Wikipedia + Flickr = Fotopedia

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia, one of the greatest achievements of sharing; I also enjoy wandering around Flickr, although its lack of over-arching organisation makes that hard to do. Maybe this is perfect solution: Fotopedia, "the first collaborative photo encyclopedia", which uses text from Wikipedia, but only to provide what amount to extended captions for the pix, which are generally very attractive.

It's not the first to do this - VisWiki has been around for some time - but Fotopedia seems to take a much more visual approach, which I find very pleasing, because it creates more than just a highly-illustrated version of Wikipedia. Articles and their pix are a little thin on the ground at the moment, but with any luck, that won't be the case for long once word gets out - and pictures start pouring in.

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Filtering an Inclusionist Wikipedia

Why didn't somebody think of this before?

Wikipedia for schools is ... a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. The current version has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fit on a DVD with good size images) and is “about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words)”. It was developed by carefuly selecting for content, then checking for vandalism and suitability by “SOS Children volunteers”. You can download it for free from the website, or as a free 3.5GB DVD.

The following point is even more interesting:

I also see this as a potential future model for Wikipedia — allow people to edit, but have a separate vetting process that identifies particular versions of an article as vetted. Then, people can choose if they want to see the latest version or the most recent vetted version. To some, this is very controversial, but I don’t see it that way. A vetting process doesn’t prevent future edits, and it creates a way for people to get what they want... material that they can have increased confidence in. The trick is to develop a good-enough vetting process (or perhaps multiple vetting/rating processes for different purposes). This didn’t make sense back when Wikipedia was first starting (the problem was to get articles written at all!), but now that Wikipedia is more mature, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a new need to identify vetted articles. Yes, you have to worry about countries to whom “democracy” is a dirty word, but I think such problems can be resolved. This is hardly a new idea; see Wikimedia’s article on article validation and Wikipedia’s pushing to 1.0. I am sure that a vetting/validation process will take time to develop, and it will be imperfect... but that doesn’t make it a bad idea.

Indeed. What this means is that different organisations could pass the whole of Wikipedia through their particular prisms - like that filtering stuff for children. This is a very strong argument for Wikipedia being inclusionist - having as much stuff as possible - and letting the filters take out stuff that particular groups don't want. These would then offer their seals of approval to that particular cut - even if many people would disapprove of the choices made. That's freedom for you, I'm afraid.

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OpenStreetMap Navigates to Wikipedia

One of the powerful features of open source is re-use: you don't have to re-invent the wheel, but can build on the work of others. That's straightforward enough for software, but it can also be applied to other fields of openness. Here's a fantastic example: embedding OpenStreetMap in Wikipedia entries:

For some time, there have been efforts to bring OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Wikipedia closer together. Both projects have the mission to produce free knowledge and information through a collaborative community process. Because of the similarities, there are many users active in both projects – however mutual integration is still lacking.

For this reason, Wikimedia Deutschland (WM-DE, the German Chapter of Wikimedia) are providing funds of 15.000 Euro (almost $20k) and starting a corresponding pilot project. A group of interested Wikipedians and OSM users have partnered up to reach two goals: The integration of OSM-maps in Wikipedia and the installation of a map toolserver. The map toolserver will serve to prototype new mapping-related projects and preparing them for deployment on the main Wikimedia cluster.

Here's how it will work:

Maps are an important part of the information in encyclopaedic articles - however currently mostly static maps are used. With interactive free maps and a marking system a way of presenting information can be created.

For some time there have been MediaWiki Extensions available for embedding OpenStreetMap maps into MediaWiki. That's a great start, but it isn't enough. If these extensions were deployed on Wikipedia without any kind of proxy set-up, the OpenStreetMap tile servers would struggle to handle the traffic.

One of our aims is to build an infrastructure in the Wikimedia projects that allows us to keep the OSM data, or at least the tile images, ready locally in the Wikimedia network. We still have to gain a some experience about this, but we are optimistic about that. On one side, we have a number of Wikipedians in the team, who are versed in MediaWiki and scaling software systems, and on the other side we have OSM users who can set up the necessary geo database.

We learned much from the use of the Wikimedia-Toolservers – for example that on a platform for experimenting much more useful tools were developed than it was predicted. Interested developers have a good starting position to develop new tools with new possibilities.

We expect similar results from the map toolserver. As soon as it is online, everyone who is interested and presents his ideas of development projects and his state of knowledge can apply for an account. We want to allow as many users as possible to implement their ideas without having to care about the basic setup. We hope that in the spirit of the creation and distribution of free content many new maps and visualisations emerge.

Now, it's happening:

There has been rapid progress on the subject of adding OpenStreetMap maps to Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikipedia) during the MediaWiki Developer Meet-Up taking place right now in Berlin.

Maps linked to Wikipedia content *within* Wikipedia: I can't wait.

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UK Pupils to Learn How to Be Spied On

Here are two interesting stories:

First, the government wants children to use social networking sites like Twitter:

Children will no longer have to study the Victorians or the second world war under proposals to overhaul the primary school curriculum, the Guardian has learned.

