“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.

This Monday at 1:30pm (East coast US time) I have the privilege of speaking with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki concept, to discuss The Wikipedia Revolution on the Yi-Tan Weekly Tech Call hosted by Jerry Michalski.

Among the things we’ll talk about:

• How has Wikipedia affected the world?
• What lessons can we take from it?
• What are Wikipedia’s next frontiers?
• What do wikis say about human nature?

Please find the details on how to listen and join the conversation at the Yi-Tan site.

An IRC Chat will be available during the call at freenode#yitan, here. On Twitter find the hashtag #yitan.

For those who don’t know Jerry Michalski, he is mentioned in the first line of my book, The Wikipedia Revolution and was the one who first introduced me to Wikipedia. So this is a nice way to see the whole thing come full circle!

Those in the San Francisco area are invited to talks TODAY about my new book “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia” (Hyperion). The talk at UC Berkeley will address academics, and the one with the Wiki Wednesday group will get deeper into the technology/wiki culture.

Feel free to tell anyone who might be interested! All are invited.

“The Wikipedia Revolution” by Andrew Lih
http://wikipediarevolution.com
REMINDER: Talks in the San Francisco Area, April 1

Berkeley, April 1, 2009, 4pm
UC Berkeley, School of Information, 202 South Hall
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/20090401lih

San Francisco, April 1, 2009, 6pm
Wiki Wednesday, Citizen Space, 425 Second St., #100 (Ground floor)
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2143776
http://www.socialtext.net/wikiwed/index.cgi?san_francisco_april_2009

SUMMARY: The Wikipedia Revolution is the first narrative account of
the remarkable success story of the “encyclopedia anyone can edit.”
Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia editor/administrator, academic and journalist,
tells how the Internet’s free culture community inspired its creation
in 2001, and how legions of volunteers have emerged to create over 10
million articles in over 50 languages.

REVIEWS of The Wikipedia Revolution:

“It’s a terrific book.. Andrew tells the story historically, providing
tons of context and background.” – David Weinberger, Author,
Everything is Miscellaneous

“It was riveting–a total page turner. I thought I knew Wikipedia
inside and out yet I learned something fascinating on nearly every
page. Bravo.” – Chris Anderson, Editor in chief, Wired Magazine

“Other books have surfaced… but Lih’s authoritative approach covers
much more.” -Publishers Weekly

“An easy, nontech, intriguing read about a Web “miracle” that today
rivals the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” -Booklist, Starred Review

“Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City” by Noam Cohen
The New York Times [link http://bit.ly/14ONna]

“Everybody Knows Everything” by Jeremy Philips
Wall Street Journal [link http://bit.ly/BtfO]

“All in good faith” by Sam Leith
The Spectator (UK) Lead review [link http://bit.ly/mUj7R]

Significant announcement by Jimmy Wales today:

In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader.

But for now, we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project (as of March 31, 2009) and will be re-directing and refocusing resources on other Wikia.com properties, especially on Wikianswers. Join me there to help provide freely licensed answers to all the world’s questions.

If you remember, Wikia Search was launched (press release) in January 2008 to be somewhat federated: using publicly crawled data via ISC.org, it was an example of “open general search index” that anyone could use. It was an interesting idea to share the crawling, and have competitive innovation on top of it.

At the time the Wikia press release heralded the cooperation:

“We believe that a completely open foundation must drive the future of search, following the same principles as the Internet and Web that it builds upon,” said Jeremie Miller, founder of Jabber and Wikia Search Architect. “Search is becoming one of the most powerful tools humankind has ever created—only transparency and open participation will protect these tools from abuse.”

For now, that experiment is over.

There are some great nuggets of information in hard to find corners of the Internet.

In Noam Cohen’s recent blog post on the death of Encarta, Tom Corddry who “ran the team that created Encarta” has some reflections on the product. Instead of hiding in the comments section, I’m reprinting it here.

I ran the team that created Encarta, so I’m standing up to say a few awkward words at its graveside memorial service. Encarta, may it rest in peace, deserves to be remembered more for its quality than you suggest. Your sources repeat several notions that were never true of Encarta-first, that the content from Funk and Wagnall’s was “low quality” compared to Britannica, and second that the value added by Microsoft was primarily “graphics and sound.” The text from Funk and Wagnall’s was far superior to Britannica’s as a starting point for a digital encyclopedia, because it was much more nearly “structured data,” meaning that the architecture of the text was very consistent from one article to the next. This allowed us to add a lot of “contextual” value–to compute the relatedness of every article to every other article, and build what was at the time a uniquely useful set of links and navigational tools across the entire content. Britannica, by contrast, was a bloated mishmash, a consequence of its long tradition of having articles written by many different celebrity authors. (I ghost-wrote one myself, in fact). By the standards of the print encyclopedia world, Microsoft invested heavily in expanding and updating the content of Encarta right from the beginning. We consciously invested in the contextual value just described, in expanding the core content, in creating the world’s first truly global encyclopedia, and in an efficient update cycle. We had enough “multimedia” in the original product to keep the reviewers happy, but focused on the overall usefulness of the whole product much more than on the relative handful of video clips, etc. I’d argue that within its first five years, Encarta became the best encyclopedia in history: it had tremendously consistent quality and usefulness across a very broad range of topics, and added a great deal of value by the relationships it illuminated between topics. All of that has been rendered a bit quaint now, but in it’s day it was an accomplishment worthy of a graveside toast. Encarta had more than “the potential” to unsettle the print encyclopedia business–it pretty much destroyed it. Print encyclopedias were dead, thanks to Encarta, before Wikipedia existed. We expected from the beginning that Encarta would eventually be superceded by online information-seeking. As brilliant as Wikipedia is, I don’t think that Wikipedia by itself killed Encarta. I think the Web as a whole made Encarta obsolete. I hope treasured old copies of Encarta will live on for a while in remote corners of the world, where people have scattered access to computers but little or no connection to the Web–school libraries in Africa, for example. In those places, even out-of-date copies of African Encarta, the only Encyclopedia of Africa ever published, will live on, and Joe Biden will forever be newly-elected. I’ll drink to that.

