I can imagine that the basic file diff tool that Wikipedia has now could learn something from this to help folks sift through changes faster, especially with something as complex as WikiMarkup.

Take a look:

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, professor Messer-Kruse documented his attempts to update the Wikipedia entry over a two year period to reflect his groundbreaking research. He was rebuffed and wrote:

The “undue weight” policy posed a problem. Scholars have been publishing the same ideas about the Haymarket case for more than a century. The last published bibliography of titles on the subject has 1,530 entries.

“Explain to me, then, how a ‘minority’ source with facts on its side would ever appear against a wrong ‘majority’ one?” I asked the Wiki-gatekeeper. He responded, “You’re more than welcome to discuss reliable sources here, that’s what the talk page is for. However, you might want to have a quick look at Wikipedia’s civility policy.”

I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds I was informed that my citations to the primary documents were insufficient, as Wikipedia requires its contributors to rely on secondary sources, or, as my critic informed me, “published books.” Another editor cheerfully tutored me in what this means: “Wikipedia is not ‘truth,’ Wikipedia is ‘verifiability’ of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that.“

Therein lies the problem.

Wikipedia depends on secondary sources. If recent scholarship, though accurate, still accounts for a minority view, Wikipedia will wait until the majority view recognizes these new advances as canon. Only then will the article reflect those changes.

What we’re seeing with the new evidence published by Messer-Kruse in August 2011, is that there is a lag time before scholarship is generally accepted. To wit, on the radio show, I read the blurb from the professor’s book and showed why it was perhaps the “perfect storm” of conditions such that Wikipedia would not include his findings right away (emphasis mine).

In this controversial and groundbreaking new history, Timothy Messer-Kruse rewrites the standard narrative of the most iconic event in American labor history: the Haymarket Bombing and Trial of 1886. Using thousands of pages of previously unexamined materials, Messer-Kruse demonstrates that, contrary to longstanding historical opinion, the trial was not the “travesty of justice” it has commonly been depicted as.

Every bolded word is in stark contrast to Wikipedia’s policies of verifiability, reliable sources and undue weight given to minority viewpoints. That is, this book is the first revelation of these new findings, and they haven’t been taken as a consensus view, at least not yet.

In time, if the facts hold up, and there is every reason to believe they will, the rest of Haymarket affair scholarship will reflect the new research, and Wikipedia will reflect that.

So chalk this up under one of the more unusual and modern complaints about Wikipedia you almost never hear:

Can’t you move faster? You’re going too slow.

I was a huge fan of Apple’s Hypercard when it was introduced in 1987, and used their 1990s Apple Media Tool and Open Doc systems, so I’ve been following Apple’s moves for over a decade in multimedia “publishing.”

While I thought today would be the revival of Hypercard “The Next Generation,” I don’t think it meets that goal. Below are my first thoughts on the system that I downloaded and tried this morning:

ABOVE: Sample project started related to my book The Wikipedia Revolution

1. It’s free to download through the Mac App Store, though that means you need to have Mac OS X Lion 10.7 installed. It’s like Keynote on steroids, with the ability to file into Apple’s iBookstore. Preview only happens on an iPad hooked up and “docked” to your computer. No iPhone export, and PDF export brands the file with Apple logo and “iBooks Author”

2. There is no generic file exchange with others — everything MUST go through Apple’s iBookstore, and you must sign up for an account and fill in lots of detailed info, including having a valid US tax ID. Availability to publish is not immediate, you have to be approved by Apple.

3. This is not the Hypercard replacement I, or others, thought it would be even if it is slick and has nice templates.That said, it will find a decent audience of simple book creators.

4. Being captive to the Apple closed ecosystem provides a nice paying audience and Apple’s quality control, but certainly has to give educators pause about how much Apple exerts over the process.

UPDATE: Matt Gemmell has an excellent summary of the issues around iBooks Author, most notably:

“If the book isn’t free, you must sell it via the iBookstore. You can repurpose the content and sell it via any other avenue you like, but you can only sell an iBooks Author-created book file on the iBookstore (where Apple will of course take 30%). You can distribute a free iBooks Author-created book file via any means you wish.”

More to come…

Check it throughout the blackout period for the latest updates.

I’d also been thinking along Rushkoff’s lines. What exactly was Occupy Wall Street trying to achieve? In many ways, it resembled the WTO protests I covered in 2005 in Hong Kong. That mishmash of protesters from the “Global South,” subsidized farmers from Korea, Southeast Asian sex workers, and domestic maids, among others, had common gripes, but exhibited no central leadership or coherent manifesto. You felt the vibe. You knew what they were against. But you didn’t know where it was going.

To me, Occupy Wall Street reminds me a lot like the folks who edit Wikipedia — a leaderless grassroots gathering of passionate individuals with similar concerns, trying to find consensus. Rushkoff describes this better as: a “decentralized network-era culture,” concerned about sustainability in their movement, rather than victory.

“It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion and groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet,” says Rushkoff.

The full piece is worth the read, because it’s this type of analysis Rushkoff does best: Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don’t get it – CNN.com.

When Steve Jobs was forced out as the head of Apple Computer in 1987, he stayed in Silicon Valley and put his energies into a new start-up called NeXT. This was while Apple was still shipping computers with nine-inch screens and Microsoft’s most advanced product was an anemic and stiff-looking Windows 2.0. The NeXT machine, on the other hand, launched in October 1988, introduced pioneering features we’re all used to now: a high-resolution “million pixel” display, a read/write optical drive, and a true multitasking operating system. And in classic Steve Jobs style, it was clad in a sexy all-black magnesium cube form factor that made it the envy of computer science departments around the world.

