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.

There’s an excellent post on Techdirt rebuking the typical “Professor Bans Wikipedia” meme that seems to creep into the news cycle every few weeks. This time it’s Deakin University associate professor of information systems Sharman Lichtenstein:

If you are faced with the prospect of having brain surgery, who would you rather it be performed by - a surgeon trained at medical school or someone who has read Wikipedia?

My immediate reaction was, “What is this, a Holiday Inn Express commercial?”

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has an excellent retort:

…no one would want a brain surgery based on someone who just learned how to do brain surgery from Wikipedia, but that proves absolutely nothing. No one would want brain surgery done by someone who just learned how to do brain surgery from Encyclopedia Britannica either — but you don’t see this professor freaking out and trashing Britannica, do you? Wikipedia is a tool, just like Britannica, and it’s not designed to be a reference on how to do brain surgery.

I hope we can all point to that blog posting every time this silly argument comes up, which seems all too often.

Anyone who knows the story of Britannica will find this a bit of dejavu. From The Independent.

The brave new world of instant enlightenment at the touch of a computer key has claimed a heavyweight victim. The 2008 edition of Quid, France’s favourite encyclopaedia, has been cancelled by its publisher for lack of interest. The annual sales of the 2,000-page tome, which reached more than 400,000 in the mid-1990s, collapsed to just over 100,000 last year.

The book’s publisher, Robert Laffont, says the whole concept of the print encyclopedia can no longer compete with the free information available on the internet. Quid, produced by a family team for the past 45 years, has suffered especially at the hands of the French-language version of Wikipedia, the do-it-yourself web encyclopaedia.

Business Week has a writeup of Baidu’s Wikipedia “competitor” Baidu Baike, which is a creation of the largest search engine company in China. It says it’s been around for 19 months, and lifts content from Wikipedia’s Chinese edition without proper attribution and inclusion of the GNU Free Documentation License. Since Chinese Wikipedia is blocked in China, it’s no surprise Baidu Baike is the most popular online encyclopedia in China.

Today, Baidu Baike is the leading encyclopedia online in China, and the second-largest Net encyclopedia anywhere, after the English-language version of Wikipedia. But the company has drawn fire for its success from some critics who say it has been built on copyright violations and complicity with government censorship. Wikipedia clearly believes that Baidu has crossed an ethical line, although the American company is planning no legal action to stop what it believes is plagiarism on the part of Baidu. “We only appeal to their moral judgment about what is right,” says Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in an e-mail interview.

When I met one of Baidu’s program managers a few months ago, I told her I’d be interested in talking to folks from Baidu Baike, just to let them know how to conform to the GFDL. It was actually fine to copy Wikipedia’s content, and also to censor stuff they don’t like, as long as they complied with the GFDL.

She got back to me saying Baidu’s folks on that side were “scared” of talking to folks involved with Wikipedia, after the strong comments by Wikimedia Foundation chairperson Florence Nibart-Devouard:

“They do not respect the licence at all,” said Florence Nibart-Devouard, chair of the Board of Trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation, during an interview at the Wikimania 2007 conference in Taipei. “That might be the biggest copyright violation we have. We have others,” she added.

It’s too bad.

It’s not hard to comply with the GFDL, but they seem to be scared of the litigation risk. The thing going for Baidu is that the Foundation cannot bring a lawsuit, since the Foundation only hosts the hardware and the site. Any lawsuit would have to come from authors who have been “harmed” by Baidu’s noncompliance. That’s not bound to happen anytime soon.

I plan to make another attempt to open up a dialogue with the folks at the company to simply explain how the GFDL works. Baidu’s a NASDAQ-listed company, so there is some “face” aspect of having it conform to the license that other prominent Wikipedia mirrors have complied with.

There is an interesting column in USA Today comparing the Wikipedia-Britannica debate to what is happening with Christianity in the US.

Do-it-yourself Christianity

Independent congregations are slowly chipping away at the ‘trusted brands’ as the Christian faith becomes more like Wikipedia and less like Encyclopedia Britannica.

I’ve often thought that Wikipedia contains a dynamic similar to evagelical congregations that build on authority by consensus. And I’m glad I’m not the only one that sees it that way.

