts underway to do this. “I’d make it a major strategic priority for the community.”

Mitch recommends An Inconvenient Truth. [Me, too.] Politics as usual is broken. See campaigns.wikia.com to see what Jimmy Wales talked about in his keynote. Democracy as the experiment in enabling people to determine what’s best is at risk. “Wikipedia is an existence proof of the power of a decentralized and respectful self-governing community to make an impact.” It is an “inspiration for a political movement.” The key attributes should include:

Participatory.

Product and process intertwined. The product is a wiki and it uses the wiki to produce itself.

Aspiration to high standard of respectful dialog.

Citizens of equal stature with experts.

To most audiences, this idea would be absurd. Politics generally shuns facts and collaboration. “We need a political movement that does not practice politics as usual just as Wikipedia does not practice Britannica as usual.” It’s been done before: Gandhi. MLK. Mandela.

But, to succeed, we need an existence proof. We need new tools, especially ones that help us argue better. Argue fairly. That’s what the Wikipedia culture is good at. [Good point.]

There are no panaceas. In the real world, sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. Facts aren’t enough. The Iraq article in Wikipedia can’t conclude that we should or should not withdraw our troops. This political movement has to have core values. Mitch says he does not have an answer.

Q: If Wikipedia is the metaphor for a political movement, consider that Wikipedia doesn’t yet address the needs of the visually impaired. We don’t have volunteers to do this. How would we get the equivalent problems addressed in the political realm?
A: There are discussions going on about evolving wikis for the visually impaired. “I’m willing to put my oar in the water on that.” For the political movement, it’s like Wikipedia in 2001. We just need a few crazy people.

Q: How might Second Life support these movements? [Mitch is on the board.]
A: It’ll become a fabulous place for collaboration.

Q: Your key attributes are new for the production of knowledge, but they’re old hat in politics. At Wikipedia, there are relatively few active participants…
A: If there were lower barriers to editing, there would be more participants.

[Mitch’s intuition about a tool for fair argument leading to a movement works better, I think, if we assume there are only a handful of parties. But suppose we’re more fragmented than that? A fair argument forum might end as diverse as the blogosphere. They key would be, I think, providing a fair argument platform — an idea I like — that also enables us to come together in movements that accept a range of diversity. Fair arguments don’t always resolve, but we need an ethos that also does not see splintering as the alternative.]

[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia politics mitch_kapor]

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SimonP, MindSpillage, Raul654, KellyMartin and Jdforrester are on the 15-person Wikipedia Arbitration Committee. (Well, Kelly used to be on it.) It was established because there people who want to make Wikipedia worse, and there needs to be a way to deal with them. In 2003, Jimbo Wales put a message on the mailing list looking for volunteers. The initial volunteers came up with a policy. Jimbo accepted it, and the community liked it.

It becomes a Q&A session…

The committee usually accepts cases when there have been other attempts at resolving it. By the time it gets to arbitration, it’s probably gone beyond the point of mediation.

There have been about 200-250 cases so far.

They discuss “brittle users” who have a lot to add as contributors and editors but who are unable to work with others.

The Committee technically only recommends banning. The “sentence” is carried out by the administrators. If the community disagrees with the decision, it may not be carried out.

Someone recently looked at all the banned users and found about 90% never return and 9% came back as problems, and 1% came back as good users. [I think I got those numbers right.]

They rarely disagree on matters of principle — if you delete a page, you should say why, for example — and they usually agree if someone is a problem user. They often disagree about the remedy.

If you don’t respond to requests for clarification, etc., you are likely to be banned by an administrator without it ever going to arbitration. A single other administrator can unban you.

“We are not a court. We don’t make precedent. And we don’t guarantee that we’ll be fair.”

Sometimes they ban someone from editing their own, or their company’s, article.

Other remedies besides banning: Mentoring. Banning from a particular article. Limiting the number of reverts per day. Reading particular pages, e.g., copyright policy. In one case, a contributor was required to provide explanations when he reverts pages, because he was reverting certain contributors’ changes on sight — because those contributors’ changes were stupid. So, even though he was right, he was put under a restriction. [Process!] In some cases, people have been banned for following policy, but doing so in obnoxious ways.

They don’t have a lot of policy disputes, but there are some. E.g., one of the members isn’t as convinced that NPOV is right. But cases aren’t over policy. It’s usually not a fine line decision: “Is the user a pest?”

“Essentially, the overriding rule is common sense. The problem usually is people not knowing what common sense is.”

The Committee stays out of content disputes. The issues tend to be ones of disruptive editing. “It’s not Wikipedia’s job to define reality or truth.”

There are some death threats pending against some of the arbitrators. [Yikes!] [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia]

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Steve Johnson has a great piece, stating the five things we all agree about in the blogging vs. journalism controversy. So, says Steve, if you’re a journalist about to write an article pointing out one of those propositions, get yourself a new topic.

Steve is responding to Nicholas Lemann’s article in the New Yorker. Jay Rosen responds, of course, with lots of links. [Tags: media steve_johnson jay_rosen journalism blogging]

Also, don’t miss Tom Matrullo and Jon Lebkowsky. And Frank Paynter‘s elegantly titled “Nick Lemann bites monkey ass.”

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AKMA outlines a talk he gave about anarchism and education. E.g.,

My concern about learning ecology impels me to press the question of “What do we want to say with the ways we teach?” When we assign our children to institutional structures that divide them into manageable divisions of age and, sometimes, alleged “ability,” of differentiated fields of knowledge, and then tell them that nine months of this experience are compulsory, but that three months constitute a libeation from learning — what are we teaching them?

AKMA in full, glorious, plummage…

[Tags: akma education anarchism]

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Ed Yourdon has a long, thoughtful posting about Jimmy Wales’ keynote, proposing him for a Nobel Peace Prize, not entirely jokingly. (He suggests putting him on a stamp as an alternative.)

I think Wikipedia is important enough that the suggestion is only somewhat absurd.We need one more milestone before we take the idea seriously. Maybe international editions of Wikipedia will get together and try to work out their differences. Hell, if they could even agree on how to draw the maps, Jimmy should get the prize.

[Tags: wikipedia wikimania2006]

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Very spotty coverage of five-minute presentations…

OpenWetWare.org “is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering.”

Callie B. Carroll (Hylaweb) talks about accessiblity and MediaWiki.

Yurik shows an add on that pops up a page when you hover over the link. It uses Query API, a read-only interface to Wikipedia. It gives back lots of info.

A troll claims that Wikipedia contains all knowledge.

Someone (sorry) talks about AboutUs.org, a wiki about Web sites.

[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia]

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Brian Oberkirch has an extended parable about General IP at Little Big Horn. SPOILER: What if they held a war and nobody watched? [Tags: media brian_oberkirch]

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