Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

That’s the question Seth Anthony asked Wikipedia’s data. From my notes of his Wikimania talk…Seth first looked at a sample of 250 recent edits:

• Outside article namespace 28% (various administrative frou fra?)
• Article talk namespace 10%
• Vandalism 5%
• 45% tweaking minor small changes, stylistic.
• Substantive changes, additions 10%
• Creating new articles 2%

Looking just at “high-content” edits, that last 12%:

• Not one by a Wkipedia admin. (They’re too busy elsewhere, Seth guesses.)
• Not one by someone with a barnstar.
• 69% by someone with a username–so, almost a third were made by an anon!
• Only 53% by someone with a userpage.
• Median date of first edit (for a registered user), April 2006 (only 3-4 months ago)

My research also (my talk’s at 2 today, aaaaaargggh!) showed that even in a “vandal wave” almost all the anonymous editors were, in fact, trying to add value to the project. It’s pretty inspiring when you think about it.

And so are the people at this conference–though I’m amazed to be one of so few women. The proportion of women speaking here is much higher than the proportion of women in the audience.

Never be too cool to try something new.

That’s my excuse for finding the Wikimania Speakers’ Lounge, though I was sure that everybody but me would be way too cool to hang out here.

But this room is not empty, although it is by no means as full of speakers as the #wikimania online chat, where the conversation includes some terrifying (to a potential speaker) realtime critiques of speakers onstage.

ai yi yi! This is scary stuff.

In case you, like me, have never been in a speakers’ lounge, there’s good stuff in here. Coffee and juice and ice and bottles of water. And a big bowl of popcorn, and another big bowl (I kid you not) of teentsy-tiny Hershey’s chocolate bars.

I can see I could get myself in big trouble in here. So I’m going to unplug now, turn away from those chocolate bars and the scary stuff in IRC and go hear the 4 p.m. workshop on vandal-fighting.

Who’s coming to Wikimania and to my talk?

Everything that anybody’s Web 2.0 startup is suddenly struggling with has been under construction at Wikipedia since 2001….

For example, coping with the ups and downs on your site triggered by stories in the media.

I’ve been looking at edit wars and vandal waves until I now see Excel spreadsheets in my dreams. (Aside from a few days off at beautiful and intense BlogHer 2006.)

Much more to say next time that I’m not messing with spreadsheets….

Just a few quick soundbites from Monday’s SXSW keynote, where communitymeister Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia interviewed communitymeister Craig Newmark of Craigslist:

Jimmy: “The biggest conflict we see at Wikipedia is not between left and right, but between good guys and jerks.”

Craig: “Yes! The biggest, most vicious conflict we see on Craigslist is not political. It’s in the pet forums.”

Craig: “Crooks are early adopters of technology. As more and more technophobes start coming online, the vast majority of them are good people. So, more and more, good people outnumber the bad guys.”

Craig: “When you talk about the wisdom of crowds–you must also be worried about mob rule. You have to be careful.”

More juicy outtakes (Hillary Clinton fetishes?) at Will Pate, Frank Gruber, and a very close transcription from Auscillate. Me, I should be packing!

Steve Rubel’s explaining memetrackers* to the marketers. “Look, but don’t touch,” says he. Darn good advice, but not possible in quantum mechanics, where observing any event inherently changes it.

Now, picture Web 2.0 as a Schrödinger’s cat, with more people peeking and poking at her every day. Is she starting to look rather different from what we expected?

Sticking to memetrackers, since that’s what Steve wrote about:

There’s now a huge difference between linking to the last story at the bottom of the page on Memetracker X and linking to the only-slightly-less-popular story that almost but never-quite made it onto that page. This creates a huge incentive for ambitious bloggers to try to link to stories they think will be popular link-targets instead of linking to stories that tickle their interest.

The linkage pattern of profit-seeking bloggers is changed because it’s observed–pulled toward what Kevin Marks called the zero-sum game of traditional media, instead of the what GapingVoid calls the “nice long tail.”

A lot of Web 2.0 Schrödinger’s cats need to worry a bit more about those nice long tails.

Whew–what a party last night! At least this time, I got to taste what I was eating….

You see, the NYC Swedish consulate celebrates Nobel’s birthday (December 10) by serving the entire official dinner from the previous year’s Nobel feast.

Last December 10, what with the distraction of Frank’s new gold medal, Mozart’s music, and HRH Prince Carl Philip, I hardly noticed the actual dinner at all.

This year was much calmer–not even white tie, “merely” black tie. Such is my ongoing double life that I’ll bet I was the only person in Wikimania’s IRC planning meeting who was struggling into a full-length taffeta skirt and silver shoes in between typing remarks about opensource software.

Then again, maybe I was not the only one. Who was it who said, “The world is not only stranger than we know, it is stranger than we can know”?

A remark that surely goes double for Wikipedia and the Web…

On Slashdot, your public reputation boils down to one word–in the best case, that word is “Excellent.”

On Wikipedia, your readers can make more nuanced judgments–are you scholarly, helpful, or trollish?–assuming they take time to read your entire contribution history.

This informal reputation system may soon change, according to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who recently told the NYT:

“…he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site’s strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems. In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.”

Big companies are racing into “identity” and “reputation” software systems–I hope Wikipedia will take this opportunity to debut and test many open-source alternatives, if only to create prior art and save useful methods from disappearing behind a wall of preemptive copyright.* Good reputation systems promote collaboration, something the world really needs.

I drank non-virtual coffee with real Lisa Williams this morning. She told me some fascinating things about improvised communities, and I told her I’m thinking about lightweight solutions to online “reputation.” Reputation avatars, if you will.

My Slashdot avatar has a gender-neutral name and excellent “karma.” My #joiito avatar uses my name and writes funny limericks. In Wikipedia, Betsythedevine writes about glacial movement and landforms (I’m from NH.) The reputation systems in these three arenas differ greatly in style and degree of formality.*

In our real lives too, we have lots of different personas for different occasions:

Lisa: And when two of our avatars collide, that’s the stuff of situation comedy.
Betsy: Yes, and of stories about “I got fired for blogging.”

Yours for more and better and funnier avatars that don’t get entangled with our credit card histories and college transcripts,
Betsy, my still-typing-darn-it avatar