Clinton's Wiki-Warrior

The New Republic has an interesting piece about the human face of online politics. There's Jonathan Schilling, a 53-year-old software engineer who spends up to 15 hours a week editing the Wikipedia entry for Hillary Clinton, even though he is ambivalent toward her. Kevin Bailey, a North Carolina teacher, until recently played guardian for Barak Obama's listing, which has become more table tennis match than battleground as changes go in, out, in, out, with the fervor of the supporters and detractors.

Wikipedia Has Inner Ruling Circle

One of the fascinating things about Wikipedia has been the concept that it runs on an open system of commenting and participation. But The Register reportered that top administrators in the organization have a secret mailing list that they use "to crackdown on perceived threats to their power." And, according to the report, this double existence is hardly new:

Kelly Martin, a former member of Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, leaves no doubt that this sort of surreptitious communication has gone on for ages. "This particular list is new, but the strategy is old," Martin told us via phone, from outside Chicago. "It's certainly not consistent with the public principles of the site. But in reality, it's standard practice."

If correct, then Wikipedia carries the seeds of its own ultimate destruction, or at least of what it claims to be. You cannot focus a group on internal politics and hope to keep upholding a mission of truth and public information. And when the secret talk moves to constant prowling for "enemies," then there is enormous trouble on the horizon.

Wikipedia and the Kindness of Strangers

A Dartmouth study preliminarily released in 2005 and out in a final version in April 2007 shows that those who infrequently and anonymously contribute to Wikipedia, nicknamed Good Samaritans, are as reliable as those who are registered frequent contributors with public reputations to maintain:

"This finding was both novel and unexpected," says Denise Anthony, associate professor of sociology. "In traditional laboratory studies of collective goods, we don't include Good Samaritans, those people who just happen to pass by and contribute, because those carefully designed studies don't allow for outside actors. It took a real-life situation for us to recognize and appreciate the contributions of Good Samaritans to web content."

Furthermore, those who rarely contribute tend to offer more reliable updates, while for people who contribute often, it's the registered that are more reliable. Here's the PDF of the original research paper. It's findings include that the highest accuracy are for people who contribute only once. Maybe after that the thrill was gone.

Wikipedia Work Slows

For various technical reasons, Wikipedia has not compiled statistics on the English version for about a year, now. However, someone decided to analyze log files and the edit histories of 6% of all 118,793 articles - which, if taken completely at random, would be a statistically significant cut. The result? The rate of edits peaked in April 2007 and have been declining since. This is apparently a big difference, as edits had before been climbing exponentially. Article creation topped out in early 2006. Does this mean we've come to the end of human knowledge, or is it a case of all the knows that's fit this print?

Japanese Officials in Hot Water Over Wikipedia

According to the Associated Press, six people in Japan's Agriculture Ministry received reprimands for spending work time contributing to Wikipedia articles that had nothing to do with agriculture. Taken together, the six contributed 408 times to the user-edited knowledge bank, including one person who contributed 260 times on articles about Gundam, a long-running animated series about giant robots:

"The Agriculture Ministry is not in charge of Gundam," said ministry official Tsutomu Shimomura.

Spoilsport. The others contributed to articles about "movies, typographical mistakes on billboard signs and local politics."

The ministry, however, did not object to their limited contributions on the World Trade Organization and free trade agreements.

Obviously a bunch of wet blanket policy wonks.