1:20 Begins the Q&A session.

Forgive me for getting names wrong or not knowing them; will try to clean this up later.

Ethan Z. gives David Weinberger the “ceremonial first question.”

DW: Hospitality has been a big deal since the Old Testament. Has there been less focus on hospitality because of the fake intimacy with strangers from around the world? Why as a term has hospitality slipped away?

LT: Part of this is the explosion of connections on the internet. Explosion of media choices, explosive growth in flow of everything worldwide–information, products, capital, and so on. Everything but people.

We’ve stopped looking at the people behind it all. Even with the news. How often do you think of the person behind the news?

Thinking of different ways to measure hospitality: Ratio of listening to speaking. Incoming attention vs. outgoing attention. Examples:

Movie imports vs. exports. Obviously, US doesn’t do great here.
Links: Link to self or others? Here, blogs are very hospitable and newspapers very inhospitable.

Jason: Gatekeeping and training of journalists. Journalists and professional training.

LT: Journalism is a craft, not exclusively a profession. Professionalization leads to certain kinds of news. What can we do differently when journalism is an internet-based craft? How can we strive to improve our craft as non-professionals?

[???}: What's the hook? What's your organizing principle?

Suggestion: Erik Erikson, social psychological identity: Who is "I," "we," and "they"? How do we identify who's inside, outside, etc.?

1:31:
[???]: (Couldn’t hear; something about respect.)

Must make sure those whose voices should be included are included.

[???]: Is hospitality also an issue of large country vs. small countries?

EZ: US is now behind both India and Nigeria in terms of number of films exported, but US films have a much bigger footprint. Top grossing film in France is Titanic. In Australia, it’s Crocodile Dundee.

This has shaped the kinds of films that get made in the US. Summer blockbusters export well; “Boom!” sounds the same in every language. Woody Allen, in contrast, exports very poorly.

1:37
[???]: What are the norms in this community, and how do they conflict with local laws and cultures? [Ex: Something about (C) and fair use.]

LT: They don’t really conflict, they’re dialectical.

[???]: A lot of traditional notions of journalism are tied up w/ specific notions of public sphere. E.g., professional journalism is tied up w/ a centralized, equal public sphere.

GV doesn’t have one polity. How does this change your analysis?

LT: GV not trying to create a global public sphere–one cosmopolitan polity. It’s more like a public of publics–ala the internet being a network of networks.

[It's about 1,000 degrees in here and I'm fading fast. The q's keep coming, but it's time to admit that I can't blog and pay attn at the same time...]

1:11: Replacing objectivity with intersubjectivity.

The internet features a new proliferation of voices. So now, our attention is the scarce resource. How do I deal with the overload of information?

We look to institutions to solve this problem–to steer attention.

We can judge these institutions based on their hospitality–the dialectical negotiation between objectivity and hospitality.

Example: Rotten Tomatoes. It’s much more interesting to read the movie reviews than the objective information. IMDb, Yelp, Amazon, etc.

Aggregating, curating, and [amplifying?] multiple voices.

How would this look for the news?

1:17: GV combines these voices together. Blends them.

Caveat: I get a lot of responses that this is unrealistic, idealistic. Hospitality is easy when we’re friends, but it’s hard and dangerous to be hospitable when we’re not friends.

Yet it’s our duty and obligation. I hope this raises our willingness to be hospitable to each other.

12:50: Is Global Voices (GV) journalism?

Rebecca McKinnon: No. No fact checking, no objectivity, most participants don’t see themselves a journalists and even refuse the label.

This question is a red herring–it’s like asking Lok whether he’s Chinese, Dutch, etc. What’s more interesting is what it says about what journalism is for, why it’s important, and so on.

Susan Sontag: Photography is not seeing, it’s a way of seeing. GV and journalism are both ways of seeing.

GV and professional journalism are both like vehicles for getting to a specific destination. One is a plane, the other a car, but both are supposed to carry us to truth.

Let’s invent a car/plane! [Shows slide of a cartoon car/plane; chuckles in crowd.]

12:53 There are 3 ideal types of journalism, each of which has its own democratic theory and purpose.

Imagine a 4 column, three row table:

Type of Journalism: Professional / Alt Media / Public Journalism

Democratic Theory: Liberal / Participatory / Deliberative

Purpose: Information / Representation / Conversation

1:00: This takes us beyond objectivity. This isn’t even the point of public journalism. What IS the goal of something like global voices?

Type of Journalism: Global Voices
Democratic Theory: Communicative Democracy
Purpose: Conversation
Objectivity?: Hospitality

Habermas looked @ so-called “3rd places” like coffee shops where political conversations can take place. This works because of relative equality, which is something of a prerequisite for his understanding of democratic discussion.

Lok: Hospitality shows how power differentials can be used for good. E.g., Ethan Zuckerman invites me over, but even though he’s ETHAN ZUCKERMAN, he subverts himself and his comparative power to serve me as his guest.

We don’t have to bracket out differences and pretend like there’s no power differential.

1:06: Correction to alternative media and the problem of inclusion. Hospitality isn’t unconditional. If your guest misbehaves, you can ask them to leave.

Opposite of hospitality: Hostility. E.g., sign in front of Geno’s cheesesteak stand in S. Philly. “Speak English.”

Hospitality: Back to Kant, Perpetual Peace. Hospitality is a right that comes from our mutual co-existence. Also, Roger Silverstone’s theory of hospitality in the context of the media.

12:38: How did Lok get to studying Global Voices?

Started by being interested in Chinese internet, as well as Dutch dislike of difference.

