Includipedia Blog

I’ve recently come across this very funny video criticising Wikipedia (and by extension, Includipedia):

(from Good Day Sunshine)

Over at Crooked Timber, Eszter Hargittai notes that the Wikipedia article on Joe the plumber is being considered for deletion:

Can anyone help me understand why some people are so vehemently opposed to certain people (or topics) having entries on Wikipedia? Why do people get so worked up about the mere existence of certain entries? Currently, an entry for Joe the Plumber is being debated. Does it really dilute the value of Wikipedia to have entries like that? I remember when some people contested my entry (I wasn’t the one to put it up), it felt like some amateurish tenure review, except with not quite the same consequences. Would anyone care to defend the practice? I’m eager to understand the motivations better.

In fact, Wikipedia’s admins decided to keep it for now. But they may of course remove it later. So I’ve copied it over to Includipedia: Joe the plumber.

When kids fail exams, it’s Wikipedia’s fault, says the Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC):

According to the report, Eleanor Coner, the SPTC’s information officer, said: “Children are very IT-savvy, but they are rubbish at researching.” She noted that today’s students do the majority of their research online instead of using books or other resources that could be found at the library.

The internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia, was one of the Council’s main concerns because its very nature allows it to be edited by anyone and it is not updated by verified researchers, they said.

In addition, the Council was worried that students don’t know how to research and tend to put faith in the validity of online resources. Says Ronnie Smith, the general secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland, “We need to make sure youngsters don’t take what they read online as fact.”

Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but then again nor is any other source of information, online or offline. Instead of blaming Wikipedia for the failings of the Scottish educational system, why not instead teach kids how to use Wikipedia and other internet resources effectively, like they’re doing in Australia:

In an Australian first, NSW HSC students will from next year be able to take a course in studying Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia.

Wikipedia, which ranks among the world’s top-10 most visited sites, has been listed by the NSW Board of Studies as prescribed text for an elective course in the English syllabus for 2009-2012.

The website is one of a number of “texts” - a choice that also includes a book and a movie - which students can choose to study in an elective called the Global Village, a course examining how the world’s communities communicate and interact.

Don Carter, the English inspector at the Board of Studies, said the course was intended to teach students skills of analysis to enable them to be more discerning about content they found on the web.

(via Techdirt)

I’ve added some content to the About Includipedia page, setting out my goals for the project in some detail.

Progress on Includipedia has been slow recently, due to the system administrator being unavailable to work on the project and a programmer leaving and getting a job in London. But we now have a new sys admin, and it looks like we’ll be employing two new programmers.

The Economist has an article about the struggle within Wikipedia between inclusionists and deletionists:

Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors’ enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.

I come down firmly on the side of the inclusionists. Why shouldn’t every film, every TV programme episode, every book, every minor band, every small-circulation magazine, every pokemon character, every restaurant, fish-and-chip shop or takeaway, every open source software project, etc have an article about it? For every one of these articles, most people won’t be interested in it, but that’s not a problem because they won’t be searching for it in the first place. But for people who are interesting in the subject, the article will be relevant and useful.

The Internet isn’t paper; there’s no need for limitations on what can go in articles.

Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen—and they are rather poorly edited.

If lots of entries on Pokémon are deleted, it’s not as if this will somehow magically create new articles on Solidarity. In fact, if anything the opposite is true, because people might originally come to the encyclopedia via a search on a Pokémon-related subject, and later edit articles on other subjects.

To measure a subject’s worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. These rules are used to devise official policies on particular subjects, such as the notability of pornographic stars (a Playboy appearance earns you a Wikipedia mention; starring in a low-budget movie does not)

Why not have an article on anyone who’s played a part in any movie (pornographic or otherwise)?

Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that [the prospect of an article being deleted] deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia’s early days is giving way to hostility and infighting.

I know for a fact that I’ve been deterred from contributing to Wikipedia after articles I’d created or worked on were deleted. That was the original impulse that drove me to creating Includipedia.

