Category Archives: Wikis

Blogsafer.org: A Wiki For Bloggers Under Fire

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I’ve been working for a year or so as a technical adviser for the Committee to Protect Bloggers, a group that raises awareness of people around the world facing state repression for the contents of their blogs. The Committee is on hiatus right now due to insufficient funding, but the director Curt Hopkins has also been working on an Anonymous Blogging campaign funded by a group called Spirit of America. I was hired by that campaign to put up a wiki containing 5 guides on blogging anonymously at Blogsafer.org.

The idea is that as wiki documents, the guides should be tended to by a community of interest, evolving over time to reflect changing conditions. And for all you wiki doubters out there, no – there is not overwhelming concern about said repressive governments editing the wiki to include bad advice and making people easier to identify. All previous versions of the documents are viewable in the archives and readers are prompted to not take any one page on face value without looking at change history, previous versions, etc.

From the press release:

Spirit of America has launched the BlogSafer wiki, available at http://www.blogsafer.org. BlogSafer contains a series of guides on how to blog under difficult conditions in countries that discourage free speech.

LOS ANGELES, California – January 7, 2006 – Spirit of America’s BlogSafer wiki hosts a series of targeted guides to anonymous blogging, each of which outline steps a blogger in a repressive regime can take, and tools to use, to avoid identification and arrest. These range from common sense actions such as not providing identifying details on a blog to the technical, such as the use of proxy servers.

“A repressive regime trying to still free speech first goes after and shuts down independent print and broadcast media,” said Curt Hopkins, project director of Spirit of America’s Anonymous Blogging Campaign. “Once that is done, it turns its attentions to online news sites. As these outlets disappear, dissent migrates to blogs, which are increasing geometrically in number and are simple to set up and operate.”

In past several years at least 30 people have been arrested, many of whom have been tortured, for criticizing their governments. This trend is likely to increase in the coming year.

The five guides that are currently on the wiki serve bloggers in the following countries:

* Iran (in Persian)
* China (Chinese)
* Saudi Arabia (in Arabic—also useful for other Arabic-speaking regimes such as Bahrain, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia)
* Malaysia (in English—also applicable to neighboring Indonesia and Singapore)
* Zimbabwe (in English—applicable to English-speaking Africans as well as aid workers)

These countries were chosen because they are representative of the kinds of repressive tactics that have been used in the past several years against bloggers. These include filtering, interrogation, torture and imprisonment.

I thought readers here might find this of interest. Big thanks to David at PBWiki for all his help with the project.

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Wow! Wikipedia=Edit This World

So Wikipedia has faced a lot of criticism lately (most of which is silly in my opinion as it presumes that readers ignore the page history in wikis) but continues to prove its worth in many ways.

But the point of this point is to reference a discussion going on elsewhere.

This is a long story to summarize, but I’m going to try:

Kick-ass anti-sexist technologist and blogger Shelley Powers was discussing with Rogers Cadenhead the fact that Wikipedia includes many biographical entries on male bloggers and other technologists, but far fewer women. (“Ladies, Wikipedia is Ours“)

In response, Cadenhead does something really cool (the original inspiration for this post, to be honest) and posts a biographical entry of Susan Mernit, super-technologist, member of the inspirational consulting firm 5iveMedia Group. You can see Mernit’s blog here.

Meanwhile Powers also requested in her original post that someone create a Wikipedia entry for her. Sure enough, Shelley Powers on Wikipedia got a “vote to delete” in a hurry. Within 2 fast days there was so much discussion (overwhelmingly supportive of her inclusion) that the “vote to delete page” on her entry was frozen and archived. That one’s for posterity, you’d better believe. Some people (very few) said Powers’ entry wasn’t of legitimate encyclopedic interest. But she, amongst other things, contributed to a book called Essential Blogging 3 years ago. And she’s still going nuts, blogging about a lot of things both technical and political at Burning Bird.