Chatted w/ Andrew Lih (of Wikipedia Revolution fame), who urged him to find something amazing that’s not well understood. Global Voices also allowed him to work on something that straddles multiple cultures–like Lok himself.

12:44: How does the world come to know itself?

The public is where strangers come together to discuss the news. How does the internet change this?

It urges us to rethink the relationship between and constraints around journalism and democracy.

Let’s imagine a better journalism together. How can we design better institutions that take advantage of the new media environment?

12:47: Point of comparison: Ethnographies of newsroom culture in 1970’s. Assumed that newsroom culture shaped production of news.

Ex: Newsroom production needs breed reliance on government sources as authoritative, reliable.

Global Voices (GV) newsroom happens online. What sort of affordances and constraints does this lead to, and how does this affect journalism?

Need a new conceptual toolkit to explain this.

My dear friend and fellow ShoutingLoudly blogger Lokman Tsui is about to begin his talk at the Berkman Center, “Beyond Objectivity: Global Voices and the Future of Journalism.”

Stay tuned.

[edited to remove sloppy and unfair ad hominem statements that I wrote in a rush without really thinking about them.  Apologies to the author.]

Blog research in political science is still pretty much in its infant stages.  There are maybe one or two dozen people who work on these topics, and most of us are (like myself) very early in our careers.  The lack of a vibrant research community means there aren’t institutional spaces where we can hash out deep theoretical differences.  So, I guess I’ll go with the next-best-thing and publish my complaints on this low-traffic blog.

I’m currently reading Richard Davis’s new book, Typing Politics: The Role of Blogs in American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2009).  This is Davis’s fifth book, all with major university presses, making him arguably one of the deans of this nascent research community.  In it he repeats a couple of major flaws endemic to political science research on the blogosphere — by which I mean they are mistakes that shouldn’t be made, and that no one else seems to make.  Consider this post my first attempt at calling these flaws out.  The three issues, as I see them, are (1) blog structure, (2) left-right balance, and (3) how we conceptualize “elites.”

Blog Structure

Davis claims to offer a detailed analysis of seven “influential” or “A-list” political blogs: DailyKos, Eschaton, Crooks and Liars, Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, Wonkette, and Michelle Malkin.  He also discusses Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, and a few other major blogs.  Davis attempts to describe the blogosphere across two dimensions — size (influential vs common) and ideology (left vs right).  Therein lies, for me at least, a major problem that is simply inexcusable in 2009.

Here’s a good way of phrasing the question.  As an empirical matter, how many blog posts appeared on DailyKos in September 2006?  Davis includes this as a datapoint in his book, so it’s plenty relevant.  He thinks there were 429 posts — fewer than Instapundit, Eschaton, and Crooks and Liars.  I compiled data on the lifetime posting rates on DailyKos for my MPSA paper, “stability and change in the poltiical blogosphere.”  Downloading the entire dataset of dKos blogposts, I find there was somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 posts that month (i’m eyeballing the graph, because this is a spur-of-the-moment blogpost.  I could get the exact number in less than an hour, though).  That’s a pretty sizeable difference, to say the least.

The difference is that I’m counting user-diaries, which DailyKos allows and the other three sites don’t.  Hell, Instapundit doesn’t even allow comments.  Those diaries are blog content.  Diaries that reach the recommended list receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of comments — more than front page posts do — and that’s a strong indicator that they play a central role in the site.  I argue in Understanding Blogspace that this difference in site architecture is effectively a difference-in-kind, that community blogs act as quasi-interest groups and forums for collective action.  If we group DailyKos with Instapundit, we ignore this distinction entirely.  If we lop off 97.5% of the content produced on a site (and do so while providing no indication or rationale to the reader), then we get a pretty badly skewed picture of what’s actually happening in the blogosphere.

Furthermore, this serves as an important indicator that the “elite vs common” distinction just isn’t good enough.  Instapundit simply does not have more posts/month than dKos.  That is factually inaccurate.  DailyKos has more posts/month than the top 25 conservative or progressive blogs combined.  That makes it a hub in a power law distribution, which is network-theory-speak for “way, way bigger than any of its competitors, and increasingly so.”  And difference of degree ends up equaling a difference-in-kind.  The size differences within the “A-list” are at least as noteable as the size differences between A-list and “common.”

DailyKos community members raise millions for the slate of candidates they endorse, often contributing more to their top candidates than the DCCC does.  There is no conservative equivalent.  That matters profoundly for the skeptical analysis of blog influence that follows in Davis’s book.  He treats DailyKos as if it = Markos Moulitsas, rather than Markos + 12 frontpage editors + thousands of active diarists.  If we limited the Sierra Club to Carl Pope, we would similarly find that his influence is pretty seriously curtailed, but then again no serious press would print a book that made such a basic flaw.  Yet Davis is just continuing an error-prone tradition that has plagued blog research since our earliest days.  Blogs in 2000 were 1 blog per blogger.  Beginning in 2003, we had community blogs.  Since then we’ve also gotten institutional blogs, and further divergences.  Those differences should be the subject of scholarly attention, even if they make our research designs a lot more complicated.

Left-Right Balance

Davis reiterates Adamic and Glance’s semi-classic paper from 2005, which conducted a large-scale hyperlink analysis and found that the left and right blogospheres inhabit separate and rarely-overlapping neighborhoods.  Yes, this is correct.  But he then goes on to walk a thin narrative tightrope, acting as though the left and right blogosphere are essentially equivalent to one another.  For a book which claims to provide solid empirical data, this is extraordinarily difficult to justify.

