The Intimate Encyclopedia

The Intimate Encyclopedia is an experiment that makes explicit the subjectivities of encyclopedic knowledge. Using Wikipedia as inspiration, it offers three core principles guiding the writing of articles. It asks authors to present the 1. Subjective Point of View (IE:SPOV), warns readers that content is 2. Unverifiable and encourages 3. All Original Research (AOR). Although the Intimate Encyclopedia is no longer, this record reminds us of the alternative ways of representing knowledge, distinct from the logics that guide our current truthmaking practices.

The following is from a talk I gave at the recent Digital Intimacies symposium organised by Paul Byron, Suneel Jethani, Amelia Johns and Natalie Krikowa, from my discipline group (Digital and Social Media) at the University of Technology Sydney.

I spend most of my time these days trying to understand what it means to know, whose knowledge is recognised and how knowledge should be governed. I do this in a world materially constituted by data and epistemologically by a moment in which truth seems to be located either as a result of machinic (as opposed to human) processes, or in the humans and crowds who seem to epitomise the rejection of a kind of politics that seems to muddy the truth. Seems, because even the algorithms that drive our truth machines are, we know, a very human craft and very much political artefacts. Seems, because the politicians who rise on the back of an idea that politics is corrupt, we learn are themselves often politically corrupt. Seems, because crowds are not – as Surowieki claimed – all wise. They do not always produce more truthful representations than individuals or groups, even if accuracy were the only thing we were in need of right now.

I’m interested in the governance of knowledge and my primary site of study is Wikipedia. When I tried to think about how I’d contribute to a conference dedicated to “Digital Intimacies”, I couldn’t imagine how. Wikipedia seems the opposite of intimate knowledge. Its policies are conservative and representative of Western enlightenment traditions. It asks editors to leave their knowledge at the door in favour of what it considers “reliable sources”, not to do original research, to represent the Neutral Point of View (NPOV).

And yet, in the decade of my research about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article, constructed as protests descended in ever increasing waves on Egypt’s streets, I learned that intimate knowledge was everywhere. It was in the decisions about what facts to exclude, about who to contact on the ground for verification, in the knowledge about how Wikipedia really works and who to engage in order to make it work for them. As Donna Haraway wrote: “All knowledges are situated. There can be no ‘infinite vision’ – it is a ‘god trick’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 581).

And so, I started to imagine what an encyclopedia that opened itself up to this idea would look like and how it would be governed. This experiment makes knowledge’s subjectivity explicit. With the help of my colleagues in the Digital and Social Media discipline at the UTS School of Communication, we wrote seven encyclopedic articles for the inaugural and only version of the Intimate Encyclopedia. My instructions to authors were to write encyclopedia articles from a personal rather than objective point of view. The other rules came later, as they did with Wikipedia.

The Intimate Encyclopedia begins with three core content principles:

1. Subjective Point of View (IE:SPOV)

All Intimate encyclopedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a subjective point of view, representing the authors’ views truthfully, momentarily and with as much bias as possible.
IE:SPOV

In the example below, Tisha Dejmanee defines the suitcase not only as a “form of luggage” but as a companion (accompanying Tisha to “grad school and new jobs, new houses and growing networks”) that is too big to hide in her new home. For Dejmanee, the suitcase (her suitcase) is symbolic of “the ruptures of 2020 while also serving as a reminder of the continued longing that carries people and hope across the world”. This statement is highly subjective (since when are suitcases symbolic?!) and thus perfectly suitable for the Intimate Encyclopedia.

In another example, Paul Byron defines his chosen object, the “Portable Webcam” as “a video camera that feeds or streams an image or video in real time” but also as an instrument of oppression that represents constant surveillance and that is reflective of “a sad story of somebody who spends a lot of time at a desk.” This perspective on the webcam is reflective of a very particular moment in time and contains opinions rather than knowledge. Its place in the Intimate Encyclopedia is guaranteed!

The second core content principle of the Intimate Encyclopedia is that it is:

2. Unverifiable (IE:U)

References provided are an indication but not evidence of the source for authors’ inspiration. Readers of the Intimate Encyclopedia must accept that authors have produced an accurate representation of their thoughts and feelings. The Intimate Encyclopedia was at one time open for challenge but is no longer*.
IE:U

In the example below, I write about the “Teapot”, “a vessel for steeping black tea leaves in boiling water”. “Only BLACK TEA?” you cry! This is an unverifiable statement (along with the method of making Proper Way tea). The citations here are a ruse – they do not support the statements made. Thankfully there is no need for verifiable knowledge on the Intimate Encyclopedia. Teapots, for this author, are “fragile things” whose “fragility reminded Ford of the tenuousness of our existence and the importance of celebrating small joys – even if they consisted only in a sip of a properly made cup of tea in a real tea cup and from a pot of freshly brewed tea made, importantly, in a teapot.”

