Earlier today on Twitter I commented about the “insanity” that is Robert Scoble following 21,000+ people on the group messaging and microblogging service. Since his bot (software robot) monitors everything on Twitter for mentions of his name, he saw my comment and challenged me.

Scobleizer @fuzheado thinks he knows the point of Twitter and says I don’t. This might be interesting. Might.

Twitter limits you to 140 characters per post, so I had to be succinct:

Twitter is a modern digital commons - nonhierarchical, transparent, open, human-speed. Once bots inhabit it, tragedy perhaps.

Earlier that day I was thinking about what Twitter “was” before the Scoble tweet.

Twitter’s model is simple but powerful — complete transparency. Anyone in the Twitterverse can see what you’re receiving, who you are following and who’s following you. It creates a continually changing set of readers and writers, allowing peer discovery faster than any other SNS. Some other features help.

“Retweeting” an interesting post to your followers effectively bridges two disconnected cliques. The directed “@user” messages send an exploratory “Tweet” to make contact with new peers. It’s great in its simplicity, and the Twitter API furthers extendibility and usability.

The Internet had a lot of naysayers in the 1990s — people complained it was a peer-to-peer system that created ghettos. Terms like narrowcasting, personalized media, customized front pages and the Daily Me all implied compartmentalized lonely existences. Twitter does the opposite, by embracing radical transparency to support serendipitous discovery and social mixing. Perhaps it’s why a number of Twitterers have been noticing they spend a lot less time on Facebook. They’ve hit a wall with their “trusted” network of friends. They’ve tagged photos, thrown sheep, played 100 games of Scrabulous and reunited with old classmates. But they didn’t really broaden their horizons.

For English-language China-oriented bloggers, Twitter has fostered a nimble community whether it’s about Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, business, arts, pop culture, academic, Olympics, you name it. Suddenly a disparate set of folks are discovering each other, trading 140-character info nuggets faster than ever before. And with recent Olympic torch dramas and Carrefour boycotts, it’s been the only info stream that can keep up with breaking events.

Elliott Ng at CNReviews.com has a metric-heavy analysis of who’s who in this sphere, based on the list created by Christine Lu (the ultimate “connector” in Tipping Point parlance). It’s like a celebrity who’s in and who’s out list.

But as Twitter grows, there is the risk the signal may not keep up with the noise. Spam, bots and scalability are always a problem to new digital commons spaces. There is a very good chance Twitter, a “faddish web app“, could be the CB radio of Web 2.0 if it can’t find a way to scale with its new-found fame.

Let’s hope we don’t refer to it as the PointCast of 2008 and wake up with a bad hangover.

Kaiser Kuo has a good writeup on his Twitter conversion. For China-based users it’s been a particularly useful application the last few weeks:

Pick the right folks to follow and there’s real value: They link to interesting reads — this is to me probably the most useful thing about Twitter — and make trenchant, sometimes insightful comments. During the recent troubles in Western China, I was following Twitter feeds from people on the scene, providing first-hand perspective that was nearly impossible to find in the press.

This is a great example of the power of citizen blogging/microblogging being not just a frivolous act (ie. tweeting: “Sitting here watching paint dry”)

With the rising tensions over the Olympic torch relay in Europe, the boycott of Carrefour, the roughing up of an American English teacher by a mob in Hunan and the takedown of Web sites by pro-China hackers, Twitter has been ahead of the curve by assembling an ad hoc community of folks across different cities, pointing to blog posts, first hand accounts from the ground and  BBS postings reflecting local sentiment. It’s something that all China-oriented reporters should check out and experience first-hand.

I’ll be addressing the Hong Kong Journalists Association next week about China’s Internet and will absolutely talk about Twitter and its China-based counterparts.

