A selection of photo's of the wikiwars event in Bangalore can be viewed at this page.

Wednesday, Januari 13, Sunil Abraham posted an article on livemint.com about wikiwars.

Wiki’s worth, on a different turf
"An Indian duo--a programmer and a mathematician--has developed a tool to expose anonymous writers and cleanse Wikipedia of rogue editors."
Sunil Abraham

Read more: livemint.com

Playcast made a podcast about wikiwars. In the interview they speak to Nishant Shah about the position of Wikipedia in India and what happens when different knowledge production systems are coming together. The original website with the podcast can be found by clicking on this link.

Playcast: Waging wikiwars, tech behind golf balls and tweeple

"This week we talk to Nishant Shah of the Centre for Internet Research about the organisations “Wikiwars” event, we look at the complex technology that goes into making a golf ball and return with another three beautiful tweeple."
Sidin Vadukut and Krish Raghav.

"Today we start by talking to the organisers of the “Wikiwars”conference currently underway in Bangalore. The conference aims to look at the various philosophical and academic ramifications that Wikipedia has had in terms of how knowledge is generated, and how the Internet can be used to deal with issues of language, accessibility and communication. We speak to Nishant Shah of the Centre for Internet Research for more details.
We then take a look at the tech behind a golf ball, following a discussion with CallawayGolf Company CEO George Fellows. And in the final segment of the show, Sidin Vadukut returns with another three “twindividuals” to follow on Twitter."

Source: livemint.com
Wed, Jan 13 2010

THIS TEXT IS WRITTEN BY HEATHER FORD.

The panel ‘Wikipedia and the Place of Resistance’ introduced some fascinating arguments about why people either leave Wikipedia (a perspective from US Internet Analyst, William Buetler) or why they’re not interested in Wikipedia (Yi-Ping Tsou about why Taiwan does not like Wikipedia) – and some thoughts on the re-appropriation of Wikipedia from Eric Ilya Lee, also from Taiwan.

William Buetler

William Buetler began the session by talking about the recent WallStreet Journal article about how editors were leaving Wikipedia in droves. He said that the Wikimedia Foundation had countered that when one looks at people who have made more than one edit this was, in fact, only a small drop-off, but that it was important to look at who edits Wikipedia and why they join in order to start to understand why people leave the project.
Buetler outlined some reasons why people join Wikipedia. ‘Some like to cause mischief,’ he said. ‘Others join because they want to assert their authority, and still others because they want to assist in developing the sum of all human knowledge’. ‘Wikipedia is so widely used but so little understood,’ he said as he revisited statistics that suggest that 50% of all edits on Wikipedia are done by 0.7% of editors (524 people) while 73% of all edits performed by 2% of all editors (1,400 people).
‘Wikipedia is complicated,’ said Beutler. ‘There are approximately 50 policies, 150+ site guidelines, and more advisory essays that are often treated as enforceable.’ Buetler suggested that editing Wikipedia is stressful and that, although some have left a ‘retired’ (or even suicide) note on their user page, most people who leave Wikipedia do so without a trace and without saying why they leave.

Eric Ilya Lee

Eric Ilya Lee introduced the next topic with some insight into the ‘failures’ of Chinese Wikipedia. He said that Chinese Wikipedia has a high barrier to entry with a ‘lack of content, bureaucratic ignorance and user unfriendly administrators’.
He told the story of resistance by an early Taiwanese Wikipedian user who wanted to fork a version of Wikipedia but who encountered difficulties with characters since only ISO 639-1/2 was available for use on Mediawiki. ‘They bought holopedia.org,’ said Lee, ‘Installed Mediawiki, but then couldn't update and couldn't connect to other language version of Wikipedia.’ Eventually they decided to use Peh-oe-j.POJ. After applying for Wikipedia in 2004, they were accepted as a new language version but faced a battle on multiple fronts.
‘There are problems of digitizing before standardizing, and of using an independent language rather than Chinese,’ he said, ending on a positive
note:  ‘We used to think that the local language is a bad way to talk about scientific information but now we're using it on Wikipedia.’

