It’s July 1, and in China the ominous deadline to implement the Green Dam/Youth Escort internet filtering software has been postponed, to much rejoicing by Internet users in the country.

To outsiders, this must seem quite puzzling. Why would China’s “totalitarian” system need to back down on this?

This should be seen as a case study on how the complexities of China’s decision system is much more nuanced than what a “Communist” regime would suggest, and the role of citizen deliberation in a new, upwardly mobile, aspirational, IT-savvy China.

While the outside world sees the PRC government in absolute control, in reality the heavy handed, top down authoritarian system rides on a delicate balance of, bottom up public consent that supports the state’s legitimacy.

Here’s why Green Dam illustrates this quite well.

China’s Internet filtering is by far the most advanced in the world in terms of precision and scale. But until now, it happened in the “cloud,” in far off intangible spaces through two main vehicles:

• One is through massive domestic Web site content regulation through revokable Internet Content Provider licenses (ICP). Operators have to self-censor through technical or human means to please the authorities regarding general guidelines on taboo topics. Keywords are banned and discussion topics are forbidden. In some cases, explicit timely edicts are required, such as for significant June anniversaries, sensitive political meetings (People’s Congress) or poor construction standards in Sichuan earthquake zones. Even with these, China’s netizens have come up with clever tricks and puns to get around many of these automated filtering systems.

• The other is the Great Firewall, the blocking of what foreign Web sites China users can surf. The implementation is clever, in that restrictions show up as technical errors (connection reset, site not found/unreachable) and curb behavior through uncertainty and doubt about a site’s reach-ability, rather than fear. You don’t know whether it’s the Internet acting flaky, or whether a site is actually being filtered. Tech-savvy users can trivially circumvent this.

But you don’t need perfect censorship to have effective censorship. Both these systems do quite well for the PRC government in keeping the 3T1F topics outside the mainstream, and ensuring that the government is not embarrassed by reporting on its incompetence.

The key, here is that both the domestic and international filtering activities happened in the cloud, the ether, the machines that comprise the Internet. It wasn’t in your home and it didn’t intrude beyond the cable to your desk.

Green Dam suddenly put the specter of restriction, surveillance and control in your home.

With that one stroke, which probably seemed like the next logical innocuous extension of the censorship regime for PRC bureaucrats, the government took the big miscalculation of crossing into the the private space, and the personal property of China’s citizens. And that’s where the outrage came.

This was the camel’s nose into the private tent of Internet users. A poll on China’s major sites (Sina, Netease, et al) all showed over 3/4 of respondents said Green Dam was not necessary or a bad idea.

(NB: China is not the first or the only government wanting to censor Internet traffic for content. Australia’s Clean Feed proposal to covertly filter out sites at the ISP level has been under fire from their netizens, and was unceremoniously put on hiatus as well. Most public schools and libraries in the United States implement content filtering at some level. This is not a uniquely China issue.)

What the authorities in China didn’t realize was how serious that breach of boundary would be.

I knew it was going to be a tough road for Green Dam when it appeared the MIIT initiative was not a unified effort. Before leaving for my travels, I did commentaries with the Associated Press, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera and others, making the point that even China’s official news outlets were openly questioning Green Dam’s legitimacy. The new Global Times newspaper, which has been rather frank about other issues, led off with serious questions about the software’s safety.

Then came the big one.

China Daily, the official mouthpiece of the government, was publishing criticisms of Green Dam shortly after it was announced, even publishing Photoshop’ed illustrations of netizens mocking the system. (”Outrage over bid to tame Web“, China Daily, June 18, 2009)

One picture it included with the article was a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” multiple choice question describing Green Dam as “spyware” with “systemic flaws” that could be “exploited by hackers.” Another cartoon shows a gray hand of censorship coming from the computer screen and stiff-arming a computer user in the face.

It was clear at this point, the Green Dam initiative was from a smaller portion of the PRC bureaucracy, and not from the highest levels. China Daily would have never published something so critical if it was of the highest-level of agenda pushing.

China’s netizens were speaking, and the media and government were taking notice (and with higher ups looking the other way). So while this was not democracy in action, it certainly was something in action.

