Happy Birthday Wikipedia!

It's been 10 years since the Wikipedia was started, although according the the folklore I know it was not on the 15th but on the 16th of January in 2001 that the first article was put up on the Internet:

This is not a real article, and the color suggests that the article on the United States is already there, but it is fun in that it shows some of the problems we have overcome in the Wikipedia. Articles used to have to be in CamlCase, that is, have at least 2 capital letters in them with at least one small one in between.

This is the official first surviving entry because the first software didn't do a great job of keeping revisions around. But since Wikipedia says that this is the first article, we'll leave it at that.

My first article? Well, we have to take a good step back to a summer I spent in the late 70s with my folks near Washington, D.C. The 'burb they lived in was boooooring, so I would get up early, ride with my Dad into town, cruise around and be back at his office at closing time. Hanging out at DuPont Circle I was in this bookstore that had a copy of Ted Nelson's dual-book Dream Machines/Computer Lib. (I just googled and saw that my first edition copy is worth upwards of 300$, great investment!)

Hypertext. Chunks of text with references to other texts. Machines mapping our minds. It blew my mind, as did Nelson's "Literary Machines" that I got a few years later. These ideas were crazy - I was programming on large time-sharing machines we could glimpse through the glass windows. But I loved the ideas. I had started messing with the Internet at college in 1975, when a pal and I sat at a teletype one night and managed to get a computer in Stanford to request us to log in. We couldn't guess the login, but the idea that we were sitting in San Diego and the machine in Stanford was wild.

I was messing with computer networks (X.25 and all that) when I joined a global company in the early 80s, and when I went back to university for a doctorate we had a communal email address for the research group.

Fast forward to the early 2000s, I've been playing with hypertext on all sorts of platforms: Gopher, Mosaic and the WWW, web-based instruction. And I get a pot of money to develop an online course on hypermedia. One of the chapters is about possible uses for hypermedia, and one of them is quaintly about the possibility of doing online dictionaries and encyclopedia. One of my researchers found a link for the Wikipedia in 2003, we linked it in as an example.

In February 2004 I was in the States and had time to seriously surf around snarfing the unsecured WiFi a neighbor of my brother had around. I started a one sentence article on the mathematician Toralf Skolem, because I had been working with skolemizations during my dissertation. I found a list of needed articles, picked off a German (Klaus Reiner Röhl) and translated a bit I found on the web about him. The next day Angela (I am so honored!) wikified it.

I grew bolder, and decided to register. But what should I call myself? I'm a respectable professor in my day job, so it would be a good idea to not use my real name until I see if this thing is a respectable thing to be associated with. As a student I had used the pseudonym "Devious Wisewoman", so I CamlCased it to WiseWoman and began my career as a registered Wikipedian.

I got really brave and wrote an article about the Swedish money exchange company Forex. I edited the article on the Queen of Denmark, researched and started an article on the Danish author Thit Jensen, and added some information about the Olympic history of handball. I was sooo proud of my contribution to the world of knowledge.

When I got back to Germany I proudly showed my colleagues what I had done - and was enraged. Someone had edited my Forex article! They had messed around with it! Rewritten all sorts of stuff and added stuff. And I had to admit - it was better than mine was.

I started an article on my birthplace, Renfrew, which I translated into German in 2008 with the help of JCornelius at a Wikipedia Stammtisch meeting. I don' actually remember the first Stammtisch meeting I went to, but I remember the place: the c-base. This hacker's den felt so comfortable with all the strange furniture and historic computing equipment. Meeting other Wikipedians, people who did all sorts of things in Real Life, was fascinating.

I went to the meeting in 2005 for founding the Wikimedia Verein at the TU Berlin. I was interested in what they were doing, but was trying to be anonymous. I sat in the back and had some fascinating conversations with my neighbors, but avoided saying who I was. That didn't help much - the first coffee break I was warmly welcomed by Eric Müller, a former student of mine. So I gave up the attempt at being anonymous, signed the register in my real name, and spoke with that Wales guy. I wanted to get him to come spend a semester at my school as a guest professor. But German Rules got in the way, there was no way we could get it sorted out, more's the pity.

So am I an "author" for the Wikipedia, as journalists kept asking me at the birthday party bash last night in Berlin? Sure. But I'm not just responsible for one particular area. I do what interests me. I explained that I'm more often than not just a Sichter these days, checking anonymous edits for vandalism. I got accused of being a censor by a student who was there with his buddy, hoping there would be free food (there wasn't much, a glass of bubbly and a piece of birthday cake and some pretzels was the size of it, but Henriette warned us not to expect food, so that was all right).

What do I do, really? I bitch at things. I fix typos. I get mad when I see that ANOTHER woman is only listed in the English Wikipedia and not in the German one and in a fit of energy translate the article about Auguste Holmés.  I read the mailing list and occasionally write, usually about something that really irritates me.

But on the whole, I'm really glad that the Wikipedia is there, and that it has "arrived", as Kurt Janson put it last night. We are now mainstream, but we are also Wikipedians, a bunch of people of all ages from all walks of life that for some reason enjoy doing what they do for the Wikipedia. It was fun seeing so many last night I hadn't seen in a long time. I stayed up far too late, shocking the resident teenagers that Mom would be dragging home from a club at 2 am.

