Abdication of Jimbo

Well, maybe not a total abdication, but Jimbo has relinquished a substantial portions of his powers. See his announcement and the context.

In an upcoming academic article I discuss why calling Wikipedia a monarchy/dictatorship, while not too off the mark in its very early stages, is no longer true. It's nice not to be contradicted by the current events :)

Civil disobedience 1: Chihuly's photos on Commons

For a while now I wanted to showcase some interesting images deleted from Wikimedia Commons due to copyright paranoia. For those unfamiliar with our modern copyright laws, not only a lot of photos on the net are copyrighted and you cannot reuse them - but a lot of objects CANNOT BE LEGALLY PHOTOGRAPHED. For example, almost the entirety of modern art, even if it is on public display, cannot be photographed.

First case:

1) Three photos of mine of a decorative sculpture in the foyer of Phipps Conservatory & Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, US.

Photos:





Commons deletion discussion: here

Summary: modern art is copyrighted by artists (in this case, Dale Chihuly), that includes photos of it. There is no freedom of panorama in United States. This means that you cannot take pictures of Mr. Chihuly's works and share them with others, no matter how much you'd like to advertise his wonderful creations.

Outcome: photos will be deleted from Commons collection, which will entitle their removal from various articles, such as on Mr. Chihuly and Phipps Conservatory. Note how the copyright that is supposedly protecting the artists is in fact hurting them, in this case limiting the informative content of the primary reference work about them.

Current use examples:





Expect them to disappear soon.

Solution: wait 70 after Mr. Chihuly's death (unless copyright is retroactively extended, again...). Or contact him and ask for permission (assuming he is still the copyright holder and haven't sold the rights to that particular sculpture to the Gardens). Unfortunately, this is quite time consuming, and few Wikimedia volunteers take care of that, when so many other tasks need doing. I have done it myself a few times in the past, and on occasion managed to save an image or two, but it is a time consuming task (communicating with real person, with no guarantee they'll bother to reply, and then having to convince them to give permission to release the photos under a free license - which is likely a concept they've never heard of - and then have fun explaining why Wikimedia needs the commercial-use-allowed one... (because our ethics requires we explain to them what the free license we need entitles in detail...)). Compared to that, categorizing some images or translating descriptions is so much easier... sigh.

So Mr. Chihuly's article on Wikipedia will soon be gutted of all images of his works. Feel free to tell me how this benefits him :)

Note: This blog post is by no means intended as a jibe against Mr. Chihuly (who is almost certainly unaware of how the law is "protecting him"), nor against Wikimedia Commons (which being a non-profit organization on a donation budget cannot really risk being sued by somebody, with all the costs it incurs). It is however intended a a jibe against the current copyright system, showing how it is hurting all of us - artists and the public, both of which it claims to protect.

In the coming months, I intend on covering other media deletions from Commons (and maybe a few examples of when images were saved). Stay tuned,

Teaching with wikis and Wikipedia

Recently I run into an excellent quote:

... the future of communication and an informed citizenry will depend increasingly on the Internet rather than on television or the print media. That doesn't mean we should stop teaching the traditional essay and research paper, but it does mean we need to teach students to work in other genres, such as writing for blogs and wikis, creating podcasts and PowerPoint presentations, and participating in social-networking sites. They need to be comfortable in a variety of online environments, understand Web etiquette, know how to protect their privacy and respect the privacy of others, and learn how to evaluate various sources of information.

-- William Pannapacker, associate professor of English at Hope College, "On Stupidity, Part 2: Exactly how should we teach the 'digital natives'?", The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2008

Hear, hear.

Personally, I see no reason not to assign Wikipedia articles as assignments, and many reasons to do so. Students improve their digital literacy, learn about the site they use so often (and why indeed it can be sometimes unreliable), have something to show for their hard work (a digital artifact, useful to others, instead of a paper that's going to the next trash bin as soon as the course has ended), Wikipedia gets some nice content and the teachers can get help from Wikipedia volunteers (for example, when I am grading students articles, I am also aided by advice from Wikipedia content reviwers). It's a win-win-win situation for everyone :)

Sometime in the near future I want to write a follow-up to my first academic article, Teaching with wikis and Wikipedia. Three years down the road, I am happy to say that most of what I wrote than is still useful - but some updates are needed.

