Wikipedia for Journalists & Bloggers

WikiWednesday last September

I’m proud to be able to announce that we’ve got something slightly different in mind for the May installment of the Portland WikiWednesday.

In little less than a week, we’ll be serving up a short presentation and panel on the research techniques journalists and bloggers (or anyone really) can use to get the most out of Wikipedia.

Often maligned and misunderstood, Wikipedia is nonetheless a body of knowledge that can be a rich resource if used properly. I’ll be giving the introductory presentation myself, with a half hour to answer such questions as…

• Can journalists avoid compromising standards and still use Wikipedia?
• How can you find exactly what you’re looking for out of 2.8 million articles?
• What clues can you look for to assess the veracity of articles and individual facts?

Afterwords, a panel of both Wikipedians and journalists will delve in to their experience with the site, and answer your questions about the nitty-gritty of working with Wikipedia in your research. On this panel will be:

• Myself (Steven Walling), a Wikipedia adminstrator with years of experience and over 30,000 edits.
• Pete Forsyth, a Wikipedia administrator with a special expertise concerning Oregon articles in particular, and a key instigator of WikiProject Oregon’s organizing and outreach.
• Abraham Hyatt, former managing editor at Oregon Business magazine.
• Dan Cook, former editor of the Portland Business Journal.

This is a little more structured than most WikiWednesdays, but the spirit remains the same. Whether you’re familiar with wikis or just one of the billions of people who use Wikipedia regularly, this should be an interesting and information look at research with the largest encyclopedia in history.

If you go

Where: AboutUs, 107 SE Washington, suite #520 (map)
When: Wednesday May 6th, 5:30pm-7:30pm
Cost: Free (as always!)
More: Calagator and Upcoming

 

Creative Commons for Wikimedia?

It’s easy to forget just how old Wikipedia is, compared to many of the free culture organizations on the Web. One looming example of this has always been our use of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

Founded before Creative Commons, the GFDL was the only copyleft license that even came close to making our work free for others in a way that fit our mission.

But it’s never been a perfect fit. Far from it, in fact.

Clauses such as the invariant sections rule and the burden of printing both the full text of the license and a list of authors have seriously handicapped past efforts to republish works of Wikimedia projects. The GFDL is not really to be faulted for this, since it’s written with software documentation in mind, not an encyclopedia with thousands of authors.

But there’s a solution on the horizon. With the advent of Version 1.3 of the GFDL, we can now legally transition to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. But the choice to move to Creative Commons rests not with our non-profit, the Wikimedia Foundation. It rests with the people who have licensed their contributions: namely, you. If you’ve got more than 25 edits to a Wikimedia project before the 15th of March, please make your voice heard by voting!

More information:

• Meta: Licensing update
• Wikipedia:Comparison of GFDL and CC-BY-SA
• Wikipedia community vote on migration to CC BY-SA begins now (CreativeCommons.org)
• Wikipedians to Vote on Site-Wide Creative Commons (ReadWriteWeb)

 

RecentChangesCamp is on!

 

Amber Case gettin' stylish at the Ignite Portland after-party/RecentChangesCamp pre-party

 

The smartest wiki folk in all the land have descended on Portland! RecentChangesCamp 2009, an annual “open spaces” conference about online collaboration tools and communities, is currently underway at Portland State University. If you’re in the neighborhood, come on by! The conference runs through mid-day Sunday; check the site linked above for all the details. Here are a few photos.

 

Geoff Burling, Cary Bass, Pete Forsyth, and Phoebe Ayers discuss the future of Wikipedia

 

RecentChangesCamp is underway!

 

The Writing on the Wall

 

We have folks from all over: Wikipedia, Connectipedia,sponsors Wikihow and AboutUs, Fandom Wiki, and numerous other wiki communities.

