How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (and Wikipedia articles)

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was selected as presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain's running mate on Friday, and her Wikipedia article has seen a predictable explosion in editing activity. From the article's creation in 2005, up until the announcement on Friday, the article had been edited something like 900 times. Since then, however, it's been edited nearly 2000 times again.

What's more interesting is how the article was edited before the announcement was made. Ben Yates mentions this NPR story detailing edits made to the page by a user called Young Trigg, who may or may not have been Palin herself (or someone on her staff). But Young Trigg was not the only person editing the article.

The Washington Post reports on some analysis done by "Internet monitoring" company Cyveillance, which found that Palin's article was edited more heavily in the days leading up to the announcement than any of the articles on the other prospects for the nomination. A similar pattern emerged in relation to the articles on the frontrunners for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination: Joe Biden's article was edited more heavily than the other potential picks in the leadup to his selection as Obama's running mate last week.

Also similar were the types of edits being made: both Palin and Biden's articles saw many footnoting and other accuracy-type edits in the leadup to the announcements of their selection. As a final piece of intrigue, the editors making these edits about Palin and Biden were far more likely to also be actively editing McCain and Obama's articles respectively than were the editors editing articles on the other potential nominees.

There are at least two explanations for these patterns. The first is that the two campaigns, knowing full well who the nominees would be, were editing the articles in advance of the announcement to ensure that they were accurate (or to take the cynical view, to ensure that they were favourable), knowing full well that Wikipedia would be one of the major sources of information for the public - and for journalists and campaign staff too - following the announcements.

The alternative is more interesting, to my mind. Cyveillance, who did the analysis, is usually in the business of data mining in the business world, aiming to collate disparate sources of public information to predict financial and commercial events before they are publicly announced. Wikipedia may be performing exactly the same function: a variety of editors collating disparate pieces of information in a far more powerful way than any individual could. It's already (un)conventional wisdom that the betting markets are equal or better predictors of elections than opinion polls are: a basic application of the efficient market hypothesis. In a similar way, high profile, highly edited Wikipedia articles like these are the marketplace of the information economy.

Userpage Google envy

Brianna Goldberg, a Canadian journalist with the National Post, wrote on Friday about her efforts to become the number one Google result for her name. Her quest was sparked by discovering that the Wikipedia user page of another Brianna Goldberg was ensconced in the top spot.

The journalist Goldberg obtained advice from search engine optimization experts on methods for advancing her ranking, but still had difficulty displacing the userpage. Moreover, the article on the journalist comes in second to the userpage in results from Wikipedia. Wikipedia user pages are certainly highly visible: every time you sign an edit, you're creating a link to your user page.

This relates to a discussion from last month on the mailing list about whether user pages (and certain other types of pages) should be indexed by search engines at all. The Wikimedia sites already instruct search engines not to crawl certain pages, including deletion debates, requests for arbitration pages and requests for adminship, but there have regularly been calls for more types of pages to be restricted (see here for example).

So, should user pages be blocked from search engine crawlers?

Kno contest

Google's Knol was opened to the public last week, to much fanfare. When Knol was announced in December last year, it was immediately compared to Wikipedia, and the comparisons keep coming now that it has launched. However, as I wrote at the time, the comparison seemed to be wide of the mark in many important ways. Now that Knol has launched and we can see how it will actually work, I think the accuracy of the comparison is still not borne out.

The three key differences I noted at the time were the lack of collaboration in writing knols, the plurality of knols (more than one on the same subject) and that knols will not necessarily be free content, differences which go to the core of what makes Wikipedia what it is.

As it turns out, Knol does provide a couple of options for collaboration, allowing authors to moderate contributions from the public, or allow public contributions to go live immediately, wiki-style. The other mode is closed collaboration, but it does allow for multiple authors at the invitation of the original author.

As the sample knol hinted, Knol does provide for knols to be licensed under the CC-BY 3.0 licence by default, and allows authors to choose the CC-BY-NC 3.0 licence, or to reserve all rights to the content. However, these are the only licences available; in particular, no copyleft licences are available.

Of course, the thing to remember is that Knol is an author-oriented service, so even if an author selects open collaboration and the CC-BY licence, it appears that they can change their minds at any time, and, for example, close collaboration on a previously open knol (I might need to do some closer reading of the terms of service, but it would also appear possible to revert the Knol-published version to all rights reserved model, too).