“Kangaroo Paw” by Amelia Johns is equally unverifiable. Little to Johns’ knowledge, the kangaroo paw was sourced from a warehouse in Melbourne, but we must rely on Johns’ account because no original receipt was included. Kangaroo Paw, according to Johns, is the companion and toilet to Ella and a reminder of “the delicate balance of nature-animal-human cohabitations that have thrived during the pandemic.”

3. All Original Research (IE: AOR)

The Intimate Encyclopedia only publishes original, untarnished thought. Although some facts may be attributed to a reliable source, authors must intersperse these with definitions of their own design so that the rendering is completely original.
IE:AOR

Bhuva Narayan’s article on the X-Ray is a very personal account of the object. Instead of an image of a human hand, she reveals that this image is, indeed, of her own hands, her own feet. These reflections are interspersed with factual statements about the ways in which X-rays were preceded by “pre-historic hunting cultures depicted animals by drawing or painting the skeletal frame and internal organs (Chaloupka, 1993)”.

In the next article about the “Dummy”, Natalie Krikowa classifies dummies as both “nipple substitute(s)” and objects “located in the cracks between couch cushions”. This original rendering is of a very particular set of dummies belonging to a very particular human.

In the final article, about the “Book”, Alan McKee presents a truly original portrait of this common object, making it very strange in this original rendering. Books, according to McKee, are not only “primitive forms of computers” but also objects that enable anxious people to “avoid staring straight into the face of the terrifying world around them”. The image is not an image of “a book” one might regularly see in an encyclopedic article about books but “a book nibbled by a parrot”. Parrots featuring in articles about books! Original indeed.

Coda

This tiny experiment demonstrates, among other things, that there are multiple ways of representing knowledges and that the rules that govern the dominant representations (from Wikipedia, for example) are not natural or obvious but shaped by particular ways of understanding what it means to know.

Through the experiment, I learned few facts about books, plants, webcams, suitcases, teapots, x-rays and dummies. I also learned about what is possibly more important: about the hopes, longings, anxieties and dreams of the people I spend many of my days with. Intimate knowledges are, indeed, a worthy persuit… alongside the Other (objective) forms we are so obsessed with at this moment in time.

* The Intimate Encyclopedia was technically available to the public for only a few weeks, even though we didn’t let anyone other than the participants of the conference. This is the only record of its existence.

Thanks to Francesco Bailo for installing our Intimate Encyclopedia and helping its authors with their contributions.

Wikipedia’s relationship to academia and academics

I was recently quoted in an article for Science News about the relationship between academia and Wikipedia by Bethany Brookshire. I was asked to comment on a recent paper by MIT Sloan‘s Neil Thompson and Douglas Hanley who investigated the relationship between Wikipedia articles and scientific papers using examples from chemistry and econometrics. There are a bunch of studies on a similar topic (if you’re interested, here is a good place to start) and I’ve been working on this topic – but from a very different angle – for a qualitative study to be published soon. I thought I would share my answers to the interview questions here since many of them are questions that friends and colleagues ask regularly about citing Wikipedia articles and about quality issues on Wikipedia.

Have you ever edited Wikipedia articles? What do you think of the process?

Some, yes. Being a successful editor on English Wikipedia is a complicated process, particularly if you’re writing about topics that are either controversial or outside the purview of the majority of Western editors. Editing is complicated not only because it is technical (even with the excellent new tools that have been developed to support editing without having to learn wiki markup) – most of the complications come with knowing the norms, the rules and the power dynamics at play.

You’ve worked previously with Wikipedia on things like verification practices. What are the verification practices currently?

That’s a big question 🙂 Verification practices involve a complicated set of norms, rules and technologies. Editors may (or may not) verify their statements by checking sources, but the power of Wikipedia’s claim-making practice lies in the norms of questioning unsourced claims using the “citation needed” tag and by any other editor being able to remove claims that they believe to be incorrect. This, of course, does not guarantee that every claim on Wikipedia is factually correct, but it does enable the dynamic labelling of unverified claims and the ability to set verification tasks in an iterative fashion.

