Stopping SOPA+PIPA: Blackout Wednesday #2
It has been 12 hours since the blackouts protesting SOPA and PIPA started. Below is coverage from the English-language Net.
Best quotes so far:
“Wikipedia blacked out. Fine, I’ll buy some used encyclopedias from Craigslist. WTF? I’m going to Reddit to complain about this. OMG!!“
“Icanhazcheezeburger?! OK, this is serious now.”
In Wikipedia land:
- The response to the English Wikipedia blackout has been overwhelmingly positive. The OTRS team (a community group that handles most email inquiries about Wikipedia) has been handling the surge of correspondence beautifully.
- a post by Sue Gardner on the WMF blog about the blackout have together received over 10,000 comments from readers — roughly 3x the total # of comments received in the entire history of the blog. 90% of them are supportive of the blackout, 5% are opposed, and 5% are neutral.
- Fellow trustee Stu West suggests that 100M Wikipedia readers may read about the bills today via Wikipedia - half via the blackout on English Wikipedia, and half from banners on other language projects and the mobile sites. (Another large audience saw the ‘heads-up’ banner we ran all day yesterday.)
Elsewhere on the Web
In Washington, politicians are beginning taking notice. They seem to be seriously considering and commenting on the demonstrated failings of the legislation on hand, not just backing off (as GoDaddy did) to await ‘consensus’.
Other coverage online:
Preserving Internet freedom: protesting SOPA and the Wikipedia blackout
Thousands of web sites across the Internet are shutting down today to protest proposed U.S. laws (
SOPA and
PIPA) that would make it difficult for websites to host community-generated content on the Internet. Most notably, the English Wikipedia is
implementing a 24-hour blackout, replacing articles with a notice describing the two bills and encouraging readers to take action to stop them.Please take a moment to
learn more about the bills and why they would be harmful to the open Web, to open education, and to present and future collaborative projects.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other non-profit organizations dedicated to preserving freedom on the Web have ways that you can make your voice heard in the national and international debate about these proposed laws.
SOPA suds-off : the first four hours
Background:
Jan 18 Blackouts:
On the WP blackout:
Analysis of WP blackout:
Reflection:
WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake. — R. Tagore
Community comentary:
- Risker, one of three community authors of the en:wp decision to shutter the site on Jan 18th, in #wikimedia-sopa :
“Folks….thank you all for doing such an amazing job to implement the screwiest decision I’ve ever had to write. You have all done well.“
- Some people are lost without WP, mirrors or no mirrors
- “Well, it’s good for people to learn how to get around the blackout of sites, because they’ll need to know how if SOPA passes.“
- I can search Wikipedia through the mobile sights…. Black that out too!!! QUICKLY (01:00 EST)
- As I thought when I read Geoff Brigham’s blog post on SOPA, ‘it’s gotta be bad if it makes the DMCA look good.’
Public commentary:
- @NatLibrariesDay Wikipedia is closed for business today, but your local public library isn’t! ow.ly/8xqFk
Mystery Hunt 2012: Romancing The Notes
Every January I spend a weekend in the Land of Mystery, tucked into a facet of MIT: that is, the MIT Mystery Hunt.
It is somewhere between a religious experience, performance art, and an exercise in observation, pattern matching, and problem solving. It is also wickedly tricky, a pinnacle of amateur puzzle contests: teams of 50+ people spend two full days solving a series of interlocked puzzles to find a coin hidden somewhere on campus.
This past weekend I took my annual pilgrimage across Cambridge to MIT for the Hunt, but for the first time my team was running the event, rather than competing. This was our tenth anniversary as Team Codex (we started out the year before as the aduni team, then adopted a proper codename), and producing the Hunt was a fitting way to celebrate. Many of us had a backlog of puzzle ideas that were converted into working puzzles over the course of the past year, with much iteration and satisfaction. Few of us had ever designed Mystery Hunt-caliber puzzles before, though we knew in principle how it was done.