After the 2004 election, there were a spate of research papers that tried to measure the blogosphere, mostly using hyperlinks, and found that the left and right were either equal or that the right was slightly stronger.  This latter point came from Robert Ackland, based on the conservative habit of including each other more frequently in blogrolls (why this supposedly operationalizes power is beyond me).  You could maybe make the case that this parity was real in 2004 — I don’t have the data, so I can’t refute it.  But in 2008?  That is simply ridiculous.

In one memorably passage of the book, Davis writes, “[leftwing blogs] helped raise an estimated $2.3 million for Democratic candidates in 2006.  Similarly, conservative blogs promote donations through Slate Card, the Republican equivalent of ActBlue.”  Notice how he left out a dollar figure for SlateCard?  That’s because the site never really took off.  It has raised about $650,000 total, as opposed to the $93 million raised through ActBlue.  What’s more, Slatecard is one of several conservative attempts to replicate ActBlue, all of which have essentially failed.  The only successful conservative “moneybomb” came from the Ron Paul crowd, and they were actively ridiculed by the network of elite conservative bloggers.  These differences are empirically demonstrable through the Blogosphere Authority Index (which was the whole reason I created the thing).  Again, my MPSA paper and my original BAI publication specifically demonstrate that the elite progressive blogosphere is far larger than its conservative counterpart, that this gap is growing, and that conservative bloggers have had a particularly tough time replicating progressive successes in online infrastructure.  Over $93 million has been raised for Democratic candidates through ActBlue, and the major beneficiaries have been those candidates who received support from the major progressive blogs.  For a book on the role of blogs in American Politics to  ignore these points, papering over them continuously through selective use of the available data, is, to me, deeply problematic.  These points were non-obvious in 2004.  They are exceedingly obvious in 2009, and I would suggest that if a scholar wants to make the case that there is little difference between the two blogospheres, the onus is on him/her to explain away these empirical facts.

Davis also mistakenly attributes a few conservative talking points as facts in his description of individual bloggers, claiming that Moulitsas endorses candidates based on whether or not they give consulting contracts to Jerome Armstrong (that has been disproven to the point of ridicule) and that Michelle Malkin had to move homes after her angry critics posted her address online (this is true, but it occurred as a response to her doing the same thing to a set of anti-war protesters at UC-Santa Cruz).  Granting Davis a wide berth, I would say that the effort to represent both networks of bloggers as equals leads to a skew in favor of the conservatives.  More broadly in the literature, we as a community have failed to capture this conservative deficit because the data is legitimately pretty daunting.  I designed the BAI specifically to help scholars get around this problem, and I am hopeful that it will lead to greater accuracy in the literature over time.

Conceptualizing Elites

Davis spends fully three pages (pps 40-42) describing the results of Matthew Hindman’s “blogger census” conducted in 2004.  Matt contacting the primary blogger from 75 elite sites to find out their demographic characteristics, and concluded that the elite blogosphere replicates the demographic disparities found elsewhere in society.  This is the core of his argument that the blogosphere is “just different elites,” to which I have often replied “yes, but they’re different elites.”  Matt describes the survey himself in The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton, 2008) on pages 118-128.  A little something is lost in replication, as Davis does not include all the methodological explanation that Hindman does, thus enshrining the 2004 census as deeper fact than it actually is.

My problem with this census is twofold.  First, there’s the issue of how it handles mega-hubs like DailyKos.  Hindman decides in cases of multi-author blogs to take the individual with the highest number of posts.  I certainly understand why, in 2004, that would seem a reasonable design choice.  But nonetheless, it leads to the conclusion that the blogosphere is, for instance, overwhelmingly male dominated.  Well is it?  DailyKos has 20 frontpage editors (some are no longer active).  All of them have equal access to the 850,000 visitors the site receives per day.  13 are male, 7 are female.  Instapundit has 1 editor, and he’s male.  So should that be scored as 2 male, 0 female, or 14-7?  Adding the editors or lead contributors of other sites similarly changes the racial complexion of the elite blogosphere, though it does remain majority-white, to be certain.

The blogosphere remains largely well-educated and otherwise demographically advangated (high education and white-collar job status are correlated with various attributes that make sophisticated blogging easier).  But to say that it is “just elites” strikes me as wrongheaded specifically because there is mobility within top community blogs like dailykos (and huffington post, MyDD, FireDogLake, and OpenLeft).  Steve Singiser just joined the DailyKos editors list last week.  he was a members of the community for years, contributing diaries as a volunteer in his spare time.  His diaries were popular and highly recommended, and this led him to eventually be elevated to front page status, with a platform to the gargantuan reader-base.  That’s meritocracy.  Not a perfect one, and not an egalitarian one (as far as I can tell, he’s another well-educated white guy, albeit a high school social studies teacher), but far more fluid and meritocratic than other elite systems of influence.

This is a challenge for blog researchers going forward — one that I don’t fault anyone for not getting right just yet.  There is significant mobility in Dailykos, and none in Instapundit.  There is some in other sites.  It depends on blog structure and community norms.  That is tremendously interesting variance, laden with questions that we should be asking.  I hope that Hindman’s early “census” doesn’t become so foundational to the literature that we fail to ask such questions.  It was a fine study for 2004, a little dated by 2008, but relying uncritically on it paints an increasingly inaccurate picture of the blogosphere today.  And what’s more, it is a picture that political scientists get wrong, while everyone else gets it right.  Computer scientists know about diary structures, etc at this point.  They ask questions about community scaling and related code-based algorithms.  For our research to remain actively relevant to the impact of blogging (or other online political action) on politics, we need to keep a close eye on how the hub sites themselves have grown and changed.

