Companies must play by the Wikipedia rules
By Peter Whitehead, Digital Business editor
Published: February 17 2010 15:21 | Last updated: February 17 2010 15:21
As if companies didn’t have enough trouble just keeping their own websites in order – now, they are now being urged to look after their Wikipedia pages, too.
Wikipedia has become an important part of a company’s profile: the Wikipedia website regularly appears second or third in a list of search engine results and for many people will be the most accessible way of learning about a business.
Yet companies fight shy of interfering with what is said about them on Wikipedia – a global online encyclopedia written and edited by its users – following high-profile incidents in which organisations have amended their entries to be more favourable. Reputations were damaged once the changes were discovered and made public.
Advice on how to manage such a delicate relationship with the website, which insists on its independence and neutrality, comes from Lundquist, an Italian communications consultancy.
It has conducted research into how businesses are presented on Wikipedia. It ranked the world’s largest 500 companies according to how much information was included on the encyclopedia’s pages, its presentation and ease of navigation.
Apple came top of the list, followed by BT, Nokia, Royal Dutch Shell, Ford and Toyota.
Lundquist suggests ways in which companies can improve their Wikipedia profile without running the risk of breaking the rules when editing their own entries.
It says the popularity of social media means it is now vital that organisations take an active role in monitoring what is said about them; they must abide by Wikipedia’s rules of openness; when updating a Wikipedia entry, they should leave a note explaining the changes made; and they should engage with and help editors interested in their subjects.
“It is not recommended that companies make longer substantial edits themselves. But users can engage with a variety of groups on Wikipedia in order to solicit help with their article,“ says the Lundquist advice.
www.lundquist.it
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Was it right to censor a Wikipedia page?
Was it right to censor a Wikipedia page?
By Struan Robertson, legal director, international law firm Pinsent Masons
Published: December 11 2008 16:37 | Last updated: December 11 2008 16:37
At the moment, most people cannot edit the page on Wikipedia that describes the Internet Watch Foundation. The “free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit” is wisely restricting who can edit that page following an outbreak of what it calls “vandalism”. Right now, the IWF is very unpopular.
The IWF exists to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet. But its existence is being challenged over its handling of a recent complaint. It was about an image that appeared on another Wikipedia page, concerning an album by German rock band Scorpions. The image featured a naked young girl. It was the original sleeve design for the band’s 1976 album “Virgin Killer”.
The IWF deemed the image potentially illegal and added the page on which it appeared to a blacklist that is enforced by all of the UK’s major internet service providers (ISPs). That action prevented most UK internet users from accessing the Wikipedia page and, due in part to the way that Wikipedia functions, it had the unintended side-effect of stopping those users from editing any of the millions of Wikipedia pages.
The web community erupted in fury. Comments on blogs were overwhelmingly anti-IWF. Fairly quickly, the IWF gave in to some of the criticism. It removed the image from its blacklist, though, after consulting with senior police officers, reiterated its view that the image is potentially illegal.
In my view, the IWF was right to put the image on its blacklist. It was wrong to remove it from the list.
Many people were alarmed to learn this week that there are restrictions on their freedom to surf the internet. Wikimedia, the non-profit operator of Wikipedia, said that this was the first time its site has been censored in the UK. It noted that it has been censored at various times in China, Syria and Iran.
Like it or not, censorship exists in the UK. The right to freedom of expression in the country is a qualified right. The European Convention of Human Rights provides that it can be restricted by laws to protect morals, the reputation or rights of others or laws to prevent the leak of confidential information. Laws on child protection, defamation, intellectual property and confidence all contain a right to suppress online material – which falls within Wikipedia’s own definition of censorship.
Other critics dislike that the IWF decides what to censor. They are right that it should not make that decision if it fails to perform that duty well. But do not judge it on the basis of one decision. It assessed 35,000 complaints in the course of last year alone (and in two-thirds of cases the image was deemed lawful).
