jill/txt

I’m giving a talk at the Wikipedia Academy in Bergen Oct 14-15, and since it’s the Wikipedia, I thought it would be better form to plot the talk out in a blog post rather than making a shiny Powerpoint. Here’s the abstract, titled “Has Wikipedia grown up?”

[Update Jan 4, 2010: the “>video of the talk is now up]

Historically, social media sites don’t last for long. The Wikipedia has lasted far longer than most of its peers, but will it last forever?

The Wikipedia seems to have avoided the last phase - spam and monetization. Or at least, spam is largely kept at bay. Unfortunately, I think the greatest threat to the Wikipedia is its community.

I’m one of those occasional contributors who sometimes adds content about topics I’m an expert on. I find the nitty gritty editing and the debates between deletionists and inclusionists rather dull. In fact, until I started gathering links for this talk, I hadn’t logged in to my account in a few months, and was surprised to find on my talk page that one of the articles I contributed had been nominated for deletion. Fortunately nobody except the nominator wanted it deleted (one person even posted a great link to a statement by Jimmy Wales about how we should relax and accomodate someone who adds a good article about a possibly trivial thing. But really: what a wonderful confirmation of the recent articles arguing that the Wikipedia is scaring away the experts… I add information about something I’m knowledgeable about and it’s nominated for deletion by someone who calls a major research centre a “club/organization”? In both the articles I started that have been nominated for deletion, the nominator clearly knows nothing about the topic whatsoever.

My unhappy reunion with the Wikipedia easily connects to recent reports that the number of contributors to the Wikipedia is stagnating. Perhaps because there already are articles on most obvious encyclopedia topics. Or perhaps because of the Wikipedians, that tight community of copy-editors. Sue Gardner of the Wikimedia Foundation argues that the natural resource of the Wikipedia is emotion, “the rush of joy that you get the first time you make an edit to Wikipedia, and you realize that 330 million people are seeing it live”. Today most often that edit will be deleted.

And who deletes it?

The thing that surprised me the most in Jimmy Wales’ presentation on Wednesday was the extremely skewed demographics of Wikipedia contributors - 85% male, 65% or so single, almost all childless, and heavily weighted towards the under-thirties. I actually hadn’t realised how out of place I am as a contributor, old, married mother that I am. Given that the contributors are so young, male, childless and single, the idea that the Wikipedia has “grown up” seems rather out of place.

Mind you, as far as I can tell, these demographics are self-reported by heavy Wikipedia contributors, so quite likely not very representative. This preliminary survey analysis seems to be the source. Here (as a PDF) are the slides Wales spoke from, pretty much.

And the readers are a different kettle of fish. In Norway, at least, the Wikipedia is mainstream. When I tweeted about the demographics Wales presented, Petter Bae Brandtzæg, a PhD fellow at SINTEF, sent me some more info and gave me a link to slides for a talk he gave in Trondheim today with lots of statistics on Norwegian usage of social media. Slide 14 shows how huge the Wikipedia is and how fast it’s still growing. Over 2/3 of online Norwegian read it at least once a month. But slide 15 shows that daily or weekly reading is skewed by gender - 35% of men and only 21% women read the Wikipedia that often. However, Pew Internet found a far more even gender balance: in 2007, 39% of US men online read the Wikipedia, as did 34% of US women online. The differences make you wonder about the surveys’ methodologies.

[An aside: Men “define the net” Brandtzæg writes. I think that is to leave out vast portions of the net - google anything to do with children, pregnancy, home, work-life balance, crafts or fashion and you’ll find women discussing it extensively. These things are a major part of the net, though perhaps invisible to those who don’t participate in these discussions. Also, a presentation from Pew Internet given just last week gives stats showing that there are more women than men using social networking sites (see slide 8) - this is another major part of “the net” that’s left out of Brantzæg’s assertion. Regardless: I’m rather saddened that the gender differences are so traditional.]

