By now, most everyone in the Wiksphere has heard of Wikiscanner, the tool that Virgil Griffith put online to help folks decipher who was doing what “anonymous IP” edits in Wikipedia. I call it the equivalent of the “DC Madam” list that rocked Washington DC this year.

You could make the argument Wikiscanner’s impact is greater in scope and importance, given the number of organizations fingered in the log analysis and the types of edits that were made.

One problem with taking all the Wikiscanner info at face value is that while you see the edit made by the IP, you may not immediately know whether it “stuck” or was reverted seconds or minutes later. That would be a good secondary level of research — did those edits stick?

Another tool worth noting is Wikirage, which tries to identify the most edited articles in a particular time span. The description:

This site lists the pages in Wikipedia which are receiving the most edits per unique editor over various periods of time. Popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games can be quickly identified by monitor this social phenomenon.

It’s a pretty interesting adjunct to Wikicharts, which shows what pages are being viewed. If you look at what’s hot top 20 now in editing, and reading for the last week, there is not much overlap. But I wonder if you readers out there see any interesting trends?

Top 20 Most Edited

1. BioShock
2. Moon
3. 2007 Greek forest fires
4. Deaths in 2007
5. Larry Craig
6. Antonio Puerta
7. Alberto Gonzales
8. Abdullah Gül
9. Oscar Gutierrez
10. Owen Wilson
11. SummerSlam (2007)
12. UEFA Champions League 2007-08
13. Archaeopteryx
14. Houston, Texas
15. 2007 World Championships in Athletics
16. Beyoncé Knowles
17. Nick Hogan
18. Making the Band
19. Google
20. William Goebel

Top 20 Most Read

1. United States
2. List of big-bust models and performers
3. JonBenét Ramsey
4. List of sex positions
5. Hurricane Katrina
6. Pluto
7. List of female porn stars
8. Irukandji jellyfish
9. Pornography
10. Wii
11. World Wrestling Entertainment roster
12. Jeff Hardy
13. Pokémon
14. September 11, 2001 attacks
15. Celebrity sex tape
16. Neighbours
17. Warren Jeffs
18. C programming language
19. Sasuke Uchiha
20. Volkswagen Type 2

(Some articles excised, like [[Wikipedia]], [[Main Page]] and the like)

Barcamp, the grassroots technology unconference, will hold its first ever Barcamp Beijing this weekend on Sunday, September 2. This is being organized largely through Facebook, and this website. Hope to see some folks there.

By now you might have seen the book The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, the contrarian book by Andrew Keen telling us that we’re sewing the seeds of destruction with Web 2.0 by being driven by the “wisdom of crowds.”

Since I’m writing a book that exalts the crowd’s ability to create something like Wikipedia, many folks have asked me what I think about his thesis.

Well the problem is, I’m not sure there is a firm thesis to his book. While I’m quite sympathetic to the idea that MySpace and inane YouTube videos might indeed be a zombie plot to eat our brains through technology, on balance the Internet and Web 2.0 have done far more to engage a new generation in writing, conversation, content creation and inter-cultural dialogue than it has to corrupt us. What I find amusing is that the Internet has averted what everyone feared in the 1980’s — comatose teenage couch potatoes transfixed in front of the TV, passively absorbing mindless programming. Yet here is Keen villifying the Internet for its engagement and interactivity to reconnect humans.
So when asked to summarize Keen’s book, I usually tell folks it’s a “loveletter to mainstream media.”

He has an immense amount of faith in the conventional media to do an unrivaled job to nurture and filter the best sources and content for the general public. (I always found this argument quite odd to make in this day and age, with the spectacular failure of the “MSM” news media in reporting accurately on the march up to the “war” in Iraq, Curveball, and weapons of mass destruction.)

The problem with Keen’s book, and his associated lecture circuit, is that too often he comes back to simply saying, “I just don’t buy it.” Whether it’s on NPR (June 16, 2007) or authors@google (Google’s guest lecturer series), he seems to retreat to this same phrase, though his British accent (with a dash of Californian) helps put some gravitas behind it.

In the NPR interview specifically, he mentions how the Internet is cause of “death of the independent bookstore” while not acknowledging this was happening well before via the arrival of megastores like Barnes & Noble, Borders and even Costco.

Keen proclaims, “I prefer the wisdom of the professional. For people who are in doubt… look at Wikipedia and then look at Britannica.” This is quite a strange argument to make. Wikipedia is in the top 10 most visited web sites in the world, and even with is quality in flux, it’s hands down more relevant and useful to the average college student than Britannica’s narrow set of subjects behind a subscription firewall.
But so far the best analysis and rebuttal of Keen’s work comes from David Weinberger, who writes an extremely detailed and thoughful work in The Huffington Post. Weinberger was one of the first folks who first alerted ordinary folks to the massive impact the Internet would have in The Cluetrain Manifesto, and his insight is incredibly forward thinking. You would do well to review their new 95 Theses.

But more importantly read Weinberger’s entire response to The Cult of the Amateur. I would argue Weinberger does a better job of summarizing Keen’s views than Keen himself.

Apologies for the long hiatus, but my first post in weeks is to bring good news — Wikipedia’s foreign language editions are “back” and accessible in the PRC. That is, all except for the Chinese (zh.wikipedia.org).

Users in the PRC probably noticed access went away a few days ago to the entire universe of Wikipedia/Wikimedia content. After my notifying the Wikimedia tech team about the outage, it was simply a matter of them restoring the previous DNS lookup scheme and things work fine.