The blacklist is kept secret for obvious reasons, but internet users who try to visit the pages on it will be oblivious to the censorship – and I think this is a mistake. ISPs present an error message that does not disclose the censorship. While the IWF can’t control that message, it could encourage transparency.
There is another problem with the IWF’s model: it bans pages, not the images themselves. It says this approach is simpler and more effective, though I confess that I don’t understand why. Still, if that policy is disproportionate it is only slightly so: it did not blacklist an entire site.
The IWF was set up by the UK’s internet industry. It began as a “notice and takedown” body for images of child abuse that are hosted in the UK, giving the public a hotline for reporting illegal images. Web hosts do not know what images are on their customers’ sites and do not need to, provided they react quickly when alerted to potentially illegal content. Only a court can officially declare an image illegal but hosts cannot afford to await that declaration – otherwise it may come at their own trial on charges that carry a maximum 10-year sentence. And they don’t want to give their own staff the job of receiving complaints with images of child abuse attached, so they outsourced the bulk of the work of receiving and assessing complaints – and the IWF was born.
When child abuse images are hosted in the UK, the IWF can identify and notify the host and the host removes them. Its work has cut dramatically the volume of illegal images hosted in the UK.
The IWF’s more controversial operation is the maintenance of its blacklist. When images are found to be hosted outside the UK, the IWF cannot ensure they are taken down. It reports the image to equivalent bodies and law enforcement in the hosting country and adds the URL to its blacklist, a list it updates twice a day. That list is followed by most ISPs in the UK, mainly to prevent their customers stumbling upon illegal images, images which are illegal to view.
Many people don’t like ISPs using this blacklist to censor their surfing. But ISPs do it in the knowledge that if they don’t, the government will intervene. Vernon Coaker, Minister of State for policing, security and crime, said so. He set a target for the end of 2007 for all ISPs to put in place technical measures ”that prevent their customers accessing websites containing illegal images of child abuse identified by the IWF”.
The IWF does not lobby for legal reform – it just interprets the legislation and court rulings that exist. It has a small team of analysts who train with the police and are experts in assessing content in line with those laws. The government trusts it to do this job.
Other industries have their own self-regulatory bodies staffed by experts in the field. The Advertising Standards Authority can ban adverts from TV without a court ruling. Spamhaus blacklists spammers to protect e-mail inboxes. Such bodies are accountable to their industries and the IWF is no different. If it fails in its duty, ISPs can kill it. If they do, they can either replace it or the government will replace it for them.
Some people have said that the Scorpions’ image is harmless in their opinion. My advice: consider it illegal because the IWF’s opinion is likely to be, in legal terms, better informed – and therefore more influential in the mind of a judge. So don’t go looking for it. It was blacklisted because it fails a test of the Protection of Children Act (a law that did not exist at the time of the album’s release). That test says that an erotically posed photograph of an under-18 will constitute an indecent and therefore illegal image. It will not censor Michelangelo’s David or a cartoon, because it is limited to photographs and pseudo-photographs. It is unlikely to censor the album cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind, on which a naked baby swims towards a dollar bill, because courts have never interpreted such images as erotically posed.
The IWF deemed the Scorpions’ image sexually provocative. It invoked its appeals procedure after Wikimedia complained and it upheld its original ruling. But the IWF decided to remove the page from its blacklist ”in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability”, it said. Further reports of the image being hosted abroad will not be added to its blacklist, though if the image is found to be hosted in the UK, it ”will be assessed in line with IWF procedures”.
”IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect,” it said.
I think it was right to blacklist the image after it deemed the image illegal. But a dangerous message is sent by the decision to remove the image from its blacklist. If an image is illegal, should its age or wide dissemination excuse repeated publication? The image cannot be erased from every corner of the internet and prosecutors will not be taking action against all those who own a copy on album sleeve or hard drive. But the IWF’s job is to minimise exposure to illegal images – not to eliminate it. Under enormous pressure I think it lost sight of the distinction.
