A comment from Cursor’s Richard Nash, who is working on Red Lemonade, a site for group review of publishing submissions with heatmap-style annotation (rather than having publishers manage the review process). He gave a great talk about why authors should review one another’s work, and why we already live in a world where we all manage the meaningful review processes.
We are lucky to have such a cool president. Anyone who takes the time to record a message for a public campaign to keep angsty teens from committing suicide is good in my book, but Obama really put some effort into this — it’s fantastic.
My dear cousin Simon (of Lynch / Eisinger / Design) is an inventive architect and the inspiration for some of my own passion for design work. His firm put together a showroom for Herman Miller recently, and over the summer it won two serious awards — the highest architecture award in New York State, and California’s state award for Adaptive Reuse. It’s nice to see this work recognized! See below for some view of it.
Herman Miller building interior
Front view of the building
Joseph Reagle is a Wikipedian and a researcher of social collaboration. He was an early fellow at the Berkman Center before I got involved there, worked on some interesting W3C projects, and joined NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication where he studied collaboration and Wikipedia. He turned some of his PhD work into a book on Wikipedia culture, which was just published this month.
“Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia” is an excellent read, suited for both my mother and for the armchair sociology buff. Having seen some of the detailed research that went into it, I was pleased to find it organizes that into clear narrative facets, each illuminating part of the whole, without creating artificial story arcs.
The book is careful with its use of language and terminology, self-conscious of when it is sharing a widely understood phrase and when it is creating one that it needs for clarity. It includes a comprehensive look at Wikipedian writings and coming-of-age debates during the heady period from 2004 to 2006, when much of the texture of current community structures was being formed. The writing is poetic at times, and I particularly appreciate its comparisons to similar projects across two millennia (we have indeed been collating and collaborating for a long time)
This is also the first extended research into Wikipedian culture to strike what I feel is a carefully-sourced (60 pages of endnotes!) and neutral perspective, giving it a certain… idempotence. In the tradition of early philosophical wikis, Wikipedia has long hosted a great deal of its own commentary on and analysis of itself and its community, and these existing analyses are given apprporiate historical prominence. Good Faith Collaboration builds on these on-wiki conversations to offer a balanced look at decision-making within the community, describing the varied and sometimes conflicting views held by groups within the community.
Kudos to Joseph for this work, which I suspect will become a launching point for future community analyses.
There is much more that could be accomplished with the open ten-year history of Wikipedia across its many languages, subprojects, and variants! One natural expansion (both for Wikipedia and for other long-lived transparent communities) would be to repeat a certain community analysis at regular intervals along a timeline. We can observe and classify cultural change with a precision and a visualization of propagating memes that would be impossible in more opaque communities (dominated by invisible communication). This was more true a few years ago than it is today — in the past year many significant documents or ideas were drafted in private, and perhaps not versioned at all, and many conversations left unarchived. If we are to continue to make this sort of learning and analysis available for future generations, we may need to refocus our energies on public and transparent communication channels.
Checking out what Tumblr does right and wrong: I posted a short series of meditations on joy, sharing and knowledge. Let me know what you think.
While still recovering from a Rein’s Deli hangover, I found myself the subject of the Ragesoss lens last weekend. Good energy, well captured.
@Ragesoss: It is a mathematical notion applied to ideas. A conceptual space around a theme is full of different concepts, each related to the theme in some way. Such a space can be described in terms of facets that can be used to describe a concept: for instance, you might describe ideas for laying out a garden in terms of their complexity, suitable climate, or total size… or many others. Complexity and size are sometimes linked. You can imagine the conceptual span of a set of facets, or their dependency on one another, as corrolaries of the span and independence of vectors being used as the basis for an abstract space.
A mesh is a limited set of elements that can be used to effectively describe an infinite space of ideas. Human languages are full of concept meshes. The easiest to discuss are one-dimensional meshes (ideas that span the spectrum of a single facet):
Higher-dimensional meshes include texture words (smooth, rough, bumpy, prickly, soft, firm, sticky… – covering facets of friction, give, tangible local structure, and more). Most higher-dimensional meshes in language are incomplete (we rarely form words for concepts whose realizations are not in common use).
If you define a metric for the distance between two points on a spectrum, you can construct an “equally-spaced” subdivision of the space, or a balanced mesh. This splits a space into a set of characteristic elements (here, concepts) or nodes which can be used to describe anything elsewhere in the space.
Choosing a metric is important and difficult. For instance, once we found a way to measure color by the wavelength of its light, we could ask for enough common color words such that every frequency of visible light is no more than 50nm from the wavelength of one of the characteristic colors. In practice, humans see different parts of the color spectrum with differing degrees of sensitivity, and we become familiar with certain constant colors in our environment . So while the rendered spectrum does not devote much space to Yellow or Orange (in contrast with green and red), we have many more characteristic words for yellows and blues than a straight “wavelength subdivision” would suggest.