Crucial things I have learned could be summarized as follow: students are lazy, and need motivating. Carrots will only work for a few - you need sticks as well. Hence in the wiki assignment, which depends on students contributing to it regularly, you need graded deadlines to avoid a relatively common phenomena where most students ignore the assignment till the last few weeks/days.

Overall, teaching with Wikipedia has been an enjoyable experience, not only to me but also to other Wikipedia editors - and to the students themselves (at least those who were sufficiently motivated to try to learn something). My last class, despite having just one month and a half, managed to expand three (out of six assigned) articles into Good Articles - and that did exceed my expectations. Now I wonder if the new class, lasting 4 months, will be able to do this to all assigned articles, and if they succeed, I am thinking about replicating the great achievement of the MMM project, and aiming to have the students write Featured Class articles.

On the subject of initiatives related to teaching with Wikipeida, it is worth to check out:
* the Wikipedia Educator's Guide
* the Best practices in assigning Wikipedia articles as coursework to students
and of course
* the Wikipedia:School and university projects

Comparing Wikipedia to Second Life (popularity contest)

I recently found that a Wikipedia-related presentation of mine in a sociological conference (ASA in SF - let me know if anybody else is going there) got shifted to a Second Life track (it was supposed to be about online communities in general, but mysterious are the ways of conference and panel organizers).

So I thought I should at least pay a token attention to SL, and I thought about a brief numerical comparison. It is possible to consider the number of total registered accounts (en-Wiki 2009: ~10 mil, other Wikimedia Foundation projects 2009: ~10 mil, Second Life 2008: ~15 mil) but I run into a problem trying to get a wiki-equivalent of "average/highest number of active editors" (SL in early 2008: ~40,000 - but that's just for people logged in, doesn't say anything about their activity - one can leave a SL client running in the background... just like one can be logged in to Wikipedia for weeks).
What about Wiki? After some thought and discussion and a useful tool that was designed I begun compiling some stats based on a number of unique editors listed at RC page. There is still not enough data to see a clear trend, but numbers seem roughly consistent at about 800 registered users / 400 ips editing en-Wikipedia per hour and 90/30 per 5 minute periods.

As for Alexa traffic rank, SL is at megere ~4000, compared to our Top 10, but that of course simply reflects the fact that Wikipedia is useful for non-logged in users as well.

I wonder if we can indeed answer whether Wikipedia or SL is more popular? Wikipedia is more popular in general, but for logged in (registered) users, which one would be?

Wikipedia statistics updated

Wikipedia en statistics have been updated updated, first time since 2006.

Find out more about it at Erik's blog (post1, post2).

Where Wikipedia doesn't work

I have to wonder why Wikipedia community has so much trouble researching itself. Sure, we love to talk about ourselves - we have blogs, newspapers (Signpost), podcasts... but when it comes to serious research, the initatives fail one after another.

Wikidemia, Wikipediology, Wikimedia Research Network - all dead. Even the Wikipedia in academic studies is doing poorly if I am not there to update it - you'd think that increasingly more numerous scholars studying Wikipedia would at the very least bother to advertise their work - apparently not :(

It took us years to get a side wide survey in 2008 - and even it had to be done by outside scholars, with all the transparency and communication problems that implies (there were some rumors about making data set publicly available, but if there has been any confirmation, I am unable to find it). The community survey project, the General User Survey, was never consulted, and there are no signs that we will have a 2009 (or 2010) survey.

There are signs of hope. The usability project looks promising. The Foundation has recently hired a Research Analyst. Yet...

My general impression of this is CHAOS. Things are being done on many foras. There is the usability project, there is the Wiki-research-l listerv, there is Wikidemia, there is the Wikimedia Research Network, things are annouced in Foundation blog or via press releases, there are initatives of individual non-English chapters (for example, non-English surveys of users...).

Some time ago I tried categorizing research pages on Wikipedia and on meta, but it's a loosing fight, particularly since there is no central place to announce them (research is being done and discussed everywhere possible, from Wikipedia subuserpages to people's own blogs). There is little to communication between existing foras, which have different members are differ in openness and focus, old foras are being abandoned due to little activity, new ones are founded by people who don't know about the old ones, research efforts are likely duplicated in various places, and the cycle goes on... it's a chaos, and pretty messy one at that :(

I hope that the new Research Analyst (whoever s/he is) will start by bringing an order to this, and creating some central forum for all of those initiatives, preferably based on a wiki somewhere.

