Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Sam Klein, Wikipedia maven, will try to give us a flavor of the world of Wikis — the collaborative, cathedral-like information structures of the web. Sam will also cover access control and antispam techniques for Wikis that keep these cathedrals from turning into an info-landfill. Sam has a weblog, SJ’s Longest Now, but you can get a feel for the variety and quickness of his intellect by visiting his page on Wikipedia.

• SJ: This presentation is a wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sj/Presentation
• SJ: Why are wikis so cool? No pretty, but fascinating. Addictive. Inclusive. Let you play and change things right from the start.
• SJ: http://www.wikitravel.org
• SJ: Easy to make any change you think is necessary.
• SJ: You can get very efficient front pages – people make the small changes that are helpful
• Susanna: Where does software come from?
• SJ: Most popular wiki programs are free software
• SJ: WikiTravel has a note to spammers in the comments on the main page, only visible when you try to edit, rather than making it harder for folks to edit main page. They monitor it heavily.
• SJ: First wiki: c2.com
• SJ: wikis are primarily about giving people the power to change what you’ve done on your site, and moving toward more comprehensive information
• SJ: You can see changes, logged chronologically, in history file – so changes can easily be undone by others if people are unhappy with them
• SJ: When you create barriers to people editing, it’s less likely people will find your site. Allowing edits encourages all kinds of interactivity – makes it more likely ppl will be involved
• SJ: wiki etymology: derived from word that means “fast” (EG says: Hawaiian wikiwiki, probably dervied from English quick)
• SJ: up til about 5 years ago, wikis would get unwieldy after about 500 users. But now with software changes to help track spam, you can have many more users. (?)
• SJ: Wikis are hard to use for discussion, though. Why we had trouble during the PM session today at iLaw. It’s easier to gather information or put together facts, even though there are opinions about facts. A wiki is not a forum – not a threaded bulletin board discussion. Wikis are not suited for that.
• JD: Though there’s lots of deliberation on the talk pages on wikipedia
• SJ: But also much much more so on other fora: IRC, Skype, mailing lists…
• SJ: People try really hard to have these discussions on the talk pages but they get tough to sort through. Hard to break it up easily.
• MW: How extensive is the search function on mediawiki?
• SJ: Decent & getting better
• SJ: “This is a lot better than porn”: Looking at the raging discussions and histories of people’s disagreements over what’s in a wikipedia article. People nitpick, spend lots of time, sometimes on minor details – but enables great precision. But when people are doing these details, it’s a good sign – usually means the main body of the article is all good by then, has been pretty polished.
• SJ: Copyright issues: people use pictures, sometimes they claim fair use but it’s unclear – you must on Wikipedia state that the copyright of a picture is fair use or public domain. When you upload a pic you must verify that it’s authorized to be released under terms of wikipedia copyright.
• (general discussion): people talking re photographers’ rights, rights of subject of a photo, when is it OK to post a pic you took without getting permission of the subject portrayed, how should you handle that, how wide is it ok to release it… esp in context of kids which is more sensitive subject.
• Sj: preventing spam: Make sure you need every bit of hard security you put in place. When you make it too hard to edit, people lose interest, your site loses dynamism.
• SJ: instead lots you can do by choosing software carefully, setting it up carefully.
• SJ: requiring a login can be pretty effective. Makes it easier to filter out one person who starts causing trouble. You can look back at their earlier posts to see when they started miscief-making. Login can be very easy even for new user. People have to go to mroe trouble when creating multiple accounts etc.
• Gigi: Hard to go by IP address right? Sometimes dynamic…
• SJ: But IP addy is often long enough to see one session of mayhem and control it.
• Sj: You can make it so some things require login, even if simple edits don’t.
• Sj: user profile pages, user talk pages, make it easy for users to talk to each other.
  <li.Sj: wikipedia requires login only for a few things. Only exceptions are access to tools for banning, etc…

