According to a Dec 11 New York Times article, Daniel Brandt, a book indexer who runs the site Wikipedia Watch, helped to flush out the man who posted the false biography of USA Today and Freedom Forum founder John Seigenthaler on Wikipedia. After Brandt discovered the post issued from a small delivery company in Nashville, the man in question — 38-year-old Brian Chase — sent a letter of apology to Seigenthaler and resigned from his job as operations manager at the company.
According to the Times, Chase claims that he didn’t realize that Wikipedia was used as a serious research tool: he posted the information to shock a co-worker who was familiar with the Seigenthaler family. Seigenthaler, who complained in a USA Today editorial last week about the protections afforded to the “volunteer vandals” who post anonymously in cyberspace, told the New York Times that he would not seek damages from Chase.
Responding to the fallout from Seigenthaler’s USA Today editorial, Wikipedia founder James Wales changed Wikipedia’s policies so that posters now must all be registered with Wikipedia. But, as Brandt shows, it’s takes work to remain anonymous in cyberspace. Though I’m not sure that I beleive Chase’s professed astonishment that anyone would take his post seriously (why else would it shock his co-worker?), it seems clear that he didn’t think what he was doing so outrageous that he ought to make a serious effort to hide his tracks.
Meanwhile, Wales has become somewhat irked by Seignthaler’s continuing attacks on Wikipedia. Posting to the threaded discussion of the issue on the mailing list of the Association for Internet Researchers, Wikipedia’s founder expressed exasperation about Seigenthaler’s telling the Associated Press this morning that “Wikipedia is inviting [more regulation of the internet] by its allowing irresponsible vandals to write anything they want about anybody.” Wales wrote:
*sigh* Facts about our policies on vandalism are not hard to come by. A statement like Seigenthaler’s, a statement that is egregiously false, would not last long at all at Wikipedia.
For the record, it is just absurd to say that Wikipedia allows “irresponsible vandals to write anything they want about anybody.”
–Jimbo
Author Archives: lisa lynch
where we’ve been, where we’re going
This past week at if:book we’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between this weblog and the work we do. We decided that while if:book has done a fine job reflecting and provoking the conversations we have at the Institute, we wanted to make sure that it also seems as coherent to our readers as it does to us. With that in mind, we’ve decided to begin posting a weekly roundup of our blog posts, in which we synthesize (as much a possible) what we’ve been thinking and talking about from Monday to Friday.
So here goes. This week we spent a lot of time reflecting on simulation and virtuality. In part, this reflection grew out of our collective reading of a Tom Zengotita’s book Mediated, which discusses (among other things) the link between alienation from the “real” through digital mediation and increased solipsism. Bob seemed especially interested in the dialectic relationship between, on one hand, the opportunity for access afforded by ever-more sophisticated form of simulation, and, on the other, the sense that something must be lost when as the encounter with the “real” recedes entirely.
This, in turn, led to further conversation about what we might think of as the “loss of the real” in the transition from books on paper to books on a computer screen. On one hand, there seems to be a tremendous amount of anxiety that Google Book Search might somehow make actual books irrelevant and thus destroy reading and writing practices linked to the bound book. On the other hand, one could take the position of Cory Doctorow that books as objects are overrated, and challenge the idea that a book needs to be digitally embodied to be “real.”
As the debate over Google Book Search continually reminds us, one of the most challenging things in sifting through discussions of emerging media forms is learning to tell the difference between nostalgia and useful critical insight. Often the two are hopelessly intertwined; in this week’s debates about Wikipedia, for example, discussion of how to make the open-source encyclopedia more useful was often tempered by the suggestion that encyclopedias of the past were always be superior to Wikipedia, an assertion easily challenged by a quick browse through some old encyclopedias.
Finally, I want to mention that we finally got around to setting up a del.icio.us account. There will be a formal link on the blog up soon, but you can take a look now. It will expand quickly.
tipping point?
