sj’s Looking for People to Write Summaries of What They Read for Wikipedia.
He asked me to contribute to the page. My immediate thoughts were:
- "sj, everyone knows I don’t read anything."
- I’m listed in Share Your OPML. Can’t you just go there to see what I aggregate?
- That’s what I do with my blogs. (Now’s a good example of that.) How about sucking up a feed?
- Where am I going to get time to contribute to another project?!?
- sj will do anything to get people to contribute to Wikipedia and he’s been hammering on me for a while.
- Why not just set something up in Feedster or use feeds to push content onto the Wikipedia site? Surely he and some of the other tech heads there can do that. (Did I hear someone say Frassle Publisher?)
- If I had editorial rights to this blog in Frassle, I could set up a special category for stuff I wanted to push to Wikipedia that sj could suck up.
I heard sj mention this idea during a Wikipedia meetup over the weekend. On the one hand, it sounds like a really good thing, but on the other, I just keep thinking, “Isn’t that what some of us do with our blogs? Isn’t there a better way for Wikipedia to tap this content instead of starting a project from scratch?”
I noticed a familiar set of initials on that page. That person doesn’t blog, but contributing to Wikipedia in that fashion could be like a blog. Keeping track of readings could be useful for a thesis or just profesional development in general.
Addendum 11:34 am: What I’m trying to say that I guess didn’t come across in the post is this: The Chronicle of Higher Education is something I look at every week day. Sometimes, I read an article. Sometimes, I summarize an article in a blog post. Instead of Wikipedia having another volunteer go through the Chronicle of Higher Education or coercing me into writing another summary of that article for them, maybe there’s a way for them to find it and pull it off my blog.
It was certainly not my intention to say anything slanderous about Wikipedia in this post. The more I learn about the project, the more fascinating I find it. One of the big reasons why I went to the meetup this past weekend was to learn more about the project and the volunteers behind it. Some very amazing and talented people are involved with Wikipedia. I respect what they’re doing.
August 5th, 2004 at 11:47 am
Gotta disagree with you strongly on this one. I love Wikipedia. What makes it good is that it’s not some machine-generated aggregation of random thoughts, but a carefully crafted, re-crafted, re-worked, labored-over collection of articles on every topic under the sun. Look up some fancy math or physics subject and you’ll see a very clear explanation with useful links (see, for example, Markov Chain, Darrieus Wind Turbine). I’ve made edits where I think necessary, but haven’t started any new articles.
August 5th, 2004 at 12:49 pm
Did I say something against Wikipedia?
What sj’s talking about isn’t summaries for the articles in Wikipedia. It’s a new article summary service they want to begin.
I’m not arguing for machine-generated summaries of articles. I’m saying that people-authored summaries are already out there in the blogosphere and in other places. If Wikipedia can tap into what’s already there instead of trying to get an army of people to summarize the world anew, they might be better off just because of how difficult it is to find people who will commit to doing certain things and actually follow through with what they say they’ll do. Also, if Wikipedia can find a source out there that’s already doing summaries of certain things, that might free a volunteer up to summarize sources that aren’t being summarized. Maybe they should look into some of the indexes and databases that provide article summaries. I know they don’t have any money, though, so that’s not the best option.
August 6th, 2004 at 1:25 am
Target markets: everyone, but also major feed consumers like the Yahoo’s of the world.
Desired restrictions: the content must be readily redistributable. That means not with restrictive licenses which inhibit lawful consolidation and reuse (I don’t think sj has this right yet – PD is almost required if you consider the space restrictions of a front page or channel page slot on the AOL’s of the world).
Purpose: To promote the Wikipedia and Wikimedia, via embedded links to appropriate articles. To provide summary service for those in the fields covered.
Unique advantages:
Wikimedia has many people who generally agree to accept no byline and who are accustomed to working together and editing and improving content provided by others.
Anyone can participate and share both the workload and the benefits. Mass aggregation of human power is one of the key strengths of the Wikimedia projects. You might not have time to do all items, but you might take a few minutes to do one entry.
Mass review and editing of entries. Self-promotion and ads are unlikely to survive unless they have real merit.
There’s merit in your points, of course. There IS redundancy. Can that be eliminated? Can blogs or other feeds meet the general requirements? What don’t you cover? What “noise” level is required to get all of what you cover and all of what ten other bloggers cover? Can the collective editing and collective responsibility approach of the wiki projects help?
That’s the unofficial summary of this person with heavy Wikimedia involvement. I’m on the technical and legal teams, paying attention to some of the MySQL database and copyright issues.
Of note is my choice of words in the last paragraph. I wrote “paying attention to”, not “accepting responsibility for”. There is collective responsibility rather than individual responsibility, in general. Ideally, enough people so that no one person has an obligation they can’t shirk or which can become burdensome. Responsibility for what you do doesn’t vanish, of course – if I crash the database server or delete something, I am solely responsible for that.
August 6th, 2004 at 1:32 am
Christina, if you read this, you might consider noting on your user page that you are a professional in one or more fields and then starting a section for “==Professional endorsements==” on the talk pages of articles you review. You can then indicate that you’re a professional in the field and consider a specific version to be accurate, in your professional opinion. You can get an unchanging link to a specific version by looking at the history of the article and picking any date/time except the first. Enclose that link in [ and ] and you’ll get a live link to that specific endorsed version. This is not official – just one way to do it and help to start to address one of the common criticisms of the project: that it isn’t professionally written or reviewed. It often is, but there isn’t a standard for indicating it yet.
August 9th, 2004 at 1:52 am
J, I’d love to reuse your blog content. As far as I know, no subset of your writings has been released into the public domain… Is there some journalism course which teaches people never, ever to allow work to be used without a byline save under dire circumstances?
And James — you don’t think CC-BY allows for consolidation and reuse?
August 9th, 2004 at 12:42 pm
Sj, if you’d like to reuse my blog content, let’s talk.
I don’t think I’ve ever taken a journalism course, so I can’t say whether they teach people not to release their work. Getting appropriate credit for work can be quite important to some people, but there are many instances when someone may be willing to forego credit.