Archive for March, 2007
Citizendium: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?
March 26th, 2007
Wikipedia is the greatest organized, easily-accessible compendium of information known to Humankind. I spend at least twenty minutes or more per day either looking up information on that site, or–even better–contributing information to the site. (Virtually every page dealing with H. P. Lovecraft or his works has felt my editorial touch at one time or another, for instance.) Presently offering 1,706,156 articles in English dealing with everything from “The Letter A” to “Zzyzx“, Wikipedia is a nearly-bottomless treasure trove of massively-crossreferenced data, trivia, and silliness which can easily lead one to wasting hours just clicking link after link after link until one’s short-term memory buffers are packed to the last neural bit with random knowledge! Don’t believe me? Check out XKCD’s handy-dizzandy infographic, “The Problem with Wikipedia,” for sheer truthiness.
But…can Wikipedia be trusted? IS there a demonstrable truthiness to the site’s content?
The short answer is so simple it needs but one qubit to represent it: Yes and No.
This is manifestly not an article dealing with the reliability of Wikipedia–or…well, not entirely. There are thousands of such articles already pinging and ponging back and forth around the Web. Every other month, another “Wikipedia scandal” (such as half-forgotten comedian Sinbad’s recent brush with Wikipedian death) calls the site’s reliability into question yet again, and yet another university bans students from citing Wikipedia on their papers, blah blah blah….But this is all inherent in the very nature of Wikipedia: if you open up a website to contributions from anybody, you are simply bound to end up with moments of vandalism, clandestine character assassination, disinformation, and so forth.
Is there anyone with at least half a brain Out There in InternetLand who does not know this? The truthiness of such a realization should be manifest to anybody the second they see the site’s front page slogan, identifying it as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Use a little logic, people:
Anyone = people who know what they’re talking about and people who don’t.
Wikipedia’s greatest strength, its open informational architecture, is also its greatest weakness–but that latter weakness is usually overcome by that former strength. For every juvenile joker or politician’s spin control agent who defaces a Wikipedia article with disinformation, there’s some responsible, knowledgeable person who will quickly step in and clean up the bullshit or rectify the errors. Of course, this can–and frequently does–lead to ongoing arguments over hotly-debated or ambiguous topics (take a look at “Islam“’s discussion page to get an idea of just how crazy it can get)…but, ultimately, Truth Will Out.
Most of the time.
Usually.
Wikipedia is, in essence, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Planet Earth–a clearing-house for vast amounts of info…but it’s not your One Stop Shop for Everything. It is, after all, an encyclopedia. A reference work. In other words…a starting point where you can begin researching a topic. Don’t know a damn thing about Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Get thee to a Wikipedia page! You can learn a great deal of generalized information about Hamlet there…but it makes no more sense for, say, a student writing an ENG 102 essay on Hamlet to cite the Wikipedia page as his/her primary source of information than it does to cite an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Start at the Wikipedia page, familiarize yourself with the material presented there, then shuffle on over to Google, Google Scholar, EBSCOHost, PROQuest, or whatever other online search tool you like and use your new basic knowledge of Hamlet to find some stone-cold primary sources from reliable journals and scholars. That’s how Wikipedia–and all encyclopedias–work.
But is the Britannica, in either its (rare) print or online form, inherently more reliable that Wikipedia? “Well, duh,” some say. “The good Ol’ Brit’s got an editorial board of ‘Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, the leading scholars, writers, artists, public servants, and activists who are at the top of their fields’ to oversee the folks writing up entries for it.” In 2005, however, a study conducted by science journal Nature and reported here
revealed numerous errors in both encyclopedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.
So…what does that say about Ol’ Brit’s editorial board of PhD’s, Nobel Laureates, and Pulitzer Prize Winners? That they’re less reliable than Joe Blutz and Derek C. F. Pegritz, Wikipedia Citizen Editors? NO. Not one bit. If anything, it shows that both the Britannica and Wikipedia are more or less equal in terms of reliability. The study simply shows that–god, must I say it again?–encyclopedias are not primary sources. They are BEGINNERS’ REFERENCE MATERIALS. The End. Got it? OK, let’s move on.