The author-oriented approach is apparent in most of the features of Knol. On a knol's page you don't see links to similar knols, or knols on related topics (as you would on a Wikipedia article) you see links to knols written by the same author. Knols aren't arranged with any kind of information structure like Wikipedia categories, or even tags; the URLs are hierarchical, but there knols are gathered under the author's name.

No, Knol is not a competitor to Wikipedia (or at least, it's competing for a different market segment). It's more a companion to another Google property, Blogger. It's a publishing platform, but not for diary-style, in-the-moment transient posts; it's for posts that are meant to be a little more timeless, one-off affairs. Google say so at their Blogger Buzz blog:

"Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic. The tone is more formal, and, while it's easy to update the content and keep it fresh, knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content or threading. Know how to fix a leaky toilet, but don't want to write a blog about fixing up your house? In that case, Knol is for you."

Some of the content on Knol might start off looking like Wikipedia articles, but over time I'll bet that the average "tone" of knols will find a middle ground between blogs and Wikipedia's "encyclopaedic" tone as people come to use Knol as a companion to blogging.

Rambot redux

FritzpollBot is a name you're likely to be hearing and seeing more of: it's a new bot designed to create an article on every single town or village in the world that currently lacks one, of which there are something like two million. The bot gained approval to operate last week, but there's currently a village pump discussion underway about it.

FritzpollBot has naturally elicited comparisons with rambot, one of the earliest bots to edit Wikipedia. Operated by Ram-Man, first under his own account and then under a dedicated account, rambot created stubs on tens of thousands of cities and towns in the United States starting in late 2002.

It's hard for people now to get a sense of what rambot did, but its effects even now can be seen. All told, rambot's work represented something close to a doubling of Wikipedia's size in a short space of time (the bulk of the work, more than 30,000 articles, being done over a week or so in October 2002). The noticeable bump that it produced in the total article count can still be seen in present graphs of Wikipedia's size. Back then the difference was huge. I didn't join the project until two years after rambot first operated, but even then around one in ten articles had been started by rambot, and one would run into them all the time.

During its peak, rambot was adding articles so fast that the growth rate per day achieved in October 2002 has never been outstripped, as can be seen from the graph below (courtesy Seattle Skier at Commons):

There was some concern about rambot's work at the time: see this discussion about rambot stubs clogging up the Special:Random system, for example. There were also many debates about the quality and content of the stubs, many of which contained very little information other than the name and location of the town.

The same arguments that were made against rambot at the time, mainly to do with the project's ability to maintain so many new articles all at once, are being made again with respect to FritzpollBot. In the long run, the concerns about rambot proved to be ill-founded, as the project didn't collapse, and most (if not all) of the articles have now been absorbed into the general corpus of articles. The value of its work was ultimately acknowledged, and now there are many bots performing similar tasks.

In addition to the literal value of rambot's contributions, there's a case to argue that the critical mass of content that rambot added kickstarted the long period of roughly exponential growth that Wikipedia enjoyed, lasting until around mid-2006. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that having articles on every city or town in the United States, even if many were just stubs, was a significant boon for attracting contributors. From late 2002 on, every American typing their hometown or their local area into their favourite search engine would start to turn up Wikipedia articles among the results, undoubtedly helping to attract new contributors. The stubs served as a base for redlinks, which in turn helped build the web and generate an imperative to create content. Repeating the process for the rest of the world, as FritzpollBot promises to do, would thus be an incredibly valuable step.

Furthermore, as David Gerard observes, when rambot finished its task the project had taken its first significant step towards completeness on a given topic. Rambot helped the project make its way out of infancy; now in adolescence, systemic bias is one of the major challenges it faces, and hopefully FritzpollBot can help existing efforts in this regard. Achieving global completeness across a topic area as significant as the very places that humans live would be a massive accomplishment for the project.

Let's see those Ws really cover the planet.

Wikipedia to be studied in New South Wales from 2009

The Board of Studies in the Australian state of New South Wales, which sets the syllabus for high school students across the state, has included Wikipedia as one of the texts available for study in its "Global Village" English electives, according to The Age.