However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia and give teachers far more freedom to decide what youngsters should be concentrating on in classes.

Second, the government wants to monitor social networking sites like Twitter:

Social networking sites like Facebook could be monitored by the UK government under proposals to make them keep details of users' contacts.

Putting these together, we can deduce that UK government has decided that passively monitoring people isn't enough: now it's time actively to train future generations in the fine art of being spied upon.

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It's *Not* The 15th Birthday of Linux – and Why That Matters

Last week, I wondered whether I'd gone back in time. Everywhere I went online – on news sites, blogs and Twitter – people were celebrating the 15th birthday of Linux, it seemed. “How is this possible?” I asked myself. “Since Linux was started in 1991, that must mean we are in 2006: have I fallen through a wormhole into the past?”

On Linux Journal.

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Watching the Internet Watch Foundation

As you've probably heard, the Wikipedia page censored by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is now freely available again....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Welcome to Great (Firewall) Britain

Most Internet users have heard of the Great Firewall of China – the technological measures put in place by the Chinese government to censor material from outside the country, and to monitor Internet usage within it. And most people have probably assumed that this is just a typical manifestation of an authoritarian regime that insists on keeping a tight control on its people. Alas, it turns out that any sense of superiority we Brits might feel is entirely misplaced, because exactly the same thing is happening in the UK....

On Open Enterprise blog.

More Analyst Cluelessness

Yesterday in "the other place" I was berating Gartner for its inability to understand the reality of open source, and now here's someone else from that strange world of "research" that simply doesn't understand the basics - in this case, digital music:

Music cannot just be 'for free' anymore than cars or houses can 'just be for free'. If people aren't paid, they don't make the product.

Sigh. Once more, then, children - and do pay attention at the back: music is digital, cars and houses are analogue. You can make copies of digital music for effectively zero cost (it exists, but it's too small to measure); you cannot easily make copies of cars or houses, and certainly not for vanishingly small cost.

As for the second part, ever heard of something called free software? Variously estimated as worth tens of billions of pounds, most of it is created by people who aren't paid. And even if they are, that's not a necessary pre-condition for its creation, simply a reflection of the health of the business ecosystem that has grown up around it. If there weren't people who got paid, free software would stil exist - as it did originally.

Similarly for Wikipedia: nobody gets paid, but look at the results. In just a few years it has succeeded in creating an unmatched respository of human knowledge, to the point where it is pretty widely regarded as the first place to look stuff up, despite its undeniable imperfections.

As with Gartner, this seems to be a case of analysts simply telling their clients what they want to hear, rather than what they need to know. Hence my general contempt for the breed, with a few honourable exceptions - RedMonk and the 451 Group spring to mind - that both know what they are talking about, and tell it as it is.

WikiDashboard

This is really cool.

One of the great things about Wikipedia is that you can see who has made edits: this makes the process of accumulation transparent - in theory. In practice, it's often too hard to see the wood for the trees.

Enter WikiDashboard, which offers a visual representation of the editing process:

The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

It's dead easy to use: you just bung in your search term, and the relevant Wikipedia page appears (from a mirror), alongside with a neat graphic that shows who did what when. (Via All the Modern Things.)

Open Content's Great Healing

There is an irony at the heart of the open content world: that the two biggest successes there – Wikipedia and the Creative Commons movement – cannot share content. This is because Wikipedia was created before CC came on the scene, and therefore – quite reasonably – used the best existing open content licence, the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL), which is not compatible with popular CC licences. As the man who did more than anyone to craft the latter, Larry Lessig, explains....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Openness is the Solution to the (Double) Subprime Crisis

As I listen to all this talk of lack of trust in the banking system, of inflated values ungrounded in any reality, of “opacity”, and of “contaminated” financial instruments, I realise I have heard all this before. In the world of software, as in the world of finance, there is contamination by overvalued, ungrounded offerings that have led to systemic mistrust, sapped the ability of the computer industry to create real value, and led it to squander vast amounts of time and money on the pursuit of the illusory, insubstantial wealth that is known as “intellectual property”....

On Linux Journal.

Who Needs Wikipedia...?

...when you've got Deletionpedia:

Deletionpedia is an archive of about 63,552 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia.

Deletionpedia is not a wiki: you cannot edit the pages uploaded here. An automated bot uploads pages as they are deleted from Wikipedia.

Couldn't we make that a round 65,536 (another pedant asks)? (Via the Next Web.)

Medpedia: Just What the Doctor Ordered

Just because Wikipedia is wonderful (well, mostly) doesn't mean that there's no room for other wikis serving narrower domains. For example, one of the quips that is frequently made as a criticism of the crowd-sourced Wikipedia way is that you wouldn't want the same approach in the operating theatre. Well, maybe not, but this shows how you can usefully apply wikis to medicine:

The Medpedia Project is an extraordinary global effort to collect, organize and make understandable, the world’s best information about health, medicine and the body and make it freely available on the website Medpedia.com. Physicians, health organizations, medical schools, hospitals, health professionals, and dedicated individuals are coming together to build the most comprehensive medical resource in the world that will benefit millions of people every year.