That’s all I have to say at the moment (probably far more than I should).  Suffice it to say, I didn’t love this book, and I think it repeats some mistakes that need correcting.  I’m hopeful that as the scholarly community grows and builds institutions for airing these theoretical grievances, we’ll start getting more of these basic theoretical points right.

Over at Public Knowledge, Robb Topolski has written an inspirational post, ISPs Behaving Badly, which criticizes Time Warner’s trial runs at tiered pricing.

I’m not opposed to tiered pricing in principle, though TW appears to have handled it rather badly, and it still fails to solve the root problem of weak competition in the wireline ISP market. Also, I’m skeptical that it’s necessary–rather than a way for TW to keep maintenance costs down and prices up in a market where consumers have few other options.

I really appreciate Topolski taking on the ever-invoked myth that the internet is about to become so choked up as to become unreliable. This is the threat that the “Internet Tubes” will get full, invoked by then-Senator, now-convict Ted Stevens was threatening all the way back in 2006.

Basically, this threat is still a bogeyman and looks to be so indefinitely. Last year, Telegeography concluded, “Internet traffic is growing fast, but capacity is keeping pace.”

Further, DSL Reports debunks the “exaflood myth” in their typical sharply opinionated style.

For a more detached, scholarly view of internet traffic, see the Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) site. Chief investigator Andrew Odlyzko and company are doing great work here. He also suggests that, if anything, the rate of growth in wireline broadband traffic is decreasing. The most recent MINTS post cites a Cogent estimate of 30% growth in internet traffic in Q4 2008 versus 2007.

Last February, Odlyzko argued that, at least as far as the network industries are concerned internet growth may be too slow. This was even based on higher estimates of growth; Odlyzko’s estimate at the time was that internet traffic grows at about 50% per year.

The key is that the cost of managing a network declines by about one third per year. Even exaflood believer Lawrence G. Roberts adopts the latter estimate, following Moore’s law.

If the cost of managing network traffic next year will be roughly 2/3 of this year’s per-bit price, and total traffic is around 3/2 of this year’s total, network providers spend about the same year-over-year for network maintenance (2/3 * 3/2 = 1) and thus make the same profit per subscriber.

Of course, it’s very un-sexy to tell your stockholders that per-subscriber profits will be the same as last year, especially considering the ever-decreasing potential for new subscribers in a broadband market that is approaching saturation.

Thus, dare I suggest: Maybe the exaflood threat is actually about broadband providers leveraging their way into a new business model–whether the Tony Soprano business model of “Charge Google,” or the wireless carriers’ model of tiered pricing.

To draw a comparison with the wireless industry is instructive; even when wireless data transmission is more than doubling every year, wireless carriers keep charging lower prices for better service and rolling out every more reasonably priced all-you-can-everything plans.

Where there’s even modest (and far from ideal) competition, customers come out far better than in the duopoly-at-best home broadband market.

But then again, maybe “global traffic will exceed the Internet’s capacity as soon as this year.” That is, if you listen to Phil Kerpen’s commentary at Forbes–from January 2007.

(Live blogging from the “From Social Network to Social Movement” conference)

What is the role of narrative in mobilizing people? Marshall Ganz of Harvard’s Kennedy School starts with Alexis de Tocqueville and tells how he was so impressed with the rich associational life here in the United States, and how participation in associations drove people into relationships with each other, so they could learn about their common interest. Common interest that was the result of learning about each other, not as an aggregation of individual interest – there was a synergistic quality to association. The promise of democracy is an equality of voices for distribution of resources – and while this does not always happen in practice – it does highlight the importancde of people coming together with common interest so they can act on it, and thus exerting power. It is crucial that associations are voluntary – they participate not because of coercion.

What makes social movements different from fashion and trends? They are different because they are collective and organized.They are efforts of purposive action, of mobilization, of translation power into action. They are not only about winning the game, but also about changing the rules. They are a hopeful response to conditions being intolerable. They make moral claims. Throughout history, they have been major drivers of political reform.

There is no social movement without leadership. Leadership is to accept responsibility to create conditions that will enable others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty. Key here is uncertainty – there is no leadership needed if things are routinized and going their way – leadership is needed when things break down.

There is the idea that social movements are about one charismatic leader that everybody follows. That is far more myth than truth. Leadership does require a critical density. Marshall believes that command and control organizations require less leadership, as opposed to what he calls commitment organizations, where distributive leadership is crucial. Social movements are models of distributive leadership. What they do? They do five tasks: 1) bring people together around shared values; 2) bring people together in the form of relational commitments – people make commitments to each other; 3) it provides structure for collaboration; 4) it provides strategies – to turn power into outcome and 5) there has to be action on the ground.

Social movements exist in the face of injustice, but there is also a requirement for hope, otherwise no action is possible. People just don’t act and make change without hope. They also don’t act without provocation – people often remember the dream part in Martin Luther King’s speech, but forget the nightmare part he talked about. It is when nightmare and dream come together that action happens.

But what has narrative got to do with this? The subject of narrative is agency. The core mission of narrative os to teach us how to exercise agency. Agency is exercising choice in the face of uncertainty. It’s in conditions when we don’t know, when things are unclear, in novel times of challenges – that’s when agency matters, that’s when we can exercise choice, which is both exhilarating and frightening.

Narrative teaches us how we become agents. The exercise of intentionality occurs under certain emotional conditions – we don’t begin to exercise agency until we experience anxiety, when we have to deal with something but we don’t know how. Anxiety causes us to pay attention.