It is also difficult to define facets that are independent of one another; but this is not necessary. It is mainly important for each facet to be easy to observe and agree on.
For a given metric, you can describe the fineness of a mesh in terms of the maximum distance from any concept to the closest characteristic element. (or sometimes twice that distance – as a description of the “largest” concept that could “slip through” the mesh without including any of the characteristic elements.) If you have different metrics for each facet, a synthetic combined metric must be created that is consistent with each.
A balanced mesh is then one in which the fineness of the mesh is essentially the same for all subsets of the conceptual space — so, a set of color words that provides equal facility in describing perceived colors at all points on the color spectrum. (Again, a suitable metric here might be one that stretches out the spectrum in regions perceived very well by the human eye, or colors that come up frequently in human life — the latter a metric that changes with social context.)
One can often have a clear definition of a mesh without having words for some of its characteristic elements. This happens often with a multifaceted space, where the intersection of well-known values of each facet is an unknown combination that has no word to describe it. One common way of constructing a balanced mesh involves creating a balanced mesh for each facet, and then defining a concept for every combination of those single-facet ideas. Building a “complete” set of characteristic concepts can be thought of as mesh completion. It is a way of thoroughly grokking a space of related concepts. And the fineness of the resulting mesh is a measure of how effectively one has used language, imagery, or other methods to illustrate the limitless variety possible within the constraints of that conceptual space.
(More after the jump…) (more…)
While sometimes confusing “books whose metadata has been scanned by Google” with “books that exist in the world”, a recent post on the G-blog about the size of the Google Books repository is delightful in its details. Thanks to Leonid Taycher for condensing that into a bit of light reading.
Sadly, no estimates are given on the long-tail number of works that are nowhere close to having their metadata scavenged; or the number of works in the world that have never been moved into a formal archive; or the average number of tomes per conceptual work. So it’s hard to gauge from this list anything like ‘what % of scanned books are available in freely licensed digital form online’.
But at least the Internet Archive collection is within two orders of magnitude. Now if only finished Wikibooks would make it into that collection… In related news, there are new docs posted for Open Library developers who want to dig into their archives. Congrats to Raj and team for the update.
Thanks to Lars for the central correction.
One of my brother’s latest projects, Chile 8.8, is a reflection on the act and goals of architectural reconstruction of cities, for this year’s Architecture Biennale. If you are near Venice while the 2010 Biennale is on, stop by the Chilean Pavillion and take a look.
17 soluciones arquitectónicas fueron seleccionadas para participar del encuentro titulado “La gente se encuentra en la arquitectura”… Los proyectos, que ya fueron construidos o lo serán en el corto plazo y se expondrán en un gran biombo de 130 metros, siguen tres pilares de reconstrucción: patrimonio, prefabricación y organización social.
17 architectural solutions (to destruction) were chosen to participate in the Biennale, where this year’s subject is “People Meet Architecture”. The projects, which have been or will shortly be built, and displayed on a 130 meter screen, focus on one of three pillars of reconstruction: heritage, prefabrication, and social structure.
After early months of interest and glory — peaking in a spike in mailing list traffic that was moderated for being too active — Citizendium’s growth all but shut down levelled off and has declined steadily since 2008. Now it is looking for a long-term home.
I have mixed feelings about Citizendium. I was excited about it in 2006 — at first blush, it offers a serious alternative for expert editors who want to contribute to free knowledge but feel unappreciated or unwelcome at Wikipedia. And in general, compatibly-licensed alternatives to Wikipedia are a very good thing – the whole point of using free licenses is to encourage reuse. But to succeed on the scale of its original dreams, Citizendium must overcome its insularity and make good on its core promise of quality. Not unlike Wikipedia, it is currently known as much for its humorous highlights as for its best work. And it faces the same problems with difficult and misguided editors — some who have quite solid credentials — only with a much smaller community to handle that workload.
I still hope for a proliferation of cousin projects, all competing to find the best way to spur collaboration around free knowledge. There is so much to explore in the way of how to create welcoming communities for different audiences of writers and creators. Community atmosphere, and a limitation in the types of knowledge that can be easily shared, are among Wikipedia’s major bottlenecks. It is welcoming to a narrow[ing?] audience, and if this does not change it may face its own dramatic slowdown in participation – more joyful models are welcome. (My recent favorite, in style, tools, and atmosphere: fotopedia.)
The questions that inspire Citizendium remain: How can we expand collaborative production of educational works to topics that require rare expertise in a field? How can we verify new works as quickly as they are produced, and how much does this speed depend on the commonality of the knowledge involved?
