Wikipedia's exponential growth over this decade is due to the efforts of the millions of volunteers who write, edit, and check its entries. But could that volunteer effort now be in danger?
Volunteers have increasingly been quitting Wikipedia en masse for a variety of potential reasons, according to Monday's Wall Street Journal.
More than 49,000 editors left Wikipedia's English-language edition during the first three months of 2009, compared with only 4,900 for the same quarter a year earlier, according to the Journal, quoting Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzes Wikipedia's online data. Though the service still boasts about 3 million active contributors, volunteers are leaving more rapidly than new ones are joining, the Journal said.
Among the top 10 most-visited sites, Wikipedia is under continual pressure to expand the scope and to police the accuracy of its data, a task that could become increasingly difficult with fewer volunteers. Errors, both accidental and deliberate, have always plagued Wikipedia.
Several reasons for the decline in volunteers have been offered by Wikipedia contributors, noted the WSJ. Many subjects have already been fully written about. The site has also enacted an array of rules to limit conflict among people who contribute to the same entries, especially on controversial subjects. But the rules often trip up new contributors who find their content removed without understanding why.
Despite those rules, arguments over various articles have also taken their toll. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again," Ortega told the Journal.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales discussed the site in an interview with Silicon.com earlier this month. With 13 million articles now written and edited by volunteers, Wales sees conflict among multiple contributors as the exception.
"We really tend to use less inflammatory words--try to stick to basic facts and so on. And that's come about over time. You have people come together [on Wikipedia] with different viewpoints but in general they tend to be trying to work in good faith to collaborate and compromise with other people."
Wales also pointed out that most articles are written by a small number of people.
"One of the things that's important to know about Wikipedia is that the entries that are edited by hundreds of people are really anomalies," he told Silicon.com.
Wales does confirm that participation in Wikipedia has slowed, the Journal said, though potential solutions depend on the reasons for the decline. "If people think Wikipedia is done, that's substantial," he said, referring to the notion that there are no more subjects to write about. "But if the community has become more hostile to newbies, that's a correctable problem."
Medpedia, a collaborative project for medical information launched in February, is getting beyond the medical-data basics as it adds answers, alerts, and analysis.
Founded on the noble and semipractical system of providing free online medical information generated for and by physicians, journals, schools, patients, and more, Medpedia's three stated goals are to be collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transparent. The idea is to maximize knowledge and minimize the kind of screwing around that continually threatens the efficacy of other wiki-based projects. Of course, the extent to which this is successful hinges on the quality, integrity, and transparency of the editors.
While Medpedia uses the open-source software Mediawiki (also used by Wikipedia), it is less collaborative than the vast encyclopedia site, allowing only physicians and Ph.D.s approved by an editor to contribute to and edit articles. (The less medicine-literate masses are allowed to create accounts and suggest changes, but not actually make them.)
The jury's still out on whether Medpedia will be big enough to be a successful repository of up-to-date information and tame enough to be useful, but three new features, announced this week, might at least help push it out of beta incubation:
Medpedia Answers is a Q&A feature, collecting questions and answers about health, medicine, the body, etc., tagged for search optimization, and pushed to relevant articles and patient communities. Anyone who takes the time to create a profile can contribute to this section, with a top-contributors list cluing in users to which answers are written by the most informed (and involved) users.
Medpedia Alerts aggregates health and medical-news alerts. Anyone with an account can submit here as well, but this section appears intended to work something like Google Reader, with all sorts of feeds plugging into the platform.
And finally, Medpedia News & Analysis lets a wide range of sources accepted by the Medpedia community self-organize by category, and tag and cross-link to articles. This section is not, strictly speaking, licensed by Medpedia, so copyright is held by the authors themselves, which could prove tricky, as Medpedia hosts content that may or may not be allowed to be there.
Since Medpedia went live earlier this year, it has drawn thousands of members, including physicians, researchers, organizations, and experts contributing to its growing knowledge base. Plus, it has the likes of Harvard, Stanford, the National Health Services, and American Heart Association participating. Will Medpedia's less democratic editing system prove more bulletproof than Wikipedia's? So far, so good.
Here's the story. Or at least most of it.
Some 19 years ago, a man in Germany, together with his half brother, reportedly murdered an actor named Walter Sedlmayr. The man was convicted and served 15 years in jail.
