StigmergicWeb

Stephen commented on Quentin D’Souza’s post regarding building a wiki community (originally from Danny Horn of Muppet Wiki).

Wikipedia, he says, is not just a larger wiki with a larger contributor base than a small wiki with a group of 50 contributors (such as Muppet Wiki). Wikipedia can control content by having a large base of contributors/editors (about 43 000 according to Danny). Having such a large pool of eyeballs to keep watch on the content can spot and erase vandalism quite quickly. How can a smaller wiki prevent vandalism and spamming?

A small wiki is different from a big wiki, not just in amount of content or number of contributors. The relationship between the contributors is also different. The contributors of Wikipedia probably don’t know much about each other - 43 000 is way way bigger than Dunbar’s number. In a smaller wiki, contributors have the chance to know of all the other contributors. Muppet Wiki has a policy (community value?) that contributing members must have a user name. Enforcing a user name might seem contrary to the wiki way, but it serves its purpose within a small wiki:

The User Name policy helps to weed out vandals and creeps — and it also helps to build communication and trust. Having a stable identity makes communication possible. Contributors with user names build a record of contributions, and a reputation. If the community as a whole knows that a particular contributor is trustworthy, then that can influence how conflicts get resolved. You need a stable identity to earn people’s trust. Allowing people to sign in with a random string of numbers breaks down the community’s sense of trust and common goals. You can’t build a strong team of trustworthy colleagues that also includes shadowy, faceless strangers.

One word that keeps appearing in that description is trust. Rick Schwier has done some research on online communities, and one of his findings is that the most important element by far in an online community is trust. Trust is the glue that holds any community together. It is especially important in online communities because it is the key form of social capital. Trust is what Muppet Wiki has that Wikipedia does not, at least not in the same degree.

In something the scale of Wikipedia where there are thousands of contributors, the degree of trust between contributors is going to be limited. It may be an effective model for managing a large corpus of content, but it cannot be truly described as a community. Muppet Wiki is much smaller. There is trust between the contributors. Membership is limited so that those whose behaviour is contrary to the policy of the wiki will not be allowed to join the group. Muppet Wiki is a true community. In a smaller wiki, the quality of the content is maintained not by the overwhelming numbers of contributors. It is maintained by the trust that contributors - the members of the community - have for the community goal (information about Muppets - I can definitely respect that as being a worthy goal) and for each other.

Today was the day that I drank the Twitter kool-aid. I have moved from Stage 2 to Stage 6 (at least) in Doc Levine’s description of the epidemiology of Twitterosis.

I spent (most of) my day attending the TLt 2007 conference in Saskatoon, which is about a 90 minute drive from home. During the drive, I listened to the audio recording of Brian, D’Arcy and Alan’s Open, Connected, Social presentation. They are all on my Twitter friends list, a detail that becomes important later in my story.

I’ve blogged conferences in the past, but today I wanted to try Twittering the conference instead. I did this for Ian Juke’s keynote, but Alec managed to coerce me into co-presenting with him in his podcasting session (OK - he asked me and I said yes, but knowing my passion to talk about podcasting makes asking akin to coercion). He also asked Heather and I into co-presenting with him on Free, Open and Collaborative Processes and Tools for the Creation of Digital Content Related to Course Development.

Note - the following interactions are archived on my Twitter favourites page; you may refer to it for the full, non-paraphrased conversation.

Dean walked into the room, so Alec invited him to join us as well. I twittered the session that I was involved in presenting whenever Alec was talking. Dean was sitting beside me, twittering about watching me twitter. As I was describing Alec’s presentation, Brian added his support for our presentation. Dean twittered the address for Alec’s open thinking wiki. Brian added a link to the wiki as Alec was presenting. At about the same time, D’Arcy twittered about a greasemonkey script that turned a MediaWiki page into an S5 presentation. I passed the URL for the script along to Alec via Skype while he was presenting. (I was also adding commentary and suggestions to Alec via Skype providing a live backchannel for the presentation).

A few hours later, Alan wrote about Twitter in his blog. He cited our addition of the mediawiki-s5 script to a presentation as it was happening:

you might chalk this up to the rabid swarming of techno geeks, but for little effort, not stuffing people with email, twitter can generate action. All it takes is a nudge, some contacts …

Dean wrote in his blog about our earlier Twitter synergy, including a link to Alan’s post describing it. Just a short while ago, D’Arcy tweaked the wikipedia-s5 script and loaded it up on his server. He then announced it on Twitter, but not (yet?) on his blog. I have now installed the newly revised script, and I’m going to check with Alec about re-writing his wiki in a MediaWiki so it can be viewed/presented as an S5 presentation.