I’ll be in NYC this week to be on “The Changing Media Landscape” panel of the Hearst New Media lectures at Columbia University. It’s a nice homecoming to the place where I helped start the entire new media modernization of the Journalism school in 1994.
I’m glad to see more international representation than in years past, as the panel will consist of:

• Josh Cohen, business product manager, Google News (coming from the
  Googleplex)
• Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan, an Iranian-born blogger,
  journalist, and Internet activist (coming from Toronto)
• Jonathan Dube, director of digital programming, CBC (coming from Toronto)
• Andrew Lih, author of a new book on Wikipedia and expert on Chinese media
  (coming from Beijing)
• Mindy McAdams, new media education pioneer and professor at University of
  Florida (coming from Gainesville)
• Michael Rogers, resident futurist of The New York Times (coming from
  midtown)

Hope to see some familiar faces in the crowd.

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.

That’s a pretty provocative headline. I don’t usually do provocative headlines. But Wikipedia has undergone such a dramatic culture shift of late that it merits wider attention.

It may seem like a trivial gripe — should we care about the battle over what stays or goes in this online encyclopedia. But it’s an indication there’s trouble in Wikipedia’s community and its collective soul. Given how many people now depend on the project worldwide, it’s a problem that needs to be recognized as a threat that could starve Wikipedia long term.

In my previous post, Wikipedia Plateau, I wondered — what was happening in English Wikipedia that would cause a massive drop in new article creation?

Lots of people chimed in, with over a dozen thoughtful comments. I didn’t really buy most of the explanations. New article creation restrictions in December 2005 didn’t make sense as a reason for an October 2006 drop.

It’s clear an emergent community phenomenon was affecting new articles. And I found something startling — articles like [[Pownce]] and [[Michael Getler]], about new and old topics alike, were equally hit by this new contagion. The fate of just these two articles will surprise most Wikipedians.

Michael Getler is an esteemed news reporter having served as ombudsman for the Washington Post newspaper. He’s currently serving as the first ever ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting System in the US. As I watched the evening news the other night, he was identified as one of the journalists tracked by the CIA, revealed by the “Crown Jewels” documents had been declassified. Like any good Wikipedian, I of course looked him up right away to see what his article had.

Nothing, no article existed at all. Surprising. So doing exactly what Wikipedians normally do, I was bold, and I created a starter article:

Michael Getler is the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting System in the United States.

External links

• PBS biography

I’ve done this many times before — I bolded the name, made internal wikilinks, included an external source and labeled it a stub. It had all the components any experienced Wikipedian would have created.

Even a bot looking for basic “articleness” would have found this perfectly acceptable. It was a fine stub. Another user Cmprince edited it to use a more specific “US television” stub tag. Yes, this was the start of a good seed crystal that would grow.

Or so I thought.

Within one hour, a User:Chris9086 came by and slapped a “speedy delete” notice on the page. The “pink slip” read:

This page may meet Wikipedia’s criteria for speedy deletion. The given reason is: It is a very short article providing little or no context (CSD A1), contains no content whatsoever (CSD A3), consists only of links elsewhere (CSD A3) or a rephrasing of the title (CSD A3). Speedy concern: It is a very short article providing little or no context (CSD A1), contains no content whatsoever (CSD A3), consists only of links elsewhere (CSD A3) or a rephrasing of the title (CSD A3). If this page does not meet the criteria for speedy deletion, or you intend to fix it, please remove this notice, but do not remove this notice from pages that you have created yourself.

What the… what manner of… who the… how could any self-respecting Wikipedian imagine this could be deleted?

I’ve been an editor since 2003, an admin with over 10,000 edits and I had never been this puzzled by a fellow Wikipedian. Did he even bother to check the subject matter, or my user page to see my track record? I wrote on his Talk page:

…the speedy deletion tag on Michael Getler is inexplicable. Since he is the first-ever ombudsperson for PBS is not only notable, but extremely notable. — Fuzheado | Talk 19:54, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

In the meantime other Wikipedians came and added more to the article. Finally, eight hours later someone (User:JPD) removed the obviously inappropriate deletion notice. Chris9086 eventually got back to me with a one liner:

It was one sentence long when I added the tag. Chris9086 02:28, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

That was his justification for deleting it. Incredible. This user was so specialized in the chapter and verse of deletion criteria, yet he had no idea about Wikipedia’s communal editing culture, its collaborative spirit or the classic essay “The perfect stub article” and its modern recommendations. I was tempted to write a nastygram, “You have a problem. You have a deletion hammer, and everything looks like a nail.”