PS. If you know of Wikipedia research initiatives / foras I missed, do let me know. I wonder how big is the iceberg that I a tip of I am ranting about :)

Wikipedia: increasingly more reliable

Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals has compiled some interesting statistics related to citation of academic journals in Wikipedia. Wikipedia may still have much unreliable info, but it has made lots of progress in the past few years, as current tens of thousands of reliable citations prove.

And of course, instead of resting on laurels, Wikipedia is now taking this opportunity to increase its coverage of the very subject of academic journals...

On the word "wiki" - and its real application

The just published issue of First Monday has an interesting paper, which employs the word "wiki" but in fact goes beyond what is usually meant by it, applying it to the studies of identities. I find the paper interesting, but the usage of the word wiki in this context, even more so. Behold the evolving language - or at least, academia's love for coining neologisms :)

Read the paper here: Wikidentities: Young people collaborating on virtual identities in social network sites by Kerry Mallan, Natasha Giardina

Another thought: the paper misspells the "Condorcet's jury theorem" writing instead about the "Concordet Jury Theorem" (Condorcet comes from theorem's inventor, Marquis de Condorcet). If First Monday articles were a wiki, this could be easily corrected. As it is... the paper, pretty modern as far as academia goes, does not even allow easy commenting on its contents. I wonder when this will change?

Google Library and Commons

I've just discovered that Google now allows you to save public domain books into your library. What good are public domain books for Commons, you may ask? Well, in addition to being interesting historical documents, public domain books, by default, are full of public domain images. In other words: Google Books project does not only collect text, but alongside, quietly, it is collecting a vast amount of old illustrations, photos, maps and such. Examples:

[Please note, those images may not be available in full view to users outside of the United States - reason] (PS. And indeed now that I am in Poland I am seeing junk...)




I've saved a few dozens old Polish books into my library, most of them have at least several old illustrations, photos, or maps. I have no idea when I'll have time to move them to Commons, but I wonder if we should create a dedicated project that would catalogue useful books (those that have media) and report on the progress of their assimilation?

It appears Google have scanned lot of duplicates of the same book; they don't seem to have any mechanism on reporting duplicates, and their reports on damaged pages seem somewhat buggy, too. Still, for a free service, it's a great tool!

Some useful tips for working with images from Google Print:
* you can switch to html mode while browsing a public domain book (small link somewhere to the right and middle of a page) and save the resulting image as a jpeg


PS. Surfing the web, I discovered this excellent blog ("Inside Google Book Search") devoted to Google Book Search; note the use of images from Google Book public domain books.

Some interesting studies on Wikipedia

Wikipedia's coverage and conflicts quantified: this important study tells us which topics are best covered in Wikipedia, and also, which topics generate most conflict.

What's really interesting is the that "philosophy" and "religion" have generated 28% of the conflicts each. This is despite the fact that they were only 1% and 2%.

Preliminary results from the UNU merit survey: Preliminary results from the General User Survey of 2008 are available.

What I found quite interesting, in addition to the (expected but still not fully understood) the great disproportion in terms of gender among contributors, was the low rate of responders from Poland (around ~15 place, and only tenth as much as those from Germany) when compared to the fact that Polish Wikipedia is the 4th largest. The researchers are somewhat surprised at the rates of response from various countries; they have for example excluded the responses from Russian Wikipedia, which were the second most numerous group (Russian Wikipeda is the 10th most largest).

The joy of ignorance

Or why do I love Wikimedia Commons (the Wikipedia-style media repository). It's not only because I can upload my high resolution, sometimes a bit crappy images :) It's not only because the images can be displayed on Wikipedia. It's because they will be near perfectly categorized - time, place, type... and if I don't know how to categorize them - I can just wait and see how somebody will categorize in in the future. Now, I know little about life sciences: animals, plants, etc. But I still take photos of them... and what happens?

I upload a picture that in my vast knowledge I name "Black bird on grass" :) and categorize it in "unidentified birds". A month later, somebody else updates it to "Unidentified Passeriformes". Few months later, we have the bird narrowed down to "Turdus merula".

Watching this happen to all of my images, from mushrooms to strange parts of machinery, is really fun :)

Feeling like testing your visual knowledge? Try the "Category:Unidentified subject". I think I see a camel...