The NeXT megapixel grayscale computer display was its most stunning feature. What it lacked in color it made up for in fineness and texture. It was so large and sharp, folks compared it to reading on paper. This was no coincidence—it used PostScript, a special language from Adobe Systems usually reserved for high-end paper printers.

So when [WWW creator Tim] Berners-Lee was testing out his idea for a World Wide Web to share documents, he used his NeXT cube computer that was geared toward handling high-resolution documents. The first Web browser he ever built was for the NeXT machine, in February 1991. But he had much grander plans than simply creating a “browser” for reading, and in fact called his program a “browser-editor.”

Not only did his program on the NeXT read and display Web pages, it could also alter them and save them. This was a function Berners-Lee had envisioned from the start—a read-write Web of information for sharing.

Given its rich and ambitious origins, it is then quite peculiar that the Web that became popular in the mid-1990s was known only for reading, browsing, and surfing. In the exuberance to push the reading experience, the “write” stuff, which was always meant to be part of the Web, was left behind as a cumbersome feature.

While the first Web browser from Tim Berners-Lee gained notoriety, there was a problem. The sexy features of the NeXT were not cheap. They offered only one model, and few folks could afford a $6,500 NeXT cube. Even NeXT’s follow-on budget version, the NeXT “slab,” was $4,995. It was hardly a computer for the masses.

But oh, what Steve was able to do since then. He returned to Apple, made the NeXT operating system the basis of all Macs, and came to dominate the world of music players, smart phones, and tablet computing.

RIP Steve Jobs, you really did make “computers for the rest of us.”

I answer with a question: Why is learning (and teaching) video so hard for journalists?

I’ve taught new media journalism for over a decade and trained correspondents with news organizations (Wall Street Journal, Reuters, et al.) all over the world.

Without exception, the weakest part of training journalists old and new is understanding visual literacy while alone, shooting in the field. We can train them before they go out in the field, and coach them after. But video storytelling is technical, complicated and all too often, a lone act while shooting.

The journalist is solo and overwhelmed by all the other duties of reporting. And increasingly news organizations are asking journalists to capture video, without the right training to get it done.

It should be no surprise then, the majority of footage that comes back is shaky and unusable in the edit room, and the visual skills of journalists rarely get better without a lot more determined training.

We don’t train journalists well in video, and we need to do it better.

But there is a solution and it’s through “video patterns.”

One of the most famous, and useful of these, is Michael Rosenblum’s “five shot” method that he developed training journalists from the NY Times to the BBC. It’s actually something he’s preached since the late 1990s, and those who are fortunate enough to learn it get an insight into shooting better video, immediately.

I’ve successfully used this in the classroom to teach visual literacy, because it hones in immediately on what’s important. The five shot method always prescribes these, shot in this exact order (my handout here):

1. A closeup on the hands of a subject – showing WHAT is happening
2. A closeup on the face – WHO is doing it
3. A wide shot – WHERE its happening
4. An over the shoulder shot (OTS) – linking together the previous three concepts
5. An unusual, or side/low shot – providing story-specific context

Rosenblum stresses that this provides usable footage every time, and this sequence always cuts together logically in the editing room. He’s right.

And it has an Atkins Diet effect — it convinces otherwise despondent journalists that they can indeed do effective video, and that it’s more hard science than unattainable art in getting stories done well.

WSJ multimedia reporter Lam Vo and I have used this to help train professional journalists in the field. I’ve used this in the classroom at USC Annenberg to give folks the starting point for video literacy. Journalists using this have said it’s helped provide an immediate “game plan,” directing them towards good shots and techniques, and reducing training time in the field. (It doesn’t hurt that the first two shots will always be useful B-roll, which can be a savior in the editing room.)

But the method is important not because this particular pattern is a universal story sequence, but because it compels journalists to learn visual literacy by doing, to form good habits, and to understand video is a closeup medium.

By mastering the 5 shot method, they learn:

• Closeups
• Logical sequences
• Respecting the line of action
• Getting effective B-roll
• Editing solutions

So where do we go from the 5 shot?

We can build on the experience of 5 shot to go on to more “patterns” as a way to rapidly gain experience in a visual storytelling. The 5 shot does not handcuff journalists to a particular sequence. It leads them to more possibilities.

At the new USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, I’m looking into how to incorporate patterns into the video shooting process through apps for mobile devices. Instead of a paper 5 shot checklist in one hand and a camera in the other, why not integrate them together into one? Imagine an iPhone or iPad interface that provides a storyboard of the 5 shots that guides the videojournalist through this shot sequence. Visual algorithms can give hints and warnings about how well a shot is framed, or if a shot is shaky (ala iPhone’s motion sensor), or if the lighting is correct.

In this way, the camera is no longer just a capture device, but an instructional device, providing direction and feedback to the operator to learn visual literacy by “doing.”

Instead of learning video shooting from a textbook, or even an e-textbook, such a device is actually an e-workbook, transforming the iPhone or iPad into an integrated capture/learning device. And imagine if we go beyond the 5 shot, to allow many other patterns to be loaded into the e-workbook, providing more visual patterns and tropes to be taught.

It has the potential to revolutionize how we learn and shoot video, opening up video storytelling to journalists and crowdsourcing efforts.

See related Carnival of Journalism posts by Michael Rosenblum and Lam Vo.

I’ll be talking about this project at the Journalism Interactive conference at the University of Maryland, in October. Andrew can be reached at andrew at andrewlih.com.