Showing some Wikilove, I decided not to. It was an isolated incident, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Until today.

While traipsing through the blogosphere, I read a post that complained that the new web site Pownce.com did not have a Wikipedia article.

I said to myself, “Oh whiny blog, of course Pownce has a Wikipedia page.”

Pownce was created by the famous entrepreneur and podcaster Kevin Rose, the founder of digg.com. If there’s anything Wikipedia is good at it’s tech stuff, the new hottest Web 2.0 projects. I just saw a BusinessWeek article out talking about Pownce.

“Let me prove you oh-so-wrong by clicking in Wikipedia and … what the?!”

Here’s what [[Pownce]] read:

View or restore 37 deleted edits?

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name.

How in the wiki gods could this be? Have the lunatics taken over the asylum?

The message about “37 deleted edits” is a bit unusual even to experienced Wikipedians. It’s a message only an administrator (like myself) can see, because admins can view deleted versions, undelete articles and restore pages.

I was flabbergasted. I went into the deleted history, and examined the last version that got deleted. It had an infobox with hard statistics, a “see also” section, external links, the works. The text started:

Pownce is one of the latest entries in the world of online social networks. But unlike similar websites, its focus is not on meeting people. Pownce is centered around sharing messages, files, events, and links with already established friends. It was created and currently maintained by Digg founder Kevin Rose, with Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen.

Since the launch on June 27, 2007 new members can only join by friend invite or e-mail request.

Now this is not the best article in the world. It’s got some marketingspeak, but it’s not unsalvageable. Yet folks nominated it for deletion, and it was indeed deleted, by claiming:

Previously speedy deleted as spam. While on DRV, where all opinions were to endorse the deletion, the article was recreated. This is advertising about a non-notable website. Corvus cornix 20:02, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

DRV is Deletion Review. Call it what you will — the zombie graveyard, the last chance saloon of Wikipedia. It’s basically the ash heap where you can revive articles that have been deleted. The article was originally deleted when four users — Evilclown93, Blueboy96, Ke5crz and Xtifr — all voted to delete. Only User:DGG had any sense to wait for a DRV outcome.

But at DRV, where you get some more eyeballs to second guess the decision, it was also unanimous delete. Three users all voted to keep it deleted — Corvux_cornix, Stifle (what a appropriate name), and Radiant. The lone voice of dissent was user Tawker.

It’s incredible to me that the community in Wikipedia has come to this, that articles so obviously “keep” just a year ago, are being challenged and locked out. When I was active back on the mailing lists in 2004, I was a well known deletionist.

“Wiki isn’t paper, but it isn’t an attic,” I would say. Selectivity matters for a quality encyclopedia.

But it’s a whole different mood in 2007. Today, I’d be labeled a wild eyed inclusionist. I suspect most veteran Wikipedians would be labeled a bleeding heart inclusionist too. How did we raise a new generation of folks who want to wipe out so much, who would shoot first, and not ask questions whatsoever?

It’s as if there is a Soup Nazi culture now in Wikipedia. There are throngs of deletion happy users, like grumpy old gatekeepers, tossing out customers and articles if they don’t comply to some new prickly hard-nosed standard. It used to be if an article was short, someone would add to it. If there was spam, someone would remove it. If facts were questionable, someone would research it. The beauty of Wikipedia was the human factor — reasonable people interacting and collaborating, building off each other’s work. It was important to start stuff, even if it wasn’t complete. Assume good faith, neutral point of view and if it’s not right, {{sofixit}}. Things would grow.

Today, {{sodeleteit}} is the norm. And it’s not with a smile, regret or even a note to the user. It’s usually in insultingly bureaucratic code: “Salt it… A7 and G11… DRV“.

