Wikipedia depends on collaboration for success (18 September 2008, Daily Trojan)

Professor Robert E. Kraut of Carnegie Mellon University discussed the factors that are involved in the success of online communities, and his own research into the coordination techniques of Wikipedia. Success in an online community can be defined in a number of ways, he said, but to succeed, online communities need to overcome challenges such as a lack of response to posts, recruiting members and welcoming newcomers. Focusing on Wikipedia, Kraut said that Wikipedia articles require “an awful lot of substantial coordination”, for example, in planning the article or dealing with disputes. There is explicit coordination (such as through planning and discussing) and implicit coordination (such as through structuring), he said, and the coordination work lies beneath the surface of the article.

Other mentions

Other recent mentions in the online media include:

• Defining the Bush Doctrine: Not as Simple as it Sounds (15 September 2008, The Wall Street Journal blogs)
  Sarah Palin’s gaffe focuses attention on the Bush Doctrine article.
• Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales on wiki success and failure (11 September 2008, ZDNet blogs)
  Listen to a podcast where Jimmy Wales discusses the factors that lead to success or failure for a wiki, such as critical mass.
• Wikipedia Sleuths Win Journalism Award for Wired.com (10 September 2008, Wired.com blogs)
  A Wired.com blog won an award for combining a voting widget with the WikiScanner application to let readers highlight self-interested edits to Wikipedia.
• Vernon Kay shocked at death by Wikipedia (15 September 2008, TechRadar UK)
  Television host Vernon Kay has had his Wikipedia biography vandalised to say that he had died in a yachting accident, when he is perfectly well and alive.
• Knol, the Wikipedia Maybe-Fork? (19 September 2008, Slashdot)
  The author of this article suggests that Google Knol accept CC-BY-SA contributions, so that once the GFDL is compatible with CC-BY-SA, copying to Knol will be completely above board; this will facilitate the creation of, effectively, flagged revisions of Wikipedia articles, supported by people’s reputations.
• How Wikipedia Works (19 September 2008, Kansas City infoZine)
  This is a book review of the book How Wikipedia Works, written by a number of prominent Wikipedians.

From the Wikipedia Signpost.

But what if you want to use Planet 3 using Opera Mini?

The short answer is, you can’t. The author of this post thinks that it’s due to the server restricting access to the built-in browsers, but I don’t think this is the correct reason.

Opera Mini, according to Wikipedia, uses a proxy server hosted by Opera that renders the page in a special compressed format. Now, it should be axiomatic that Planet 3 is not accessible outside the 3 network, and the proxy servers are definitely located outside the network. Q.E.D.

Andrew Keen on New Media – Recently, Internet commentator Andrew Keen was at Oxford University together with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger to debate whether “the internet is the future of knowledge”. Keen notes that it was ironic for the discussion – including discussion of whether the internet was democratising the creation and distribution of knowledge – to have occurred at Oxford, a representative of the “ivory tower business model for knowledge”. He notes that establishment of Oxford University by a wealthy landowner contrasts with the origins of Wikipedia, and sites like Wikipedia and Citizendium are driving the adoption of wikis, podcasts and blogs, even by traditional knowledge companies. Keen found the response of Oxford faculty and students to the democratic potential of the internet enthusiastic and “anything but snooty”.

Other mentions

Other recent mentions in online media include:

• Myanmar or Burma? Wikipedia debates – Wikipedians have been grappling with Burma’s name, which is a “complicated issue” according to one academic.
• Toronto is #1 (On Wikipedia) – User:Bearcat, from Toronto, is the (human) user with the highest number of edits on Wikipedia, based on the latest rankings.
• Cyber bandit sabotages top cop – The Wikipedia article on Australian Federal Police chief Mick Keelty has seen a spate of nonsensical vandalism recently, and is now semi-protected.
• The Backstage Sights, the Locker Room Scents – The “Wikipedia test” for tour guides: would you have gotten more “charm, energy and knowledge” if you had brought a printout from Wikipedia instead?
• Wiki gone wild – This author claims that Wikipedians tend to be anti-Israel while pretending to be objective, for example, in the treatment of the term “occupied territory“.

From the Wikipedia Signpost.

HSC students to get Wikipedia course – As of next year, the English curriculum for students sitting for the Higher School Certificate, which is taken in New South Wales, Australia, will incorporate an elective called “Global Village”, which will include the option of studying Wikipedia. Explaining the choice of Wikipedia, the English inspector at the Board of Studies, which oversees the HSC, said that Wikipedia reflects “notions of the global village”, and that the course will allow students to examine communications on a global scale. There has been a positive response from education.au, a not-for-profit educational organisation that brought Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to Australia on a speaking engagement last year. The CEO of education.au, Greg Black, said that young people need to learn how to understand and contextualise the information they gather on the Internet and to determine “whether there’s an alternative view”.