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Read this transcript of a great public speech about how to do great science, by R. W. Hamming. This sort of good advice is timeless… as are many of his works.
At TED Global. (The original Zuck, of course.)
Waray-Waray Wikipedia, started in 2005, welcomed its 15,000th article recently. It had to do with Possibly The End of Life As We Know It.
Mitchell Charity recently quoted to me from Lant Pritchett‘s essay, “Long-Term Global Challenges in education: Are There Feasible Steps Today?” – Ch.3 of RAND’s Shaping Tomorrow Today: Near-Term Steps Towards Long-Term Goals.
A fun quote:
So, a key question is, “Is each annual 100 million–strong cohort emerging from completion of basic education adequately equipped for its lifelong participation in the relevant society, polity, and economy?” The answer is, “No one has the slightest idea.” Really. Not the slightest idea[…]
I wonder how RAND chooses the areas it tackles for long-term global planning. How does one go about finding ‘documents like this’ (e.g., long-term plans for educational purpose) in a meaningful way? Tony Pryor, call your office.
The elections results are out, and I will be serving the community as a Trustee for the next two years. I am looking forward to the challenge; thank you to those who trusted me with their vote, and congratulations to Ting and Kat – it is an honor to represent the community alongside them.
Thank you also to Philippe and the elections team, and to all candidates who took time to run. I was particularly glad to see Góngora running, as a new face in meta-affairs, and I hope to see more participation in meta discussion by active es:wp contributors.
I will help the Board be more open. I have revived the Wikimedia meetings page for suggested agenda items – please leave your ideas and comments there, in any language. (I know this is a tough thing to request in a monolingual blog. Suggestions for making this blog more accessible are welcome.) I will post my own thoughts about agenda items there in advance of future Board meetings. One of my first efforts will be getting all foundation resolutions and policies translated into Wikimedia’s core languages.
The next one is coming up in a few weeks, during Wikimania – I don’t officially become a Board member until we meet. I am looking forward to Wikimania, and hope to see some of you there!
I have also updated the old Wikimedia Reports page, as one way to better coordinate organize information – please help add new reports to it, and translate it into other languages.
Disambiguate has been a somewhat obscure term for ‘specify’ for ages. And the noun form, disambiguation, has been used even more sparingly. At some point in the last century, perhaps in the 1950s, it became a popular term in computational linguistics. And before that it was basically only used by one person, writing about logic and semantics in the early 19th century. All of this sprang to my mind because of the tremendous popularity of the word in and through Wikipedia. In the encyclopedia, it is the canonical way to describe the clarification of an ambiguous term, the indication of type used to specify the context of an article title.
Google n-grams and other public domain searches suggest disambiguation was not popular at all before the 50s. It is used in quotes in a 1954 federal court case, expressly referencing the earlier work of the one philosopher and author who consciously used it for a specific purpose: Jeremy Bentham. But who introduced it into the jargon of linguistics? And to the original point, who introduced it to Wikipedia?
The word’s recent history touches on Rush, Nirvana, Invictus, Larry, and Magnus… and started with a policy page on Naming conventions/Disambiguating.
Do you know people who are currently doing statistical and social research about Wikipedia, or have good ideas about this they haven’t had time to work on?
I’m trying to build support for continual, detailed statistics generation from Wikipedia data, possibly at the Harvard-MIT Data Center. There is still time to come up with good ideas for lightning talks and discussion groups at Wikimania 2009 this summer in Buenos Aires. And there is a research-related Wikimedia job available starting this summer.
I am uncomfortable with many of the details of said job posting*, but as long as its up the best people should apply.
Our interconnected global economy is built on the illusion of trust. Gautama himself would be impressed by how far we have advanced the texture of societal illusion. While there are certainly many non-illusory sources of trust, the trust most modern men have in our financial instruments and currencies is based on a blind association of “interest rates”, “inflation”, “market valuation” and similar concepts with a hazy set of economic laws, as though they were fundamental laws in the sense that one discoveres Mathematical or Physical Laws. Not social norms that could change on short notice; not starting rules of nomic games of risk and manipulation; not Massively Multilayered Online Resource-Permuting Guidelines, hundreds of indirections removed from the original social norm of personal credit and unenforcable on any large scale. They are perceived instead as Laws, discoverable and immutable. Not quite.
For better or worse, we live in fascinating times. Thanks to this motif of fright, many once-in-a-lifetime financial decisions are being made every day. A few recent moves by the US Federal Reserve Bank, striving to maintain order:
Updates as the week progresses. The large market swings are reminiscent of the month before Black Monday… so stay tuned, relax, stick to insured banks, and (remind your loved ones to) stay out of the stock market.
Liquidity pyramid diagrams, fractional reserves, and other comments below the fold. (more…)