In association with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School and other leading global health organizations, the Medpedia community seeks to create the most comprehensive and collaborative medical resource in the world. Medpedia will serve as a catalog, database, and learning tool about health, medicine and the body for doctors, scientists, policymakers, students and citizens that will improve medical literacy worldwide.

The key thing here, of course, is that only people who know what they are talking about will be allowed to add content, making it closer to the Citizendium model than Wikipedia (although the latter continues its slow waltz in that general direction too.)

Let's hope that other knowledge domains pick up on the idea: you simply can't have enough of this open content (Medpedia is under the GFDL, like Wikipedia).

Open Source Drug Discovery

There's something utterly perverse about the way new drugs are developed. Pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions - sometimes billions - of Euros investigating vast numbers of new compounds in the hope that they might treat a particular disease. If they find one that works, they then have to test it extensively for side-effects and the rest. Moreover, most of the negative knowledge they acquire - what doesn't work - is wilfully thrown away, since it represents "competitive" information.

But how about turning things on their head? Instead of trying millions of new substances for one disease, how about experimenting with the tens of thousands of known, safe medicines in the public domain on thousands of diseases? Like this:

The Johns Hopkins Clinical Compound Screening Initiative is an open-source effort to collect and index more than 10,000 known medications and determine which of them are also effective against hundreds of low-profile, Third World killers, such as Chagas disease, cholera and leprosy. The library will function something like a Wikipedia of drug discovery, where scientists around the world can contribute to the database and even provide samples or screen drugs themselves, thereby saving millions of dollars on R&D.

This could save millions of lives. Just one problem: nobody gets obscenely rich in the process....

Is Cheating in Microsoft's DNA?

Seems so:

I was looking to see what search sites might have a particular bug that I (ahem) came across and was trying the search for the number 0 in various places. There is a pretty good Wikipedia page about zero. Zero has a rich and interesting history and there are many other potentially reasonable results.

But I was surprised to see MSN search had demoted their good results below some crappy ones from MSDN

Includipedia - Count Us In

As I've written elsewhere, I am a big fan of inclusionism when it comes to Wikipedia - the idea that there is no good reason why it shouldn't include entries on anything. After all, nobody forces you to read the stuff, and it's not as if it's sitting on your bookshelves. Includipedia feels the same:

The main difference between Includipedia and Wikipedia is that Includipedia will have an Inclusionst policy.

When people's work is trashed by deletionists, they become discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia. If many good Wikipedia editors get disgruntled with Wikipedia's deletionists, the important work of creating a repository of all information is harmed.

Why shouldn't every film, every TV programme episode, every small-circulation magazine, every pokemon character, etc have an article about it, if people want to write those articles? People who aren't interested in these subjects won't read them, and people who are interested will find them useful.

Also worth noting is Encoresoup, an partial, inclusionist version of Wikipedia all about free software:

The goal of Encoresoup is to provide a comprehensive reference guide to virtually all Free Software and Open Source projects and the FOSS ecosystem.

The core and inspiration for Encoresoup is the set of Wikipedia's FOSS articles managed by the Free Software WikiProject. Encoresoup seeks to build on and enhance this content in the following ways :

* Include many more articles. Practically any Free/Open Source Software project can be documented here (but see our inclusion policy) and we hope one day to host articles covering the vast majority of projects.

This is What the Internet Was Invented For

Who needs television, when you've got WikipediaVision?

WikipediaVision is a visualization of edits to the English (and the German, French, Spanish) Wikipedia, almost the same time as they happen.

Be warned, this is totally addictive. (Via if:book.)

Wackypedia: the Wikipedia fork

On Linux Journal.

Wikia: Weak, but Working on It

So, the much-bruited Wikia has finally launched, in alpha at least:

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

What's most interesting about this is how everything is merging into everything else: Wikipedia's co-founder is doing Wikia, Amazon has an on-demand cloud computing service, Google is beginning to enter the mobile phone business. Everyone is competing with everyone.

Open Source: A Question of Metrics

Here's a characteristically thought-provoking post from Chris Messina:

I’ve probably said it before, and will say it again, and I’m also sure that I’m not the first, or the last to make this point, but I have yet to see an example of an open source design process that has worked.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to wager that “open source design” is an oxymoron. Design is far too personal, and too subjective, to be given over to the whims and outrageous fancies of anyone with eyeballs in their head.

Call me elitist in this one aspect, but with all due respect to code artistes, it’s quite clear whether a function computes or not; the same quantifiable measures simply do not exist for design and that critical lack of objective review means that design is a form of Art, and its execution should be treated as such.

What interests me is that he's actually articulating something deep about the open source methodology: it can only be usefully applied when there is a metric that lets you judge objectively when things get better.

That's why free software works: you take some code and improve it - making it faster, more compact, less buggy - or, ideally, all three. It's why collaborative novels and symphonies rarely work. There's no clear way to improve on what's already there: anyone can tinker, but there will always be different views on whether that tinkering works. It's also why why Wikipedia more or less works: although based on facts and their citations, there's still plenty of room for disagreement over how they should be presented.