Thus my twitter mediated day comes to an end. I am still somewhat gobsmacked by the way that Brian and D’Arcy (and Alan, in retrospect) were able to become co-presenters as mediated by Twitter. A posse-amigos co-presentation, if you want to look at it that way. Cool - very, very cool!

If you listen right now, you can hear that the edublogosphere is buzzing in outrage at the U.S. congress’ proposed Deleting Online Predator’s Act (DOPA). I found out about it from Will Richardson (Congress Targets Social Network Sites), but Stephen, Danah and Raj have mentioned it as well. (and on Kairos News, and Bryan Alexander).

My mind is reeling at just how ignorant this is. If legislators were really concerned about protecting children from predators, they would ban minors from going into shopping malls and school yards, since I’d bet many more children face threats from predators in those venues than online. We’d best ban the kiddies from skating rinks too - who knows who might be taking their picture without permission?

Sayeth Will:

It’s not safety. It’s politics. It’s a hot button issue. It’s fear mongering. It’s power, or the potential loss of it. It’s got to stop.

Too right, Will. It seems to me that this is much more about denying people the right to communicate more than safety. I’ve talked with students who use MySpace, and they know how to choose who to talk to - generally they only allow people they know (and like) in RealSpace to be on their buddy list. And the girls are quite able to discern who the creepy guys are, just like they can in the rest of their life. The kids, to quote the ever-quotable Mr. Townshend, are alright. We’d be much better off spending our time teaching children and young adults how to deal with the creepy guys in the world instead of isolating them for 18 years then expecting them to cope in a world they’ve never been allowed to experience. Will, I think, agrees:

I’ve got two days left in the public school system, so I can still feel insulted. Insulted that I’m not trusted to make good decisions about the technology. Insulted that I’m not trusted to teach my students what they need to know to be safe. Insulted that my school space is being trotted out as a place where kids are running amok online all for the sake of political gain. Talk about dangerous…

I’m glad to hear that Will is full of righteous indignation. I hope that , whatever he ends up doing after the next two days, he’ll remember that the students and teachers in the school need his help (and your help, too) to protect their right to communicate.

D’Arcy blogged about coComment, a new tool for tracking distributed conversations by keeping track of comments you have made on various blogs. Now we can achieve total zen-like serenity by blogging across the internet without actually having a blog. The description at the coComment site sound great, and a brief poke around shows that each persons list of comments has RSS and Atom feeds available, so someone can now establish a blog by putting up a single web page with a little bit of rss2js sweetness embedded in it, and update the content just by putting comments on other blogs, or just add a bit of the feed to the sidebar of a regular blog. This seems like a great way to encourage interaction. I know that I normally put my reactions to other peoples’ posts on my own blog, but with this I’ll be more inclined to be a bit more neighbourly. At least, I will once I have a chance to use it - sadly, coComment is in beta and requires an invitation code (which I have signed up for!). Heck, if I had this going already, I might have just commented on D’Arcy’s blog instead of posting to my own! :^D

MLBlogs : Official Affiliate : Unofficial Opinions

Now you can follow along the boys of summer by reading about them in the blogs of summer. I haven’t seen it linked from the main Major League Ball page, but Major League Ball has set up a blogging site for baseball fans, supported by SixApart. From what I’ve seen, it looks like a MLB branded version of TypePad, including some customized templates so that fans can identify with their favourite teams. So far, it looks like the blogs are mostly MLB reporters, but there are some other standouts including a professional groundskeeper, a ball collector, and even Tommy LaSorda is blogging (with comments on - now there’s courage!)

I can’t think of a better community of interest than baseball fans. If there’s one thing that baseball fans love more than watching baseball, its talking about baseball (for an example, just listen in to Cubscast.com - the Chicago Cubs podcast. If I didn’t have half a dozen different blogs on the go, I might sign up for one. There is a 30 day free trial, and after that the cost is US$4.95 per month or US$49.50 per year - much cheaper than game tickets. I can’t wait to see how this develops!