In the context of social movements, urgency and anger are often stand-ins for anxiety. To get attention, to provoke indignation. How we respond is the next question. If we respond in fear, we will withdraw, freeze, strike back, in general we will not have productive responses. On the other hand, if we are in a hopeful state, we will explore, get more information, learn how to deal with this novelty. So it is crucial whether we experience anxiety from a fearful or hopeful state. Whether we experience it from a state or alienation or empathy, from self-doubt or confidence. Emotive conditions are what facilitate intentionality (Marshall makes a reference to George Marcus’ book, the Sentimental Citizen). Narrative does the emotional work to exercise agency. This is especially critical, when conditions of uncertainty are great or when your agency is in question.

Plot, what initiates plot? Not surprising, it is uncertainty. What makes a plot is the unexpected. That’s when we get engaged – the reason why we get engaged is because we as agents, as human beings, the texture of our being is to cope with uncertainty – big or small. A plot recreates this.

The protagonist allows us to emphatically identify – we therefore get emotive affect, so that it is not just conceptual content – but instead we enter the affective reality of the moment, thus we can learn affectively, not just cognitively. Stories teach not just the head, but through the heart. The moral lesson that comes out – is through experience, and it is not just conceptually. We use stories – to make a point – to cause something to happen.

Stories are not true or false, but they work or not. The affective meaning you try to convey occurs in different kinds of settings. In the context of social movements: they are about creating agency where there have been none. Change does not occur without risk or uncertainty.

Public stories: Moses. Moses asked: Why me? Who are these people? Can’t this wait? Really, right now? Marshall compares this to the first 7 minutes of Obama’s speech – explaining why he has been called, where he comes from, choices his parents made that influenced him. He remind what we as a nation are called to and confronts us with challenge of action required now – through a series of small stories – and couples the challenge with hopefulness so people know what to do.

Stories are about reflection on choices one has made in the past. Retrieving these moments so listeners can experience the significance these stories had for you. Going through specific episodes – this is episodic memory rather than semantic memory – and it’s enhanced by visualization, because it raises affective reality. If you are in public life, and you don’t tell your own story, well, see what happened to John Kerry.

The story of us – is about what constitutes collective identity, and is a shared experience. Social movement leaders tell stories of us, and often draw on established stories to do so. Social movements are not simply a set of relations, nor strategies, nor a set of practices or actions, not just structures – they are narratives. They do the work to craft new identity – and are transcending – they are not just about changing the world, but also changing ourselves – what connects the two is narrative.

(cross-posted from lokman.org)

Do you want to know how Wikipedia was able to become such an incredible success? Who the people behind its success are? The best book to learn about the history and the culture of Wikipedia is Andrew Lih’s new book “The Wikipedia Revolution“, launched last week. He was at Harvard last night to give a talk and do an interview with Berkman Fellow and distinguished internet scholar David Weinberger.

Andrew shares with us his story of how he first came across Wikipedia – in many ways, it was a very different experience from most people. On February 9, 2003, Andrew was looking for his next research project – he has been studying online journalism and new media for a long time – and has been instrumental in creating the new media program at the Columbia J-school – he was told that he should take a look at this new site called Wikipedia – this amazing site that “anyone can edit”. Contrary to most people, he heard the principle first, before he saw the actual website. When he took the time to explore the site, he was immediately taken away with it, thinking “the crowd could not have written this” He looked at more pages, started using Wikipedia in class assignments, and became so fascinated with the project that he wanted to study it full-time.

“It works in practice, but not in theory” is often said of Wikipedia. And that’s definitely true if you consider its origin. Wikipedia started out of a project called Nupedia – in many ways this was projected to be a conventional encyclopedia. Started by Bomis, it envisioned a 7 step rigorous peer review – it would recruit volunteers to write its articles – and the hope was that most of these volunteers would have a PhD degree. That is, the original vision of an online encyclopedia was one with very high stringent requirements.

The big problem: after one year, Nupedia had the grand total of twelve (count ‘m) articles. Even worse, they were written by someone on the payroll. This was clearly not sustainable. Larry Sanger decided to intervene – realizing they needed something radical to at least get seed material. He turned to this thing he saw called wiki software – created by Ward Cunningham – wiki was a way for programmers to share best practices – it would be an online resource for programmers. The name came from the wiki wiki bus in Hawaii – meaning ‘quick’. The wiki software indeed produced quick results – as of recent, there are over 2.8 million entries in the English Wikipedia alone. So why does Wikipedia work? Andrew suggests five key factors: it was free – open – neutral – timely and social.

Andrew describes the piranha effect – the idea that one change in one corner can inspire other changes and create a torrent in the community. For example, in one particular week, 33,800 (count ‘m) articles were added in Wikipedia. This was largely from a huge body of census data from the US – a software robot was written to extract relevant information from this data and inject every possible town and city in Wikipedia. One such town was Apex, and it just happened that on one day SethIlys visited this page. It was a dry article – what he decided to do was – hey, why not put a map on there? A few keystrokes later, he had added his own handmade map – and in his own way, was able to contribute his knowledge to the world. Useless perhaps? Perhaps, but if he visited this page, why not someone else as well? This experience was really empowering to him. Once he started with one map, he figured, why not add others? And once he started, it did not make sense to stop – so like Forrest Gump – he kept on running. The strange thing was, others started running, too. Nearly all the US census location articles now have maps.

There’s a famous saying: “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Andrew adds to that: “If there was ever a project that had lots and lots of unhammered nails, it was Wikipedia.” The dot map project was an inspiration – an exemplar – encouraging people to do things they never thought possible. And in many ways, Wikipedia itself is such a project as well – an exemplar.

David starts his interview with Andrew.

David: Let’s get this out of the way first, are you neutral about Wikipedia?

