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I’ve been spending the last few days thinking about my upcoming research into how Wikipedians currently use and understand sources and citations in different situations (directly after a major international news event like the Japan earthquake and in conflict situations such as the Middle East conflict) and what kinds of software tools could be helpful in advancing some of the goals and philosophies of Wikipedia globally. I’ve learned that there are a number of problems that Wikipedians encounter with the current policies and tools – including what some view as conservatism around sources (bias in favor of traditional, often inaccessible print-based materials and against online sources and commercial research, for example) and some specific observations of how blunt a tool MediaWiki is at supporting citations in emotionally-charged edit wars and in rapidly evolving events.
The big questions that I’m trying to answer in this research are:
1. What debates are Wikipedians having around sources and what does this say about how Wikipedians understand the verifiability policy?
2. What is the effect of the technical features and affordances of current wiki tools on issues of quality (for example, the ability of Wikipedia to be a current and accurate source of information on rapidly-evolving events) and diversity (how Wikipedia might incorporate a wider range of viewpoints that may be situated outside of traditional academic publications)?
3. How might alternative policies and tools affect those principles of quality and diversity?
These are great questions! And great questions are always a good place to start. But deciding on how to answer these questions with limited time and resources is where I need to get creative and hopefully ask for help from wise academics, Wikipedians and friends. These are some of my initial ideas and as a newbie ethnographer I’m hoping for some kind but realistic responses.
I was originally going to start off with a bunch of interviews of Wikipedians working on topics related to big international events. But after chatting to a number of Wikipedians at Wikimania and doing a few more open-ended interviews, I’ve actually realised that starting with particular articles and telling the story of those articles could actually get me to a better understanding of what’s going on in “source talk” a lot quicker. I think that I was initially caught up in the regular social science and usability methods of conducting research where you decide on your sample, go out and collect responses to a specific set of questions and then analyse the data. Spending the past two days reading and analysing talk pages for the ‘hummus’ articles in English, Hebrew and Arabic has made me realise that there is a wealth of incredible data about how Wikipedians actually talk about sources and that a better approach could be more like a detective – starting with the little pieces of evidence and then following the story as I interview the characters reflected in the articles.
Like a detective (or at least the ones in the movies) I’m working towards understanding motivations in order to piece together narratives about what happened and why. When I first thought of Wikipedia article debates, I envisioned a large boardroom table with people sitting around it rationally discussing what to add and what to leave out. Actually, the debates are much more like noisy town hall meetings. You have the crazy person who keeps shouting all sorts of completely irrelevant details and then complaining that they’re being systematically ignored, the exhausted public administrator who has seen the same arguments play out over and over again and who is snippy and terse when newcomers try to cover old territory. There’s the polite newbie who is surely too polite to be making genuine statements, and the loud Westerners who drop into the meeting to make sarcastic remarks about how stupid everyone is for fighting about such trivial matters. I think that these narratives — who is allied to who, what happens to the debate when related national or international events hit, how disruptive editors can deadlock entire articles — are actually at the heart of bigger questions about verifiability and that, especially when we’re thinking of designing new tools to fit into current working methods of users and not the other way round, then understanding exactly how the articles tick makes sense to me.
I started by printing out articles and talk pages for ‘hummus’ in WP English, Hebrew and Arabic (Google translated version at least) and did some rough analysis and coding (using present participles to denote what I thought was happening) plus notes relating to what was interesting in comparison to the other language versions. I will go over this again and then type up themes with related quotations and summarised stories, then follow up leads with some of the editors who were involved, code all of their interviews, add to the thematic groupings and then do the final analysis.
After I’ve done the same thing for a page relating to an international news event (either the 2011 Egyptian Revolution or the 2011 Japanese Earthquake which I have started to look at), I’m hoping to be able to make some good conclusions about how Wikipedians understand verifiability and what the effect of current policies and tools are on issues of quality and diversity. You’ll notice that I’m choosing to go deep rather than wide but in order to really ‘people’ this analysis and understand who is behind the pages and what the dynamics are, I’m thinking that this might be the best way of going about it.