An article by Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger C. Schonfeld in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed claims that over the past year, libraries have accelerated the transition towards purchasing only electronic journals, leaving many publishers of print journals scrambling to make the transition to an online format:
Faced with resource constraints, librarians have been required to make hard choices, electing not to purchase the print version but only to license electronic access to many journals — a step more easily made in light of growing faculty acceptance of the electronic format. Consequently, especially in the sciences, but increasingly even in the humanities, library demand for print has begun to fall. As demand for print journals continues to decline and economies of scale of print collections are lost, there is likely to be a tipping point at which continued collecting of print no longer makes sense and libraries begin to rely only upon journals that are available electronically.
According to Fenton and Schonfeld, this imminent “tipping point” will be a good thing for larger publishing houses which have already begun to embrace an electronic-only format, but smaller nonprofit publishers might “suffer dramatically” if they don’t have the means to convert to an electronic format in time. If they fail, and no one is positioned to help them, “the alternative may be the replacement of many of these journals with blogs, repositories, or other less formal distribution models.”
Fenton and Schonfeld’s point that electronic distribution might substantially change the format of some smaller journals echoes other expressions of concern about the rise of “informal” academic journals and repositories, mainly voiced by scientists who worry about the decline of peer review. Most notably, the Royal Society of London issued a statement on Nov. 24 warning that peer-reviewed scientific journals were threatened by the rise of “open access journals, archives and repositories.”
According to the Royal Society, the main problem in the sciences is that government and nonprofit funding organizations are pressing researchers to publish in open-access journals, in order to “stop commercial publishers from making profits from the publication of research that has been funded from the public purse.” While this is a noble principle, the Society argued, it undermines the foundations of peer review and compels scientists to publish in formats that might be unsustainable:
The worst-case scenario is that funders could force a rapid change in practice, which encourages the introduction of new journals, archives and repositories that cannot be sustained in the long term, but which simultaneously forces the closure of existing peer-reviewed journals that have a long-track record for gradually evolving in response to the needs of the research community over the past 340 years. That would be disastrous for the research community.
There’s more than a whiff of resistance to change in the Royal Society’s citing of 340 years of precedent; more to the point however, their position statement downplays the depth of the fundamental opposition between the open access movement in science and traditional journals. As Roger Chartier notes in a recent issue of Critical Inquiry, “Two different logics are at issue here: the logic of free communication, which is associated with the ideal of the Enlightenment that upheld at the sharing of knowledge, and the logic of publishing based on the notion of author’s rights and commercial gain.”
As we’ve discussed previously on if:book. the fate of peer review in electronic age is an open question: as long as peer review is tied to the logic of publishing, its fate will be determined at least as much by the still evolving market for electronic distribution as by the needs of the various research communities which have traditionally valued it as a method of assessment.
interview with cory doctorow in openbusiness
There’s an interview with Cory Doctorow in Openbusiness this morning. Doctorow, who distributes his books for free on the internet, envisions a future in which writers see free electronic distibution as a valuable component of their writing and publishing process. This means, in turn, that writers and publishers need to realize that ebooks and paper books have distinct differences:
Ebooks need to embrace their nature. The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an ebook’s distinctive value propositions — that is, the more you restrict a reader’s ability to copy, transport or transform an ebook — the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes.
On first read, I thought that Doctorow, much like Julia Keller in her Nov. 27 Chicago Tribune article, wanted to have it both ways: he acknowledges that, in some ways, ebooks challenge the idea of the paper books, but he also suggests that the paper book will remain unaffected by these challenges. But then I read more of Doctorow’s ideas about writing, and realized that, for Doctorow, the malleability of the digital format only draws attention to the fact that books are not always as “congealed” as their material nature suggests:
I take the view that the book is a “practice” — a collection of social and economic and artistic activities — and not an “object.” Viewing the book as a “practice” instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a book?
I like this idea of the book as practice, though I don’t think it’s an idea that would, or could, be embraced by all writers. It’s interesting to ponder the ways in which some writers are much more invested in the “thingness” of books than others — usually, I find myself thinking about the kinds of readers who tend to be more invested in the idea of books as objects.
more on wikipedia
As summarized by a Dec. 5 article in CNET, last week was a tough one for Wikipedia — on Wednesday, a USA today editorial by John Seigenthaler called Wikipedia “irresponsible” for not catching significant mistakes in his biography, and Thursday, the Wikipedia community got up in arms after discovering that former MTV VJ and longtime podcaster Adam Curry had edited out references to other podcasters in an article about the medium.
