Today’s Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog has a piece about Ron Livingston’s lawyers filing a lawsuit against an anonymous Internet user, in an attempt to identify who’s been editing his Wikipedia article to add rumors that he’s gay. The best legal description I’ve found is at the Copyrights & Campaigns blog:

The complaint includes claims for libel, false light, and violations of Livingston’s statutory and common-law right of publicity, and seeks actual and punitive damages. Presumably Livingston will seek discovery (IP and email addresses and other identifying information) from Wikipedia and Facebook, which they hope will identify the poster. Livingston can then name the individual in the complaint, and proceed against him. Section 230 won’t protect the individual; it only shields the service (i.e., Wikipedia or Facebook) that hosted the material.

The suit is here, as Coupleguys, Inc. vs. John Doe.

In being interviewed by the reporter of the piece, I explained the Streisand effect to him. He mentioned this phenomenon of Livingston trying to combat edits that he’s gay but perhaps bringing more attention to this rumor in the process. The sticky situation about Livingston’s lawsuit (at least according to LGBT groups) is whether calling someone gay is actually “maliciously altering” his article.

My comments about the case pertained instead to the sticky issue of people notable enough to be in Wikiepdia, but not enough to have legions of watchdogs.

According to Andrew Lih, author of “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia” (Hyperion), inaccuracy or vandalism problems are difficult to stop for people who are “notable but not extremely famous,” a category Livingston, best known for his roles in “Office Space”and “Sex and the City,” falls into. Lih, a registered Wikipedia editor and one of 1,000 administrators who oversee the site [his wife is also a reporter for the Journal], said Madonna’s Wikipedia page may have dozens of people watching out for abuse, whereas someone like Livingston rarely receives that kind of attention.

This is roughly the same dynamic that led to the Seigenthaler case, where a fairly notable journalist didn’t have throngs of passionate folks looking out for his article.

And perhaps that’s my worry about a smaller user community than was here in 2007. As the number of articles increase, are there enough watchdogs to keep article quality high, or are other technical measures (flagged revisions, semi-protection, et al.) needed for maintaining quality?

Erik Zachte and Erik Moeller of the WMF blogged recently that contrary to other studies, the core “active editors” has remained stable of late.

On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000

Is it enough for that community to have the same numbers, year on year, when that same period saw a growth of over 500,000 articles?

I cannot say that I know, but it is something that gives me pause.

The Wikimedia Foundation has responded to the recent press attention started by the WSJ piece about Wikipedia participation on the decline.

The main takeaway from chief data analyst Erik Zachte and deputy director Erik Moeller is that the decline has happened since March 2007, but the number of participants seems to have stabilized at around 40,000 making at least 5 edits a month. (The English language Wikipedia seems to have a slight downward trend over the last two years, but this may not be statistically significant)

This is in contrast with researcher Dr. Felipe Ortega’s numbers, where he measures a participant as someone with at least one edit, which would of course make for a much more jittery number. He calculated a departure of 49,000 editors. His stats aren’t wrong, but is the interpretation of them right? This brings up the question — what does it mean to “depart” Wikipedia?

There is a Missing Wikipedians page that has been maintained for many years now, to document people who haven’t been seen for a while. It’s often a big guess as to whether people are dormant, coming back, or long gone. Wikipedians typically do not depart with a definitive reason or declaration of their disillusionment.

Even with a stable number of “active” contributors, what does this mean as the number of articles keeps growing past 3 million? Journalist Jennifer 8 Lee of the NY Times asked me in Twitter, is the ratio of editors per article important, or is editors per number of edits?

How do bots, and other technical features such as semi-protection and autoconfirming editors aid in relieving human editors from the drudgery of vandal fighting, and augment editors’ ability to add useful editorial content? The role of bots is tough to measure, but merits more research. With roughly 2 edits per second in the English Wikipedia, human efforts alone cannot keep up with the traffic. It is possible the technical systems implemented during the decline since 2007 have compensated for the community decline. There’s lots for further study here.

Today’s WSJ has an article by Julia Angwin and Geoff Fowler: Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages and the associated Digits blog post. It’s one of the best reported stories so far on the dropoff in numbers in Wikipedia (and it’s not just because they quoted me).