Wikipedia is obviously more popular than Britannica.com. Why? Let’s see….Wikipedia’s got close to two million articles. Britannica Online has…well, they don’t say–but I’ll bet they, too, offer a fairly gigantic number of entries. Wikipedia is free, but Britannica.com isn’t.
Ah. And there it is. Freeness.
Britannica Online is a wonderful site–I use it all the time, just as I use Wikipedia. BO’s equipped with some wonderful educational resources, as well, to help learners of all ages discover the wonderful wide world of online information. I would never disparage it. But…it ain’t free.
Furthermore, Wikipedia owes its position at the top of the online encyclopedia heap to its easy-to-use interface and its (almost-)universal editability. Anyone with expertise in a particular subject can contribute his or her knowledge to appropriate entries: adding new information as it comes to light, correcting erroneous information, and just generally keeping Wikipedia as honest as it possibly can be. Wikipedia does have a board of editors: the community of scholars and knowledgeable folks, worldwide, who take part in its überdemokratischer functionality.
Lately, Wikipedia has been taking steps to curb abuse by “locking down” certain pages (such as “Abortion“), restricting editing privileges to only established, well-known users in order to prevent any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a rabid pro-life or pro-choice grudge from slipping weighted statements into the articles. There has also been talk of employing a number of professional editors to help oversee the clamor–a great idea, if you ask me. As much as I love the power inherent in a highly-democratized source of information like Wikipedia, I fully realize that there’s a fine line between democratic sharing of information and mob rule. In order to prevent abuse, there has to be someone “at the top” keeping an eye on things…and one cannot fully trust the council of one’s peers to always be ready, willing, and able–like minutemen of the mind–to come a-runnin’ the second some jackass changes the name of the The Republic of Iraq to The Republic of Bootystan.
So what does all of this have to do with something called “Citizendium”?
<Borat voice>It is-a the simple</Borat voice>: Citizendium is new “experimental wiki project”, initiated by a founder of Wikipedia itself (Larry Sanger*), that “aims to improve on that model by adding ‘gentle expert oversight’ and requiring contributors to use their real names.” In short, Citizendium is Wikipedia with a professional editorial staff and an application process that hopes to vet out non-experts and uneducated hacks by requiring anyone applying for an authorial or editorial position (for some reason they have the two separated) to verify their credentials with a CV, proof of expertise, etc. As of today (26 March 2007), Citizendium has just taken their beta version public and has already been receiving a great deal of interest. The front page even notes that they have “over 1,100 articles” in process. And, as with Wikipedia, it’s free as can be!
So, does this mean that Citizendium will become the “more reliable free encyclopedia” that the world so desperately, desperately needs?
No. In fact, I’ll wager anyone $5 or a cookie of their choice that Citizendium is little more than a footnote in Web history by the end of the year. Why? <THESIS ALERT!> Because it just is not necessary </THESIS ALERT!>
I can understand Herr Sanger wanting to do his thang on his own–but there’s a big problem with that. Who needs another Wikipedia? The Citizendium process is a great idea–but why start a whole new separate project in order to implement it? Even if Citizendium has gone public with a respectable deck of 1,100 articles ready for viewing, it’s still…oh, about 1,705,394 articles to go before they catch up to Wikipedia–and that’s downright impossible, since Wikipedia’s content is growing exponentially. Citizendium may very well offer more “certifiably reliable” information than Wikipedia, but it also offers far, far less. And besides…if Britannica, one of the oldest encyclopedic resources in the world, is not appreciably more reliable than Wikipedia, than who honestly expects Citizendium to be any better?
I’ve been exploring Citizendium all day (at least until the site’s newfound popularity hosed its servers), and my initial impressions of the site are entirely positive. Because it’s Wikipedia with a slightly different site layout and design. In a blind taste test, scientists here at Pegritz Laboratories replaced your favorite coffee Wikipedia with Folger’s crystals Citizendium, and four out of five people didn’t know the difference! In the future, I plan on providing you, Dear Readers, with text examples from similar Wikipedia and Citizendium pages to allow you to compare/contrast the overwhelming similarities between the two…but, as I noted, the site’s dead for now.
