Google v Wikipedia

The Times reports that Google is about to move on to Wikipedia's turf:

A new Google service, dubbed knol, will invite “people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it”, Udi Manber, a Google engineer, said.

Like Wikipedia, articles in knol (the name derives from “knowledge”) will be free to read online. In a departure from the nonprofit Wikipedia model, however, knol’s authors will be able to attach advertising to their work and take a share of revenues.

“The goal is for knols [individual articles] to cover all topics, from scientific concepts to entertainment,” Mr Manber said.

.....

Google, which says that it exists “to organise the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible”, suggested that knol was designed to stamp out the malicious entries that have blighted Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that “anybody can edit”.

“We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content,” Google said. The company noted that it “will not serve as an editor in any way and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors.” Contributors will retain the copyright to their submissions.

However, as well as being ranked by readers, content will be ranked by the Google search engine, which will be the most important access point to the site. Mr Manber said: “A knol is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.”

Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, who recently launched a rival search engine to Google’s, questioned whether knol would be able to generate enough “quality content”. He also suggested that knol articles would lack balance. “They are not going to allow collaboration and aren’t going to go for Wikipedia’s neutral style,” he said.

Where Wikipedia promotes collaboration between authors, knol looks set to foster rivalry. Contributors to knol will not be able to contribute anonymously and will not be able to edit each other’s work, two defining characteristics of Wikipedia. Whereas on Wikipedia, readers find only one entry on, say, the First World War, on knol authors will submit separate pieces that will compete for advertising dollars.

Some thoughts/ questions:

• How and by whom will the knol topics be chosen and, as will often be necessary (eg the First World War), how will they be broken down into sub-topics?
  
• Who will invite whom to write knols and what selection criteria will be used?
  
• What processes will there be for editing and updating?
• Will Google, as it does with its other services, yield to pressure from countries such as China and block/ edit/ filter/ censor knols?

Let the contest begin.

Declaration: I'm a contributor to Wikipedia and support the concept despite being from time to time exasperated by poor expression, errors and, surprisingly for such a voluminous project, omissions.

Wikipedia notches 2 million English language articles... and the debate goes on.

The 2 millionth English language Wikipedia article has been posted: it's about a popular Spanish TV show (the one millionth was about a railway station in Glasgow) .

And this is only part of the story: the ABC informs us that the online encyclopedia now has over 8 million articles in a scarcely believable 250 languages.

This is a magnificent achievement and confirms that many people are willing to share their knowledge (and opinions) voluntarily for a common good, even if their goodwill and industry is diminished by the actions of some contributors who grind axes relentlessly or, for their own reasons, butcher the bona fide efforts of others.

To deal with the alleged vandals new methods of monitoring and regulating content are about to be implemented. The New Scientist reports

News of the plans came to light last August when Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced changes to the editing restrictions on the German-language version. However, implementing those changes turned out to be more difficult than anticipated and has still not happened. Now New Scientist has learned that Wikimedia plans to start the first trial of the changes this month.

The shift is a dramatic one for the encyclopedia. For now, edits to an entry can be made by any user and appear immediately to all readers. In the new version, only edits made by a separate class of "trusted" users will be instantly implemented.

To earn this trusted status, users will have to show some commitment to Wikipedia, by making 30 edits in 30 days, say. Other users will have to wait until a trusted editor has given the article a brief look, enough to confirm that the edit is not vandalism, before their changes can be viewed by readers.

This is sure to ease some readers' doubts. Most malicious edits involve crude acts of vandalism, such as the deletion of large chunks of text. Now such changes will rarely make it into articles.

These benefits will come at a price, though. New users could be deterred from participating, since they will lose the gratification that comes from seeing their edit instantly implemented. That could reduce the number of editors as well as creating a class system that divides frequent users from readers. The trusted editors, likely to number around 2000, may also find that articles are being changed too fast for them to monitor.

Not all versions of the encyclopedia will follow this route, says Erik Moller of the Wikimedia Foundation. While editors on the German version are happy with a hierarchy of contributors, the English editors favour a more egalitarian approach. So English readers are likely to continue to see the latest version of an entry, with a page that has been certified as vandalism-free by trusted editors available via a link.

For edits that are more subtly inaccurate, perhaps because they have been designed to promote an agenda, another tool is in store. It allows select groups of editors, probably associated with specific subject areas, to vote on whether an article should be flagged as high quality. Readers would still see the latest version of an article by default, but a link to a high-quality version, if it exists, would also be available.

As well as relying on trusted editors, Wikipedia's upgrade will involve automatically awarding trust ratings to chunks of text within a certain article. Moller says the new system is due to be incorporated into Wikipedia within the next two months, as an option for the different language communities.

The software that will do this, created by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, starts by assigning each Wikipedia contributor a trust rating using the encyclopedia's vast log of edits, which records every change to every article and the editor involved. Contributors whose edits tend to remain in place are awarded high trust ratings; those whose changes are quickly altered get a low score. The rationale is that if a change is useful and accurate, it is likely to remain intact during subsequent edits, but if it is inaccurate or malicious, it is likely to be changed. Therefore, users who make long-lasting edits are likely to be trustworthy. New users automatically start with a low rating.

The Australian via The Times also reports this. The Times has also printed an update:

Jimmy Wales said that changes to the online encyclopedia which meant it would now be overseen by a group of 'trusted editors' did not mean that ordinary users weren't free to edit the site, only that they had to have been registered for 4 days before making a change.

