EchoDitto - Wiki

RootsCampDC: A WikiConference - posted by Jason Rosenberg

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:47:51 -0800

Michael and I attended RootsCampDC this weekend. It was an amazing conference with an equally exciting vibe. The attendees were all remarkable people with great stories and experiences to share. They included 2006 campaign workers fresh off the trail, a candidate for U.S. Senate and leaders of the netroots community.

The idea of the conference was to bring these ideas together to progressive ideas to reality, and I think it really worked. The sessions I attended were filled with lively discussion and some great ideas were shared.

Everyone I spoke with told me that this was one of the best conferences they've attended. One person told me the reason they enjoyed RootsCamp so much was because this conference didn't have a room full of vendors trying to sell their services. This was a conference of ideas not of products.

What I found the most interesting was how the sessions were formed. On one of the floors of the building was a giant cork board. People that wanted to host a session could simply post a piece or paper with the vital information: Name of event, topic, time and place. The conference was truly a wikiconference.

RootsCampDC was a great success and should serve as a model for other progressive conferences.

Check out RootsCampDC's Flickr pics.

When Wiki Writers Attack - posted by Terrance Heath

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 10:11:54 -0800

I have to be honest. Despite my line of work, I still haven't entirely quaffed the wiki kool-aid. Blogging is one thing, but something about a reference source that's editable by anybody makes me a little wary. John Seigenthaler, Sr.'s story only reinforces that wariness.

“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.”

— Wikipedia

This is a highly personal story about Internet character assassination. It could be your story.

I have no idea whose sick mind conceived the false, malicious “biography” that appeared under my name for 132 days on Wikipedia, the popular, online, free encyclopedia whose authors are unknown and virtually untraceable. There was more:

“John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984,” Wikipedia said. “He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter.”

At age 78, I thought I was beyond surprise or hurt at anything negative said about me. I was wrong. One sentence in the biography was true. I was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the early 1960s. I also was his pallbearer. It was mind-boggling when my son, John Seigenthaler, journalist with NBC News, phoned later to say he found the same scurrilous text on Reference.com and Answers.com.

My experience was a bit different, and a bit less personal than Seigenthaler's -- I don't have a Wikipedia entry, and given Seigenthaler's experience I'm not sure I want one. I was simply using Wikipedia to look up information for a online calendar of important dates and people in the performing arts, so I could write 365 brief paragraphs on the people and the dates.

I quickly learned not to rely on Wikipedia alone. There were frequent discrepancies on important details like the birthdates of certain figures, or the facts on certain important works. I ended up having to cross reference information between Wikipedia and sites like AllMusic.Com, the Internet Movie Database, and the Internet Broadway Database (yes, there is one), as well as other online encyclopedias, like the one's Seigenthaler mentions -- that feature content from Wikipedia.

Eventually my employer bought a subscription to a reputable online encyclopedia just to ensure that we ended up with accurate information. Turns out the old truism really is true sometimes: you get what you pay for.

Seigenthaler goes on to detail the process of getting the false information in entries about him removed. Compared to actually finding out who posted the disinformation, getting it removed was the easy part. In the end, the wiki author who libeled Seigenthaler simply struck and slipped back in to the ether of the internet, with considerable legal protection. And while Seigenthaler was successful in getting the entries corrected, in some ways the damage was already done.

When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of “gossip.” She held a feather pillow and said, “If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people.”

For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.

The most exciting thing about the new media age we live in is that almost anyone has access to the tools disseminate information on a global scale. The most frightening thing about the new media age we live in is that almost anyone has access to the tools to disseminate information on a global scale. A lot more people have the power of media at the fingertips than ever before, and not all of them use it for good.

The only defense is to become your own personal anti-defamation agency. The same advice that applies in the case of anyone who's ever blogged, posted on an online forum, posted on Usenet, or even emailed: Google yourself once in a while. It's a good way of knowing what others -- from potential employers to students working on research papers -- are reading about you. If you happen to have your own entry on Wikipedia check it out every once in a while. Register on Wikipedia, add your entry to your watchlist and correct it when you find inaccuracies. And if you have, as Seigenthaler does, it's helpful a major media megaphone like USA Today at your disposal.

Seigenthaler's story is certainly disturbing. Almost anyone would be shaken after seeing disinformation posted about them for all the world to see, and by an anonymous author who can't be held accountable. And that's just one wiki entry. Multiply it by the number of sites that post Wikipedia's content, and the ever expanding number of blogs and online forums, and the personal anti-defamation tactics mentioned above can become a full-time job if you're famous enough. Unfortunately, in an age when almost anyone is armed with the ability to spread information or disinformation far and wide, that kind of eternal vigilance will probably remain a necessity for the foreseeable future.

Update: Wikipedia is now requiring users to register in order to submit articles.

Fortune 500 Companies that Blog - posted by Joshua Shimkin

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 21:01:31 -0800

Jeremy Wright has posted a list of the Fortune 500 companies with blogs. He counts any type of blog -- internal, external, product, etc -- as sufficient for a company to be included in the list. Jeremy, thanks for keeping us all up to date. (Assist to Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion)

There is also TheNewPR/wiki that's keeping track of corporate blogs (listed by type of corporate blog as well) and other PR related developments. The list is not as comprehensive as Jeremy's but there many other good resources included in the wiki.