• BK: Say you want to have a wiki but aren’t a techie… Is there a typepad like solution for wikis? Can people host a wiki for you?
• SJ: yes. places like wikicity, xwiki, others. even free hosted ones.
• SJ: more users = more people to help you monitor content. Economies of scale.
• Q from ? person: What if someone steals content and sells it?
• SJ: if the site has an automatic creative commons license, then it’s ilelgal for someone to scrape the content and sell it with charge for content.
• SJ: On wikipedia, If you do charge, you have to specify that it can also be found for free online in an editable form. it’s a special GNU free document license.
• (discussion) what if terrorists started using a wiki? would it still be trackable?
• ” If I was a terrorist, I wouldn’t use a wiki because someone could come in to change my instructions” (uncertain who said)
• How to good-bye depression (link??)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Berkman
• SJ: wikis require some kind of free license, because nobody can claim sole authorship when it’s out there and editable. people often don’t think about this. it can result in bad stuff.
• q: is there precedent? Sj: not that i’ve heard of, but actual legal threats from lawyers have ensured
• Sj: ppl don’t jsut sue individual, they sure ISP, etc.
• LB: What about inappropriate or copyrighted content? Livejournal requires an “action report” from a complainer to take action on objectionable or infringing material. How would that work on wikipedia?
• SJ: everyone’s a volunteer, even the active monitors. But i predict we’ll have to take it more seriously over time. it’s hard but it is possible for any person to monitor all the recent changes. Ex: the person who checks every new submission on the German wikipedia.
• (some discussion about max numbers of google vs yahoo api keys that I (EG) totally don’t understand.)
• LB: Trillian’s latest version has a plugin that automatically links wikipedia articles for words…

• BLOGS

Blogs: Blogger and Berkman Fellow Rebecca MacKinnon will be on hand with participants of iLaw, the Berkman Center’s annual conference on internet legal issues, to give iLaw participants a look at blogging from the inside.

