The Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge was a challenge launched in November 2009 by Google. The task was to translate English Wikipedia articles into Kiswahili or to write Wikipedia articles from scratch. Participants received prizes such as laptops, mobile phones, prepaid internet access modems, Google T-shirts. Google stated goal: “We hope to make the online experience richer and more relevant for 100 million African users who speak Kiswahili.”

The results might not be that great. The Wikipedia Signpost of 2010-07-26 quotes from the blog post what happened on the Google Challenge @ the Swahili Wikipedia:

Nearly all of them are gone now and left a lot of articles which often are not really state of the art formally and also linguistically … they don’t care because they were there for laptops and other prizes (no need to be rude, but it hurts me pretty bad).

An article in New York Times is similarly not exalted. The last paragraphs of the article comments on Google-generated content in Wikipedias in languages of India.

However, the surge in content created by Google’s project to improve these sites still needs work, according some local site administrators. For example the Wikipedia in Tamil – one of the underrepresented South Asian languages – the entries covered “too many American pop stars and Hindi movies, which Tamils may not need as a priority.” There was also sloppiness in language and coding.

Despite these concerns, Tamil Wikipedia plans on working with Google to continue the additions. The Bengali Wikipedia, however, took greater umbrage and simply deleted the Google-generated content. The Bengali Wikipedians explained that the material simply did not meet their standards.

The Health Speaks Wikipedia pilot project was announced yesterday and is focused on increasing the quantity and quality of online health information in languages spoken in developing countries. They started a pilot project to support community-based, crowd-sourced translation of health information from English Wikipedias into Arabic, Hindi and Swahili Wikipedias.
They have chosen hundreds of good quality English language health articles from Wikipedia that they hope will be translated with the assistance of Google Translator Toolkit, made locally relevant, reviewed and then published to the corresponding local language Wikipedia site. They have also funded the professional translation of a small subset of these articles. And they are additionally providing a donation incentive to encourage community translators to participate. For the first 60 days, they will donate 3 cents (US) for each English word translated to the Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357, the Public Health Foundation of India and the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) for the pilots in Arabic, Hindi and Swahili, respectively, up to $50,000 each. This means that community translators will help their friends and neighbors access quality health information in a local language, while also supporting a local non-profit organization working in health or health education.

As dating interactions have moved from the privacy of bars and social gatherings to the digital world of websites and e-mails, they are generating an unprecedented trove of data about how the initial phases of romance unfold. Most research is done on OkCupid, that now publishes a blog, OKTrends, that delves into its database of more than 1 million users to analyze their interactions.

Some findings reported in the article:

Men get more responses from women if they don’t smile in their profile pictures, and women find most men below average in attractiveness — but write to them anyway.

A man needs to make several extra tens of thousands of dollars to compensate for being an inch shorter, and that race matters more than people admit.

The company found that while men rate women’s attractiveness in an even curve — most women being average — two-thirds of men’s messages go to the best-looking third of the women. Women, on the other hand, are more harsh on men, rating the majority as below average, but are more likely than men to send messages to people they don’t find attractive.

In their online profiles, for instance, all users add an average of two inches to their height and a 20 percent raise in salary.

The data debunk some dating myths. In analyzing 7,000 user photos, the company found that women get more male attention when they flirt into the camera or smile, while men, surprisingly, did better when they looked away from the camera and didn’t smile. Even more surprising, not showing their face in their photos didn’t affect the number of messages users received.

Putting bottles in the bin becomes a game …

Walking on the stairs … and play piano…

Throw rubbish in the bin and … so deeeep?

The essay is released under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License, so, just because I can, I copy and paste the original HTML after the jump (and most links are of course broken). Enjoy!

Contents

Anarchy

Wikimedia pages can be edited collaboratively by anyone, including IP users, with no hidden strings attached. Rarely, they can be lost over time (see below) but if our policies (e.g. policies of the English wiki) are followed, it is possible for anyone to become a respected editor.

Respected editors also respect the anarchic “accept all comers” approach to this collaborative endeavour. Newcomers are a valued resource.

Similarly, our guidelines and policies, based in tradition are evolving through collaborative editing and the search for consensus and compromises. Besides the talk pages of the respective policy pages, the meta wiki and mailing lists are used to discuss these matters. The mailing lists once carried more active discussion than they do presently.

The smaller national language Wikipedias have less structure due to their smaller sphere of contributors.

