Next week, the annual gathering of Wikipedia volunteers and professionals will take place in Boston, Massachussetts, USA. See the full schedule for a list of speakers, like Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons), Yochai Benkler (Wealth of Networks), Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) and Mitch Kapor (EFF).
I will be chairing two important panel sessions:

• The general Wikimedia Board meeting on Sunday, which will be important for charting the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) future. Compared to last year, some dramatic changes - on June 12, WMF appointed an interim executive director in Brad Patrick, who also legal counsel. Also, Angela Beesley, one of the first community elected board members resigned June 29, reminding us there may be road bumps.
• The Arbitration Committee Q&A, which is the sometimes controversial “high court” of Wikipedians that decide on conflicts and the long term fate of individual users.

Both will likely draw lots of critical discussion about the community.
Other sessions this year that will be interesting:

• Happy Hacking Days - What better location than MIT One Laptop Per Child office to have geeks talk about the technical aspects of Wikipedia? This takes place in the three days before the conference.
• Lighting talks - Short, quick talks meant to deliver high S/N ratio and stimulate discussion. There are a cluster with a China theme regarding Wikipedia’s blocking in the mainland. I’ll talk about “Seven Ways” of dealing with the block in the PRC.
• Citizen Journalism Unconference (Aug 7) - Organized by Dan Gillmor after Wikimania, I’ll be hosting a session on technical tools for citizen journalists. Feel free to sign up.

Hats off to the grassroots organizing team of Sam Klein, Phoebe Ayers, Delphine, Austin Hair and many others. Last year in Frankfurt was one of the most inspiring and stimulating conference I’ve been to, and I’m sure this year will be no less profound.

technorati tags:citizen, journalism, wiki, wikipedia, wikimania, wikimedia, boston, mit, harvard

For those trying to reach the esteemed EastSouthWestNorth blog, there is nothing wrong with Roland Soong or anything related to his writing.

His Internet service provider, Dreamhost, had a bunch of technical problems triggered by the heat/electricity crisis in California.

Dreamhost status as of Saturday morning, China time:

While on generator power, a dead short occurred from one of our internal telecom users. We are investigating where the dead short occurred. A follow-up memo will be sent by the end of the business day reconfirming our transfer at 11:30pm tonight. We are currently on DWP power until further notice.

So you could say global warming bumped off ESWN, for now.

technorati tags:eswn, blog, china, roland, soong, internet, dreamhost, outage

EFF’s co-founder John Gilmore talks to CIOL, a tech publisher in India, about the latest India blocks. One particularly interesting quote from the article:

Do you think, as a trend, Internet censorship is increasing over the past few years?
People who wish to control what other people are allowed to read or think have not given up those wishes. I think that Internet censorship is increasing, but I think it is increasing less than the growth of the Internet. Thus, the Internet is pulling ahead of the censors despite their efforts.

I think there are many folks who disagree, finding that the Great Firewall in China is doing quite an effective job of filtering. As Nart Villeneuve of Citizen Lab said recently:

Filtering does not have to be technically foolproof, the reality is that *most* people won’t even try to access banned content let alone attempt to circumvent filtering.

That is, imperfect “leaky” censorship is still very effective at restricting general access to critical content.

In terms of user experience, the circumvention tools often require some tech knowhow to install and maintain. Even those with the best tools need to go through the hassle of firing up the resources in each particular instance of blocking. Even then, there is often a big performance hit in response time or download speed. Each obstable dissuades another set of folks, to the point where even with the clear technical means to avoid a block, the user has lost interest or determines it’s not worth the effort. (It is the tech equivalent of demoralizing the opponent.)

It is perhaps a bitter compliment, but the GFW has scaled up quite well so far.

technorati tags:china, censorship, blocking, internet, eff, gilmore

There are reports that Wikipedia has been sporadically inaccessible in Saudi Arabia since last week according to Arab News.

Saudi site-blocking officials can’t seem to decide what to do with Wikipedia, a popular online public-access encyclopedia that amasses information on virtually everything under the sun. In recent weeks the site has been blocked, unblocked, blocked and unblocked again. Yesterday the site was accessible, but earlier in the week it wasn’t.

This seemingly arbitrary site-blocking method has called into question the credibility of the Saudi filtering policy for Internet sites.

Wikipedia Signpost had this to say:

According to the story, Saudi Arabia effectively has only one Internet service provider, except for satellite users who are unaffected by the blocks. Its policy is to block sites that are “in violation of Islamic tradition or national regulations”. Blocking is done at the direction of the Saudi government, which sometimes directly requests the blocking of a particular site. The report did mention that the organization is going through a restructuring process, and mistakes are sometimes made in blocking.

If in fact Saudi officials are blocking Wikipedia due to religious concerns, this probably is not the first such case. Pakistan reportedly briefly blocked access to Wikipedia at the peak of the controversy over cartoon depictions of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Wikipedia nevertheless remains popular in Pakistan, ranking #14 among websites in traffic there according to Alexa’s country breakdowns. It no longer ranks in the top 100 in Saudi Arabia after making a brief appearance on that list earlier.

Hope this can get sorted out before Wikimania 2006 next week. There may be a lightning talk about how to deal with censorship overseas.

Fancy this from The Onion:

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence

Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored

“It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone.

“At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world’s oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition,” Wales said. “According to our database, that’s 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven.”