At TEDxShanghai last month, I described the phenomenon of Wikipedia and Twitter forming the basis of a new online commons where global netizens come to share and reinforce memes across geographic and social boundaries (SlideShare presentation). For years, enthusiastic faith-based technology enthusiasts hoped the Internet would bring democracy to any place it touched. This has been spectacularly elusive. On the flipside, some viewed the new Web 2.0 social revolution as “socialist”, “collectivist” and at worst, Maoist. That’s been inaccurate as well.

Instead, I describe the new borderless, socially agile, activist associations that crop up on the Internet as a new system of ‘deliberative adhocracy’. Alvin Toffler, and later Cory Doctorow, used adhocracy to describe a new form of rule based ephemeral associations that “capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results.” (Waterman)

Whether it’s as massive as #IranElection to bring global awareness to its politics, or as small as #MotrinMoms to discuss outrage at an insulting advertisement, we now have an online information commons (Twitter) and knowledge commons (Wikipedia) that supports a space for the new distributed Zeitgeist. In China, obviously there are other analogs (Twitter clone Fanfou, Baidu Baike, BBS forums, et al.) but the effect is the same. To see deliberative adhocracy in action look no further than the Human Flesh Search Engine that metes out social justice in the absence of a strong rule of law in China.

Readers familiar with my book will know I described how a Wikipedia Revolution changed forever how we deal with free access to knowledge and its production. I will however, be quite Burke-ian in my pronouncement about the Internet’s effect on China.

Revolutions are sudden overthrows and disruptive repudiations of the status quo. China has a terrible modern history with revolutions, with more of them going bad than good. The rule law is sometimes described as when “reason trumps politics.” To China’s authorities, the Internet is being used in a deliberative process that fulfills that role. It is not perfect, nor prevalent enough to ensure social justice on a large scale. However, it is a huge step forward for a country that is convinced that after a century of turmoil, that any step must take safety and efficiency into account.

The hiatus for Green Dam, is the standard face-saving way for the government to back down. There is a good possibility it may come back in another form, watered down or otherwise. But for now, China’s netizens are having their day.

“Scientists have more faith in Wikipedia than national print media”

That’s one of the takeaways from a recent poll of nearly 1000 toxicologists when they were asked  how various media outlets cover their specialty: the representation to the public of chemical risks. (The poll was conducted by STATS, The Center for Health and Risk Communication at George Mason University, and the Society of Toxicology)

Given the common lament that Wikipedia shuns “experts,” and information is produced by people “off the street,” the results are intriguing when you look at the numbers for other professional and “mainstream” media outlets. From the report synopsis:

WebMD and Wikipedia were seen as significantly more accurate in the way they presented chemical risk than any other media source.

·         56% say WebMD accurately portrays chemical risks

·         45% say Wikipedia accurately portrays chemical risks

·         By contrast, no more than 15% say that leading national newspapers, news magazines, and television networks accurately portray chemical risks.

·         Over 80% say that leading national newspapers, news magazines, and television networks overstate chemical risks

[...]

…only 15 percent described similar coverage in the national print media (i.e., the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal) as accurate. This figure dropped to 6 percent for USA Today and 5 percent for broadcast network news.

At a press conference at the National Press Club to release the preliminary results of the study, Dr. S. Robert Lichter, who conducted the survey described the Wikipedia finding as an indictment of the mainstream media - ” it’s disturbing that someone off the street seemingly can do a better job than the media.”

I’d take issue with the fact that Wikipedia is simply the product of random person “off the street,” but it is a real shift in what we consider authority and how reliable information can be produced.

Even the best performer, WebMD, gained the approval of only about half the toxicologists who were surveyed which should be a bit surprising in itself. My (full disclosure: unpaid, uncompensated) commentary as it appeared in the report:

“This reminds me of the Nature study [link] that was done in December 2005 where it found that on average, Britannica had 3 errors per article, and Wikipedia had 4 errors,” Lih says by email. “It was surprising because Wikipedia did much better than expected, given its foreign work process and Britannica did much worse. People had presumed a certain level of accuracy from Britannica’s reputation, and it was knocked down from that pedestal. To me the WebMD and Wikipedia results here are similar – they’re much closer than what one would expect. Wikipedia doing better, WebMD doing worse.”

But perhaps the most interesting part was not WebMD, but that the daily professional print media came up so short in the eyes of these experts. It seems to reinforce the old adage: “Journalists do a pretty good job of covering things, except for subjects in which you’re knowledgeable.”