Precedent

As a practical matter, most Wikimedia policy is a matter of tradition. Certain foundation issues are considered, for practical purposes, beyond discussion. Other matters are currently handled according to tradition despite an overall consensus that the status quo is not ideal (c.f. en:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and en:Wikipedia:Requests for adminship).

To understand this aspect of the Wikimedia power structure, realize that many, perhaps most, contributors consider it impractical to revisit difficult issues as consensus seems unlikely to them. As in other organizations, change most often comes when it must rather than when it should.

However, one is not compelled to follow this point of view, indeed one should probably work against it in a constructive way, for instance by making alternative proposals.

Bureaucracy

Over time, as the project has grown, a complex collection of policies, procedures, user groups, and conventions has grown up to assist in its organisation and improvement. Theoretically these are mostly transparent, informal, and neutral, but in practice they give an advantage to those who understand them. New or less frequent users may simply be overwhelmed by requests to adhere to the Manual of Style, use the correct categories and templates, or understand the complexities of deletion policy.

Deliberately using greater understanding of the processes to further your own agenda is actively discouraged. Moreover, wherever possible new editors should be encouraged to be bold and get involved, and more experienced users should actively help them through the complexities of the system. See “Please do not bite the newcomers“.

Despotism

User:Jimbo Wales used to be the “Benevolent dictator” but has turned over control to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees. He originally paid for all of Wikipedia’s operations with no financial return whatsoever, and retained a veto right on all decisions. He also sometimes unilaterally announced certain decisions, such as user bans, and has elevated some guidelines to the status of enforced policies. Other than holding certain foundation issues in high regard, his active participation in the power structure was increasingly limited.

Jimbo at one time was involved in nearly all proposed bans of a signed-in user. After the ban of EntmootsOfTrolls in November 2003, Jimbo issued few new bans, instead relying on the en:Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee to approve bans. Users whose edit history is solely vandalism can be blocked by any administrator. So too can any “reincarnation” of a previously banned/blocked user, though in many cases it is impossible to prove that a user is a reincarnation to the satisfaction of the community without the use of the CheckUser tool.

Wales largely left non-English Wikipedias to get on with it, due to language difficulties. This suggests that his influence was actually more symbolic than effective. Others acted under his authority and general rule statements.

Democracy

Not all conflicts can be resolved through consensus, and in many cases, simple votes are organized using only the wikipages as a tool. Virtually all existing voting methods have been tried and used, and no standard has been agreed upon yet.

In March 2003, with Wales’ approval, User:Eloquence organized the first official project-wide vote on a Wikipedia policy, on the subject of which articles to include in the Wikipedia total article count (see Article count reform). The voting method used was average voting. The result was accepted, and more official votes on contentious subjects may follow.

Basically, whenever you feel like it, you can try to start a vote on a talk page, but people will probably not participate in it if they think discussion has not yet been exhausted as a way to resolve conflicts of opinion. In general Wikimedia follows a deliberative democracy model, where nothing is in a hurry… it could evolve towards consensus democracy if Wikipedians chose to do so.

While Jimbo remains skeptical of voting, he has suggested that he is more willing to accept votes on the non-English Wikipedias, where he is less able to oversee the decision making process. It is most likely for original structures to emerge in such areas.

Republic

Some Wikipedias, such as the English, French, Dutch and Swedish Wikipedias, have a class of administrators (formerly “sysops”). For information on the specific powers and guidelines for administrators, see:

• Meta administrators
• administrators of German Wikipedia
• administrators of English Wikipedia
• administrators of French Wikipedia
• administrators of Japanese Wikipedia
• administrators of Dutch Wikipedia
• administrators of Swedish Wikipedia
• administrators of Polish Wikipedia
• administrators of Italian Wikipedia
• administrators of Spanish Wikipedia

See also Administrators of Wikimedia projects/Wikipedias for other languages.

Though each language has a different culture, generally administrator actions are limited and controlled by “the people at large”: most administrators see themselves as servants of the community, not masters (see also Administrators on your wiki). For example, page deletions are transparently logged at (for example) Wikipedia’s log. The nomination process for administrators also differs among the various languages.

While administrators are not technically elected, they are representatives of the larger group of Wikimedia users. Their power is strictly limited, and abuse results in the removal of administrator powers from the abuser (though in practice this is rare).

Administrators’ power chiefly derives from the latitude in interpreting rules and consensus. For example, administrators may determine at their discretion when a page qualifies for deletion, either under “speedy deletion” guidelines or as a result of a !vote. Deletions are rarely overturned by other sysops except in high-profile cases or where it is clear a mistake was made. In like fashion, page protection guidelines are vague, and administrators as a rule do not overrule each others’ decisions on page protection.

