This week might just have been the spark for the next phase in Wikipedia’s evolution. The public embarrassment for the online encyclopedia that “anyone can edit” was the Washington Post publicizing short-lived errors in the articles for Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, two US senators that had to excuse themselves on inauguration day for health and other reasons [ref]. To be fair, the WaPost article exaggerated the importance of this run-of-the-mill vandalism in Wikipedia that existed only for a number of minutes. There were probably a few hundred or a thousand people who might have seen that error, but likely no more. Far less harmful than an errant AP news or wire story.

But this was reason enough to cause Jimmy Wales to “sigh” and push for the implementation of Flagged Revisions, a feature that would show the casual readers of Wikipedia a version of an article that had been approved (ie. flagged) at a very basic level by editors. Even before this incident, there was a fairly well publicized straw poll to gauge interest among the frequent Wikpedians. (I say “fairly well publicized” because the announcement showed up primarily when people loaded their Watchlist, which I don’t often do. I was informed by other Wikipedians by chance.) Wales said on his talk page:

This nonsense would have been 100% prevented by Flagged Revisions. It could also have been prevented by protection or semi-protection, but this is a prime example of why we don’t want to protect or semi-protect articles - this was a breaking news story and we want people to be able to participate (so protection is out) and even to participate in good faith for the first time ever (so semi-protection is out).

We have a tool available now that is (a) consistent with higher quality (b) will allow us to allow more people to edit it a wider range of circumstances and (c) will prevent certain kinds of BLP harm.

Flagged revisions has roughly a 60/40 for/against at the straw poll. I was dismayed that it took place on a rather obscure location: a subpage of a talk page of a policy page, and didn’t quite get the due diligence of a widespread announcement. Nevertheless, there are some good points raised by folks in reaction to the poll — for substantial policy changes in Wikipedia, how realistic is it to get the overwhelming consensus of 75% or more? Things in Wikipedia have almost always moved forward with the will and prodding of Wales, as a benevolent dictator, without such high consensus numbers. This was the case with the Seigenthaler incident that led to anonymous users not being able to create articles, and also the biography of living persons policy that has become a solid part of the editing guidelines.

Noam Cohen at the NY Times has a good writeup on this as well, describing the dynamics of the debate. In the end, there is going to be a bit of a crisis about jurisdiction, as Wales has requested:

“To the Wikimedia Foundation: per the poll of the English Wikipedia community and upon my personal recommendation, please turn on the flagged revisions feature as approved in the poll.”

Why is this an important turning point? It’s arguably the first major change to en.wikipedia that seeks the authority of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, with a strong hierarchical management layer of executive director (Sue Gardner), deputy director (Erik Moeller) and chief technology officer (Brion Vibber) to act on the request of Wales and the will of the community per the straw poll. This is quite different than in the past, with Brion Vibber and other technical team members making a field decision, based on Jimbo’s recommendation and testing the winds of the community.

It will be interesting to see if this dual-appeal to official authority (WMF) and authority based on historic social capital will win out and become the norm.

Meanwhile, it’s good to see Brion Vibber approach this carefully and with sensible goals. His response:

I just want to note that we would not turn FlaggedRevs on here on enwiki before working out some very specific parameters for the test first. Keeping an eye on workflow and seeing what can be streamlined or taken out would be very much part of our attention.

This is a notable word of caution by Brion — flagged revisions will be no panacea. It has the risk of submerging and pushing the problem of edit warring and inaccurate edits into another unknown, and perhaps harder to track, domain if editors are not used to seeing how flagged revision modifications are reflected in the recent changes list or their watchlist. Are the tools ready to track and flag? Is the community “tight” enough so that flagged revisions can be turned on with the same concept of what being “flagged” or “sighted” means?

For English editors who voted “yes” — you should really look at the German experience to know what you voted “yes” on exactly. On the Wikipedia Weekly podcast episode 56, we had the pleasure of interviewing Phil Birken of the German Wikipedia who was in charge of turning on and monitoring flagged revisions there. Take a listen at the Wikipedia Weekly web site.

How good is the international Skype conferencing on a Beijing DSL connection? After five weeks of doing Skype: pretty good, I have to conclude.

When we do the WikipediaWeekly podcast with others from around the world, we use Skype to conference call four to five people at a time. The group conversation is recorded, and one person (David Still, in Australia) usually edits it down to size. During recording, if network conditions are good, it sounds excellent - nearly as good as the ISDN lines radio stations use for studio quality.

This week I hosted the conference from a humble one megabit DSL connection in Beijing, connecting two folks from Australia, and one person from the continental United States. Later in the show, we had one fellow from Hawaii. It worked out great.

(When doing a multiway conference, Skype might choose another host for the conference among the participants, which seems to be the one with UDP port forwarding working. To our knowledge, I was the only one with it configured this way.)