Censorship takes place in the UK every day, for legal, moral and commercial reasons. When Wikipedia blocks those who vandalise its pages or deletes their hateful comments, it too engages in censorship. Internet companies engage in censorship because they have to – and they outsource part of that burden to the IWF. This incident has focused attention not just on a 1970s album cover. Clearly some people dislike our laws, our industry’s preference for self-regulation and/or the operation of the IWF, though they have failed to offer a credible alternative, one that the industry and government would support.
Balancing our freedom of expression with the protection of children is difficult and important. It is a healthy issue to debate. But like any Wikipedia article, that debate needs some balance. In this case, that balance was missing.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Struan Robertson, legal director, international law firm Pinsent Masons
Published: December 11 2008 16:37 | Last updated: December 11 2008 16:37
At the moment, most people cannot edit the page on Wikipedia that describes the Internet Watch Foundation. The “free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit” is wisely restricting who can edit that page following an outbreak of what it calls “vandalism”. Right now, the IWF is very unpopular.
The IWF exists to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet. But its existence is being challenged over its handling of a recent complaint. It was about an image that appeared on another Wikipedia page, concerning an album by German rock band Scorpions. The image featured a naked young girl. It was the original sleeve design for the band’s 1976 album “Virgin Killer”.
The IWF deemed the image potentially illegal and added the page on which it appeared to a blacklist that is enforced by all of the UK’s major internet service providers (ISPs). That action prevented most UK internet users from accessing the Wikipedia page and, due in part to the way that Wikipedia functions, it had the unintended side-effect of stopping those users from editing any of the millions of Wikipedia pages.
The web community erupted in fury. Comments on blogs were overwhelmingly anti-IWF. Fairly quickly, the IWF gave in to some of the criticism. It removed the image from its blacklist, though, after consulting with senior police officers, reiterated its view that the image is potentially illegal.
In my view, the IWF was right to put the image on its blacklist. It was wrong to remove it from the list.
Many people were alarmed to learn this week that there are restrictions on their freedom to surf the internet. Wikimedia, the non-profit operator of Wikipedia, said that this was the first time its site has been censored in the UK. It noted that it has been censored at various times in China, Syria and Iran.
Like it or not, censorship exists in the UK. The right to freedom of expression in the country is a qualified right. The European Convention of Human Rights provides that it can be restricted by laws to protect morals, the reputation or rights of others or laws to prevent the leak of confidential information. Laws on child protection, defamation, intellectual property and confidence all contain a right to suppress online material – which falls within Wikipedia’s own definition of censorship.
Other critics dislike that the IWF decides what to censor. They are right that it should not make that decision if it fails to perform that duty well. But do not judge it on the basis of one decision. It assessed 35,000 complaints in the course of last year alone (and in two-thirds of cases the image was deemed lawful).
The blacklist is kept secret for obvious reasons, but internet users who try to visit the pages on it will be oblivious to the censorship – and I think this is a mistake. ISPs present an error message that does not disclose the censorship. While the IWF can’t control that message, it could encourage transparency.
There is another problem with the IWF’s model: it bans pages, not the images themselves. It says this approach is simpler and more effective, though I confess that I don’t understand why. Still, if that policy is disproportionate it is only slightly so: it did not blacklist an entire site.
The IWF was set up by the UK’s internet industry. It began as a “notice and takedown” body for images of child abuse that are hosted in the UK, giving the public a hotline for reporting illegal images. Web hosts do not know what images are on their customers’ sites and do not need to, provided they react quickly when alerted to potentially illegal content. Only a court can officially declare an image illegal but hosts cannot afford to await that declaration – otherwise it may come at their own trial on charges that carry a maximum 10-year sentence. And they don’t want to give their own staff the job of receiving complaints with images of child abuse attached, so they outsourced the bulk of the work of receiving and assessing complaints – and the IWF was born.
When child abuse images are hosted in the UK, the IWF can identify and notify the host and the host removes them. Its work has cut dramatically the volume of illegal images hosted in the UK.
