Category: Social Media

Seth Finklestein provided great coverage on the recent controversy over Wikipedia editor/community manager “Essjay” (one, two, three, four, five, and six).

The gentleman in question misrepresented himself as a tenured professor, both in an interview and in Wikipedia. Rather than show him the door, Jimmy Wales defended him–boys will be boys or some rot. It was only when Wales found out that Essjay lied to people ‘within’ the Wikipedia community that he was subsequently banished.

Essjay’s apology, if such can be said about it, was that he fabricated the information about himself to protect himself in this dangerous world. You don’t know how much my fingers itched to go out and do a little ‘self-protecting’ with my own page. Letsee…triple PhD holder, Pulitzer Prize winner, former Ms. Universe.

I refrained though. Instead, I invite you all to do the same–the three most colorful entries get a copy of either Practical RDF or Learning JavaScript, or the upcoming Adding Ajax.

Essjay’s ‘apology’ was an unbelievably silly excuse, but the irony doesn’t enter the picture until you view Essjay’s farewell page. Checking the history, most of the critical comments have been edited out.

I’ve recently stopped using Wikipedia, or stopped using it as an original source. I’ve found two things:

First, Google’s results have degraded in the last year or so. When one ignores Wikipedia in the results, on many subjects most of the results are placement by search engine optimization–typically garbage–or some form of comment or usenet group or some such that’s not especially helpful. Good results are now more likely found in the second or third pages.

Second, I find that I’m having to go to more than one page to find information, but when I do, I uncover all sorts of new and interesting goodies. That’s one of the most dangerous aspects of Wikipedia (aside from the whole ‘truth’ thing), or any single-source of information: we lose the ability to discover things on the net through sheer serendipity.

I still respect many of the authors in Wikipedia, and think it’s a good source. However, this event only strengthens my belief that Wikipedia should be pulled to the side for search engine results, like the Ask definition for words that match in Google, and people go back to searching the web by actually searching the web.

Anne Zelensky attended the recent Adobe Engage. She writes of her experience, being one of the few women present:

There were slights throughout the day: a mention of “granny mode” for a beginner’s big fonts mode of some Adobe software, a comment from some developer along the lines of “our users aren’t technically astute, they’re mature mothers,” and an example of a cell phone graphic for girls that was pink with cutesy animals. Stereotypes of females attended in greater numbers than actual females, if you don’t include the Adobe women who were there. No wonder these stereotypes prevail. If you work in an environment with actual women you might learn that some are technically oriented and some less so, some like pink and some do not, some are airbrushed and perfect like a Victoria’s Secret model… but most are not. I am not airbrushed and perfect, as anyone who has met me online or in person knows. But I am real in a way that those Victoria’s Secret models and clueless LASIK-free grannies and imagined versions of mature mothers are not.
…
I didn’t speak up yesterday with my complaints except on the ad hoc Twitter back channel because I do want to work within this space of blogging and technology and influence. I don’t want to fight against it and be labeled shrill or out of touch or difficult. That’s why I so appreciate James’ speaking out. James is not going to get labeled shrill–only women are called shrill. And it’s fine within tech blogging for men to speak for or against diversity.

Being one who is labeled shrill or out of touch or difficult, Amen.

The discussion thread just mentioned in the last story is also a good demonstration of what can happen when newspapers and other localized publications open up discussion threads. In particular, the St. Louis Today site, which runs its weblogs using WordPress, doesn’t put much in the way of restrictions on comments. What’s happened is a group of people have moved into the discussion area and setup housekeeping.

You can’t read a thread where it isn’t dominated by people like robsmyth and others, with their own insider language and discussion–usually only incidentally related to the topic.

danah boyd is going through Wikipedia deletion pains. The comments on her Articles for Deletion page and Discussion page have been very interesting reading.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has been pointing out my own entry on women in Wikipedia, but my preferred post on that particular event was Yo Sock Puppets; much of the discussion about Wikipedia occurred in the later post.