 

3 things SEO & SEM people need to learn about Wikipedia

Over the years, I have seen numerous individuals and organizations in the SEO and SEM industry wringing their hands over what to do about Wikipedia. Some have simply ranted about the massive SEO success of the free encyclopedia. Others try some rather underhanded tricks to get their own “Wikipedia page.” (Hint: Want an article to stick around? Ask for one.) Here are three personal observations from a Wikipedian that I think my friends working in this field need to hear…

1. Wikipedia is not a marketing tool. Period. Anything you might do outside that mindset is an unproductive way to approach interaction with the site and its community. The benefits of an article or links can be substantial. But you’re not going to get either if you don’t think of how your actions benefit Wikipedia as an encyclopedia first and foremost. When you edit out of self-interest instead of altruism, you are not only being unethical. You’re being dense by trying to force Wikipedia to become something it’s not. If you can’t think of a way to link to your client or write an article that doesn’t help readers a lot more than it helps you, then don’t do either.

2. Getting angry at Wikipedia is counterproductive. Ranting and raving may feel cathartic, but it’s not going to help your business. Apologies if that seemed completely obvious to the smart people that I know are in this line of work. But you’d be surprised at whom I’ve heard blame their failure on Wikipedia’s success (not impressive to peers or clients), or get muffed when Wikipedia doesn’t respond well to their marketing efforts (see point one).

3. The best way to capitalize on Wikipedia is not to get in Wikipedia. It’s to learn from our successes (and failures), and to use these strategies for your own purposes. Understanding what makes Wikipedia successful and imitating those practices is not hard. Even on an infinitely smaller scale, valuable original content with a sensible internal linking structure will provoke the genuine inbound links you desire. Gleaning the best practices that Wikipedia has (almost entirely by accident) learned, and implementing them in an environment that you control saves you much time and effort, as well as avoiding the potential blow to your reputation if there’s a backlash.

What will not succeed in the long run is trying to leech off us. No amount of manipulating Wikipedia will make up for having a client no one cares about. Our community didn’t set out to dominate search engine results. We set out to write something worth reading. We don’t always fulfill that mission, but we try our damnedest. Do the same, and you’ll probably engender a similar result.

Conclusion? The real shortcoming of these two industries is not that they are filled with nefarious or lazy people. It’s that the laundry list of  “tricks”  for gaming Wikipedia has obfuscated the fact that a little honest work is the easiest way to get the results you want, both inside and outside Wikipedia. Perhaps it’s time you did some.

 

RecentChangesCamp 2009, international wiki conference

Building the schedule at RecentChangesCamp 2008

In the McCarthy era, American citizens were jailed for the crime of being “collaborators” or “informers.”

Today, even multi-million dollar companies are tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to foster better collaboration and manage information more effectively.

How times have changed! (Hat tip to Jeremiah for the metaphor.)

Wiki technology and culture is at the core of how our society is making that transition. Many of us form and join new communities on a regular basis, using wikis and other collaborative Internet tools.

But what’s a community without handshakes, shared meals, beer and wine, or a spontaneous game of catch?

The international wiki community gathers once a year for an “unconference” called RecentChangesCamp. It’s free. That has two meanings: it costs no money and it liberates your soul.

If you’re part of the evolving world of online collaboration, we need you at the 2009 RecentChangesCamp. We need you to lead a discussion, or participate in one. Or to set up the table with nametags or clean up a spilled drink. We’re finding better ways to collaborate online, and to do that, we need to get together in person once in a while!

RecentChangesCamp will be held at Portland (Oregon) State University, the weekend of February 20–22. Or come early if you want, and get those synapses warmed up at Ignite Portland!

Sign up on our wiki (based on the innovative Wagn software). Or view (or edit!) our online invitation. But above all — COME ON DOWN!!

Thanks to AboutUs, WikiHow, and Portland State University for their generous contributions to make this conference possible!

 

WikiProject Oregon at Day On, Not Day Off

This is just a quick notice for Oregonians that members of WikiProject Oregon will be at CubeSpace in Portland to help as best they can with Geeks Day On.