Many people in academia view Wikipedia as an unreliable source and do not encourage students to use it. What do you think of this?

Academic use of sources is a very contextual practice. We refer to sources in our own papers and publications not only when we are supporting the claims they contain, but also when we dispute them. That’s the first point: even if Wikipedia was generally unreliable, that is not a good reason for denying its use. The second point is that Wikipedia can be a very reliable source for particular types of information. Affirming the claims made in a particular article, if that was our goal in using it, would require verifying the information that we are reinforcing through citation and in citing the particular version (the “oldid” in Wikipedia terms) that we are referring to. Wikipedia can be used very soundly by academics and students – we just need to do so carefully and with an understanding of the context of citation – something we should be doing generally, not only on Wikipedia.

You work in a highly social media savvy field, what is the general attitude of your colleagues toward Wikipedia as a research resource? Do you think it differs from the attitudes of other academics?

I would say that Wikipedia is widely recognized by academics, including those of my colleagues who don’t specifically conduct Wikipedia research, as a source that is fine to visit but not to cite.

What did you think of this particular paper overall?

I thought that it was a really good paper. Excellent research design and very solid analysis. The only weakness, I would argue, would be that there are quite different results for chemistry and econometrics and that those differences aren’t adequately accounted for. More on that below.

The authors were attempting a causational study by adding Wikipedia articles (while leaving some written but unadded) and looking at how the phrases translated to the scientific literature six months later. Is this a long enough period of time?

This seems to be an appropriate amount of time to study, but there are probably quite important differences between fields of study that might influence results. The volume of publication (social scientists and humanities scholars tend to produce much lower volumes of publications and publications thus tend to be extended over time than natural science and engineering subjects, for example), the volume of explanatory or definitional material in publications (requiring greater use of the literature), the extent to which academics in the particular field consult and contribute to Wikipedia – all might affect how different fields of study influence and are influenced by Wikipedia articles.

Do you think the authors achieved evidence of causation here?

Yes. But again, causation in a single field i.e. chemistry.

It is important to know whether Wikipedia is influencing the scientific literature? Why or why not?

Yes. It is important to know whether Wikipedia is influencing scientific literature – particularly because we need to know where power to influence knowledge is located (in order to ensure that it is being fairly governed and maintained for the development of accurate and unbiased public knowledge).

Do you think papers like this will impact how scientists view and use Wikipedia?

As far as I know, this is the first paper that attributes a strong link between what is on Wikipedia and the development of science. I am sure that it will influence how scientists and other academic view and use Wikipedia – particularly in driving initiatives where scientists contribute to Wikipedia either directly or via initiatives such as PLoS’s Topic Pages.

Is there anything especially important to emphasize?

The most important thing is to emphasize the differences between fields that I think needs to be better explained. I definitely think that certain types of academic research are more in line with Wikipedia’s way of working, forms and styles of publication and epistemology and that it will not have the same influence on other fields.

What I’m talking about in 2016

Authority and authoritative sources, critical data studies, digital methods, the travel of facts online, bot politics and social media and politics. These are some of the things I’m talking about in 2016. (Just in case you thought the #sunselfies only indicated fun and aimless loafing).

15 January Fact factories: How Wikipedia’s logics determine what facts are represented online. Wikipedia 15^th birthday event, Oxford Internet Institute. [Webcast, OII event page, OII’s Medium post, The Conversation article]

29 January Wikipedia and me: A story in four acts. TEDx Leeds University. [Video, TEDx Leeds University site]

Abstract: This is a story about how I came to be involved in Wikipedia and how I became a critic. It’s a story about hope and friendship and failure, and what to do afterwards. In many ways this story represents the relationship that many others like me have had with the Internet: a story about enormous hope and enthusiasm followed by disappointment and despair. Although similar, the uniqueness of these stories is in the final act – the act where I tell you what I now think about the future of the Internet after my initial despair. This is my Internet love story in four acts: 1) Seeing the light 2) California rulz 3) Doubting Thomas 4) Critics unite.

17 February. Add data to methods and stir. Digital Methods Summer School. CCI, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane [QUT Digital Methods Summer School website]

Abstract: Are engagements with real humans necessary to ethnographic research? In this presentation, I argue for methods that connect data traces to the individuals who produce them by exploring examples of experimental methods featured on the site ‘EthnographyMatters.net’, such as live fieldnoting, collaborative mapmaking and ‘sensory postcards’. This presentation will serve as an inspiration for new work that expands beyond disciplinary and methodological boundaries and connects the stories we tell about our things with the humans who create them.