Would love any (kind) thoughts, suggestions and even, yes, encouragement in my lonely space over here 
In the wake of anxiety about the “trustworthiness” of Wikipedia articles and the different quality levels of articles, a number of tools have been developed to automatically determine how trustworthy content on Wikipedia is. The first is ‘content-based filtering’, the second is ‘collaborative filtering’. Content based filtering uses properties of the text itself to automatically gauge trustworthiness. WikiTrust, a MediaWiki extension, for example, enables users to view a Wikipedia article with text highlighted in different shades according to the reputation of the author, which in turn is based on the number of times that the authors’ contributions have been reverted (lower reputation) or preserved (higher reputation). Collaborative filtering, on the other hand, is based on the subjective evaluations of Wikipedia articles by users. The Wikipedia Recommender System (WRS), for example, uses the ratings of users similar to you to predict how you might evaluate articles in the future.
Christian Jensen, Povilas Pilkauskas and Thomas Lefevre are behind the WRS and have just published ‘Classification of Recommender Expertise in the Wikipedia Recommender System’ detailing the next version of their prototype. Jensen et al explain that the key problem of collaborative filtering systems is that a single user has varying levels of expertise in different areas and will therefore be good at rating some articles and not-so-good at rating others. You may have provided an accurate rating of an article about drag racing, for example, but that does not mean that you should automatically be believed when you provide feedback about painters from the Italian Renaissance. The first version of WRS worked with this kind of simplistic recommendation system and the team wanted to advance it to take account of a user’s expertise in different areas.
Now comes the hard part. In order for the system to take note of which topics users were proficient in, they had to decide what classification system they were going to use for all the information on Wikipedia (i.e. all “human knowledge”). They looked at the hundreds of classification schemes in order to Read the rest of this entry »
Sir John Daniel, President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning
Sir John Daniel from the Commonwealth of Learning was interviewed by Creative Commons’ Timothy Vollmer recently about his ideas on open education. He is one of the wisest, most gracious members of this community, and I just loved some of the answers.
Many of the COL member states are located in the global south. How does an OER policy affect global south states differently than the global north?
I’m exaggerating quite a bit here, but we’ve observed that in the north people are more focused on producing OER and that in the south people are more focused on how they can use OER. Just a few months ago I was at the Open Courseware Conference in Boston. Perhaps three-fourths of the presentations there focused on producing OER, while only a small number were about re-purposing and reusing OER content. This has to change for the OER movement to take off.
In the south, there’s a cautious attitude of “there’s lots of stuff available, why not use it?” We’ve been encouraging the north to take a more universal approach and think multidirectionally. This is why we’re delighted that a school like the University of Michigan is using OER from Malawi and Ghana in its medical programs. Why should the University of Michigan create OERs about tropical diseases when there are folks that live in the tropics that can do it better? So, we encourage people to see OER production and use as a multi-directional flow.
Yes! Open education should certainly be about mutual sharing and cooperation! It should be about breaking down barriers that Read the rest of this entry »
I wrote a short memo to the Ushahidi team about what exactly an ethnographer does and how ethnography as a discipline could be useful to Ushahidi (and Crowdmap in particular). I’m thinking of actually writing more about this and interviewing ethnographers working at technology companies to shed some light on this growing field.
What is ethnography?
Ethnography is a research method, with roots in anthropology, that aims to gain a rich perspective of user communities. Ethnographic research projects require the researcher to be deeply immersed in a specific research context (also called “participant observation”) and to develop an understanding that would not be achievable with other, more limited research approaches (Lazar, Feng, Hochheiser: 2010). Ethnography emerged from the practice of early anthropologists who studied “new” cultures Read the rest of this entry »
Alex and I completed our masters projects report on Thursday night. I thought I’d post the research that I did looking at information flows at the I School and the role of architecture in shaping the kinds of interactions that were taking place.
Interviewing students, staff and faculty and observing what was going down in the students lounge, the classroom, the co-lab and corridors, I concluded that the “spaces between” class play an important role in the learning experience because it is here where students can construct knowledge with their peers and practice the performance of their new identities. The fact that these spaces are located outside the purview of those in authority and that they enable students to choose who they can be intimate with is critical to the success of these spaces for enabling peer learning. In contrast, private digital spaces are unavailable to students, with the result that students attempted to use spaces like Facebook to engage with one another resulting in harms including exclusion, identity crises and self-censorship.