Happy Birthday, Wikipedia! And may the German Wikipedia learn to find articles on women, children, and aspects of rural life to be noteworthy enough to have their own articles and not be deleted or subsumed under the male lemma.

The Professorin Lemma

Ooooh, what a great Berlin Stammtisch we had this evening for the Wikipedia! After all the hullabaloo about my lemma "Professorin" that had been deleted some years back, never to be found again, it was a major topic this evening.

I had asked for it to be recovered from the dregs of the Wikipedia memory, and the admin I had asked said it had disappeared. This evening a very wise admin logged on and clickety-clicked his way through the jungles. We looked hither and thither, and there it was: the last version of the lemma before it was killed and the state of the discussion page just before it died.

And the killer and the person accusing the article of irrelevance sat at the table.

We had a lively discussion about relevance (not that we have solved the problem, by any means) and the deletion of knowledge. And I have my files back, now SAVED on MY disk. So I can now finish writing the article (which I started in 2005!) in peace and quiet before publishing. Of course, I had envisioned me starting and then others continuing, all happily contributing to the wealth of knowledge of the world.

Silly me, to have missed that it was only the knowledge of MANkind that was to be collected and ordered. On with the show!

Relevance and the Swedish Wikipedia

This is getting to be kind of repetitive. I was in Sweden over the holidays and was reading through the Aftonbladet about a Swedish blogger, Sanna Lundell, who is currently under attack by people putting up hate comments on her blog. She happens to be the daughter-of a famous author and musician and a sambo-of [that is Swedish for "life partner you are not officially married to", meaning literally living-together] a famous Swedish actor.

I wanted to know more about her, and started my search at the Swedish Wikipedia, which now has about 300.000 entries. Nada. Zilch. Hmm. I googled a bit, and found out that she is a free-lance writer and that her blog, a blog about being a mother which was awarded the blog-of-the-year award by one of the women's magazines, pulls in 30.000 page impressions a week. Wow!

So feeling especially virtuous and wanting to contribute to the knowledge of the world, I started the Swedish article on her. Except that there had once been an entry on her, and it was deleted. Why? Well, because she is daughter-of and sambo-of.

Hey, guys! What do women have to do in order to be "relevant"? Other than be porn stars, that is. Here we have a journalist who has studied theology, written for numerous journals, and is currently an acclaimed blogger. Sure, she's not president of a company (very few women in Sweden are) or a well-known politician (Sweden has a few). But she has worked hard to come out of the -of shadow. And she even went to work for a daily newspaper that had been doggedly trying to get photos of her with her (at that time new) boyfriend. She just said in an interview that she would not be reporting on him.

I put a request for restoration on the discussion page of the admin who had deleted the page. The answer was quick: No.

Excuse me? Like, you don't have reasons in Sweden? No, you won't because it is against your religion, or no, you can't because your arms are in a cast, or what? I protested.

Another admin gave the the link to the place where you can officially make a restoration request. I noted that I read and speak Swedish, but my written Swedish sucks, so I had written in English. This nice admin said: English is no problem.

So I duly submitted my restoration request, and was told to WRITE IN SWEDISH. And another said: there was nothing in the article of value. Sigh. I wrote, politely, that I was hoping that at least her birth date and place and such would be in that article. Finally, some other admin took pity on me, and restored the article.

While I was on the boat home, a request for deletion was entered. Daughter-of and sambo-of = not relevant. Ach ja. At least the Swedes have an orderly sort of deletion request page. There is a discussion part and a voting part. I've put in my vote and my discussion, and at the moment, the keepers are in the lead. While the article is open, I've added a few more tidbits of information (such as her mother's name, strange that people have two parents...) I gleaned from the media reports published when her blog was given the award in November. Neither she nor her mother were listed on the Wikipedia entry on her father, so I ended up adding that section as well. We'll see how long that lasts.

I am getting more and more concerned about the so-called "relevance" discussions deleting information that could be useful to others. For example, Sannas birthdate given in the original (and deleted) entry was wrong, but has been quoted in numerous articles about her. I checked the Swedish person database (everything is online) and was able to correct it. I've spent an hour doing so - why should others have to do this work again? Sure, if they want to verify the fact, they should. Otherwise: why delete?

Wikipedia - Deleted because of Irrelevance

The debate within the German Wikipedia on the question of relevance was taken to a new level at a podium discussion at the 26C3 conference, as reported here in German by heise. I listened to most of the discussion via live feed, as I was not in Berlin.

The fight is on between the "exclusionists", who want to make a high-quality, exclusive encyclopedia, and the "inclusionists", who want to include everything, as one does not know in advance what is relevant to someone.

As a member of the exclusionists, Kurt Jansson, former chair of the German group that promotes open information and now at the German newsweekly Spiegel, used an example to demonstrate why he wants high quality. The German president was giving a speech on the occasion of the German woman's soccer team winning another World Cup. His speechwriter apparently was using only the Wikipedia as a source, as the president spoke of the first team winning receiving a set of coffee china and an ironing board each. In reality, they only got the china, the ironing board was a joke put there by some troll. Jansson feels that we have a duty to provide correct information in the WP.

