One of the most interesting sessions of Wikimania 2006 were the Lightning Talks (five minute speedy presentations, somewhere between a brain fart and a quick demo). I moderated two rounds of them, and learned about Webaroo’s offline Wikipedia, Yurik’s Query.php, Yellowikis, Azerbaijani and Serbian Wikipedia writing system issues, among many other things. (I will post my Lightning Talk on “Using Wikipedia Efficiently”, as promised).

But what takes the prize is Domas’s talk about “How to Read Wikipedia.” Only a few dozen people at Wikimania had the pleasure of hearing it. Fortunately, I have a recording of it for posterity.

(3.6 Mbytes in Ogg and MP3 format, 96 kbps. NullC, this Ogg’s for you.)

There is a new list of the most visited Wikipedia pages, which shows how very few pages stick out, and that the “long tail” effect shows just after the #5 page. Not sure about #3 though… here’s a sample:

SHORT: I will be hosting a live Skypecast of a conversation/interview with Brad Patrick and Danny Wool of the Wikimedia Foundation on Friday, August 25, 2006 at 11 am EST (UTC-5). All are welcome to join (using Skype), and also to chime in with questions. Find details on the Skypecast here.

LONG: I’m in St. Petersburg, Florida, as part of research on a book about Wikipedia, and wanted to interview both Brad and Danny. I figured, why don’t we do a “radio-like” show with us in the Wikimedia Foundation offices, and community members can chime in as well? Brad Patrick is the general counsel and interim executive director of the WMF, and Danny Wool is a longtime Wikipedian and holds the position of grants officer. Among the things we’ll discuss (but we want audience participation):

• What does the WMF office do? Who are the people in the office?
• What is the difference between Wikimedia and Wikipedia?
• What happens on a day to day basis in the office?
• Where are the Wikimedia servers?
• What can the WMF staff do to help the Wikimedia projects?
• What are the challenges for the future for WMF?

Please feel free to add comments/questions here, or listen live via Skype and you can “Request the microphone” just like a radio call-in show. We will try to let as many participants chime in.

The time was chosen so that it occurs when most folks are awake - 11pm in East Asia, 9pm in Moscow, 4/5pm in Europe, 11am in Eastern US, 8am in Western US. If you cannot join online, I plan to make a podcast available.

Caveat: This is the first Skypecast we’re hosting so please be patient if at 11am we are still working out some kinks.

I forgot to mention this piece in The Atlantic Monthly by Marhsall Poe (The Hive). Poe, by the way, was so captured by the wiki concept, he started his own wiki project called MemoryArchive. An excerpt from his piece:

Wikipedia has the potential to be the greatest effort in collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known, and it may well be the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration of any kind.

…

They also searched the Web for material they could use to expand my one-line biography. After they were done, the Marshall Poe entry was two paragraphs long and included a good bibliography. Now that’s wiki magic.

This piece, along with the New Yorker piece in July by Stacy Schiff (Know It All), give some of the best reporting on the Wikipedia phenomenon so far. Good historical perspective in both.

Some areas that have not been written about much - the dynamics of edit wars, how community consensus is reached and how new policy is proposed and decided. I hope to address these things in my book about Wikipedia.

I was only recently alerted to this mention of me in Network World:

GOOD: Another business card milestone

Remember the first time you saw an e-mail address, IM address or cell phone number on a business card? Wiki expert Andrew Lih says he may be the first to have his Wikipedia user name on his business card: Fuzheado.

Yes, it’s true, I have “User:Fuzheado” on my business card.

Just recovering from Wikimania where I moderated at least five sessions, and will post more about my post-conference experiences. But the news of the day is the brief outage of Wikipedia. From the Wikimedia Foundation press release (UPDATE: link here):

Wikimedia Foundations were offline today for 2.5 hours due to a dispute between the Foundation’s hosting provider Hostway and their IP transit provider Cogent. The Foundation is assured that this event is in no way related to Wikipedia or any other Foundation project, but rather sole an issue between the two companies.