We staged the first musical-themed Hunt on record, in an effort to encourage teams to share their own creativity while solving. Max and Leo from The Producers showed up at MIT, now out of jail and looking to make goo^B^B^B out like bandits, this time for good. They staged a short production of their own to get everyone in the mood, and then invited students to help them research and put on a series of guaranteed musical flops… While this didn’t work out exactly as planned, along the way were fancy cocktail parties with potential stars, swimming-pools full of Sets of ducks, research into the private peeves and longings of theater critics, campus spelunking, video game hacking, and a denouement in which, unbelievably… . . . well, it’s complicated. You’ll just have to explore the Hunt site itself to see how the saga ended.
We had roughly 70 active people on our organizing team, and everyone played multiple roles — writing, testing, and implementing puzzles, software, and skits. Our lead performers, in addition to being fine actors and musicians, happened to be professional puzzle writers and editors, and wrote many of the Hunt’s 107 puzzles as well as the book for our productions. Our lead editor also kept the production team together through stressful moments, providing black humor as needed, and preserving a fast editing pace all Fall without upending our minimal-heirarchy team. Hotshot solvers shifted gears to rewrite swaths of code. When puzzle-lover Neil Patrick Harris declined to MC the awards ceremony, we called on a home-grown rock star instead. Dozens of people joined the cast in the final weeks and picked up their parts without a hitch.
Having been involved with organizing perhaps a dozen events of similar size, I can say without hesitation that this was the most satisfying and life-affirming. We had varied and prolific organizers, an elaborate and dynamic schedule, a completely committed audience, and an extraordinary host-participant collaboration, with continual feedback. While the event ran for only 1500 people, its primary output was a broadly valuable story, told through puzzles: something that may be enjoyed for years or generations to come: a set of curious, colorful, maddening, marvelous puzzles, illustrated and interlinked, free to solve and repurpose. Just one more Act in the perennial romance between creative puzzlers and scientific endeavour.
Here is a sampling of this year’s puzzles, drawn from my favorites. Happy hunting! The average puzzle takes 2-10 person-hours to solve, depending on your experience and how quickly the right insights come to you.
Sounds Good To Me
(my all-hunt favorite)
Slash Fiction
(best casting and music, and the most expensive puzzle production)
Paper Trail
(an elegant, satisfying black box)
Yo Dawg I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts
(yo dawg, i herd you like herd you like)
Itinerant People Of America
(man, this one is a hodge-podge.)
Picture An Acorn
(the final aha! will make you chump for joy)
The Rainbow Connection
(Now that’s rainbow-bright…)
Google Bodyslam
(“so, we’re working on a pro wrestling puzzle. what should we call it?”)
JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS
(the puzzle consists of nothing more than the title)
Coming To A Location Near You
(a wikipedia-based scavenger hunt)
OLPC Tablet: the XO-3 prototypes are here
The XO-3 design is almost finished. And there is a steady stream of loving video and photo coverage of the first prototypes, from the gadget-geek journalists at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
I have a less flashy version of the prototype on my desk, but have yet to touch acquire one of the magical solar tablet-covers. (yes, it’s what you think. yes, it makes sense for all devices below a certain power-to-area ratio… a ratio that gets larger in the tropics.)
fuseproject‘s design work is, as usual, interstellar.
Hat tip to Neal Stephenson for extra inspiration this time around. (Update: as Kim Bruning notes, now we need to write the primer.)
Update: a video of an XO powered only by a solar panel twice its area. that’s using the least expensive solar tech; panels twice that density can be had for under $4/Watt .
Aaron Swartz v. United States
Aaron Swartz is a friend and Cambridge-area polymath whose projects focus on access to knowledge, open government, and an informed civil society. He has worked as a software architect, digital archivist, social analyst, Wikipedia analyst, and political organizer. Last year he co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the non-profit political advocacy group Demand Progress.