The commentary for Columbia Journalism Review contributor Alissa Quart was insightful about why the MSM approach (reporting science as a storyteller for the masses) is perhaps systemically flawed:

“Journalists fall into storylines, because that’s how we write. There are three narratives, that we use, which can make us great but also get us into trouble – one narrative to please our editors, one to please our readers, and one which leans toward our sources, because we identify with them. WebMD and Wikipedia contributors are disconnected from most of those narratives – maybe they are trying to please certain readers, but they aren’t ‘the reader.’ Their model of knowledge doesn’t ask for stories, or sentiment or people.

This is a really good observation that meshed well with my views about the role of public relations and the dangerous media narrative driving scientific reporting. Quart and I arrived at the same conclusion.

In short, argument trumps aesthetics. Lih, an engineer by education, concurs. The clash of narratives “also says something about motivation, in that the mainstream press will be driven by reports, PR bring shoved at them, and also the market and the desire by editors (in a top-down manner) to demand reporters find a story in the latest research, even if in the greater context of the field, it doesn’t warrant so much attention. In that sense, Wikipedia’s motivations are different, in that the ‘crowd’ helps moderate and even dampen the type of ‘recentism’ that is so pervasive in news coverage.”

The overall summary can be found at the Stats.org site, or you can view the full PDF.

Kindle 2 (photo by ShakataGaNai, CC-By-SA)

Just one month after our household welcomed the beautifully designed Kindle 2 to supply the latest books while we live overseas, out comes the Kindle DX, the version that promises to provide 8.5″ x 11″ viewing pleasure, and has been put forth as possible savior for the college student and the newspaper industry (with the emphasis on “paper”).

The inevitable march towards electronic paper is exciting, as the screen on the Kindle is gorgeous when it comes to displaying static pages. However, I fear this may not be so much “digital papyrus” as it is “digital pyrite” — the new media version of fool’s gold. There’s several reasons why.

If you don’t own a Kindle, you may not know how s-l-o-w the screen is to refresh. We’re talking page-to-page times that take more than one full second. Because of the technology used, the process of turning the page means having to flip and invert all the pixels before presenting the next page, creating an X-ray-like flashing effect. This is not so bad for reading that crime novel serially as you spend 15-20 seconds per page. But for the browsing, searching and scanning mode one uses as a newspaper reader and college exam crammer, I’m afraid the lag time and flashing effect providing a rather jarring experience.

Second, interactivity has some ways to go on this device. It’s not Amazon’s fault per se, but we’re so used to iPhone’s touch screen experience that anything less than that feels like a handicap. The Kindle’s screen is not touch sensitive, so I often find myself having to slap my own hand away from interacting directly with the page. Instead, you’re stuck with a very “1.0″ four-way tiny joystick, that seems so yesteryear when you have something like Google Earth on iPhone that makes you feel like a demigod as you spin, rotate and fly around the globe while you slip and slide your two fingers on the glass.

By now you know the Kindle is a monochrome device. With Kindle 2’s paperback-sized screen, black-and-white only isn’t a liability. But as an alternative to college textbooks, the lack of color becomes problematic. Given that some of the most expensive books the Kindle might replace are biology, science and medical textbooks, the lack of color diagrams and illustrations reduces the prospects people will convert to the DX device. Add to this, the rumors that Apple is working on a iPad — a larger screen version of an iPod touch-like device — and suddenly Amazon’s device may look a generation behind as people will find a general computing device with a large color screen a better value.

Which brings us to the price. People have gasped at its $489 price tag for a dedicated-use, monochrome device that lacks even a decent Web browser. At that pricepoint, many decent sized netbooks are available that provide much more functionality and not much more bulk.

Will Amazon DX sell? Of course it will, it’s a sweet early adopter device that makes lots of folks drool. Leo Laporte of TWiT.tv said his 75-year old mom fell in love with the Kindle, and felt she could take up reading again because of the large adjustable font size. That’s a great Mother’s Day gift for her. And no doubt with its built-in networking with Whispernet, it will be a great device for end users who don’t like interacting with a PC.

Will Amazon DX sell in quantities that will make a difference to the textbook and newspaper market? I can’t see that happening with this model. The lack of color, the lack of extendibility and its failure to be a general purpose tool is a big drawback. Some will say that the Macintosh with a black and white screen changed everything back in 1984 when everything else was color. But the Mac had so many more paradigm shifts even with a lesser screen. The Kindle doesn’t do the same. It mimics paper and the most basic version of a printing press, in a beuatiful form factor. But that’s about it. It’s not a game changer, though it might just make the newspaper industry think there’s some overtime to be played.