One of the most fascinating elements to come out of the discussion on danah’s entry has to do with her name: danah is legally ‘danah boyd’. She was born ‘danah michele mattas’–different last name, but same use of lowercase; she uses danah boyd for all of her own work. However, the Wikipedia editors won’t allow her entry to reflect the case on her name–insisting that since the publications that reference her name give her name as “Danah Boyd”, the Wikipedia entry must do the same. Why? Because, to quote a Wikipedia editor:

Unfortunately, you seem to have a misconception of how Wikipedia works. I strongly recommend reading the policies and guidelines at Wikipedia:Autobiography, Wikipedia:Verifiability, and Wikipedia:No original research. In a nutshell: Wikipedia is not for placing “the truth”, it is for placing summaries of information that is already published in other credible news sources. If you can’t convince the NY Times, NPR, USA Today, and Fox News to lowercase your name, that makes a really tough case to argue on Wikipedia, since the policy here is to only incorporate information after it’s been published elsewhere. If, however, you *can* convince the major media outlets to print it differently in future press, then that will make a stronger case to get the Wikipedia article adapted to match. Or in other words, don’t sweat it for an immediate change — take the long view.

(emph. mine)

The point of the editor is that because of danah’s appearance in these publications as Danah Boyd, most lookups on her name would occur because of this case. Those who know danah as ‘danah’, most likely wouldn’t be looking up her name. Still, I would assume that Wikipedia would accept danah’s verification of the accuracy of her name, and that the tool is intelligent enough to manage differing case when performing a lookup on her name.

What’s more relevant to a discussion on Wikipedia at large is the direct admission that Wikipedia is not the place for ‘truth’. This, to me, is an extremely honest and important statement to make. I would hope the statement is pasted all over Wikipedia, because this is the ‘truth’ of Wikipedia, of any encyclopedia: what’s contained is less a matter of philosophical truth than verifiable source. Where Wikipedia editors are making a mistake is treating danah’s work as it appears in non-mainstream publications such as the ACM or her own birth certificate as less ‘worthy’ than those that appear in Fox.

The editor then responds with confrontations in this regard with a recommendation to danah to get the publications to use the proper case, which would then make a better argument for correcting the case in Wikipedia. My goodness–what an intransigent viewpoint, and almost bizarre recommendation.

At first glance, the editor’s comments are baffling, in the extreme. I think what’s happening with Wikipedia, though, is that given the lack of early structure for the online site, the editors have, over time, formulated rules of their own. As happens in cases such as these, they then maintain a far more rigid adherence to said rules then if there had been a structure in place in the beginning. As time passes, Wikipedia becomes less a tribute to fact and more a tribute to process.

This doesn’t mean that Wikipedia doesn’t have value–I still use it to look up information, though I don’t consider it the definitive authority on a topic. As the editors would say, only a fool would rely solely on what’s written in Wikipedia. Still, at what point does the rigid adherence to process outweigh the usefulness of the data? In other words: what is Wikipedia’s tipping point? And has it been reached?

It’s Easter morning where I am. The storms of last night were mild in our area, and the sun is up, the birds singing, and a nice breeze blowing through my windows. The trees are mostly green, except for the dogwood, with it’s pink and white dog tooth blooms.

If I were a Christian, I would end my post here, because it is Easter, after all. Oh, I might mention the bunnies running around earlier. Since I’m not a Christian, and weblogging is neither all Christian (or any other religion) nor all based in the US, one can continue on as usual despite this holiday or that. Well, other than one can’t order any camera equipment for this week. (And I so wanted that 600mm.) I wish now, though, that I’d bought a new spring outfit. I always used to buy a light yellow outfit for Easter. Yellow is not my color, but I only wanted yellow for Easter. Go figure.

