Lesson 24: Wikipedia II

Aims: as per lesson 23

We'll review the origins and history of Wikipedia and then work through the Wikipedia Tutorial. In particular, we'll look at the page Keep in Mind, work on Editing and discuss the role and value of Talk Pages (and also of Registration). Part of the background we should all know involves familiarity with the NPoV guidelines. Other pages that are useful to read: Avoiding common mistakes; exemplar Featured Articles. The page read for prep, Wikipedia: Vandalism, is also important. There's a useful, one-page overview of editing Wikipedia, How to contribute to Wikipedia (2005).

Then:

1/ Access to publishing, editing … in wiki form

Being able to publish material (text, photos, video …) online (on social sites, blogs, wikis …) is something that, we've seen, is now available and accessible to huge and rapidly increasing numbers of people. Traditionally, to publish was something that was quite difficult, time-consuming and expensive to do. Similarly, to edit, or co-edit, an encyclopedia was, for most of history, something few would have the chance to do. Now, it, too, is accessible to just about anyone and can be done rapidly, in response to events. 7 July 2005 London Bombings is a good example — this is the article as it was first created, that morning, at 9.15am:



In its first four hours, the article was edited over a thousand times. There's a time-lapse video of the creation of this page here.

Another, very recent example:

Charlton Heston is gone and all of Life mourns his passing. But here’s an interesting tidbit from my friend Holly.

I was reading a discussion board at 11:10 (last night, central time) when someone posted that Charlton Heston had died. A few minutes later, I went to Wikipedia to look at his Wiki entry. Yep, already there. It beat the front pages of all the major news sites. It’s not on CNN’s front page as of my clicking Compose Mail to send you this.

Like it or not, mainstream media, this is the way it is. A week ago, I wrote about the concept of “finding” news consumers based on a comment from a student during a focus group. “If the news is that important,” the young man said, “it will find me.” How does that happen? Word-of-mouth and examples like this. The change to Heston’s Wikipedia page could have come from his own people, or it could have come from a fan. But the fact that it occurred ahead of major news outlets is a stunning example of how people are able to sidestep the gatekeepers in the quest to be informed.

Wikipedia extends the received idea of what an encyclopedia is. It is open to all to edit (and is therefore part of what has been called the process of mass amateurisation), can be edited so as to be as up to date with events as is one could imagine and can be quickly and/or constantly edited, and is:

The other day Wikipedia had an open house for their move to San Francisco. Their new digs are cozy, funky, and just right. They had a number of public screens on display in corners of their offices, but one caught my eye. This screen showed a log of edits to Wikipedia in real time. The edits were happening about one per second, almost faster than you could follow. As you watched the improvements to the ultimate book would scroll up off the screen in a blur. That's the speed of correction. It gave me a sense of the almost animal-like power of the hive mind behind the Wikipedia -- a constant ceaseless buzz of diligence. Kevin Kelly

(For another set of visualisations of Wikipedia edits, considerably more sophisticated than the above, see IBM's History Flow and the paper Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations [pdf]. Quote of note: "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects. The pictures below tell the story." The University of Minnesota study linked to in 3/ below is also important here.)

2/ Collaboration

Wikipedia articles have been described as processes, not products: — all edits are provisional. It's an example of something more than sharing (as, say, with a Google Doc): technically, it's an example of distributed collaboration. In order to accomplish these things, Wikipedia needed to be a wiki — and that decision was taken in 2001: the original conception of what would become Wikipedia, Nupedia, was established in 2000, was not on a wiki but, instead, had elaborate editing procedures, and by the end of its first nine months of existence had just 20 finished articles on it and a few in development. On the other hand, Wikipedia beat that within the first weeks of its life and by the end of 2001 had 15,000 articles up.

Clay Shirky (interview, 2008):

If all of Britannica's editors quit or were fired tomorrow, the copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica in its most current form would slowly become less and less valuable as things became out of date one way or another. If the top 10 percent most active Wikipedians lost interest and stopped logging in, Wikipedia would vanish in about 48 hours. The vandals and the people with different points of view would come in. The thing would just be destroyed. Because Wikipedia is this process. It exists today because, again, today people care enough to defend it. That's one of the really big shifts. People in traditional media often miss this, because they think they're seeing the replacement of one product with another product, when in fact they're seeing the replacement of products generally with processes generally.

A wiki is a hybrid of tool and community: it augments community — it does not replace it.