I noticed that the architecture of online-only educational spaces (looking at learning management systems, social media learning systems and open educational learning environments) seemed to replicate only the classroom space during class but without the protective walls available in conventional learning environments. This is really just exploratory research but I believe that the lack of nuanced social environments in online learning systems is a big part of what is leading to high dropout rates in distance/online learning programs and that we really need to build for “intimacy” rather than either the “private/closed” or “public/open” architecture characterised by current systems.
I’d love to carry on this research in the next few months but would love any feedback in the meantime.
And, yay! I’m going to graduate!
On the 3rd of January this year, Guardian contributor, James Richardson wrote an article about how Wikileaks would have committed the same ‘collateral murder’ it accused the US military of (in their edited video of an Iraq drone operation) if Zimbabwean Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangarai was convicted of treason. One of the cables (published 8 December 2010) indicated that Tsvangarai was privately supporting sanctions by the US against Zimbabwe when he had publicly denounced them. The Zimbabwean Attorney General responded by launching an investigation into the matter, saying that ‘The WikiLeaks appear to show a treasonous collusion between local Zimbabweans and the aggressive international world, particularly the United States.’ Richardson complained that ‘WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life’.
Soon afterwards, in a Twitter response to the article, Wikileaks alerted the Guardian to the fact that the Guardian, not Wikileaks, had actually published the cable in question. Eleven days after the story was published, it was edited to reflect the new facts with following statement: ‘This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact.’
On January 13, The Guardian’s Deputy Editor, Ian Katz wrote an explanation of the mistake, saying that technically it was both Wikileaks and the Guardian that published the cables. He explained the process as follows:
‘The Guardian and four other international news organisations had – and has – access to all 250,000 leaked US embassy cables. When the Guardian released a story based on one or more documents, we generally published Read the rest of this entry »
Eight years ago, I applied to the Digital Vision Fellowship Program at Stanford University with an interest in developing GIS (Geographic Information Systems) tools to map conditions that could lead to conflict in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Benetech generously sponsored the fellowship hoping that I could help them with Martus, a human rights reporting tool that they were developing for people to report human rights abuses using computer networks. But when I got to Stanford (fresh from being transfixed by Larry Lessig for the first time) I started volunteering for Creative Commons and was so excited by the potential for cc in Africa that I did a 180 and worked on copyright reform and digital culture in Africa and globally for the next five years.
In 2009, driven by some of the hard questions that I started to ask myself about what we were doing with iCommons, I came back to the US to do my Masters at the UC Berkeley School of Information. It was here that I discovered ethnography in a class taught by the wonderful Jenna Burrell. Jenna is not only a great teacher (her classes actually demonstrate the philosophy that she’s trying to teach!) she also brought me around to thinking that there was a way that I could combine my passion for writing and journalism with deep, systematic analysis of where virtual and “real” worlds meet (and sometimes collide). And so I decided that I wanted to be an ethnographer.
But ethnography jobs in the tech sector seem to require PhDs and I was starting to give up on actually being able to find someone to give me a break. Last week, I saw a job posting on Ushahidi’s website for an ethnographer/behaviorist and I immediately wrote to Jon Gosier to ask what he required for the application. I have always had deep respect for Ory Okolloh who co-founded Ushahidi and Erik Hersman (aka “WhiteAfrican“) who is now Director of Operations and Strategy, and intuitively thought that it would be a really wonderful opportunity.
Jon called me yesterday to interview me for the job. He asked me to tell him my story, about the work I was doing and why I wanted to work for the Ushahidi platform. I briefly introduced him to my ethnographic work and he asked me to tell him more about my Wikipedia research. After a while, he said: ‘This is going to sound strange but your essay was one of the reasons why I dreamed up this position. It made me realize how this kind of work could really help what we’re doing. I wasn’t going to say anything when you applied because I wanted to hear why you wanted to join us, but I know all about you and was stoked when you applied for the job.’