Wild World of Wikis - posted by Garrett Graff

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 11:45:57 -0800

I came across today an article written by Robert McHenry, the former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Brittannica, about his reactions to the Wikipedia, or what he calls the "faith-based encyclopedia":

...The Wikipedia project is flourishing. As of November 2004, according to the project's own counts, nearly 30,000 contributors had written about 1.1 million articles in 109 different languages, though some of these language versions of Wikipedia remained quite small. The Manx Gaelic version, for example, had only 3 articles, the Guarani 10, and the Klingon (yes, from the Star Trek series) 48. The largest, the English language version, contained over 382,000 pages that were thought "probably" to be encyclopedic articles. (The "probably" tells as much about the limits of Wikipedia's oversight as any single word possibly could.)

All-in-all, it's not a very flattering piece, but you can't help but a get a sense that he just doesn't "get" it. The whole piece is written with a patronizing tone that sees the Wikipedia only as a distraction from "real" reference sources. He points out problems in a few entries and uses that and the Wikipedia's instructions to damn it as a "reliable" tool.

But that's not really the point of wikis. They're not meant to be perfect right out of the box. They're "open source," collaborative, and iterative knowledge, just like the heart of the internet. They represent millions of people coming together and pooling their talents towards a greater (non-commercial) goal. Wikis are an exercise in the shared humanity of the world, and that's something you're never going to get out of a "closed source" solution like Encyclopedia Brittannica.

What's more interesting, though? If you go to the Alexander Hamilton entry that McHenry specifically picked apart, you'll see that the errors he pointed out have already been fixed. I don't know whether he fixed them or someone else did after reading his article, but the wiki world is self-correcting and it's always possible to edit away.

No, the wikipedia isn't perfect, but every day it is getting better. Just look at how far it's come in three years, and imagine what it'll be like in ten years. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the massive Encyclopedia Brittannica's first editions in 1768 weren't the be-all-and-end-all of knowledge then either.

(If you're looking for more information on wikis, this is as good a time as any to unveil the EchoDitto Wiki page. If you have a favorite wiki, let us know and we'll add it below.)

Wikipedia Hits 1,000,000 - posted by Joshua Shimkin

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:13:43 -0700

Today, Wikipedia announced the publication of their 1 millionth article. Mabye it signifies the breadth and depth of this groundbreaking online, collaborative endeavor. Maybe it's just another milestone to toast and make a bet with your friend when they will hit 2 million.

A toast to collaboration!

George Wiki Bush - posted by Tim Jones

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 11:49:22 -0700

David Weinberger points to a rumble going on at Wikipedia over the George W. Bush page. Democracy, meet meta-Democracy.

I can only hope that the EchoDitto page on DisInfopedia will cause similar controversy one day.

I've just added a Wiki blog category.

The Post Discovers Wikis - posted by Todd Plants

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 11:49:36 -0700

The Washington Post reports on the success of of Wikipedia today. The article itself is nothing new, mostly comparing the communitarian nature of a wiki with the tightly edited nature of a traditional encyclopedia. But we've been thinking a lot at EchoDitto about how you might use wiki technology for something a little more structured than "A Big Encyclopedia About Everything."

From what I've seen, the folks over at Disinfopedia seem to have some idea how to introduce structure and - get this - some level of organizing into the wiki process. It's clear that wikis aren't going to be the tool we can use to get activists doing all sorts of real-world activism. But we can get a lot of activists to do a lot of research to build the store of information we need to make our real world activism most effective.

Old Media vs. New - posted by Garrett Graff

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 11:49:49 -0700

We've been talking a lot about wikis in recent client meetings, so I was particularly interested to read this blog entry today on the Wikipedia vs. the Encyclopedia Brittanica (via BoingBoing.net):

Princeton University: Both entries are accurate and reasonably well written. Wikipedia has more information. Verdict: small advantage to Wikipedia.

Me: Wikipedia has a short but decent entry; Britannica, unsurprisingly, has nothing. Verdict: advantage Wikipedia.

Public-key cryptography: Good, accurate entries in both. Verdict: toss-up.

Microsoft antitrust case: Britannica has only two sentences, saying that Judge Jackson ruled against Microsoft and ordered a breakup, and that the Court of Appeals overturned the breakup but agreed that Microsoft had broken the law. That's correct, but it leaves out the settlement. Wikipedia's entry is much longer but error-prone. Verdict: big advantage to Britannica.

Overall verdict: Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.

My question: Who wants to write the Wikipedia entry on Nicco?

Sunday Night on the Blogs - posted by Tim Jones

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 11:49:55 -0700

No original content in this post.

Cosmopolity and Dave Winer's ConventionBloggers.com aggregate lots of bloggers covering the RNC in NYC. Me, I want to know how the Viking Protests went.
Ross Mayfield sums up recent interblog discussions on the reliability of collaboratively-written encyclopedias like Wikipedia and Dkosopedia.
Jason Kottke looks at the recent activities of Google Inc., and suggests that GMail is their first step towards building an all-pervasive Google "Operating System".
Me, I just scribbled a few excerpts from Hunter S. Thompson's ramblings on the 1972 presidential race that remind me of 2004.