I continue to get painted as anti-Wikipedia which couldn’t be further from the truth. I want to clarify a few things and i think that the latest BoingBoing entry on Wikipedia helps.

It is presumed that the data contained in a dictionary is ‘true’ but *scholars* have pointed out that there are ‘inaccuracies.’ There are two issues at play here. First concerns the truth-value of any record – when is there truth and when is only interpretation possible? I’ll leave that one alone for now. The better question concerns who has the authority to say whether or not something is ‘true’ where truth refers to presumed collective knowledge. The article that BoingBoing cites tells us explicitly that it is ‘scholars’ that have such authority.

Herein lies my primary complaint with Wikipedia – the lack of known authorship. (Note: i have the same problem with encyclopedias and dictionaries too, but i don’t see the Wikipedia arguments as boiled down to paper references vs. digital references.) I want to know that what part of the Wikipedia entry the Jane Austen scholar wrote and what was edited out by others. I want to know that the Jane Austen scholar looked at the entry that a 14 year old wrote and thought it was perfect. I want to know the investment level of the authors. I don’t think i’m alone on this one.

Secondly, i may be a scaredy-cat but i’m not afraid of Wikipedia. Like Clay, i firmly believe that students should cite their sources; nothing is more gut-wrenching than throwing a line of someone’s paper into Google and finding it on the web. My concern with academic citation is metaphorically concerned with citing Cliffnotes. Don’t tell me what Wikipedia tells you about Benjamin’s essay – tell me what Benjamin says and tell me your critique. If you want to use a third party’s critique to contend with, great, but that’s rarely what students do. Wikipedia’s interpretation may or may not be accurate and if you haven’t read the primary source (which is often the problem), you don’t know. There is no doubt that this is a problem with a broader variety of sources but the efforts to legitimize Wikipedia as better than an encyclopedia wreaks havoc. This is not because i want students using the encyclopedia – they’re far more likely to read the 10 page essay than hike up the hill to the library to find an encyclopedia that may or may not give them a clue about what’s going on. Encyclopedia citations are rarely my problem but Wikipedia as Cliffnotes is. I want students to be critical thinkers, not just piece together the varying levels of supposed critical thought that they find on the web. And if the web is useful to them, it should be as an interlocutor for argument’s sake, not a source of authority.

In both of these cases, comparisons to other media can be made and the problems that manifest are not necessarily new. The problem that i’m having with the Wikipedia hype is the assumption that it is the panacea for it too has its problems and those problems must be acknowledged, addressed and situated. It certainly has great value, both as a tool for information and as a site of community. But there are limitations and i believe that the incessant hype is damaging to being able to situate it properly and to recognize its strengths and weaknesses.

I have zero tolerance for company bullshit and threats. First, SMS.ac had all of my friends spam the hell out of me with their scam-like service (most of whom apologized immediately afterwards). Now they’re sending cease and desist letters to friends who apologized publicly, calling this defamatory. It’s not defamatory – it’s an apology for inappropriate social behavior brought on by autistic software. SMS.ac’s C&D is uncool, inappropriate and a complete abuse of the legal system to threaten people into submission. I was annoyed before, now i’m outright pissed.

To most of my friends, i appear always-on. If i’m not on the computer, my IMs usually go to my Sidekick. I have a round-the-clock presence on AIM, even if frequently idle. I share this round-the-clockness with some of my buddies – people who always appear to be on, although sometimes idle. There are other buddies who pop up whenever they’re on their computer (often 9-5). Then, there are those who pop up very occasionally.

The thing about members of this latter category is that they *always* want to talk when they come online. This makes sense – they’re appearing online only to talk, not to share presence. They are seeing IM as a communication tool first and foremost.

Interestingly, it is this group that complains the most about how they can never get anything done when IM is on. I try really hard not to respond in a snarky voice that i can never get anything done when they’re on. They get upset when i don’t have time to talk, arguing that i shouldn’t be online if i don’t want to talk.

There is, in fact, a culture divide in instant messaging.

As someone who is always on, i spend a small fraction of the day using IM. It is always on because of presence. There are types of ‘interruptions’ that are not actually interruptions. For example, when my roommate wants to ask when i’ll be home or when a friend wants to know a reference. Quick, practical questions that are far more like presence pokes than interruptions. Then, there are acceptable interruptions – things like work questions, emergencies, pointers to relevant info, etc. And then, there’s conversation.

