Charles Matthews: Backing Limited Perspectives
This is a guest post by Charles Matthews. See also his previous posts. —Brianna
That is not what BLP stands for on Wikipedia, though you might sometimes wonder. This now-notorious three-letter acronym stands for Biography of Living Person. Wikipedia hosts several hundred thousand of them, and the summary deletion of a number of those has recently caused consternation and recrimination, not to speak of admin-on-admin disrespectfulness, of a kind that hasn’t been seen for, oh, all of several years.
BLPs are troublesome because in real world terms they affect lives, in legal terms they may be defamatory, and in Wikipedia terms content policies must be applied very strictly, and still may give poor results. But they predominate among biographies: there is a decay law saying if you go back a decade by birth date the number of biographies for that year of birth drops off by a factor (could be something like 20% or 30%) and this is quite marked as you get back to 1900 and before. Around 1983 is the peak (over 8000), which tells us what? Duh, sport (Finnish speedway stars, anyone?) and popular culture. Editors add but do not necessarily maintain well numerous articles about young stars aged 27 or so who are mentioned in the media.
Back among the grumpy folk known as “old school Wikipedians” the term “MySpace page” may occasionally pass the lips, but surprisingly, perhaps, there is a classic old-style inclusionist argument that works the other way. In a polite form it reads “if you come across work of others on the site that is substandard, your first task is to try to improve it, before cutting it or sending it for deletion”. In the matter of BLPs substandard means just one thing: references absent or low-grade. Wikipedia shouldn’t post things about real people out there that are just made up. We all agree. So, an editor finding a substandard BLP should try to reference it better.
Nice theory. BLPs are speedy-deleted by the thousand as newly-posted pages when unreferenced, sometimes quite wrongly, because as posted they don’t have the references needed to support them (no verifiability and/or no convincing reason to support notability). The drama has come up when the same criteria, or stricter, have been applied to articles dormant on the site for years: unreferenced BLPs that seem not to be going anywhere better.
So what is the “old school” counter-view? ‘Wikipedia has no fixed rules’ is part of the old-time mantra called the ‘five pillars’. Which allows for tectonic shifts in how things are done. Some anti-BLP activism has homed in on the broken nature of incremental change in dealing with the issue. Some BLPs are inherently problematic, functioning only as places of wars between supporters and denigrators of a real person (I have to babysit three of those). As Wikipedia expands, it gets into the area of biographies that are not that easy to reference. And such tenuous biographies may just have to remain, as things stand, because the inclusionist view amounts to saying that you are obliged to nurture them. And indeed better references or a controversy may turn up tomorrow: I started Ruth Padel never dreaming she’d be in the news so prominently. I read a history book by David Gress not knowing he was going to appoint himself to climate change controversy.
So what has happened? The limited perspective that there is no real lower threshold for biography on Wikipedia has created another limited perspective, that only a radical cull and shift to a seriously summary deletionist policy on BLPs can save Wikipedia from a future as a morass of neglected gossip about real people. Some demonstrative admin actions on the site have brought the matter to the top of the agenda. These things get messy and costly in human terms, but the logjam gets broken along with the eggs for the omelette, and the real losers are peaceful editors who detest mixed metaphors. No, this is serious stuff, but the lurching motion is unfamiliar to those who haven’t seen Wikipedia in this mood.
Information philanthropy
I learned an interesting term today, while reading the draft Government 3.0 report.
From the draft report:
11.5: Gifts of public good – Information Philanthropy
Innovation often occurs well in advance of the regulatory and cultural frameworks needed to support it. Many of the most innovative endeavours have been made by people with an idea, some time to volunteer and the wherewithal to make it happen.
For the many innovations that have social and democratic value but no apparent commercial return there are currently few options. Funding through government grants is unlikely, micro-donations and online advertising will rarely cover any substantial costs and the current philanthropic framework does not support substantial giving to such projects.
In the UK and the US examples such as mysociety.org and guidestar.com demonstrate the potential for social good. In Australia initiatives such as OpenAustralia and the Taskforce’s mashup competition and associated hack day events are clear examples of the potential and appetite to innovate with data and online engagement.
It may be possible for organisations whose purpose is to build online systems for public good to receive Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) and Tax Concession Charity (TCC) status for organisations but it is far from straightforward. There are no categories that specifically support the provision of public goods online in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) regulatory definitions. DGR and TCC status provides both tax advantages for the organisation and the capacity to receive grants and donations from philanthropic foundations and other donors.
This is not surprising as Information Philanthropy is new and is not widely understood. Reducing the obstacles to the free flow of philanthropy to projects that use government data for public good, or improve the democratic process will no doubt boost innovation and expand the understanding of the value of such projects.[…]
The consultants to the Taskforce have proposed the establishment of such a Specially Listed Deductible Giving Recipient Foundation to support the initial development of info-philanthropy. For the purposes of establishing this, one might define the foundation’s mission as assisting in projects of properly registered not-for-profit organisations and which, in a way that is not party political or focused primarily on advocacy either:
- Re-use data, including data of Australian governments for public benefit or
- Engage citizens in projects that seek to enhance democratic accountability or the democratic process and the development of public policy.