I call this bullshit. Expletive not deleted. Journalists must learn to do research, and not just parrot what they are fed. They need multiple sources for statements of fact. I mean, come on, surely someone out at the German Soccer Association could confirm or refute the ironing boards. People must learn how to use Internet media - and the first rule is to have a second source on everything, then to see what the quality of these sources is.

Sure, it would be sooooo nice to have everything be right at your fingertips and to be correct. But what, indeed, is the meaning of "correct"? That is one of the things we fight about a lot at the Wikipedia. I say that everyone needs to take the WP with a grain of salt. It's a great place to go for a first idea about a topic. But every fact needs collaboration if you are going to use it somewhere else. The links given will be a really, really great first step.

Mathias Schindler spoke for the inclusionists. He gave a really wonderful example: waaaaay back when, he started (he really did, I checked!) an article on a US local politician who was running for the Senate. He wasn't elected yet, but was showing some promice. Schindler did some research and started the article on Barack Obama. Schindler writes on the comment line: "This is a basic stub. Does anyone want to continue?" Indeed.

Using the current "relevance" criteria at the time the article was written, it would have been deleted. Sure, once the guy got to be better known (at the latest when he became president!) someone would have written an article on him. But hey, this was a start and there was some basic information about him in there.

And come on - it's not like as if we are strapped for space.

Martin Haase, the wise forty-something who has his own Wikipedia entry on account of being a professor of linguistics, points out that deleting articles that already have links from elsewhere pointing to them is a deadly sin and takes away information from the knowledge basis. He points to the Open Knowledge Foundation, an organization that is trying to get as much information as possible into the public domain.

He also notes that deleting articles kills the purpose of interwiki links, which are great helps in translations. As an example he uses the cocktail Tschunk, a cocktail popular with hackers that mixes rum, sugar, lime and Club Mate, a high-coffein drink based on mate tea. It is an acquired taste. There is a nice article in the English-language Wikipedia, but the German-language one was deleted and a sentence or so about it worked into the article on Club Mate. The problem is, if you want to know what Tschunk is, you end up on a completely different page and have to read through the entire article to find the bit about Tschunk, instead of quickly finding a short page giving the details.

Really, guys, the German idea of checked changes helps a lot. If people just keep an eye on new articles and quit making heros out of people who propose deletions, we'd be a lot better off. I liked the idea proposed from the floor: have Wikipedia money. Writing articles or editing articles gets you Wiki-Dollars. Proposing a deletion costs 5 Wiki-Dollars. There you go, let the market settle this! And have people buy Wiki-Dollars just like Linden-Dollars, and we even have money flowing in!

More on Wikipedia Relevance and Women

The relevancy discussion at the German Wikipedia continues, the fires being fanned this time by Spiegel Online. Many people have written to me, wanting to have a copy of the article "Professorin" that I worked on and got itself deleted, because the "real" "main" category is, of course, the male form "Professor". I had fought to get this made into "Professur" (the office, not the person), but that was about the size of it. My statistics disappeared (only to partially resurface when the Swiss and Austrians wanted some comparative numbers.

So anyway, I went back through my editing history for a look down memory lane. Goodness, one learns a lot about a person reading the editing history! And then I stumbled on Anna Maria Schleiermacher. In 2005 when WiseMan and WiseKid and their pals were biking to Sweden, I had been visiting the little museums along the way and stumbled upon a collection of her paintings. There was a little booklet for purchase which I got (where on earth is that now??), and while waiting for the bikers while enjoying some free WLAN (used to have that in the olden days when people didn't protect their WLAN) I set up a little stub about Anna Maria. It went like this:

'Anna Maria Arndt, geb. Schleiermacher (* 18. Februar 1786, † 16. Oktober 1869 in Bonn), zweite Ehefrau des Rügener Dichters Ernst Moritz Arndt.

Before I got all the painting stuff sorted out, I wanted to read the booklet. Well, it was a nice summer and I never actually got around to doing anything with the article. Today I had a look:
Ah yes, the women get subsumed into the articles of the men. Musn't have these uppity women having their own precious pages.

A check of the edit history reveals that there was a deletion discussion three years later in 2008, at the end of which the user Wahrheitsministerium (Ministry of Truth, how fitting) notes "redirect, wie in der LD angeregt, Lebensdaten bei Ernst Moritz Arndt eingearbeitet" (Redirect as suggested in the deletion discussion [which lasted 5 hours], data has been put into Ernst Moritz Arndt.)

The discussion was only about that she was sister-of and wife-of. No one made any attempt to find out more about her, and I did not realize that I had to observe and fight for everything I contributed. At that time I naively believed that we were collecting the knowledge of the entire world.

So go have a look at the entry on Ernst Moritz. Can you find anything on her? After I had edited, others contributed their wedding day and how many children they had.

I think I have to find that book again.

Senioren?

In the November 2009 monthly report from the German Wikimedia Pavel Richter reports on the project "Generation 50+". As he has done in the past, he uses the term Senioren (senior citizens) synomously for this group.