Andrew: No I’m not. I analyze neutrally. But I’m a big fan. I believe Wikipedia is one of the most fascinating creations man has ever made. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve scrutiny.

David: You think it was important enough to write a book about – an endorsement in itself. But let’s go to its origin myth – as all super heroes have one – the myth is often that idealists came together to do this democratic experiment and that the world’s greatest encyclopedia is the result. Is that right, where did it go wrong?

Andrew: Telling Nupedia’s story helps debunk a lot of this. It started as a failure. There was no way anyone knew how to do this. Even though the founders were very internet savvy and big fans of open source, it was not apparent that doing an encyclopedia in that style was the way to go. Only after a full year, did they decide to try it this way.

It’s also interesting that Wikipedia is always cited as an example of democracy, but the community itself never uses that word. It assumes good faith, it likes consensus, but it never ever uses the word democracy. As a matter of fact, a key thing in wiki is NOT to do voting. They discourage voting – they rather decide through discussion, not to rely on hard measures like voting.

David: What’s wrong with hard measures?

Andrew: The problem of gaming the vote without having meaningful discourse. One of the most contentious issue was the Danzig/Gdansk edit war. An edit war is what happens when you don’t converge on a neutral point of view – the result is that there is a constant flipping back and forth between different revisions of one article. This edit war was the catalyst of a lot of policy change – for example, the Three-Revert-Rule. But in this case, after a year of brutal edit war, voting was inevitable – it was a defining edit war in English Wikipedia history.

David: Can you talk about the flatness – that supposedly every voice is equal and there is no hierarchy – and its rules, the anti-rules and emergence of rules?

Andrew: The rule is that you shouldn’t have that many rules – having too many rules, you start to game the rules. There are rules nevertheless – neutral point of view, assume good faith, – the idea that your next contributor could be the most prolific one, so don’t bite the newbie. But these rules are soft ones and established during the early days – the community has changed quite a bit since 2001.Today it is no problem to get people to contribute. The problem is to get rid of bad stuff. The concern: is the community is still as vibrant as the early days?

David: There is an antipathy towards rules – the idea that rules tend to breed bad behavior – yet at the same time it is a warm-hearted community – assume good faith. To what extent is Wikipedia free of a certain political mindset in the structure of Wikipedia as an emergent community?

Andrew: The English Wikipedia, it’s a liberal progressive community, or libertarian. It is reflected in the early roots of Wiki – they met on Objectivist mailing lists. Jimbo (Jimmy Wales) is a straight forward libertarian – common in the geek community. The articles are generally of good quality nevertheless. But if you disagree, you can fork. One such response is Conservapedia.

David: Is it built along the same principles?

Andrew: No, but I wish it were. Articles are often written in direct opposition to Wikipedia articles.

David: Is it open to edit?

Andrew: Hmm, hard to say. More people are in control, they are not as inclusive.

David: What I like is the pragmatism of Wikipedia – a general dislike for rules, but if you need a rule to build an encyclopedia, then it’s fine.

Andrew: There are really five pillars, one of them is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. That might sound silly, but that wasn’t so in 2004. Wikipedia had grown as a community with lots of social aspects – there was a gaming lounge for example where people were playing virtual chess games. We had to shut that down – it was pretty cruel – but we are here to write encyclopedia articles and not to support MySpace activities.

David: It’s also a discussion about which articles are deleted – that Wikipedia is not an art project. It’s an encyclopedia, but sort of different – so the question becomes what an encyclopedia is in a digital age? It’s a sharp edged debate between the deletionists and inclusionists – what side do you fall on?

Andrew: The inclusionists’ argument is that wiki is not paper – why not have articles about anything under the sky? An article on an obscure issue does not take away from your general experience. The deletionists, also called exclusionists, argue that the value of an encyclopedia is that it is a set of articles. It’s no good to have an article where every single word is cross-linked, or that are not reliable – the key test here is – should we have an article on what we had for breakfast?

In the early days, I was considered an exclusionist. I argued that it does matter how selective you are – that articles need to be verifiable, high quality. Over the years, the community standards have shifted, to the point that I don’t think I have changed my stance that much, but where I am now being considered an inclusionist.

Now it is crucial to keep out the bad stuff – Wikipedia is now high profile – and recent policy changes are all about restrictions, restrictions, restrictions. It provides a much more different atmosphere than the early days – now much more stringent.

David: What gets people so passionate about this particular issue?

Andrew: It’s not just within one language – it’s across cultures as well – for example, the German Wikipedia has 900,000 articles – a long way to go before you hit the 2.8 million articles of the English Wikipedia. But the Germans are very happy with their 900,000 articles – they generally have a much more stringent standard. Wikipedia used to be known as the definitive guide to Pokemon – that would not fly in German Wikipedia. That’s their style. The German Wikipedia is more traditional – but also has a great reputation – the German government, libraries, and universities are all interested in working with Wikimedia Deutschland because their quality is so high.

That is to say, the inclusionist/exclusionist argument also varies widely depending on the cultural lens you use.

David: Is it a problem that neutrality happens only if there is enough homogeneity in the community? Or they will have to break off? Does Wikipedia reinforce a prevalent domain of discourse that everybody agrees on? And thus excluding other views?

Andrew: Certainly in some languages – the first twenty languages – the largest languages – are fairly well educated and multilingual – especially contributors for the English Wikipedia span the whole world – and there is diversity of view points. But after the twenty languages – the drop off is bigger – and people are more homogeneous.

David: Isn’t this the case in English Wikipedia as well? That is, neutrality hides a fork – people fork.