The new syllabus will apply from 2009-2012, and (certain selected parts of) Wikipedia will be one of four texts available in the elective. It will be up to teachers to choose which text is studied, so there are no guarantees that Wikipedia will actually be studied in New South Wales :) According to the syllabus documentation (DOC format), the other alternatives are the novel The Year of Living Dangerously, about the downfall of Sukarno and the rise of Suharto in Indonesia in 1965; the play A Man with Five Children; and the modern classic film The Castle.

I think formalised educational study of Wikipedia is going to be very important in the future, as the reality of its success and its widespread use coincides with a long period of neglect of skills in critically evaluating source material in many schools, certainly in this country. Thankfully the people at the Board of Studies seem to get this. There's also a good quote from Greg Black at the non-profit educational organisation education.au:

"The reality is that schools and schools systems are going to have to engage with this whether they like it or not... what the kids really need to learn about is whether it's fit for purpose, the context, the relevance, whether there's an alternative view - an understanding about how to use information in an effective way."

And, just for good measure The Age article features a quote from Privatemusings, exhorting students to "plug in". Indeed, some good advice.

Wikipedia's downstream traffic

We've been hearing for a while about where Wikipedia's traffic comes from, but here are some new stats from Heather Hopkins at Hitwise on where traffic goes to after visiting Wikipedia. Hopkins had produced some similar stats back in October 2006, and it's interesting to compare the results.

Wikipedia gets plenty of traffic from Google (consistently around half) and indeed other search engines, but what's interesting is that nearly one in ten users go back to Google after visiting Wikipedia, making it the number one downstream destination. Yahoo! is also a popular post-Wikipedia destination.

It was nice to see that Wiktionary and the Wikimedia Commons both make it into the top twenty sites visited by users leaving Wikipedia.

Hopkins also presents a graph illustrating destinations broken down by Hitwise's categories. More than a third of outbound traffic is to sites in the "computers and internet" category, and around a fifth to sites in the "entertainment" category, which probably ties in with the demographics of Wikipedia readers, and the general popularity of pop culture, internet and computing articles on Wikipedia.

Hopkins makes another interesting point on the categories, that large portions of the traffic in each category are to "authority" sites:

"Among Entertainment websites, IMDB and YouTube are authorities. Among Shopping and Classifieds it's Amazon and eBay. Among Music websites it's All Music Guide For Sports it's ESPN. For Finance it's Yahoo! Finance. For Health & Medical it's WebMD and United States National Library of Medicine."

Similarly, Doug Caverly at WebProNews states that the substantial proportion of traffic returning to search engines after visiting Wikipedia "probably indicates that folks are continuing their research elsewhere", and this ties in well with Hopkins' observation about the strong representation of reference sites.

All of this suggests that Wikipedia is being used the way that it is really meant to be used: as a first reference, as a starting point for further research.

Protection and pageviews

Henrik's traffic statistics viewer, a visual interface to the raw data gathered by Domas Mituzas' wikistats page view counter, has generated plenty of interest among the Wikimedia community recently. Last week Kelly Martin, discussing the list of most viewed pages, wondered how many page views are of protected content; that thought piqued my interest, so I decided to dust off the old database and calculator and try to put a number to that question.

The data comes from the most viewed articles list covering the period from 1 February 2008 to 23 February 2008. I've used that data, and data on protection histories from the English Wikipedia site, to come up with some stats on page protection and page views. There are some limitations: I don't have gigabytes of bandwidth available, so some of the stats (on page views in particular) are estimates, and protection logs turn out to be pretty difficult to parse, so I've focused on collecting duration information rather than information on the type of protection (full protection, semi-protection etc). Maybe that could be the focus of a future study.

There were 9956 pages in the most viewed list for February 1 to February 23 2008. Excluding special pages, images and non-content pages, there were 9674 content pages (articles and portals) in the list. Interestingly, only 3617 of these pages have ever been protected, although each page that has been protected at least once has, on average, been under protection nearly three times.

Protection statistics

Only 1223 (12.6%, about an eighth) of the pages were edit protected at some point during the sample period, 902 of those for the entire period (a further 92 were move protected only at some point, 69 of those for the entire period). Each page that had some period of protection was protected for, on average, 82.9% of the time (just under 20 days), though if the pages protected for the whole period are excluded, the average period spent protected was only 34.8% of the time (just over eight days).