At any rate, Citizendium looks to be little more than a test-bed for ideas that, hopefully, if they play out–and I sincerely hope they do–will be gently incorporated into Wikipedia. Citizendium as its own entity, competing with Wikipedia? Not a chance in hell.
Citizendium is facing the same kind of competition that smaller, specialized search engines like Clusty face when going up against the insurmountable might of Google. Google is universally known. Google is astonishingly competent at what it does (hence the reason it’s got such name-recognition under its belt). And Google is simple to use. Wikipedia is the same: easy-to-use, information-rich, and known ’round the world as the place to start when looking for organized, basic, encyclopedic information. Anytime you do a Google search for, say, “Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” guess which site is right there at the top of the first page of links? Wikipedia.
Citizendium could offer the best, most reliable information in the world. Its entry on “Hawking radiation” could be written by Stephen Hawking himself, but that still won’t give it a chance against Wikipedia–because Wikipedia’s gigantic, universally-known, FREE shadow lies heavy upon the land as the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Plus, it is a sure bet that if some new information appears stamped and certified 100% Truthful on Citizendium’s “Hawking radiation” page, what’s to stop a true citizen editor on Wikipedia from adapting that information and adding it to the Wikipedia page on the same topic? All information on both sites is offered up under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2, after all….
So, really…will Citizendium still be around by the end of the year? I doubt it. Will it have an impact on the basic idea of the wiki? Very likely. I certainly hope so, because Wikipedia could be a bit more controlled.
But will Citizendium ever grow to be an actual challenger to Wikipedia? Not a chance in hell. Like a primitive mitochondria being absorbed and integrated into early bacteria as energy pumps, so will Citizendium be swallowed whole by the mighty Wikipedia, and perhaps will energize the great beast to truly become The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Planet Earth.
——————
*Whom Wikipedia frontman and Whiny Bitch Extraordinaire Jimmy Wales claims was little more than his subordinate. You’d think the fella generally regarded as Top Dog at Wikipedia would have much better things to do than creech and cry incessantly about his competitors and their various supposed schoolyard attacks on him, but…hey, what do I know?
Roll Your Own Panopticon Society
March 24th, 2007
What am I doing right now? Typing this line.
What am I doing right now (approximately three-five seconds later)? Typing this line and thinking about getting another Capris Sun drink-sac to pierce and drain.
What am I doing right n–
WHO FUCKING CARES?! Why should the second-by-second, minute-by-minute minutiae of my extraordinarily average, unexciting life mean ANYthing to you?
And yet…there is a new website, yclept Twitter, which has been gaining quite a bit of notice lately–and its purpose is simply to answer the question “What am I doing right now?” by allowing users to keep a running log of…well, whatever the hell they’re doing at that particular moment. Por ejemplo, let’s take a look at the site right now (2459 on 23 March 2007) and see what’s happening….
User bogomo has just posted something in one of those unintelligible Asian hieroglyphics that no one on earth but other Asians can understand.
Be-bearded and smiling user bear poses the question, “cygwin, o cygwin — how can it be that I love you and also hate you[?]”
Crow simply notes that he/she/it is “Watching Mario Batali–oh, it;s [sic] off.”
And, finally, shtikl ponders the Jack-Handeyish Deep Thought: “Is this Twitter Zen?” But, of course, does not offer up an answer or any form of followup thought…because that’s not what Twitter is all about. Substance? Reflection? Commentary? Intelligence? Such things are beyond Twitter’s purview.