Andrew: Yes, but they create meaningless forks, that nobody links to, they fade away.

David: That is exactly the price that it exacts – marginalization of points of view out of mainstream – that they cannot get on the same page – lots of groups accuse Wikipedia of this.

Andrew: Jimbo said once that Neutral Point of View is a term of art – most things that work are not razor sharp. There is a lot of faith in the actual ground troops – that they stay within directive – and that hopefully the diverse community will take this in account and create reliable content.

David: Lets talk about the changing roles of authority. Being a big prof doesn’t matter – its bad form even if you say this.

Andrew: Editorial authority is even more interesting in Japanese Wikipedia – most are anonymous – this is because the dominant internet culture in Japan is based on anonymity. You could be discussing with anyone, a housewife or a prof, what matters is the quality of edits.

David: Let’s talk about Essjay.

Andrew: That was one of the bigger crisis. Essjay was a pseudonym – and on his user page it said that I can’t tell you who I am but I have a PhD in Theology and I work at an academic institution but would get into trouble if I tell you my real name. Was an incredible prolific contributor – over 10,000 edits and everybody generally accepts that they were good quality. He eventually got access to admin privileges – that is, he could check IP addresses of users behind the scenes, and only a dozen people can do that, had access to private data.

What happened was that the New Yorker was doing an article – by Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer award winning reporter – she did an interview with Essjay – wrote a long piece. Then Essjay took a job with Wikia Wikimedia Foundation (EDIT: Andrew corrected me: he took a job with Wikia, the for-profit firm founded by Jimmy Wales and another Wikipedian Angela Beesley) – and to do so, he had to come clean – that he was a 20-year old with no PhD degree. This was a huge embarrassment to the New Yorker – it seemed that Stacy never even asked Essjay’s name just to fact check it.

Some people argue that Essjay lied to a reporter but had good contributions. Others pointed to the fact that he sometimes used his credentials to win arguments. It was a real soul searching for the community – a prized Wikipedian would lie to the outside world, to a Pulitzer award winning reporter, and raised issues with regard to having faith in each other in the community.

David: The increasing use of credentials – or the German system that now allows for the marking, a flagging of pages that are considered reliable – is this a trend that will continue?

Andrew: Germans lead on quality issues – they have a tighter community of admins, who almost act like a council – whereas the admins in the English Wikipedia function more like janitors. So why not have a flagged version – you could flag the last version of an article that is stable – and you show people the latest checked version. You get better quality but you lose that they are instantly updated. The Germans implemented this last year – quite a success – flagged 89% in first year. The English Wikipedia has interest to implement this but it is hard to get the community to reach consensus on anything at all. Right now it’s a total stalemate – it had a surge of initial support but now trickled down.

David: The common complain is that students go to Wikipedia and simply believe what is there. What is it that readers need to do not to be fooled by occasional vandalism? How scared should we be?

Andrew: Wikipedia should be the starting point, but not ending point. It should not be in citations, just like entries from the Britannica should not be cited.

David: How confident should we be when we use it to look things up>

Andrew: The critique that it is dangerous when 14 year olds take it as gospel is not fair. Most people are media savvy. And then there is a whole range of things the community implemented – for example, requiring sources – in 2003, 2004 you never had any article that was tagged ‘citation needed’, now you do everywhere – there is a team called the ‘citation needed patrol’. Standards have improved – but ultimately I think flagged versions should be put in some way – right now it looks like it will be used for entries of living persons – this is for libel reasons. We start there and see what happens.

Audience Questions

Question: Can you discuss failed Wiki projects?

Andrew: The battlefield of failed wikiprojects is vast. Wikitorial from the LA Times was a real disaster. There is an assumption that you put up a Wiki and the Wiki Magic will happen. The LA Times learned the hard way – if you have no robust community with admins that fight vandalism, it’s a recipe for disaster.

What you realize after all this failed projects – wiki is perfectly suited for encyclopedia. It’s like a bento box of writing.
Very structured writing and lends to crowdsourcing. Very modular. This is not true for a novel, for example. Penguin had a contest where they put up a Wiki and expected that the magic wiki crowd would write a novel – did not happen.
Those that do work: lots of sharing, step by step, modular structured style of writing. Certain type of content are like this, but lots don’t. A lot of other organizations learn the hard way.

Question: Why not make people use full names?

Andrew: There is always talk in community – now do we don’t need anonymous people anymore – they give us more problems than they are worth – lets start requiring higher standard. In the beginning – the original culture dominates – Wikipedia tends to be inclusive – anonymous users are the core value of “anyone can edit”.

David: What about pseudonyms?

Andrew: It makes you to be able to converse with this person, it allows interaction, although you don’t know the authenticity. You can still see all the edits. Interestingly, pseudonym users give less information than anonymous users – with anonymous users, an IP address is recorded, and that often provides geographic location, what organization you are part of, etc. The Wikiscanner used this to its advantage – found out that people in Congress, Ogilvy, all kinds of organizations were editing articles they probably should not be editing. It was a typical example of sunshine being the best disinfectant – it was a kind of watchdogging the crowd.

Question: If Wikipedia would have been run by company, would it have been different?

Andrew: If Wikipedia was a commercial company, no way it could have been successful – people contribute because it is a free license – same like with Linux – people know it wasn’t making a company rich. Example is the Spanish fork – in the early days, there were some rumours about the possibility of advertisements – the Spanish community went ballistic on the mention of ads – they literally took the ball and went home – started Encyclopedia Libre – convinced all contributors to leave. This incident set the tone for the community since then.

Question: Is the bulk of content made by a small number of people?