In nondenominational churches, there are certain people and activities that get by without full critical scrunity because community norms of “Love thy brother” make anyone even slightly skeptical seem like mean spirited nonbelievers. The result is that dissenters leave, and those who stay join a spiral of silence and submit themselves to the power of a forceful minority.

In Wikipedia the equivalent is “Assume good faith.” There is no faster way to kill (or divert) a debate in Wikipedia-space than by declaring “AGF!” Anyone accused of not assuming good faith winds up looking like a nonbeliever and a heretic. In that sense, yes, Wikipedia can exhibit cult-like tendencies.

That’s why every few months I browse through one of the more fascinating repositories in Wikipedia — Missing Wikipedians. It’s like leafing through an old church directory. “Oh yes, I remember Thelma, the one who played the organ for the choir,” or “Wow, that RickK was one badass vandal fighter.” On certain visits, I imagine the tribute from the Academy Awards where they honor actors who have passed away that year with a dignified lament.

It brings on some nostalgia and contemplation when seeing the edit history of that page. What if Wikipedia could have retained some of those veterans? What could the community have done different? Will we ever get anyone like that again? Are we better or worse for having that person leave?

After a two year moratorium, it appears that anonymous (or more precisely, unregistered) users will be able to create new articles/pages in Wikipedia again.

The “clamp” was lowered in December 2005 after the Seigenthaler incident proved embarrassing to the Wikipedia community and started the march towards quality over quantity.

The move was announced boldly on the WikiEN-L mailing list by Greg Maxwell, one of the more resepected developers in the community and chief research coordinator for the community.

In December 2005 during the John Seigenthaler biography controversy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy) it was decided to require that users create an account and log in before starting a new article. The ability of people to make changes without logging in remained unchanged. […]

In the time since late 2005 the English Wikipedia community has grown substantially. The nearly exponential growth rate in articles we previously experienced has stopped. Even if disabling anon page creation was beneficial then, there is no current evidence suggesting that the change continues to be beneficial. As such, barring complications, anonymous page creation will be re-enabled on English Wikipedia on Friday November 9th.

After a one month period, on December 9th, we will re-evaluate this decision using previously established methods (average article lifespan, rate of deletion, manual quality classification, random samplings of newly created articles, and most importantly, community discussion). If there is evidence of harm, anonymous page creation will be disabled to collect more data and provide time for discussion. If there is no significant evidence of harm, the issue will be evaluated again after six months. Further milestones and actions may be proposed at that time.

It seems like a sensible trial given that many folks, including myself, have noted that the article growth has slowed substantially.

The announcement presented as fait accompli bothered some folks. But this is a classic example of Wikipedia’s community dynamics — being bold, with a person’s established social capital, rather than any strict hierarchical mandate, providing the authority for making things happen. It will be an interesting experiment.

Congratulations to the Chinese Wikipedia, which just hit 150,000 articles, despite being blocked in China.

The latest stats showed that Hong Kong and Taiwan contributors make up over 50% of the contributors. Dedicated PRC users who can get to zh.wikipedia.org by proxy and overseas Chinese make up the rest. A quick spot check also shows lots of the activity in zh: relates to pop culture and current events, such as Harry Potter (哈利波特－死神的聖物), Rain Man (雨人), Heart of Greed (溏心风暴), GiGi Lai (黎姿). This does not seem so different than English Wikipedia, and may well be what gets folks introduced to Wikipedia first.

I usually talk to at least a reporter a week on background concerning Wikipedia’s community and associated shenanigans. Writing a book on the subject will attract that attention.

This week, however, Telegraph UK’s article about inclusionism/deletionism put the Pownce issue up front and center again. I talked to reporter Ian Douglas about a lot of concerns, and he pretty much came out with the right set of facts. But this was perhaps worded too strongly:

Submission of new articles is slowing to a trickle where in previous years it was flood, and the discussion pages are increasingly filled with arguments and cryptic references to policy documents.

