If you have time to answer just three questions, please add a comment below. If you have time to answer more than three, we’re looking for up to 25 volunteers to complete a branding survey at Wikia.
If you’re interested in my answers to the following questions, Jeff De Cagna has posted an interview with me answering these on his “Principled Innovation” site. I’d be interested in feedback on my answers and whether there are any points you agree or disagree with.
1. How would describe the power and spirit of wikis to someone who is unfamiliar with them?
2. What led you to become so deeply involved in Wikipedia, i.e., what was the initial inspiration?
3. What do you see as the driving forces of Wikipedia’s success to date, and what are your biggest concerns for the future?
4. What is your take on my suggestion that each Wikipedian contribution is a form of “microinnovation†that builds and sustains the huge global, game-changing innovation that is Wikipedia?
5. What advice would you give to non-profit membership association leaders who are uncertain where to begin with social media in their organizations?
6. How do you see social media/Web 2.0 evolving the next few years? What should we expect?
See my answers at Principled Innovation, or answer them yourself in the comments section below.
“What Wikipedia is not” is one of the core policies of the project. It claims that Wikipedia is not paper, a dictionary, a publisher of original thought, a soapbox, a mirror, a link repository, a webhost, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a crystal ball, and that it’s not censored.
One point that isn’t listed there is that Wikipedia is not the place for a documentation of its own history, but perhaps it should be.
The redirect from “What Wikipedia is not” in the article namespace to the correct location in the project namespace was deleted last month. The deletion removes the early edits to that page. The edits in Wikipedia’s first year, 2001, by TOertel, Kragen, The Cunctator, and possibly others that the conversion script lost when Wikipedia was first placed on what is now known as MediaWiki, are now invisible on Wikipedia itself. The development of such a defining policy has been lost.
Is it a result of what MeatBallWiki calls NoRespectForHistory? Or is it actually adhering to the “What Wikipedia is not” policy? The policy states that “Wikipedia is first and foremost an online encyclopedia“. Keeping redirects to non-encyclopedic content in the article namespace could be seen as hindering the main goal of the project since they lead to broken links when other sites mirror only the main namespace’s content, and possibly lead to confusion between which part of Wikipedia is the encyclopedia and which part is the community.
I would have opposed the deletion in the past, but then I’ve also supported deletions of other content that “oldbies” saw as a important part of Wikipedia’s history, but now I’m somewhere in between not caring and thinking it might be for the best. The history isn’t exactly lost - it’s just removed from the encyclopedia. It’s still available in old database dumps, and everything before 2002 is available on nostalgia.wikipedia.org. So, perhaps it’s time to give up my bias towards keeping redirects and old page histories for reasons of historical value, and focus on whether the redirects listed for deletion are actually benefitting the encyclopedia.
I guess the researchers will just have to find other ways of uncovering the project’s past.
An almost inactive Wikia had a revivial today. In reaction to reports about the Indian government’s blocks of various blog hosting sites, a Bloggers Against Censorship campaign has started on Wikia’s censorship wiki, launched by members of the BloggersCollective group. In the last few hours, content has been added to the wiki on the list of ISPs blocking Blogger, ways to bypass the ban, press coverage of the ban, a listing of blog posts about the ban, and more. If you have more information, you are welcome to edit the wiki at censorship.wikia.com and help to document this issue.
I hoped it would be third time lucky when trying to get the Wikipedia article about me deleted, but John Lyden closed the debate as “keep” today since there was no consensus to delete it.
I thought that my resignation from Wikimedia’s Board would be enough to sway the decision, not because I think resigning from a post makes me less notable, but because I didn’t think I was notable to start with and I thought that people might realise this if they were no longer biased by their desire to keep self-referential articles about current Board members.
A lot of the votes were simply based on whether or not I meet the guidelines at [[WP:BIO]]. A few of the reasons were patent nonsense (”Keep. As a Vice President of the Wiki Foundation…” - there’s no such thing as the Wiki Foundation and I wasn’t a VP of Wikimedia either, and “a co-founder of one of the highest traffic and most famous sites on the Internet” - from someone bizarrely thinking, and refusing to correct this false statement, that I founded Wikipedia). Other reasons for keeping seemed like exaggerations to me (”100 years from now, people would like to know more about her as one of the pioneers of [the] wiki-movement” — Bhadani or “In a hundred years, people are going to wonder about this “wiki” thing and want to know the key players behind it” –GreenReaper).
Comparisons were made with other people who wanted to be deleted (like Daniel Brandt and Seth Finkelstein, who both supported the deletion of my article), and some were worried about the precedent it might set (”it might not be good for us to set any sort of precedents regarding deletion of articles because the subject wants it.” — Dtobias). Some were opposing deletion on the grounds that I nominated it (”we can’t be having articles based on the desires of the subjects” — Badlydrawnjeff) though it did raise some policy issues about whether the subject’s view should be taken into account (”If the subject of a borderline biography does not want an article about themselves in Wikipedia, we should respect that.” — Eloquence).