The following graph shows the distribution of the portion of the sample period that pages spent protected, rounded down to the nearest ten percent:


The shortest period of protection during the period was for Vicki Iseman, protected on 21 February by Stifle, who thought better of it and unprotected just 38 seconds later.

Among the most viewed list for February, the page that has been protected the longest is Swastika, which has been move protected continuously since 1 May 2005 (more than 1050 days). The page that has been edit protected the longest is Marilyn Manson (band), which has been semi-protected since 5 January 2006 (more than 800 days).

Interestingly, the average length of a period of edit protection across these articles (through their entire history) is around 46 days and 16 hours, whereas the average length of a period of move protection is lower, at 41 days 14 hours. I had expected the average bout of move protection to last longer, although almost all edit protections do include move protections.

The next graph shows the distribution of protection lengths across the history of these pages, for periods of protection up to 100 days in length (the full graph goes up to just over 800 days):

Note the large spikes in the distribution at seven and fourteen days, the smaller spike at twenty-one days and the bump from twenty-eight to thirty-one days, corresponding to protections of four weeks or one month duration (MediaWiki uses calendar months, so one month's protection starting January will be 31 days long, whereas one month's protection starting September will be 30 days long).

The final graph shows the average length of protection periods (orange) and the number of protection periods applied (green) in each month, over the last four years:

At least on these generally popular articles, protection got really popular towards the end of 2006 into the beginning of 2007, and again a year later. However, it seems that protection lengths peaked around the middle of 2007 and have been in decline since then.

Protection and pageviews

What really matters here though is the pageviews. The 9674 content pages in the most viewed list were viewed a total of 805,569,269 times over the relevant period. The 1223 pages that were edit protected for at least part of the period were viewed a total of 270,057,550 times (33.5%), with approximately 247 million of these pageviews coming while the pages were protected.

This is a really substantial number of pageviews, however, this number includes the Main Page, which alone accounts for more than 114 million of those pageviews. Leaving the Main Page out of the equation gives a healthier figure of around 133 million views to protected pages during the relevant period (and remember, this is only counting pages on the most viewed list).

Conclusions

Although only one in eight of the pages in the most viewed list were protected at some point during the relevant period, they tended to be higher-profile ones, accounting for one third of the page views. The pages that were protected at some point tended to be protected alot of the time, three-quarters of them for the entire sample period. This certainly fits with what many people have already suspected, that a small pool of high-profile articles attract plenty of attention in the form of both page protection and page views.

It will be interesting to do some more analysis on the history of page protection. Based on just this small sample, it seems that average protection lengths are trending downwards, which could well be something to do with the advent of timed protection. Hopefully I'll have some more insights to come.

Beware corners

I'm sure that everyone who follows the news around Wikipedia will be aware of the latest controversy to gain attention in the media, namely the dispute about the inclusion of certain images in Wikipedia's article on Muhammad. Much of the external attention has focused on an online petition that calls for the removal of the images which, at the time of writing, has more than 200,000 signatures.

The debate so far has been understandably robust. Unfortunately, issues like these tend to harden positions, and push people towards the extremes. Consider a recent example: the seventeen Danish newspapers who, in the wake of the arrest of three men suspected of planning to assassinate Kurt Westergaard, author of one of the cartoons at the heart of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, republished the cartoons in retaliation.

Likewise, positions are being hardened in this debate among both supporters and opponents of the images. The relevant talk pages are remarkably free of comments (from either side) even contemplating compromise. The Foundation is receiving emails on the one hand giving ultimatums that the images be removed, and on the other exhorting the Foundation not to "give in" to "these muslims [sic]".

Retreating into corners like this is contrary to the ethos of Wikipedia, which operates on open discussion in pursuit of neutrality. So just as the supporters of the images are asking opponents to challenge their assumptions, so too should the supporters be prepared to challenge their own.

The first assumption that should be questioned is that the images are automatically of encyclopaedic value. Images have little value in an encyclopaedia unless used in a relevant context and given sufficient explanation. Take this image, for example. An interesting image, but unless it is explained that it appears in Rashid al-Din's 14th century history Jami al-Tawarikh, and the observation made that it is thought to be the earliest surviving depiction of Muhammad, it lacks its true significance. We have a whole article on depictions of Muhammad. While some of the images in it are discussed directly, many are merely presented in a gallery, without much text to indicate their importance or relevance.