Interesting first day at South by Southwest conference.

It started with a panel “User Generated Content: State of the Union” where I asked whether the term UGC was still useful, as we have better more specific terms. I relayed the fact that Wikipedians (specifically, Brianna Laugher of Wikimedia Commons) have come up with the term “community curated content,” as a more meaningful phrase to describe what Wikipedians do. Chris Tolles, Topix CEO, who was moderating, asked whether people knew what that meant. Not many raised their hands. But later on in the Q&A, someone described their company as doing “curated video” and Steve Rosenbaum, on old friend from NYC I ran into, described a trend towards using the term “curation.”

The next session, an excellent talk by author Stephen Johnson, talked about the future of news. On his diagram of the news ecosystem, he described News and Commentary functions, being mediated by a Curation layer, and feeding the Distribution of news. Johnson says this curation is done by various sources: social media groups, professional editors, aggregators, group filters.

I see it as more than a coincidence that the term “curation” is a word being used now.

This is a smart crowd at SXSW. I’m glad to see more accurate, nuanced and thoughtful terminology being used to describe the functions within the Web 2.0 community.

UPDATE: I forgot that on day two of the conference, the curation theme continues, with a session titled: Curating the Crowd-Sourced World: “With all the stuff we weed through online, good filters are crucial. Who’s best-suited to determine what’s best, curators or the crowd? People have their religion about one or the other, however this panel will focus on the overlap, the grey areas and how curating and crowd-sourcing enrich each other.”

UPDATE 2: The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss blogged about this too, but just a slight error in referring to it as “crowd-curated works”

John Markoff has a weekend story in the New York Times titled “Do We Need a New Internet?”

He provides anecdotes from influential security and Internet experts, but it comes off as a disconnected set of observations about IP addressing, security, privacy, botnet infection. Unfortunately, i’s a story with grand ambitions but without a logical thread.

From the very first sentence, the premise is problematic. He introduces us to the  Morris Internet worm (though oddly doesn’t mention it by name) which clogged the fledgling Internet in 1988.

Markoff concludes, “Since then things have gotten much, much worse.”

I was rather surprised by this. Some estimate the Morris worm affected 10% of computers then, but its impact was much greater since those machines were the hubs of timesharing and e-mail activity at coporations and college campuses in an age before laptops and cheap client computers.

I was working at the university computer labs in 1988, and since then I haven’t seen anything as massively disruptive as the Morris worm was in proportion to the user community. It had nearly every college system administrator scrambling during that time. The homogeneity of computer systems (UNIX systems running a variant of the BSD distribution) meant the worm’s job of infecting and propagating was rather simple, as it exploded out of control to jam computers and networks. Today, we have a wide variety of hardware and operating system software that has changed the nature of the risk so that an Internet-wide threat on that scale isn’t likely. Yes, on today’s Internet there are many more hosts and a wide array of threats. But characterizing today’s situation as “much, much worse,” than that massive Internet outage of the 80s is an odd claim.

One commenter in the geek ghetto of Slashdot said, the majority of the problems Markoff talks about “are almost entirely a Windows phenomenon” hooked up to always on broadband connections. Yet, Markoff doesn’t even mention this and only mentions Microsoft once in passing. More relevant would be explaining to readers how MS had been shipping insecure, dangerous Internet Explorer configurations for years out of the box by allowing ActiveX controls to be downloaded and executed off the net, no questions asked. Even in recent years, the firm’s reaction to known security holes has been sluggish (as has been the case with Markoff’s example, Conficker). One could also argue Microsoft’s new Genuine Advantage system makes things even worse by withholding system updates unless Microsoft can verify a Windows installation as a legit purchase. What this means is pirated Windows installations serve as persistent infected zombie bot-net computers. (Anyone concerned about these issues must listen to the Security Now podcast with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson. They do a great job explaining all these issues.)

When it comes to solutions to the problem Markoff has posited, it gets no better.

Consider this buzzword-heavy, information-light paragraph about a project called Clean Slate:

That has not discouraged the Stanford engineers who say they are on a mission to “reinvent the Internet.” They argue that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world. Like the existing Internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organization will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today’s network and are adopted as Internet standards.

