Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary occurred this past weekend, on January 15th. Alas, I did not make it to the local meetup in Washington, DC, where I live, but I did something else, something as fun as it was unexpected—I was on Ukrainian television.

Friday afternoon, a small TV crew led by reporter Maksym Drabok visited my apartment in Lanier Heights to record me talking about Wikipedia and even editing Wikipedia. Fortunately, I had some material about University of Oregon head football coach Chip Kelly waiting to be added, so I used the occasion to add a few more citations to his biographical article (it still needs more). Also featured in the segment was Thomas Boylston Adams, about the ne’er-do-well son of second U.S. president John Adams, which I created in April 2008 (while watching the HBO miniseries John Adams).

Also also featured: my home office, me in a wiki-related T-shirt, and the blog I write from the perspective of a veteran Wikipedian (fittingly, and as you probably know, it is called The Wikipedian). Here’s the segment in full:

Last but not least, thanks very much to Maksym Drabok and INTER TV for the opportunity.

But what interests me even more is the intellectual framework writer Jonathan Dee imposes on the proceedings. While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination. It’s impossible for me to say whether this is true in Johnson’s case, but Dee at least presents a persuasive case.

Key excerpts:

Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine. …

Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997.

Fans of Don DeLillo may recall the final pages of his 1997 novel “Underworld” (no relation to the graphic novels, film series nor English techno artists) where the characters Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover are joined for eternity in cyberspace, “a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information. Everything is connected in the end.” Well, I did, anyway.

Meanwhile, Dee makes a secondary point that this blurring of context may contribute to a conflation of conflicting perceptions which one may find too often in online discourse:

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind. …

The soundest conclusion seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.

I cannot say that is what is happening here — I’m certainly not about to be pulled into a discussion of Vlaams Belang. And while misreadings of intentions are not new to online discourse, I think there is a “flattening effect” or, to borrow a metaphor from television, “time-shifting” of opinion which can sometimes confuse more than enlighten. Such confusion may be innocent, but it is also open to exploitation. With no information online separated by more than a few clicks, anyone can choose their own context. And in the blogosphere, some choose contexts incompatible with others’ — even if only for the sake of argument.

According to records released by the New York City Board of Elections, the cartoon billionaire received 27 write-in votes out of the 299 that were cast. … Burns and the rest of the write-in candidates ultimately lost to real-life billionaire and incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Disappointingly, CNN does not attempt to provide an explanation. It would not be hard to find: Montgomery Burns was the focus of an Internet-driven joke campaign this fall intended to parody Bloomberg’s third basically inevitable term (and shady maneuvers to secure it).

Even Monty Burns. would be a better mayor — I think that was the joke.

As of now, BurnsforMayor.com remains up, and if you have a few moments to spare, I suggest perusing “Monty’s Plan” for New York City. Oh well. Maybe in 2013.

Apart from the auto-launching pre-roll ad—I tried and failed to pull this off DVR myself—not too shabby: I got two sound bites, the final conclusion restated in the reporter’s words, and some hilarious B-roll which is clearly the two of us shooting B-roll. Enjoy.

Twenty minutes later, Treviño received a call from a producer at ABC News’ Nightline, asking for his source. As he put it in an e-mail yesterday evening:

The answer? Steven Seagal’s 1992 classic, “Under Siege.”

There is only one word in all of the English language which can sufficiently capture the essence of the intriguing though vaguely farcical nature of the mainstream media’s close observation of relatively well-known, if frequently land-locked, blogosphere and Web 2.0 media figures such as occurred in this particular case of a scoop-hungry television news producer tracking down someone with little probablility of special knowledge regarding said then-ongoing crisis, save a propensity to blog or tweet opinions about international relations involving mostly-unrelated countries: FAIL.

Update: Treviño just keeps breaking news:

Getting word that the Maersk Alabama affair is a ruse: the captain is actually trying to defect. Developing ….

Though I had successive waves of friends in town this year both to cover the crazy scene around the Inauguration Weekend and to participate in it, I myself decided to play the part of a jaded Washingtonian familiar with big crowds on the Mall and especially in the Metro, and took up a comfortable spot in front of my 65″ DLP and behind my 17″ MBP open to TweetDeck. Here are two representative shots, and the reason this post even exists.

     

This is the part where I think I am supposed to say something inspiring about the interconnectedness that results from the speed and ingenuity of modern technology, and how this has been said for a long time but with Twitter going mainstream and digital/HD television becoming the norm now the difference of degree almost itself becomes a difference of kind, well, I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to describe this as intricately as I would like. But you can give it your best shot in the comments.

