Forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman

[ Subject: Wikipedia
[ From: S. Kalyanaraman
[ Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2006

Growing Wikipedia revises its 'anyone can edit' policy

Katie Hapner
Saturday, June 17, 2006

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can
edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert
Einstein
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/albert_e...  ,
human rights in China or Christina Aguilera.

Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and
edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results,
have captured the public imagination.

But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective
creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so
much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.

At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but
also an online community that has built itself a
bureaucracy of sorts - one that, in response to well-
publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown
more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives
volunteer administrators the authority to exercise
editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect
those that are vulnerable to vandalism.

Those measures can put some entries outside of the
"anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as
of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera
were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from
all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or
disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries -
including those for George W. Bush
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w...  ,
Islam and Adolf Hitler
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/adolf_hi...  -
were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who
had been registered at the site for at least four days.
(See a List of Protected Entries
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki-side.html

While these measures may appear to undermine the site's
democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder,
notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a
tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-
language site.

"Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly
defines Wikipedia," Mr. Wales said. "What does define
Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open
participation."

From the start, Mr. Wales gave the site a clear mission:
to offer free knowledge to everybody on the planet. At
the same time, he put in place a set of rules and
policies that he continues to promote, like the need to
present information with a neutral point of view.

The system seems to be working. Wikipedia is now the
Web's third-most-popular news and information source,
beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo
http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://cu...  News, according to Nielsen
NetRatings
http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://cu...  .

The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done
by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so
regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.

"A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million
people, each adding one sentence," Mr. Wales said. "But
really the vast majority of work is done by this small
core community."

The administrators are all volunteers, most of them in
their 20's. They are in constant communication - in real-
time online chats, on "talk" pages connected to each
entry and via Internet mailing lists. The volunteers
share the job of watching for vandalism, or what Mr.
Wales called "drive-by nonsense." Customized software -
written by volunteers - also monitors changes to
articles.

Mr. Wales calls vandalism to the encyclopedia "a minimal
problem, a dull roar in the background." Yet early this
year, amid heightened publicity about false information
on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-
protection of some articles. The four-day waiting period
is meant to function something like the one imposed on
gun buyers.

Once the assaults have died down, the semi-protected page
is often reset to "anyone can edit" mode. An entry on
Bill Gates  
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/bill_gat...  
was semi-protected for just a few days in January, but
some entries, like the article on President Bush, stay
that way indefinitely. Other semi-protected subjects as
of yesterday were Opus Dei, Tony Blair  
tp://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/tony_blair/index .html?inline=nyt-per  
and sex.

To some critics, protection policies make a mockery of
the "anyone can edit" notion.

"As Wikipedia has tried to improve its quality, it's
beginning to look more and more like an editorial
structure," said Nicholas Carr, a technology writer who
recently criticized Wikipedia on his blog. "To say that
great work can be created by an army of amateurs with
very little control is a distortion of what Wikipedia
really is."

But Mr. Wales dismissed such criticism, saying there had
always been protections and filters on the site.

Wikipedia's defenders say it usually takes just a few
days for all but the most determined vandals to retreat.

"A cooling-off period is a wonderful mediative
technique," said Ross Mayfield, chief executive of a
company called Socialtext that is based on the same
editing technology that Wikipedia uses.

Full protection often results from a "revert war," in
which users madly change the wording back and forth. In
such cases, an administrator usually steps in and freezes
the page until the warring parties can settle their
differences in another venue, usually the talk page for
the entry. The Christina Aguilera entry was frozen this
week after after fans of the singer fought back against
one user's efforts to streamline it.

Much discussion of Wikipedia has focused on its accuracy.
Last year, an article in the journal Nature concluded
that the incidence of errors in Wikipedia was only
slightly higher than in Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Officials at Britannica angrily disputed the findings.

"To be able to do an encyclopedia without having the
ability to differentiate between experts and the general
public is very, very difficult," said Jorge Cauz, the
president of Britannica, whose subscription-based online
version receives a small fraction of the traffic that
Wikipedia gets.