Zona Yi-Ping Tsou

Zona Yi-Ping Tsou’s analysis of ‘why Taiwan does not like Wikipedia’ outlined some reasons common to other countries (for example, the reluctance by academics to Wikipedia) but also introduced some fascinating glimpses into how Taiwanese is unique in its appropriation of Wikipedia.
‘There is a gap between the users and contributors. Wikipedia is the 21st most visited website in Taiwan - but there are not many edits.’ Tsou said that the new generation in Taiwan is disobedient, defiant, politically apathetic with a lack of national identity. She said, ‘When growing up, we were only taught mainland (Chinese) history and geography. We called ourselves "Chinese". Now everything is different. Our national identity is contested.’
Tsou talked about a number of groups – including those who use a version of the swastika as their national identity – who are contesting Wikipedia. She noted that there is resistance on a number of fronts as Taiwanese struggle to make meaning within the Wikipedia community.
The panel was, all in all, a glimpse into the ways in which a society’s struggles are mirrored in fascinating ways on Wikipedia, how the global, the regional and the local collide in fascinating arrangements, and how little we know about why such projects succeed or fail in different parts of the world. I’m left with more questions than answers. And that, I guess, is the point.

THIS TEXT IS WRITTEN BY STUART GEIGER.

Eric Zimmerman: Wikipedia and the Current Research Information System

Zimmerman spoke about trusting Wikipedia, asking if anonymity could ever lead to trust. He pointed out that there was a key difference between information and knowledge, and asked which one Wikipedia was facilitating. As an academic and a father, he claimed that he was deeply concerned that his students and children may be over-relying on Wikipedia, which may not provide a good learning environment.
In an age in which anyone can become an author, Zimmerman asked if we as a society are better off or ‘dummied down’ by the entire Web 2.0 movement. He argued that we may have lost our sense of personal identity in such environments. By making it ‘too fast and too easy’ to collaborate, Wikipedia was contributing to this phenomenon, which he felt was damaging to young people.
In order to solve this problem, Zimmerman proposed that Wikipedia should name its contributors. However, he went beyond efforts like Citizendium and suggested that Wikipedia use the existing Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) platform. CRIS is an identification system used by scientists in Europe which he called the ‘metadata of science.’ Each contributor to Wikipedia would have to obtain such credentials, and edits would be clearly marked with one’s personal identity.

Johanna Niesyto: Wikipedia as Translingual Space

Niesyto began by invoking the widespread visions of wiki-cosmopolitianism, showing how many members believe that Wikipedia is a global project and that the Wikimedia Foundation is a global community. However, she quickly critiqued this position by showing that this is a very Western idea and that many efforts at wiki-globalization carry with them Western biases. For example, the ‘List of articles every Wikipedia should have’ was notoriously skewed towards Anglophone topics.
However, Niesyto found that the issue was more complicated, as Wikipedians recognized this bias and tried to fix it. As one editor claimed, ‘we can edit each other’s biases out’ of the list, collectively coming to a global consensus on the issue. This view exists in other spaces, such as the Foundation’s strategic planning wiki where there is a proposal for a ‘unipedia’ that will universalize Wikipedia. Because of this, Niesyto argued that Wikipedia as a global project must be analyzed as a translingual space, focusing on the ways in which different languages and cultures negotiate common understandings.
In order to do this, she interviewed 16 users who contributed to the English, German, and French Wikipedias – and others, as most the interviewees were active on more than one language. These editors had many different roles, but they were mainly established, highly-active users. When Niesyto asked about collaboration between different language versions of Wikipedia, editors pointed to two main spaces: Wikimedia Commons, the shared media repository that all wiki projects use, and interwiki links. However, as interwiki links are predominantly created and maintained by bots, she claimed that this complicates the matter quite a bit.
Another core finding was the growing belief among editors that Wikipedia is becoming a battleground where the entire world is coming to fight. As Niesyto claimed, complicated issues of the global community versus cultural autonomy arise in such situations, and she analyzed this as a conflict between the scientific and the pluralistic point of view.