What I can offer are details about the Convention Hub microsites. There will be two, one for each convention, with video and blog coverage around the clock:

• C-SPAN will provide exclusive video from the conventions, and for the first time, this C-SPAN video is searchable, clippable and embeddable. As someone who has tried (unsuccessfully) to jerry-rig an embeddable C-SPAN video in the past, this is a huge leap forward.
• NMS will feed the latest convention reporting and blogging to the Convention Hub pretty much non-stop. Or as our official language puts it, “extensive real-time blogosphere coverage using NMS’s proprietary combination of software and trained human analysts.”
• More about that software another time; all I can say is that it answers the questions I’ve asked about such analysis tools.
• The Hub will also include Twitter feeds of users using the hashtags #RNC08 and #DNC08 (and surely other tags, as their usage rises).
• The site goes live at c-span.org/politics later this month. The Democratic Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/DNC08 and the Republican Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/RNC08.
• NMS will have a presence at each convention to help to facilitate coverage and promote the Convention Hub. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we have bloggers credentialed to both (see you in St. Paul).
• There is more, but I’m not exactly sure what I didn’t see in the press release that’s public, so I’d better hold off for now. At the moment, this is the only public hint on c-span.org:

Meanwhile, the C-SPAN Convention Hub is already drawing praise from one of C-SPAN’s (few) notable critics. The Sunlight Foundation has differed with C-SPAN before over distribution of copyrighted C-SPAN video, so they are enthusiastic about the open nature of the Convention Hubs:

The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

As a longtime C-SPAN junkie, I couldn’t be more proud to play a small part in this project. How dependent am I on the C-SPAN network?

• I wake up to Washington Journal every weekday morning (my Twitter account will bear this out).
• Before I found podcasts, I’d listen to streaming Realplayer segments from the program (I still listen to the podcast of Brian Lamb’s Sunday night Q&A).
• Back in college I would sometimes wake up early (4 a.m.) to catch particular episodes live, such as the first of the Hitchens-Sullivan conversations with Lamb, shortly after 9/11.
• If it’s the weekend and my television is not on baseball or football, it’s on BookTV.
• The tagline of my personal blog, The Washington Canard, is: “Where C-SPAN is the local TV news.”

The good news is that it’s a supportable addiction.

And by way of conclusion, a confession: I want this searchable video for my own reasons. On Election night 2004, The Hotline worked all through the night covering the coverage, as the election tipped from Kerry winning the exit polls to Bush winning the popular vote. If you’ve seen my Facebook photo, this is where that crazy image comes from.

As usual, C-SPAN cameras were in the office for Chuck Todd and Vaughn Ververs to offer recaps, also deep into the morning hours. Sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning, I informed friends watching the coverage from back on the West Coast to look carefully: As the cameras rolled, I picked up a plastic trash bin and… well, I danced through the background.

The waltz, I think.

I entered left with vulcanized dance partner, twirling across one shoulder, behind the talking head, past the other shoulder, exiting right. To this date, it’s still my best television appearance. And I look forward to the day, much sooner now, that I can embed this on Blog P.I.

Making the rounds of the political blogosphere is an op-ed by novelist Andrew Klavan from today’s Wall Street Journal titled “What Bush and Batman Have in Common”:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

It may also be worth noting that comic book writer and artist Frank Miller, author of the graphic novels “300″ and 1986’s “The Dark Knight Returns,” upon which all non-Schumacher Batmans since have been modeled, is working on a new Batman graphic novel: “Holy Terror, Batman!” Yes, it’s Batman vs. al-Qaeda.

The second Bush-Batman juxtaposition, which I first saw on Digg yesterday, is a series of Leno-esque person-on-the-street interviews by Philadelphia sketch comedy troupe Secret Pants. The interviewer has a set of quotes that were spoken either by President Bush from 1600 Pennsylvania or Adam West from the 1960s TV show. Passersby are asked to guess which. It’s definitely worth your 3:35:

However, it also marks the beginning of a new direction for this recurring feature, or at least a new frequency for its recurrence. When July ends in two more weeks, All the Rage will start appearing on a monthly basis. I think we’ve pretty well established a week-by-week pattern, and here is a brief outline of the kinds of articles that usually make the list:

• Weekly installments of popular television shows in the U.S. and UK are frequently represented.
• The highest-grossing film in North America each week almost always makes the list.
• Pay-per-view professional wrestling events are not unheard of.
• Other entertainment genres popping up from time to time: Nickelodeon sitcoms aimed at tweenagers, televised elimination-style competitions produced by Simon Cowell, sports playoffs and championship series.
• Deaths in 2008 is the list-based article most likely to appear in the top ten articles, and prominent passing figures sometimes earn a spot of their own.
• Those who write the breaking/current news articles — on terrorist attacks, natural disasters and many things government-related — are among the most sophisticated and motivated Wikipedians of all.
• If an article attains the status of Featured Article, thereby giving it 24 hours on the front page of Wikipedia, the resulting vandalism and reversions thereof can push it into the most-edited articles of the week.