Let me translate the lemma for you:

Senior citizens

• are seldom constrained by time restrictions imposed by working life
• make independent purchasing decision and have a sophisticated purchasing behavior that is different from the younger generation
• learn differently
• suffer more often from and are susceptible to sickness, especially old-age diseases (see Geriatrics)

Well, Pavel, the current age for retirement is on its way from 65 to 67, and not all of us over 50 are out of work. We may make wiser decisions when purchasing goods and learn differently (i.e. not through YouTube et al), but I don't think you want to be calling us all susceptible to sickness.

Is there any way I can convince you to rename this project? And focus on something other than age? Like life experience? Discrimination on account of age is not allowed by law in Germany any more, you know.

The Priesthood

Recently it seems that in discussions with computer science people about political issues I often hear the statement "They just don't understand X!". And of course, this is true - the majority of people on this planet just don't understand computers and computing. And they don't really get why and how some systems work.

Are they stupid? No, of course not! I can't fix my car motor and I don't even want to think about trying brain surgery. But I am a computer scientist, so it is my job to explain to people how things work. Repeatedly, if necessary.

But it appears that many in my field feel themselves to be members of some technologically elite priesthood. The know the magic incantations to bring printers to life, find lost files, discover the answers to important questions and to weave intricate applications for solving some problem (hopefully without introducing new problems). And they like it this way - they don't really want the rest of the world to be able to deal with computers, after all, that would put them out of a job, wouldn't it? And it is fun to make jokes about the "lusers".

I am reminded on a book by Ted Nelson, the father of hypermedia, called Computer Lib. It was published in 1974 (right, that is not a typo. And wow, these are selling used for serious money, I better take care of mine). The first paragraph:

Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do. Unfortunately, due to ridiculous historical circumstances, computers have been made a mystery to most of the world. And this situation does not seem to be improving. You hear more and more about computers, but to most people it's just one big blur. The people who know about computers often seem unwilling to explain things or answer your questions. Stereotyped notions develop about computers operating in fixed ways -- and so confusion increases. The chasm between laymen and computer people widens fast and dangerously. [...] This book is therefore devoted to the premise that EVERYBODY SHOULD UNDERSTAND COMPUTERS."

Well said Ted, but unfortunately, it doesn't look like people were paying attention. 35 years later, this is still very true.

Nelson introduced the word "Cybercrud", defined as "putting things over on people using computers."

If I look closely at the current relevancy debate surrounding the Wikipedia, I see the same mechanism. There is the priesthood of the active people behind the Wikipedia (admin or not). They understand the baroque system (more or less) that has been built that is rather scary for new users. Oh, they complain about too much to do and very few new people, but is it any wonder? They make it so difficult to join the priesthood. And in a way, they have created "PediaCrud". I'll define that as "putting things over on people using the Wikipedia".

This includes all the trolls, who deface the Wikipedia just because they can. It includes the people who write lengthy novels for a lemma, instead of breaking it into a dozen or so more manageable chunks. It includes the deleters who want to keep the Wikipedia "clean" and "relevant".

But what about the users of the Wikipedia? Why do they come, millions a second, to the Wikipedia? What are they looking for? No, they don't want to read a 25 page treatise on Prussia. An encyclopedia (even the EB) strives to give people a quick overview of the lemma, and points to places to get more information, if necessary.

The users want a fast system that is pretty good. They want a system that is easy to use. They don't care about the authors or how the article was written. They just want to know more about a term they picked up somewhere. And many are willing to contribute their mite for the general good. But they don't want to have to register YetAnotherUserName with YetAnotherPassword and fuss with a system and then when they push save maybe discover that there is a concurrent user editing the same page.

The Wikipedia must get better - in usability. The Wikipedia must get better - in broader coverage, lemmata in areas that are not broadly covered. The Wikipedia authors must learn to edit, work with the texts and get them tighter, cleaner, more neutral, better verified.

Above all, they have to get away from the notion that they are somehow the high priests of Wiki-hood. Or the apostate, pointing fingers at the priests and taunting them. Quit wasting your energy on fighting and get down to writing.

[Idea developed during an interview with a Spiegel writer about the Wikipedia Wars.]

Wikipedia and Relevance and Dreams

The German Wikipedia has been embroiled in a discussion of its relevance criteria for a couple of weeks. Even the stately FAZ had a long article over the weekend one it (Das Schweigen der Lemmata, the silence of the lemmas, a pun that actually works, something Germans rarely use). I had a longish discussion with one of the bloggers leading the charge, Felix von Leitner (known as Fefe), by email, and I agreed to meet with him. I was going to be in that part of town anyway, and I was curious to meet him.

He and another CCCler, Frank Rieger, met with me at the CCC headquarters in Berlin, and we had a nice chat over donuts. The CCC sees the problems, and they are basically solved problems. Technically. The problem is, that the Wikipedia does not really have a captain on the bridge, telling this oil tanker where to go next. There are a bunch of people in the galleys, paddling every which way.

Making changes in an extremely large, global system like the Wikipedia is a very, very delicate operation. You can't just change the interface or the way one edits or introduce icons that signal how trustworthy a lemma entry is just to see if it works. There are literally millions of users out there who don't really understand what all the extra tabs are for, don't even realize they can edit and see the history or even follow a discussion on a page.

