Harry Wood Blog

Last week the London Wiki Wednesdays thing kicked off again, which I’m pleased about. I enjoyed this regular meet-up of wiki and web 2.0 enthusiasts. It was happening monthly for a while, but this is the first time we’ve managed to get together in 2008. Apparently David Terrar has been struggling to find people to host it, so if anyone knows anyone who has a big (~40 capacity) room with a projector, we’d love to use it (in exchange for appreciative blog links). Big thanks to David Terrar for managing to bring it together again, and special thanks this time since he paid for the food & drinks himself! I showed my appreciation by drinking all the booze and rambling to him on the tube on the way home! And thanks to Alek for hosting us again.

Andreas Rindler’s OmCollab looked interesting. It’s a blending of MediaWiki with Wordpress and bookmarking tools. Some nice customisations, obviously including skinning, but also dropping in various extensions for added toolbar buttons, category tag clouds, easy attachments etc.

Andy Roberts pointed out that wordpress is adding a ‘revisions’ feature, which is rather wiki-like. This kicked off a discussion about using wordpress as a wiki , whether it can be regarded as a wiki, and whether you want to use it that way. Without actually playing with it, it’s not clear whether it would support open editing, how it would relate with the “publish” button, or what would appear in RSS feeds. Personally I don’t expect wordpress to become a wiki. It is fundamentally a blogging tool, and this little revision feature does not represent a dramatic departure from that. But it is nod towards the wiki way of thinking, and this is exciting because wordpress is so extremely widespread, with a colossal installed-based. That’s a lot of users who may start to feel more comfortable when they see a history page in a wiki interface.

People pointed out that this wordpress-wiki wouldn’t support wiki style links, that is, links which are (perhaps) created via some [[square brackets]] or CamelCAse, to create a new page by the same title, or to point to a potential new page. In my opinion this a defining feature of the wiki concept. It is the linking approach which allows wikis to function as a gloriously simple but powerful knowledge management tool, and can also lead to a characteristic wiki sprawling mess in the absence of careful wiki-gardening. Conventional HTML linking features won’t cut it, in my opinion. On the face of it, the only thing which matters about a wiki, is that you can edit a page really easily. But for me the wiki linking aspect, cannot be dismissed.

Green Hat has bought Solstice Software, a U.S. based testing software company.

“Solstice has always been an innovative company, and this acquisition will not only extend Green Hat’s technology but also provide North American sales, development and product support, something our existing North American customers have requested. We are delighted to welcome the staff of Solstice to the Green Hat family,” said Peter Cole, Green Hat’s Founder.

While I’m out consulting on site, this isn’t effecting me much, but it sounds like there’s a lot of activity back in the office, working on integrating Solstice and Green Hat. Lots of work on integrating our software offerings too. But hey… it should be easy. Integration is what we do.   …well we’ll see.

Anyway expansion is always fun. We’ll probably bring that whole team onto the wiki (Green Hat’s internal knowledge-bank) so I wonder if we’ll see some good transatlantic wiki knowledge sharing in the coming months. We can’t easily meet face-to-face, and there’s only so much knowledge sharing that can be achieved over email/skype, so this kind of thing is where wikis can really excel. We already find it quite helpful on occasions for sharing/coordinating with our people in Belfast and Australia… and Ealing.  But I’m hoping that there will be a wiki enthusiast or two among the new joiners.

There are 341 wikipedia users who have added themselves to Category:Wikipedians in London. I wanted to know which of these people had been active recently. My guess was that a small minority of these people were actually still around in the wikipedia community.

I wrote a little bot in java which harvested the information. I needed the date of their most recent wiki edit. Ranking the users by this metric, it turns out I was wrong. About half of these people have edited this month (pretty recently), and the vast majority have made edits within the last year. I guess people who go to the trouble of adding a ‘Living in London’ userbox, tend to be quite dedicated, and likely to stick around in the community.

My plan was to send direct messages to the active users, to make sure they know about the next London Wikipedia Meetup. My original idea was to whittle down the list, to eliminate what I thought would be the large majority of inactive users. But this hasn’t helped me whittle down the list at all! It’s a more helpful ranking than an alphabetical list though:

London wikipedians ranked by most recent edit

Fun to play with developing bots too.

We went for a sunday lunch pub meet up with some wikipedia enthusiasts last Sunday. It took us a while to get this organised (and I even ended up doing a bit of the organising) but eventually the turn out was pretty good.

In the pub we had a few others like me, but actually most were wikipedia sysops and some were even more “powerful” within the chaotic organisation of wikipedia. I’m an enthusiastic wikipedia contributor, or at least I’m enthusiastic about what wikipedia represents. I am fascinated by wiki technology, and the processes that it facilitates within wikipedia (the most extreme example of a wiki).  I would say I have a deep understanding of this, but actually as far contributing goes, I only dip in and edit articles briefly when I spot somewhere I can make a quick improvement.