This would hopefully lead to a reduction in the number of high profile pages - such as George W. Bush's - that suffered from spontaneous vandalism, he said, as well as improve the reliability of the site, which has been shown to be untrustworthy on several occasions of late.

"There are no plans to restrict anybody's status," Mr Wales said. "Anyone can make an edit, but if the user hasn't been registered for at least 4 days, then it would have to be approved by someone who has been registered before going live."

Mr Wales acknowledged that Wikipedia's reliability had come into question following the discovery that some organisations, including political parties, had been tweaking their entries to improve their image.

But he dismissed the idea that the changes - which will initially only affect the German site - were a response to a planned competitor to Wikipedia, ' Citizendium', which will solicit entries from the public but be edited by a group of experts to root out inaccuracies.

Mr Wales said that it was Wikipedia's aim to "protect the public from goofballs doing bad things" whilst at the same time allowing the "spontaneous acts of goodwell", which were a valuable feature of the site.

I assume that "goodwell" should be "goodwill", but what would a Wikipedia article (or an article about Wikipedia) be without at least one typo?

I should also mention John Quiggin's recent post. Quiggin is a longstanding albeit not uncritical supporter of Wikipedia. What he says about the encyclopedia ( is it time to come up another word which describes the scope and now the scale of the enterprise?) is worth reading. Extract:

The most obvious change in the past eighteen months is the way attention has shifted from the extensive margin (more articles) to the intensive margin (work on existing articles, metacontent such as categorization and classification schemes, and internal process such as the development and enforcement of policies on biographies of living persons, prompted by embarrassments like the Siegenthaler hoax and by the increasing propensity of politicans and others to edit their own entries).

There’s a natural economic logic here. With two million entries already, the typical new entry (ignoring the many short-lived attempts such as this one) is going to be something like List of state leaders in 1390s BC or Kitaōji Station. The marginal benefit of adding an entry is declining, though certainly not zero. On the other hand, the demand for internal improvements builds on itself. A stroll through Wikipedia using the Random entry function shows that the great majority of entries are tagged as needing improvement of some kind.

This process of cumulative improvement is resource-intensive, but not nearly as much as the dialectical processes that operate for controversial entries (and on Wikipedia, anything and everything can be controversial). Edits are made, reverted, reverted, tagged as needing support or violating some Wikipolicy or other, until a single sentence can consume dozens of hours of work. Still, the result is often a drastic improvement in quality compared to a starting point in which one point of view or another is taken for granted. One obvious manifestation of this is the vast increase in referencing of claims, and the increasing pickiness of policy regarding sources for such claims. Blogs have been a particular victim, with only a handful of expert-written blogs being accepted as reliable sources on particular topics. Despite the merits of the process, it’s easy to get burned out defending an article like Global warming controversy against the sustained efforts of delusionists to include lengthy and uncritical presentations of their latest talking points.

One thing is clear though. Complaining about Wikipedia now is like complaining about the Internet. There isn’t going to be any alternative for quite some time to come.

I'm not (having myself made some extremely modest contributions to the genre) one of those who thinks that there are too many articles about railway stations, but I question the justification for entries like Port Road pub crawl, which have no substantial basis in fact (or more than one person's opinion) and are riddled with errors and omissions. As it stands today the article is a bag of chaff with a few grains (which could easily be transferred to other articles) scattered throughout.

Oh, and don't expect the Port Road pub crawl article to remain in its present form for long (and don't call me a vandal if I amend and rename it).

Wales stranded on April Fool's Day

This morning Channel Nine's Sunday screened an item about Wikipedia in which Ellen Fanning interviewed Jimmy ("Jimbo") Wales, its founder. She surprised him by claiming that her own entry incorrectly claimed that she was the brother of entertainer Bernard Fanning.

Wales looked flabbergasted, and immediately went into his computer, apparently to check and then amend the mistake. He, or someone else with the authority to do so, has amended the article to reflect this morning's exchange:

In the April 1, 2007 episode of Sunday, Fanning interviewed Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, correcting a substantial error of fact in her article that claimed that she had a brother, Australian solo artist and lead vocalist of band Powderfinger, Bernard Fanning. During the interview, Ellen stated to Jimmy that Bernard was not her brother.^[2]

At the top is a box with a padlock and these words:

Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled because of vandalism to the article caused by the recent interview of Jimmy Wales. If you are prevented from editing this article, and you wish to make a change, please discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or create an account.

According to the Wikipedia archives, the revision with the error about Bernard Fanning was posted on 27 February this year by user 58.170.81.88, all except one of whose contributions (which are listed here) relate to media personalities and were posted on the same day.

Who is 58.170.81.88? Someone with connections to the Sunday program?

Even if it wasn't intended as an April Fool's Day joke it's drawn attention to some of the shortcomings of Wikipedia, which I still think is a very good concept despite its potential for abuse. The Sunday website (link above) promises a video of the interview but as I post it's not appeared. If and when it does it'll be well worth watching.

As for Jimbo Wales, it'll be a long time before he agrees to be interviewed by someone without checking their Wikipedia entry.

Oh, and just to put myself at ease, I've checked to see if there's a Wikipedia entry about me. There isn't (which is what I expected), though I have several namesakes with entries: they can be distinguished from each other by applying the disambiguation guidelines, one of Wikipedia's more worthwhile innovations.