Anyway, let’s get back to the Wikipedia. I think the question of demographics is huge. And yes, I definitely think it can scare people away. Look at any nomination for deletion, say this current nomination that the article on WoWWiki be deleted, for instance, and the bickering and aggression is really very off-putting. Someone wants it deleted because WoW is stupid. Great. Someone else thinks that numerous academic articles citing WoWWiki doesn’t show its notability because academic articles are “primary sources” and Wikipedia doesn’t allow original research in articles. Talk about misunderstanding. This discussion certainly sounds as though its being conducted by those sad 18 year old boys who can’t find girlfriends.

boyd’s law: “Adding more users to a social network [site] increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” With the Wikipedia, the problem is that it’s too good. There are so many articles out there that most of the activity is nit-picking.

Clearly we need copy-editors, which to a large extent is what “wikipedians” are. Without them, most articles would probably look like an “incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids (..) that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts”, as Nicholas Carr accused the articles on George Bush and Jane Fonda of being in 2006.

But there’s a rather dangerous balance between the copy-editors and the content-contributors. Certainly the copy-editors - the “Wikipedians” - do most of the editing. According to Aaron Schwartz in his interesting article “Who Writes Wikpedia“, Jimmy Wales has said that:

it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”

However, when Aaron Schwartz looked at several individual articles, analysing instead who had contributed the most content (i.e. words) rather than simply moved things around or formatted things, the proportions were almost reversed. Most of the content is contributed by people who have made less than 50 edits to the Wikipedia in total.

That might turn the demographics around significantly, too. Maybe 85% of the copy-editors and formatters are young, childless, single men, but occasional contributors - the people who actually write the Wikipedia - are more representative of the general population?

I love the Wikipedia, and I hate the Wikipedia. Most of what I hate about it is the bickering, the ignorance and the hidden agendas camouflaged by acronyms and templates and bragging about superior knowledge of the rules of Wikipedia. What I love about it is the content, the articles, and the freedom. I want to be able to read an article about anything I’m curious about. I’m thrilled to finally have access to a copy of something very close to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Despite the work of dedicated field researchers such as Ford Prefect, much of the contributions to the Guide are made on a strictly ad-hoc basis. With the permanent staff more likely to be on a lunch break than working, “most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.”[7] This has led to the Guide being patchy in its coverage, cobbled together (Its entry on “The Universe” was copied from the back of a packet of breakfast cereal)[8] and often riddled with errors.

I want the Wikipedia to still be around in ten, fifteen, twenty years time.

Queen was my first musical love - well, after ABBA, of course. I must have listened to Bohemian Rhapsody hundreds of times. Although the theme of the repentent murderer may seem odd for a fourteen year old to appreciate so greatly, the passionate cries of “I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all” were perfect for my teenaged angst. I must try to remember how normal those intense feelings are at that age as my eldest daughter rapidly approaches her teens…

Anyway, this wonderful cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody has been flying around the intertubes. It’s played entirely on vintage computers and oscillators and such - and “what you see is what you hear”. Amazing.

I gave a talk for local librarians on Wednesday, which ended up being about the idea that the age of print was but a short blip in the history of human culture, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, as Tom Pettitt and others have called it (see this PDF for Pettitt’s paper on the topic at MIT5), and that we’re now in the post-parenthetical period. I love the Gutenberg Parenthesis concept - it seems such a great way of explaining the changes we’re going through. But the librarians did point out some problems - for instance, why did copyright appear so late in the age of print if it’s one of the defining features of the Gutenberg Parenthesis? Ibsen didn’t actually own copyright to his own works at the end of the nineteenth century - his publisher did, though. And did I realise that early printers used to travel around from village to village and set up their portable printers and publish small runs of whatever people wanted? Well, no, I hadn’t. Well, the librarian continued, the “authority” and mass-media quality of print wasn’t an issue until Richelieu decided that the state needed more information about its citizens and suddenly required all printed material to be sent to the government - and this idea that print should be controlled by the government quickly spread to other countries. Isn’t that a great example, by the way, of how technology and culture/society are interdependent?

I think these objections merely show that the transitional periods are extremely long, and that norms and expectations based on a previous technology carry over far past the extinction of that technology. That’s why copyright extends and even increases in today’s world, despite its being largely unsuitable for today’s technology and communication.

Having thought about this all Wednesday, Thursday’s lecture to my web design students ended up circling around the same issues - and all the links and so on are summarised in the class blog [Update Sept ‘09 - Oops - a teaching assistent deleted THE WHOLE BLOG for that class so that link won’t work and all my notes are lost. GRRR!]