Yes, the technology is just so last century. People don't come to the Wikipedia for the technology. They want to settle a bar bet - or look something up for school. Or worse, copy it for use at university. But that's a topic for my Other Blog.

If you want to fork the Wikipedia - please, do so! That's the point of free documents. If you succeed where Wikipedia fails - all the better!

As for making up new rules to keep the trolls and vandals at bay - I don't know. Since we now have only checked versions on display in the German Wikipedia, that is, changes are only possible for unregistered users when a checker has eyeballed them to make sure that it is nothing stupid or silly. I suppose we ought to apply the same rule to new articles (maybe we do - even experienced people get lost in all the pages).

But it's a wiki, everyone should be allowed to edit. That's part of collaborative writing, there is no one author, there is just the collaborative authorship. If you want to have someone responsible for the text, to have the text be some sort of authority, then it has to be linked to someone. I have suggested that users could sign versions of articles, saying: What is written here is true, as far as I know. But when I see how difficult it is to get people to use digital signatures or even use PGP for encrypting their communication, I despair of getting some sort of change put through the Wikipedia.

But it's okay. The Wikipedia does not need to be 100% correct. Good enough is just fine. It is meant to be a starting point for answering a question, not the end point. It is troubling, that lately I have been wanting to look things up in the Wikipedia and there has been no entry. Just this weekend, I wanted to know more about Borussia, the female allegory for Prussia. Nix. Nada. Lots of soccer teams with Borussia in their name, and of course the article on Prussia. But nothing about all these statues with the name Borussia. I secured some links on my user page, I guess I will have to start an article in my spare time.

The Verein, the Wikimedia, does lots of things. What it does not do is run the Wikipedia. It offers technical support. Sure, a lot of the stuff they do is boring. I rattled of the list of what the Verein has been doing the past few months. Oh, sure, the picture action was great. But things like teaching teachers how to use the Wikipedia was met with a puzzled look.

I know, it is hard to realize how little many teachers know about the Wikipedia. My son tried to tell a teacher that his mom "worked" for the Wikipedia. Okay, work was not the correct work. His teacher laughed at him, he was telling tales. I put a notice up on my user page for the teacher: Dear Mr. X, yes, I am the Mommy of WiseKid, and he told you the truth. WiseKid tried to get the teacher to look up my user page, but he didn't know what that was. Instead of shaking our heads at the ignorance, we have to let people know. Show them how to use it. Show people how to research, edit, write.

And if they want to make a new Wikipedia, make it, and show us. Maybe we like it so much, we all switch!

Yes, I've given up on the Wikiversity. I personally declared it broken for me in 2007. My attempts to create a new university, a web-based one, were foiled by people re-inventing the broken wheel of German universities. Okay, I turn my attentions elsewhere.

I've not given up on the Wikipedia, Felix. And actually, I'm not currently cutting back. I've started reading the requests for deletion again, and adding my 2 cents worth to the discussions. I am even trying to save a lemma from theoretical computer science. Some guy insists that all lemmata need to be generally understandable. I don't think so. I need to get a general idea of what the concept is. And then I either decide to dive into the literature given in order to understand the maths behind it, or I decide that I don't understand this. It's okay.

I'm an inclusionist.

Oh, and I have papers to grade.....

Relevant Irrelevancy

There has been quite a discussion raging throughout the German blogosphere about the question of relevance in the Wikipedia. German admins, the people who can delete articles, use a complicated document that they have produced called the relevance criteria to determine what is relevant and what is not. Pavel Meyer wrote a good blog article called 99% of all Germans are irrelevant.

The fight all began with the deletion of an entry (called a lemma) about a group of people who are fighting the silly German government idea of putting stop signs in the Internet to stop child pornography. Right. I have actually offered to give a course Internet 101 to the members of parliament, but I am afraid they are too busy to attend.

Anyway, the German A-Team blogger picked it up, some Wikipedia authors and admins retaliated by deleting all sorts of other articles, and the fight raged on.

There was a meeting, packed into two rooms at the Wikimedia headquarters in Berlin, where everyone had their say, but nothing was actually decided. Many people do not understand that Wikimedia has nothing to do with the Wikipedia on the level of content or administration. That is for the community to do. Wikimedia can encourage community, but has other jobs in the area of wrenching knowledge and information and data that has already been paid for by the taxpayer from the claws of those who want to make money with it and get it put into the public domain.

And of course this falls at a perfect time, when Wikimedia itself is having communication problems between the leadership and the general membership and having a ton of vague notions about where they want to be in 10 years without realizing that the whole project may implode if they don't solve the current problems.

To me it just seems to be an exercise in Applied Anarchy. There is no government in the Wikipedia, just a bunch of rules and regulations that have developed over the years (including the rule to ignore all rules). But this means that people who delight in the attention they get by destroying work that others have done or who cannot tolerate any view of the world that is not their own, have very few checks and balances on their doings.

Oh, sure, we suggest that authors don't feed the trolls, and there is a vandalism patrol that keeps check on the most virulent of the vandals. But there are enough ways around this, and so many are calling for the installing of a Wikipedia Police Force (or at least a full-time editorial board with sweeping rights). But this opens up the whole thing to the lawyers, with people then having someone to sue to get an article about themselves or their companies either included or cast in a more flattering light.