It’s like I’m in some netherworld from the movie Brazil, being asked for my Form 27B(stroke)6.

If anyone knows all the codes on the Deletion Criteria page, you are a danger to Wikipedia. You are a menace. Because it used to be that users thought about the value of an article first. As a thinking individual and Wikipedian, you were expected to decide based on its merit, rather than trying to shoehorn it into a deletion category.

It was never like this before. What’s happened?

In a drive for article quality, there have been new policies: citing references, writing biography of living persons and picking reliable sources. They are all good things, but if and only if they are coupled with existing community values that built Wikipedia — assume good faith, don’t bite the newbies (or even oldies), use the talk page, open lines of communication and support each others’ work. We’ve lost these values. The community has gotten so big you cannot recognize people anymore. It lost the village feel a while ago, but it’s not even a town or city anymore, it’s on the cusp of becoming an impersonal bureaucratic slog depicted in Apple’s 1984 video.

What can we do? Can the community model be rehabilitated? I welcome suggestions, from Wikipedians, technologists, sociologists, urban planners, anthropologists and anyone with a clue.

There’s one thing I can do. Take it back, one article at a time. Educate the young folks, that it’s not about forms, A7, G11, not using edit summaries and ignoring talk pages.

So here goes my voyage into gonzo journalism. I’m undeleting [[Pownce]] now. Unilaterally. It’s out of process, and it may cause a stink. But I’m being bold in restoring the article, and maybe restoring a bit of Wikipedia’s heritage.

And I’ll report back what happens.

UPDATE: I’ve undeleted the article with this message:

I am undeleting Pownce in the name of common sense. There was an era in Wikipedia when a web site detailed in Business Week [1], started by a prominent Internet entrepreneur, and widely spoken about on the Internet would be more than ample notability to be included. So I am making this stand in the spirit of Wikipedia, for its original roots, for its community values and the triumph of rational thought over mindless A7, G11 and DRV nonesense. I claim this article back in the grand tradition of the wiki. I hope you will join me. — Fuzheado | Talk 22:30, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

UPDATE: Kelly Martin seems to have been inspired by my complaining about this oddity in IRC the other day. Here’s her take on Pownce in Wikipedia.

It’s rare to see China reporting that provides insight to both newbies and old China hands. But Washington Post’s Ed Cody does an excellent job today describing how information communication technologies enabled the local masses to oppose the construction of a chemical plant in Xiamen, China. (story link)

By promoting the construction of a giant chemical factory among the suburban palm trees, the local government was “setting off an atomic bomb in all of Xiamen,” the massive message sprays charged, predicting that the plant would cause “leukemia and deformed babies” among the 2 million-plus residents of this city on China’s southern rim, just opposite Taiwan.

The environmental activists behind the messages might have exaggerated the danger with their florid language, experts said. But their passionate opposition to the chemical plant generated an explosion of public anger that forced a halt in construction, pending further environmental impact studies by authorities in Beijing, and produced large demonstrations June 1 and 2, drawing national publicity.

Ed had all the elements of a top notch China story — lucidly describing the Internet and telecom technology; identifying key bloggers and activists; relating Xiamen’s local green pride; capturing the national-provincial government dynamics; dissecting local media practices; and not going overboard with tired old China cliches. (To be fair, Wall Street Journal’s Shai Oster had it back in May).

Xiamen really is a unique place — it has been known as China’s Green City for years, with the city’s university sporting palm trees and rolling green lawns. Gulangyu Island, a short ferry ride from the city center, is like the Newport or Martha’s Vineyard of China, with the former mansions of colonial-era European businessmen while now playing home to a budding musical arts scene. Citizens rose up not for Western notions of democracy, liberty or personal freedoms, but simply to protect their basic right to a healthy life.

Even with the state-approved media outlets muzzled, people found ways to mobilize, get their message heard, and take to the streets to demand a modicum of social justice. Beijing’s leaders realized this, and had no choice but to relent in what was clearly an inept handling of issues by the provincial leaders.