3/ Power Laws

Wikipedia is created collaboratively through radically unequal levels of editorial activity. "Fewer than 2% of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. And among those contributors, no effort is made to even out their contributions. … In Wikipedia article edits … you would expect the second most active user to have committed only half as many edits as the most active user, and the tenth most active to have committed only one-tenth as many." Like many other patterns of behaviour in large social systems, Wikipedia editing follows the form of a power law: "a power law describes data in which the nth position has 1/nth of the first position's rank". Under such a law, there's little sense to the idea of the "average user": users may contribute once but in a major way, or frequently but by correcting typos and altering formatting. There is no simple "representative", contributing user: "Power law distributions tend to describe systems of interacting elements, rather than just collections of variable elements. … To understand the creation of something like a Wikipedia article, you can't look for a representative contributor, because none exists. Instead, you have to change your focus, to concentrate not on the individual users but on the behaviour of the collective." (Quotations in this paragraph from Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.)

These are still early days for understanding how Wikipedia works. Here are some other links, with excerpts, to research and reflections which have something of note to say about this and about "network culture" …

Aaron Swartz, Who Writes Wikipedia? (2006):

Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account. … When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia (pdf; University of Minnesota, 2007):

Wikipedia matters. It is widely used and immensely influential in contemporary discourse. It is the definitive exemplar of collective action on the Web, producing a large, successful resource of great value. Our work has set the scientific study of Wikipedia – and, by extension, study of other online collective action communities – on a much firmer basis than ever before. Most fundamentally, we offer a better way to measure the phenomena people care about. Others have used author-based measures, counting edits to approximate the value of contributions and measuring repair time to approximate impact of damage. We use reader-based measures. We approximate both the value of contributions and the impact of damage by estimating the number of times they were viewed. Our view-based metrics let us both sharpen previous results and go beyond them. Others have shown that 1% of Wikipedia editors contributed about half of edits [6]. We show that 1/10th of 1% of editors contributed nearly half of the value, measured by words read.

Henry Jenkins:

… collective intelligence exploits the potential of network culture to allow many different minds operating in many different contexts to work together to solve problems that are more challenging than any of them could master as individuals. In such a world …nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any member knows is available to the group as a whole at a moment's notice.

Power Law Graphs

Wikipedia illustration to the Power Law article, "An example power law graph, being used to demonstrate ranking of popularity. To the right is the long tail, to the left are the few that dominate (also known as the 80-20 rule):




(There's a very good explanation of the Pareto Principle here.)


From Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality (2003):



Clay Shirky's essay is an excellent overview of power laws and blogs: "we know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot".


Palo Alto research, Long Tail of user participation in Wikipedia (2007):



(On the Long Tail, see here.)

As Thomas Vander Wal wrote in 2005, "I have learned not to see the power curve as a bad thing, but as something that has opportunities all throughout the curve, even in the long tail."


In all this, there's still a curatorial role being played by Jimmy Wales and administrators. Kevin Kelly:

We are too much in a hurry to wait around for a pure hive mind. Our best technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every successful technological system, including Wikipedia, has design wired into it. What's new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much "hive" in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations.

Last words to i) Wikipedia's own About page:


And ii), Wikipedia's Citing Wikipedia page:

If you decide to cite Wikipedia, remember that its articles are constantly changing: cite exact time, date, and version of the article version you are using. Page history and toolbox features "cite this article" and "permanent link" are very useful for finding that information. For example, the link en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia&oldid=101425275 is for a specific version of this page created at 22:13 on 17 January 2007; 101425275 is the article version number. The link will display the article as it existed at that time; no later revisions will be included in the text.

So when we quoted from Wikipedia's own About page we should have used the toolbox 'permanent link' feature,



and used the url that gave us, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:About&oldid=208870458. That url shows that that version of the About page was edited at 00:07 on 29 April 2008.  (The full info runs: "This is the current revision of Wikipedia:About as edited by Fribbler (Talk | contribs) at 00:07, 29 April 2008".)  If you use the permanent link feature, the full date and time of the article revision you are using won't normally have to be cited. (You can find the date and time of the last revision at the bottom of every page, above the copyright notice. There's more information about citing Wikipedia here.)

Prep: on your blogs, write an introduction to Wikipedia explaining what you have now learned about it and its operation. Focus in particular on: its origins and scale; what you've learned about how it's edited, its reliability and how it should be used; its significance.