Where pegs grow legs: hanging ideas on words

Wikipedia is growing up. That was my overall impression of the 2009 Wikimania conference in Buenos Aires recently. This spells great news for the government community, which more or less culturally speaking, but certainly technically speaking, has followed the lead of Wikipedia. In a similar project for example, there is the idea of “sysops”, community organizers and wiki administrators. There also is the idea of open editing, or that individuals’ edits are all considered equal across all topics. There is no delineation of specialty other than the delineation one makes in choosing articles that they wish to contribute to. While there are some major differences between the projects, the general ethos is the same.

While an amazing success, Wikipedia has been plagued by usability problems, subtle bias in articles (relating to trust), and a true lack of understanding of its own community. These issues are not new either – I remember us talking about them in 2006. But this year felt different: the Wikimedia foundation seems to be ready to tackle these issues head on, and there is concrete progress to show.

Technical Progress

I was glad to see some very promising projects at the conference that the technical community has been working on, many of which will benefit the government community. Anyone who has ever used the MediaWiki discussion system knows that there is a lot to be desired. Liquid threads is an extension that looks like it will be a great replacement for the hodgepodge of colons, double-colons, and other syntax that is used to help visually denote a “thread” in the current discussion system.
The new system makes it easier to start new discussions, follow existing ones, and quickly summarize the contents of an entire discussion. Take a look at a test system here.

Flagged Revisions

Wikipedia appears to be interested in introducing the idea of “flagging” revisions, or revisions that have been reviewed by a group of pre-ordained experts on a particular topic. The reviewers would be experienced individuals who clearly have demonstrated their expertise in some arena, eg. Biology. These reviewers won’t be allowed to change a revision, but they can rate it (flag it). This insures individuals such as newspapers can be assured that at a particular point in time, the article did not have egregious errors in it, and can be better trusted for use as references. Last minute edits that introduce embarrassing errors in an article won’t end up in the NY Times.

For the government community, this is huge. One of the major complaints of the raw wiki system is that is lessens the role of the subject matter experts, who form the vast majority of people doing the analysis that is produced today. Unlike the volunteers in Wikipedia, they are paid to work on subjects that are of importance to the organizations they work for. The flagged revision extension will hopefully provide a medium ground between the two camps. I can only see good things coming out of this, particularly as the extension and the idea underlying it are refined.

PDF export

This was also the first time that I saw the pdf export tool, which was developed with help from pediaPress, the organization that publishes Wikipedia articles in printed format. That was always an item that many folks asked for, and I think they’ve finally gotten the implementation down well. Kudos.

More Trust

Additionally, Wikipedia will be doing testing on an extension that provides “trust info” to articles. The extension is developed by Luca de Alfaro and others at UCSC, and it batch processes every revision in an article to determine authorship of each word in the current article, as well as provide inferences as to the likelihood of controversial or hotly debated phrases, as determined by the number of times a phrase has been reverted in an article. They’ve implemented the capability as a firefox extension. You can download that here. This could be potentially interesting to understand more about the regularity of content. I also think the government community could extend this to include looking at groups of people, by taking editors and categorizing them by type (eg. Agency).

Usability

New beta version of Wikipedia

Lastly, I think some of the greatest work and most telling as to the project’s maturation is the work on usability. It is fairly established that editing on Wikipedia is not as easy as it should be. The Wikimedia foundation has hired several developers to tackle some of the problems. Here is the list of things in their current release.

• Tab reorganization – The new interface called Vector provides clear indication of the state of “read” and “edit” whether you are in an article or an discussion page.
• Edit toolbar improvements – Action-grouped expandable toolbar hides infrequently used tool icons. Users can expand the toolbar based. Power users can expand the toolbar to access specialized tools. Special characters and help references (cheat sheet) are built into the toolbar for easy access. Special characters are displayed based on the configuration of each language site. Toolbar icons are redesigned by reusing Tango and Gnome icons.
• Improved search interface – Search result page is often the entry point to articles. The visibility of relevant results are increased by removing the clutter.
• General aesthetic improvements – Some aesthetic improvements have been applied for visual enhancements and redundant information has been removed.
• Opt-in/Opt-out switch and survey – As the features above are deployed as one of the user preferences, Opt-in/Opt-out page allows logged in users to turn on and off multiple preferences for the usability initiative at the same time. Users are asked to participate in a quick short survey when they opt-out.

You can try it too, by clicking on the “Try Beta” link at the top of the page. They are looking for feedback at this point, so please let them know what you think!

Statistics are huge

So much can still be learned from the data in Wikipedia: from looking at the works themselves, to the rate of change in the creation of pages, to the rate at which new users drop off the project from different countries. At the keynote, Jimmy Wales showed a slide that highlighted cultural differences between Wikipedias, as well as areas of potential concern. There is so much more that can be learned from this massive data store, and we’ve only scratched the surface. I’m hoping to get involved with building some tools that can help automate additionally unique ways of looking at the data, as well as at the same time provide a strategic mechanism to insure we’re answering questions that are most interesting to the community. I’m hoping that this type of work will help Wikimedia gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the community, making it become an even bigger success.