PS. In other news: my Wikipedia adventures were blogged about by Durova.

More Wikipedia statistics!

There is a blog dedicated to Wikipedia statistics: Infodisiacs

Another blog of an interesting Wikipedian: Durova

Polish museums do not like photographers

But this may be changing. I thought I'd just make a brief note in English about a recent development - several Polish blogs and even mainstream media articles have run some recent articles on that subject, criticizing museums who forbid people to take photos. Hopefully change is not far...

Read more (on Polish Wikinews): "Kiedy dowiemy się, dlaczego nie można robić zdjęć w niektórych polskich muzeach?"

For whom the bells toll

Two major print encyclopedias cease production

No suprise there. Back in 2004 in related news I blogged that ex-CEO of Britannica compared dictionaries to dinosaurs. In 2006 Nature dealt a death blow to Britannica. Recently I found out that Alexa graph comparing popularity of Britannica to Wikipedia has lost its usefulness - because Britannica line is now FLAT, so I have to use two graphs. Let them finish the story:

Popularity of Wikipedia vs...

...popularity of Britannica.

Hear, hear

From Wikipedia Signpost:

Reference books? Give me Wikipedia - In response to a professor calling Internet sources "white bread" (see archived story), the author of this article states that the notion that the Internet is eroding our research skills echoes the past mantra that the lower classes should not be taught to read. He argues that the professor is blaming the messenger and not the message, and the problems that are blamed on the Internet have always plagued students: the way that their work is marked may be reinforcing that using predigested material is acceptable. The author questions the assumption that because something is bound in book format, it is therefore more reliable.

It's nice to see this argument coming not from a wizkid but a seasoned journalist.

Recently I witnessed several people being highly critical of sources like Google Print. They rant about "selective quoting" and how people will not read books but just tiny paragraphs or sentences.

So what? I have read many books. And in 90% of cases (non-fiction wise), the traditional rule that 'most of everything is useless' holds true quite well. Most of books have some useful arguments or facts - but much more filler. Being able to Google through hundreds of books in few dozen minutes, and find what I am looking for is extremly useful. Sure, I may miss some useful random snippets I'd otherwise find, but you know what - I will find them anyway, reading other books in the free time generated by the fact I am not reading others :)

The increase in research productivity that is being generated by easy access to searcheable databases is only just begining. With more and more sources being accessible full text through open licences, the revolution, not much smaller than the invention of writing, printing or the Internet is upon us. It was one thing to have the theoretical means to access lots of information. It's quite another to be actually able to do so.

And for those who want to preserve their ivory towers... "The avalanche has already begun. It's too late for pebbles to vote."

Real voice of the Prokonsul

I got interviewed by Wikipedia Weekly!

Among other things, I blabbered about: Is there a cabal? Are Polish Wikipedians different? Is Wikipedia facing a crisis? How to encouraging civility and cooperation? How to use WP in the classroom to benefit both the student and the project?

TTags: Wikipedia

Wikis and Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool

I've just learned that my article was published by International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. In January, but let's skip this miscommunication technicality - instead, this little delay allows me to review what, if any, impact my work has had.

First, IJoITaDL makes it very easy for others to read its contents. Being open access journal, it belongs to the still rare but growing faction in the academic community, which argues that making academic works available online free of charge to anyone, thus being true to the science mission of educating the public and spreading knowledge is actually a good idea. Such approach is still being opposed by the "tradional" faction, which prefers restricting access to academic works from "unwashed masses" beyond "pay-per-acccess" traditional databases, which until recently did a splendid job of ensuring that unless you are an employee or student at a rich Western university, or go through slow and cumbersome interlibrary loan (again not available in most non-Western countries), you will have to pay few dozen $ for the privilige of reading anything but an abstract. Guess where my sympathies are :)

Therefore I was nicely - but not very - suprised when the editor of the journal told me today that my article has received 2320 page and an even larger number of downloads as part of the entire January issue :) A brief web search on my article led to some interesting findings:
* Google Scholar doesn't see it? :(
* it is mentioned in blog comments and such - so indeed somebody reads it :)
* somebody thinks its "somewhat scholarly" :)
* somebody discusses it in Finnish :)
* it was mentioned in British Council and various databases

I couldn't find any more in-depth reviews or references, but it's a nice start :)


TTags: Wikis, E-learning, Wikipedia