The IWF’s more controversial operation is the maintenance of its blacklist. When images are found to be hosted outside the UK, the IWF cannot ensure they are taken down. It reports the image to equivalent bodies and law enforcement in the hosting country and adds the URL to its blacklist, a list it updates twice a day. That list is followed by most ISPs in the UK, mainly to prevent their customers stumbling upon illegal images, images which are illegal to view.
Many people don’t like ISPs using this blacklist to censor their surfing. But ISPs do it in the knowledge that if they don’t, the government will intervene. Vernon Coaker, Minister of State for policing, security and crime, said so. He set a target for the end of 2007 for all ISPs to put in place technical measures ”that prevent their customers accessing websites containing illegal images of child abuse identified by the IWF”.
The IWF does not lobby for legal reform – it just interprets the legislation and court rulings that exist. It has a small team of analysts who train with the police and are experts in assessing content in line with those laws. The government trusts it to do this job.
Other industries have their own self-regulatory bodies staffed by experts in the field. The Advertising Standards Authority can ban adverts from TV without a court ruling. Spamhaus blacklists spammers to protect e-mail inboxes. Such bodies are accountable to their industries and the IWF is no different. If it fails in its duty, ISPs can kill it. If they do, they can either replace it or the government will replace it for them.
Some people have said that the Scorpions’ image is harmless in their opinion. My advice: consider it illegal because the IWF’s opinion is likely to be, in legal terms, better informed – and therefore more influential in the mind of a judge. So don’t go looking for it. It was blacklisted because it fails a test of the Protection of Children Act (a law that did not exist at the time of the album’s release). That test says that an erotically posed photograph of an under-18 will constitute an indecent and therefore illegal image. It will not censor Michelangelo’s David or a cartoon, because it is limited to photographs and pseudo-photographs. It is unlikely to censor the album cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind, on which a naked baby swims towards a dollar bill, because courts have never interpreted such images as erotically posed.
The IWF deemed the Scorpions’ image sexually provocative. It invoked its appeals procedure after Wikimedia complained and it upheld its original ruling. But the IWF decided to remove the page from its blacklist ”in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability”, it said. Further reports of the image being hosted abroad will not be added to its blacklist, though if the image is found to be hosted in the UK, it ”will be assessed in line with IWF procedures”.
”IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect,” it said.
I think it was right to blacklist the image after it deemed the image illegal. But a dangerous message is sent by the decision to remove the image from its blacklist. If an image is illegal, should its age or wide dissemination excuse repeated publication? The image cannot be erased from every corner of the internet and prosecutors will not be taking action against all those who own a copy on album sleeve or hard drive. But the IWF’s job is to minimise exposure to illegal images – not to eliminate it. Under enormous pressure I think it lost sight of the distinction.
Censorship takes place in the UK every day, for legal, moral and commercial reasons. When Wikipedia blocks those who vandalise its pages or deletes their hateful comments, it too engages in censorship. Internet companies engage in censorship because they have to – and they outsource part of that burden to the IWF. This incident has focused attention not just on a 1970s album cover. Clearly some people dislike our laws, our industry’s preference for self-regulation and/or the operation of the IWF, though they have failed to offer a credible alternative, one that the industry and government would support.
Balancing our freedom of expression with the protection of children is difficult and important. It is a healthy issue to debate. But like any Wikipedia article, that debate needs some balance. In this case, that balance was missing.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Monitor | The battle for Wikipedia's soul | Economist.com
Monitor | The battle for Wikipedia's soul | Economist.com
Monitor
The battle for Wikipedia's soul
Mar 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The internet: The popular online encyclopedia, written by volunteer contributors, has unlimited space. So does it matter if it includes trivia?
IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content” on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online. But Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.
Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen—and they are rather poorly edited.
Inclusionists believe that the disparity between Pokémon and Solidarity biographies would disappear by itself, if only Wikipedia loosened its relatively tight editorial control and allowed anyone to add articles about almost anything. They argue that since Wikipedia exists online, it should not have the space constraints of a physical encyclopedia imposed upon it artificially. (“Wikipedia is not paper”, runs one slogan of the inclusionists.)