I don’t spend a lot of time conversing on IM, very little in fact. I simply do not have time. But, i am 10 million times more likely to converse with someone who is always-on than someone who just pops up for conversation. The reason is simple – collective signaling of conversational possibility. As an always-on’r, when someone pokes me to talk and i don’t have time, i say sorry – can’t talk or some equivalent (except in the case of my phone which might appear to be on while i’m doing something but isn’t really). I expect the same from my fellow always-on’rs. So, when i’m in the mood to talk to people and they’re in the mood to talk to me (or we’re equally procrastinating), we come to a consensus and conversation happens.

Now, let’s go back to the people who come online just to talk. The problem with this group is that they’re unintentionally exerting power. They are declaring their free time by logging on and they’re assuming that i am signaling the same thing. But i’m not. This is simply cultural cluelessness. But when they then get upset with me, that’s the exertion of power. And this is what has prompted me to change IM accounts or block people in the past. Now, i’m just rude.

Consider the telephone. When your phone rings, are you required to pick it up? At first, everyone assumed you were. Eventually, we learned that the phone doesn’t have to have that kind of power over us. And many of us now screen and only pick up the phone when it is applicable to the situation we’re in. (Of course, some of us still need to learn that.) The caller is signaling their free time, but the receiver gets to decide if it’s culturally appropriate. And thus, they are actually doing the negotiating dance of us always-on’rs.

The problem with IM is that the always-on’rs have gotten far more comfortable with the technology than those who still see it as a communication tool, not just a desirable presence tool. The cultural divide is very much magnified by experience and time spent engaged in the technology. Of course, the split happens around those who recognize the value of presence and want to do what it takes culturally to retain that.

Update: Since Liz called me on bits of this entry, i should clarify a key assumption i was making in presenting this argument – i am talking very explicitly about people with relatively equal standing in terms of power (i.e. peers). While all “equal” relationships are about negotiating power back and forth, the technology consistently gives one person in the peer-duo power over the other – that’s where the problem is primarily situated. With unequal power pairings, the problem is exacerbated because there’s an assumption of equal power standing in IM that is not actually true to form. For example, as a TA in college, i would have students who thought they could bug me anytime they had a problem with their assignment. This happened because it was assumed that there was equal power between IM participants and so the negotiation of power got usurped by the technology because the context got cleansed. In other words, all IM windows look the same and so you forget about the context that would normally differentiate situations of equal footing (such as the bar) and situations of differentiated footing (such as the TA office).

Clay’s right – i’m a huge skeptic, although i don’t attribute it to the academy at all. My first reaction to hype is and always was critique (unless, of course, i’m doing the hyping). This has resulted in me always ::raising eyebrows:: over everything from the *best* bands to “i just met the best girl in the world” stories.

I’m not actually in disagreement with Clay about classification – i am, after all, in a librarian school. My first indoctrination was “classification is impossible – here are a bazillion techniques that we use to try to get better schemas.” So, when i critique folksonomy, it is not in comparison to formal structures of classification. My critical reaction comes from any and all concerns that folksonomy is the panacea to hundreds of years of librarian woe. I know that formal systems are screwed, but i think that folksonomy has its own set of problems.

While i acknowledge the comparisons that can be made about the problematic similarities between folksonomy and formal classification, i also think that the effort towards ‘accuracy’ is actually clouding a few major differences. The differences are not that surprising, but very important. It comes down to benevolent dictator vs. crowd behavior. Sometimes the benevolent dictator goes way wrong, but also, sometimes crowds are scary.

There’s a problematic feature to crowds – they like to homogenize. Yes, the guy with the mohawk can assert his independence, but folks might trample him. Or he might be left to his own planet. Should he be given more attention than others because he is different? Should a classification schema be concerned with frequency/popularity or the full range? What does it mean to classify things that are rare viewpoints? Who gets to decide? That’s a heavily contested domain in classification.

Folksonomy isn’t asking the questions about the implications of collective action classification. Who benefits? Who becomes marginalized? What priorities bubble up? How does pressure to homogenize affect the schema and the people involved? How are some people hurt or offended by decisions that are made? Should moderation of classifications occur? If so, what are the consequences?

I totally appreciate the just-do model that is often espoused here, but i don’t subscribe to it. I believe that you have to go into the doing with the questions always at hand and always in check. What makes formal classification interesting is not its end result, its “technology” but the huge discourse around it, trying to figure out the implications of any and all decisions. Those questions have been around for years and i think that it’s important that we use those questions, those concerns, not for comparison but as a guideline for our hyping.

In short, i love tagging and folksonomy. But once it is taken serious and people are talking about ‘accuracy’ and being offended, questions that must be asked despite the hype – “folksonomy is better” is not good enough for me.