Meritocracy

Wikimedia is very much a meritocracy. Quality is the abiding goal of Wikimedia, and so those contributors who provide the best quality work are most likely to see their contributions come to influence specific articles. They are less likely to be edited and corrected by other users as they gather respect and influence within the community or sub-community of topic area. Wikipedia articles are explicitly stated to have no author, but users only have to check page history to see who has provided the most positive influence in the development of an article. The needs of personal ego can thus be subtly met.

If meritocracy is understood as a community where merits can be accumulated in a power status that afterwards is rendered untouchable whatever the quality of further contributions (or deletions), then Wikimedia is not a meritocracy: the quality of every separate contribution is, in this respect, considered in its own right, and for example, “votes for deletion” take little or no account of the persons that contributed to the questioned content, neither does any wikipedian’s vote have more or less weight according to “merit” in such case.

Plutocracy

“Those who pay the bills make the rules” is a common adage. It is hardly true on Wikipedias, and whether it is becoming on such a project as Wikipedia, considering the nature of the effort, could be debated, but the openness of Wikipedias allows anyone with enough financial resources to fund extensive development in a specific area or work on a specific range of topics. This work could then be used in discussions as leverage to implement certain policies — generally, people who contribute a lot are less questioned because they enjoy the respect of the community.

Certainly this is the weakest element in the Wikimedia power structure, but it will grow in importance now that the Wikimedia Foundation has begun to take donations — when money is explicitly involved, the influence of those who have it tends to increase. See the Disinfopedia for some analysis of the impact of money on opinion in the larger world.

See User:Qq/Voting power is not allocated by donations.

Technocracy

Underlying all of the above is a technocracy. Some people have power to develop and change code. Others have the power to change article histories and discover the IP addresses of logged-in users. And underlying all that, someone — the Wikimedia Foundation, though Bomis occasionally lends servers — owns the hardware. Sometimes a Wikipedia Vicious Cycle with strong elements of technological escalation, use of bots, many accounts, access to server logs, etc., takes over, and it is resolved ultimately by “who has the technological power.”

As an electronic community, Wikimedia depends to a high extent on the software it uses. This software is developed as open source by volunteer developers. New developers have to submit patches to the existing coders and, if their patches are of high quality, ultimately get write access to the code and can make their own changes. (The write access is somewhat less open than on the wiki itself, because the software should remain functional at any given time.) Very highly involved developers may get access to the Wikipedia servers, giving them even greater technical power over the project. The controlling process at work, at least theoretically, is that those developers with the greatest ability (and motivation) should have the highest access level in the system.

This is viewed by some as a form of militarism, with whoever has the best technological “weapons” able to cut off input from others. This may be better at Wikipedia than on most “web sites”, but, it’s far from an equal-power relationship. After all, it is a very rare phenomenon to elect developers, sysops, or server admins, although it happens from time to time.

The problem with this, of course, is that it favours technical over other kinds of knowledge - say, moral or ecological knowledge. Those capable of hacking code are not necessarily those most capable of improving the list of ecology topics or list of ethics topics. Wikipedia has suffered very much from technocratic biases in the past, and over-covers views of that sort.

Developers at present play a less prominent and more specialised (if no less influential) role in decision-making than was once the case. Most developer effort has been directed towards capacity issues and other operational matters, including startup of the dozens of related projects in a plethora of languages, and the implementation of feature requests and developments.

Over the long term, the quality of a given Wikipedia article will do a random walk around the highest level of quality permitted by the most persistent and aggressive people who follow an article.

Larry Sanger is co-founder of Wikipedia but left years ago. You can read the hyper-interesting account of his involvement with Wikipedia in “The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir” (part 1, part 2).

The style is funny, amazingly refreshening and awesomely young, as you can see in the video of the presentation.
Below you can find the embedded video and some tidbits from his presentation extracted by me.

Main message:
Last decade was the decade of social. This next decade is the decade of games. We use game dynamics to build on it. We build with mindshare. We can influence behavior. It is very powerful. It is very exciting. Let’s all build it together, let’s do it well and have fun playing.

The game layer on top of the world is already under construction. But it’s filled with lots of different things that, in short, aren’t that fun.
There are credit card schemes and airline mile programs and coupon cards and all these loyalty schemes that actually do use game dynamics and actually are building the game layer, they just suck.

So the presentation is about four really important game dynamics, really interesting things, that, if you use consciously, you can use to influence behavior, both for good, for bad, for in-between. Hopefully for good.