Stian Haklev: Equitable Governance in Multilingual Wikipedia. Haklev began his presentation speaking rapidly in Chinese. To much applause, he said that this is how non-English speakers feel all the time. He framed this in terms of global, wiki-wide governance - decisions that affect all Wikipedias. Meta is intended to be the multilingual point of discussion for all languages, but Haklev quickly showed that this was a façade. Most pages just link to English articles, and to discuss anything – on Meta, on the Strategy wiki, or on Foundation-l – you need to know English.
However, Haklev asked a critical question: should Wikipedia and the Foundation aim to be truly multilingual? This is a pragmatic vs. idealist approach: in the ‘United Nations’ view, every language should get everything translated. However, he noted that we are UN, and we don’t have those resources. This is why there is no perfect solution - but he urged us to be creative.
With this in mind, he noted that there are two kinds of non-native English speakers: people who don’t speak the language at all, and those who speak some but need support. For those who need support, it would be helpful to have a visual map or diagram of governance processes in different wikis. There are a lot of automated and semi-automated tools that could also help with translation. However, he claimed that people drown in excess information, and skimming can be difficult. At conferences, Haklev suggested that live summaries (on Twitter or IRC) would help quite a bit.
For those who don’t speak English at all, he remarked that the traditional solution, translation, is very demanding. What about reducing the amount of text that needs to be translated, or even reducing the number of supported languages? Can everyone who speaks Swedish also speak Norwegian, for example, making translation to both these languages redundant?

Han Teng Liao: Map of Interlanguage Links

Liao presented on how keywords are governed. He claimed that Wikipedia is a special case because it dominates search results of corresponding keywords. This means that when one article on one language of Wikipedia rises in popularity, others rise as well. He contrasted this to the famous ‘Jew watch’ incident on Google, in which an anti-Semetic organization was able to get their website to the top of the results for the search “jew” – but only in the English-language version of Google.
He noted that search was a symbiotic phenomenon: search needs content, and content needs to be searched. This leads to what Liao termed a ‘keyword economy’, and in such an environment, both demand language capacity building from the other. As the ‘jew watch’ incident shows, he claimed that we think a lot about hyperlinks and backlins, but we don’t realize that language plays a huge role in ranking.
Search engines bring linguistic order to the web: as is necessary, certain content is pushed away from the user. He noted that it was more helpful to think about this in terms of reach instead of inclusion/exclusion. This is an efficient mediation that allows users to access a vast amount of web content. Liao then showed a striking example of two different Google Suggest queries, both for the term “communist party”, but one from simplified Chinese and the other from traditional. As the choice between simplified and traditional reflects a deep social and political divide, the results were quite different.

Whereas for many Wikipedia is part of the Web 2.0 wave, it is different in that it is a non-profit organization that is funded through grants and donations. In that sense we not say that contributors are exploited for the sake of the (short term) interests venture capitalists and shareholders. In this case the ideology of 'free' and 'open' plays out in a different way.

Linda Gross
The Bielefeld-based German researcher Linda Gross gave a formal PhD presentation--and apologized for this. Her topic is open and openness in the case of Wikipedia. First of all she made a distinction between open at a technological level and the rhetoric. Openness is a problem which is solved by the production of structures. Using methods such as interpretive ethnography and objective hermeneutics (as developed by Uwe Overmann), Gross will look into the ideology of openness that is followed by a practice of closure. She signaled a tendency towards single authorship.

Heather Ford
Next speaker was Heather Ford from South Africa, now based at UC Berkeley. Heather has 8 years of experience in FLOSS, CC and iCommons and speaks from experience. She recently decided to leave the field and reassess her involvement in the movement by doing a masters and a PhD. Heather experienced first hand how the deal between Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) and Creative Commons (Lawrence Lessig) was made. Apart from the deal-making behind the scene, leaving out the community, Heather started to question the use of rights-related licenses such as CC in the first place. What CC does is leave the system of copyright in tact (while claiming to be otherwise). Heather asked whether CC is the right strategy for governing the ownership and distribution of Wikipedia. The uneven distribution of CC started to bother her. Heather: "We have a choice here. The issue of licenses is really important. CC is a political artifact." The sharing among some, while restricting others is the core of the problem. Law and lawyers are introduced through the backdoor whereas Wikipedia could easily do without them. CC uses law to maintain the system of copyright. What the Wikimedia Foundation should do is to redistribute resources worldwide, but Heather is sceptic about this. Nearly all financial resources remain within the USA. By adopting CC the WF is reinforcing copyright law, and reinforcing the powers of powerful, expensive US lawyers, a service which in many countries is not available. By introducing CC the Wikimedia Foundation is bounded to remain a US centric initiative (while traffic and growth of communities are happening elsewhere).