The second assumption worth revisiting is the assumption that, since the images were created by Muslim artists, then there are no neutral point of view problems. This view overlooks the fact that there are many different traditions within Islam, not only religious ones but artistic ones also. The Almohads, for example, with their Berber and eventual Spanish influences, had vastly different cultural and artistic influences than the Mongol, Turkic and Persian influenced Timurids. The Fatimids of Mediterranean Africa had different influences again from the Kurdish Ayyubids.

The Commons gallery for Muhammad contains an abundance of medieval Persian and Ottoman depictions, a small handful of Western depictions, but only one calligraphic depiction, and no architectural ones. Calligraphy is extremely significant in Islamic art, given the primacy of classical Arabic as a liturgical language in all Islamic traditions. It's worth considering why there is such an over-representation of Persian and Ottoman works, and such a dearth of works from other Islamic traditions. It's worth considering for a moment whether the Western preference for natural representations, as opposed to the abstract representations preferred in most Islamic traditions, has informed the predominance of physical depictions of Muhammad in the English Wikipedia and on Commons.

These images should not be removed altogether; many come from historically significant works, and represent a significant artistic tradition. But the images - as with any other content on Wikipedia - ought to be used in appropriate and expected contexts, and ought not be used exclusively or primarily to illustrate these articles, but should be accompanied by images representative of other traditions.

Most of all, discussions on these questions should proceed openly and freely, and all participants should make an effort to question their assumptions, and move away from their corners.

Knol worries

Last week Google announced an invite-only trial of a new tool called Knol (their name for a "unit of knowledge") to allow people to write an information page on a subject which can then be rated, reviewed or commented on by others. The central idea, as Google's VP of Engineering Udi Manber put it, is authorship:

"Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content."

You can see a sample knol here (isn't everyone just itching to edit out that spelling mistake in the first sentence?).

Most of the press coverage of Knol is positing it as a competitor to Wikipedia, but is it really? We won't know what Knol will really be like until it is open to the public (presuming it makes it out of private beta), but from the looks of things it differs markedly from Wikipedia in all of the most important ways that Wikipedia is unique.

Firstly, knols won't be collaboratively written: Google says that the Knol platform will include "strong community tools", enabling the general unwashed to submit changes to knols (they use the name for individual articles too) as well as review, rate and comment on them, but ultimately the content of knols will be controlled by their original authors. Obviously, this is different from Wikipedia's collaborative wiki editing model under which no-one owns articles.

Secondly, there will likely be multiple knols on any given subject: as they say in the Knol announcement, it will be Google's job to appropriately rank knols in search results. Presumably they'll make use of the rating and reviewing tools in the platform as well as standard metrics like PageRank to try to work out which knol really is the most authoritative on a subject. Again, this is clearly different from Wikipedia, with its single-voice, neutral point of view system.

Thirdly, knols will not necessarily be free-content: while the sample knol mentioned above has a CC-BY 3.0 licence displayed on it, there are no indications that such licencing will be required, and Knol's "author control" vibe probably indicates that each author will get to choose the licence for their knols.

Kevin Newcomb at Search Engine Watch thinks a better comparison for Knol is Squidoo, and to an extent Mahalo, "since it allows users to build authority and sign their work [and aims] to build content pages that rank highly in search engines." Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land also draws the comparison between Knol and Squidoo, and suggests that Knol is more likely an attempt by Google to carve out a niche of its own in the 'knowledge aggregation' industry rather than an effort to compete directly with any of the projects in the field.

However, it's perhaps best to think of the Knol proposal less as a project and more as a platform: Rafe Needleman at Webware compares Knol with Google's existing text publishing platform, Blogger, though with "Digg-like elements". Knol authors will build reputation, like blog authors (though Knol will be more about discrete articles rather than a stream of them), and users will rate and review competing knols in much the way that Digg and similar link-sharing sites operate. I think this is the best comparison, and fits well with the strong focus on individuality and authorship, and on Google's planned hands-off approach, in the Knol announcement. There's certainly a niche available for this kind of publishing.

So, presuming Knol goes public one day, it may well garner a significant slice of search results and a place in the knowledge business, but with its author-driven multiple-voice model and basis as essentially a publishing platform, it is more likely to be a complement to Wikipedia than a competitor.