Confused? I’ve read these lines five times over, and still don’t understand what the explanation is about. This is perhaps my general lament about the NY Times’s technology reporting. Too often, when trying to simplify their points for the layperson, they strip out so much information that it flummoxes both novices and experts.

There is a legitimate debate about the future of the Internet in terms of privacy and safety, but it is  more robust than this 1300 word story conveys. (See books like The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain.) Markoff touches on issues all along the OSI stack, from application level issues to low-level network architecture problems. But it’s not a cohesive argument for a “New Internet” per se.

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.

The job of a journalist is hard. New subjects crop up each day, and the task by the deadline is to demystify a topic for the general public. A common technique is to use familiar markers to interpret new ones. Give the reader something they know to help understand things they don’t: “The KitchenAid stand mixer is the Cadillac of cooking equipment,” or “The new Blackberry Curve is the answer to the iPhone.”

But the seduction of this technique poses some serious problems.

This has been the case with Google’s new offering called Knol, the so-called “Wikipedia rival,” which is meant to “highlight authors” creating user-generated content.

The recent general reporting around Google Knol has been rather atrocious. For the lack of any better metaphors, most journalists (including professional “tech journalists”) saw the “user created” part of Knol and lacking any significant understanding about either project, immediately labeled it a “Wikipedia rival.” A quick Yahoo News and Google News search sees an overwhelming number of headlines trumpeting Knol as this Wikipedia “rival” or Google’s “answer” to the free encyclopedia.

But besides simplistically sharing a “user generated” Web 2.0 pedigree, the comparison is flawed in so many ways.

The head-to-head matchup seems obvious because Wikipedia is the only thing that immediately comes to mind to most writers when thinking “user generated.” I contend it’s lazy journalism, where respected tech outlets also fell for this trap. It seems it was too tempting to stick by the story, portraying nonprofit David competing against corporate search king Goliath.

The result, is we’re stuck with this fallacious “media narrative.” And from now on, Knol will always be seen as Wikipedia’s foil. Even when it’s not.

Have you heard of Associated Content, Squidoo, Helium or WikiHow? No? If you haven’t, you shouldn’t be writing about Google Knol. These are exactly the working models that Google Knol is up against, not Wikipedia’s.

To see exactly why Wikipedia is such a bad comparison, consider the main aspects of Google Knol [1] [2]:

• Goal: “first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read”
• Articles are controlled by a single author, who has to use a real name.
• Collaboration: at the discretion of the lead author aka “moderated collaboration”
• Opinions are allowed and encouraged in articles, and there can be competing articles about the same subject.
• Knol may include ads at the discretion of the author, and profits shared
• Licensing of content is varied: can be CC-BY, CC-BY noncommercial, or traditional copyright
• “Google will not serve as an editor in any way”
• “So what subjects can I write on? (Almost) anything you like. You pick the subject and write it the way you see fit.”

As a result, most of the content that has emerged so far resemble the “practical” content sites as listed above:
how-to guides, health and medical advice, consumer/buyers guides, business/career pointers. These are exactly the things Wikipedia has insisted it does not want to be.

Don’t take my word for it, see the guidelines at [[What_Wikipedia_is_not]]

• Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, or textbook…
  • A Wikipedia article should not read like a how-to style manual of instructions, advice (legal, medical, or otherwise) or suggestions, or contain how-tos. This includes tutorials, walk-throughs, instruction manuals, game guides, and recipes.[4] If you are interested in a how-to style manual, you may want to look at wikiHow or our sister project Wikibooks.

The guidelines of Wikipedia also prohibit: personal essays, advocacy, opinion pieces on current affairs or politics, scandal mongering or gossip columns and self promotion.

Although Knol has been touted as a more responsible, moderated Wikipedia the above policies actually makes Knol much more liberal and uncontrolled than Wikipedia, which has many guidelines about what constitutes an article, what is acceptable content, and how to abide by its neutral point of view policy.

By throttling collaboration through a single lead author, you lose what has been Wikipedia’s hallmaark — the “piranha effect” of people building off each others’ work and evolving content beyond a single author’s knowledge.

