Clinamen

Via Aaron Swartz, all government agencies disbursing money for the stimulus package will be required to publish information about that disbursement in an RSS feed. There are very specific instructions about what information must be included and how that information should be formatted.

I assume that these feeds will be available at Recovery.gov. This is a fantastic idea, and it seems to be evidence that the current administration is trying to put its technology (and transparency) promises into practice.

I will be joining Will Burdette, John Jones, Jillian Sayre, and Trish Roberts-Miller on a panel at SXSW interactive called "Is Aristotle on Twitter?" It should be really fun to present some of these ideas to folks outside of the academy. Here's the description:

Tim O'Reilly recently suggested putting change.gov under revision control. After a recent dust up about content on Obama's Transition website being taken down and then re-posted, many have questioned the transparency of the site. O'Reilly's suggestion of revision control is interesting because it would better allow members of the community to see what's changing on the site. However, I'm not sure I'd go as far as O'Reilly's suggestion that the site be run on a Wikipedia model.

This morning, I made another donation to the Obama campaign. I have probably donated more than I should given my financial situation, but this is the first time I've ever been a "part" of a political campaign (I volunteered during the primaries). When Obama turned down public funding, I was skeptical. I was worried that this would cloud many voters' view of his stance against corruption in politics. However, I think it's fairly clear that a majority of Obama's donations are coming from individuals and not PACs, and I think this is a good thing.

Slate's Paul Boutin lauds Friendfeed because it's not as demanding as all of those other Web 2.0 applications:

No, I don't want to use Twitter. I'm way too busy—and, let's be honest, too uninterested (and uninteresting)—to spend all day thumb-typing status updates from my cell phone. That's the problem with Web 2.0 services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and the rest: They expect me to eagerly upload, type, click, and tweet my life onto the Internet so these tidbits can be served to others. What I really want is to be able to reap the advantages of these sites without having to lift a finger—to see what my friends are up to without having to write anything myself.

Encyclopaedia Britannica is getting ready to release a new interactive site that will allow "participation by both...expert contributors and readers." The site will "become the hub of a new online community." The plan sounds interesting. It sounds like readers will be able to contribute to the site, even if that contributed content will be separate from the "core content" of Britannica:

Encyclopaedia Britannica will continue to form the core base of knowledge and information on the site, though the material created by contributors and the user community, which each member will control and be credited for, will be published alongside the encyclopedia. Encyclopaedia Britannica itself will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and will bear the imprimatur “Britannica Checked” to distinguish it from material on the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible.

And then there's this:

Powerset has developed a tool that allows users to search Wikipedia with "conversational phrasing instead of keywords." I tried this out by searching "Who is the current president of Russia?", and didn't really get my answer. The first link told me it was Vladimir Putin, but Dmitry Medvedev was inaugurated on May 7. How do I know this? I Googled "president russia" and eventually got my answer. The first link of the Google search gave me Putin as well, but the second and third links gave me Medvedev.

And this is what I don't get. Who is it that is having such a hard time searching the Web using keywords? I'm not arguing that this is the best way to search, but I do think it's currently doing the job. Much like the QWERTY keyboard (which was designed to slow down typists who were jamming typewriters), it seems we've settled on keyword search for any number of random (and not so random) reasons.

I have been a Weezer fan since the first time I heard "Undone" in 1994. With the exception of their most recent album called Make Believe, I think Weezer's stuff still has something to offer. (Make Believe struck me as an attempt to reach a younger demographic. If so, then maybe it wasn't "bad." Maybe it just that it wasn't "my" Weezer.)

The new album will be self-titled but it will be called The Red Album (in the tradition of The Blue Album and The Green Album), and it will be released in June. The first single is called "Pork and Beans" and sounds promising. But in the meantime, front man Rivers Cuomo has been using YouTube to pull together his minions in a collaborative song-writing effort. I've included the video for steps 1 and 2 below, but you can watch all the steps of the compositional process at Rivers' YouTube page.

Last week, a number of friends emailed me Chris Wilson’s story in Slate, The Wisdom of the Chaperones. I’m glad I’m finally getting a chance to respond to it.