Now that we’re going monthly (and between these three installments, bi-monthly) I wonder what different patterns will emerge. What’s likely is that some or all of the above article types will remain, but they won’t all and their relative chart positions may prove to be different as well. Or maybe the trends will look no different on a month-by-month than week-by-week basis. Stay tuned and we’ll find out.

Also, this is not to say that Wikipedia commentary on Blog P.I. itself will be reduced, and this may also be a good place to announce that I will introduce, in the next few days, a new recurring feature also focused on evaluating Wikipedia articles. The angle will be different and the frequency will be a little more when-I-feel-like-it-and-have-the-time, and I’ll have much more to say about that very soon.

And in the meantime, how about that list for the past week:

1. Article: Rafael Nadal
   Why: Spanish tennis player Nadal, long the #2 in the world, won Wimbledon 2008 over Roger Federer, long the #1 in the world.
   Detail:
   This article is very long and well-developed, and was so going into the final two days of the tournament. And while new information has been added to the 2008 section, making it a few paragraphs longer, it is now recognized as being of lower quality. Specifically, the “Playing style” section has been slapped with a warning that says it “may contain original research or unverified claims.” This despite the fact that it’s a paragraph or two shorter and already cited several sources. Among the claims disputed enough to be removed entirely is his being known for “ultra-precise drink bottle positioning on changeovers.”
2. Article: Roger Federer
   Why: Despite losing to Nadal last week, Swiss tennis player Federer is still the #1 ranking player in the world, for a record consecutive 232nd week.
   Detail: As with the Nadal article, it is very much the same article as it was just a week ago, and the differences are not always apparent on first glance. On second glance, however, we see that the old section “Personal life” — listed above the “Tennis career” section — has been broken up into two constituent parts and reordered. The article now begins with a section called “Early life” containing a basic biographical sketch. Information about his dating life and charitable works has been relocated to the end of the article and is still titled “Personal life.” Meanwhile, context has been given to the “Tennis career” section, which is itself broken into “Junior tennis” and “Career on the ATP.”
3. Article: WALL-E
   Why: Pixar + robots × space = intense fan interest.
   Detail: Seriously, this is the third week in a row WALL-E is on the list, after consecutive weeks in the number one position. I could be wrong, but that might make it the single most-edited article in the three-plus months I’ve been writing this feature. Based on the discussion page, it looks like much of the recent editing has focused on dealing with the extraneous info added by some editors — an Apple references section existed at one time — and debates over how much a critique of consumerism it represents. In its current form, the “Commentary” section largely focuses on disagreements among conservatives about whether the film is “leftist” or reinforcing of “traditional conservatism,” and whether the culprit is big business or too close a tie of business to big government.
4. Article: List of characters from Total Drama Island
   Why: Let’s see if I’ve got this right: it’s a Canadian television show modeled on Survivor and Drawn Together, now being shown on Adult Swim.
   Detail: Why not the main article itself? Why the list? Well, the show seems to have a lot of characters, and the show has apparently struck enough of a nerve that fans are compelled to fill out as much information as possible about them. And the place for that has been designated this page, not the main article.
5. Article: I Love Money: Challenge Show
   Why: This one is about a reality game show, rather than the above article, which is a parody of a reality game show.
   Detail: I must say, this is a terrible article — written by fans and for fans but not giving outsiders any idea what the show is like or why it is interesting or how it works different from other shows. Most edits, so far as I can tell, have gone into meticulous updates of the chart showing contestant and episode progress, with detailed but impenetrable episode summaries. Too much detail. Not enough background. Just goes to show that even highly active articles are not necessarily good articles.
6. Article: Journey’s End (Doctor Who)
   Why: Marking its second week on the list, this is the final episode of the “fourth series” of Doctor Who — after 26 “seasons” that is.
   Detail: To be fair to the fans of I Love Money, I am sure it is much easier to write an “encyclopedic” article about Doctor Who. The show has been around since the 1970s, continuity and the TARDIS-associated universe has a detailed history to explain and even summarize when it gets too long. While there is very little discussion on the I Love Money series talk page, the talk page for this individual episode of Doctor Who is already very long, and fairly sophisticated. And it surely can’t hurt that there is a WikiProject Doctor Who.
7. Article: To Kill a Mockingbird
   Why: It was the Featured Article (FA) on July 11.
   Detail: Featured Articles are frequently vandalized (sometimes amusingly but more often not), articles with racial components are especially vulnerable, literary disputes can get very contentious, and damage done by these edits will bring people to the talk page complaining about how this terrible article was made, FA by editors who may or may not have a bone to pick with other editors or WikiProjects. That more or less describes what’s happened here.
8. Article: Atom
   Why: The Featured Article on July 9.
   Detail: More FA vandalism. After watching this list for some time, I would probably be willing to vote for temporary semi-protection of Featured Articles. Wikipedia prides itself on openness and in its site policies prefers not to create barriers for new editor participation (in its behind the scenes clique-ishness, it can be a bit different). However, policing vandalism on these articles seems like a real drain for editors on “Recent changes (RC) patrol”, aka vandal watch. A semi-protect would only apply to unregistered users and very new accounts, and would only last the period on which the FA was front-paged. I am sure this has been proposed before and shot down in a vote or debate, but if I ever become aware of a discussion to implement this, I would certainly weigh in on its behalf.
9. Article: Deaths in 2008
   Why: The hardiest perennial makes another showing.
   Detail: Passing this week: former White House press secretary and Fox News anchor Tony Snow, medical pioneer Michael DeBakey, the founder of Benihana, a producer of Woody Allen films, and an Indonesian serial killer.
10. Article: 34th G8 summit
    Why: As mentioned above, the government and news-focused Wikipedians do a damn good job of creating detailed articles about recent events in record time. Editors of, say, I Love Money expended many edits on not that much result. Editors of this article added a great deal of information in fewer edits.
    Detail: It seems strange to me that President Bush’s joking conclusion, “goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” didn’t make the article. I could understand, though, that it may be a little too U.S.-centric given the global scope of the article, although with equal treatment of similar news coverage of leaders’ statements in other countries, it would not be out of place. But then it seems even more curious that the statement was not raised at all on the discussion page. These people mean business.