[…]
Recommendation 12 – Encourage info-philanthropy
Because some of the most successful experiments in Government 2.0 have been fuelled by not-for-profits in leading countries such as the UK and the US, Australian policy-makers should minimise obstacles to info-philanthropy being treated as an eligible activity to qualify for deductible gift recipient and other forms of legal status which recognise charitable or philanthropic purposes.
(Emphasis mine.) In my opinion that’s a brilliant idea. I don’t really have a lot to add, I just wanted to point it out to everyone. I hope this recommendation is picked up by government. It would be an easy one to implement and make a start towards useful formal recognition of the good that such projects can do.
I’ve only quickly skimmed the report – it’s kinda huge – but I already found a few other nice nuggets. Like The Three Laws of Open Government Data:
The Three Laws of Open Government Data:
- If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist
- If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage
- If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower
Summarisable as Find, play, share. I like it!
There are also nice summaries on OpenAustralia, and the Social Benefits of PSI talks about the National Library of Australia newspaper digitisation program.
There’s lots to absorb here, but that’s what caught my eye in a first pass.
GeoScience Australia goes CC-BY
Following the Australian Bureau of Statistics, it appears that Goescience Australia is making the leap and going CC-BY.
In the press release, their CIO says
Our agency is custodian of a vast range of valuable geological and spatial datasets that are used by the public sector and private sector industries in the exploitation of resources, management of the environment, safety of critical infrastructure and the resultant well-being of all Australians. The Creative Commons licence has created a more efficient process for them to access this valuable information.
Exactly, right?
Although looking around their website, it seems like various bits of their data you need to specially order or buy. I wonder if that will be changing as they update their website.
I’m not really up on “map stuff” but I am sure the attendees of the recent FOSS4G conference (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) in Sydney will be pleased about this.
Wiki[mp]edia data sources & the MediaWiki API
A brief presentation I gave for Melhack last week:
I wrote a bit on my techiturn blog about what I worked on in my 24 hour hack.
There is a huge amount of rich data in Wikipedia and other MediaWiki collections, naturally, but as there is no API evangelist you have to do a bit of digging to figure this out. Regular readers may recall that I am quite a fan of the API and what it means for reusers.
[guest] AntWeb goes CC-BY-SA
Waldir has previously guest-blogged here and I am happy to welcome him back for his second post. Congrats on helping make this cool project happen! —Brianna
Image by AntWeb, licensed CC-BY-SA-3.0
written by Waldir Pimenta
Did you know that the most venomous insect in the world is an ant? That’s right. One sting from the Maricopa Harvester Ant is equivalent to twelve honey bee stings — the required amount to kill a 4.5 pound rat.
I found that over a year ago, through University of Florida’s Book of Insect Records. I immediately headed to Wikipedia to see what it had to say about it, but to my surprise there was no such article! I thus started one from scratch, using some information I found in several ant-related websites. Eventually people started adding information to the article, up to the point that it contained a fairly good collection of information about this fascinating species. But still one thing was missing — something that single-handedly could make the article ten times more useful: an image.
So, when searching for images to illustrate it, I found the fantastic images from AntWeb, a project from The California Academy of Sciences, which aims to illustrate the enormous diversity of the ants of the world. I was especially happy to find that they were using a Creative Commons license — but soon after I was disappointed to find that the specific one they used (CC-BY-NC) was not appropriate for Wikipedia (or, more generally, free cultural works, and thus discouraged by Creative Commons itself).
So I sent them an email suggesting them to change the license. When they replied, I found out that they actuallly had been internally discussing license issues for quite a while. I kept in touch, and made sure to let them know the advantages of having their work showcased in such high-traffic websites as Wikipedia, Commons or WikiSpecies.
I like to think that my two cents helped in their decision, some time later, to not only change their license to CC-BY-SA, but also upload all their images to Commons themselves! This was part of their overall mission: “universal access to ant information”. Before, the AntWeb project focused only on digitization of content and development of the web portal; but now they also decided to “export” AntWeb content to improve access. Putting the images and associated metadata in Commons was an example their outreach initiatives.
This was very welcome by the community, and there was a lot of input on how best to perform the mass upload in order to make the images easy to find and be used to illustrate articles and other relevant pages. The process took several days, but finally, over 30,000 images were uploaded, full with EXIF tags, taxonomic data, and geographic information when available.
This is just the beginning, though! As usual in the wiki world, you can help! There are articles to be illustrated in the various Wikipedia language versions (Magnus’ FIST tool comes in handy for finding them!). There are WikiSpecies pages to be illustrated. There are categories in Commons to be created to allow the ant category tree to be navigated and have every ant image reachable through it. And more importantly, there are these great news to spread and let people who are interested in ants know that they can now count on what’s possibly the greatest online repository of free, high-quality ant images.
Many thanks to Brian Fisher, AntWeb Project Leader, who coordinated the license change process, Dave Thau, AntWeb Software Enginer, who wrote the upload script and performed the upload, and to all the AntWeb staff for their outstanding work!
