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 stumbled into a strange story at the Wiki-Observations blog, which had a cryptic discussion of the departure of a Wikipedia admin named Newyorkbrad. After some googling, I think I've pieced things together. It seems that Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt has outed (or threatened to out) Newyorkbrad by publishing his name and the law firm he works for. This has prompted Newyorkbrad to leave Wikipedia. From what I can tell, Brandt was able to figure out Newyorkbrad's identity because of pictures taken of him during Wikipedia's "Wikimania" conference. Many Wikipedians like to remain anonymous for various reasons - one oft-cited reason is cyberstalkers, but I can imagine that Newyorkbrad might not want the firm he works for knowing that he spends parts of his days editing Wikipedia.

Brandt's site - Wikipedia-Watch - has a list of a number of Wikipedia admins that Brandt deems to be part of a "hive mind." He feels he's been personally attacked by many Wikipedians as he's attempted to get the article about him deleted (currently, there is no "Daniel Brandt" article on Wikipedia.) Brandt also thinks that Wikipedia's anonymity policy is unethical and invites corruption.

German Wikipedia will be published as a book. Will it still be called "Wikipedia," or will it be called something different? It seems to me that that a new name is required the moment a wiki is transformed into something more stable. It ain't a wiki anymore. Unless maybe they are going leave some blank pages at the end of each article...

This story about connections between "military analysts" (i.e. talking heads that defend war strategy) and military contractors is making the rounds. I've now seen it linked on Boing Boing, The Blogora, and a few other blogs. It turns out that those "explaining" U.S. war strategy in Iraq had financial interests linked with that war and also served as a kind of public relations staff for the White House:

“It was them [the Bush administration] saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Followers of Wikipedia know this tactic by the name of sockpuppetry. As Bevelacqua notes, a sockpuppet involves some other entity sticking their hands up another's...errr..."back" and putting out a particular message. On Wikipedia, this is used to hide identity and it's linked to whitewashing and other nefarious practices.

An interesting documentary about Web 2.0, and it even includes Andrew Keen doing his thing. I'm really starting to wonder if Keen believes much of anything that comes out of his own mouth. Dude has found a niche market and is hanging onto it for dear life. Interestingly enough, he's using the Web to make sure many people receive his message...hrm:

So, I just read this interview of Jens Lekman. Lekman is a musician whose stuff I really don't much like. My roommate once commented that dude belongs on the Love Boat. Another friend described his new album this way, "his new album does indeed sound like watching late 70s escapist TV shows while laying on shag carpet."

But anyway, that's not the point. It turns out that when this "Swedish indie pop maestro" comes through customs in the U.S. and claims he's an artist (for work permit purposes) they look him up on Wikipedia:

SFBG: I read online that the latest album was inspired by a first kiss from a lesbian friend. Is that right?

JL: Uhhhh - I love it! It sounds like someone has put together all these different things...

SFBG: I think that might have been on Wikipedia.

JL: I love Wikipedia! That's so funny. Every time I come into the US and i cross customs or border control, they always check my passport and I have a work permit now for the first time - I never had it before and I always had to sneak in before - and they check me and say. "Oh, you're an artist." There's always a guy behind the guy saying, "Check him on Wikipedia."

That's so funny that the American authorities would use Wikipedia as a trustworthy source! Anyone can change anything. A friend of mine usually goes into my Wikipedia and writes all this bullshit, just changes things. I think the last thing she wrote was that I was the son of a bear trapper.

Mark Bauerlein's post at the Chronicle of Higher Education Brainstorm blog frets about "the Wikipedia syndrome." It seems to me like the same old stuff. He describes a study by Mike Petrilli in Education Next:

It starts with an experiment, and the results are worth noting. Petrilli collected 100 items from U.S. and world history textbooks, things such as the Mayflower Compact, the Protestant Reformation, and Anwar Sadat. He then did what students do when assigned those terms as research topics. He typed them into Google...Eighty-seven times out of 100, the Wikipedia entry for the term came up first. Twelve times it came up second, and once third. “In other words, the Wikipedia site was listed among the top three Google hits 100 percent of the time.”

For Bauerlein, "this is bad." It's bad because students will likely take the easy route:

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.

Along with many others, I’ve been following the latest Wikipedia controversy: the publishing of images of the prophet Muhammad and the subsequent petition filed by those who would like to see those pictures taken down. Recently, I began viewing my dissertation as the presentation of a number of Wikipedia episodes, followed by rhetorical analysis of how (what I’m calling) Wikipedia’s hospitable constitution plays out in practice. I want to be clear: the code is hospitable. This is different than saying Wikipedians themselves are hospitable (there is evidence that some are not.)

At the moment, I’m thinking that the Muhammad episode will find its way into my dissertation; however, it’s becoming more and more difficult to stop adding such espisodes. Wikipedia is a moving target (what text isn’t?) and I’m going to have to stop adding stuff. At any rate, I thought I’d chime in briefly about how this whole story is playing out in terms of who’s responsible. Much of the news coverage of this issue has discussed how Wikipedia/”they”/editors have decided to leave the images up in the name of Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View Policy. For instance, the Guardian describes the situation this way:

I'll bet those of you who read this headline - U. of Texas Professor Praises Wikipedia - thought that I had begun passing myself off as a professor. No, the article is not about me - it's about a UT Dallas professor named David Parry. He, of course, makes great points (points that I have made in the past):

He encourages his students to read Wikipedia’s “history” and “discussion” pages, saying they explain how articles were produced. And he says the online encyclopedia’s entry on global warming does a good job of explaining both the controversy and the science surrounding the issue.

But for a real treat, check out the comments on The Wired Campus blog where this story was posted. Academics are scared shitless of Wikipedia. Here's one of the comments:

Ah, Yes, Transparency …