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Archive for March, 2010

On SXSW and Next Big Things

Published by William Beutler on March 21, 2010 in Geosocial, Metapost, New Media Strategies and Twitter. Closed

While in Austin last week, I wrote a blog post for New Media Strategies about what I saw there:

For better or worse, the just-concluded SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas carries the weight of massive geek expectations. The big reason has to do with Twitter: it was at SXSWi in 2007 that the now-ubiquitous messaging service first gained wide exposure. The buzz from Austin traveled far and wide throughout the blogosphere and, up in Washington, I was inspired to join Twitter three years ago yesterday. The rest is history.

Each subsequent year, the question buzzing around the Austin Convention Center has been the same: “What’s the new Twitter? What’s the new big thing?” With a few years’ distance, it’s clear that the rise of Twitter is sui generis, like the blogosphere itself. SXSW is a great launching pad for new services (here’s one from this year called Lunch.com), but no law of the universe dictates that every March in Central Texas, something new and wonderful will take world by storm.

And a funny thing happened this year: I don’t recall anybody asking about the next big thing. I think I know the reason, and it is not that there wasn’t something to talk about. It’s that the next big thing was obvious from the first day.

Read the whole thing at: At SXSW, Last Year’s Next Big Thing Was This Year’s Actual Big Thing.

John Patrick Bedell: Pentagon Shooter, Wikipedian

Published by William Beutler on March 5, 2010 in The Wikipedian, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 1 Comment

jpatrickbedell_wikipedia

Last evening, about two miles of the office building where I work, a crazy guy named John Patrick Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon Metro station, wounding two officers before being killed by return fire. While police are still sorting through his motives, bloggers are combing through the trail of his Internet activity. One thing we know already: Bedell was a contributor to Wikipedia.

The website Media Elites was the first to locate his user account, which has since been suspended (reason given: “User is deceased”). The user page for Bedell’s account has been shielded from public viewing; no public explanation is available but this is almost certainly to prevent Wikipedia from becoming a posthumous soapbox for Bedell’s views (Wikipedia tolerates unorthodox beliefs, but not when they become the impetus for attempted murder). However, Media Elites thought to copy and republish the full text before Wikipedia’s administrators stepped in. Here is an excerpt:

I apologize for the graphic content of some of my contributions, but detailed evidence is sometimes necessary to address important matters. I am very disturbed by the fact that Col. Sabow’s civilian superiors and their successors have been able to continue their narco-mercantilism. For historical comparison, I might resemble the odd German still complaining about the murders of the Night of the Long Knives in 1938(?). Of course, Wikipedia didn’t exist in 1938!

While his User page is gone, Bedell’s Talk page and Edit history remain. From these vestiges of his editing activity, we can learn some things about him:

While political bloggers argue over whether Bedell was a member of the far-left or the far-right, such arguments are really less about Bedell and more about the participants. As Gawker put it, Bedell was “clearly intelligent” but “nonetheless a certifiable wackjob”.

Likewise, I can imagine some who would depict Bedell as a typically obsessive Wikipedian, although as Media Elites notes, his Internet activity included Facebook, YouTube and Amazon, although it seems not Twitter. Believe me, I have seen obsessive Wikipedians, just as I have known people on the far-left and far-right, and they haven’t shot anybody. Bedell’s participation in Wikipedia was as incidental as his politics; the content of his madness and platform for its expression are less important than the fact of it.

Update: It should come as no surprise, now John Patrick Bedell is the subject of a Wikipedia article himself.

Cross-posted from The Wikipedian.

Four Thousand Editors in Real Lancashire

Published by William Beutler on March 1, 2010 in The Wikipedian, Wikipedia and William Beutler. Closed

wikipedia-lancashireA unifying theme of The Wikipedian in the first year of its existence — and will again be now that its unscheduled hiatus comes to an end today — has been the lag between the public’s recognition of Wikipedia as an important if imperfect information resource and the public’s understanding of how Wikipedia works.

Illustrating the point perfectly is a clumsy news item in a small UK newspaper, the Southport Visiter, highlighting local complaints in late February about a perceived error concerning the boundaries of Lancashire. According to the Visiter, the following text from Wikipedia (still present at this writing) is the matter of some dispute:

The county was subject to a significant boundary reform in 1974, which removed Liverpool and Manchester with most of their surrounding conurbations to form part of the metropolitan counties of Merseyside and Greater Manchester. Today the county borders Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and North and West Yorkshire.

I say “some dispute” in part because I’m not quite clear on what the issue is. According to a group called the Friends of Real Lancashire, Wikipedia “leaves Southport off the … map.” But as far as I can tell, Wikipedia has already absorbed this perspective and includes the following sentence later in the article:

Pressure groups, including Friends of Real Lancashire and the Association of British Counties advocate the use of the historical boundaries of Lancashire for ceremonial and cultural purposes.

So it appears to me that Friends of Real Lancashire are unhappy with the representation of Lancashire’s borders on Wikipedia, and have gone to the press with their concerns. This is not such a crazy idea: oftentimes ensuring placement of a particular fact or viewpoint in Wikipedia requires validation in a newspaper or magazine article before Wikipedia editors are likely to agree the fact or viewpoint is true or significant enough for inclusion. Because their viewpoint is presented, at least in summary, this must be a dispute over facts.

Now, let’s say I am a Wikipedia editor who lives thousands of miles away from Lancashire and have no special knowledge of the area’s boundaries (which is in fact the case). A newspaper article pointing out a supposed error could be useful to me. Perhaps I’m inclined to update the article based on what I have learned. Except the article does not explain the dispute carefully enough for me to make a judgment; the impression I am left with is that some people are unhappy with the designated boundary and wish for Wikipedia to elevate their views over existing reality. In which case I will ignore them as soon as I figure this out. Or maybe I write this blog post.

That Friends of Real Lancashire and the Southport Visiter have little idea how Wikipedia works is also quite evident:

[Friends of Real Lancashire] has contacted the website on several occasions, are concerned that those wanting to learn about Lancashire will be given the wrong information. … Although comments and letters have been sent to the editor of Wikipedia, Mr Dawson said that no action has since been taken.

Letters to the editor? The editor? There is a fundamental disconnect here, one in fact so stark that one wonders whether Wikipedia’s structures are so vanguard as to be incomprehensible to the average user, or whether the Real Lancashirites are hopelessly behind the times. It’s one thing for people who don’t think much about Wikipedia to misunderstand it; it is quite another for an organized interest group to care what Wikipedia says but not take the time to understand why it says what it does.

This phenomenon is bigger than Wikipedia. From where I live and work in Washington, DC, I often see advocacy organizations that are so focused on advancing their viewpoint using a manner and technique which is advantageous to them in one venue (newspapers, radio, television) that they cannot adjust their approach to advance their viewpoint in another (weblogs, social networks, Wikipedia). Sometimes, this adjustment may require the undermining of their original point, in which case they were destined to lose, anyway. This happens all the time.

So Friends of Real Lancashire may lose no matter what; if I am correctly interpreting their case, they will. Even so, it does not appear they have even tried to make their case in the proper manner. At least they have not engaged the one forum in which they might make their case directly to Wikipedia’s contributors: the Talk page associated with the Lancashire article. It’s there for a reason, and if you don’t use it, those who will probably have themselves a laugh at your expense and go right back to editing Wikipedia.

Lancashire map via Wikipedia.