In response to the hullabaloo, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales now plans to bar anonymous users from creating new articles. The change, which went into effect today, could possibly prevent a repeat of the Seigenthaler debacle; now that Wikipedia would have a record of who posted what, presumably people might be less likely to post potentially libelous material. According to Wales, almost all users who post to Wikipedia are already registered users, so this won’t represent a major change to Wikipedia in practice. Whether or not this is the beginning of a series of changes to Wikipedia that push it away from its “hive mind” origins remains to be seen.
I’ve been surprised at the amount of Wikipedia-bashing that’s occurred over the past few days. In a historical moment when there’s so much distortion of “official” information, there’s something peculiar about this sudden outrage over the unreliability of an open-source information system. Mostly, the conversation seems to have shifted how people think about Wikipedia. Once an information resource developed by and for “us,” it’s now an unreliable threat to the idea of truth imposed on us by an unholy alliance between “volunteer vandals” (Seigenthaler’s phrase) and the outlaw Jimmy Wales. This shift is exemplified by the post that begins a discussion of Wikipedia that took place over the past several days on the Association of Internet Researchers list serve. The scholar who posted suggested that researchers boycott Wikipedia and prohibit their students from using the site as well until Wikipedia develops “an appropriate way to monitor contributions.” In response, another poster noted that rather than boycotting Wikipedia, it might be better to monitor for the site — or better still, write for it.
Another comment worthy of consideration from that same discussion: in a post to the same AOIR listserve, Paul Jones notes that in the 1960s World Book Encyclopedia, RCA employees wrote the entry on television — scarcely mentioning television pioneer Philo Farnsworth, longtime nemesis of RCA. “Wikipedia’s failing are part of a public debate,” Jones writes, “Such was not the case with World Book to my knowledge.” In this regard, the flak over Wikipedia might be considered a good thing: at least it gives those concerned with the construction of facts the opportunity to debate with the issue. I’m just not sure that making Wikipedia the enemy contributes that much to the debate.
the role of note taking in the information age
An article by Ann Blair in a recent issue of Critical Inquiry (vol 31 no 1) discusses the changing conceptions of the function of note-taking from about the sixth century to the present, and ends with a speculation on the way that textual searches (such as Google Book Search) might change practices of note-taking in the twenty-first century. Blair argues that “one of the most significant shifts in the history of note taking” occured in the beginning of the twentieth century, when the use of notes as memorization aids gave way to the use of notes as a aid to replace the memorization of too-abundant information. With the advent of the net, she notes:
Today we delegate to sources that we consider authoritative the extraction of information on all but a few carefully specialized areas in which we cultivate direct experience and original research. New technologies increasingly enable us to delegate more tasks of remembering to the computer, in that shifting division of labor between human and thing. We have thus mechanized many research tasks. It is possible that further changes would affect even the existence of note taking. At a theoretical extreme, for example, if every text one wanted were constantly available for searching anew, perhaps the note itself, the selection made for later reuse, might play a less prominent role.
The result of this externalization, Blair notes, is that we come to think of long-term memory as something that is stored elsewhere, in “media outside the mind.” At the same time, she writes, “notes must be rememorated or absorbed in the short-term memory at least enough to be intelligently integrated into an argument; judgment can only be applied to experiences that are present to the mind.”
Blair’s article doesn’t say that this bifurcation between short-term and long-term memory is a problem: she simply observes it as a phenomenon. But there’s a resonance between Blair’s article and Naomi Baron’s recent Los Angeles Times piece on Google Book Search: both point to the fact that what we commonly have defined as scholarly reflection has increasingly become more and more a process of database management. Baron seems to see reflection and database management as being in tension, though I’m not completely convinced by her argument. Blair, less apocalyptic than Baron, nonetheless gives me something to ponder. What happens to us if (or when) all of our efforts to make the contents of our extrasomatic memory “present to our mind” happen without the mediation of notes? Blair’s piece focuses on the epistemology rather than the phenomenology of note taking — still, she leads me to wonder what happens if the mediating function of the note is lost, when the triangular relation between book, scholar and note becomes a relation between database and user.
killing the written word?