Holdovers this week: WALL-E and Deaths in 2008.

Falling off the list: Everything else from two weeks ago.

Recurring themes: Doctor Who episodes, reality TV, Featured Article vandalism.

Honorable mention: Tony Snow, the 50th most-edited article for the concluding week. More and more this section reads like an obituary, which I really don’t need to be doing on a weekly basis. But on Saturday morning, as I learned of Snow’s passing from the morning television news, I did what came natural and checked out the Wikipedia page. While the article obviously reflected current events, as a Wikipedia article it was only mediocre at that point. I made a few edits of my own, removing extraneous information. Did his “pay cut” comment upon leaving the White House need to be mentioned in the second paragraph? Did Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan need to be mentioned in the first paragraph? I said no, and on both counts, other editors have since agreed.

Images courtesy Graham Hodgson, agentjon and davidsilver on Flickr.

1. Article: WALL-E
   Why: Disney-Pixar’s latest movie hit theaters this weekend, and it’s unsurprisingly shaping up to be a hit, posting Pixar’s third-best opening ever.
   Detail: Wikipedia aims to be as impartial as possible, but what can you do when the subject is universally acclaimed? You fine-tune the language and cut back on verbatims, as one editor advises: “Well, as you say, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, so it will be difficult to get the reception section sounding anything less than a puff piece. However, and speaking as the editor who added the current version of the reception section, I entirely agree that the reviews should be paraphrased better, with fewer direct quotes.”
2. Article: The Stolen Earth
   Why: The penultimate episode of the latest run of Doctor Who episodes on BBC One.
   Detail: Which means there’s a very good chance we’ll see the final episode appear in one of these slots next weekend. Of the numerous British articles included in this list over the past few weeks, Doctor Who has ranked the highest most consistently.
3. Article: 2008 NBA Draft
   Why: If you’ve ever wondered where all these new basketball players come from, perhaps you should learn about the NBA draft.
   Detail: The NBA still hasn’t caught back up with football in national prominence, but basketball fans still eagerly anticipate and closely follow draft night each year. With two televised rounds of thirty picks each and numerous trades, that’s a whole lot of updates on one night — and as Wikirage shows, most edits did occur all on one night.
4. Article: Night of Champions (2008)
   Why: It’s not the WWF, that’s the World Wildlife Federation. It’s WWE now — World Wrestling Entertainment.
   Detail: If the NBA draft is a bit less-attended than the adventures of the Tenth Doctor and his TARDIS (yes, I’ve been skimming the Doctor Who pages) at least it is a little better-attended than this WWE event.