Andrew: The idea behind the 80/20 rule is that 80% is done by 20% of the people. But this is not necessarily true for Wikipedia – Aaron Swartz’s research shows that there is a wide swath of people that edit Wikipedia. While the distribution is still non-linear, it’s just not the case that there is an elite crowd who edits over hundred hours a week.

David: Aaron’s work shows that the creation of new articles, the bulk of it is done by a broad range of users – which makes intuitive sense.

Andrew: As far as where the community is now, we don’t have good numbers. Since October 2006, there is no authoritative dump of Wikipedia anymore – it takes more than a month to do a monthly dump. This leaves Wikipedia vulnerable – and you also can no longer do statistical analysis.

David: We should each download one page!

Question: Can you talk about Larry Sanger?

Andrew: Sanger has an odd role – he did set up most of the basic rules of Wikipedia – but over time also encouraged Wikipedia to be more elitist over time – and some started seeing him as a pariah, as the anti-Wikipedian. Citizendium is supposed to be Wikipedia done right – with a layer of expertise but still largely open. His main criterion seems to be maintainability. He thinks a lot of what is going on in Wikipedia is just bs – trying to turn vandals into productive members – he is saying, cut that out, work with experts who can cut through the junk. We’ll see what history will say about that.

(Question about the vote on license migration – got lost in the details)

David: Wikipedia experienced exponential growth – but what got us there may not be the right set of tools to move ahead.

Andrew: That’s why flagged is inevitable – not to grow further, but to maintain quality.

Question: How did the power structure evolve?

Andrew: The number of privileged positions have grown but tend to be technical rather than editorial oversight. As an admin – you can block users – but only in narrow situations. You can lock articles – but only temporary – for combating vandalism. Promotion is community decision, there are no hard metrics. Things considered include the number of edits, activities you engage in, social capital – these are all intentionally left vague – the decision is made on an interaction human human basis – it’s not like there is an eBay rating or Amazon ranking.

Question: Why are there different forks and how do they exist – is there a possibility to have one global Wikipedia instead of all these divides?

Andrew: You’re right that it is too easy to see the 2.8 million English entries as the super set from which other Wikipedia languages should be translated from. This set is missing lots of things on Chinese arts, history – things the Chinese Wikipedia has. But the problem is, you need bilingual folks, tools to discover which article is good in one language and has a bad counterpart in another ..

Question: Will the WikiMedia foundation do this?

Andrew: They are a great engine to raise funds.

In attempting to build a vibrant community-of-interest, every political blog faces a policy choice of sorts: what kind of commentary will we allow.  Some of the basics are easy to sketch out and universally applicable.  Disagreement is good, but flame wars are bad.  Don’t engage in ad hominem attacks. The site owner/moderators reserve the right to take away posting privileges if you are obviously just there to antagonize the community.  The low transaction costs of the internet make it very easy for a hostile liberal or conservative to jump onto the comment boards of their ideological opponents and start acting obnoxious.  Whether this ideological diversity is supported when polite is an open question.  There aren’t a lot of Republicans on DailyKos or Democrats on RedState, but that could either be because they get banned or because they eventually get bored and give up.

A trickier policy choice can perhaps be summarized as “how do we deal with our own crazies.”  On either end of the political spectrum, there exist a tiny minority of tinfoil hat-wearers.  The most radical offline leftists set fire to auto dealerships and ski resorts.  The most radical offline conservatives start militias and shoot up churches.  Online, how are we to distinguish them, and what are we to do about them?

Conveniently, online crazies tend to grab hold of a popular conspiracy theory and not let go.  On the left, these are the “9/11 Truthers” and, post-2004, the “Ohio Fixed Election” folks.  On the right, we have the “Obama birth certificate” fanatics.

I raise this because I’ve started to think recently that Markos Moulitsas made a particularly important policy decision in the early days of DailyKos.  Wanna see how fast you can banned from DailyKos?  Post a 9/11 conspiracy diary.  Same with the 2004 election conspiracy theory.  Kos took a hard line on this talk and said that it would have no place on his site.  You want to help build a progressive majority?  Welcome to dKos.  You want to talk about statistically variations between exit polls and final results, or the spookiness of Diebold?  Banned.

The conservative blogosphere is currently experiencing a surge in traffic, as online conservatives have something more to complain about than all the liberals on tv (this supports a deeper theoretical argument about “political opportunity structures” and innovative campaign technologies, but I don’t want to give away the ENTIRE dissertation on this blog…).  From what I can tell, they haven’t drawn the same policy stance (I haven’t conducted a large-scale content analysis yet, so feel free to correct me in the comments).  Want to claim that Obama is a foreign-born Manchurian candidate?  Welcome!  Gateway Pundit, in particular, has soared up the conservative rankings in the past few months, all while exhibiting a type of borderline hysteria that cannot be too attractive to mainstream conservatives (you may not like Obama’s tax proposal, but that doesn’t make him Mao or Stalin).

My hunch is that this policy choice serves as sort of a path dependent critical juncture in the development of online political communities.  When a new visitor drops by the site, what is the tenor of the conversation like?  DailyKos has made a series of policy choices in support of their goal of being a “reality-based community.”  Whether you like them or not, the tenor of the conversation bears little resemblance to the caricature presented by Bill O’Reilley, and a reasonable argument for why dKos has gotten so large is because Kos chose to lop off the most extreme-left commenters, making the tenor of the conversation better reflect the preferences and opinions of the much larger population of less-extreme, but less outspoken, progressives.  Which conservative community blogs will take a similar policy stance, and how will it play out in the development of online conservativism?  Anybody have a good guess or two?