Other mentions

Other recent mentions in the online press include:

• Clinton’s entry in Wikipedia has a watchdog – One of the editors watching over Hillary Clinton’s Wikipedia biography has been brought unexpected celebrity and is profiled by this article.
• The Wiki business plan – Sue Gardner and Kul Wadhwa talk about growth plans for Wikimedia, the business side of the foundation, and future opportunities.
• REPN TRI to the FULLEST!!! - “[A]s a model of discourse, it’s a killjoy”; this author believes that the style of the prose on Wikipedia is apt to lead students to believe that intellectual discourse is “leaden” and “spiritless”.

As published in the Wikipedia Signpost

Google usually makes a noisy entry wherever it dares to tread, and this week’s announcement of Knol, a site that will host user-generated articles was no different. Wikipedians, however, should have nothing to fear.

Knol, which is currently only accessible to a select few who have been invited, will be a site that hosts user-generated content on a wide range of subjects. The term knol was coined by Google to mean a unit of knowledge, and refers to the entire project as well as individual articles. While the jury is still out on whether Knol will be successful, or whether it will even make it to a public launch, the obvious comparison that has sparked the Internet alight is with Wikipedia.

There are some immediately apparent differences between Knol and Wikipedia. The most important one is that Knol is not a wiki. Content pages will be owned by a single author and that sole author has the responsibility of maintaining its content; users can participate by suggesting edits, or by rating or commenting on the article, but that’s about it. There is no Wikipedia-style collaboration model; in fact, it is difficult to see how there can be much of a strong community. The single author approach admittedly has its attractions, though; an author’s reputation lives and dies by his or her words, and this builds trust into the equation. However, as many have noted, this denies Knol one of the more valuable aspects of Wikipedia articles, that controversial articles are likely to have been edited by a variety of users who have had to compromise to produce a relatively neutral and balanced piece of work. The competition between different Knol pages will not necessarily result in greater utility for the end user.

This competition is what will define Knol, and this further differentiates it from Wikipedia. Writers of Knol content will have the ability to insert Google advertising into their pages and earn a cut of the resulting revenue. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is advertising-free, and the competition on this site, if you can call it that, is one more akin to a friendly meritocracy than the harsh world of chasing advertising dollars. Knol, from its very foundations, does not seem conducive to a community spirit, something that may keep editors on Wikipedia.

But maybe Google doesn’t need a sense of community. Cynically, all it needs is for people to link to Knol articles, have the pages appear close to the top of its widely-used search results and then have its advertising cash registers chinking; by comparison, sending people to Wikipedia does Google no direct financial favours. Wikipedia could lose out by having less incoming traffic, and therefore less exposure to new, potential editors.

Knol is an interesting idea that will surely stimulate debate about how the face of user-generated content should proceed. It currently appears as neither friend nor foe, but as another choice for users that will probably satisfy its own niche.

No, I don’t believe it’s true in general. Sure, the quality of blogs does vary quite a bit — but they all serve some kind of a purpose. Whether it’s a professional blogger contributing in his or her field of expertise, or a university student writing about life, the universe and crap like that, it’s all because they have something to say. The ability to link between blogs and comment on blogs creates a kind of dynamic that encourages people to think — instead of merely being passive consumers. That is a great thing to see. I suppose Andrew Keen wouldn’t agree, but just because he’s published in dead tree form doesn’t amount to much: see the Wikipedia Signpost review. By being able to search exclusively in blogs, you too can participate in this part of the Internet — participate in free speech. You can find out things that traditional media will not cover — how-to’s in obscure topics, political rants that match your persuasion. The results you get are pretty good — see this description of how it all works. Yes, Google’s thorough.

For bloggers, it is important that you are indexed by search engines, even if you are a small time blogger like me. What’s the point of writing publicly if you don’t actually intend on anyone reading it? I had known of Technorati before this, but Technorati has many irritations that other bloggers have covered and I won’t cover here; anyway, Google’s overtaken it. To ping Google Blog Search, just add http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 to your list of servers to ping.

In other news, Google Maps features content for the 2007 federal election. Click on the “My Maps” tab and it’s under the “Featured content” part. Overlay the party colours onto the map of Australia, and you’d be surprised about the land area that the Liberals/Nationals represent!

On a final note, Google Blog Search and these special maps rather emblematic of the problem that Google has so many fantastic services written by so many fantastic engineers that just aren’t seeing much of the light of day because… there are just so many of them.