Surely there is no harm, they argue, in including articles about characters from television programmes who only appear in a single episode, say? After all, since most people access Wikipedia pages via search, the inclusion of articles on niche topics will not inconvenience them. People will not be more inclined to create entries about Polish union leaders if the number of Pokémon entries is reduced from 500 to 200. The ideal Wikipedia of the inclusionists would feature as many articles on as many subjects as its contributors were able to produce, as long as they were of interest to more than just a few users.
Deletionists believe that Wikipedia will be more successful if it maintains a certain relevance and quality threshold for its entries. So their ideal Wikipedia might contain biographies of the five most important leaders of Solidarity, say, and the five most important Pokémon characters, but any more than that would dilute Wikipedia's quality and compromise the brand. The presence of so many articles on trivial subjects, they argue, makes it less likely that Wikipedia will be taken seriously, so articles dealing with trivial subjects should be deleted.
The rules of the game
In practice, deciding what is trivial and what is important is not easy. How do you draw editorial distinctions between an article entitled “List of nicknames used by George W. Bush” (status: kept) and one about “Vice-presidents who have shot people” (status: deleted)? Or how about “Natasha Demkina: Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision” (status: kept) and “The role of clowns in modern society” (status: deleted)?
To measure a subject's worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. So an article in an international journal counts more than a mention in a local newspaper; ten matches on Google is better than one match; and so on. These rules are used to devise official policies on particular subjects, such as the notability of pornographic stars (a Playboy appearance earns you a Wikipedia mention; starring in a low-budget movie does not) or diplomats (permanent chiefs of station are notable, while chargés d'affaires ad interim are not).
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has himself fallen foul of these tricky notability criteria. Last summer he created a short entry about a restaurant in South Africa where he had dined. The entry was promptly nominated for deletion, since the restaurant had a poor Google profile and was therefore considered not notable enough. After a lot of controversy and media coverage (which, ahem, increased the restaurant's notability), the entry was kept, but the episode prompted many questions about the adequacy of the editorial process.
As things stand, decisions whether to keep or delete articles are made after deliberations by Wikipedia's most ardent editors and administrators (the 1,000 or so most active Wikipedia contributors). Imagine you have just created a new entry, consisting of a few words. If a member of the Wikipedia elite believes that your submission fails to meet Wikipedia's notability criteria, it may be nominated for “speedy” deletion—in other words, removed right away—or “regular” deletion, which means the entry is removed after five days if nobody objects. (To avoid deletion or vandalism, many highly controversial articles, such as the entries on the Holocaust, Islam, terrorism or Mr Bush, can be “locked” to prevent editing or removal.)
If your article is selected for deletion, you may choose to contest the decision, in which case you may be asked to provide further information. There is also a higher authority with the ultimate power to rule in controversial cases: the Arbitration Committee, which settles disputes that the administrators cannot resolve.
Debates about the merits of articles often drag on for weeks, draining energy and taking up far more space than the entries themselves. Such deliberations involve volleys of arcane internal acronyms and references to obscure policies and guidelines, such as WP:APT (“Avoid Peacock Terms”—terms that merely promote the subject, without giving real information) and WP:MOSMAC (a set of guidelines for “Wikipedia articles discussing the Republic of Macedonia and the Province of Macedonia, Greece”). Covert alliances and intrigues are common. Sometimes editors resort to a practice called “sock puppetry”, in which one person creates lots of accounts and pretends to be several different people in a debate so as to create the illusion of support for a particular position.
The result is that novices can quickly get lost in Wikipedia's Kafkaesque bureaucracy. According to one estimate from 2006, entries about governance and editorial policies are one of the fastest-growing areas of the site and represent around one-quarter of its content. In some ways this is a sign of Wikipedia's maturity and importance: a project of this scale needs rules to govern how it works. But the proliferation of rules, and the fact that select Wikipedians have learnt how to handle them to win arguments, now represents a danger, says Andrew Lih, a former deletionist who is now an inclusionist, and who is writing a book about Wikipedia. The behaviour of Wikipedia's self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as “wiki-lawyering”.
Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that this deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia's early days is giving way to hostility and infighting. There is already some evidence that the growth rate of Wikipedia's article-base is slowing. Unofficial data from October 2007 suggests that users' activity on the site is falling, when measured by the number of times an article is edited and the number of edits per month. The official figures have not been gathered and made public for almost a year, perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia's health.
It may be that Wikipedians have already taken care of the “low-hanging fruit”, having compiled articles on the most obvious topics (though this could, again, be taken as evidence of Wikipedia's maturity). But there is a limit to how much information a group of predominantly non-specialist volunteers, armed with a search engine, can create and edit. Producing articles about specialist subjects such as Solidarity activists, as opposed to Pokémon characters, requires expert knowledge from contributors and editors. If the information is not available elsewhere on the web, its notability cannot be assessed using Google.
To create a new article on Wikipedia and be sure that it will survive, you need to be able to write a “deletionist-proof” entry and ensure that you have enough online backing (such as Google matches) to convince the increasingly picky Wikipedia people of its importance. This raises the threshold for writing articles so high that very few people actually do it. Many who are excited about contributing to the site end up on the “Missing Wikipedians” page: a constantly updated list of those who have decided to stop contributing. It serves as a reminder that frustration at having work removed prompts many people to abandon the project.
Google has recently announced its own entry into the field, in the form of an encyclopedia-like project called “Knol” that will allow anybody to create entries on topics of their choice, with a voting system that means the best rise to the top. Tellingly, this approach is based on individualism rather than collaboration (Google will share ad revenues with the authors). No doubt it will produce its own arguments and unexpected consequences. But even if it does not turn out to be the Wikipedia-killer that some people imagine, it may push Wikipedia to rethink its editorial stance.
Monitor
The battle for Wikipedia's soul
Mar 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition
The internet: The popular online encyclopedia, written by volunteer contributors, has unlimited space. So does it matter if it includes trivia?
IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content” on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online. But Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.
Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen—and they are rather poorly edited.
Inclusionists believe that the disparity between Pokémon and Solidarity biographies would disappear by itself, if only Wikipedia loosened its relatively tight editorial control and allowed anyone to add articles about almost anything. They argue that since Wikipedia exists online, it should not have the space constraints of a physical encyclopedia imposed upon it artificially. (“Wikipedia is not paper”, runs one slogan of the inclusionists.)
Surely there is no harm, they argue, in including articles about characters from television programmes who only appear in a single episode, say? After all, since most people access Wikipedia pages via search, the inclusion of articles on niche topics will not inconvenience them. People will not be more inclined to create entries about Polish union leaders if the number of Pokémon entries is reduced from 500 to 200. The ideal Wikipedia of the inclusionists would feature as many articles on as many subjects as its contributors were able to produce, as long as they were of interest to more than just a few users.
Deletionists believe that Wikipedia will be more successful if it maintains a certain relevance and quality threshold for its entries. So their ideal Wikipedia might contain biographies of the five most important leaders of Solidarity, say, and the five most important Pokémon characters, but any more than that would dilute Wikipedia's quality and compromise the brand. The presence of so many articles on trivial subjects, they argue, makes it less likely that Wikipedia will be taken seriously, so articles dealing with trivial subjects should be deleted.
The rules of the game
In practice, deciding what is trivial and what is important is not easy. How do you draw editorial distinctions between an article entitled “List of nicknames used by George W. Bush” (status: kept) and one about “Vice-presidents who have shot people” (status: deleted)? Or how about “Natasha Demkina: Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision” (status: kept) and “The role of clowns in modern society” (status: deleted)?