Henry Jenkins has a very useful blog post exploring the origins of the term “digital natives” and showing how its a term that’s increasingly problematic today. This ties in beautifully with the talk I gave in Oslo a couple of weeks ago, where I argued that “the idea of “digital natives” is dangerous - it lets us as teachers and parents off the hook.” As a physical immigrant myself (my family moved to Norway from Australia when I was eight) I particularly appreciated Jenkins’ note on the jingoism implied in the term “digital immigrants”, where an immigrant is seen as always inferior, always going to be struggling with the language, the accent and the culture. In Norway the rhetoric is still largely about immigrants “integrating” successfully, but in the US and Australia, the “melting pot” metaphor has largely been supplanted (thankfully) by the “jambalaya” of multiculturalism, where diversity can be celebrated and seen to be to everyone’s advantage. Jenkins writes:

Surely, we should recognize what digital immigrants bring with them from the old world which is still valuable in the new, rather than simply focus on their lacks and inadequacies.

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At one time, the digital immigrant metaphor might have been helpful if it forced at least some adults to acknowledge their uncertainties, step out of their comfort zone, and adjust their thinking to respond to a generation growing up in a very different context than the realm of their own childhood. As Prensky concludes, “if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives - i.e. all their students - they will have to change.” Yet, I worry that the metaphor may be having the opposite effect now — implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other.

As I argued in Oslo, the skills “digital natives” bring to universities are immensely valuable, but also very different to the ones that we as educators define as “digital literacy”. Teens use the internet differently to adults, and the ways they use it do not completely transfer to the skills needed in a world based on knowledge and information.

Bergens Tidende has a good article about Linn’s machinima evening last Thursday, and Linn herself has blogged very useful rundowns of the program (part 1 and 2) and even two pieces that there wasn’t time for. The evening (and these blog posts) serve as excellent introductions to machinima, giving examples of typical genres and tendencies, neatly and entertainingly organised. A great resource for someone interested in learning about the genre or maybe in discussing machinima in class.

Several major libraries have started saying no to Google’s offer to digitize their books for free - so long as the digitized books are not made available to any commercial search engine but Google. Instead, these libraries are going with the Internet Archive’s Open Archive Alliance, where it does cost $30 to digitize each book, but the content is genuinely open. As a librarian at the Boston Public Library says in this short video at the Open Content Alliance, an important principle of libraries is that they should be open to everyone - indeed, the Boston Public Library has the words “FREE FOR ALL” emblazoned above the entrance door. The New York Times also reports on this. (Via if:book)

Espen Andersen noted the new O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence, by Toby Segaran, which looks really interesting. In an excellent blog post discussing the book, Tim O’Reilly writes about the importance of what users implicitly contribute to the web, rather than just looking at the photos and videos blog posts and Facebook profiles that are explicitly contributed.

No one would characterize Google as a “user generated content” company, yet they are clearly at the very heart of Web 2.0. That’s why I prefer the phrase “harnessing collective intelligence” as the touchstone of the revolution. A link is user-generated content, but PageRank is a technique for extracting intelligence from that content. So is Flickr’s “interestingness” algorithm, or Amazon’s “people who bought this product also bought…”, Last.Fm’s algorithms for “similar artist radio”, ebay’s reputation system, and Google’s AdSense.

This is a book explaining the practical sides of actually using this information - it “teaches algorithms and techniques for extracting meaning from data, including user data”, O’Reilly writes. For instance, it explains that you might be able “to determine if there are groups of blogs that frequently write about similar subjects or write in similar styles” by “by clustering blogs based on word frequencies”, and that this “could be very useful in searching, cataloging, and discovering the huge number of blogs that are currently online.” It then proceeds to tell you exactly how to do this by “downloading the [RSS] feeds from a set of blogs, extracting the text from the entries, and creating a table of word frequencies.”

And the way they’ve set up the online table of contents, with extracts from each subchapter, is a thing of beauty. The bit about finding word clusters in blogs is from Chapter 3, in the sub-section “Word Vectors”.