To get a more thorough appreciation of the colossal pointlessness and stultifying banality of Twitter, let’s have a look at the above-mentioned Zen questioner shtikl’s posts over the last few days, as cut’n'pasted directly from his Twitter page:
Drinking Ayurvedic Tea ‘Nirvana’ w/ Soy Milk, drawing new Shtikl Cartoon while Elli and Baby are still asleep. 8 minutes ago from web
“baking” pre-baked bread-rolls in the mini-oven for the family. preparing new Shtikl for the world! about 24 hours ago from web
reading: JPod by D. Coupland (Late, I know. Still.) 11:47 AM March 21, 2007 from web
twitter is still 20% ’bout coffee 11:00 AM March 21, 2007 from web
@ado: one of my favorite lines in music, (by the band Garbage, I think): The trick is to keep breathing! (Sorry for the pun…) 10:01 AM March 20, 2007 from web
@Scobleizer: HR may rock, BUT: With 25 contacts (the free version) it is useless, the next bigger version is 144 Dollars a year–come on! 07:42 AM March 20, 2007 from web in reply to Scobleizer
I am Robert Scoble’s newest friend! Whoooot! Yeah! Hello Scobleizer! :-)) 07:07 AM March 20, 2007 from web
Hooray, finished the paper on ‘Augustine 05:34 PM March 19, 2007 from web
I’m not watching, I’m not watching. [Covering eyes. What is the visual equivalent to ‘BLA BLA BLA’?] 09:07 AM March 19, 2007 from web
The next minute just became this minute, will soon be a minute ago. 08:52 AM March 19, 2007 from web
Wow. “The next minute just became this minute, will soon be a….” That is deep, man.
Yeah. About as deep as a goddamned sheet of paper. The text on a shithouse wall is positively epic in comparison to the monodimensional drivel that people scrawl all over Twitter.
Mind you, Twitter’s purpose is, indeed, almost Zen in its simplicity: it exists only for the purpose of letting people keep a tally of events in their lives–and, to be fair, it does that brilliantly. I loves me a well-built website regardless of its purpose. Twitter gives users a plethora of means by which they can post: via a typical web form, via cellphone, via Post-It notes stuck into empty Coke bottles and left on appropriate streetcorners for all I know. The design of the site is elegantly simple, too: very easy to navigate, and intuitive to grasp…as one would only expect from a site whose purpose is, ultimately, to reduce its users to brainless babblers for whom even MySpace and LiveJournal are simply too complex.
Y’see…Twitter is institutionalized Adult ADD. In effect, it reduces the concepts of both blogging and social networking to their most stripped-down, minimalistic, skeletal natures…paring away any and all meaning and leaving little more than bitesized chunks of barren text. I call it microblogging. That is, blogging for those who really have absolutely nothing to say but simply must take part in the expanding universe of the Social Web. And what better way to let the shallow take part than by providing them an “in” as simple and as undemanding of their miniscule intellects as possible?
But…why?! Why would anyone think it a Good Idea to spatter the Web (or, at least, this one little corner of it) with such trivial blather in the first place? And why would other people want to keep an eye on their fellows’ and total strangers’ trivial blather?
Because we’re living in a burgeoning panopticon society. The original “Panopticon” was a prison designed by social and criminological pioneer Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s to “allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a ‘sentiment of an invisible omniscience.’” In other words, someone’s always got their eye on you. Big Brother’s watching. Orwell’s 1984 depicts the stereotypical panopticon society in which citizens have no privacy and are observed at all times by elements of The State. In 1998, sci-fi writer David Brin published a landmark nonfiction work, The Transparent Society, arguing that traditional ideas of privacy are rapidly disappearing in the present age of cheap, ubiquitous surveillance technology–but, he notes, this is not a Bad Thing…because the same technology that Big Brother uses to watch you gives you just as much power to watch Big Brother.
Many of the ideas broached by The Transparent Society have already become accepted entirely by our society–or, at least, by the younger generations who are actively taking part in driving the cyber-boom of the Internet. Witness the continued success of MTV’s The Real World and other “reality-TV” programmes, in which “everyday” folks live out their lives before the camera eye. Consider the fact that millions of people worldwide have blogs, many of them accessible to anyone and everyone on the ‘Net, in which they gladly discuss aspects of their personal lives that my mother’s generation never, ever would’ve brought up in public. (Hell, there were things–y’know, like “S-E-X”–that they wouldn’t even discuss behind closed doors!) Notions of what information a person should keep “private” and what a person should make public are entirely culturally-defined, and those definitions are greatly in flux. And old-timey ideas of secrecy and privacy are crumbling.