I met James F. who is on the wikipedia arbitration committee, and Theresa knott who used to be, and WJBscribe who is current chair of the mediation committee. What this basically means is, these people dedicate a lot of time and energy into keeping wikipedia going. These are the people who essentially have the “final say” with a calming voice of reason, when disputes turn nasty. I have a lot of admiration for them, but I wouldn’t want to take on the task myself.

What do I mean by “disputes”? Wikipedia encourages good will among contributors, as it opens up every article to public editing. Anyone can edit anything, and provided people act in good faith, that might be the end of the matter; the encyclopaedia just gets built… bit-by-bit, collaboratively. Remarkably this actually works a lot of the time. Unfortunately this is not always a harmonious collaboration. You may have to engage in a discussion to persuade others not to revert your edit. Where there is discussion, there may be debate, which leads to arguments, which lead to furious rows. Still, the people involved in such a row are allowed to edit the articles. To prevent the disputes raging out of control across the community, there are hierarchies and layers of permissions, and processes for “mediation” and ultimately “arbitration”. The people on the mediation and arbitration committee must regularly deal with people who will argue their cases politely (otherwise they would just be blocked), but who are simmering with anger and vitriol.

Seth Finkelstein’s critical description of wikipedia as an “elaborate hierarchical structure which is infested with cliques and factional conflicts” isn’t so inaccurate, but what does he expect? It’s an open community of volunteer editors in which the voices of sanity and calm need to somehow triumph when debates erupt. Perhaps he could suggest a better way of organising it (Instead he seems to be deeply concerned about the state of Jimmy Wales’ ex-girlfriend’s biography article). The mediation and arbitration committee have a kind of a position of power at the top of some hierarchy, but it looks like hard emotionally draining work. Clearly they are an essential part of what allows wikipedia to keep running smoothly. I am grateful that some people have the energy to do it.

Anyway… Those guys obviously enjoyed the opportunity to meet up face-to-face, chatting enthusiastically about organisational voting processes, and other such topics which went way over my head. The rest of us had some more down-to-earth chit-chat about general topics of interests. I briefly showed people some OpenStreetMap stuff before laptop battery died. This was all good fun. Hopefully we can arrange another London meet-up pretty soon.

I spotted a minor typing error in the Apache JMeter user manual. Most people wouldn’t worry too much about this, but I thought “This is a nice open project. I’d like to help out by fixing this typo”. I had thought that this might involve finding a file in a CVS repo and then submitting a patch, in which case… yeah maybe I won’t bother. The barrier is way too high. Too much hassle.

But to my delight I found that the manual was replicated (through some snazzy automated process no doubt) in a wiki. A simple search for the mispelling revealed it

“Great! Wikis are easy and openly editable! I’ll have this typo fixed in a jiffy”. Unfortunately not. Since web spammers moved in on the wiki scene its become increasingly difficult to keep wikis openly editable. It’s not impossible, but it involves deployment of a lot of anti-spam filters and careful stewardship. Most wiki administrators dont bother with that. Instead they raise the barrier by requiring registration and login to edit. This is very sad really. Due to spamming scumbags, these sites become less easy and accessible.

This typo fix is a classic example of the kind of “drive-by contribution” which you will miss out on if you require registration. For the vast majority of typing pedants, you’ve raised the barrier too high. There’s no way a normal person would bother to go through a registration process just to fix a typing error.

But I’m no normal person. I’m a wiki enthusiast. I’ve registered on hundreds of wikis just to change something minor. “If I don’t fix this typo nobody will”. So I head over the registration page and fill in the details, but what’s this? There’s a field which says “ASF = ?”. I dont know what it means, but I can feel the barrier raising. Is this typo really worth the hassle? I enter “what?” and submit.

The message “Incorrect expansion of acronym ASF” comes back. OK… so as I had actually suspected, this field is actually a kind of primitive captcha. A little puzzle which makes it more difficult for spammers to automatically register themselves on the wiki. It’s the next irritating line of defense, necessitated by particularly sneaky new breed of spammers who automate the registration process and keep coming back and spamming with new users every time they are blocked. In this case I am supposed to be filling in what ASF stands for. An automated spammer would struggle with this, but a human… well actually in this case a human would struggle with it too, so I think whoever set up this captcha maybe didn’t quite get the idea of it.

The barrier has raised higher. Not only do I need to register on the wiki, but I now need to know what ASF stands for (not to mention decoding the fact that this is what the field means) I’m thinking “This is getting silly. The typo is definately not worth it.”

“…ooh but what does ASF stand for? I’m actually quite curious now. Is this some basic knowledge that any human should have?”. I ponder it breifly but nothing comes to mind. In fact it ocurrs to me that there surely must be several different things that ASF stands for. “Which definition is it expecting? Probably the most widely known and accepted use of ASF, which according to google is… ‘Advanced Systems Format’. Never heard of it. Fine. Whatever. Paste it in…”

“Incorrect expansion of acronym ASF”

“&#*$*£&+ Fine! You know what! Screw your manual. You can keep your typo and I hope you choke on it!”