Lighten up, people. If we could just channel this energy into writing articles and not deleting things that have promising beginnings (and not trying to stuff a doctoral thesis about topic X into the lemma) we can start to get the Wikipedia on better footing, so that we have a chance to indeed still be around in 2020.

Vulgar Feminist

I was able to attend the German Wikipedia discussion about the deletion and relevance discussion last week in Berlin (more on that in another blog entry). I made my point that most of the admins who are doing all the deletions are youngish men of German descent who live in cities, to make the point that they are quite biased in their view of "reality". Other bloggers have extended this to include childless. My point was rather drowned in lots of other points, although the blogs Spreeblick and Netzpolitik at least recorded it.

We stood around afterwards making small talk and I went over to join two other professors who are active and tend to attend such events. We began speaking and then two journalists joined us, a male reporter from a print newspaper and a female blogger. I repeated my point about the bias of the Admins, and a colleague began berating me as a "vulgar feminist". I was rather taken aback, especially at the vehemence of his words and his agitation.

This is something that I have been noticing recently. The gentlest of mention of the word "gender", or a reminder that professors are German Beamte and have a constitutional duty to work for equality of the sexes, brings out the fighting in many men, especially in colleagues.

Now, when I was going to university in the 70s the women's movement in Germany was much more radical. We wore purple bib overalls, cut our hair, smoked pipes, debated politics, and set up women's health centers. We fought for abortion rights, started discussions about rape and about violence against women and noted that we were not paid the same for doing the same work. There were radical groups that demanded the castration of men - I never saw that violence was useful for fighting violence, but there were people demanding this.

But why was I a vulgar feminist for pointing out a gender difference? It was impossible to get rational argument out of the colleague, and he could not listen to me even speak a complete sentence - as so many men can't - before he interrupted me. He began ranting about the nonsense of "feminist mathematics" - so I challenged him to name 5 female mathematicians. Before I could say "besides Emmy Noether" he interrupted me with "Emmy Noether, the first woman professor in mathematics". Sigh.

I waited. I goaded him. He couldn't come up with any names, then sputtered that it was the fault of the women if they didn't go into mathematics. Great job, it's always our fault, right? I remarked that Sonja Kovalevsky was the first woman professor in mathematics. She submitted 3 doctoral theses in Berlin to Karl Weierstraß, so they pretty much had to give her a doctorate. She was made professor in Stockholm (the first in Northern Europe) before her early death of pneumonia, caught while traveling to Paris to receive the Prix Bourdin.

He lashed out again, this time at the female German politicians in Hamburg who had voted against something that was near and dear to him (I didn't catch what). The female blogger pointed out that there was at least one man who also voted against the measure. He got called a green "Weichei" (a German derisive term for an unmanly man). And again he complained about vulgar feminists.

I asked for a definition of "vulgar feminists", as I tend to see the anti-feminists as the vulgar ones. Seems that he has a problem with the PorNo campaign. I see. And these feminists are prudes. It seems to be flashback time. The woman's strike at the taz newspaper where I was a free-lancer end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s was started over exactly such a reproach. A journalist had published a full page under a pseudonym about pornography that we complained about. When we were called prudes - which we were expecting - the leader of the group gave the code words "Sisters, are we prudes? Let's make ourselves free." Which we did. The author of the pornography page was so freaked out by all those women sitting calmly with bare breasts at the table that he ran screaming from the room and never returned. And we got a daily woman's page in the paper.

But what does that have to do with my point, that the admins find lemmata in the Wikipedia about women's topics "irrelevant"? The female blogger and I tried to get back to the point at hand. He now turned the blogger a cold shoulder and brushed her off. "Fräulein, I'm trying to talk with this journalist." And he turned to the male journalist.

I was speechless. I have seldom seen such bad behavior in recent years, and then to have a colleague, one who is interested in many current topics, act like that and call me a vulgar feminist - I was nonplussed. I nodded - oh, by all means, do speak with him. And went to another corner of the place to speak with the blogger in peace and quiet.

What on earth is going on? Some men seem to be of the opinion, we have had quite enough of this equality now, it is time to shut up and get back to more important things. I remarked that an oldish SPD sticker I have in my room is so true: you can judge the necessity of specific actions by how loud the men shout about them.

I am reminded of the book by Susan Faludi, Backlash, that I read many years ago. I dug it out at home - it was from the early 90s. It was published in 1993 in Germany as "Die Männer schlagen zurück". I surfed around a bit and then found a wonderful book review of this in the Emma from 1993, written by the Minister for Family of the time, the current German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The book review is excellent - she notes how Faludi makes clear that men use irrelevant statistics to try and make us feel guilty about having power. She states that women must continue the march through the institutions.

Spot on, Angela. You made it, now we have to see to it that our sisters are not drowned in guilt and accusations because it is still making many men uncomfortable. And that they, someday, earn the same money for doing the same work. We aren't there yet.