Open-ness and transparency in democratic societies are generally Good Things, for reasons which I shan’t get into here, as they’re not particularly relevant to this argument. But, like all Good Things, they can be exploited by the smallminded and petty. Especially those folks–like Paris Hilton or, for that matter, Perez Hilton–whose lives revolve around attention-mongering.
People raised on Real World reruns don’t get nervous when cameras are pointed at them–they preen. The MySpace/Facebook generation doesn’t understand the concept of overexposure. Social networking is a wondrous concept that personalizes the power of the Web and redefines Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to apply to everybody. But it can just as easily devolve into nothing more than Popularity Contest 2.0. The same technology that lets me rediscover and stay in contact with long-lost relatives on the other side of the country, converse with my favorite musical artists, and stay abreast of upcoming Major Events (like weddings) in friends’ lives can also be used to engage in an ever-spiraling game of childish one-up-manship called “Who has the most MySpace friends listed?”
Several years ago, when LiveJournal was the New Big Thing, my friends and I signed up for accounts because we all loved the idea of being able to publish our own thoughts and comment on each other’s. LJ was, and still is, an excellent means of staying in contact with each other, sharing anything and everything from amusing links found while trawling the ‘Net to troubling affairs that could really benefit from others’ input. We’ve all made stupid, silly posts to our LiveJournals before–hell, I’ve a friend who regularly blogs his BMs (he calls it his Journal of Ass Production)–but for the most part, the material that we post to our journals is thoughtful or thought-provoking. Many of us now have official blogs of our own, such as this one, and we tend to follow the same rules for posting there as well: don’t waste everyone’s time with inane chatter. If you’re going to post something to a blog, post something that someone will want to read because it appeals to their mind, or their funnybone, or their boner, if pr0n’s their thing–but for gods’ sake, do NOT waste untold kilobytes on random stupidity.
My friends and I come from a slightly-older generation, though: a generation that had been thought to think before opening our mouths. To not put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) without having something to say first. We’re attention-seekers just like everyone else–I mean…why else would I have a domain all my own on which I post stuff like this for the delectation of friends and Total Strangers? We want our voices to be heard, just like anyone.
But when we speak, we say something. It may be a Portentous Statement on the sad state of American politics. It may be a quick’n'dirty analysis of a story from MSNBC concerning a polar bear cub and moronic “animal rights” activists. It may be a fart joke. Regardless of type of content, there’s some kind of content there for the edification or amusement or excoriation of our readers.
“Twitter twits,” on the other hand, are taking the easy way out: they’re posting stuff to the Web, sure–but it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Who gives a shit if you’re “out shopping wit the wife” at 8:04:13pm on 19 March 2007 or pondering “What bra sizes of the red0haired bitch on Desprate Hosewives [sic, sic, sick]?” These people have nothing of substance to say–but, oooooohhhh, do they crave the attention. They just want to be Real Life stars, too! But instead of setting up a webcam, whipping out a tit, and declaring themselves camwhores, or setting up a blog and actually writing something that comprises more than 20 words and makes a point of some sort…why, they just jump to Twitter, where all they have to do is cough up a handful of words n’ letters to describe “What are you doing now?” And SHAZAM! You have a web presence. You have defeated solipsism! You have PROVED YOU EXIST!
And all you had to do was take a few seconds to record a meaningless moment of your thoroughly-average existence.
So maybe someone, somewhere, will look at your latest post–”12,32 am just took a shit and there was corn in it”–and think to him/her/itself, “Wow, there’s someone whose crap I just have to keep up with!”
Perhaps if you actually had a life that matters, you wouldn’t need to bore the world with soundbites of it.
UPDATE: There is a program called Twitteriffic (shown here in 2.0 Beta screenshots) that gives users not only another means of posting their minute-by-minute inanities to the web, but lets them keep track of their friends’ inanities as well. Wow. Talk about a productivity murderer.