Now he is free. And, according to Wired, he has exercised that freedom by instructing lawyers, the elegantly named firm of Stopp and Stopp, to sue Wikipedia.
The lawsuit claims that German privacy law, designed to help criminals re-integrate into society, prevents the man being named in association with Walter Sedlmayr's murder.
Wired quotes Jennifer Granick from the Electronic Frontier Foundation as saying that the lawyers are not only demanding that publications change whatever they write now, but that online archives must endure revision, too.
In writing to Wikipedia, the lawyers offered a very interesting approach: "As your article deals with a local German public figure (such as the actor Walter Sedlmayr), we expect you are aware that you have to comply with applicable German law."
Well, gosh, perhaps not everyone realizes when they mention, say, Boris Becker or that interesting actress who was in the first of the Bourne movies, that one is subject to German law when one does so.
Geek.com quotes the Electronic Frontier Foundation as adding: "At stake is the integrity of history itself. If all publications have to abide by the censorship laws of any and every jurisdiction just because they are accessible over the global Internet, then we will not be able to believe what we read, whether about Falun Gong (censored by China), the Thai king (censored under lèse majesté) or German murders."
(Credit:
CC Schoschie/Flickr)
You might be wondering why I have not mentioned this German murderer's name. You see, as I write, I am reminded that the world seems to revel in the persona of murderers. In some slightly twisted way, they become figures of fascination.
I have a strange suspicion that the more the name of Walter Sedlmayr's murderer is mentioned, the more famous he will become. And the more famous he will become, the more money he might be able to make from the fame he claims not to desire.
So I am conducting a fame-reduction experiment. Moreover, I know that everyone who chooses to discover his name can do so in a myriad of ways.
I wonder how many people tried to access information about this man who murdered the German actor Walter Sedlmayr and how many people have done so in recent days.
I also wonder how Wikipedia will choose to respond to this interesting and rather revisionist-minded lawsuit. At the time of writing, the full names of both murderers are still there in the Wikipedia entry for Walter Sedlmayr.
However, the Wikipedia Administrators' noticeboard has a spirited discussion about all aspects of the case.
The solution proposed by a poster called Zara 1709 on the noticeboard is to "remove the full name from the article and the article talk page, but leave in the edit history of the article and the talk page. We would even have some sources that mention the full names in the reference, simply because they provide other, relevant information, too."
The precedent for this is the so-called Star Wars kid case, in which a 14-year-old Canadian boy waved around a golf-ball retriever like a lightsaber and then endured painful taunts, leading to an equally painful lawsuit.
Zara1709 noted that: "It is quite important to point out that, on Wikipedia, regard for people's privacy applies to criminals and former criminals, too."
However, another poster, Baseball Bugs, dissented: "There is no justification whatsoever for censoring the names of the killers. The notability argument is bogus, there is no privacy or BLP issue, and the 'doing harm' argument is crystal-ball and thus is irrelevant. And some anonymous German judge has no jurisdiction over Wikipedia."
In reading all this, I am left with the words that were often drubbed into me by teachers: "History is written by the winners."
So if this German request succeeds, might some consider that the winner is Wolfgang Wehrle, the man who, with his half brother Manfred Lauber, murdered Walter Sedlmayr 19 years ago? Dash it, I couldn't help myself. I hope I'm not causing undue work for some future editor.
Jimmy Wales gives a keynote address at the 2009 Symbian Exchange and Exposition.
(Credit: Natasha Lomas/Silicon.com)If you've ever written something about Jimmy Wales and posted it online, chances are he's read it. He mentions a Twitter post I made, prior to our interview, asking whether people think he's a hero or villain.
With my tweet I'd been hoping to get a feel for opinion on the Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikia founder. Which is he then, I ask? Hero or villain?
"Oh I would say both," he replies with a smile. "Depends on who you are."
Read more of "Jimmy Wales on what's next for Wikipedia" at Silicon.com.
Wikipedia will soon be adding a feature to its English-language site that assigns an experienced editor to sign off on any changes to articles on living people, according to Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the user-written online encyclopedia.
Confirming a story reported Monday by The New York Times, Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh said the "flagged revisions" feature is already active on the German site, but needs some fleshing out before it goes live to the public on the English site.