Continue reading “What I’m talking about in 2016” →

How Wikipedia’s Dr Jekyll became Mr Hyde: Vandalism, sock puppetry and the curious case of Wikipedia’s decline

This is a (very) short paper that I will be presenting at Internet Research in Denver this week. I want to write something longer about the story because I feel like it represents in many ways what I see as emblematic of so many of us who lived through our own Internet bubble: when everything seemed possible and there was nothing to lose. This is (a small slice of) Drork’s story.

Richard Mansfield starring in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Wikipedia. Public Domain.

Abstract This paper concerns the rise and fall of Wikipedia editor, ‘drork’ who was blocked indefinitely from the English version of the encyclopedia after seven years of constructive contributions, movement leadership and intense engagement. It acts as a companion piece to the recent statistical analyses of patterns of conflict and vandalism on Wikipedia to reflect on the questions of why someone who was once committed to the encyclopedia may want to vandalize it. The paper compares two perspectives on the experience of being a Wikipedian: on the other hand, a virtuous experience that enables positive character formation as more commonly espoused, and alternatively as an experience dominated by in-fighting, personal attacks and the use of Wikipedia to express political goals. It concludes by arguing that the latter behavior is necessary in order to survive as a Wikipedian editing in these highly conflict-ridden areas.

Introduction

Recent scholarship has painted two competing pictures of what Wikipedia and Wikipedians are “like” and what they are motivated by. On the one hand, Benkler and Nissenbaum argue that because people contribute to projects like Wikipedia with motivations “ranging from the pure pleasure of creation, to a particular sense of purpose, through to the companionship and social relations that grow around a common enterprise”, the practice of commons-based peer production fosters virtue and enables “positive character formation” (Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006). On the other hand, we have heard more recently about how “free and open” communities like Wikipedia have become a haven for aggressive, intimidating behavior (Reagle, 2013) and that reversions of newcomers’ contributions has been growing steadily and may be contributing to Wikipedia’s decline (Halfaker, Geiger, Morgan, & Riedl, in-press). Continue reading “How Wikipedia’s Dr Jekyll became Mr Hyde: Vandalism, sock puppetry and the curious case of Wikipedia’s decline” →

Why Wikipedia is no ‘proxy for culture’ (Part 1 of 3)

First posted at EthnographyMatters.net

Last month’s Wired magazine showed an infographic with a headline that read: ‘History’s most influential people, ranked by Wikipedia reach’ with a group of 20 men arranged in hierarchical order — from Jesus at number 1 to Stalin at number 20. Curious, I wondered how ‘influence’ and ‘Wikipedia reach’ was being decided. According to the article, ‘Rankings (were) based on parameters such as the number of language editions in which that person has a page, and the number of people known to speak those languages’. What really surprised me was not the particular arrangement of figures on this page but the conclusions that were being drawn from it.

According to the piece, César Hidalgo, head of the Media Lab’s Macro Connections group, who researched the data, made the following claims about the data gathered from Wikipedia:

a) “It shows you how the world perceives your own national culture.”

b) “It’s a socio-cultural mirror.”

c) “We use historical characters as proxies for culture.”

And finally, perhaps most surprising is this final line in the story:

Using this quantitative approach, Hidalgo is now testing hypotheses such as whether cultural development is structured or random. “Can you have a Steve Jobs in a country that has not generated enough science or technology?” he wonders. “Ultimately we want to know how culture assembles itself.”

It is difficult to comment on the particular method used by this study because there is little more than the diagram and a few paragraphs of analysis, and the journalist may have misquoted him, but I wanted to draw attention to the statements being made because I think it represents the growing phenomenon of big data analysts using Wikipedia data to make assumptions about ‘culture’. Continue reading “Why Wikipedia is no ‘proxy for culture’ (Part 1 of 3)” →

WikiSym Redefined

Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, at the first WikiSym in 2005 which was co-located with ACM OOPSLA in San Diego, California. Pic by Peter Kaminski CC BY on Flickr.

There has been much reflecting and soul-searching about the future of WikiSym in the past year (and probably before that as well). Many felt that the conference was becoming dominated by Wikipedia research and that it needed to grow to encompass more research in the open source, open data and open content realm. I felt that the conference needed to attract more social scientists and qualitative researchers in order to reach more detailed understanding of Wikipedia is being integrated into everyday life.

