WIKIPEDIATRICIAN

I am painfully aware that the title is woefully poor. I'm tired. Sorry.
Aaaaanyway, this is intended to be a brush up on whatever else needs saying about Wikipedia, so try and listen for the short time I will distract you.

• Sandboxes are important, more important than I stressed in the large post. They are where you learn to use Wikipedia. They show you how to interlink, reference and provide images for articles and then show you the result while not actually publishing what you write. If you're planning to use Wikipedia, using the sandbox(es) is essential as it allows room for error but still shows you how to use Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia is always going to be a work in progress by its very nature: there will be no Wikipedia Mk. II or anything, but on the plus side, updates can clearly be made quicker than between editions of a regular encyclopedia. For example, when the 7/7 bombings happened, the Wikipedia page was updated hundreds of times in the hour after the page was started, while newspapers only got one chance to get it right. Wikipedia is quicker and easier to edit than other information sites and therefore more accurate on the whole and in the long run.
• Wikipedia is a community and a tool at the same time, but 80% of the content comes from 20% of the users (see here for that funny rule that governs this). Everyone knows a bit about something: if you see an error that you can correct with reference, do so. It only enhances the experience for everybody and there's nothing to stop you. Try and think of ways that you can help Wikipedia and then it'll be even better for you and for others.
• Wikipedia is massive beyond scale. If you looked at every single page in English alone for only a minute each consecutively, you'd have to be looking at a screen straight for about 4 years. That's how big it is. It came from nothing and was edited by us, not by pros. When you think about it, it's weird how so many people have united to form such a behemoth of a website but hardly anyone knows anyone else doing the same thing. We isolate ourselves in order to unify our knowledge. How peculiar.

Well that's it as far as what time and effort constrains me to tell you about Wikipedia. But do try and contribute, even if it's only to a very silly or trivial page. It'll do no end of good. In short, Wikipedia is by us and for us, and we need to keep it that way for it to work. Adios.

See below for pictures, videos etc.

I'VE RUN OUT OF WIKI PUNS...

...So it's time to talk about Wikipedia. Where did it come from? Why has it been so successful? Why is it controversial? Is it really all it's cracked up to be? How can you use it? Do Wikipedia workers wear yak-wool sweaters? All will be revealed...except that last thing.

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It was born out of Nupedia, a project of the same two guys. Wikis had been around for a little while before then (as we saw earlier) and Nupedia and Wikipedia were run by the same guys, but they operated independently of each other. Nupedia's servers went down permanently in 2003 as Jimmy and Larry saw Wikipedia growing quickly, more quickly than Nupedia, see here for a graph of how many articles are added a day. It resolutely refused to go commercial and remains so to this day. It continued to grow and the rest, as they say, is history.

I have talked lots about wikis before, so not much to say there. However, Wikipedia is a bit more than just a collection of wikis. It is probably the most important encyclopedia ever written because it was not written by a team of experts, but by us. The largest encyclopedia on earth, with over 2 million articles in English alone, was written by computer anoraks and catfood enthusiasts and me and you. I, for example, have written a short article on a sports book. Not much, but almost everything is worth something where Wikipedia is concerned (unless you write an autobiographical entry and are subjected to the humiliation of being deleted because of insufficient interest in the page). Create an account, read up on some stuff, fiddle about in the tutorials and sandboxes and you're there: a bona fide Wikipedia contributor. It was created by us and is an example, according to Time magazine, of a "Web 2.0 service success" like Myspace and YouTube and consequently Time made "You" the Person of the Year 2006 for going from the person who watched the people who broadcasted to an army of broadcasters who release extraordinary amounts of information every single day.

Of course, this sort of mass broadcasting hijack is going to lead to some errors in accuracy in terms of information broadcasted. You can't use Wikipedia as an educational resource because some of the things put on Wikipeda are utter rubbish. It's pretty easy for Wikipedia's administrators to spot glaring errors, but smaller errors are harder to find. Wikipedia has three basic rules: articles must be objective, verifiability and no original research - everything must be able to be referenced to a published article. If you're looking at an article, essentially ask yourself these things: has this person proved himself reputable? Has the article been reliably referenced? Can I back this information up? Asking these things usually helps to show whether something is legit. Here are a couple of Wikipedia controversies that have emerged, but nowadays the media (i.e. US) can find fault with anything if we look hard enough. However, it does go to show that Wikipedia isn't squeaky-clean.

Wikipedia is different from anything before it: it will always be a work in progress, and it was built by a community of Wikipedians. It means that the news (because Wikipedia is, among other things, a current affairs site) comes to us - mass amateurisation at its finest. I repeat: we are the journalists. Edits happen at about one per second. It's like a hive of information with bees making cyber-honey. It's unbelievable.

It has transformed the way we think about information, but it was us who made the transformation. Wikipedia is the new way. Is it the right way? We'll have to wait and see.