Day On connects nonprofit organizations that need advice and assistance with volunteers who are ready to help. Today’s inaugural project is Geeks Day On, a day of service during MLK Day, Monday, January 19, 2009 where geeks will offer free technology and Internet communications advice and assistance to nonprofit organizations.

Learn more about how you can get help or volunteer during Geeks Day On.

Update:

The wiki crew arrived somewhat late to Geeks Day On, but since we’re familiar with the MediaWiki-style editing of the site and there’s no news coverage to verify a Wikipedia article with (yet!), we built DayOn.org their own AboutUs page.

 

Brion is Busy: two new MediaWiki features we noticed at WikiProject Oregon

With 2009 underway, Brion Vibber and the rest of the great staff developers of MediaWiki at the Wikimedia Foundation have put their noses to the grindstone once again, rolling out one minor but distinctive feature on Wikipedia and testing another very significant one.

It’s the little things that make a difference

The first is the addition of friendlyclock. Once only a part of Friendly, an optional collection of JavaScripts that many Wikipedians use to automate common editing tasks, friendlyclock is a simple feature that adds an updating UTC clock in the top right-hand corner of the screen next to the usual links for logged in editors. Clicking it also acts as a purge of your page cache.

on the far right

Friendlyclock may not sound so exciting, but once you spend even an hour or two editing, you’ll come to appreciate having both of those features handy. In fact, I’ve had a JS gadget enabled that does the exact same thing for months now. It’s just this kind of incremental but gratifying change to the software that shows how sensitive Brion and the Wikimedia Foundation has been to the needs of the core community over the years.

Important new functionality.

The second MediaWiki addition is a full extension that Brion announced Friday. Currently in beta on test.wikipedia.org, the aptly named Drafts extension is a serious advance in MediaWiki and wiki software in general.

It doesn't get much easier than this.

At least once, everyone has written an extensive draft only to see it disappear when human error, a browser crash or saving problems cause you lose all your hard work. In fact, several months ago I saw this exact experience happen to wiki inventor Ward Cunningham when using a MediaWiki installation.

Needless to say, an inability to save drafts in a wiki without a live version being saved as well has been frustrating at times. A lot of other great platforms (such as WordPress) have drafts capability built in already. But as far as I know, there is no wiki engine with native drafts functionality.

From some test edits to the Sandbox I made, I can tell that drafts is a delightfully AJAXy addition to the ecosystem of MediaWiki extensions. Drafts can be saved via an easily accessible button and are saved every 120 seconds regardless. Not only can you save and view drafts from a particular page, but you get a special list of all your drafts.

I found the interface for viewing saved drafts extremely intuitive.

When it comes to wiki software, and MediaWiki in particular, I tend to be something of a stick in the mud. I’m used to MediaWiki and I like it just fine the way it is, thanks. But Drafts is one extension that I think is inarguably useful, and makes up for a key weakness in wiki software to date.

 

Hurray, it’s Wikipedia Day! The World’s 8th Most Popular Website Turns 8.

Every year on the 15th of January, Wikipedians of all stripes stop for a moment to celebrate Wikipedia Day, the anniversary of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit going public. This time around, the eighth most popular website in the world turns eight, and somehow it just feels extra special.

We’ve had our fair share of scandals and trolls still haunting the environs, but in retrospect, it’s been an unthinkably brilliant year for the free encyclopedia. Why am I so excited? Let me count the ways. Eight in fact…

