WikiMania 2005 Redux

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

[I originally wrote this two days after the conference, but because of limited Internet access the past few days, I couldn’t post it until today. -EEK]    (JME)

Wikimania is over. What a whirlwind three days. I’m so glad I came early for Hacking Days, because it gave me a chance to meet key members of the community in a relaxed environment, the calm before the storm as it were. That I was able to blog my impressions each day is proof of that.    (JMF)

Blogging during the conference itself turned out to be impossible. I had no time to get away and gather my thoughts, at least on my computer. Ross Mayfield mentioned a Peter Kaminski maxim during my talk: Face-to-face time is too precious to waste working. Well, I embodied that philosophy this past weekend. I met people from roughly twenty different countries and managed to spend quality time with most of them. (According to Florence Devouard, there were 52 countries represented among the 300 participants and speakers.)    (JMG)

Right now, my body is complaining about the cumulative effects of repeated late night sessions over too much beer and apfelwein, but my mind and spirit are refreshed. Each day, a different group of us shared stories, laughed, and argued about international politics, Wikis, Fleischbutter, and our compatriots, families, friends, and selves.    (JMH)

Now, I find myself both moved and troubled. This is not the first time I’ve walked away from a great event like this and felt this way. In many ways, this gathering embodied what communities and collaboration should be about. The danger is that we might view it as the way things are. They’re not. Many of us will return to our banal lives, bracing ourselves for the inevitable stack of work that accumulated in our absence. Some of us will return to homes that practice rampant censorship, to populations with miniscule literacy rates and significant poverty. All of us return to a world that is dangerously volatile, where tensions between our respective countries are taut and frayed.    (JMI)

Did our little gathering make the world a better place? Sure. It will take years for our new and strengthened ties and our newly broadened perspectives to noticeably change the world, but the effects are real and will reverberate and grow over time. However, these changes are also barely apparent now, and the work that we must continue to do is daunting.    (JMJ)

In the end, I walk away from this conference a little wiser and a little scared, with a lot of hope and a renewed sense of purpose. More importantly, I look forward to the new partnerships that will inevitably emerge, and I wait excitedly to see my new friends once again.    (JMK)

I’ll have more to say about the conference itself, but not this week. This week, I’m in Berlin, exploring a great city that has changed so much in only fifteen years and spending time with old friends and new.    (JML)

[Berlin was fantastic! I’ll blog extensively about it next week after I post the rest of my Wikimania thoughts. -EEK]    (JMM)

WikiMania Hackfest Day 4

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Bits and tids:    (JM7)

  • I didn’t plan my Hacking Days schedule very well. I missed most of the first day, when the Mediawiki developers apparently made progress on a new metadata design. Days 2 and 3, from which I based most of my criticism, focused on servers and reliability, an area to which I really couldn’t contribute, not because I’m ignorant, but because I’m powerless. This morning, they discussed Single Sign-On and usability, two areas that I do know something about. Sadly, I missed these sessions, because I was too busy spouting on and on about how we really can save the world. Owen Davis, Fen Labalme, Kaliya Hamlin, and the rest of the gang will undoubtedly kick my butt when they read this. In my defense, I managed to talk a bit about Identity Commons later in the day. I also plugged the FLOSS Usability Sprint, and met Zeno Gantner, who’s done some usability studies on Mediawiki.    (JM8)
  • I was one of the featured participants for the afternoon “Wiki developers informal discussion,” along with Ward Cunningham, Sven Dowideit, Christophe Ducamp, and Brion Vibber. Domas Mituzas, Wikimedia Foundation‘s head of operations, asked Ward, “Why Camel Case?” I won’t go into the explanation here — I have a long interview with Ward, to be published eventually, that explains this in detail — but you should know that hating Camel Case is a running joke among this community. I laughed along with everyone else, but when Sven mentioned his desire to remove Camel Case from TWiki, I felt compelled to pipe up. I gave a balanced defense, describing Camel Case’s advantages over free links, but also acknowledging the appropriateness of free links in Wikipedia. Then I got a very amusing introduction to Erik Moeller, one of Mediawiki‘s core contributors and the Wikimedia Foundation‘s chief research officer. Erik had a strongly worded response. It got a bit heated, but never overly so, and I closed by saying that we were in violent agreement. We laughed about it over dinner, but then we got serious again. We also talked about Purple Numbers. I’ve explained many times why I may seem like a poor evangelist, but I think Erik was one of the few people who appreciated my perspective. He was clearly not a big fan of Purple Numbers — as it turns out, he was somewhat familiar with my work — but after hearing my explanation, he responded, “Only intelligent people are going to understand what you just said.” Fair enough. Fortunately, regular folks don’t need to get Granular Addressability for Granular Addressability to become ubiquitous.    (JM9)
  • A group of us broke out into a small group to discuss a Wiki Interchange Format, knowing full well that this is an issue that’s been discussed many times before (Wiki:WikiInterchangeFormat, MeatBall:WikiInterchangeFormat). Nevertheless, I think our discussion was not only constructive, it has a high chance of succeeding. See my summary.    (JMA)
  • Magnus Manske, the original creator of Mediawiki, participated in our Wiki Interchange Format discussion. He also mentioned a clever idea: a “shopping cart” where people could aggregate and possibly export Wiki pages they were interested in.    (JMB)
  • Sven Dowideit demonstrated the prototype WYSIWYG editor for TWiki, based on Kupu. He also showed a WikiText editor with real-time preview, which was pretty slick. Also, Ross Mayfield showed me a prototype editor for KWiki in response to my previous post. Very good to see these things.    (JMC)
  • So many people have come to this gathering to learn from others with different experiences. Granted, all of these experiences center around Wikipedia, but I’m still envious. My neverending quest is for folks interested in collaboration to look beyond their own narrow domains for deeper insights.    (JMD)