CAN YOU DIGG IT?

I talked about tagging a little bit in my last post. It's pretty cool; it makes photos searchable, which is a brilliant development. But tagging gets even more clever with services like Delicious and Citeulike. Social networks + tags = social bookmarking. That's what Delicious does: it links you tag sites, see other people's tags and explore those tags. Essentially it's a social network, but it's tagging, so less risk of funny looks at interviews than, say, a photo of you rolling around drunk. That said, it probably isn't wise to do silly things like tag illegal music sites. Anyway, these social bookmarking sites have huge potential. Here's why.

The ideal and default setting for Delicious is "public" i.e. anyone can see your tags. That's significant. Put it this way: you are researching a project that the whole class is doing. You tag some sites with Delicious and your friends see it. They have also tagged some sites, and you all find more and more interesting sites and here's the really clever part: it's all organised in tags, so it isn't nearly as chaotic as bookmarks. A Latin dictionary with dozens of tiny bits of paper with no meaning sticking out of the top versus all the words you need to know being subdivided and labelled by context and urgency - and you can search it. It's a no-brainer. Here's an SPS Classics Delicious page.

This is changing the way we think about information. With the advent of Web 2.0 and specifically services like Delicious,finding information was a tedious, slow, laborious process. You go to the library, find the reference card, fiddle your way through the Dewey decimal system which is still the preserve solely of librarians and geeks of the first order and find the book on the Battle of Hastings you were looking for is somewhere in the middle of the German manga. You are only allowed this book for a short period of time and then you are told that your account expired seven hours, four minutes and thirty-nine seconds before you tried to take out the book. Immensely frustrating, the whole procedure. Delicious takes this process, blasts it to smithereens and reassembles it in a new and far simpler manner. But here's the crucial part: information used to be created and dished out by a class of people who were specific to this task. Now, information is ours to contribute, distribute and classify. If Galileo surfed the web, there would be little to stop each one of us collating the information he had published and/or garnered from the internet, and if we did this with lots of great thinkers and revolutionaries, just think of the sheer volume of previously priceless information at our fingertips. This guy calls that a "folksonomy" and believes we can use it to take over the world (Part 1) (Part 2). A system was recently revealed at TED whereby all the world's digital photographs online are hyperlinked, creating a 3D image of the world. That's unbelievable, and ten years ago it couldn't have happened. The information hierarchy is no more. Delicious makes information more readily classifiable and searchable and the power which comes from information and knowledge is now in our hands. Roll on the knowledge revolution...

A FLICKR OF RECOGNITION

Picture this: you are all at the eleventy-first birthday party of your great-great-aunty Muriel with all the photo albums spread out across the table and you are looking for a picture of the birthday girl as the back end of a pantomime cow. Everyone's crowding around the coffee table as a dedicated team of well-wishers scour all 23 of Muriel's photo albums for this one photo. If only there was a quicker way...


Flickr is the answer. Flickr is the photo sharing service that means that all your photos are in one place (or rather not with the rise of cloud computing). Better still, these photos are searchable. This is because you can tag photos - put little signposts on them that give keywords relating to the topic of the photo. That means that - joy of joys! - you can now access that priceless Muriel memory by simply searching "Muriel the cow's arse". Sorry. Inappropriate joke. I hang my head in shame.

But smutty remarks about one's great-great-aunt aren't the point. The point is that Flickr is a photo revolution. It is simpler and cheaper than putting photos on a CD, and sending a link to someone by email is quicker than emailing a bloated JPEG image. Here's a link to the girl who first thought of Flickr while working at a games company and realised she needed to share her photos with a co-worker. That's another clever thing about Flickr: sending links is viral advertising that encourages people around Flickr uses to use the service as well. It started in 2004 and by June 2006 had 177 million photos. That's 17 photos uploaded every 10 seconds. November 2007? 2 billion images. Wow.

By now Flickr is up there with Facebook for being seriously good at what it does. There is now a Flickr smartphone app, which might sound daft, but let me put it into perspective: you take a photo on your phone then upload it to Flickr. Your smartphone automatically "geotags" the photo you upload through the phone's GPS. When you look through your photos on Flickr, you get a map telling you exactly where in the world you took each one of your photos. That's quite impressive.

Flickr have even managed to deflate the tricky issue of copyright through "Creative Commons". This gives users a variety of options for how their photos are used by those who find them on internet searches or otherwise. You can say people can use your photos for non-commercial use, use it and credit it, or your photo but not "derivative work" based on it. The point is that it is a total revolution of the copyright idea; Creative Commons and media-sharing websites like Flickr and Youtube are not making you pay for a privilege that ten years ago would have been a sticky topic. In fact the photo of the cow above is from Flickr. It's hard to express it, but Flickr is a new way of looking at media sharing. Sounds lame, but it really is big news (see an article from The Observer here). Muriel would be proud.