— Tom Corddry

UPDATE: Corddry’s second post also provides some insight on his time with Encarta.  Thanks to Sage Ross for the tip.

In response to Randonneur, post 15, a bit of explanation: Print encyclopedia editorial groups, even in their heyday, were actually quite small, and much of their work from year to year was devoted to removing content in order to make room for other content. The size of the multi-volume sets was fixed, so every word added had to be offset by a word subtracted. Since it was also expensive to touch more pages than necessary when making changes (a printing fact of life), the editors ingeniously found ways to remove content as close as possible to where they were adding content. Need a big new article on Bosnia? Better find stuff to cut from the articles about Bosporus or Boss Tweed. The senior editors at these publications estimated that at least half of the total editorial effort was devoted to this sort of non-value-adding work. At Encarta, by contrast, nearly all the editorial work added value–writing new articles, updating, expanding and improving existing articles, and, of course, adding the sorts of elements that computers could support that were truly valuable: the sound of a bassoon, the way gravity works in orbital models, and so forth. At its peak, the Encarta editorial staff was roughly four times the size of any of its print competitors, included many of the best people from those competitors, and was devoting much more effort to actual new and better content. Then there’s the whole international aspect… all print encyclopedias were highly nation-specific. Encarta was always global. In practice, this meant a core of universal content with “extensions” in each national area, and global licensing of content, which further increased the value created by the editorial staff. This model also works brilliantly for Wikipedia. By exploiting its advantages, The Encarta team, over a period of a decade (late 80s to late 90s), created a body of content that offered greater scope AND depth than its print competitors, then tossed in the advantages of navigation, multimedia, integrated updates, and low price. As a result, more copies of Encarta were sold, by far, in its 16-year run than were sold of all print encyclopedias combined in their several-century run. It reached many more school children world wide than any encylopedia had ever done before it. Wikipedia has since expanded greatly on that reach, and is a far superior resource, as long as you recognize the inherent uncertainty about accuracy–but even that is a useful lesson for life: there’s no such thing as ultimate authority. My reference to “treasured copies” doesn’t expect too much sentiment in the first world, just continuing usefulness in the third world, where computers are spreading faster than the Internet, and even an outdated copy of Encarta may be the best source of accurate information in the whole village.

— Tom Corddry

The news came as I happened to be finishing up a visit to the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco. Jay Walsh told it to me: Microsoft is closing Encarta down.

Wow. I had to say I was a bit surprised. Not shocked but surprised.

When I got a look at Microsoft’s announcement it was classic: generically non-useful public relations boilerplate:

Why are these Encarta Web sites and software products being discontinued?

Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.

Microsoft’s vision is that everyone around the world needs to have access to quality education, and we believe that we can use what we’ve learned and assets we’ve accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions. In doing so, we feel strongly that we are making the right investments that will help make our vision a reality. [link]

But everyone could see the elephant in the room — Wikipedia obliterated the need for anything like Encarta’s paid firewall encyclopedia online.

If you look back to a previous post in January, you’ll see that Wikipedia had 97% of the online encyclopedia traffic, and the rest shared 3%. Ouch.

Now why was I surprised?

Because Microsoft could have kept it going indefinitely, given its cash pile and the “Windows Tax” paying for everything. With this being such a prominent example of “free” trumping commercial and proprietary, I do wonder if this makes for a victory that might give spiritual comfort to others in the free culture movement. What’s next in Microsoft vs Linux, Microsoft vs OpenOffice, MPEG vs Ogg and other battles?

Interestingly, Encarta was a product that was always meant to be a throw-in: a me-too product that enticed consumers as part of the Microsoft suite when buying a Dell or Gateway PC. It was never destined to be a standalone moneymaker. Add to this, the fact that Bill Gates founded Corbis as a photo and video archive, and bought the prized Bettmann Archives, and Encarta suddenly had a wealth of visual multimedia features. Its rich interactive features were far ahead of others, and it had rights to the most important historical photos of the last century. It was more a showcase than a business. It was an old school model in a new media world.