Ghosts of Sokal

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Three MIT graduate students — Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo, and Maxwell Krohn — wrote a computer program to autogenerate a “research paper” entitled, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy.” They submitted it to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI). It was accepted.    (IML)

The CNN article about their accomplishment noted that it was reminiscent of the infamous Alan Sokal hoax. Sokal submitted a fake paper to a postmodern scholastic journal, Social Text (not to be confused with Ross Mayfield‘s company), and the paper was accepted. Sokal wanted to show that postmodernism was a farce, but what he ended up demonstrating was that peer review was incredibly flawed.    (IMM)

The “Rooter” paper isn’t the first fake paper to be accepted at a scientific journal or conference, but it’s the first to my knowledge that was computer-generated. It’s not that hard to point out the problems with peer review. What’s more interesting to me are effective alternatives that challenge our assumptions. Wikipedia is an obvious example, but arXiv.org is a much more compelling one.    (IMN)

In any case, many thanks to Jeremy, Daniel, and Maxwell for giving me a good chuckle. Please donate to their cause so that they can deliver a randomly-generated talk at the conference.    (IMO)

Online Community Summit: Friday’s Sessions

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Notable talks and comments at last Friday’s sessions at the Online Community Summit:    (2F4)

  • Soren Kaplan described iCohere’s work with World Vision, a billion dollar nonprofit with 20,000 employees worldwide. There was an online collaborative process leading up to a conference, using iCohere‘s software.    (2F5)
  • Dave DeForest discussed the online communities at the Motley Fool. There’s a 40:1 read-write ratio on their bulletin boards. The Fool’s strategy for monetizing the communities was to get the readers to pay, and to comp the writers. The comping process is transparent in that participants know that some people are being comped, but the actual process for comping people is not concrete. When the Fool went to a pay model, it had a 90 percent attrition rate. 73 percent of its community participants are also likely to perform another transaction on the Fool.    (2F6)
  • Mark Williams discussed Apple’s support forums. Right now, he’s handling everything — management, development, etc. His managers tell him that the objective is to reduce phone volume, but he sees the two audiences as separate. Robert Labatt noted that Apple does a great job of converging threads on its support forums.    (2F7)
  • Anne McKay posed the following theory, citing last year’s The Atlantic Monthly article on introversion: You need extroverts for a successful online community. I would argue the opposite, although I have no numbers to back me up. We had an interesting discussion about this very topic in the Collaboration Collaboratory about a year ago. It would be interesting to do Myers-Briggs analysis on online communities in a future case study.    (2F8)
  • Steve De Mello told stories of “bad behavior” on some of ezboard’s online communities, and noted that hosts should only deal with black-and-white issues. The best pressure is peer pressure. Gail Williams agreed with Steve’s assessments, and noted that while paid communities helped filter out trolls, they didn’t eliminate them entirely.    (2F9)
  • During a breakout session on metrics, Gail suggested that our biggest problem is understanding and serving lurkers. (See my previous entries on lurkers.)    (2FA)
  • Tom Coates informed folks on the IRC Backchannel about Wiki proxy, a cool little proxy that automatically links terms to Wikipedia.    (2FB)

Finally, Reid Hoffman and Ross Mayfield gave a quick walkthrough of Social Software. I was amazed at the blank stares in the room during this talk. These folks seemed to have some awareness of Social Software, but certainly not a deep understanding. The previous day, Marc Smith said that threaded forums aren’t going away. I agree, but the common wisdom in the group seemed to be that threaded forums tend to be the end-all and be-all of online communities. I strongly disagree with this assessment. Dave asked what Wikis offered that threaded forums do not. That question missed the point: It doesn’t have to be one over the other. (Ross enjoys needling folks by claiming that email and threaded forums are dead, but I don’t think he actually believes it.) My response to Dave was that there’s great potential for integrating Wikis and threaded forums (as I and others do with blogs).    (2FC)