Last week, Wikipedia user Tawker and I launched the new “Wikipedia Weekly” audio podcast, which is in a radio show format to cover issues related to the online community and encyclopedia. It’s a great example of international collaboration, socially and technically. Tawker was in Vancouver, Canada and I was in Beijing, China, and we used Skype to record near studio-quality audio across the Pacific.
Some of the topics include:

• New category browsing system
• China unblocks Wikipedia
• Top visited articles for the week (The World According to Wikipedia)

Give it a listen. You can download individual versions, or subscribe to the podcast in Apple’s iTunes to get it delivered every week automatically.

CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast recently talked about the Wikipedia block being lifted in China. I noted a few inaccuracies in their report and sent an audio comment, of which they used the first minute or so. I’ve put in my entire audio segement here with observations about the Great Firewall.

• Buzz Out Loud for 2006-10-12 - MP3 (top of the program, “Wikipedia unblocked in China”)
• Buzz Out Loud for 2006-10-13 - MP3 (my audio comment, 18:45 into the program)
• My unedited full comment - MP3 (3 minutes)

Text version of my comments below:

Hi Buzz Out Loud,

I’m glad to see you led off the show with news about Wikipedia being more accessible in China. Users here in the PRC are pretty excited about the lifting of the block.

Unlike other news outlets, you correctly noted the English version is now accessible, while the Chinese version is still blocked in many places. I was one of the folks who posted to Slashdot about not getting too excited yet, because it’s still only a PARTIAL lifting.

It’s also interesting to note the lifting of this block comes almost one year to the day it was blocked, on October 19, 2005.

However, I’d like to point out an error in your report. Now it’s understandable because it was badly reported first in The Guardian newspaper in September and then further misreported in BoingBoing before it got corrected.

You mentioned, “China had asked Wikipedia to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing.”

Now this never happened. The Chinese authorities never requested anything from the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone connected with Wikipedia. I work quite closely with the Wikipedia community in China so I would have known, and I also confirmed this with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.

In fact, it is standard for the PRC to never to discuss why anything is blocked or under what conditions a block might be lifted. So hopefully people will understand this was not a negotiation - users in China have been patiently waiting for this day for nearly a year. And it’s finally come.

Another thing you mentioned was that “Tiananmen has been the focal point” for blocking content. While Tiananmen content will likely get blocked, it is only one of many subjects that might get blocked. Some other standard subjects are Tibet, Taiwan independence or the falun gong spiritual movement. Other terms like swear words or pornographic content are blocked too. In fact there are probably many social conservatives in the US that wouldn’t mind blocking the same sites.

But you’d also be surprised what does NOT get filtered.

Tom mentioned content about the Great Leap Forward would probably be blocked. In fact, the English Wikipedia page for Great Leap Forward worked fine for me. And if you click down the list of China History articles in Wikipedia the following worked just fine: Hundred Flowers Campaign, Cultural Revolution, Chinese Civil War, Gang of Four, Chinese economic reform, and even the original Tiananmen Incident of 1976.

However, once you click on the article for Tiananmen protests of 1989 you get blocked. So actually, I’m pretty impressed it let through the Tiananmen Incident of 1976, but blocked the more controversial Tiananmen protests of 1989.

So here’s something that’s a bit counterintuitive - the filtering in China’s Great Firewall is getting more technically sophisticated, with observers seeing it as becoming more ominous.

But in fact, it’s very likely more sites can be unblocked and available to China’s Internet users, because the page-by-page filtering can catch the “problem” articles, while letting the rest through. This “high tech filtering” might just be the reason why Wikipedia can be unblocked today so that 99% of the 1.4 million articles can now be accessed. That’s a mixed blessing I suppose.

I’m a big fan of the podcast, and I’m looking into creating a podcast for the Wikipedia community in the same style as Buzz Out Loud. I’ll let you know when that happens. Keep up the good work.

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.

It seems the use of video parody has inspired a creative streak in China. At the recent FEAC conference in Manila, I talked about the rise of podcasting (audio and video) in China, and the famous viral video “The Bloody Case That Started From A Steamed Bun” which lampooned the high budget movie “The Promise.”

Roland Soong at ESWN has a story about how Hu Ge’s video has inspired even more creations. But it seeems some folks are not happy. An excerpt:

The targets of the spooks [sic] are two classical Chinese movies: Twinkle Twinkle Red Star (闪闪的红星之潘冬子参赛记) and Railroad Guerilla Brigade (铁道游击队).

A spokesperson for the company that produced Twinkle Twinkle Red Star said: “Hu Ge was making fun of a commercial entertainment movie and did not overstep any moral bottom line. But Twinkle Twinkle Red Star is an acknowledged red classic and its contents have nothing to do with a singing contest. To make fun of it for no apparent reason is incomprehensible. This can only be Internet junk.” But the movie company probably has no recourse because they are up against the state behemoth CCTV.

In round #3, creative netizens made a spoof on the CCTV spoofs (see story in link). This spoof used the used the video clips from Twinkle Twinkle Red Star and Railroad Guerilla Brigade. The difference was that the newly dubbed voice-over contains a lot of obscenties. CCTV has announced: “We will investigate until we get to the bottom of this. We will be merciliess in eradicating this type of behavior.”