I have been wondering for a long time how I would ever find anything that fitted me. I kept thinking about how I didn’t want to end up in a position where I didn’t have the freedom to be who I am, to speak out about what I’m passionate about, and to feed my passion for Africa while still doing something that is globally relevant. And then all of a sudden, the universe provided me a job that was – literally – made for me. Speaking to Jon, I felt like a gibbering wreck I was so blown away. The job will enable me to work on improving SwiftRiver and Ushahidi’s great tools for harnessing the social web. And since I’m working 70% time for them, I’ll get to do some teaching and writing on the side. I will be mostly be in the San Francisco Bay Area but the job isn’t dependent on a particular location so I’m hoping to spend some time in Kenya learning Swahili and researching Wikipedia as planned. More than that, I have no idea, but I feel like this new chapter is going to be a pretty exciting one. I start 1 June.
This essay <download below> is being published as part of the ‘Critical Point of View: Wikipedia Research Initiative’ Reader. Thank you to Geert and Nathaniel and the rest of the folks at the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures (INC) and the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society for making me realise that you can love something and be critical about it – and that sometimes you have to love it to be truly so.
Much has been said of the future of Wikipedia. Some have prophesied that the online encyclopaedia will fail due to increasing spam. Others have said that, as large parts of the world go online, Wikipedia might see a wave of new editors as countries from Zambia to Indonesia begin to fill in Wikipedia’s blank spots. In a project that aims to ‘make all human knowledge accessible’, those blank spots can mean many things: the hundreds of thousands of places that aren’t talked about on Wikipedia, the thousands of languages that either don’t have their own encyclopaedia or are struggling to build one, and the countless things that people know about their world but aren’t in written form.
This essay is concerned, not so much with the future of the English version of Wikipedia (about which much of the prophesying occurs) but with the 277 other language Wikipedias. Will this number shrink as editors grow tired of their lonely pursuits, or will it grow as more of the world goes online? As large parts of Africa go online, it is expected that they will start to edit Wikipedia and that they will edit it in their own language. Both of these assumptions may be incorrect. Firstly, there are a number of external and internal limitations to this new wave of editors joining Wikipedia, and secondly, the scale of smaller Wikipedias may mean that they are over-shadowed by stronger motivations to edit the larger, more powerful English version.
‘The Missing Wikipedians’ in Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Critical Point of View: A Wikpedia Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011. ISBN: 978-90-78146-13-1. Download PDF
An alternative GeekRetreat story
It is a hot, swampy night just minutes before midnight on the outskirts of the small village of Stanford. An eagle howls. The cicadas ring in the ears of a huddle of beasts in the palm of the valley. A small flashlight is bobbing at the top of the hill. Soon other lights follow it as more emerge over the hill. Their bearers come into view. They are dressed in long black and silver cloaks and seem to float across the drought-stricken ground. Behind them are others dressed in deep red cloaks that seem to be dipped in blood. The GeekRetreat Elders have arrived to initiate new retreaters.
The Elders enter what looks like an old stone farmhouse. The wide room is lit by a circle of candles on the stone floor behind which sits the uninitiated geeks, dressed only in swaths of white cloth and their skin painted with white paint. Geoff the Greek is sweating profusely despite the heat. The cloth is prickling him and he is visibly nervous. He has left his CEO mantle behind him. Everyone starts at the lowest rung here. He is reminded of the time that he was the last person picked in break-time cricket in primary school. Will his geek skills be up to scratch? It was a long time since he wrote html. These days he hands his if-when-statement-writing over to his tribes code-monkeys scattered across the Web like pellets of the lonely male springbok.
The GeekRetreat Elders are staring down at the Newbies. A particularly dark looking character is grinning at him and staring into his stricken face. He has the word ‘Naughty’ tattooed across his forehead.
The elders enter the room and shout abuse at the Newbies. They make them do a series of tasks:
1. do their multiplication tables in binary while drinking a sickly brown substance with a snake emblazoned on it
2. doing pc support for grannies wanting to get onto the internets
3. reciting the words of the Tron
Geoff was doing ok. He’d been rehearsing his whole life for this. But Naughty was still grinning at him and when there was silence again, he opened his mouth for the first time:
What is the Wikileaks password? he asked.
Others put up their hands but Naughty waved them away.
I want him to tell me.