Sad kitty: my cats would hate this - this surely counts as animal cruelty! Only in Japan…

Are the days of the SMS numbered? As the only person using mobile Internet regularly that I know of, I’ll just say something quickly. No, I don’t think email (in its current form) can supplant SMS. Putting aside the reputation of email as being for more “serious stuff”, email is fundamentally a pull medium, not a push medium that SMS is. The usually widely different uses of the two mediums doesn’t really make a strong argument for the convergence of the two - one’s for short quick messages that you’d prefer to be received instantly, while the other’s for longer messages that can be digested at the recipient’s leisure. I guess you could do something like what Google has done by meshing email and chat together in Gmail, the logic being that both are about conversations, and they’re just different manifestations of the same thing… but I just don’t see SMS and email together as offering any additional benefits to what we have currently. In terms of cost, yes, one SMS nominally costs a lot more than one email, but my cap plan at least allows me to treat SMS as an all you can eat thing - I can’t possibly use it all up unless I text day in day out.

A less harsh review here

Put simply, anti-virus software is only necessitated by the hoards of people who basically just click anything that moves. I’ve watched, transfixed, many times, as non-technical users use the Internet and check their mail. I just don’t understand.

Until recently, I too have considered anti-virus software to be the necessary yearly “Windows tax” that you’ve just got to pay… until it basically struck me that in the last couple of years, we’ve had no instances of virus infected files at all. In fact, because of our vigilance, we’ve also had no instances of spyware or adware at all in the last couple of years (as detected by Ad-Aware and Spybot). Our ROI on security software is… zero.

That’s why I didn’t take up their offer of free technical support. Even if I had a desire to work out what was going wrong, it would’ve taken too much trouble to switch uninstall AVG Free Edition (which is really good - low resource usage, and did I mention that it was free?) and reinstall NAV, and my subscription runs out about now (I was not intending to renew), so there would’ve been absolutely no point in fixing it anyway.

So, farewell Symantec. For those of you who are wondering what I use: AVG, Ad-Aware and Spybot on all machines; Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall on XP, the built-in firewall on Vista. (The firewall isn’t strictly necessary, because I have a router that blocks most incoming connections anyway.) I highly recommend all, and they’re all free.

Almost by definition, it is not possible, nor desirable, to have two formats that cover one particular domain. And a war has been brewing in none other than in the document format arena: the battle between the Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft’s Open Office XML (OOXML) has just begun.

A standards war is typically just that: two standards compete against each other on technical aspects, and the better one wins. This time, we have the muddying effects of large commercial interests, and the possibility of legislative action. In recent months, legislation has been brought before several U.S. states (but defeated) to mandate the use of an open XML standard for use by government documents; this has been widely interpreted to mean mandating the use of ODF, because OOXML hasn’t quite yet been promulgated as an open standard.

It is a debate that doesn’t have a clear answer. The main piece of software that uses ODF is OpenOffice, which in my opinion is inferior to Microsoft Office (all things equal, and ignoring price). Microsoft Office, in its most recent incarnation, has demonstrated that it is a mature product; it is comfortable to use, and almost anyone can become productive with it almost immediately. While I’m not disputing OpenOffice’s ability to create documents and spreadsheets and what not, it feels like a cheap clone of what Office was about ten years ago; it feels clunky and wrong, and I just don’t like it. I’m sure others agree. People who know me will just argue this is just me exhibiting my usual biases.

There are a number of reasons, however, that ODF is preferable to OOXML; Rob Weir (an IBM employee) presents his arguments quite lucidly. The primary motivation behind the legislative push towards mandating the use of an open format is the realisation that we need a way in which documents can be kept for posterity; if we rely on a closed, proprietary format, our descendants in, say, 100 years’ time, will no longer be able to open our documents. I agree with this motivation, and I support open standards because they increase interoperability; I recall the days when writing web pages that behave reasonably identical in different browsers was an arduous task.

This is where the dilemma lies. ODF is more open; it is a community driven standard that has a number of open source writers/readers. OOXML is, I suppose, open; however, the format is published in a formidable 6,000 page document, and its development will always be driven by a single company - is that really open? (Even if it isn’t strictly open, I do note that having the format in a specification does enable document longevity.) However, mandating the use of ODF practically means mandating the use of OpenOffice, because Office support for ODF is rather poor (and is likely to be for the foreseeable future). Sure, I’m muddying the waters between formats and applications, but currently, the leading office productivity suite does not effectively use ODF. This is a problem that must be taken into account in any push towards mandating the use of a particular format.

One could argue that this is one of the evils of Microsoft’s monopolistic empire - that we are so addicted to their products that we are unable to move off them. The winner will be the camp with the biggest will, and the biggest ability to muster powerful friends. Perhaps it will once again be the law, and not economics, that breaks up a monopoly (c.f. AT&T). But there is one thing that is clear: in the end, there will be one format that prevails, for two is unsustainable and impractical.

To finish, it is slightly ironic that Microsoft is attacking open format legislation; their reaction is almost tantamount to denying that OOXML is not open. As Rob Weir notes, Microsoft executives have a history of making confusing statements; if they are actually confused, that isn’t a good sign, and if they are confusing us intentionally, I’m sorry, but the community isn’t that stupid. Microsoft shouldn’t be scared of open standards; they should just look to how successful Adobe has been with PDF.