Make sure you know what The Onion is before reading the full article.

technorati tags:wikipedia, satire, funny, onion

According to different China mailing lists, SCMP is reporting that the “Century China” forum/BBS in the PRC has been shut down.

A popular online forum co-sponsored by the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Institute of Chinese Studies has been ordered to shut down as mainland authorities move to tighten their grip on the internet.

Chinese University and the Beijing Zhongqing Future Community Culture Development Research Institute set up the Century China site in July 2000. It issued an online notice yesterday saying it would be taken offline along with several forums popular among mainland intellectuals and students.

Century China hosted eight online forums, including Century Classroom - the most popular - which had attracted more than 30,000 registered members. A Century China official said it had received an order on Monday from the Beijing Communications Administration and was scrambling to take the site offline  yesterday.

technorati tags:china, internet

Finally, what we’ve been waiting for.

No, not the cat.

The new Skype for Mac has video. This snapshot was from a video conference between my Windows machine running Skype 2.5 and my Mac with 1.5.0.47 beta.

It’s an important step that could spur more adoption of videoconferencing, though it’s doubtful it will challenge the preference for voice. Several reasons why this is significant:

• Cross-platform conferencing. The Mac has iChatAV, which is spectacular between two Macs, but no Windows version. MSN Messenger is popular on Windows, but no Mac video version. As the only popular app that can talk to both platforms, Skype can really use this as an advantage for market share.
• NAT/firewall traversal. Skype wasn’t the first to do voice over IP, but it succeeded to find a seamless way to work through firewalls and residential NAT routers. Doing the same for video is a huge leap forward, as anyone who’s ever tried to configure a router to forward H.263 packets.
• Mac users are important trends setters. Look at all those iMacs and Macbook computers with builtin cameras with nothing to do.

Mac users can try it out here.

technorati tags:mac, skype, video, videoconference

The New Yorker has a generally great expository (KNOW IT ALL - Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? by Stacy Schiff) that ably captures Wikipedia’s most interesting corners. But this deserves a big whaaa?

Wales—who resembles a young Billy Crystal with the neuroses neatly tucked in—recalls the enchantment of pasting in update stickers that cross-referenced older entries to the annual supplements.

One Wikipedian said, “By far the best article I have ever read about Wikipedia.”
I agree.

UPDATE: This nugget was too good to leave out. To those who say leave encyclopedia writing to the experts…

When I showed the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. “Obviously, this was the work of experts,” he said.

technorati tags:wikipedia, newyorker, article, commentary, mustread

BBC China correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes takes a trip to India and notices the stark realities between Delhi and Beijing. For folks familiar with both counties this is no surprise, but he captures the cognitive dissonance quite well.

There are, I suspect, many who are hoping that India, with its freedom and democracy, will win this new race to become the nexteconomic super power. I am not so sure.

I have spent the last eight years living in Beijing, and only four days in Delhi, so comparisons are difficult.
But the few days I recently spent in India made me look at China in a new light

Delhi is an overwhelming experience. It is as if all of humanity has been squeezed into one city.

The streets groan under the weight of people. The air is filled with deafening noise and sumptuous smells.

Switch on the television and it is the same.

Between channels blasting out voluptuous Bollywood lovestories and pop videos, an endless stream of news channels dissect the latest politicalscandals, and debauched lifestyles of the rich andfamous.

Coming from China it is an almost shocking experience…
Later that day as I drove home from Beijing airport along the smooth six-lane highway I could not help feeling a sense of relief at being back in a country where things work.

And it was not just the airports and roads.

Driving through a village on the edge of Beijing I was struck by how well everyone was dressed.
In Delhi, I had been shocked to see thousands of people sleeping rough on the streets every night, nothing but the few rags they slept in to call their own. Even deep in China’s countryside that is not something you will see…

China is not a free society, and it has immense problems. But its successes should not be underestimated.

They are ones that India, even with its open and democratic society, is still far from matching.

During a trip last year to the high tech center of Bangalore, I had similar feelings.

I rode an autorickshaw through town that had to dodge a cow before making it to the massive intersection with an abandoned unfinished overpass, just down the road from the gleaming Dell Computer workplace.

Locals know it’s also famous for the traffic light that holds west-bound traffic for a full seven minutes, so most vehicles turn off their engine and wait it out. (I took the opportunity to hop out and take some pictures.) If you take a left turn to head towards the town center, it’s all brown dirt with large sharp rocks jutting out. Driving a three-wheeled rickshaw through it is completely insane, where you’re one jolt away from completely toppling over.

But it’s important to note that the India vs. China competition is not very productive in the grand scheme. The success of one will not be at the expense of the other.

technorati tags:india, china, bangalore

Deb Fallows of the Pew Internet and American Life project spoke about “Comparing Popular Online Activities in the US and China” at the recent Chinese Internet conference (July 21-22, 2006) in Singapore.

The numbers confirmed what many emphasized at the conference - the Internet is an entertainment medium in China and used very differently than in the US. Fallows’s numbers illustrate this dramatically. For 19 “common tasks” done online, here are the notable ones.
Task (Percent of respondents in China - US)

• Send an instant message/ICQ (67 - 47)
• Look for job info (61 - 44)
• Play online games (84 - 36)
• Download music (85 - 25)
• Chat online (68 - 22)

There were also significant splits for “Study online” and “Create a blog” but I will post those numbers when I get the full paper in my hands.

technorati tags:china, internet, usa, report, pew, statistics, entertainment, music