Geoff was being tested. For the future task of chief Greek? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he needed to get this right. The sweat dripped from his forehead and he stammered:
There is… no password.
The room errupted. Their new leader had been found. He was shown to have the powers of the Internets behind him. The covenant had been sealed.
Naughty’s grin disappeared and Geoff the Greek Geek hoorayed.
If you were following the GeekRetreat on Twitter last weekend, you may think that the event took a horrible turn for the worse by turning into a reality tv-type event. The story started on Saturday, where I apparently announced that this wasn’t the GeekRetreat but Geek Factor – a mix of Fear Factor, Big Brother and Survivor, Geek Factor pitted 37 geeks against one another in a battle to control the title of uber geek. After a number of intense challenges including a Treasure Hunt, Swimming Race and staring competition, Argent Brown, CEO and Lifetime President of Argent Rockstar Corporation, apparently emerged victorious, winning R100,000 from the GeekRetreat Foundation.
Although many of the activities were similar (there was, in fact, a treasure hunt at the retreat) the GeekRetreat was far from a competition. A spirit of play, respect and support permeated the event, where geekstars could test out new ideas and practice geekdom in what GR fellow, Elodie Kleynhans referred to as a very ‘safe’ environment.
GR fellows arrived on Thursday evening to a room with a very different setup to traditional conferences. Instead of dozens of chairs facing a podium, the chairs were arranged in a circle and before long geeks were playing a geek version of musical chairs where ‘the wind blew’ others like them to another chair in the room. 36 geeks from Joburg to Cape Town to San Francisco were there. The San Franciscan, Andy Volk, had come to the event last year and couldn’t resist the opportunity to come back again. ‘I got great value out of the retreat. It’s definitely worth traveling half way around the world for.’
Next up, Jarred Cinman and I explained the format of this year’s retreat. We have learned over the years that the most valuable interactions happen during the games and in the corridors – opportunities for us to have fun and collaborate with one another and through that collaboration learn who we want to work with in the future. Instead of just talking and debating, this year was about actually making something – an app, a website, a campaign, a competition or an activity – over the remaining three days.
As the smells of Cornelie de Villiers’ great cooking wafted over to the conference room, we collaboratively designed the schedule for the next few days. Each day was punctuated by scrum sessions in which the large group would come together to decide what had been done, what needed doing and whether anyone was facing any challenges. In actual fact, the scrum continued throughout the day as teams worked in a small corner of the conference room, in peoples’ rooms and outside, with a constant dialogue running about what was happening, who needed help and how priorities needed to be shifted.
In the next few days, fellows worked hard at their projects – asking folks from other teams to help them with interviews, content, and coding. In between gadget time, we swam in the lake, hugged the calf that is being reared on the farm, did frog dives off the pontoon, visited the local brewery, taught one another how to knit and danced to 80s music. In skill share sessions ,comprised of 10 minute how-to’s and conversations, fellows showed us how to make a box out of a sheet of paper (Pam Sykes), how to fold iphone headphones (Henk Kleynhans), how to program (Paul Furber) and how to keep healthy (Elodie Kleynhans), amongst other geeky and non-geeky tips.
In the end, eight projects were developed and showcased over the course of the weekend. Geek Factor emerged from the GeekRetreat documentation project with the goal of creating a spoof GR campaign. The team wanted to create a series of competing narratives about the GeekRetreat, emphasizing the fact that what people say about the event is often very far from individuals’ experiences and that people often believe what they want to believe on the Internet, not stopping to question or critically analyze what is being ‘reported’. In documenting GeekFactor, the team built spoof websites for GeekFactor and Argent Brown’s Argent Rockstar Corporation, shot video diaries documenting competitors’ feelings about how the competition was going, maintained a series of new Twitter accounts, Facebook pages and used the analogue power of rumor to weave a narrative about the retreat that was very far from the reality of what was really happening.
Said Jarred, ‘The decision to be unreliable narrators on the retreat was an experiment in how information spreads, how reputation informs communication and the fluidity of perspective. Critically the project showed what the weekend was about by showing what it wasn’t. Accused of being elitist, self-aggrandising and an excuse for inebriation, we took those accusations to their logical extreme. The ultimate geek ego was embodied by Argent Brown; the geeks indulged in hacking contests and staring competitions; and reports of self-important dialogue were legion. Retreatants themselves were kept partly in the dark and the stark contrast to the retreat as it was and as it was reflected became more and more pronounced giving everyone a unique and vivid experience of what it’s like to become victims of the new media we both create and live within.’