1. We didn’t reach another full million like in 2007, but we have nearly  2.7 million articles. At the current rate of increase, we should have our three millionth article well before the end of ’09.
2. You can now be knighted for editing Wikipedia. Seriously. Florence Devouard, who rose from within the ranks of everyday contributors to become the Chair of our Board of Trustees, was awarded the French National Order of Merit by President Sarkozy in May.
3. In middle of a total economic meltdown, 125,000 people still found Wikipedia valuable enough to donate more than six million dollars.
4. In addition to the six million dollars Wikipedia raised to cover operating costs, we received a special grant from the Stanton Foundation of $890,000 to make it easier for anyone to edit.
5. Academics, who have either banned Wikipedia outright or simply ignored it in the past, are now engaging with us in new and interesting ways. A prime example are any scientists submitting work to RNA Biology, who must now simultaneously publish in Wikipedia.
6. Educators aren’t just softening to Wikipedia, they’re actually having their students help write it in droves. Both higher and lower education has been working in Wikipedia for a while, but 2008 was a landmark year. Case in point: a University of British Columbia project contributed the 2,000th Featured Article (our best peer-reviewed work), in addition to hundreds of other great articles written by students at the request of profs.
7. The worst scandal about founder Jimmy Wales was some boring garbage about his ex-girlfriend. It would seem people still respect the man enough for his personal appeal to mean something come fundraising time, and to read his CNN editorial with Andrea Weckerle about Obama’s CTO.  Either way, if your founder isn’t killing everyone’s confidence by stepping down due to failing health, you’re in good shape (no pun intended).
8. We’re not even close to being done. Normally, volunteers might be reluctant to admit that their mission is perpetually incomplete, but (in case you hadn’t noticed) Wikipedia is different. Not only are 10 million pages in 260 languages not enough to satiate our geeky lust for information, but we admit from the start that Wikipedia will never be finished. An encyclopedia already so big that you could never finish it, but still not complete? Now that’s exciting. Happy birthday Wikipedia, and here’s to another productive year ahead.

 

Wikisource: meet the redheaded stepchild

As you probably know, the Wikimedia Foundation hosts several wiki-based projects in addition to the wildly popular Wikipedia. None of them (with the possible exception of Commons, a free media repository) has an editing community that’s nearly as active as Wikipedia; however, there’s high-quality work going on all over the place.

One of my personal favorites is Wikisource. This site serves as a repository for historical documents. Unlike the other projects, Wikisource editors don’t create content, but instead gather it from existing sources, and update its formatting to make it more web-friendly. Why is this such a good thing? Well, let me give you an example:

My biggest project on Wikisource, currently underway, has been “wikifying” the Oregon Constitution. Wikipedia editor Athelwulf has set a high standard for making a clear presentation of this foundational document.

The Constitution is, of course, online on a couple of different State web sites; but it’s presented in ways that scream “best of the web, circa 1995.” The formatting makes it very difficult to read lists; there are few if any web links to clarify concepts, or indicate which ballot measures approve certain amendments; and numerous other problems make it much less useful than it should be.

But no matter. With Wikisource—and because the Constitution is in the public domain, owned by the people of Oregon—it’s in our power to build a better resource. In time, I hope this will set the standard for the state’s presentation of this vital document. Or if not, perhaps Wikisource will become a core resource for law students, legislative aides, historians, and others all over the state.

Like what you see? Please help us finish the project! Article I (the Bill of Rights) is more or less complete, but most of the others still need a lot of work.

 

Snowed in? Join the Collaboration of the Week.

It's so weird to see these in Portland, that people come out of their homes in below-freezing temps. to take photos of them.

It has been a banner year for the Collaboration of the Week at WikiProject Oregon.

With 32 seven-day collaborations, more than 60 articles have been worked on. There have been nearly a dozen Did You Know? entries from COTW appear on the front page of Wikipedia, and two Good Articles have been produced. Now, you have a chance to participate in one of the last Collaborations of 2008.

For Portland residents in particular, the weather these past weeks has been pretty unusual in Oregon. With freezing rain and much more snow than we’re used to, it seemed like the perfect time to have fun with Snow Bunny, the article for a recreation area on the south face of Mt. Hood. We’re also continuing to improve WikiProject Oregon’s already pretty spectacular political coverage with a focus on Margaret Carter, a Democratic member of the Oregon State Senate.

Please join us on improving these articles however you can. Even just a quick stop by to fix a typo or make discussion page suggestion would be a big help to all Oregonians. In the meantime, stay warm and dry!