Read the article in full, and then indulge me on my soap box.

It’s stories like these that make me want to print out a thousand copies for citizen journalism naysayers such as Nicholas Lemann and Andrew Keen. These pundits continue to feed a tired, first world, elitist snubbing of anything dealing with empowering individuals positioned at the point of contact with issues of the day. What they don’t realize is that outside their cozy privileged corners of the world, tech-enabled citizens are on the front lines countering state-run propaganda, corruption and social injustice.

The logical flaw is in their confused belief that “paid professionals” are the only ones with “professional standards.”

Wide swaths of Wikipedia are overseen and edited by unpaid professionals, but hold bachelors, masters and Ph.D.s in the fields they are editing. Slashdot commenters, often tops in their respective fields, quickly dissect so-called professional science journalism done my mainstream media and converge on the truth value of these news stories, often to the embarrassment of the authors. In areas devastated by war and strife, bloggers in Iraq and Afghanistan are the only ones providing any on-the-ground reality check while newspapers and TV news try to get individual foreign correspondents (if they’re lucky) some type of access to these stories.

As for the paid professionals? Fox News is a “professional news organization” filled with paid “professionals” severely lacking professional standards. And in between the Paris Hilton watch, the Anna Nicole Smith vigil, the Missing White Girl of the Week, waiting To Catch a Predator and the hourly shoutfests, sometimes television news will attempt something approaching serious journalism. But that’s only after 11pm or on Sunday.

The United States has the most free press environment in the world, yet it is puzzling why so many who purport to embody its values so enthusiastically throttle the practice of it. It seems folks like Lemann feel the job of journalism is too important to leave to ordinary people.

Myself? It’s too important NOT to have ordinary people do it.

This is fantastic news, related by Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig:

Due to the historical nature of presidential debates and the significance of these forums to the American public, CNN believes strongly that the debates should be accessible to the public. The candidates need to be held accountable for what they say throughout the election process. The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. Therefore, CNN debate coverage will be made available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate. We believe this is good for the country and good for the electoral process.

First, you may be a bit surprised to even learn that, yes, the television networks hosting the debates have always held the copyright to the appearance of the candidates. If you wanted to use the debate audio and video, you would have to assert “fair use” and the associated provisions (comment, criticism, parody, and proportionality in relation to the whole work). C-SPAN was the only one who had said they would free up the coverage. But the announcement by CNN is the first one by a major media company.

If you think about it, the established practice is quite ludicrous. In an era before the Internet, or even broadband Internet, there was no impetus to press for change. What could one do with the video anyway, other than edit it around on your VHS cassette?

But in an era of YouTube and citizens generated content, it made the case obvious. Lessig made a plea to both the RNC and DNC in April 2006 to demand all the networks free up the content with CC licenses.

I hope all the U.S. networks will agree to the same type of freeing of debate footage.

There’s a lot of post-mortem analysis of the cyber-revolt that intimidated Digg.com into their current stance of allowing an HD-DVD key to be left on it ssite. It’s not over at all. Digg and the AACSLA will have a lot more interaction in the future.

There are three views I’ll highlight here:

(1) REPORTING. The NY Times got a part of the reporting wrong re: Wikipedia. They mentioned firms getting “letters” from the AACSLA:

Last month, lawyers for the trade group began sending out cease-and-desist letters, claiming that Web pages carrying the code violated its intellectual property rights under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Letters were sent to Google, which runs a blog network at blogspot.com, and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. [ref]

According to all reliable sources, the Wikimedia Foundation has never received anything from the AACSLA on this matter. Though the Times acknowledged this in the “Corrections” part of the site [ref], they should include a correction on the article page itself. Also, the IHT still has the erroneous claim, as of this writing. [1, 2]
(2) MEATSPACE. Fellow blogger Ryan Shaw points out these cyber-revolters should actually engage in something useful in the real world to effect change, instead of simply cyber-wilding:

If the Slashdotters and Diggers of the world spent their time engaged in real activism, instead of getting their kicks being part of a mob, maybe we’d have seen some progress on DRM issues by now. But that would involve doing more than just clicking on posts while you’re in your parents’ basement waiting for torrents to download. [ref]

(3) THE VALUE OF DIALOGUE. On Wikipedia, there has been a running debate whether the call by admins “in the field” to delete the HD-DVD key “on sight” was correct.