Foundation engineers worked quickly to restore services The Foundation has secured new networking space and is working to prevent a recurrence of any similar interruption.

“This was an unfortunate case of collateral damage” said Brad Patrick of
the Wikimedia Foundation. “It was a shock that something like this could happen to us without warning. We will do everything necessary to make sure our users have continuous access to our projects.”

Wikipedia is so now firmly in the top 20 web sites in the world, they should make sure to get redundant network connections or have quick rollover to other sites in the Netherlands or Korea.

I’m heavily involved with planning and execution of Wikimania 2006, so there aren’t that many posts coming. But I’ll drop in the occasional note about events here.

Today, there is an extended interview with me on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Harvard Hosts ‘Wikimania 2006′ Conference

Weekend Edition - Saturday, August 5, 2006 · This weekend over 400 Wikipedia enthusiasts are gathering at Harvard for Wikimania 2006, a tribute to the Wikipedia Web site. Andrew Lih, who is writing a book about the Wikipedia phenomenon, tells Scott Simon about the conference.

The satirical comedy-news show The Colbert Report made prominent mention of Wikipedia and said how easy it was to vandalize the online wiki site. Host Stephen Colbert then called on his loyal viewers to trample on the [[Elephant]] page on Wikipedia to add bogus information, as a gonzo-exercise in truthiness. (Video found via YouTube/OGrady.)

Of course Colbert is all about fun and games, but it inspired a deluge of visitors to Wikipedia and to elephant-related pages.

Fortunately, it also showed how the Wikipedia community is robust and can filter out noise and vandalism quite effectively.

• Immediately after the initial burst of activity, the [[Elephant]] page was put into semi-protection mode, meaning “new” users and anonymous users could not edit.
• The AntiVandalBot, an automated software robot that automatically detects and reverts vandalism based on pattern matching and heuristics, cleaned up lots of obvious vandalism. See an example in the edit history where the bot reverted the spurious addition of “EXPLAIN THAT AL GORE!”

In the end, one prominent Wikipedian, Tawker, who also runs the anti-vandalism robot Tawkerbot4, posted this on his blog:

I blocked Stephen Colbert on Wikipedia

Yes, that’s right. I blocked the defender of truth, Stephen Colbert (or at least an impostor… people are arguing if it was him or not) tonight on Wikipedia. Yes, I am Wikipedia Tawker and yes, I blocked. That “joke” used way too much of my bandwidth, my poor Tawkerbot4 couldn’t keep up!
In all, we ended up protecting 20 elephant related pages (I’m not listing them all here, I only have so much disk space , my stats for the the anti vandalism bots show 250 or so elephant related pages reverts. Most were, you guessed it, the fact that the population tripled - way too many times (repetition my friend).

Wikipedia is the world’s largest online reference, and firmly in the top 20 most visited sites worldwide. I guess this is what happens when you’re not a fringe site anymore.

According to reports on the Bloggers Collective, the blocking issue is still not resolved in India. There are still reports of blocks in place, or being reinstituted. From Nikhil Pahwa on the mailing list:

The problem is either with VSNL or Flag Telecom (which is owned by Reliance). If users on Reliance are able to access blogs, then the fault lies with VSNL. MTNL is checking it out - I mailed them, they called, and now they’re trying to find out what is happening. They have the traceroutes.

Fortunately, in his case calls to the telco/ISP got things restored quickly as he updated on his blog, but others are still having problems:

Update 2:
Shyam confirms that this is a VSNL problem, which gets its connection via Reliance. Airtel gets its connection via Singtel, and seems to be working fine.

Update 3: Able to access blogs now. That was quick.

Before Wikimania 2006 starts on Friday, there are Hacking Days, where developers and geeks get together to brainstorm and discuss techincal issues.

If you’re interested in seeing some info about how Wikimedia’s 240 servers power multiple projects and languages across the world, check out the server descriptions and Mark’s presentation.

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