Nate Tkacz
Co-editor of CPOV Nate Tkacz from Melbourne presented his research on the implementation of open politics in this session. For his PhD Nate is studying open projects, and Wikipedia is certainly the biggest and most successful of them. Crucial is the recent history of the 'open' was the move from free software to open source in 1998. After that it was Open Everything. Nate made references from Rushkoff, Lessig and Hardt/Negri to Obama's Open Government initiative. Instead he proposes a negation of openness. In order to formulate a critique of 'free' and 'open' Nate went back Karl Popper's Magnus Opus The Open Society and it Enemies (published in 1945), a work that seeks to find the sources of 20th century totalitarian regimes and their ideologies in the work of Western philosophers such as Plato, Hegel and Marx. Their historicism in which people get subjected to the larger forces of History is seen as a closed system. The force that works against this totalizing tendency is openness. The open is seen here as a negative, relational concept. By and large Popper's work is a critique and lack any positive, more detailed definition of what openness is all about. The fact of the re-mergence of the term 'open' since the late 1980s confirms the poverty of the concept to start with.

Elad Wieder
Unfortunately there were no notes of Elad Wieder's speech, an Israeli lawyer and Creative Commons activis who spoke about communities vs. markets.

Thursday, January14, the newspaper DNA City of India published the article: 'What lies beyond for the different Wikimedia?'  about the Wikiwars event in Bangalore, wich was held 12 and 13 of Januari.



What lies beyond for the different Wikimedia?

The two-day Wikiwars, an event that saw prominent Wiki experts gather in the city from around the world to dwell on Wiki as a medium, came to an end on Wednesday. The event was organised by the Bangalore-based Centre for Information and Society (CIS), in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.
Delegates from 14 countries participated. The outcome of the meeting is expected to be published in the form of a text titled, Critical Point of View. Geert Lovink from the Institute of Networks Cultures said, "We thought an international initiative with opinions from people across the globe would be a good idea. We also wanted to organise this debate outside the Wikimedia framework. The discussions, we thought, should centre on Wiki as a medium rather than be confined to Wikipedia," Lovink said.
Eric Zimmerman, a delegate from Israel, spoke about the current research information system. "In educational institutions, Wiki is generally looked down upon as a source of information. It lacks credibility because of its anonymity. If all the material is linked to a centralised database and in turn linked back to the Wiki, the problem of credibility could be dealt with," Zimmerman says.
Zimmerman's was one of thirty presentations made over the last two days. Other subjects explored included 'The Wisdom of Bots: A Critique of Self-organisation in Wikipedia' by Stuart Geiger of Georgetown University, Washington, 'Wikipedia: a Social Semiotic Perspective' by Dipti Kulkarni of the department of humanities and social sciences, IIT Delhi, and 'Beyond the English web: The Cross-lingual Wikis' by Anas Taweieh from the Internet Society, Israel. The sole presentation from the city was made by Noopur Rawal and Srikiet Tadepalli, on 'Problems of Authenticity in Experimental Information on the English Wikipedia'.

Link to the original page:
DNA City

Day one of WikiWars begins with brief opening addresses from Nishant Shah and Geert Lovink.

Shung-Ling Chen

The first panel titled Wiki Theory begins with Shun-Ling Chen from the Harvard Law School.  Shun-Ling is interested in comparing Wikipedia with the historical 'republic of science' and begins by looking at the 19th century OED. She draws broadly from Michel Callon's notion of translation to investigate different models of knowledge, noting some of the difference between Wikipedia and other commercial models. Continuing with a loosely actor-network-theory approach, Chen looks at the 'boundary work' of Wikipedia, of how Wikipedia defines and produces itself in relation to external forces and controversies, and then moves to posit the emergence of new actors in the Wikipedia knowledge network. Of particular interest is her discussion of the 'vigilant reader', who steps in for other traditional modes of authority and perhaps trust. Such actors are central to the success of Wikipedia.