Let’s put these criteria up side by side again:

Let me pull out my journalism professor’s ruler and whap all the tech journalists on the wrist who have used this comparison. Let’s please stop pitting these two against each other.
From my feed of Yahoo News reporting on Wikipedia and Knol, here are my three tier ratings of how folks did on this story. I will not even bother hyperlinking to the stories I considered faulty analysis.
Poor

• Google launches Wikipedia rival Knol (ZDNet UK)
• Google Launches Its Challenge To Wikipedia With Wide Release Of Knol (paidContent.org via Yahoo! Finance)
• Google’s Wikipedia rival, Knol, goes public (CNET)
• Google Launches Its Challenge To Wikipedia With Wide Release Of Knol (CBS News)
• Google launches Wikipedia rival (IT World)
• Knol: Google Takes on Wikipedia (ReadWriteWeb)
• Knol, Google’s Version of Wikipedia, Goes Public (PC Magazine)
• Knol: (n.) Google’s version of Wikipedia (BetaNews)
• Google infiltrates the knowledge sharing game (SiliconIndia)
• Google unveils Wikipedia-like tool (Australian IT)

Average

• Google’s Knol Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation (Search Engine Land)
• Wikipedia, Meet Knol (New York Times)
• Google Launches Knol, The Monetizable Wikipedia (TechCrunch)
• Google Makes Knol Publically Available (EContent Magazine)

Good

• Google Knol Launches; More Like Squidoo than Wikipedia (Mashable)
• Google Decides to Make its Knol Site a Moderated Wikipedia (Search Engine Journal)
• Knol is no Wiki (techkeyla.com)

And for those still debating the quality of “blogging vs journalism” issue, consider all the best sources for reporting on the Knol launch are, yes, blogs.

I take back my gripes about paying Accor hotels US $30 a night for Internet access. We have a new winner, namely the Beijing Olympics Media Village. My wife who is staying there already told me they were going to charge reporters for Internet access (and a censored one at that) but now the details have been posted to Slashdot, the online tech salon:

“Working for the Olympics as an IT contractor, I recently moved to the Media Village (where all of the reporters live) and was surprised the there was no free internet. BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games) is charging a ridiculous amount of money for ADSL service: for

• 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1,131.20 USD);
• 1M/512 it costs 9156.25 (1,342.95 USD);
• 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1,716.05 USD).

That is for only one month! For extra features like a fixed IP? That costs an additional 450 RMB (66 USD). I just can’t believe that not only do I have to deal with the Great Firewall of China, but also pay through the nose to use it!”

While I can imagine that it is “noise” for NBC and the big guys, it is not inconsequential for other news outfits.

I suggest someone be kind and bring an Airport Express or other Wifi router and share the Internet love.

For the last week, gossip web site Valleywag has been dressing down Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, about his previous essays and thoughts about — and let’s use the most ‘neutral’ term we can for this — “child sexuality.” The “Wag” links to his postings of yesteryear on his own web site and the tech/Internet discussion site Kuro5hin. The inventory of their headlines is vintage Valleywag:

• Erik Möller, No. 2 at Wikipedia, a defender of pedophilia
• Wikipedia leader Erik Möller: “Children are pornography”
• Wikipedia’s porn-loving No. 2 and his abiding concern for the children
• Wikipedia’s Erik Möller on the history of child sexual abuse: All Greek to him!

Among the sentences that has caused the most buzz is the one from Erik’s essay “Pleasure, Affection, Cause and Effect,” where he states:

“But if there was any doubt, yes, I am defending that children can have sex with each other. Not only adolescents, but also children of earlier ages — whenever they want to.”

One should read the whole thing in context to understand his larger argument through the prism of his libertarian stylings. Erik’s is an intellectual argument, in a style familiar to the user-created “diaries” of the nearly forgotten Kuro5hin tech community. (People today may know a site that was inspired by the same diary model and Scoop software — DailyKOS.)

Some Wikipedians have expressed deep concern about the nature of Erik’s writings and the lack of discussion about this in a normally open community. Others think that simply because the story broke in Valleywag, it should be discounted altogether.
My view? As they say in basketball, “Play the ball, not the man.” Nevermind your feelings about Valleywag’s style, if the links show it, deal with it.

To be fair, it is nearly impossible to publicly discuss the topic without quickly degenerating into a bitter emotional exchange. The mailing lists for Wikipedia have withered in terms of traffic and usefulness. And we’ve seen recently there has been a tendency to pull the “moderation” trigger on lists such as Foundation-L. Even with mandatory moderation lifted, the standing threat is still there, putting a lid on any dialogue that goes outside the mainstream. And we thought self-censorship was a only a problem in China.