It’s not that Encarta didn’t try to change.

In March 2005, Microsoft tried installing wiki-like features by soliciting input from the readers (p 204, from The Wikipedia Revolution):

“We’re about to roll out a new set of tools that will make it far easier for you to suggest revisions in Encarta. By the time of our next post, we should have the new tools up and running, and we’ll be looking to you to help us help you.”

If you have never heard of the Encarta Feedback function, it’s with good reason. It never developed much beyond the public announcement. The Encarta staff produced a  six- month report with a sample of the types of feedback they were getting, but the last mention of Encarta Feedback was on their blog on September 28, 2005. Today most links to this feature are defunct, without a trace of this  wiki- like experiment on Encarta’s pages.

It’s important to note that the bells and whistles of the visually rich Encarta didn’t win out in the end. It was the instantly updated, always available free content of Wikipedia that grabbed eyeballs and links. All that resulted in sky high Google rankings. And because it was free, it could be molded to fit mobile devices, translated to other languages and be adapted for the end user.

Add it to the case studies of yore: 8-track vs cassette; Digital Audio Tape vs MiniDisc; Beta vs VHS. The lesson? High fidelity rarely wins out with consumers. It’s all about convenience, availability and ease of use.

There is a loss to the world with the absence of Encarta’s historic images. Because Wikipedia has a strict “free” edict on content, especially images and multimedia, it will always be at a disadvantage in having visuals that are unique and under copyright protection. For that, the community will have to wait until copyright runs out on those materials. Technology may be fast, but that’s one area that will be slow.

Oh, and by the way: no surprise, the Wikipedia article [[Encarta]] has already been updated to reflect its passing, likely by a very smug, grinning editor.

Those in the NYC area are invited to help me launch my new book “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia” (Hyperion) on March 19, 2009, at 6pm.

I’ll be talking about the background of the book, and I’ll be interviewed by Jonathan Dube, VP of ABCnews.com and president of the Online News Association. Books will be available for sale and signing afterwards. (For Wikipedia veterans, I might have an extra gift for you.) Hope to see you there!

• Location: Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, New York City, NY
• Time: 6pm to 9pm
• For details and Facebook event: http://www.wikipediarevolution.com/Blog+News.html

REVIEWS AND PRAISE

“Fantastic page-turning history. By far the best Wikipedia book.” -Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief Wired Magazine, author of The Long Tail

“It’s a terrific book.. Andrew tells the story historically, providing tons of context and background.” -David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous and The Cluetrain Manifesto

“Other books have surfaced… but Lih’s authoritative approach covers much more.” -Publisher’s Weekly

“An easy, nontech, intriguing read about a Web “miracle” that today rivals the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” -Booklist Starred Review

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”

If you’re a Wikipedian at SXSW, in Austin, Texas this weekend, why not get together? A page has been created on Wikipedia:Meetup/SXSW2009, where you can sign up.

Or, feel free to email me or follow me as @fuzheado on identi.ca or Twitter.

“What the hashtag?!” is a user-editable encyclopedia (ala Wikipedia) I discovered the other day to catalog and document hashtags found on Twitter.

Hashtags are the keywords you see in Tweets that start with “#”. This might be something like #bachelor to talk about the TV show, or #snOMG to discuss the massive snowstorm in the US. In China, I use one #gfwlist with other Internet users to document overseas Web sites blocked by the Great Firewall.

People are creating, using and sifting through dozens of hashtags a day, but the nomenclature is incosistent. Sometimes the tags are obvious, but oftentimes they are clever puns or inside jokes. To help people understand this new uncontrolled vocabulary, wthashtag.com was created as a dictionary to explain the hashtag’s origins and uses.

This is about as perfect a parallel to Ward Cunningham’s original purpose of the wiki you will find.

In my book (The Wikipedia Revolution) I describe Ward’s thinking process in envisioning a tool that would help people “teach each other the metaphors” that we use in life. An excerpt from my book, Chapter 3, Wiki Origins:

In his book with Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff explains how humans give words meaning through metaphors, such as when we use spatial words like “high” and “low” to describe a person’s mood. To Cunningham, Lakoff’s concept resonated as a very powerful idea. In thinking about computers as the conduit for carrying messages around the Internet, he imagined metaphors spreading around and finding the right place on the Net to help. His entire quest was to find a system that supported this function, to create places to allow individuals to teach one another their metaphors.

After a decade thinking about this issue at Tektronix, Cunningham would finally discover a tool to help realize it. He happened across a brand-new software product from Apple Computer called HyperCard, which was given away for free with every Macintosh computer sold in 1987. Very quickly, people started to recognize it was something special. HyperCard was a revolutionary piece of software—it was the first easy way to make free-form hyperlinked content, allowing people to click on items on the screen to bring up other text. Unfortunately, Apple had no idea what a breakthrough product it had on its hands.

With the HyperCard experience, Ward would go on to create prototypes for what would eventually become the first wiki software on the Internet. And today, wikis are doing exactly what he described — helping people explain their use of new jargon to each other.

The site can be found here: http://wthashtag.com