They’ve set up a nice little interview thing on stage, with Thomas Friedman from the New York Times and Eric Schmidt from Google sitting across from each other with a little IKEA table between them and a soft Persian carpet underneath them. It’s a Keynote Conversation. I don’t think I’ve seen one of them before.
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Right now, Mike Newman is talking about The Show with ze frank, which was an immensely popular daily video log that ran for a year (though I never heard of it before). He just played this short video of ze frank talking about the ugliest myspace page contest he’s organising, where he switches from an apparently naive they’re so ugly approach to an excellent argument about elite and collaborative and amateur cultural creation - really worth a watch.

Via the Norwegian YouTubeBlogg (which seems a good way to track Norway-related YouTube content) I found this video, posted by Datatilsynet as part of a campaign where they’re trying to make teens more aware of their privacy rights and of surveillance in everyday situations.

There’s a website for the campaign too: dubestemmer.no, which means “you decide”. Lots of comparisons - “you have the right to shut the door to your room” encouraging more awareness of privacy issues. I wonder whether it works? I find it striking that this is something we have to teach teens. Will they reject privacy as an odd historical concept? Privacy wasn’t a common right a few hundred years ago, or even a few decades ago, when the idea of a teenager having a room of her or his own would have been extraordinary. Or will there be a revolution against the extreme panopticon of surveillance today?

I think I was born fifteen years too late to have an FTIC (Full-Time Intimate Community):

FTICs are the close group of friends (usually around 8-10 people) with whom you share presence. Most mobile youths know whether members of their FTIC are awake, at school, happy, sick, finished with their homework, etc. They use their mobile phones to keep in touch with their FTIC usually sending state changes by text message.

Joi Ito posted this, discussing something called Radar, which is supposed to let young people easily share photos as well as text with their FTIC. I guess these are the people Twitter is for.

I wonder whether my students have FTICs, or whether they’re too old as well? My ten-year-old doesn’t - well, not yet. She has MSN messenger (the pervasive IM in Norway) but it’s infrequently used. Her mobile phone is only dragged along when I insist. For now.

Axel Bruns has written a very useful discussion of Habermas’s (lack of) development of his notion of the public sphere in response to the internet, based on a keynote adress Habermas gave that is now published.

Is anyone using Twitter? As with most of these social sites I’m not sure how useful it will be, but I’m curious as to how it works. And again, you need friends on it to figure it out! I’m intrigued that it seems happy to send me SMSes to my international mobile phone to update me on my friends’ activities without charging me a thing. So far I only have one friend (thanks Elin!) but I suppose with a lot of friends the SMS thing might get a bit much. We’ll see. Anyway, if you’re on Twitter, let me know!

(And yes, I am still writing my DAC paper, it’s just that I needed another example of a social networking site and well, when I write I need to intersperse it all with little expeditions online. And I’ve revised all the way up to page five now, only three and a half to go, and really, it’s looking a lot better than feared though of course it still has heaps of potential for improvement…)

I found this quote in Trevor Scholz’s blog (and may I say that post is a lovely example of how you can blog a classroom discussion using links and narration - students, please try to emulate that!):

A recent survey conducted by Kelton Research discovered that a majority of Americans (52-percent) said their “most recent experience with a computer problem provoked emotions such as anger, sadness or alienation,” yet a whopping 65-percent of these same folks spend more time with their beloved computer than their own spouse (Engadget)

The logic of the comparison isn’t quite compelling. I mean, I could say that wow, for 99% of women, their bras touch their breasts for more time than their boyfriends do, without that proving anything very useful about women, bras, breasts or boyfriends other than that bras and boyfriends are good for entirely different things. But there’s a certain frisson to it that made me blog it anyway.

Quickly, let me note that Pew Internet has a new survey out on how American teenagers use social networking sites (dated yesterday - hey, that was Sunday! No rest for the wicked?), and that danah boyd (direct link to post not working?) and Fred Stutzman have already commented on it.

As previous surveys have found (sorry, no time to find the links, that one about how Norwegian kids use mobile phones and SMS comes to mind) teens primarily use social networks to hang out with people they already know. Danah writes:

I would like to highlight the fact that 91% of teens are using social network sites to stay in touch with friends they see in person while only 49% are using them to meet people (ever). I hope that this makes people realize that, for teenagers, these sites are *not* about networking. They are about modeling one’s social network.

The content of this post was entirely inspired by a post to the AoIR mailing list.