To measure a subject's worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. So an article in an international journal counts more than a mention in a local newspaper; ten matches on Google is better than one match; and so on. These rules are used to devise official policies on particular subjects, such as the notability of pornographic stars (a Playboy appearance earns you a Wikipedia mention; starring in a low-budget movie does not) or diplomats (permanent chiefs of station are notable, while chargés d'affaires ad interim are not).
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has himself fallen foul of these tricky notability criteria. Last summer he created a short entry about a restaurant in South Africa where he had dined. The entry was promptly nominated for deletion, since the restaurant had a poor Google profile and was therefore considered not notable enough. After a lot of controversy and media coverage (which, ahem, increased the restaurant's notability), the entry was kept, but the episode prompted many questions about the adequacy of the editorial process.
As things stand, decisions whether to keep or delete articles are made after deliberations by Wikipedia's most ardent editors and administrators (the 1,000 or so most active Wikipedia contributors). Imagine you have just created a new entry, consisting of a few words. If a member of the Wikipedia elite believes that your submission fails to meet Wikipedia's notability criteria, it may be nominated for “speedy” deletion—in other words, removed right away—or “regular” deletion, which means the entry is removed after five days if nobody objects. (To avoid deletion or vandalism, many highly controversial articles, such as the entries on the Holocaust, Islam, terrorism or Mr Bush, can be “locked” to prevent editing or removal.)
If your article is selected for deletion, you may choose to contest the decision, in which case you may be asked to provide further information. There is also a higher authority with the ultimate power to rule in controversial cases: the Arbitration Committee, which settles disputes that the administrators cannot resolve.
Debates about the merits of articles often drag on for weeks, draining energy and taking up far more space than the entries themselves. Such deliberations involve volleys of arcane internal acronyms and references to obscure policies and guidelines, such as WP:APT (“Avoid Peacock Terms”—terms that merely promote the subject, without giving real information) and WP:MOSMAC (a set of guidelines for “Wikipedia articles discussing the Republic of Macedonia and the Province of Macedonia, Greece”). Covert alliances and intrigues are common. Sometimes editors resort to a practice called “sock puppetry”, in which one person creates lots of accounts and pretends to be several different people in a debate so as to create the illusion of support for a particular position.
The result is that novices can quickly get lost in Wikipedia's Kafkaesque bureaucracy. According to one estimate from 2006, entries about governance and editorial policies are one of the fastest-growing areas of the site and represent around one-quarter of its content. In some ways this is a sign of Wikipedia's maturity and importance: a project of this scale needs rules to govern how it works. But the proliferation of rules, and the fact that select Wikipedians have learnt how to handle them to win arguments, now represents a danger, says Andrew Lih, a former deletionist who is now an inclusionist, and who is writing a book about Wikipedia. The behaviour of Wikipedia's self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as “wiki-lawyering”.
Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that this deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia's early days is giving way to hostility and infighting. There is already some evidence that the growth rate of Wikipedia's article-base is slowing. Unofficial data from October 2007 suggests that users' activity on the site is falling, when measured by the number of times an article is edited and the number of edits per month. The official figures have not been gathered and made public for almost a year, perhaps because they reveal some unpleasant truths about Wikipedia's health.
It may be that Wikipedians have already taken care of the “low-hanging fruit”, having compiled articles on the most obvious topics (though this could, again, be taken as evidence of Wikipedia's maturity). But there is a limit to how much information a group of predominantly non-specialist volunteers, armed with a search engine, can create and edit. Producing articles about specialist subjects such as Solidarity activists, as opposed to Pokémon characters, requires expert knowledge from contributors and editors. If the information is not available elsewhere on the web, its notability cannot be assessed using Google.
To create a new article on Wikipedia and be sure that it will survive, you need to be able to write a “deletionist-proof” entry and ensure that you have enough online backing (such as Google matches) to convince the increasingly picky Wikipedia people of its importance. This raises the threshold for writing articles so high that very few people actually do it. Many who are excited about contributing to the site end up on the “Missing Wikipedians” page: a constantly updated list of those who have decided to stop contributing. It serves as a reminder that frustration at having work removed prompts many people to abandon the project.