In Wikipedia-related mailing list debates, some thought having the key in articles was legitimate. Some expressed disgust about the DMCA making “a number” illegal, while others said the Wikimedia Foundation board should chime in with an “OFFICE” action (which would actually be an incorrect use of that doctrine). But for now, the policy holds — the insertion of the full key is treated as spam and disruption, because it likely runs afoul of DMCA law.

As for the rationale, Kat Walsh (User:Mindspillage) had an excellent distillation of the issues. It shows why Wikipedians, as a deliberative and thoughtful community that thinks VotingIsEvil [1,2], came to a more reasoned stance than Digg.

If deleting something illegal is “out of process”, process is broken and should be ignored. (And possibly changed. Either way, the result should be the same.)

I see posts further in the thread going on about how admins can’t be trusted to determine what’s illegal. This is no argument, however, for not requiring that what actually is illegal shouldn’t be deleted. If someone makes a mistake in judging that, correct it. The world doesn’t end if something is down for a few hours or a few days that in the long run shouldn’t be.

Look, I’m no fan of the DMCA anti-circumvention rules; neither, I suspect, are most of us. But Wikipedia is not a venue for unrestricted free speech or for copyfight activism through civil disobedience; that’s just not what we do. We’re a venue to create an encyclopedia under a free content license, as an alternative to the content only available within the current heavy-handed and wasteful system of copyright, and we’re actively trying to encourage more content be created with the same freedoms — which people on all sides of these disputes should be able to support.

Hosting illegal content doesn’t help us do that. For one thing, it would divert our resources from our primary goal; for another, it’s just not what we set out to do. We delete things we believe to be illegal; this is not a new development, though it strikes more of a nerve in some cases than others.

To the extent that Wikipedia is fighting the current system of copyright, we do it through making alternatives viable — accepting only free content that can’t legally be locked up with DRM, using only formats that don’t require proprietary software or patent licenses. That method is weakened if people try to take on the current system
head-on through the site, also.

(Reproduced with the permission of Kat Walsh. She posted in her own capacity and not that of a Wikimedia Foundation board member.)

In the world of user-generated content (or crowdsourcing, if you will) today was historic. The storm clouds gathered this morning when I started receiving meta-content and flickr photos about what was brewing on Digg.com.

And then I saw the elements align perfectly for this disaster:

• The issue: copyright of movies and video
• The technology: encryption key of HD-DVD discovered
• The community: digg.com users who posted the key
• The conflict: “censorship” of the key by digg.com higher ups
• The villain: the MPAA, RIAA and the Advanced Access Content System
• The co-conspirator: digg.com

What happened was an all-out cyber-revolt, with the three most visible and popular usergen sites in the crosshairs — Digg.com, Slashdot and Wikipedia. It shows both the power and the danger of crowdsourcing, and the fickle balance between the mob and the operators.

How did it start? Users at Digg.com submitted stories related to the discovery of a key, a string of 16 bytes, that were related to the decryption of the new HD-DVD technology. It looks something, but not exactly, like the following:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c1

Digg was understandably concerned about violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forbids circumvention technology. There are lots of critics about the breadth of this law, and its direct opposition to ‘free culture’, but until it is successfully challenged in court, it is pretty clear folks should take down information about circumvention (emphasis mine):

From U.S. Code TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 12 > § 1201

(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

In a rare, but not unusual, move, Digg.com suppressed these user-created stories to prevent running afoul of the DMCA.

That did not sit well with the crowd, made up of young male techies with a penchant for net libertarianism, and some of them outright info-anarchists. Cries of “censorship” and being in bed with industry flew. It did not help that HD-DVD was a sponsor of the sister podcast Diggnation. Even more accusations erupted about a conspiracy.