The article taps all the right folks: founder Jimmy Wales; WMF’s Sue Gardner and Frank Schulenberg; WMF board of trustees members Sam Klein and Kat Walsh; and many researchers of the project ranging from Mathias Schindler to Ed Chi. It’s hard to argue the plateau is something that can be dismissed lightly.

Perhaps the greatest fear is that Wikipedia will decline not with a bang, but a whimper. Why? Wikipedia has usually made its big strides from reacting to massive public relations “bangs.” Whether it was the Seigenthaler incident that restricted anonymous editing, or upped the requirement for verifiability and reliable sources, Jimmy Wales has been able to push through tough community changes in reaction to obvious public problems.

The alarming thing about a slow decline in Wikipedia’s quality is that there may be no flashpoint to rally around. A slow, low-level infiltration of spam and non-neutral edits may be occurring that the shrinking community may not be able to police.

At SXSW 2010, I’ll be doing a solo talk on this exact topic: “Can Wikipedia Survive Popular Success and Community Decline?” I welcome any and all theories related to this question, either in email or as comments to this post.

Here is an extended video interview I did with the Journal’s Angwin about this.

Last night I joined CNN’s Campbell Brown to comment on China, Google, and Green Dam software. I’m glad she asked more than the usual basic questions when it comes to filtering and censorship. See the link or the clip below (which may not work in Safari on Mac):

In my latest Tech Raw device review, I conclude the Apple Magic Mouse is like a high heeled shoe: beautiful if a bit impractical.

I’m getting more used to this low profile, nearly flat mouse but it’s a heavy aluminum and plastic unit that still falls short of a real three button, scroll wheel mouse. Its swipe gestures while nifty, may not be that useful for many folks. When more people use Snow Leopard MacOS X 10.6 the “momentum scrolling” the advantage of this mouse might be greater.

You can see the original Tech Raw site, or read my extended review.

View more news videos at: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/video.

I’m thrilled that Don Norman took the time to write about e-books here, and reminiscing about Bob Stein and Voyager CD-ROMs. His comments below are a response to my original post.

Wow. I stumbled across your review while trying to research a paper on things that get published ahead of their time.

I still love my Voyager books, even if they only sold about 5 copies. The concept was fantastic, as was the team that worked on them. Many have moved on to very successful careers, but not in ebooks. (I’m friends of Peter Merholz now but i didn’t remember that he was working on the book until you pointed it out).

Your analysis is absolutely right. As for the future of ebooks? The Kindle is wonderful for reading page-rutners: mystery novels, sci-fi, etc. It sucks if you have to take notes, or go back and forth. and it doesn’t even pretend to do multi-media. In the essay I’m writing, I say that Stein was 15 years ago, but that it will still be another 10 years before his dream becomes widespread.

Thanks for the wonderful essay. And the memories.

Don Norman

In testing geocoding with Google Maps, here’s an example showing where the Wikimedia offices are located in San Francisco, not far from Citizen Space.

On August 1, my wife Mei and I boarded a plane in Beijing. We shook the dust off our shoes (literally), took the last bites of some of the best cuisine in the world, and made the big move back to the United States.

Our new home: Venice, California, and a nice modern bungalow near the beach where the sun shines bright and the sea air welcomes you each morning with a cool relaxing breeze. I’ll be taking up a new post as associate professor and director of new media the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Journalism.

I’ve always said I like to go where “interesting problems” are. For the last six years in Asia, I got to observe the growth and impact of the Internet in the region, especially while living in China. I also had the chance to write a book, the book, about Wikipedia while traveling the world to meet enthusiastic volunteers contributing their slice of human knowledge for free. It’s been a great ride.

As a journalist and educator, right now, there is no more compelling place to be than the US where the news industry is facing an incredibly tough challenge as it looks for ways to survive an era of digital economics with Craigslist, hyperlocal content, and rapidly changing subscriber and revenue models. It will require smart analysis, enthusiastic practitioners and a unique new role for the academy to help determine how the news industry remains solvent and relevant in the 21st century. I’m thrilled to be with USC to help figure out that future. It’s a city I never imagined I’d live in, but have been impressed and excited at every turn.

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.