Harry Wood Blog

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!”