My colleague left in a huff, I went out for pizza with the usual suspects from the Wikipedia. One young man of German descent who lives in Berlin and is an admin brought up the women's topic again. He just didn't see why, when two people are equally qualified for a job, it had to be the woman who got the job. I sighed and explained that this was only necessary in cases where women are underrepresented. As soon as 40% of the jobs go to women, this is no longer necessary. And in fields where men are underrepresented this rule holds equally. He shook his head - he just didn't get it. I wrote, calmly, to my colleague the next day. I wonder if I will get an answer.

Sisters, we got a lot of work cut out for us. I wonder where my purple bib overalls are.

Update: My colleague has replied within a day and apologized. And promised to read a paper if I send it to him. I immediately looked for Frances Grundy, "Computer Software - A Clue to De-Gendering Technology?" And guess what? Frances is now retired, and her department had nothing better to do than to remove her works from their server. I'm so mad, I wrote to them and asked for her private email. I want to publish a collection of her papers. Now!

Minestrone and Corn Bread

Tomorrow is the Wikimedia yearly business meeting, so we had our Stammtisch tonight so the guests could have a party. And I volunteered for kitchen duty. We had some 35 people on the registration list, and expected a good many more, so we were looking at some major food-making.

We met at 3 pm and went shopping at a nearby Turkish market - they have great fresh produce. Then we wanted canned tomatoes - minestrone was on the menu. There were six different brands that had tomato pictures on them, and all were tomato paste, none canned tomatoes. We asked around (on account of not being really fluent in Turkish) and after some effort we found a can - the industrial sized can with 1.5 kilos of tomatoes in it. Whatever.

I was also planning on making cornbread and needed milk, but there was none to be found. There was lots of Ayran, though, a salted youghurt drink. So I figured I would just leave off the salt and use this.

Then we started chopping. We chopped an ENORMOUS amout of veggies for 40-50 portions of soup. We also had 3 kilos of ground meat that I rolled into about 200 little meatballs for the soup. The kitchen was small, but we managed to get it pretty much done in time, despite the slow stove. My corn bread needed an hour and 15 minutes, the soup needed hours to boil.

We took some soup out before the meat went in as our veggie special, and also had some Turkish mixed pickles, some cucumber and some bread to go along with it. One member went around and assessed 5 Euros per eater, calling it a flat-rate party: eat as much soup as you want.

And indeed, it was enough for everyone, and they just so *raved* about the corn bread, that I have to give the recipe here, adapted from my good old Better Homes and Gardens cookbook.

Per batch (I made a triple batch for 40 people) you take 1 cup of white flour, 1 cup of polenta, 1/2 cup of sugar, and an envelope of baking powder (4 teaspoons) and mix well. In another bowl you beat 2 eggs, 1/4 cup of oil, and 1 cup of ayran (if you are using normal milk, add a teaspoon of salt to the dry ingredients). Grease a casserole, mix the wet ingredients into the dry, stir until just moist enough, pour into the casserole and bake for 25 minutes at 210° C, or more, until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. This is really good with fresh butter.

I am now exhausted, my back hurts and I'm off to bed.

Wikipedia wins

The German Wikipedia has admirably demonstrated that the Internet just routes around attempts to censor it. The German parliamentarian who tried to shut down the German Wikipedia (which is just a page that then links to the servers in the US and elsewhere) has apologized and said that he didn't think far enough ahead what this action of his would have as consequences.

Duh. Many pundits have pointed out that this rather summarizes German politicians in a nutshell. They just do, and worry about the consequences later. At least he did apologize and not just go into hiding.

The German Wikipedia is extremely happy to note that we managed to collect half the money we need for new servers (to be kept as mirrors in Germany in case any US courts try the same trick) just over the weekend. Many in the Verein have suggested that we take a tithe - 10% - of this money and earmark it for figuring out how to sort out the entries on living people, which seem to be the ones that get us into the most trouble. A very fine suggestion, in my opinion.

At the Stammtisch in Berlin we were joking about taking bets on how many people will try and get the politician kicked out of his party this week. Petra Pau, a member of the party ruling committee, came out sharply against the actions of the parliamentarian without actually mentioning his name. She speaks of Maschinenstürmerei (Luddites), quite a funny name for someone who toys with the Internet.

The Internet cannot be censured!

A member of the German parliament from the party Die Linke (aka PDS, neé SED, the ruling party of the former German Democratic republic) has managed in one fell swoop to discredit his party even more than they normally do on an average working day. And he has helped the Wikipedia Germany tremendously.

We are currently running a financing campaign, as we are in need of new servers and people to run them, the project is growing by leaps and bounds. This member of parliament found something on his entry that he did not like - seems he used to work for the Stasi, according to some media. This was stated in the article with a reference to the source.

Since he apparently does not understand how the Internet works, he went to court and received an injunction against the owner of the domain wikipedia.de to shut it down. Okay, this is run in German, so it had to be capped. What he apparently does not realize is that this does not stop the servers. They are physically located in places like Holland, the US, South Korea. A German judge cannot shut down a server in the US. Okay, the URL is different: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite, but it is still reachable! That is what forwarding is - it just rewrites the URL.