My take-aways:

  • Wikipedia is media that you can change, and if social justice is important to you – you can change it in ways that still meet the requirement of Neutral Point of View.
  • There’s not enough biographical entries about women in Wikipedia. Anyone can write more.
  • I’m going to make sure I’m subscribed to the feeds of all 3 of the bloggers discussed above.
  • I’m going to tag several of the pages above WebJustice2.0. (Check out that tagstream. Items submitted are slow and subscribers to the feed are way down this month. Is the idea not going to fly?)

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Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britanica

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New study in Nature magazine evaluates 42 science entries in both sources, checks for errors.

“Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia … but reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica respectively.”

Best comment from Digg coverage of this article: “What I want to know is after they found the errors in wikipedia, did they bother to fix them?”

Related: Best way to search Wikipedia – Wikiwax.com.

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Less E-Mail, More Wiki, Says Business Week

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The very cool wiki company SocialText was just highlighted in a Business Week article on the decline of email and the ascendancy of wikis for internal organizational communication.

What is a wiki? My short explanation is that a wiki is a web site that any authorized visitor can edit, where all previous versions are saved for easy retrieval, creation of new pages is as simple as giving them a name, and users can receive an automatic notification whenever any page of interest has been changed by anyone. Wikis are great for planning, collaborative document development, knowledge bank creation, etc. They hold great potential for knowledge management.

(Aside: one of my favorite pitches that never got made was to create a wiki for the local University Ethnic Studies department, so that succeeding generations of students and staff could have a depository of cross cultural information that maximized knowledge retention and collaboration. Doesn’t that sound like a cool idea? I wish I could find the time to talk to someone about it.)

Here’s a few highlights from SocialText’s coverage of Business Week’s article Email is So 5 Minutes Ago: It’s being replaced by software that promotes real-time collaboration

  • Legitimate e-mail will drop to 8% this year, down from 12% last year, according to Redwood City (Calif.) e-mail filtering outfit Postini Inc.
  • Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.
  • At Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half

  • So far, companies have invested 95% of their spending in business processes, according to Social Life of Information author and former Xerox Corp. (XRX ) Palo Alto Research Center director John Seely Brown. A scant 5% has gone toward supporting ways to mine a corporation’s human capital. That’s why fans say the beyond-e-mail workplace will become a key competitive advantage. In the global race for innovation, it’s not as much about leveraging what’s inside your factories’ machines as what’s in your employees’ heads.

Wikis are not always easy to start using, however. Especially non-technical users have some real psychological barriers to overcome before they buy in substantially to this radically different model for communication and collaboration. It is amazing how much email has staked a claim on our minds and habits! But the benefits really are incredible, and with a good wiki mentor helping new users take advantage of the tool – a wiki really can work very well.

That said, many of the same claims could be regarding other Web 2.0 technologies as well. The above article is good for showing mainstream validation of the tool, but only scrapes the surface of the real benefits of wikis in particular.

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Wiki Resources Galore!

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If you are unfamiliar with what a wiki is, I explain it like this: it’s a web site that anyone can edit, where all previous versions of every page are viewable, and where users can recieve automatic notification whenever a page of interest changes. Wikis are used for collaborative knowlege and document development. The best introduction is Wikipedia, the biggest wiki in the world. If you visit that site, make sure you click on the tabs at the top of each article and give a good look around.

There’s a fantastic looking conference underway yesterday through tomorrow in San Diego, called WikiSym 2005, the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis. The online resources available alone are terrific. The workshop page for the Wiki Spam session alone looks worth a look. I’ll be looking over this site as much as I can before I facilitate a discussion about wikis at a TechSoup online event later this month (Oct 24-28).

I found out about WikiSym via the blog of Ross Mayfield, wiki-guy extraordinaire and head of the wiki heavy-weight company SocialText. Ross is a charming guy and is providing some good, live coverage of the conference.

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