Despite the negatives, everyone felt that WikiSym was and still is the best place for people who do research about Wikipedia and other wikis to gather and that there was a lot of promise in broadening our mandate. This is why I feel so excited about co-chairing a new dedicated Wikipedia track at next year’s WikiSym in Hong Kong along with Mark Graham, also at the Oxford Internet Institute. And that’s why I was also happy that Dirk Riehle, veteren of WikiSym, is at the helm again next year, leading an effort to redesign the event around a changing research landscape.

There are a few key differences to next year’s event:

1. WikiSym 2013 will be held jointly with a new conference called ‘OpenSym’ and the entire event will consist of four tracks dedicated to different research trajectories:

Open collaboration (wikis, social media, etc.) research (WikiSym 2013), chaired by Jude Yew of National University of Singapore
Wikipedia research (WikiSym 2013), chaired jointly by myself and Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford
Free, libre, and open source software research (OpenSym 2013), chaired jointly by Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona and Gregorio Robles of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Open access, data, and government research (OpenSym 2013), chaired by Anne Fitzgerald of Queensland University of Technology

This means that Mark and I can focus on getting the very best of Wikipedia research to WikiSym and in thinking hard about what is missing and what needs to be encouraged in the years to come. Continue reading “WikiSym Redefined” →

Language, identity and Wikipedia: Some perspectives from the Cairo “Wikipedia in the Arab World” workshop

It was the end of the final day of our workshop on the outskirts of Cairo and we were all feeling that curious mixture of inspiration, energy and exhaustion that follows those meetings where a world of ideas and people and things are thrown together in a concentrated few days. Mark Graham asked each of us if we’d like to say a few parting words and the participants spoke about how they enjoyed meeting Wikipedians from so many places in the Middle East, that they were happy to come to an event with academics and that they were excited about doing something to make a change in the real world. The majority of participants spoke in English – what was for many of them a third or fourth language – while some had their Arabic translated on the fly by other participants.

I was surprised when we got round to Mohamed Amarochan, Wikipedian, Mozilla hacker and blogger from Morocco, when he said that he would like to speak in Arabic. I knew that Mohamed had a really good command of English because I’d spent a fascinating ride with him from the airport on the way to the workshop where we commiserated with one another about visa hardships. When he chose to speak in Arabic and allowed others to translate into English, I realized that Mohammed was making an important statement about how small decisions like which language you choose to speak in a conversation like this one has big consequences.

As Clive Holes writes, ‘How we speak is an important part of who we are: in a sense, speech is the oral counterpart of how we dress. Both are intimately linked to our sense of self, and of how we prsent ourselves to, and are seen by, others.’ (Holes, 2011) Continue reading “Language, identity and Wikipedia: Some perspectives from the Cairo “Wikipedia in the Arab World” workshop” →

The politics of truth: Who wins on Wikipedia? A study of what Wikipedia deletes and who it bans

Below is the research proposal that I wrote when I applied to the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) DPhil Programme in November last year. I’m guessing it’s going to evolve some (especially since I’m wanting to add some statistical work surrounding citations and translations between languages), but I’m really excited about it as it stands. The wonderful Dr Mark Graham is my supervisor at the OII and I’m lucky to also have Dr Chris Davies as my college advisor (I’m at Kellogg College here). Thank you to the OII for putting me forward for the Clarendon Award and to one of my heros, Bishop Desmond Tutu, for inspiring part of the award that got me here. Thanks, lastly and mostly, to Dror for inspiring me 🙂 With all these thanks it sounds like I’m at the end. But it’s only the beginning. I’m looking forward to comments and suggestions on how I might discover the answers to this question. I think I’ll certainly hear them in the months and years to come.

Download as PDF

Abstract: Wikipedia is, in many ways, the poster child of the Internet Age. It has been singled out as the ultimate working example of the collaborative power of the Internet (Shirky, Tapscott) and what Yochai Benkler calls ‘commons-based peer production’ to describe how the Internet has created radical new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture (Benkler, 2009). Part of its popularity comes from its power to influence and inform. As the sixth largest website in the world, with over million users and 90,000 active editors, Wikipedia is becoming one of the most influential reference works in history.

