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News from the Future of Public Media
Wikimania 2006
email discuss Posted by Jessica Duda on Aug 10, 2006 at 7:41 PM
Wikimania 2006: The International Wikimedia Conference
Cambridge, MA
August 4-6, 2006
by Jessica Duda
Despite Wikipedia’s infamous minute-by-minute edits (delete-revert-delete-edit…) Wikipedians who met at the second annual "Wikimania 2006: The International Wikimedia Conference"exhibited the strongest sense of community I have ever observed at conference. Wikipedia’s increasing volunteer corps of site administrators, writers, editors as well as other spin off-sites, such as Congresspedia.org and Wikihow.com, traveled from across the globe to present and discuss the future of Wikipedia as the example of participatory media. Its ironic – or tragic – that ‘free’ culture must cover a variety of technical issues common to most major publishers: accuracy, anti-defamation, legal liability, usability, educational use, covering news, language translation, as well as the role of its board hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation. These were just a few topics Wikipedians covered at the conference held at Harvard Law School from August 4-6.
Comedian Stephen Colbert may question the "truthiness" of Wikipedia as having its own "wikiality," but Wikipedia must be attracting more legitimacy given the line up of the conference sponsors: Answers.com, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, amazon.com, Nokia, WikiHow.com, Wetpaint, Ask.com, Yahoo!, Socialtext, IBM, FAQ Farm, Elevation Partners, Open Society Institute, and the Sunlight Foundation - Coca Cola even squeezed itself in by providing free beverages. This growing commercial interest is a sign of the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising change from seeking individual online donations toward foundation and corporate sponsorships. Hopefully the forthcoming funding changes will maintain Wikia’s mission to create projects that build toward, "a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." As founder Jimmy Wales told me, "it’s a tall order, but then again, I created Wikipedia."
Jimmy Wales kicked off the conference explaining the past, present and future of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation projects all rooted in participatory, free culture media. After playing clips from The Colbert Report on the Word of the Day, "wikiality," he noted Nature Magazine concluded that on "selected topics" Wikipedia averages four errors per topic compared to three in Encyclopedia Britannica. Further, Whales noted, Wikipedia has "lots of articles on ‘truthiness’ that Britannica has never heard of," – showing how participatory media expands the concept of "reference" material. Improving quality control with better content editing and site usability will be the main focus of Wikipedia now that it nearing a critical mass with 1 million entries in English and the hundreds of thousands in German, Dutch, Swedish and Japanese. Other Wikimedia projects will focus a variety of reference and educational projects:
- expanding to a 100 languages,
- rolling out Campaign Wiki to promote civil political discourse,
- launching new code for ‘stable versions’ of entries while undergoing editorial debate,
- launching Wikiversity to conduct academic research and "free the curriculum,"
- expanding Wiktionary to "free the dictionary,"
- improving biographical coverage of people and personalities, and
- improving image tagging to share free licensed photos.
A supporter of the fair use doctrine, Wales, however, prefers limiting it to when its "worthwhile" and otherwise use free licensed material so that people can use photos for any reason across the world. He would rather use Wikipedians’ free licensed photo more than copyrighted material: "We’re not fundamentally about having a really pretty encyclopedia, we’re fundamentally about having a free encyclopedia, and in the end that’s far more pretty, if you ask me." Wikinews contributor Erik Moeller, and MIT graduate student Mako Hill are creators of freecontent.org and begged to differ with Whales on free licenses. They proposed creating a definition of ‘freedom’ akin to open source software - as opposed to limiting free content to only noncommercial uses. They believe people should be able to use, modify and distribute derivative works with attribution for commercial and noncommercial use. They proposed that Wikipedia promote such a set of ground rules to create a larger social movement of free culture. Overall, a copyright chasm seems to exist across the copyright spectrum, from open source development to the barrage of ‘cease and desist’ letters for what is otherwise legitimate fair use.
The other conference sessions included such heavy hitters as Lawrence Lessig on the free culture movement, Yochai Benkler on his new book The Wealth of Networks regarding the cultural, knowledge and economic transformation from networked technologies, (which conferees considered the book of the year), and Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive, the world’s largest digital archive of books, music, video, audio and websites. (Grateful Dead fans too young – or too stable - to have gone ‘on tour,’ can stream over 2,800 concert recordings on the site.) Berkman Center Fellow David Weinberger gave a practical, yet philosophical talk about the future of knowledge using Wikipedians as an example of how knowledge creation is becoming a participatory, transparent process - giving it more, not less, credibility. Britannica is a closed, one-off published process; whereas Wikipedia acknowledges human fault and works to improve knowledge based on the Hegelian process of the dialectic.
While unique, the Wikipedian debates are not too far from the internal reviewing process in commercial publishing, especially when working with multiple reviewers. With the right legal protection and content standards, this public media experiment may move from wooing recent free culture converts to the mainstream. For example, a national French radio show broadcasts a daily, hour-long review of Wikipedia entries with subject matter experts; pretty soon Wikiversity will be printing free text books. Who knows how much sooner the entire public will be telling and defining their own "wikiality?"
See wikimania.org for selected conference audio and text archives.
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