He is also currently charged with computer fraud by the US Attorney’s office, in what appears to be the latest example of “a sweeping expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction” based on the broad applicability of wire fraud and computer fraud statutes. An overview:
Background
Aaron has studied institutional influence and ways to work with large datasets. In 2008, he founded watchdog.net, “the good government site with teeth“, to aggregate and visualize data about politicians – including where their money comes from. That year he also worked with Shireen Barday at Stanford Law School to assess “problems with remunerated research” in law review articles (i.e., articles funded by corporations, sometimes to help them in ongoing legal battles), by downloading and analyzing over 400,000 law review articles to determine the source of their funding. The results were published in the Stanford Law Review. Most recently, he served for 10 months as a Fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, in their Lab on Institutional Corruption.
He contributed to the field of digital archiving, designing and implementing the Open Library, which serves as a global digital resource today, and as a foundation for any digital libraries in the future. And he collected 2 million public-domain court decisions from the US PACER system — a system that nominally makes all such decisions available to the public, but in practice keeps them hidden behind a paywall – to add to Carl Malamud’s collection at resource.org. (That work in turn gave rise to the crowdsourced RECAP project.)
The Case of the Over-Downloader
Last week, Aaron was charged by a grand jury with computer fraud [1], for allegedly downloading millions of academic articles hosted by the journal archive JSTOR, and exceeding authorization on MIT and JSTOR servers to do so.
JSTOR claims no interest in pursuing a legal case. However they are not part of the prosecution, and Aaron faces a possible fine and up to 35 years in prison, with trial set for September. You can support his legal efforts online.
So how did this come to pass, and what does it mean for the Internet?
Details of the case and public reactions it inspired, after the jump.
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Footnotes to an Afghan image
A few details about the photo in my recent post about using Wikipedia in Afghanistan:
- They are reading Wikipedia online, not offline; you can see the sidebar. Making use of the mesh network available from their compound.
- There is a set of solar panels in the background, not quite visible, providing power for a mesh wifi node nearby.
- The adult using the XO is facing into the sun, not away from it; and the screen is less readable in the shade than it would be in the direct sunlight. This may be one of the first times he has used it.
Introducing Afghan families to Wikipedia
OLPC Afghanistan currently works with school in Kabul, Jalalabad, Herat, and Kandahar. This is one of our most politically complex and interesting deployments. The initial schools involved tend to be on the wealthy side, but are still often in areas with poor power and connectivity.
Jalalabad also houses Afghanistan’s only FabLab – which set up the first “FabFi“ mesh network to serve the surrounding community. After the deployment of OLPC laptops to a local school there, families began to have access to the Internet, and to Wikipedia, for the first time. Here are three generations of one family, outside on their roof, browsing Wikipedia together:
An Afghan family browses Wikipedia together outside
(As it happens, one of the university students who helped localize the software into Dari and Pashto is also a Wikipedian.)
Over a year after that deployment finished, I am working with FabLab folk to figure out what a similar lab and community wifi setup might look like in Herat, where we also have an OLPC school and may add another. They’re refreshingly fun and competent people to work with, and full of great stories about young Afghans taking interesting ideas and running with them, turning them into amazing art projects or montages or startups. Any city trying out cool new technical innovations should have a fablab to amplify the joys of being on the cutting edge.
Today we have 4,000 families connected to eachother and to the Internet in Afghanistan through OLPC; we hope to have thousands more by the end of the year. And now I’m wondering if we can get fablabs started in the US cities where there are significant OLPC projects.
[MR 0b] Individual and project roles
The movement roles of individuals, informal groups, and our many wiki projects need to be discussed by a different group of participants, reflecting the diversity of community and editorial efforts that make our projects work. This discussion will receive more attention from the current MR working group once its recommendations are published this summer, but can be pursued independently from the current formal-entity discussions.
This set of issues is very broad, perhaps the broadest set of issues raised during strategic planning. Topics on organizational structure, dynamics, and communication all have analogies in more traditional movements and organizations. However the constellation of independent wikiprojects, ad-hoc groups, and active individuals is closer to the structure of a town than that of a non-profit; and we have had less in the way of concrete advice on how to organize and plan such work.
By the same token, these issues are central to the original success of the Projects, and to pressing questions such as how to increase participation, openness of projects to new types of contribution, and communication across projects. What groups have the role of helping wikiprojects communicate about their work, or organize and maintain their efforts? Responding to floods of new users? Responding to spam, vandalism, and abuse of project policies? Maintaining accuracy and quality? Who are responsible for protecting contributors who are harassed or placed at legal or personal risk? Who manages messaging on the main pages and banners of the projects? And who prioritizes updates and improvements requested by each project?