For every broad statement about Wikipedia, however, there are examples on the ground that hint at an alternative reality. The ideal that commentators (many of whom are not involved in editing the encyclopaedia on a daily basis) project is of a unified group of rational, detached, individual editors building a neutral, free encyclopaedia that is “the sum of all human knowledge”. But the organic nature of the encyclopaedia, its culture, politics and architecture have produced and continue to produce an encyclopaedia in which particular tactics, identities and relationships, many of which are in defiance of original rules, often prevail over reasoned and rational dialogue. Wikipedia still has a number of “dark spots”: from uneven geographies of articles written about places (Graham, 2011), to low numbers of female contributors (Lam et al, 2011) and vastly different levels of quality (Duguid, 2006). But there are other dark spots too – spots within the encyclopaedia itself: knowledges that are silenced, perspectives that are marginalised and people that are banned.

Who wins and who loses in this open environment? How do culture, politics, regulations, architecture and identity influence who wins or loses? And what does this mean for the way we think about online collaboration, its power and pitfalls? Continue reading “The politics of truth: Who wins on Wikipedia? A study of what Wikipedia deletes and who it bans” →

Where does ethnography belong? Thoughts on WikiSym 2012

First posted at Ethnographymatters

On the first day of WikiSym last week, as we started preparing for the open space track and the crowd was being petitioned for new sessions over lunch, I suddenly thought that it might be a good idea for researchers who used ethnographic methods to get together to talk about the challenges we were facing and the successes we were having. So I took the mic and asked how many people used ethnographic methods in their research. After a few raised their hands, I announced that lunch would be spent talking about ethnography for those who were interested. Almost a dozen people – many of whom are big data analysts – came to listen and talk at a small Greek restaurant in the center of Linz. I was impressed that so many quantitative researchers came to listen and try to understand how they might integrate ethnographic methods into their research. It made me excited about the potential of ethnographic research methods in this community, but by the end of the conference, I was worried about the assumptions on which much of the research on Wikipedia is based, and at what this means for the way that we understand Wikipedia in the world.

WikiSym (Wiki Symposium) is the annual meeting of researchers, practitioners and wiki engineers to talk about everything to do with wikis and open collaboration. Founded by the father of the wiki, Ward Cunningham and others, the conference started off as a place where wiki engineers would gather to advance the field. Seven years later, WikiSym is dominated by big data quantitative analyses of English Wikipedia.

Some participants were worried about the movement away from engineering topics (like designing better wiki platforms), while others were worried about the fact that Wikipedia (and its platform, MediaWiki) dominates the proceedings, leaving other equally valuable sites like Wikia and platforms like TikiWiki under-studied.

So, in the spirit of the times, I drew up a few rough analyses of papers presented.

It would be interesting to look at this for other years to see whether the recent Big Data trend is having an impact on Wikipedia research and whether research related to Wikipedia (rather than other open collaboration communities) is on the rise. One thing I did notice was that the demo track was a lot larger this year than the previous two years. Hopefully that is a good sign for the future because it is here that research is put into practice through the design of alternative tools. A good example is Jodi Schneider’s research on Wikipedia deletions that she then used to conceptualize alternative interfaces that would simplify the process and help to ensure that each article would be dealt with more fairly. Continue reading “Where does ethnography belong? Thoughts on WikiSym 2012” →

Beyond reliability: An ethnographic study of Wikipedia sources

First published on Ethnographymatters.net and Ushahidi.com

Almost a year ago, I was hired by Ushahidi to work as an ethnographic researcher on a project to understand how Wikipedians managed sources during breaking news events. Ushahidi cares a great deal about this kind of work because of a new project called SwiftRiver that seeks to collect and enable the collaborative curation of streams of data from the real time web about a particular issue or event. If another Haiti earthquake happened, for example, would there be a way for us to filter out the irrelevant, the misinformation and build a stream of relevant, meaningful and accurate content about what was happening for those who needed it? And on Wikipedia’s side, could the same tools be used to help editors curate a stream of relevant sources as a team rather than individuals?

Original designs for voting a source up or down in order to determine “veracity”

When we first started thinking about the problem of filtering the web, we naturally thought of a ranking system which would rank sources according to their reliability or veracity. The algorithm would consider a variety of variables involved in determining accuracy as well as whether sources have been chosen, voted up or down by users in the past, and eventually be able to suggest sources according to the subject at hand. My job would be to determine what those variables are i.e. what were editors looking at when deciding whether to use a source or not? Continue reading “Beyond reliability: An ethnographic study of Wikipedia sources” →

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Tag: wikipedia