For each dynamic, Seth gives 3 examples
a) one that shows how this is already being used in the real world,
b) one that shows it in what we consider a conventional game — I think everything is a game, this is sort of more of a what you would think is a game played on a board or on a computer screen,
c) one how this can be used for good, so we can see that these forces can really be very powerful.

1) Appointment dynamic: in which to succeed, players have to do something at a predefined time, generally at a predefined place.
1.a) Happy hour: come here at a certain time, beer is half price. To win, all you have to do is show up at the right place at the right time.
1.b) Farmville (a game inside facebook): has more active users than Twitter. You have to return at a certain time to water your crops — fake crops — or they wilt. And this is so powerful that, when they tweak their stats, when they say your crops wilt after eight hours, or after six hours, or after 24 hours, it changes the life-cycle of 70 million-some people during the day. They will return like clockwork at different times. So if they wanted the world to end, if they wanted productivity to stop, they could make this a 30-minute cycle, and no one could do anything else. (Laughter) That’s a little scary.
1.c) GlowCaps: but this could also be used for good. This is a local company called Vitality, and they’ve created a product to help people take their medicine on time. That’s an appointment. It’s something that people don’t do very well. And they have these GlowCaps which, you know, flash and email you and do all sorts of cool things to remind you to take your medicine. This is one that isn’t a game yet, but really should be. You should get points for doing this on time. You should lose points for not doing this on time. They should consciously recognize that they’ve built an appointment dynamic and leverage the games. And then you can really achieve good in some interesting ways.

2) Influence and status: the ability of one player to modify the behaviour of another’s action through social pressure.
2.a) Credit card: everybody wants the black American Express Card!
2.b) Levels in games: people work very hard to level up. For example, in World of Warcraft, the average most dedicated player spends 6 and a half hours per day! It’s like a full time job! Status is really good motivator.
2.c) School: is a game, it’s just not a terribly well-designed game. There are levels. There are C. There are B. There is A. There are statuses. Why can’t you level up in school as you do in World of Warcraft?

3) Progression dynamic: success is granularity displayed and measured through the process of completing itemized tasks
3.1) Linkedin: in many sites, for example on Linkedin, there is a bar showing how many activities (such as filling a certain profile field) you have to do before reaching 100%. If not completed, I am an un-whole individual. I am only 85 percent complete on LinkedIn, and that bothers me. And this is so deep-seated in our psyche that, when we’re presented with a progress bar and presented with easy, granular steps to take to try and complete that progress bar, we will do it. We will find a way to move that blue line. all the way to the right edge of the screen.
3.b) Online games: they use it as well, for example World of Warcraft.
3.c) SCVNGR: they use games to drive traffic and drive business to local businesses. They go places, they do challenges, they earn points. And we’ve introduced a progression dynamic into it, where, by going to the same place over and over, by doing doing challenges, by engaging with the business, you move a green bar from the left edge of the screen to the right edge of the screen, and you eventually unlock rewards. And this is powerful enough that we can see that it hooks people into these dynamics, pulls them back to the same local businesses, creates huge loyalty, creates engagement, and is able to drive meaningful revenue and fun and engagement to businesses. These progression dynamics are powerful and can be used in the real world.
I just installed SCVNGR on my iPhone and starting to use it.

4) Communal discovery: a dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to achieve something, to solve a challenge. It leverages the network that is society to solve problems.
4.1) Digg: is a communal dynamic to try to find and source the most interesting stories. Seth talks about it was a game, and the leaderboard which became a sort of cabal and was eventually shut down.
4.2) The game Monopoly
4.3) Final example is the DARPA ballon challenge: how do you mobilize people to collectively find 8 balloons flying over the entire USA territory? Well, MIT guys did it, in just 12 hours (!) leveraging on a simple wen site, simple social dynamics and incentives for social netwokr propagation!

The main message (again):
Last decade was the decade of social. This next decade is the decade of games. We use game dynamics to build on it. We build with mindshare. We can influence behavior. It is very powerful. It is very exciting. Let’s all build it together, let’s do it well and have fun playing.

(just as a note, Seth Priebatsch’s company (SCVNGR) is followed on twitter by the verified account of BarackObama. This is quite amazing and I don’t think the policy of twitteresque Obama is to reciprocate every “follow” since he has 717,027 following and 5,016,427 followers. Anyway beside this small point, I suggest you to check out the video and to think about “which incentives do you put in your site/platform for people? Could you exploit motivations at the base of games?”)