Instead, the places it’s being discussed are personal blogs such as with Ben Yates, Danny Wool and Ben McIlwain (Cydeweys), and their comment threads. Yes, trollish banter from anonymous commenters are inevitable, but you will see there is also honest dialogue and true concern for the plight of Wikipedia.

These blogs are now being picked up upon by sites with more sway than Valleywag. Mashable, the influential tech blog covering Web 2.0, has now published about this and did not hold back:

So long as you’re desired profession is underwater basketweaving, fry cook at McDonald’s or tomato picker at country farm, I doubt your employers are going to do much of a reputation search to see what sort of objectionable positions you’ll go at great lengths to play devil’s advocate for on the web.

The only question that remains is how long Wikimedia will fail to go through and do these sorts of reputation background checks. For a company in the public eye, these things do matter (particularly when they have to do with your second in command). Given the predilictions for the directors at Wikimedia though, I get the impression that such background checks that look for shady behavior might be a case of pot, kettle and black.

This is going to be an ongoing PR problem for Wikipedia if it does not respond. It’s already under fire for hosting “pornographic” images, if you believe WorldNetDaily which you normally should take with great skepticism. This only makes the issue of public trust even more pressing.

So while Valleywag does bring up an issue worth reviewing, it also has its flaws.

Just today, it got a story all wrong about Erik’s past edits. In their juicy headline, “Wikipedia’s Erik Möller on the history of child sexual abuse: All Greek to him!” Valleywag claims that he was responsible for introducing text into the article [[Child sexual abuse]] that started with

Pederasty in ancient Greece took on mystical significance…

It went on to attribute this to Erik:

Since the practice was so widespread in ancient Greece, and there is no indication of any detractors at the time, many do not consider this an example of child sexual abuse (see moral relativism)

The problem is, it’s not Erik’s edit.

The link they provide [diff] shows nothing of the sort, and instead displays what changed between Erik’s edit in 2003 and today’s version. An analysis of the article’s edit history shows that the text in question was added by an anonymous IP user [1] on June 1 2002 and elaborated upon by User:Gretchen [2] two weeks later. This was one full year before Erik’s first edit to that article.

Valleywag needs to retract that post.

I’ve been watching the fallout of this story via Valleywag, blogs, personal mails, Twitter and IMs over the last week. Taste and preference notwithstanding, Erik’s comments butt up right against the line of generally accepted views in Western society regarding relations between minors and with adults. Does it cross the line? I can’t tell you, but I can help navigate the field of evidence and people’s views.

The community should have a say in what this means for projects that Erik has been involved with, such as WikiYouth or Wikimedia Youth Camp. It’s what’s demanded when volunteers make up the project. Ultimately, though, it’s the board and the executive director that have the final decision as to what implications this has. And it behooves them to be mindful of the sense of the community.

We will be discussing this issue in this week’s Wikipedia Weekly podcast in a fair, balanced, responsible manner that is fact-based and non-sensational.

It may be our toughest show to produce yet.

From behind South China Morning Post’s paid firewall, here’s an article about a university student’s Facebook account mysteriously being shut down. No firm proof yet about why it was disabled but it may be related to organizing protests in Hong Kong ahead of the torch arriving on Friday.

Facebook cuts protester’s accounts

Jimmy Cheung
Apr 29, 2008

The university student who plans to protest with Tibetan flags during the Olympic torch relay on Friday says her Facebook account has been disabled for “persistent misuse of the site”.

Christina Chan Hau-man, 21, said she had received a warning from Facebook that her message volume had approached its limit a few days ago.

“I wrote back and explained that I had to respond to those who wanted to join my action,” she said. “Some 60 people have said they will join.”

Ms Chan said her account had been disabled on Sunday “for persistent misuse of the site” and information related to the protest had been deleted.

“It may be political censorship. But I don’t know what is happening exactly.”

Ms Chan said she would continue with her plan but believed fewer people would join because she could no longer reach her supporters via Facebook.

Facebook was not available for comment yesterday. Its rules say users should not disseminate content that would constitute, encourage or provide instructions for a criminal offence, violate the rights of any party, or otherwise create liability or violate any law.

League of Social Democrats chairman Wong Yuk-man said his Facebook account, which carried anti-Beijing content, had been disabled last Tuesday, without any reason being given.