Sam Ruby pointed to a Matt Mullenweg post titled, The Feed Validator is Dead to Me. It seems that Sam et al at the Validator made a correction in how the case is treated for wfw:commentRSS. This, in turn, led to Matt’s rejection of all things Validator:

Is anyone else sick and tired of the so-called feed validator changing its mind on fundamental issues every other week? I’m sure Sam Ruby and whoever else is still working on the Validator mean well, but the constant ivory tower decisions to change the way it interpets “valid RSS 2.0″ is making it seem more like a political advocacy tool than anything else. Perhaps I should give the benefit of the doubt and “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Whoa! It is just such tirades that make me hesitant about porting back to WordPress. It’s not that the software isn’t good — I like it. Or that the developers aren’t hardworking–they are, and I appreciate their hard work. It’s that Matt has a real strong arbitrary streak himself, all the while that he disdains what he perceives to be an arbitrary streak in others. This inconsistency tends to grip my graw, as we used to say back in the home country.

Hey, I’m all for arbitrary, but not in my tech. I want my tech to be mind numbingly consistent. I don’t want the developers of Firefox’s JavaScript engine to suddenly decide that wouldn’t it be fun to process all math operations in Firefox as base 8 rather than base 10 by default.

A technology validator’s primary purpose is to validate against a known specification or standard: no more, no less. If the specification or standard is open for interpretation, then the results may not be consistent against various implementations. If a feed specification or standard is clearly defined so that there are no ambiguities, then neither Sam nor anyone else can make any form of arbitrary decision as to what the validator will, and will not, accept. There would be no issue of personalities, because either the feed is valid, or it’s not.

It’s the same with code: either a PHP program is written using valid PHP, or it breaks. I would expect that someone who has spent time with WaSP, as Matt has, would understand this one. After all, I seem to remember this organization’s intolerance to Mozilla’s growing pains back in the days when this effort was fairly young. As for myself, I have finally taken WaSP’s message to heart–so much so that I want my syndication feed to be without ambiguities, and valid.

I know, same old story: the syndication ‘wars’ continue, in which case most of you turn away in ennui. The thing is, I don’t think many of you realize how fragile the whole syndication thing is. When you have imprecise specifications, undergoing change from many different players, the whole thing is held together by a thread. The only reason it’s worked to this point is that most feed aggregators include code to handle all the many arbitrary differences. Frankly, who this serves, I have no idea: I think it’s an abysmal waste of development skill and time.

I’m more or less deciding to drop my RSS 1.x feed, primarily because I can incorporate my use of RDF into many other applications. I’ve never thought that syndication was the best use of RDF, and to too many people, it is RDF (as witness WordPress use of RDF to signal an RSS 1.0 feed, rather than rss1, which would be more appropriate). I’m thinking of making my full content Atom feed my main feed and removing the username/password, as some folk have had problems with this. I figure if my content ends up being re-published in its entirety at another site without my permission, I’ll then handle it the way it should be handled: by using my skill with tech to demonstrate to the site the error of its ways.

The Atom feed is the only feed I know of currently being actively supported by an organization outside of this environment. Support for RSS 1.x seems to have died out. RSS 2.0 is doomed to be forever broken because of an ill-advised assignment of the specification to an organization that seems to be indifferent to the problems associated with it. Okay, fine. Atom: one and only.

Still, I’m not sure how redirecting my feed of one type to another will work. Will have to try, see what happens.

But to return to the concept of arbitrariness, when I do have the time to finish porting back to WP, then I know I’ll be committed to spending time having to create plugins countering some of this arbitrariness. That’s okay, I can publish the plugins; a developer likes to see her work used by others.

As for the syndication feed Validator, frequent changes are perhaps not the best approach when it comes to what the Validator will or will not accept–I would suggest those maintaining the Validator consider a Fix Friday, once or twice a month, preceded by a note about what will change. No need to add to the chaos.

Oh and for those of faith: Happy Easter, May your Passover be a happy time with your families.