It was as if you were at a Berkeley picnic and yelled “narc!”.

Diggers who felt slighted ran to shout the story from their virtual rooftops at sites like Slashdot and Wikipedia, the other cousins in the usergen family to make a spectacle and make a point.

Wikipedia articles such as [[HD-DVD]] and [[Digg]] were inundated with references to the verboten key. And just like Digg, Wikipedia administrators excised any mention of the key immediately, just as they do with copyright violations or libelous content.

With that avenue blocked, the protestors took a different tack — new articles cropped up in Wikipedia with the key, usernames were created with the key, categories were formed with the key.

As I was hanging out in the administrator’s IRC chat room, there were roughly a dozen or so admins fighting the attempts to add it. They deleted articles, blocked users, blocked IP numbers and “salted the ground” so certain articles could not be created. After an hour or so, they had it under control.

Unlike Digg, Wikipedia is accustomed to floods of malfeasance. It’s a top ten site, after all. Its caretakers have created the tools, policies and methods to deal with onslaughts like this. Social capital of the administrators played a big role in the end to encourage longstanding users to pitch in and delete references. Though Wikipedia didn’t exactly escape criticism.

“I should add that Google has 27,000 hits for this code. It is 100% encyclopedic. Shame on the admins here…” [ref]

Wikipedia locks out “the numbers”
wikipedia too! freedom of speech is dead. [ref]

Slashdot was a different story, and became a refuge for the disgruntled. The meta-moderated community has always been the more refined, thoughtful older brother in tech news. It was the first online Web salon of techies, with members so influential Wikipedia was for a time dubbed “the encyclopedia that Slashdot built.”

Slashdot carried an article about the entire case, and users posted open references to the string of bytes, even putting it as a tag along with the story for all to see. Slashdot let it stand, and found itself in good graces of the geek crowd. It was the beacon for net liberty.

Digg, however, was not so lucky. In the end, the latest darling of the dot-com world was at the mercy of its drive-by users. As a pure voting site, it does not have mechanisms to create sophisticated community norms, as user cooperation is determined only by individual up/down votes. So Digg’s paid staffers were on their own, trying to take the big hits and fending off the PR disaster. It did not go well.

The cybervillage suddenly had a mob with torches and pitchforks, and they were setting things ablaze in acts of cyber-wilding.

After a good six hours of this hammering on the site, Digg’s front page was changed to “We’ll be back shortly. Digg will be down for a brief period, while we make some changes.”

At around 9pm West coast time, Digg creator Kevin Rose made an astonishing post to the blog, with the taboo string as the subject.

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c1

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

This is quite unprecedented — you basically have a multi-million dollar enterprise intimidated by its mob community into taking a stance that is rather clearly against the law.

It’s even more fascinating if you realize the amounts of money being considered. Business Week had a front cover story about Digg, where they said,

So far, Digg is breaking even on an estimated $3 million annually in revenues. Nonetheless, people in the know say Digg is easily worth $200 million.

This hundred million dollar company has decided to follow its crowd, and face the music (and movie industry). It shows that Web 2.0 has a dynamic very different from the original dot-com boom of the 1990s.

Of the free labor that is the “Digg Army,” 94% are male; more than half are IT types in their 20s and 30s making $75,000 or more. It’s a demographic advertisers lust after.

Yes, but these are certainly not just passive Maxim Magazine readers who just want cool gadgets. They are passionate, activist and resourceful. They will turn on you in a second if you look, sound or smell like a sellout.

In the movie Gladiator, the elder fighter Proximo said to the Russell Crow character, “I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd and you will win your freedom.”

For now, Kevin Rose seems to be betting the company on that advice.

Last week I found myself speaking to a number of people about the fast evolution of the Wikipedia article on the [[Virginia Tech massacre]], and how Wikipedia has become the first-stop for many folks to get the immediate snapshot of history.