• RMack: Let’s have the iLaw people tell us what they want to learn, and then demo the Blogging101 project…
• One person familiar with them but hasn’t got one herself
• MB: visiting scholar from Moldova. Not very familiar w blogs. Wants to publish online law journal. Thinks can learn things applicable.
• Susanna: Good tools for beginners? I read a lot of blogs but can’t ever figure out how they get rights to the articles they post. Some blogs post the full articles. Do they have rights? What about liability, potentially incorrect defamatory comments, etc.
• JD: Workaround: New York Times has an RSS feed that allows a permanently linakble URL
• RMack: so we need some explanation of basic blogging tools, yeah?
• MB: Q: I have a friend who put text of laws of Moldova online and is now being sued by the govt for doing that. Accused of stealing the info. How can you steal your country’s laws, they’re public right? http://www.docs.md – currently suspended. They cited the code, but now we don’t have the text up to check.
• RMack: Let me show some examples of similar stuff. Something I think could get sued for violation of copyright, and then some examples of fair use.
• RMack: One guy who pastes whole articles out of washington post into his blog. If he posted this on my site, I’d be liable, so I don’t give him guest authorship on my site. However on my site, we sometimes post articles when people send them to us and we are sure they have authorization. It’s also totally fine to post a link to the article. It’s commonly considered fair use to do a quote of even a few paragraphs but just not for the whole article.
• RH: “Fisking” – If you post paragraph by paragraph and comment on each paragraph individually it can be argued that it’s fair use.
• RF: Also it’s courtesy *not* to paste the whole article, taking up space.
• MW: If the link goes dead that’s no good either. You need a long enough quote to get a sense of it even if the link goes dead, so the commentary makes sense.
• RMack: A Texas newspaper (Tulsa world) sent a cease and desist letter to a blogger telling him it was illegal for him to link to them without permission, to quote a few sentences without permission. This is bull. His use was entirely fair use, and you can’t control who links to you. And in the end the paper got lots of bad publicity from the incident.
• side discussion: is it fair use to post a c&d sent to you? can you be sued for publicly posting a c&d? (EG: I am not a lawyer but I really hope it’s fair use. Otherwise chillingeffect.org would probably have been chilled by now.)
• RMack: lots of ppl blog w/out thinking of the consequences. Blog about work and then are surprised when fired. Naming names of their young kids without thinking of how this may affect them later on.
• (general discussion re defamation)
• Q: what about defamation on review sites that allow anonymity? is it responsibility of owner of site to police?
• SR: may be insulated if post disclaimer of nonliability of site owner.
• RMack: Now you have to sign in to comment on Jeff ooi’s site, because he almost went to jail in Malaysia because someone posted a comment defaming Islam. It was very very close for a while – he was going to be held responsible for an anonymous comment on hsi blog. That’s Malaysian law.
• BK: How did the govt find out?
• RMack: reported by someone who didn’t like Jeff. He’s been controversial. The thing about blogs is you can control the conversation esp. if you’re the only author. You control the front page. You can invite guests but you don’t have to. You can delete anything you don’t want there. You can moderate comments so you have to approve all comments. We do that on Global Voices – helps control for comment spam, hate rants, etc.
• j: James on IRC says the CDA protects forum owners from people who comment on forums and that ppl can ask him about it (contact info??)
• RMack: Typepad for instance… (shows some of the tools)
• Gigi: why did you pick typepad then? Talk about the decision…
• DF: Similar to blogware, i can do some of the same type of things with comment control. But i can’t prevent them a priori. So look to the features of your platform beforehand.
• RMack: I am not a techie. i wanted ease of use. i got this blog up and running very fast. When you maintain on your own server it can be a real pain. But yes I also do pay. But some services are free. It depends what services you want. I got the pro version cos I want to be able to do a lot of other stuff.
• Q: how market your blog? A: July 14, Amanda Watlington’s session at blog group, will talk all about that!
• RMack: If you make a post that ppl find interesting and link to, that can drive new traffic. Trackback tool shows when someone else with trackback links to you. Enables a conversation – can see what ppl say in their own blogs, not just in your comments section.
• MW: you can see who adds you to public RSS readers like bloglines
• (lots of other discussion re this topic that I am too tired to write: EG)
• Q: i was frustrated when i tried to search for stuff on blogger.com so i gave up. i wanted to see what was out there.
• SR: find blogs of people you know on topcis that interest you. Those blogs will link to toher blogs. You’ll discover new topics that you will become interested in and the blogs talking about those. then you have a network you’re jumping into as a beginner blogger.
• also goggle for stuff you’re interested in, some results will be blogs
• LB: livejournal has an interest search. also communities as ways to meet other bloggers.
  <li.Rmack: not everyone has a “reason” to blog. Why should they blog if they don’t have something to say. a successful blog shares opinion, information, ideas. Don’t care what anyone else will say about you. You don’t always have to be reacting to something else in the blogosphere. It doesn’t matter what everyone else is already saying about the subject you’re talking about. Say something original instead. Your unique voice, perspective, expertise, that is the most valuable kind of blog. I have no interest in blogs that just link to what everyone else is saying.

• MW: you can get a sense of the conversation though. NCBlogs.com has all the North carolina bloggers aggregated for example. In Boston there’s Unviersal Hub. Local blog sites. google can help you find them. Interst based blog communities.
• Q: so if i want women’s blogs from nigeria?
• RMack: try global voices actually! globalvoicesonline.org We’ve grouped it by country. But you can find interesting stuff just by googling. You don’t need to already know the special sites. One blog on a topic has links to others on that subject. You’ll find things.
• discussion on the work involved in blogging. some posts are low investment some are high investment, involve research etc. blog about things you’re already interested in writing about, already thinking about, want feedback on, etc. bl;ogging is a commitment, takes time and some discipline. it;’s writing. it’s hard to do well.
• RMack: Blogging 101 wiki: http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Blogging101

• Well wishes for Gregory
• Happy Birthday to Jay! Happy Birthday to Jay! Who fell off the Earth–Happy Birthday to Jay! (and many more …)
• What else?
  • Inviting Cameron Marlow to talk about his Blog Survey: Erica emailed him, and he’d love to come talk to us after his doctoral defense: anytime after August 5
• Eat:
  • Hurray for free pizza! Anyone wanna go out for drinks/dessert?
    • j types: anyone for contradancing!!!
    • erica types: w00t!
  • Last week, Uno’s.