Wiki Users, The Few. The Proud. The Altruistic?

Do people contribute to Wikipedia out of the goodness of their hearts? I don’t think so. If they did, they would contribute and edit any old article. Instead they edit the pages relevant to the subjects that they are interested in. People seem to have a need to express themselves on their topics of interest, especially when they have strong emotions about it.

In 2006, Marshall Poe’s article on Wikipedia in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The Hive”, recounts that Wikipedia’s founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, had originally intended to employ scholars to build an online encyclopedia, called Nupedia, but it proved very slow going. When they decided to let anyone in the community contribute, they “looked on Wikipedia as anything more than a lark”. This is evident in Sanger’s flip announcement of Wikipedia to the Nupedia discussion list. “Humor me,” he wrote. “Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” And, to Sanger’s surprise, go they did. At the end of January, Wikipedia had seventeen “real” articles (entries with more than 200 characters). By the end of February, it had 150; March, 572; April, 835; May, 1,300; June, 1,700; July, 2,400; August, 3,700. At the end of the year, the site boasted approximately 15,000 articles and about 350 “Wikipedians.” Last year, in March 2008, Wikipedia hit ten million articles. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/10M_articles

What propels the Wikipedia editors seems to be their personal interest in certain topics. The stronger their feelings, the more they seem to edit. This is evidenced in the most commonly edited wiki pages:

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The result of strong feelings about subjects in Wikipedia is that emotionally charged subjects like George Bush or Michael Jackson have been subject to “edit wars” where people push their own personal biases. According to Poe, in June 2001, only six months after Wikipedia was founded, a Polish Wikipedian named Krzysztof Jasiutowicz made an arresting and remarkably forward-looking observation. The Internet, he mused, was nothing but a “global Wikipedia without the end-user editing facility.” What is interesting is that on the web, most blogs or website are private property, and the only one who can edit them are the owners of the sites.

However, the communal editing function pushes out the bias, and the result is a neutral recounting of the facts that allows most readers to draw their own conclusions. Thus, the Wikipedia aphorism, “Given enough eyeballs, all errors become shallow.”, does not just apply to correcting dates and punctuation, but to the elimination of opinion and bias. Because the communal edit function improves the quality of information, the emotional fuel (basically a self interested need to express oneself) that propels the contributors adds information while their personal biases are filtered out. The net result is that the contributors self interest benefits the community as a whole.

Mmm..Mmm...Mmm...Del.icio.us!

For those of you who do not know, Del.icio.us is a social networking website in which users post their favorite bookmarks on their profiles and other users check out other people's bookmarks. Del.icio.us is used by and for the user, for his or her own personal reference. It is unlike Digg and Reddit because no one is trying to be the most popular user. People simply post their bookmarks on their profile and get cool bookmarks from others and add on to their profile. Now, as simple as it is, it has raised some concern for me as it exemplifies something I find very interesting about my generation--selfishness. An important distinction to make is that selfishness is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it often create online communities that are extremely community-minded. Del.icio.us is a perfect example of this idea. Although people make personal choices as to what their favorite bookmarks are, the site is completely open for others and so everyone can benefit from one another's choices. People using del.icio.us are not maliciously inflicting their selfishness upon others, they seek out others' bookmarks in order to fulfill their needs.

Why does this generate a community? First, people are contributing to a community database without even realizing it. So, when you have millions of users with ten bookmarks each, people start to look at others' bookmarks and take them as their own. So as people contribute to the database with their personal favorites, others seek out more bookmarks so that they can fulfill their personal needs. It is through this mechanism that a community is created. This community becomes more community-minded as people begin to realize that they are sharing their bookmarks with others. Since del.icio.us is not discussion based like Digg or Reddit, it presents a new breed of online community that can be classified as a community built upon the foundation of selfishness.

The Way We Live Now--Growing Up on Facebook

This being the first time I've written a blog entry on a blog, I am not quite sure how to express these statements so as to fit the formula for blog entry. However, if I do not write in such a way, it is solely because I am not one to follow the norm. Here it goes.

An article in the New York Times entitled, "The Way we Live Now--Growing Up on Facebook"

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine/15wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&scp=20&sq=facebook&st=cse) by Peggy Orenstein gives both a very real and connected perspective on my blog topic; the evolution of social networking. She outlines how Facebook has allowed her to see people in her past that she did not necessarily want to connect to. She dabbles in the Facebook friending politics of whether or not to add a stranger, a true friend, or a kinda friend and ends up thrusting herself "into a perpetual episode of 'This Is Your Life' (complete with commercials)". Peggy argues that Facebook friends almost seem to shape someone's character through messages, pictures, etc. when most of us wanted to create our own adult identity. She writes, "As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?" The question is spot on. How can we escape our past, when we are stripped of our privacy and those from where we wanted to escape are trying to shape our present? This question measures whether or not it is worth it to sacrifice the value of privacy to maintain a social network. And when one decides to have 1,000 friends, what is the long-term impact of the social network? As Peggy describes, it is impossible to know the impact of social networks. In fact, many college students within the 25 million under 25 years of age have mixed feelings about, as Peggy writes, "the guinea pigs for the faux-friendship age". These college students should be thinking about this as most of us are sharing our information without restriction, viewing our friends information without their knowledge, and permitting the extended social network (friends of friends) to see our information. If we look at the values of the stakeholders in the situation Peggy delineates, we find that for the users, privacy and long-term impact concerning values. We can also deduce that there is a conflict of personal intimacy. Peggy explains that the ability to discover intimate details about a person over the course of a few minutes on a social networking website can be seen as a negative. However, Peggy writes, "....a study published in 2007 in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggested that hanging onto old friends via Facebook may alleviate feelings of isolation for students whose transition to campus life had proved rocky. Evidently they took comfort in knowing that “Dylan is drinking Peets.” There is a dichotomy here between privacy and personal interest. When does the comfort from personal interest infringe upon one's privacy. So far it seems as though there is no such boundary.

Even more important is the idea of growing up and evolving as an individual. The connectedness that a social network provides, creates an environment where people are shaping what they believe to be your life. There is absolutely no space for introspection and transformation. Peggy talks about her nieces' use of Facebook, reflecting on how it might affect them, "perhaps my nieces will find a new way to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation. Perhaps they will evolve through judicious deleting and updating of profile information, through the constant awareness of their public face." There is a valid point here. That is, Facebook users are so involved with their friends, public profile, and public persona that loneliness is non-existent. What happens to people without solitude and abilities to self-adjust/improve? They do not grow into adulthood. Peggy feels that Facebook eliminates individual growth through loneliness. Arising from this idea are a myriad of questions and conflicts. How does that affect the individual's future? How will the government play a role in limiting computer time? How can parents deter the use of social networking sites in order to allow their child solitude? Does Facebook pander towards self-awareness or selfishness? And just how much time do we spend on Facebook? Here's the graph: 15wwln-lede.graphic.350.jpg It's more than enough for us to be worried about the future. But, what does Peggy think about how this affects Facebook? Two words--THE END.

Test: Winograd

Winograd proof. I love this class. Test.