That’s why I often say, “If news is the first draft of history, Wikipedia is the instantaneous working draft of history.”

Some folks asked for more tangible numbers, so I decided to crunch through them, to find out what was going on behind the scenes. Top of the list as most prolific contributor is most certainly Natalie Erin, a female student at Antioch College who made 183 separate edits to the article. US-based editors dominated this stateside event, but there was representation from Canada, Germany, and Finland.

At the peak editing period (about 3-4 hours after the story broke) there was roughly one edit saved every 10 seconds. This would not have been possible without the some tools Wikipedia has developed — individual section editing, automatic resolution of simple edit collisions, and the tiered system of Squid servers that helped handle the massive load of read requests, while the industrial database servers could handle the “editing.”

As of April 25, there were 7828 edits to the article. About 30% of the editors that contributed were IP “anonymous” editors with no accounts, though they only contributed 13% of all the edits.

A chart of nearly nine days of activity looks almost like a seismic tremor. You can see the peaks most certainly coincide with the waking hours in the States and the news cycles of US-based news organizations.

It would be interesting to see the results from other seminal breaking news events in Wikipedia’s history, namely the [[2004 Indian Ocean earthquake]] and
[[7 July 2005 London bombings]]. As the reporting of these two events was spread out over a longer period, I would expect to see a more stretched out graph for London, and even moreso for the tsunami, which took a lot of reporting to sort out the total impact of that catastrophe.

There has been debate on the Wikipedia lists about whether Wikipedia should be serving this function as a running update of news. I stick to my post back in September 2006:

Wikipedia uniquely fills the gap between “the news” and the history books. It’s an instantaneous cumulative view of the state of the world, given the best information at that point in time. Rather than shedding this function, we should be embracing and celebrating it.

Back in 1995, when I was teaching journalism, I pondered when a “rolling memory” system might be realized given the development of the Internet. That’s why I was captivated by Wikipedia back in 2003. Wikipedia has accomplished this, whether by design or fluke. And it’s been revolutionary.

NB: Below are the raw results, culled from the user pages of the top 21 contributors to the article. They are ranked by number of edits to the article, which in itself is not necessarily an indicator of the most “significant” contributor. For more reading, Noam Cohen of the NY Times described the crush of folks in a nice piece for the paper.

Top editors of the article, with edit counts. All information culled from explict references in their Wikipedia user page:

• 183 Natalie Erin, 23 year old female student, Antioch College, Ohio
• 147 Kizor, from Finland
• 127 ElKevbo, no info
• 118 Ronnotel, software engineer, Chicago, Illinois
• 110 W guice, no info
• 103 Sfmammamia, mother, professional writer/editor, San Francisco, California
• 86 Halo, no info
• 81 Abe Lincoln, from Thuringia, Germany
• 75 Swatjester, from Tallahassee, Florida
• 68 Gdo01, from Florida
• 67 AEMoreira042281, Adam Moreira, Graduate student at Queens College, Brooklyn, New York
• 55 Markm62, attorney, Sacramento, California
• 55 John Stattic, no info
• 52 WhisperToMe, male teenager, Houston, Texas
• 49 Jmw0000, Jarred Michael F. Weiner, 20 year old math major, Binghamton University, New York
• 47 Rdfox 76, no info
• 47 Netscott, Scott Stevenson
• 47 Mercenary2k, Vicky, 25 year old Pakistani, from Toronto, Canada
• 46 Golbez, Andrew, from North Carolina
• 46 Dcandeto, from New Jersey
• 46 Coemgenus, Coemgenus Salminis, 28 year old lawyer, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

As of 25 April:

• 7828 total edits to the article
• 6781 edits from registered editors
• 1047 edits from IP editors
• 13.4 % of edits are from IPs

• 2270 total unique (distinct) editors
• 1572 unique registered editors
• 698 unique IP editors
• 30.7% of unique editors are IP editors

• Peak editing hour: EDT 1600-1700 on 16 April
• 354 total edits
• 6 edits per minute
• An edit every 10 seconds