I love the conversations that have emerged recently on folksonomy/ethnoclassification/tagging/ontology (see del.icio.us tag folksonomy for a good collection of them). Of course, i’m particularly a fan of skeptical posts that raise the social consequences flag (thank you Liz and Rebecca). I wanted to bring up a few things about culture that i feel haven’t been really addressed yet. (My apologies if i’ve missed them.)

First, don’t forget Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Classification schemes are always culturally dependent based on how people organize information. There is nothing universal about the terms that we use, the relationship between those terms and the meanings behind them. Many terms are contested, used differently by different populations for different reasons and otherwise inconsistent. (Take a look at Raymond Williams’ Keywords if you want to see how different socio-cultural terms are employed over time in Western culture alone.)

What makes the tagging phenomenon utterly fascinating is that there is a collective action component to it. We love to see how people will come to common consensus on relevant terms. But part of what makes it valuable is that, right now, most of the people tagging things have some form of shared cultural understandings. The “in the know” groups using these services are very homogenous and often have shared values and thus offers valuable related links. This helps explain why Rebecca Blood is concerned about the MLK tags – they signify a lack of shared common ground. In tagging, quality is not just about ‘accuracy’, but about what cultural assumptions dominate. This is also the problem that motivated my earlier post on digital xenophobia.

The translation problem alone offers insight into the problems of collective action tagging (see Benjamin). There are tons of words that cannot be simply translated literally both for linguistic and cultural reasons (such as my colleague’s favorite – ohrwurm from German or any number of metaphors). And there are tons of words with multiple and conflicting meanings. This is why reading a translation of something is never the same – it’s not just a matter of linguistic translation, but cultural translation. That’s almost impossible.

Flipped around, the culture of the people tagging says a lot about how they use language that is quite valuable. We might want to see everything with a particular tag using the sense that we mean.

There is also a perspective problem. Think about the tag ‘me’ on Flickr. This is fantastic when we’re organizing stuff for ourselves, but such a tag is inherently dependent on perspective.

These questions have been raised as ones of ‘accuracy’ but they’re not. They’re about perspective and culture. Accuracy is only meaningful if we share the same cultural assumptions. Ironically, we know that culture matters at some level, if only via our collective choice to discuss FOLKsonomy and ETHNOclassification.

Given that we’re dealing with culture and structure, we must also think through issues of legitimacy and power. How are our collective choices enforcing hegemonic uses of language that may marginalize?

Design questions then emerge. How do we deal with conflicting cultural norms as more people are engaged in the act of tagging? How useful are tags across cultures? Do we only gain value from collective-action tagging amongst groups of shared values? If so, how do we implement that? And what are the social consequences for explicitly delimiting culture online?

[Also posted on M2M]

[Also posted at M2M]

In response to Clay, i *definitely* do not believe that Wikipedia should be ignored and i definitely do not believe that Britannica is better – just different. When i said that Wikipedia will never be an encyclopedia, i am definitely referencing the current definition (although being flexible on the fact the definition does state book form). Whether the definition will expand, who knows but i don’t think it matters. Both encyclopedias and Wikipedia are knowledge resources and they will always be different. If legitimacy requires a definitional change, i’m worried. Why does it have to be an encyclopedia? Why can’t it simply be Wikipedia?

In this (long) entry, i want to make 3 points:
1) A vetted Wikipedia can have complementary value;
2) Reflexivity would be of great value for entries that interpret (not necessarily for entries that are about empirical facts);
3) Authority has to do with knowledge, investment and risk.

Continue reading →

[Also an M2M entry in direct response to various points in Clay’s K5 Article on Wikipedia Anti-elitism which responds to Larry Sanger’s Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism]

First, let me acknowledge that i have excessive privilege in this lifetime. That said, i’m not convinced that academia operates solely on an aggressive exertion of privilege nor am i convinced that any institution in the United States can be discussed without an assertion of privilege. But that’s another story.

I would argue that many librarians, teachers and academics fear Wikipedia (not dislike it) because it is not properly understood, not simply because it challenges their privilege, just as most new systems and media are feared by traditionalists of all sorts. Have we not had enough conversations about blog fear amongst journalists?

As a contributor to and user of Wikipedia, there is no doubt that i have a deep appreciation for it. All the same, i roll my eyes whenever students submit papers with Wikipedia as a citation. This is probably a source of much Wikipedia dislike amongst academics.

Wikipedia appears to be a legitimate authority on a vast array of topics for which only one individual has contributed material. This is not the utopian collection of mass intelligence that Clay values. For many non-controversial topics, there are only a limited authors and we have no idea what their level of expertise is. Hell, i submitted a bazillion anthropology entries while taking Anthro 1 based on my textbook and most of them remain untouched. My early attempts to distill anthropology should definitely not appear as legitimate authorities on the topics, yet many students take them as such.