Surprisingly, no one actually came up with anything new that might demonstrate more notability - like the fact I contributed to a book on wikis that was published earlier this year or my three television appearances. The only research people reported was in favour of deletion - I apparently have no citations in Google Book Search or The New York Times. Unfortunately, a lack of reliable sources wasn’t enough to convince most people to agree to deletion.
I don’t believe I meet Wikipedia’s requirements for inclusion in the encyclopedia. I didn’t think so on April 1st 2005 when the article about me was first written. I assumed it had been put there as an April Fool’s Day joke, so I listed it for deletion. The article was kept, mostly because people felt me being on the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation made me notable enough for an article.
On the French Wikipedia not long after, Anthere listed herself and me for deletion, and we were deleted in May 2005. Back on the English Wikipedia, WikiFanatic relisted me for deletion in October 2005 and again it was kept. On the German Wikipedia, Southpark listed me for deletion in May 2006 and I was deleted there. The article still exists in Czech, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Since I announced my resignation from Wikimedia’s Board, I assumed the people who had said “keep, she’s on the Board” on the previous attempts would no longer have a reason to keep me, so I decided to relist the article on “Articles for deletion” (AfD). It’s starting to look like I was wrong.
It’s half way through my AfD (they last 5 days). Almost 100 people have “voted” (though many will claim AfD is not a vote, especially since it was renamed from “votes for deletion” to “articles for deletion”). The outcome at half time is 56% in favour of deletion — definitely not close enough to consensus to delete (since the English Wikipedia takes a “when in doubt, don’t delete” approach). It was an interesting turnaround since the first 14 comments were all in favour of deletion. It looked like it was going to be a non-controversial listing, and Kimchi.sg, who I met in Singapore last month, thought the case was so clear, he deleted the article under Wikipedia’s “snowball clause“, which states
“If an issue raises no controversy, and therefore doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting an unexpected outcome from a certain process, then there is no need to run it through that process.”
However, Badlydrawnjeff objected, and Kimchi undeleted it.
The sensible reasons people are giving for keeping the article are mostly that founding Wikia makes me encyclopedic, and that my time on Wikimedia’s Board is still significant even if it’ll soon be over. There are also a lot of very odd reasons for keeping me, with claims that vandalism isn’t a reason to delete an article… even though no one suggested it was, and a few people with the opinion that the subject of an article shouldn’t be allowed to request its deletion.
It’s a very strange experience to have 100 people discussing your supposed notability, or lack of it. I don’t know what to make of the fact that Australians and people I’ve met seem more inclined to delete me! It’s unfortunate that some people are taking the listing to mean that I’ve lost my belief in the “wiki-way” or that this somehow shows Wikipedia isn’t working. I don’t feel that at all. I accept that articles will be vandalised, and I don’t think long-term semi-protection is beneficial to the project as a whole. Although I am sick of being trolled, it was my resignation that I put forward as the reason for deletion, so this should only be seen as a reflection of my acceptance of the notability policies, not as any sort of reflection on whether or not Wikipedia can successfully handle biographies of living persons.
Continued at “Who is this Angela person I keep hearing about?â€
Update (18 July): The Italian and Portuguese Wikipedias are now voting to delete me too.
Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” policy, known as NPOV, states that “all articles must be written from a neutral point of view, representing views fairly and without bias… Where there are or have been conflicting views, these should be presented fairly, but not asserted. All significant points of view are presented, not just the most popular one. It should not be asserted that the most popular view or some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one. Readers are left to form their own opinions. As the name suggests, the neutral point of view is a point of view, not the absence or elimination of viewpoints. It is a point of view that is neutral - that is neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject.”
I’m giving a talk today for the Students of Sustainability conference at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. The conference website includes this extract from freepress.net:
“when viewpoints are cut off and ideas cannot find an outlet, our democracy suffers.â€
When votes come up on the site, a common opposition to those votes is that Wikipedia is not a democracy. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not important to democracy, and the inclusion of viewpoints that the NPOV policy tries to ensure may be helpful to this.
As I announced on Uncyclopedia today, Wikia is the new owner of the Uncyclopedia trademark, and the Uncyclopedia.org domain name. We’ve been hosting this very funny parody encyclopedia since the start of 2005, and we’re pleased to now be able to display a commitment to ensuring the continuity of the project. More details will be in a press release later this week.
Arrgh. I just lost my whole blogroll by clicking the wrong thing in bloglines when I was trying to delete something. I have a backup but it’s very old, so if you know any good wiki-related blogs (including areas like community and collaboration), please add links in the comments here, or on my wiki, so I can rebuild it. Thanks!
Dirk Riehle has published an interview on How and Why Wikipedia Works which he recently conducted with Elisabeth Bauer (Elian), Kizu Naoko (Aphaia) and me. The interview presents perspectives from the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and is part of the proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym ‘06), where I’ll be giving a keynote talk on the same topic. Registration is still open for WikiSym, which is taking place in Denmark from August 21-23.
Update: the interview is on Slashdot!