Google has recently announced its own entry into the field, in the form of an encyclopedia-like project called “Knol” that will allow anybody to create entries on topics of their choice, with a voting system that means the best rise to the top. Tellingly, this approach is based on individualism rather than collaboration (Google will share ad revenues with the authors). No doubt it will produce its own arguments and unexpected consequences. But even if it does not turn out to be the Wikipedia-killer that some people imagine, it may push Wikipedia to rethink its editorial stance.
Friday, December 14, 2007
FT.com / In depth - Google in challenge to Wikipedia
FT.com / In depth - Google in challenge to Wikipedia
Google in challenge to Wikipedia
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: December 14 2007 21:41 | Last updated: December 14 2007 21:41
Google has taken direct aim at Wikipedia with a project designed to supplant the collectively produced encyclopedia as the primary source for basic information on the web.
Known as Knol, and currently restricted to a limited test, the service is a highly ambitious attempt to collect and organise “user-generated information” in all fields of knowledge.
The move echoes other Google efforts to transform online behaviour – although some, such as Google Base, designed as an open database to collect items for sale, have failed to catch on widely.
With Google’s service, anyone will eventually be able to write a web page about any topic they want, and have it indexed by Google and other search engines. Authors will also be able to benefit from any advertising placed on the page.
Google gave few details about how it would rank submissions to highlight the most accurate or useful, but the group said user ratings would be important.
“A Knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read,” Udi Manber, a Google engineer, wrote on a blog post that announced the project.
That role is often taken by Wikipedia entries, which frequently appear high on Google’s and other search engines’ results, making the collective encyclopedia one of the 10 most-visited sites.
The design of the Google project seeks to address some of the fundamental issues that have hampered the controversial Wikipedia. Entries in the encyclopedia are anonymous and often lead to heated “edit wars”, as people with rival opinions compete to change items. By contrast, Google plans to identify its writers and avoid the collective editing process altogether.
“The key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors,” Mr Manber said.
He added Google expected rival notes to appear on many topics: “Competition of ideas is a good thing.”
That approach will avoid the “problems of governance that come from trying to run a collaborative community” like Wikipedia, said Larry Sanger, a founder of the website who split with that project over its failure to apply stricter editing policies.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Google in challenge to Wikipedia
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: December 14 2007 21:41 | Last updated: December 14 2007 21:41
Google has taken direct aim at Wikipedia with a project designed to supplant the collectively produced encyclopedia as the primary source for basic information on the web.
Known as Knol, and currently restricted to a limited test, the service is a highly ambitious attempt to collect and organise “user-generated information” in all fields of knowledge.
The move echoes other Google efforts to transform online behaviour – although some, such as Google Base, designed as an open database to collect items for sale, have failed to catch on widely.
With Google’s service, anyone will eventually be able to write a web page about any topic they want, and have it indexed by Google and other search engines. Authors will also be able to benefit from any advertising placed on the page.
Google gave few details about how it would rank submissions to highlight the most accurate or useful, but the group said user ratings would be important.
“A Knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read,” Udi Manber, a Google engineer, wrote on a blog post that announced the project.
That role is often taken by Wikipedia entries, which frequently appear high on Google’s and other search engines’ results, making the collective encyclopedia one of the 10 most-visited sites.
The design of the Google project seeks to address some of the fundamental issues that have hampered the controversial Wikipedia. Entries in the encyclopedia are anonymous and often lead to heated “edit wars”, as people with rival opinions compete to change items. By contrast, Google plans to identify its writers and avoid the collective editing process altogether.
“The key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors,” Mr Manber said.
He added Google expected rival notes to appear on many topics: “Competition of ideas is a good thing.”
That approach will avoid the “problems of governance that come from trying to run a collaborative community” like Wikipedia, said Larry Sanger, a founder of the website who split with that project over its failure to apply stricter editing policies.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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