Anyone interested in starting this next phase of movement roles analysis is encouraged to do so on Meta – and to join the current working group even if the ‘formal entity’ topics are not of interest.
[MR 0a] Formal Wikimedia groups and roles
The Wikimedia movement consists primarily of hundreds of thousands of contributors, reusers, donors, and other readers who support the movement and the projects each in its own way. However the most complex parts of the movement, with their own legal, financial, and bureaucratic issues, are the incorporated groups within the movement — the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters, each incorporated in its own jurisdiction — and the governance groups that oversee and inform the work of those groups.
At present, chapters are the only groups formally recognized by the WMF with standard trademark agreements and a license to pursue partnerships within their jurisdiction. Another group type – a partner organization without geographic limits – is being proposed in one of the MR recommendations. There are few global governance groups at present, only committees of the Foundation and its Board of trustees. Two other bodies have often been discussed: a community council with representatives from the editing communities of the projects, and a chapters network or organizational council with representatives from all chapters and similar formal organizations.
The initial work of the Movement Roles group has focused on the roles and responsibilities of these formal groups, which have some of the most explicit needs for coordination. A related effort is needed to resolve these questions for informal groups – the roles of the more numerous individuals, small groups, and informal organizations that sustain the movement.
Movement Roles: Understanding roles and responsibilities in a broad Movement
As Wikimedia has grown as a movement from a website and cool idea to a family of sites and a network of national and international non-profits, we have developed many ways to engage partners and the media, raise funds, and make large-scale decisions. National chapters have become significant non-profits in their own right, and collaboration between chapters and the global Foundation has become more intricate. For instance, chapters today run and support international events, offer scholarships and grants to community members, raise significant funds directly through the annual sitenotices, and run branding initiatives — including the global campaign for “Wikipedia as World Heritage Site” organized recently by Wikimedia Deutschland.
In 2009, during Wikimedia’s strategic planning process for the coming five years, a task force focused on movement roles was set up. Its task was to research how individual contributors, Chapters, and the Foundation currently interact, and how they should ideally work together, and how this happened in other global organizations. This was the most abstract part of optimizing operations, which included discussions of how we guarantee financial sustainability, build partnerships and infrastructure, and influence public perception and policy.
This group tackled questions of how the different parts of the movement develop strategy, make decisions across the movement, and communicate with one another. A few initial recommendations were made, but these issues required more detailed discussion.[1] So a Board working group was created to continue the work.
This group chose to focus for its first year on the roles of formal organizations in the movement — the WMF and its Committees, Chapters, and other structured groups that should have similar formal recognition. We tabled the equally complex issue of the roles of individual contributors, wiki projects, and other informal groups to a separate discussion.
The result of this work will be a set of recommendations to the movement as a whole – expressed in a movement charter that all formal parts of the movement can endorse, to the WMF, and to chapters. The project and its recommendations are being developed on the Meta-wiki. All are welcome to participate in the working group and discussions (or simply browse our meeting notes). By Wikimania this year, the group aims to have recommendations on new models for organizations that the WMF should recognize (Associations and Partner Organizations), on movement standards for transparency and auditing, and more.
I will post a series of updates about the project over the coming weeks, leading up to in-person discussions at Wikimania. If you have questions about the project or any of its targets, suggestions about important issues we aren’t yet considering, &c – please let me know on my talk page.
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Google to cancel its translate API, citing ‘extensive abuse’
Google’s APIs Product Manager Adam Feldman announced on Thursday they will cancel the Google translate API by December, without replacing it, and that all use of it will be throttled until then. Any reusers or libraries relying on the translate API to programmatically provide a better multilingual experience will have to switch over to another translation service. (Some simple services will still be available to users, such as google.com/translate, but APIs will not be available to developers of other sites, libraries, or services.)
