… who looks after things.
PBS together with Democracy Now! have produced a three part series about the living wage. The first installment is about Walmart and Chicago’s ‘Big Box’ Ordinance and in the Boston market airs tonight at 10:00 PM on WGBH 2. Transcripts and audio are available on the PBS website.
Zvi and Malvina discuss fine points after the panel.
Malvina [right] was one of the panelists.
Suppose that you, like me, are a new wikipedian. You’ve learned the wiki codes which is not a big deal - rather easy compared to HTML, but still takes non-zero time. You’ve learned some of the conventions of the culture. You put “your” page together and put it up on the ‘pedia. What happens then. Well, if you, like me, didn’t read ALL the conventions of the culture, you will come back some time latter and find “your” page emblazoned with banners informing you of the conventions of the culture that you didn’t read. One of these might be that you forgot to assign “your” page a category. So you then need to spend a chunk of time reading the tree of available categories. It’s not hard to find one or two quickly, but how do you know you’ve found the best categories. How do you know you’ve found all the relevant categories. It is a ‘barrier to entry’ for new Wikipedians and a problem even for some experienced Wikipedians.
Natural language Processing (NLP) is equal to automating this process to some extent. It is possible for programs to read bunches of categorized articles and collect a ’signature’ which could then be used to match up with new articles to make suggestions for categorizing them. This could be done now. The Wikipedians are discussion whether it should be done now.
On the one hand it would make creating new articles easier. Jimmy Wales mentioned in the morning plenary that with over 1,000,000 articles in the English Wikipedia, quality of existing articles is a higher priority than creating new ones. But NLP techniques can help here too. For example, a tool that can identify population numbers could check that a given city has the same population everywhere in the ‘pedia.
On the other hand, NLP systems are complex and consume a lot of computing resources. They are ‘heavy’. Wikipedia currently is ‘light’ i.e. simple and fast. The Wikipedians would like to keep it that way. NLP techniques will be introduced cautiously.
Why have I said “your” page throughout? That’s another aspect of Wikipedia culture. Articles do not belong to the originator, the most profilic contributor, or anyone else. It’s free content baby! It belongs to the world.
Some brief remarks by Eben Moglen, President of the Software Freedom Law Center followed by a panel together with Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain.
Some remarks pro and con about Hyack an interesting arguably conservative economists who does not yet have a Wikipedia page.
Mostly I work in the Economics building. [Downstairs from Andrei Schleiffer in fact.] It is right next to the Law School. Accident?
You can believe in accidents, but if you believe in accidents, science ceases to exist.
Economics, in the capitalist paradigm, can’t exist without legal definitions and enforcement of property. It was interesting to hear someone talking from the Law side.
Lessig put up Richard Stallman’s picture and described him as someone who was viewed as a crackpot in the ’80’s but in the 20th century is not. “He is a hero.”
Mention pro and con of Austrian free-market economist Friedrich Hayek.
Mako Hill
Eben Moglen, President of the Software Freedom Law Center made some interesting remarks about why Free Software managed to get as far as it did, whereas other works have suffered more damage. Basically, software was easy to protect because there was not a prior body of law rigidly defining property rights. Other works are covered by pre-existing long standing law.
Meeting in Pound Hall [where Registration also happens] with a few sessions in the Ames Courtroom in AUstin Hall, It is really quite exciting. I don’t multi-task as well as the young people so my reporting will lag a bit, but you can follow the action through streams on the conference website. The conference will continue through this afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday. Y’all come! It does cost money. People with employers that respect them could ask for professional development money? Details are on the conference website.
Jimbo Wales talk gave a much richer picture of the political economy/sociology/cognitive model of the organization behind Wikipedia and related projects. It is much more realistic than catch phrases that appear in the news. At the same time, Wales has built what is overwhelmingly a volunteer organization and seems to understand that he has to take direction from them as well as give it. It is a relatively open communication model. Very different from … oh … say … the Harvard College Library. I’ll go into this in more detail in time.
My apologies to the folks in Harvard’s Lamont, Littauer, and Widener Libraries. I misjudged my time and didn’t get to invite y’all personally.
I must further apoligize! I should have invited everybody in Havard College Library. Heck Harvard University Library. Heck alll 5000 members of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers. Ok Derek, you can come too.
Randy.f
Union steward AFSCME local 3650