The plan is to deploy the feature on a test wiki soon so the Wikipedia community can play around with before it goes public. The test wiki is expected to go live soon, but no specific time frame has been established, Walsh said.
The feature was debated earlier this year in the aftermath of a false entry that was posted by a user, saying Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd had died after an inaugural luncheon in January.
It's intended to provide some additional "protection" and to "prevent vandals" from messing with living-person articles, Walsh said. Until approved by the volunteer editor, any changes to such articles will sit invisible to the public on Wikipedia's servers.
This is a big job, Walsh added, and ultimately the community will decide whether to make it a permanent feature. It's bound to be controversial for those who passionately believe in the site's motto as "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit."
Staff writer Daniel Terdiman contributed to this story
The nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia has received a $500,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to expand its effort to make educational information freely accessible.
"The enormous popularity of Wikipedia and its collaborative premise make the Wikimedia Foundation an ideal vehicle for spreading the open educational resources movement," Barbara Chow, director of the education program at Hewlett, said in a statement.
A Wikimedia representative said the grant is coming at a "critical time" for the foundation that operates the online encyclopedia.
"We've just begun the planning that will help us identify how to maximize our impact around the world," Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said in the statement. "This support will help us to execute our priorities for the current year, and enable us to plan for the future."
The San Francisco-based Wikimedia said it plans to use the grant to improve the user-friendliness of Wikimedia's software, develop training materials to engage new potential volunteer editors, and establish metrics to track the foundation's impact.
The Hewlett Foundation has bestowed more than $100 million in grants since 2001 to make educational materials available to all people for free.
Oh, Wikipedia. Have you really become just another political organization?
I only ask because some clever people with nothing better to do have dedicated their bright gray matter to poring through Wikipedia's pages and drawing conclusions. The members of the Augmented Cognition Research Group at the Palo Alto Research Center could probably solve health care over a nonfat latte and a blueberry scone. Instead, they have examined who makes edits on Wikipedia and whose edits are reversed.
It makes for the same kind of dispiriting reading that you might once have expected from a Politburo travel brochure. You see, it appears that a hierarchy has emerged at Wiki Central, one that seems to have a significant influence in what is published and, indeed, what is removed.
These days, there are between 650,000 and 810,00 active editors of the world's most beloved unofficial encyclopedia, figures that suggest Wikipedia activity has plateaued rather than grown. And this has been accompanied by a jostling for authority that reminds one only of, well, Congress. You know, the place where senior senators seem to be able to get away with, well, I was going to say "murder," but that would be inappropriate until proven.
The researchers seem convinced that editors who make more than 100 edits per month are less likely to have their entries reversed than those who contribute fewer. The group that contributes more than 1,000 edits per month (when was the last time these people saw the sky?) are enthusiastic about acting as the factual bible-writers of our time, to say the least. Between 2005 and 2008, their average number of edits has increased from 1,740 to 2,095.
The boys from Palo Alto seem to believe that those in the editing oligarchy rarely have their contributions deleted, or reverted, as seems to be the parlance. However, those who occasionally take a step away from their normal lives to make an entry are far more likely to have their contributions incised.
The researchers, led by Ed H. Chi, concluded: "We consider this as evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content, especially when the edits come from occasional editors."
It seems, from the Palo Altans' brightly colored graphs, that elite editors only have their work questioned 1 percent of the time, whereas occasional editors can now expect a 15 percent deletion rate.
Oh, Lordy. It's just like the Senate, isn't it? The bigwigs know best, control the most important committees, and generally swan around in limos with the finest companions of the day and night. All the while, the junior senators toil for influence, beg for their voices to be heard, and dream of becoming senior senators.
The Guardian newspaper offered this plaintive quote from a frustrated junior editor, Aaron Schwarz: "There's no place on Wikipedia that says: 'Want to become a Wikipedia editor? Here's how you do it.' Instead, you basically have to really become part of that community and pick it up through osmosis and have the tradition passed down to you."
Oh, why can't people find a more beautiful way to organize themselves? This is the only knowledge our children will ever have. I mean, we don't really expect any of them to read books on a Kindle, do we?
As news organizations reported Michael Jackson's hospitalization on Thursday afternoon, Wikipedia editors were wrestling with the problem of whether to allow an unverified report of the singer's death to appear on the online encyclopedia.