What has happend, however, is that the mainstream German media (including the Tagesschau) has picked it up. And the most amazing thing is happening - the money is pouring in! People are donating small amounts - 5, 10 Euros. Some are donating larger amounts. Many are doing it anonymously, others are making a statement: that the party Die Linke needs to examine why it has this particular politican in its ranks. Surely there are "cleaner" people to be found for the job of parliamentarian.

I suppose it is the Obama Effect - get everyone mad, and they will all donate what they can. Together it is sufficient to change the world. I am just so moved by all the entries, and the people saying: "Thank you, Wikipedia!" That really makes all the hours spent writing and editing and arguing and talking about the Wikipedia all the more worth it!

Okay, it is a crying shame to have to waste this money on court and lawyer's fees, but if that is what we have to do to keep the Wikipedia online and accessable, then we will do it. The Internet has changed the world - it is high time the politicians realized that!

I am available - for a price - to teach them.

Older Women

Got a survey form in my email today from the German Wikipedia.

"Dear WiseWoman, you are an active Wikipedia person who is older than 50"
Thanks, I *really* needed that today.

"We want to reach out to older people and encourage them to be active in the WP. Please fill out this form to help us!"

And then they wanted to know stuff like how well I can cope with the help pages and whether I think older people would like a video explaining how to edit.

To be honest, I think age is not important at all in the WP. Last Stammtisch I sat with JCornelius and put together pages about Tibet in German. He still goes to school - but who cares, it's our words, not our combined or difference of ages that count.

I suggested the Admins quitting acting like power hungry hogs and the trolls growing up and moving to China, but fat chance of that happening.

Better check the mirror tonight and count my wrinkles. But honestly, is a woman with a home office full of technical odds and ends representative of the "Generation 50+ Gals"? Gawd, how I hate that term....

But I trust Wikipedia!

Had a rather strange Wikipedia-experience last evening. We were having dinner with some friends a their beach house. Their teenager was expounding on all sorts of things, and giving the Wikipedia as a source.

I volunteered that I found the Wikipedia a great first-look resource, but not as a quoting source. His mother looked up and said: But don't they check all the information? I think it is a very reliable source.

Then the son chimed in with the history of the Wikipedia (sort of) and that they do have people checking facts, and that there is now a media collection called Wikimedia.... so I had to step in and correct: history, fact checking, Wikimedia (which is the Verein in Germany). He didn't believe me, after all, he is a teenager. I volunteered that I am, actually, a founding member of the Verein (and have actually shaken Jimmy Wales hand). But really, what do I know?

I'm kind of shaken that the average Joe does, indeed, trust the Wikipedia more than other sources. We have a lot to live up to.

Proof by Intimidation

There has been quite a lot of excitement over at Wikipedia-EN these past week with the media "discovering an imposter". A tried and true administrator, EssJay, was to be hired by Wikia for a top (paid) editing job. At the point that Real Life (tm) intersected the Internet it was discovered that EssJay was actually a college dropout in his early twenties and not a learned theologican.

Well gosh. Does that make his edits any worse, just because he was pretending to be someone else? Apparently it does, someone found a discussion in which he ranted "I have a doctorate in theology, so I know what is correct". He has now resigned from the Wikipedia (surely soon to return under another name with a doctorate in zoology...) and did not get that editing job.

It reminds me of the day of my rude awakening as a grad student. Like many students I had believed that professors and learned people with doctorates were rather pope-like in their infallibility. They strove for truth, were above pettyness, and were just vastly intelligent. Sure, there were a few bozos, but I attributed this to stray values. I had my "Question Authority" button on regularly, but that was for administrators and burocrats, people with no connection to Real Life.

I was at a meeting of the large, EU (well, it was called the EEC then)-funded multi-national research group. Prof. Everyone Knows Me was at the board doing a proof. I think I lost the trail shortly after "Let x= .....". One of the research guys from the Danish group put up his hand and was recognized. "Sir," he said, "that is not true for all cases." Prof. Everyone Knows Me was puzzled, then pulled back, looked at the board and said "Of course it is true, I have thought this out!"

Those of us in the back row started giggling about "Proof by Intimidation", "I'm Prof. EKM, I say so, so it is true."

This brave soul would not let loose. He replied "Let me show you" and went up to the board and scribbled a lot of mathematics. It was evident to those who could follow that indeed, the grad student had constructed a case in which the purported theorem did not hold. Prof. EKM waved his hand and said, well, this case cannot happen because I am only looking at code which is produced from a proven-correct compiler, this case cannot be produced by a proven-correct compiler. And the lad sat down while the proof continued.

Ah ha. So even the big shots made errors? But we had to believe everything they said, just because they were who they were?

From that point on, I no longer believed people only because they have lots of nice extraneous letters decorating their name. It is the content, what they do and say, that counts.

And so it should be at the Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales has suggested a sort of Certification Authority for proving who we are. This is a can of worms - it is trivial to print off your own doctoral certificate these days (although if you misspell the name of the school or the field you are supposedly holding a doctorate in, it will be obvious that this is a fake). People even get doctorates (real ones) by handing in false theses - plagiarisms.

Respect must be earned, one edit at a time, one publication at a time, one discussion at a time. Of course this is difficult, and how do people in X know when A is a con artist from Y? You don't - you just keep a healthy skepticism open, question authority, and strive for truth.