   This page was reverted and protected and reverted, but not necessarily due to vandalism. More the problem seems to be enthusiastic but inexperienced editors adding information in the wrong place and even trying to use the page as a forum. This happens often on some popular subjects, and it makes me wonder about members of the WikiProject Professional wrestling. No doubt the project counts among its members some dedicated and knowledgeable editors, but it seems that they find themselves having to undo a lot of the “help” they get. I doubt the same happens at WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology.

5. Article: Guitar Hero World Tour
   Why: Previously titled Guitar Hero IV, makers of the next installment of the popular video game series have continued to make new information available over the past few weeks, but was protected from unhelpful help (see above) until early June. Now the gates are wide open.
   Detail: Allowing people to add spurious rumors such as the planned inclusion of a Soulja Boy track with no guitar instrumentation (since removed). Interesting also that video games seem to show up in this list months ahead of release — the title won’t be out until late October — while movies typically don’t appear until the week of release.
6. Article: Deaths in 2008
   Why: Death and taxes may be inevitable, but only one ranks well in the list of most-edited Wikipedia articles.
   Detail: Passing this week: one of the most influential comedians in my life and the second half of the 20th century, George Carlin. And then some other people, including a 37-year-old American comic book artist of cancer, a 20-year-old Russian-Kazakh model who threw herself from her 9th story Manhattan appartment yesterday afternoon, and the 9-year-old University of Georgia mascot, Uga.
7. Article: District of Columbia v. Heller
   Why: In the session’s most closely-watched decision, the Court affirmed 5-4 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a firearm.
   Detail: Through the week I’ve been somewhat skeptical of the claim bandied about that the case was the first to rule on the Second Amendment, and here is an amusing smackdown of Slate’s lead legal correspondent, who apparently was among the banditos: “We are well aware of U.S. v. Miller, and know much more about it than the sensationalist writer Lithwick. The article does not say that D.C. v. Heller is the first case to pertain to the Second Amendment or that has incidental remarks that could be interpreted as pertaining to the question of individual-rights vs. collective-rights; it is not the first such case, nor is it the second. It is, however, the first case to definitively or directly or comprehensively address the question.”
8. Article: Battlefield: Bad Company
   Why: Not the English rock supergroup, but a new video game from Electronic Arts which “puts the player in a fictional war against Russia, where gamers will lead a squad of AWOL soldiers fighting both Russians and Mercenaries.”
   Detail: I can’t really tell where all the edits went, except that editors have removed some unnecesary sections, but I was a bit surprised to find out that this page has existed since August 2006, presumably when it was first announced.
9. Article: 2008 WWE Draft
   Why: Did you know the WWF WWE had a draft? Or maybe that should be “draft”? If it wasn’t for Wikipedia and this feature, I wouldn’t.
   Detail: Do you think Vince McMahon is mocking David Stern?
10. Article: Camp Rock
    Why: The Disney Channel sitcom all but ignored in last week’s edition because I was trying to pay attention at Personal Democracy Forum is back again, down to the tenth slot from the third.
    Detail: For I think the first time, Disney holds the first and last articles on this list.

Holdovers this week: Camp Rock

Falling off the list: Everything else.

Recurring themes: Top American film releases, Doctor Who episodes, the NBA, Disney.

Honorable mention: I would have thought Carlin would have been ranked higher. Instead, it looks as if his page was edited heavily on June 22 but not much thereafter. And while there was some coverage this past week of the young woman who was fired for editing Tim Russert’s article before his death was officially announced, less has been said about Carlin’s article though an edit war of sorts took place here. Several people tried to add the correct data, only to have other editors ask for more information, changing the article back until receiving confirmation.

Meanwhile, you still can’t say the seven dirty words on television, but as the headline implies, you most certainly can say them on Wikipedia. In the proper context, of course.

P.S. For what it’s worth, I feel compelled to note that I have made a few disclosed edits to a handful of Disney movie articles for distributor Buena Vista. However, I have not contributed to the Disney movies listed here — haven’t been asked and haven’t needed to do so.

Images courtesy andy castro, noamgalai and eyewash design on Flickr.