There are some fine references – in semiotics (meta-analysis), translation research (metadata about translation), and translation practice (rolling up all the content of a body of work into some new original [translated] piece) – to metatranslation. It is the last definition that I prefer, but all are important and related.
The new Global Voices drive to have parallel content generated in many languages suggests a partnership between meta, meat and silicon translation…
A friend I made just recently was trying to explain a fear of public exposure
— not precisely a passionate sense of privacy, as certain breaches
thereof were acceptable (being published in one’s own field, being
known for good work one had done, being a backup dancer on stage); but
a strong aversion to specific kinds of exposure (being published for a
lay audience, having comments published in a local paper, being a
singer on stage, having a web page, being written about publicly by
friends). It made me think of what a luxury this is; of all the people in the world who have no access to exposure, nor any notion of what it might mean to be ‘overexposed‘.
Reverends Mandell and Pierce gave sermons recently about survival in the modern world; specifically for children,
whose capacities to choose are frequently limited. Global Voices should
start including those of children — not yet old enough to have their
own sites, perhaps, but surely old enough
to think, react, journal, and speak. I know some people who would
like this idea; for instance, I would love to hear thoughts on the
matter from Rebecca. Mandell spoke of reaching out to children; Pierce published a sermon from his church in Lawrence, on sinning by omission, which I find significantly less compelling [how many omissions would I unmake, if I could? and how to prioritize among them?].
But reaching out, taking their voices seriously as we do those of adults, is a major step. Let us take it.
Joho wrote recently about distributed authority, providing trusted
views of Wikipedia content. An excerpt from my reply follows:
Distributed authority — in the ‘stamp and seal’
sense — is not my idea. And what I would like to see happen with research groups has
been suggested by others before me; there is simply growing interest in
it now. I want to make it easy for people who already work on and
review content in a field to do so in a way that directly improves
Wikipedia.
At the moment, individual authors ‘adopt’ certain articles and try
to keep them fresh and free of errors. And various organizations
maintain their own internal knowledge-bases with content that overlaps
a good deal with relevant Wikipedia articles
Rather than trying to hack an authority system into MediaWiki, you
can do something simpler to encourage both of the above : have groups
that maintain their own small clusters of articles — 10 or 20 or 100
— on a local wiki, with its own portal page. Give them an easy way to
offer their work for merging with WP, without requiring them to all
join the site. The edits they make are implicitly ‘approved’ by them.
This is not a good verification method within WP, however
software changes are required for that (and Seth’s suggestion is one
specific path one might take). At the moment, Nature can link to
revisions of 100 articles that they approve. But once you follow a link
through to a Nature-edited revision of [[DNA]], and follow a link to
another WP article, you’ve already returned to the realm of public
editing.
The motivation for this is a few professors and talented writers who
began editing on WP, but commented that editing Wikipedia directly can
be offensive and off-putting (they are readily offended by trolling,
and have no patience for even trivial wiki-lawyering).
We’re making progress towards Wikipedia 1.0, slowly but surely; I
think along the way we will improve both the default view of content
and the selection of optional views suggested above.
Feel like writing a research monograph? Want a muse to inspire you? Here are Wikipedia article requests gone unfilled for over a year.
An online complaint forum about all things Wikipedia, called the Wikipedia Review, has recently gone live.
It has a thriving community, and is about real experiences more than
rants or insults, which makes it fascinating to read. I’ve
learned interesting things from one or two honest contributors there;
though there is a lot of ranting that must be waded through.
There’s something refreshing about seeing a variety of complaints in
one place, somewhat organized. And in most complaints, a kernel
of truth. Now if only that forum would morph into what its name
suggests, and become an ambivalent review of all parts of the spectrum of WP experiences…
I have seen many estimates of the size
of Wikipedia’s community; all of them too low. And what surprises
me most of all is that noone cares much about the lack of real metrics
in their speech, their writing, their journalism, their research.
Okay, that last is going a bit far; many researchers are very careful
about defining their metrics and terms. But this is what makes
those which are not stick out so severely.
Here are some basic statistics, care of Erik Zachte’s scripts, the Wikimedia Foundation’s server farms, and over 100,000 active contributors over the past four years (user statistics often exclude the 15% of edits which come from editors without named accounts).
To the point of the user community:
Just to reiterate the casual power of thousands of zealous volunteers
with a variety of content-addictions, some of the scripted data above
has a hand-generated and hand-updated wiki cousin, with its own original additions.
As for where I personally draw the line at counting community size, I
would say the English Wikipedia has this year passed the
10,000-volunteer mark, and is currently around 20,000. We would
know better if we counted not only edits but page-views
per
user… there are those who edit infrequently but keep up with all
aspects of the community; and also many who edit occasionally but
haven’t taken
time to learn the community policies or norms; which one might discount.
I would estimate 60,000 in the ‘copyediting’ community (active
readers, familiar with the interface, acting as typo and vandalism
monitors; and anonymous contributors), and ten times again as many
regular readers – around 500,000.
For all languages combined : 40,000 volunteers, perhaps 120,000 in the
‘copyediting’ community (people in other langs are on average less
likely to understand that they can edit; which I would expect to grow more than linearly
with the size of the community and press coverage in that language),
and some 2M active readers.
There’s been some hubbub lately about the usefulness of anonymous
contributions to the information commons. In particular, Monday
saw a somewhat ad-hoc test of the effect on forcing account-creation on
the quality of contributions to the* English Wikipedia.
I have some statistics of my own to add about that particular
experiment. However, for the moment I would simply like to point
to a lovely Wikipedia contribution analysis, “Explaining Quality in Internet Collective Goods: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the case of Wikipedia” (pdf) by researcher Denise Anthony, who presented it this past Monday at MIT. Her research suggested to her that “the highest quality contributions come from the vast numbers of anonymous ‘Good Samaritans’ who contribute infrequently.”
* Note : the direct article is appropriate here because of the
“English” adjective before Wikipedia. For more detail, see my old reply
to JDL at Joho’s house.