Creation of new articles is hardly a trickle, it’s just down from previous highs, so that we are seeing perhaps the latter part of the S-curve of growth. Though we got into the lack of dumps, missing statistics and other tools that might help to diagnose this phenomenon, but that did not make it into the article. My mention is but a single data point in the debate, so it would have been good to have better stats on this.

Andrew Lih was a well-known deletionist until recently when he became embroiled in the row over the entry for Pownce, a messaging and bookmarking website from Kevin Rose, the founder of the popular site Digg.com. The entry for Pownce, which had been written up in Business Week, was deleted as advertising until Lih resurrected it. He wrote about the row on his blog and has become a de facto spokesman for the inclusionists, and says he feels like an old hand.

“The old timers remember the early days when we used to say ‘ignore all rules’ and ‘assume good faith’, but people tend not to emphasise that now. The third or fourth generation of Wikipedians has only heard Jimmy Wales talk about the problems.

“So now, mixed in with the euphoria and positive energy it’s a lot of cutting, fighting, referencing, cutting back while leaving the good stuff in. New priorities are arriving. Newer folks feel like they’re wielding a machete, not planting new trees.

“A lot of the veterans see established articles nominated for deletion. They try not to be arrogant, try to be inclusive, but it’s tedious after six, seven or eight times.”

A group of Wikimedia Foundation staff and volunteers served on the jury to decide on where to hold the Wikimania conference in 2008, and selected Alexandria, Egypt. (Full disclosure: I served nominally as one of the three moderators of the process, but did not take part in the decisionmaking itself.)

I have to say it’s an exciting choice. The New Library will be the host, and will be sponsoring much of the conference for this historic homecoming to the most significant repository of human knowledge in ancient times. The public relations value and the seeding of interest in the Middle East and Africa is a great opportunity.

However, the choice has not been without controversy. David Strauss was one of the more vocal critics, alluding to Egypt’s treatment of women, LGBT and dissidents. His initial post:

I’m offended that the desire to have Wikimania hop around the globe (rotation) trumps the egregious history Egypt has with LGBT and other civil rights (local laws). While visitors to Egypt are certainly not at the same risk, I refuse to spend any money in a country that — as recently as 2004 — sentenced someone to 17 years of prison and two years of hard labor for posting a personal ad on a gay website[1]. A blogger was imprisoned in 2007 for four years for “insulting Islam and defaming the President of Egypt.”[2] Jimmy Wales even attended the Amnesty conference denouncing the censorship. No legal or cultural reforms since give me confidence that the situation has improved.

After a followup thread, there were some folks who agreed with him, but there has been no large outcry. Most folks seem excited and in support of the historic context and chance to engage a new community.

The choice of whether to boycott or engage has been a tough one. It happens with the Olympics, on trade, on technology transfer, and choosing conference venues. Given the international makeup of the Wikipedia community you’re not going to get consensus. When we chose Boston two years ago, there were folks who were upset because of the US’s foray into Iraq and the harsh requirements for visas.

Jimmy Wales has noted this, and has chosen “engagement” as his stance.

In honor of David’s concerns, I have decided to make the title of my own talk at Wikimania 2008 “Free knowledge and human rights” and I will use this opportunity to speak out against censorship and other violations of human rights around the world, including examples from Egypt.

Phoebe Ayers, who served on the jury, mentioned that the process is not perfect and that the team is willing to re-evaluate the criteria for future cycles. But this particular decision is final, and it seems on balance rather well supported.

She perhaps summed it up best.

Wikimania and Wikimedia are both global in scope, which means that while we can condemn censorship and loss of human rights everywhere we must also take into account a global range of values. Our projects focus specifically on free knowledge, and I expect that will be highlighted at the conference.

I talked at length with the reporter from the LA Times about the entire universe of contemporary Wikipedia issues, before jetting off for China’s October holidays. The circle of Wikipedia bloggers has done a fine job of summarizing the article by David Sarno about deletion/inclusionism, sparked by the Mzoli Meats controversy, so I will simply link to them.

• Kelly Martin
• Marc Parent (full article quoted)
• Geoff Burling

Overall, it was a good treatment. I’m glad to see Sarno took the time to talk at length to understand the complexity of the issue, rather than doing a simplistic “parachute journalism” article.