Stuart Geiger

The uptake of concepts from ANT took full flight in Stuart Geiger's presentation, The Wisdom of Bots. Geiger's presentation is more faithful to the ontological politics of ANT/STS scholarship and its call for a parliament of things. The purpose of Geiger's presentation, however, was less a plea for such a parliament and more a pure mapping of the techno-mediated condition of knowledge production. The focus, as the title suggested, was the role of Bots in the organisation of Wikipedia. Despite the common perception that Wikipedia fights of nasty contributers (vandals) via hoards of committed users, Geiger points out that the vast majority of vandals are held off by these Bots. Geiger provides a useful taxonomy of different Bots and their respective duties. In the background of this paper is a playful critique of the popular web 2.0 notion, the 'wisdom of crowds' and a subtle gesture to the techno-mediated political condition of Wikipedia.

Beatriz Martins

Up next is Beatriz Martins, with an interest in authorship and authority. After a brief historical and theoretical discussion of the author, Beatriz asks what kind of author manifests in digital networks and looks to other historical modes of authorship for continuities. Her conclusions point to notions already popular in web 2.0-style cultural studies - interaction, collaboration, unfinished - without drawing on these theorists directly.

Dipti Kulkarni

The final presentation is a linguistic/semiotic analysis of select articles in Wikipedia by Dipti Kulkarni. Dipti analyses how the style and structure of knowledge statements work to create the impression of objectivity. Among other things, Dipti notes the lack of deictic words, first or second person pronouns, perceptive or private verbs, as well as the minimal occurance of hedge words (may, might, could etc.). All of these stylistic components work to remove the interpersonal component of language. Most interesting here is that contributors adopt this style automatically, as an effect of the genre.

THIS TEXT IS WRITTEN BY LINDA GROSS

Usha Raman

Usha Raman's talk „Definitive references and disruptive locations? The wikipedia as a school teaching-learning ressource“ discussed the potential of Wikipedia as a learning resource for both teachers and students. While the internet is entering classrooms it challenges traditional learning processes by introducing a discontinuity in exisiting modes of learning. So Usha is interested in how web-based resources may shape and change existing contexts, conceptions and processes of learning. She claims that WP gives both teachers and students the opportunity to learn about learning: First, with the appropriation of WP in classrooms processes of learning are negotiated. Second, WP allows teachers to gain insight in meaningmaking and uses of information resources. And hence provides an environment for students to develop critical, collaborative and creative literacies.

Nupoor Rawal & Srikiet Tadepalli

Nupoor Rawal's and Srikiet Tadepalli's talk on „Problems of authenticity in experiential information on the English Wikipedia“ took off with the popular experiment of TV host Stephen Colbert introducing the concept of 'wikiality' (which is worth watching) and adressed the question wether Wikipedia has to produce and represent truth and unified knowledge. Both argue against a prejudiced, static critique on WP, rather processes of knowledge production and the dynamics of this new environment, hence how users shape this space, should be taken into account. Therefore Wikipedia is not to be conceived as a static, complete product but as „an active, organic site of resistance“, as Nupoor stated. Srikiet, who himself is an admin in Englisch Wikipedia, gives insight into some phenomena of organic self-organisation. He claimed a.o. that Wikipedia itself is able to react on criticism through the development of policies and strategies. He also stated that in Wikipedia the wisdom of the masses is nothing else than the wisdom of the expert. Hence expertise and authority play an important role in the collaborative production of arcticles. Furthermore the paradox of NPOV was discussed and the question was raised how to encompass notions of neutrality.

The following discussion covered several issues, amongst them the question of scepsis and resistance to Wikipedia which seems to be caused due to Wikipedia challenging and threatening the existing order of knowledge. It was a clear consensus that determinist point of views and critique on wikipedia has to give way to a differentiated focus on user's appropriation of the technology in different contexts. The question about best practice experience remained to be unanswered due to very little experiences in Indian classrooms. Furthermore a proposal was made for creating space in Wikipedia for the discussion and exchange of experiences on implementing Wikipedia as a learning resource in classrooms.