On topics for which i feel as though i do have some authority, i’m often embarrassed by what appears at Wikipedia. Take the entry for social network: “A social network is when people help and protect each other in a close community. It is never larger than about 150 people.” You have *got* to be kidding me. Aside from being a patently wrong and naive misinterpretation of research, this definition reveals what happens when pop cultural understandings of concepts become authorities.

I have extreme respect for those who seek to define concepts such as those who craft the dictionary and encyclopedias. It is extremely challenging to define a term because you are trying very hard to capture and convey excessive amounts of information in an abbreviated fashion that cannot be misinterpreted. This takes talent, practice, precision and a great deal of research. Consider, for example, the difference between a good science writer and a bad one. Not everyone can convey large bodies of research in an easily accessible manner.

This does not mean that i dislike Wikipedia, just that i do not consider it to be equivalent to an encyclopedia. I believe that it lacks the necessary research and precision. The lack of talent and practice mostly comes from the fact that most entries have limited contributers. Wikipedia is often my first source, but never my last, particularly in contexts where i need to be certain of my facts. Wikipedia is exceptionally valuable to read about multiple sides to a story, particularly in historical contexts, but i don’t trust alternative histories any more than i trust privileged ones.

My concern – and that of many of my colleagues – is that students are often not media-savvy enough to recognize when to trust Wikipedia and when this is a dreadful idea. They quote from it as though it cannot be inaccurate. I certainly distrust many classic sources, but i don’t think that an “anti-elitist” (a.k.a. lacking traditional authority and expertise) alternative is automatically better. Such a move stinks of glorifying otherness simply out of disdain for hegemonic practices, a tactic that never gets us anywhere.

I don’t believe that the goal should be ‘acceptance’ so much as recognition of what Wikipedia is and what it is not. It will *never* be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes. If the fuss dies down, i’d be exceptionally worried because it would mean that we’ve lost the ability to discuss the quality of information.

Alternatively, i too would love to see a vetted version of Wikipedia, one that would provide a knowledge resource that is more accountable and authoritative.

Update:

“The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.” – Robert McHenry is Former Editor in Chief, Encyclopedia Britannica

[From Tech Central Station via Preoccupations]

[From OM]

When Friendster, et. al. were the hottest thing on the block, hordes of people jumped online to articulate their social network for everyone to see. Analysts thought that they were buying in to the “goals” of the services – dating, job seeking, classified, etc. There’s no doubt that many people gained value from these services but is this why everyone was so keen on articulation?

Articulation is not new. Building an address book is a form of articulating relationships. The address book is considered to be a tool of memory, yet what assumptions are being made when an entry is created? I would guess that anyone who scribbles a new name in assumes that they will have some reason to contact that person again. There is an assumption of a future connection aided by the knowledge of a current or past connection. Address books are an articulation of our connections to others with pointers for locational reference. The primary purpose of an address book is to look up an individual. It is our own personal people dns.

In the technology sphere, there are plenty of tools that incorporate articulated relationships into their application. Consider LiveJournal or AIM. In both applications, one articulates the people one wants to keep in touch with and uses each application to connect with others voices either through static or synchronous text. Both are tools for presence and communication – the articulation is key to engaging with these people.

What then are the motivations behind articulating relationships in publicly articulated social networking tools? Certainly, many participated simply because it was the cool thing to do. For some, PASNTs offer a nouveau address book where people can have access to a collection of one’s relationships for future use. For others, it is a mechanism to keep in touch with others’ evolving representations of self. Yet, the public aspect of this articulation takes on an additional role, that of signaling connection (a topic that Judith Donath and i took up in Public Displays of Connection).

Because the public signaling is so deeply rooted in PASNTs, this is off-putting for some people. Not everyone wants to engage in this practice which can be seen as pretentious at best. This is not necessarily an empowering feature for everyone, particularly those who keep their relationships dear to their heart and see no value in public signaling.

While all social people maintain relationships, there is nothing consistent about how people maintain them, yet these tools require some consistency. Who does this limit and how?

For some, private articulation for a particular purpose (memory, reference to a connection, presence) can feel quite comfortable and thus the people engaged in tools that permit this may not feel nearly as comfortable in ones that require public performance of relationships.

I would be very curious to know what motivates others to articulate their relationships and in what situations. If you think about your blogrolling habits, your be-Friending on PASNTs, your address books, your IM buddies, why do you choose to put people there? What purpose does this serve in your life?

[From OM]

In September, Joel on Software crafted a blog entry entitled It’s Not Just Usability that can be read both as a positivistic call to action and a scathing critique on the current methods used for understanding how design should connect with people. Personally, his words brought me great joy and should be deeply considered by designers, technologists and users of technology.