A random sample of 370 Wikipedians were emailed a request to participate in a Web-based survey.
A total of 151 valid responses were received (40.8% response rate), of which 140 (92.7%) were from males (first “gosh”!).
The respondents’ mean age was 30.9, and on average they have been contributing content to Wikipedia 2.3 years.
The average level of contribution was 8.27 hours per week.

The Wikipedians were asked to state how strongly they agree or disagree on a scale of 1 to 7 with items.
Items were related to 8 different types of motivations: Protective, Values, Career, Social, Understanding, Enhancement (typical measures about volunteering motivations) and Fun, Ideology (added by authors since relevant for Wikipedia).

Overall, the top motivations were found to be Fun and Ideology. Agreement with Fun was in average 6.10 (in the range 1 to 7!). Ideology was 5.59. The other motivations were inferior to 4.

Each of the six motivations positively correlated with contribution level.

The Ideology case is particularly interesting (…): while people state that ideology is high on their list of reasons to contribute, being more ideologically motivated does not translate into increased contribution.

It would make sense for organizers of user-generated content outlets to focus marketing, recruitment, and retention efforts by highlighting the fun aspects of contributing.
Credit for image: nojhan released under Creative Commons

This paper presents a model of editors who have successfully passed the peer review process to become admins. The lightweight model is based on behavioral metadata and comments, and does not require any page text. It demonstrates that the Wikipedia community has shifted in the last two years to prioritizing policymaking and organization experience over simple article-level coordination, and mere edit count does not lead to adminship.

In short, authors compute lots of stats for every single user and then they do regression with the binary variable “election successful, i.e. X became admin”. They separate Request for Adminship pre-2006 and after-2006.

If you want to read the details, you can read the PDF of the paper.
Credit: Picture by inju released under Creative Commons.

The main ideological dichotomy is between Inclusionists and Deletionists. Inclusionists favor keeping and amending problematic articles over deleting them, Deletionists favor removing articles that are not encyclopedic. Currently there are 1123 self-declared Inclusionists and 261 Deletionists.
As it is typical of Wikipedia, fun enters the stage and a new philosophy emerges AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD, acronym for “Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn’t Mean They Are Deletionists”. Currently this the 3rd most frequest philosophy with 434 adherents, denoting how Wikipedians likes to have fun ;)
And in fact the 6th most frequent philosophy is WikiGnome (makes useful incremental edits without clamouring for attention, works behind the scenes of a wiki, tying up little loose ends and making things run more smoothly, fixing things like typos, poor grammar, and broken links) but there are also 265 WikiFairies (beautifies Wikipedia by organizing messy articles, improving style, or adding color and graphics).

Myself, I think I’m a Darwikinist or maybe not … ;)

Below the complete table and the same pie but in 3D.
Well, there’s a lot of Philosophy(ies) in Wikipedia! ;)

Slide 42
• Wikitravel: only 5% of those who press “edit” actually save
• Wikipedia: 1/5 to 2/5
• WikiHow: 30% with guided editing
• Wikia: WYSIWYG editor >> 50%
Sources: Jack Herrick, WikiHow; Erik Zachte, Wikimedia Foundation

Slide 91:
An experiment by The Guardian on crowdsourcing journalism.
The Guardian obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.
How do you catch up? If you’re the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack.
Your cost for the operation? One full week from a software developer, a few days’ help from others in his department, and £50 to rent temporary servers.

Would be interesting to automatically check the differences in how different communities (in this case defined by the language) represent the same concepts.
For example the beginning of the article from the Vietnamese wikipedia (automatically translated) says: In Vietnam, newspapers still use the name of resistance against American for just this war, [9] as well as to distinguish it from other wars that happened in Vietnam when anti- French , anti- Japanese , anti- Mongolia , against China. Some people [10] feels not name the U.S. invasions of neutrality by the war also reflects elements of a civil war; [10] that some other name for the Vietnam War reflected the views of West rather than the people living in Vietnam. [10] The name of this war is still a matter of controversy. But now scholars in and outside Vietnam have gradually accepted the name “Vietnam War” because of its international nature.

Some people are using the hashtag #sunbelt on Twitter, you might enjoy posts tagged as #sunbelt as made visible by visibletweets (iframed below)

Last point, I’m at Sunbelt with my colleagues in the SoNet group, Michela Ferron and Asta Zelenkauskaite. Tomorrow we will present two recent works: one about
social networks in Wikipedia, the other about social capital and enterprise2.0 platform usage.

Now back to finish the slides …