Clinamen

While revisiting some of historian/journalist Marshall Poe's comments on Wikipedia, I found out that Poe leads a project called MemoryArchive. MemoryArchive is a wiki, but unlike Wikipedia it isn't an attempt to use "NPOV" or to focus on what is "verifiable." Instead, its front page asks us to contribute a memoir: "Everyone has a Story. Make Yours History."

I have discussed Wikipedia with Jeff in terms of electracy, and I find his take persuasive: Wikipedia is not an electrate project - it lacks the "felt" (in all the choragraphically complicated meanings of the term) aspects of writing that electracy seeks out.

Check out jamiew's visual representation of edits on Obama's Wikipedia article, and note that "users who edit a lot drift toward the center." That is, the "community" of users here slowly congeals and communes around its center (Obama). But also note that those "other" community members on the outskirts never fully go away. They're always gnawing away at the edges of the center. This is what community looks like. It never communes fully...however hard it tries.

Obama Wikipedia page edits from jamiew on Vimeo.


Link via All the Modern Things

Nate Silver at 538.com has dubbed Sarah Palin the "Wikipedian Candidate":

The problem is that Palin's faults have been precisely those sorts of things that might be difficult to detect from a Wikipedia page. For instance: her tendency to let her nerves get the better of her in interviews, her seeming lack of intellectual curiosity, and the way that her mannerisms, fairly or not, could easily become the butt of jokes. When I saw her debut event in Dayton, I was underwhelmed, asking "how will SNL and Jay Leno react?" and declaring that "this is a pick that looks better on paper than in practice".

My brother is the numbers guy in the family, and he could tell you a great deal more about the problems at Lehman Brothers these days. I won't even attempt a detailed discussion of it. The important point: Lehman Brothers is a casualty of the current "recession" (if the economists are using that word yet).

There is speculation that a McCain speechwriter lifted some phrases about Georgia from a Wikipedia article (link via Wikipedia Blog).

According to Taegan Goddard of Political Insider, here are the three instances that people are focusing on:

First instance:

one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion (Wikipedia)

vs.

one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion (McCain)

Second instance:

Last week, I wondered whether adding information about the John Edwards "love child" controversy to Edwards' Wikipedia article was way to sneak a smear in through the backdoor. Well, Edwards has admitted to the affair (though, he denies the "love child" part).

So, it seems The Enquirer was on to something, regardless of whether it is a "legitimate" news source. And here we are - less than two weeks removed from an edit war - with a John Edwards Wikipedia article that isn't even locked. Here's the section on Edwards' affair:

Wikipedians are grappling with the story of John Edwards and his "love child." The usual arguments of "liberal bias" are floating around, but it seems reasonable to question a story that is only being reported by two media outlets: The National Enquirer and Fox News.

The issue at hand seems to be "verifiability." What constitutes a "verifiable" fact? This is Wikipedia's threshold for what can be included in an article. If it can be cited, it can (in most cases) be included in the article. But what about a story that is just simmering below the surface? A story that is only being reported by two sources, one of which is a tabloid and another which seems to have a very distinct political agenda?

Currently, the John Edwards article references the scandal this way:

My dissertation is moving along these days. I've drafted an opening chapter that explains why I see Wikipedia's constitution of hospitality (that is, its willingness to invite a broad range of writers) as a reason to rethink some key terms like intellectual property, community, and rhetorical agency. I've also drafted two other chapters: one that takes up the Essjay controversy and Citizendium and another that focuses on the Seigenthaler controversy and tools like Wikiscanner.

Mackenzie Meador, a writer for The Daily Texan, contacted me yesterday with some questions about Wikipedia. Her story in today's edition rehashes some of the arguments that appear in most news stories about Wikipedia, and she seems to have gotten a good range of viewpoints. Hopefully, my remarks weren't too cliché.

Have you ever come across a piece of writing that basically sums up your dissertation better than you could? I think I just did. Now, it would make more sense if this writing had come from my dissertation director, but what I found was written by someone I've never met and who (to my knowledge) has not clue that my dissertation even exists. And so I say "Thank you, Nat Torkington." While writing about a Wikipedia dust up regarding the "notability" of a hacker named "Why_the_lucky_stiff"(and the possible deletion of his Wikipedia article), Torkington's post at O'Reilly Radar did a fairly decent job of summing up Hospitable Texts. He didn't hit every point. But hey, nobody's perfect:

"Perhaps an analogy to another social process would help. Wikipedia is like an open source software project where the great unwashed submit patches, the committers choose which to apply, and the core team make executive decisions when needed. There's no piece of code that determines worthiness to be committed to the source tree. Instead, there are people with judgement and human flaws in the way. The Linux kernel shouldn't grow e-mail protocol stacks, web server hacks, and a built-in relational database just because someone submits the patches. The project's committers are there to keep the software project on track. So too with Wikipedia.

Hating the humans or even hating the filtering process is a waste of time and energy. The deletionists and the inclusionists both have a role to play. Wikipedia has a lot of things that it is not and the humans are there to keep the project on track. Those who want to delete and want to keep are doing their bit, just as others did by creating a page for _why in the first place.

The creators of any piece of social software must carefully choose where to punch holes in pure computational deterministic perfection to let human attributes like intelligence or taste shine through. Their choices define the project. This 'you want X, I want Y, we'll go back and forth citing Wikipedian principles and external sources until a decision emerges or must be made by an administrator' process isn't Wikipedia's weakness, or even its strength, it is Wikipedia."