In design, there’s a desire to understand the relationship between the human and the computer. Interface designers are often trying to understand the psychology of the “user” so that they can offer an interface that will make the tasks at hand easy to do. This is the reason that cognitive and quantitative psychologists have been so involved in human-computer interaction.

Social tools don’t fit well into the HCI paradigm. While the interface is important, it is not as important as the way social relationships are negotiated. Napster was not a good interface, but the social desire to share overcame that. Many of the Articulated Social Networking tools are the same – a pain in the ass to use, but worth it because of the social component.

The ways in which tools for mediated sociability are conceptualized and analyzed must shift. No longer can we simply study how the user interacts with the tool, but instead we must consider how people interact with each other and how the tool plays a part in that interaction. Note: people, not users. The tool is not a primary actor in sociability, but a tool that mediates. People should not be framed in terms of the tool, but the tool framed in terms of their use.

This means focusing first on the types of social interaction desired and THEN on the technology necessary to instrument that interaction. A technology first approach is a crap-shoot. It can work simply because people may find a way to repurpose the tool to meet their needs. But without an understanding of the social behaviors that should be supported, one should not expect the technology to be valued simply because it is good technology.

Focusing on social interaction does not mean simply focusing on an activity unless you broaden the term activity to include identity construction, play and reputation management. These are all aspects of sociability and part of why people use these tools. Think about the role of an architect. An architect designs a public space not for a limited number of activities, but for an increased possibility of social interaction that will be extensible enough to support the diversity of ways in which people wish to interact. This is the kind of mindset that is needed.

Focusing on sociability means understanding how people repurpose your technology and iterating with them in mind. The goal should not be to stop them but to truly understand why what they are doing is a desired behavior to them and why the tool seemed like a good solution. A park bench wasn’t made for stretching but just because people do stretches on it rather than sitting on it doesn’t mean you should stop them. Taking away the park bench stops the sitters as well as the stretchers. Figure out how to support the stretchers and the sitters so that they are not in conflict but both appreciative of the park bench.

Think about Friendster. Friendster was built for a very specific activity, yet people’s interactions with the technology were about a whole range of social management. Their activities grew from their conception of how Friendster fit into their social lives. They did not see it as a dating site, yet the company kept trying to force them to see it that way. This was foolish. Instead, the company should’ve tried to support the wide ranges of behaviors in a way that was not conflicting. Consider the pub. Some people go to the pub to be voyeurs, some to date, some to socialize with friends, some to just drink. Pubs rarely try to make everyone have the same agenda – why should online services?

Much of this has been said before but not much of it has been heard. If we want to thinking about designing social tools, we must be prepared for a shift in mindset. If you find yourself thinking “those stupid users”, you’re in the usability frame not the sociability frame. Just as there are no stupid questions in the classroom, there are no stupid users in technology. People who use technology are offering a roadmap to different social behavior around technology than we normally consider. Pay attention to them.

[From OM]

At CSCW, one attendee asked me what made Friendster a social network? He was frustrated because the term social network did not simply refer to a group of people who could be modeled in a graph-like structure, yet that is how it is being used these days. I have to wonder if the anthropologists are giggling since their term for the same behavior has not been co-opted.

Both sociologists and anthropologists have tried to understand and model social relationships since the beginning of their fields. They want to know how these relationships are connected with practices, culture, organizations, etc. They want to know how these relationships affect how people interact with one another. Whenever they try to model these relationships, their goal is not simply to build a graph, but to construct a visual representation that will allow them to better understand people, society and culture. The end goal is not the graph and the graph is not meant for the people being studied.

Conversely, consider what all of the social networking sites have attempted to do. The goal in constructing the relationship structures is certainly not for a researcher to make sense of society and culture, but for those represented to be empowered by the articulation and representation of their relationships. Rather than a researcher attempting to understand and model what s/he susses out about others’ relationships, the represented are doing the modeling. Furthermore, their models are being used by others and this affects the ways in which they model their relationships.

Rather than actually analyzing the practical effects of the differences in these approaches, i’d like to encourage the readers to really reflect on the divergent goals. We often speak about the need for activities once networks are built, but we don’t consider the underlying goals. In many ways, i feel as though the goals are what affects the activities, not vice versa.

The goals of sociological networks are very clear, but what are the goals of people-generated networks for public consumption? What are the goals of the designers vs. the goals of the people producing these representations? Is one motivation to empower people to find new ways to relate? Is the goal to have a more efficient way of spreading memes? Is the goal to make people reflect on their relationships? What are the goals?