Henk Kleynhans from Skyrove, who donated the bandwidth and bandwidth management for the event, launched a project to ask DSL subscribers across the country to test their DSL speed in order to elicit real data that shows which service providers provide the fastest network connections. Bootstrap Secrets, a project led by Elan Lohmann, built a website where entrepreneurs can give others advice about running a startup in South Africa. The website’s focus is on anecdotal advice, tips, lessons and __ and contributors are encouraged to be as honest as possible. Speaking to the GR fellows, Elan said, ‘We couldn’t have done it without the fantastic submissions from you guys. In the next few weeks we’ll be inviting specific people who aren’t here to contribute tips and advice through Twitter.’
Solve my fucking problem – inspired by What the fuck is my social media strategy and Writer’s block – was a website developed for people to submit their problems. According to project lead Andy Hadfield, the team was experimenting with a viral campaign that would inspire businesses to solve real world problems.
Geeks @ Play saw fellows creating a play list of things they wanted to play at over the weekend and tagging each activity with their initials once they’d completed it. According to project lead, Leslie Maliepaard, stargazing, ‘hug a calf’, ‘lollipops and cupcakes’, and diving off pontoon were some of the most popular activities, with the least popular being ‘climb’ a tree’ and ‘twitpic a bunny’. Other fellows added onto the Play List by creating a paper progress bar, showing how far each fellow at the retreat had gone in achieving their playful activities. Leslie is keen to explore these ideas even further after the retreat, exploring ways to take these playful ideas online by inspiring people to play with their friends on Facebook. ‘This showed me that it’s easy to play, that everyone wants to have fun and that sometimes it’s important to take time to play,’ said Leslie.
The Reputation group explored the problem of deciding who to follow on Twitter and to dedicate scarce attention resources to. Led by Len Weincier, the team wanted to build a reputation graph that showed reputation levels relative to one another, inspired by the ELO ratings for chess and from X-box Live. After asking GR fellows to rate one another according to whether each was a ‘cool geek’ or an ‘uber geek’, the team used 3 different algorithms to compare the data. By looking at the graphs that resulted from adding up individuals’ ‘scores’, then weighting scores of scorers according to whether they were more positive or negative than others, the team ended up learning a great deal about how complex reputation graphs are and how their concept could be extended to real world situations in which people could offer one another favors with some kind of understanding of how good they were for it.
The Pitch Off team led by Pete Flynn created a Pitch Off competition for fellows to pitch five social entrepreneurial business ideas to judges and then to the audience. The five brave souls pitched their ideas and got valuable feedback from GR fellow judges, Alex Fraser, Brian Pinnock and Elan Lohmann who all have experience having ideas pitched to them in their businesses. Fellows learned a great deal from the pitches and the feedback they received. Said Pete, ‘It was interesting to see how differently judges scored their ideas – just emphasizing how we shouldn’t give up when we receive negative feedback from someone.’ It was a close call between contestants but Sam Christie won the final prize with his idea to use computer labs in low-income schools as call-center hubs.
The Geek Movie team produced a movie from interviews with almost all the fellows at the retreat on their experience of being a geek and what advice they would give to young geeks. The team led by Pam Sykes, Elodie Kleynhans with help from Luisa Mazinter, Larry Claasen and Jon Maliepaard said in their final presentation that the result was totally different from what they expected and that the process where everyone pitched in and where there was very little hierarchy worked really well.
It was an emotional farewell after prizes and thanks to everyone who helped make this year’s GeekRetreat such an incredible success. In final words, fellows emphasized how inspiring it was to find a community with such patience, understanding and tolerance. Tasleem Williams said how inspired he felt about the potential of Africans after seeing the incredible showcase of products. Others noted how lonely it is to always be on the outside and how it was wonderful it was to meet people just like them.
With these words, my job is done. I wish the next team everything of the best as they prepare for the next GeekRetreat. Onwards and upwards.