(via Slashdot)

Further to this previous article, here a cartoon from The Joy of Tech:

Read the rest of “Joy of Tech” on editing your own entry »

A story has hit the news concerning Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ relationship with “controversial Canadian TV pundit Rachel Marsden”. I’m not going to talk about that, because frankly I’m not interested in Wales’ sex life. But one thing that did interest me is the allegation that he spent Wikimedia’s money on himself. (Wikipedia is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a charity that gets its money from donations). According to Wired:

Former Wikimedia exec Danny Wool, who left the foundation last year, wrote a blog post insinuating that Wales used the nonprofit foundation as his own personal piggy bank. Expenses that Wales tried to apply to the foundation included $300+ bottles of wine and visits to Moscow massage parlors, Wool alleges. According to Wool, the expenses got so out of hand that the Wikimedia Foundation took away Wales’ corporate credit card.

Since the Wikimedia Foundation is a charity, it’s obviously relevant how it spends its money. Includipedia, on the other hand, is a for-profit organisation which aims to fund itself by advertising, and if I want to spend £150 on a bottle of wine (I don’t, incidently), that’s no-one’s business but mine.

But although Includipedia is for profit, it’s not just for profit. We have other goals, too: we want to encourage open content, including free software/open source. So we’ll be developing software for MediaWiki and other projects, and giving it back to the community under open source licences. One project we’re particularly interested in is OpenStreetMap, because non-free alternatives such as Google Maps restrict what you can do with the data.

Our long-term goal is to bring all the world’s information to all the world’s people. This has implications. For example, some people cannot afford an Internet connection. It may be that mesh networking will help to solve that problem; if so we can develop or fund suitable mesh networking software.

Another way to help people afford an Internet connection (and other things) is to help them be richer. Perhaps Includipedia could do a tie-in with organisations such as Kiva to allow the businesses they fund to have micro-wikis on the Includipedia site.

There has been some controversy when a person or organisation edits the article about themself on Wikipedia. Such a person is Sir Norman Bettison, the chief constable of West Yorkshire, who has apparently ordered his underlings to monitor his article:

“A chief constable has told his staff to monitor online encyclopedia Wikipedia - to stop its users posting rude comments about him. Sir Norman Bettison took exception to being described as a “greedy, vain moron” on the online encyclopaedia, according to Police Review magazine. The 52-year-old chief constable of West Yorkshire - favourite to succeed Sir Ian Blair as head of the Met - has ordered employees to check for changes often.”

There is an obvious issue here regarding misuse of public funds.

But I think a more interesting issue is that of vandalism of Wikipedia, and other online encyclopedia projects. When Includipedia is fully up and running the policy will be to limit what people can do with their own articles. If someone edits an article about themself, or about an organisation they work for, or a person or organisation where they are being paid to edit it, then they will be obliged to state their connection with the subject on the article’s talk page. And any such editor will be forbidden under Includipedia’s terms and conditions from removing material that is uncomplementary to the subject.

Which brings up an interesting possibility. Unauthorised modification to a computer system is illegal in Britain under the Computer Misuse Act. Modifying Includipedia contrary to its terms and condictions is clearly unauthorised modification, so if Norman Bettison got his staff to do so then both they and he would be breaking the law; it’d be amusing to see a chief constable charged under this.

Includipedia is a project to build an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.

A feeling that something was necessary to be done had been growing in me throughout 2007, when articles I had created or contributed to had been removed by deletionists. So eventually I decided to build Includipedia. As I wrote on wikimedia:

I am fed up with deletionists destroying articles I’ve created or worked on. I worry that Wikipedians are being put off from writing or editing articles by the prospect that their work will be consigned to the dustbin by deletionists (I know this has happened to me and I bet I’m not the only one).

Why shouldn’t every film, every TV programme episode, every small-circulation magazine, every pokemon character, etc have an article about it, if people want to write those articles? People who aren’t interested in these subjects won’t read them, and people who are interested will find them useful.

In an ideal world the deletionists would delete themselves, or at least go found their own encyclopedia which would, appropriately enough, be empty. But they don’t want to do that, instead they want to actively disrupt the project of delivering all the world’s knowledge to all the world’s people.

So I propose an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.