When stories like this are published, I always come back to the same observation: a number of journalistic accounts of Wikipedia are really lazy. I mention one example of this in a dissertation chapter I just finished. When a Wikipedia editor named Essjay was found to be lying about his credentials, Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen argued that, like the communists, Wikipedia had found a way to make Essjay disappear: “Jimmy Wales fired loyal Jordan/Essjay and, all of a sudden, the kid/theologian is history. One minute he's everywhere and then he's nowhere...Now Wikipedia just says: RETIRED: This user is no longer active on Wikipedia.” Yet, had Keen taken a few minutes to do some research, he would have found that Wikipedians were obsessively discussing the Essjay controversy on a request for comments page and in a Wikipedia article about the controversy. This controversy didn’t disappear on Wikipedia – it multiplied. Journalists and critics seem to be so blinded by disgust or annoyance that they fail to do their job - they fail to investigate. There are problems with Wikipedia, and if these folks would take the time to make careful, researched arguments about those problems they might gain some credibility. As it stands, Keen comes off as the exact thing he rails against in his book: an amateur.

Wilson seems also to have stopped short in the area of research. As I read through the article a first time, I was completely on board with Wilson’s comment that "social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy" while in reality "a small number of people are running the show." Yep. This is a big problem, and people should continue to debunk any notion that Wikipedia is utopian or democratic. However, that remark was followed with this citation: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits." This piqued my interest. After reading Aaron Swartz’s study, I’m skeptical of blanket statements that Wikipedia is run by a few elites. Certainly, administrators wield power, but Swartz makes a convincing case that it all depends on what you count. If you count the number of edits a Wikipedian makes, you’ll get the “1 percent” story. However, if you count the amount of text changed by Wikipedians, you’ll get a much murkier story. According to Swartz’s study, it turns out that casual Wikipedians contribute a great deal of content.

But Wilson was citing a much newer study as he made his argument that Wikipedia represents the "wisdom of chaperones" rather than the wisdom of crowds. Maybe this Palo Alto study provided a different account? So, I went to the PARC study, and now I wonder if Wilson even read it. It turns out that when you actually read the study, these researchers found something similar to Swartz:

“Although the population and content of Wikipedia appear to be in continued exponential growth, a closer look revealed a major shift in the distribution of work in the system. We discovered an initial rise and subsequent decline in the influence of ‘elite’ users. This result held true whether elite users were defined by peer-selected groups (administrators) or data-driven groups (high-edit users). We demonstrated that this decline was not due to a decrease in elite user activity or to shifts in user group editing patterns, but instead was driven by marked growth in the population of low-edit users – the rise of the bourgeoisie. These results were consistent whether the data were analyzed by edit count or by the actual change in content.” (Kittur et. al.)

In other words, elites are actually making a smaller proportion of Wikipedia edits as more and more "low-edit users" contribute to the project. These researchers cite Swartz’s study and they cite Jimmy Wales' claims that Wikipedia is essentially written by a very small number of people. Then, they conclude that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: "we show that the story is more complex than explanations offered before." Wilson takes one piece of information from a complex and complicated argument and completely perverts the meaning of the study. He makes it sound as if these researchers argue that Wikipedia is written by a relatively small number of "chaperones." The quotation I provide above should be evidence enough that the study found things to be a lot more complex than this. But I’m not sure that Wilson actually read the study.

Wilson’s "chaperones" argument raises necessary questions, but it does so by cutting corners. Critics of Web 2.0 utopianism often worry that we are lauding amateurs and that the work of professionals is getting shuffled aside. But stories like Wilson’s are evidence that the professionals are not always doing their homework. The argument he makes needs to be made, but why can’t it be made more responsibly? Why can’t Wilson include in his argument that Wikipedia, while not utopian, is the result of a complex composition process that involves both "elites" and "low-edit" Wikipedians? This wouldn’t stop him from discussing that the Wikipedia inner circle wields a good bit of power, and it would allow him to show readers that the issue is complicated.

Wikipedia is not utopian, but it’s not dystopian either. Journalists like Wilson can better serve their readers by slowing down a bit and explaining the complexities of phenomena like Wikipedia.

This is a term I learned recently: Pajamahadeen. Wikipedia gives a cursory explanation, and they have some good links. Apparently the American Dialect Society voted it the most creative word of 2004 - I am way behind on this.

This word is going to play into a chapter I'm beginning to write on how Wikipedia (or, maybe, any electronic text) deals with agency and responsibility. Terms like pajamahadeen attempt to provide an image of the blogger/Wikipedian/internet troll under one neat umbrella. As former CBS News executive vice president put it:

"You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances (at CBS), and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

Bloggers (mockingly, of course) took this and ran with it, creating the term pajamahadeen. Still, it is this circulating image of "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing" that I'm most interested in. Wal-Mart employees have edited the Wal-Mart Wikipedia article, and their not the only ones. Wikiscanner - a tool that traces IP addresses on Wikipedia edits - has shown us that it's not just the pajamahadeen editing Wikipedia (or blogging). This should be evidence enough that the blogosphere and Wikipedia are not controlled by the pajamahadeen.