A November 28 Los Angeles Times editorial by American University linguistics professor Naomi Barron adds another element to the debate over Google Print [now called Google Book Search, though Baron does not use this name]: Baron claims that her students are already clamoring for the abridged, extracted texts and have begun to feel that book-reading is passe. She writes:
Much as automobiles discourage walking, with undeniable consequences for our health and girth, textual snippets-on-demand threaten our need for the larger works from which they are extracted… In an attempt to coax students to search inside real books rather than relying exclusively on the Web for sources, many professors require references to printed works alongside URLs. Now that those “real” full-length publications are increasingly available and searchable online, the distinction between tangible and virtual is evaporating…. Although [the debate over Google Print] is important for the law and the economy, it masks a challenge that some of us find even more troubling: Will effortless random access erode our collective respect for writing as a logical, linear process? Such respect matters because it undergirds modern education, which is premised on thought, evidence and analysis rather than memorization and dogma. Reading successive pages and chapters teaches us how to follow a sustained line of reasoning.
As someone who’s struggled to get students to go to the library while writing their papers, I think Baron’s making a very important and immediate pedagogical point: what will professors do after Google Book Search allows their students to access bits of “real books” online? Will we simply establish a policy of not allowing the online excerpted material to “count” in our tally of student’s assorted research materials?
On the other hand, I can see the benefits of having a student use Google Book Search in their attempt to compile an annotated bibliography for a research project, as long as they were then required to look at a version of the longer text (whether on or off-line). I’m not positive that “random effortless access” needs to be diametrically opposed to instilling the practice of sustained reading. Instead, I think we’ve got a major educational challenge on our hands whose exact dimensions won’t be clear until Google Book Search finally gets going.
Also: thanks to UVM English Professor Richard Parent for posting this article on his blog, which has some interesting ruminations on the future of the book.
open rights group
Becky Hogge writes in Opendemocracy about a new digital rights organization, The Open Rights Group, based in Westminster, Brussels and Geneva. Like the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States, the Open Rights Group will address issues such as access, freedom of speech online, and file sharing. Unlike the EFF — which was initially bankrolled by a small group of beleivers — the Open Rights Group was started by a group of 1,000 subscribers who will each pay five pounds a month to get the organization going.
katrina archive on internet archive
The Internet Archive has just established an archive dedicated to preserving the online response to the Katrina catastrophe. According to the Archive:
The Internet Archive and many individual contributors worked together to put together a comprehensive list of websites to create a historical record of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and the massive relief effort which followed. This collection has over 25 million unique pages, all text searchable, from over 1500 sites. The web archive commenced on September 4th.
If you try to link to the Internet Archive today, you might not get through, because everyone is on the site talking about the Grateful Dead’s decision to allow free downloading
freedom forum founder wants less freedom online
For just over four months, a biography of Freedom Forum Founder John Seigenthaler that appeared on Wikipedia, Biography.com, and Answers.com claimed — incorrectly — that he was once a suspect in the assasination of both John and Robert Kennedy. Last month, Seigenthaler found out about it, and he got angry. Very angry.
In fact, he got angry enough to write a November 29 editorial in USA Today complaining about Federal laws that protect online corporations like Wikiepedia from libel lawsuits and protect the anonymity of the person who published false information about him online.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s certainly a serious problem that Seigenthaler’s biography contained false information (I haven’t been able to determine yet whether the assassination rumor is an artifact of the vast Kennedy conspiracy rumor mill, or whether it was a pure invention of the phony biographer — anyone know?). And the flaws in Wikipedia are a real issue. But I’m still astonished that one of the nation’s great free speech advocates seems to be advocating systemic changes to legislation that protects not only prank speech, but political speech online.
Is it that Seigenthaler feels (but does not say) that there is a fundamental difference between print media and online? Or is this a case of someone knowing Seigenthaler’s Achille’s heel, and publishing the one rumor about him that would cause him to seemingly contradict his basic principles?