Intentional mischief can go undetected for long periods.
In the article about John Seigenthaler Sr., who served in
the Kennedy administration, a suggestion that he was
involved in the assassinations of both John F. and Robert
Kennedy was on the site for more than four months before
Mr. Seigenthaler discovered it. He wrote an op-ed article
in USA Today about the incident, calling Wikipedia "a
flawed and irresponsible research tool."

Yet Wikipedians say that in general the accuracy of an
article grows organically. At first, said Wayne Saewyc, a
Wikipedia volunteer in Vancouver, British Columbia,
"everything is edited mercilessly by idiots who do stupid
and weird things to it." But as the article grows, and
citations slowly accumulate, Mr. Saewyc said, the article
becomes increasingly accurate.

Wikipedians often speak of how powerfully liberating
their first contribution felt. Kathleen Walsh, 23, a
recent college graduate who majored in music, recalled
the first time she added to an article on the
contrabassoon.

"I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was," recalled
Ms. Walsh. "You write all these pages for college and no
one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the
whole world sees it, instantly."

Ms. Walsh is an administrator, a post that others
nominated her for in recognition of her contributions to
the site. She monitors a list of newly created pages,
half of which, she said, end up being good candidates for
deletion. Many are "nonsense pages created by kids, like
'Michael is a big dork,' " she said.

Ms. Walsh also serves on the 14-member arbitration
committee, which she describes as "the last resort" for
disputes on Wikipedia.

Like so many Web-based successes, Wikipedia started more
or less by accident.

Six years ago, Mr. Wales, who built up a comfortable nest
egg in a brief career as an options trader, started an
online encyclopedia called Nupedia.com
http://nupedia.com/  , with content to be written by
experts. But after attracting only a few dozen articles,
Mr. Wales started Wikipedia on the side. It grew
exponentially.

For the first year or so, Mr. Wales paid the expenses out
of his own pocket.

Now the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization
that supports Wikipedia, is financed primarily through
donations, most in the $50 to $100 range.

As the donations have risen, so have the costs. The
foundation's annual budget doubled in the last year, to
$1.5 million, and traffic has grown sharply. Search
engines like Google
http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://cu...  ,
which often turn up Wikipedia entries at the top of their
results, are a big contributor to the site's traffic, but
it is increasingly a first stop for knowledge seekers.

Mr. Wales shares the work of running Wikipedia with the
administrators and four paid employees of the foundation.
Although many decisions are made by consensus within the
community, Mr. Wales steps in when an issue is especially
contentious. "It's not always obvious when something
becomes policy," he said. "One way is when I say it is."

Mr. Wales is a true believer in the power of wiki page-
editing technology, which predates Wikipedia. In late
2004, Mr. Wales started Wikia, a commercial start-up
financed by venture capital that lets people build Web
sites based around a community of interest. Wiki 24, for
instance, is an unofficial encyclopedia for the
television show "24." Unlike Wikipedia, the site carries
advertising.

Mr. Wales, 39, lives with his wife and daughter in St.
Petersburg, Fla., where the foundation is based. But Mr.
Wales's main habitat these days, he said, is the inside
of airplanes. He travels constantly, giving speeches to
reverential audiences and visiting Wikipedians around the
world.

Wikipedia has inspired its share of imitators. A group of
scientists has started the peer-reviewed Encyclopedia of
Earth, and Congresspedia is a new encyclopedia with an
article about each member of Congress.

But beyond the world of reference works, Wikipedia has
become a symbol of the potential of the Web.

"It can tell us a lot about the future of knowledge
creation, which will depend much less on individual
heroism and more on collaboration," said Mitchell Kapor,
a computer industry pioneer who is president of the Open
Source Applications Foundation.

Zephyr Teachout, a lawyer in Burlington, Vt., who is
involved with Congresspedia, said Wikipedia was
reminiscent of old-fashioned civic groups like the
Grange, whose members took individual responsibility for
the organization's livelihood.

"It blows open what's possible," said Ms. Teachout. "What
I hope is that these kinds of things lead to thousands of
other experiments like this encyclopedia, which we never
imagined could be produced in this way."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html?_r=1&oref=sl...

End of forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman

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