Michael Jackson, age 13, poses in his home in Encino, Calif., in 1972. He earned his first No. 1 solo record that year with "Ben."
(Credit: CBS)The entertainment site TMZ.com reported at 2:20 p.m. PDT that: "We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back."
Some Wikipedians repeatedly deleted references to Jackson's alleged demise, saying in separate comments that "This is not yet verified," "He's not dead," "Premature edits," and "ONCE AGAIN, HE IS NOT DEAD, JUST STOP."
But they were too slow for the legions of Wikipedia users who descended on the site and repeatedly modified the entry about the pop star. The typical edit was to insert Thursday as the date of Jackson's demise. Others were more subtle; one used the word "was" instead of "is," while another edit called "Invincible" his "last studio album."
By around 3:15 p.m. PDT, Wikipedia appeared to be temporarily overloaded. The site reported the error: "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties... Cannot contact the database server: Unknown error (10.0.6.24))"
Plenty of blogs echoed TMZ's report, but news organizations tended to be more cautious. Fox News said Jackson's "condition wasn't immediately clear," while Reuters cited TMZ.
The Los Angeles Times initially reported that Jackson was in a coma, and then updated its story at 3:15 p.m. PDT to say: "Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times." (The Times' Web server was overloaded and could only be reached intermittently.)
Around the same time, the Wikipedia editors had finally intervened in the edit-and-delete-the-edits scrum. One locked two articles about Jackson and his health for about six hours, which prevented them from being modified until the situation became more clear.
Just as Encyclopedia Britannica is moving in the direction of user-based entries, Wikipedia might soon be clamping down on theirs.
Wikipedia is apparently considering instituting a new editorial process that would put better safeguards in place and require all updates to be approved by a "reliable" user. The so-called Flagged Revisions process would allow registered, trusted editors to publish changes to the site immediately. All other edits would be sent to a queue and would not be published until they get approved by one of Wikipedia's trusted team of editors.
The proposal comes in the aftermath of a false entry that was posted by a user, saying Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd had died after an inaugural luncheon last week.
News.com Poll
On his public discussion page, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said, "This nonsense would have been 100 percent prevented by Flagged Revisions," adding that the system gives the site the flexibility to cover breaking news stories quickly while avoiding some of the shenanigans it's seen in the past.
The German version of Wikipedia has been using the system for a while now (partially since May and fully since August, according to one Wikipedia user). But Wales himself points out one major problem with the German model, citing delays of up to three weeks before edits get approved and go live.
"Our version should show very minimal delays (less than 1 week, hopefully a lot less)," wrote Wales, "because we will only be using it on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog."
Which subset of articles would be flagged and exactly how those boundaries would be set isn't clear from the discussion.
Wales writes in his comments that 60 percent of users who responded to a poll approved of the move. Think Wikipedia's plans are a bad idea? There's time to give your input. Wales has asked people opposed to the Flagged Revisions plan to propose other workable solutions to the problem of wiki malfeasance.
Wikipedia functionality has returned for Brits after the country's Internet watchdog reversed its decision to prevent users in that country from visiting a Wikipedia page containing an image of a naked child.
The Internet Watch Foundation had taken exception with a page dedicated to a 1976 album by rock band The Scorpions. The cover of that album--called Virgin Killer--includes the image of a prepubescent girl, which the group deemed a "potentially illegal indecent image," landing Wikipedia on the group's blacklist.
As a result, Internet service providers in the U.K. began filtering access to all pages of the online encyclopedia over the weekend.
The IWF announced in a statement Tuesday that it would reverse that decision after an appeal and presentation by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia.
"The IWF board has today considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case, and--in the light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability--the decision has been taken to remove this Web page from our list," it said.
The group went on to acknowledge that its effort to prevent people from seeing the image actually resulted in the opposite effect, bringing more attention to the album cover worldwide.
"IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect," the watchdog group said. "We regret the unintended consequences for Wikipedia and its users."
The Wikimedia Foundation applauded the Internet watchdog's "swift action," but noted that the episode emphasized the need for watchdog accountability.
"We recognize the good intentions of Internet watch groups, including their focus on blocking and discouraging illegal content," Mike Godwin, general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement. "Nevertheless, this incident underscores the need for transparency and accountability in the processes of the Internet Watch Foundation and similar bodies around the world."