Ouch. This is a sudden shift, both from their strong earlier support for this API (I was personally encouraged to use it for applications by colleagues at Google), and from their standing policy of supporting deprecated services for up to 3 years. What could have spooked them? Why the rush? As of today, the Translate API page reads:
The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011.
Most disappointing to me is the way this announcement was released: buried in a blog post full of minor “Spring Cleaning” updates to a dozen other APIs. Most of the other deprecated APIs were replaced by reasonable equivalents or alternatives, and were being maintained indefinitely with limits on the rate of requests per user. None of them is being cancelled within six months, and none of them are half as widely used!
I hope that this obfuscation was an unintentional oversight. There have been 170 irate replies to that post so far, almost all about the Translate API cancellation. But it has been three days already without any significant update from Feldman or any mention of the change on the Google Translate blog. Google’s response to a ZDNet inquiry was that they have no further information to provide on why they made this decision.
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Wikimedia Commons: Happy 10 Millionth!
Commons hits eight figures of media. The WMF blog post about it is lovely.
Commons growth continues to be geometric and visually stunning. And the extra horsepower running it (and making regular dumps!) marks a great improvement from last year. Now we need to help the community there keep up with its popularity!
Editor-to-Reader ratio on Wikipedia: a visual history
After early exponential community growth, editing on Wikipedia has slowed recently. The number of readers, on the other hand, grows steadily. Over the past 3 years, the number of active monthly editors in all languages has declined by 12% (and twice that in English). But the effective change in active editors per reader may be 4x as large.
This change in how many readers become editors points to both a problem and a short-term solution: On the one hand, we have many more people coming to the projects who don’t know they can edit, find no reason to do so, or are discouraged before becoming active. On the other, we reach many more people than in the past, so effective changes in messaging, tools, or policy have a larger impact.
Mako and I were discussing this last night, leading to some back-of-the-envelope calculations (using some of the many great stats resources the Foundation maintains) and a heady R + ggplot session, which turned into a beautiful post on copyrighteous:
Unlike all those other [encyclopedia projects] Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is powerful because it allow its users to transcend their role as consumers of the information they use to understand the world. Wikipedia allows users to define the reference works that define their understanding of the their environment and each other. But 99.98% of the time, readers do not transcend that role. I think that’s a problem.
Read the full post.
Wikipedia loves editors: 2011 campaigns?
Wikimedia had a terribly successful fundraising campaign ths year, with a team of stats-loving traffic and feedback analysts learning a lot about our reading audience and how to connect with them. There was diverse support for the idea of running some banners to promote donating time and expertise and edits as well as money, and some general-purpose “discover Wikimedia” banners were run the first week of January, but this was soon overtaken by preparations for the (wickedly fun) 10th anniversary celebrations.
We should do more of this. The idea of inviting people more explicitly to edit, and running campaigns dedicated to this, is more fundamental to the nature of Wikipedia than fundraising itself. We should be thinking about all year round, spending as much time and effort campaigning for meaningful content contributions as we have for funds.
What would that look like? Here is one idea: WikiProjects could be encouraged to write copy for their own banners, from a hook to a detailed call for what they need. These would be run for a % of new visitors proportional to the project’s capacity to absorb new contributors. A few generic projects would be geared up for a larger influx of editors, and established editors would be asked to help work with those newbies (and to set up comfort zones where they can find and help one another).
The generic projects would ramp up slowly; with one month’s newbies helping welcome those who came the next month. Some new policies regarding working with newbies would need to be proposed on the major wikis, possibly with a group like the original Fire Brigade dedicated to helping the ambassadors and welcomers with the extra load. And the specific WikiProjects could continue to draw in as many new editors as they want, and could try out different messages to attract just the right sort of reader (including efforts at targetting specific kinds of readers).
What do you think? How would you reach out to readers if you could change the way the site looks? (What ever happened to the idea of highlighting the “edit this page” tab?) Over 1% of people who saw the best fundraising messages clicked through them — imagine what we could do if we showed all of those people that they could really edit.
Wikipedia Demographics
We still need better demographic data, and an understanding of our own sample biases, as this recent floatingsheep article indicates.
