Trip to Italy June 2016 – itinerary – Milan and Lake Como, and Wikimania 2016

By bluerasberry on 2016-07-16

Sometimes I do not find time to journal all the things that I wish I could record to remember. Here are some scatted notes and thoughts –

    I felt exhausted in Milan. I had been consuming maximum culture. Fabian paces himself and kept up his energy.

    We stayed in a bnb in a cheap neighborhood. I suppose it was seedy. It was the first time in my life seeing an automated dildo vending machine on the street, so apparently the price we were paying put us in the sort of neighborhood where people walk by at all hours and need such things. It was easy for us to see whatever we wanted. We saw the Duomo. We did other things.

    We took the train to Lake Como near the conference and stayed in a really sleepy town one night before. We had not anticipated how sleepy it actually was. There was not a single restaurant in town, so despite being in a beautiful place, we were trapped without food for the night. Whatever – not eating makes for a more memorable experience than eating, so we looked at the lake and nibbled a bit on our traveling snacks.

    Fabian was with me for the first day of the conference and I introduced him to wiki-friends. We toured the conference town then he left. I liked having him there, because Wikipedia people are important to me, and I felt like it would be good for me to introduce Fabian to them.

    On Friday 24 June I attended the “Asia meetup” and the “Bangladesh meetup” at Wikimania. In previous Wikimania conferences there had been an India meetup, and certainly there were many Indian people here, but somehow people decided to combine all Asian countries for this conference. I would not have recommended this, but actually, Asian countries in the Wikimedia community face similar challenges, and I think that it was productive to meet together. The representatives of Iran, India, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, and Taiwan happened to be most outspoken in my opinion, but I also know that Indonesian contributors are influential. Chinese people not resident in China also are influential.

    I went to all sorts of events. I had all sorts of conversations. From one perspective I regret not having capacity to write more, because I feel like in the future I might want to reflect on my notes and experience. From another perspective, maybe my memory of neglecting my journal this time will inspire me to create better notes in the future.

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Gay artwork said to not be gay

By bluerasberry on 2016-07-16

Since visiting Italy and seeing Ancient Greek art, Roman art, and Renaissance art I have been thinking about gay art. Classical artwork contains a lot of nude imagery, and so does Renaissance artwork. Western culture since classical times has avoided discussing sexuality, and consequently, there has been a disconnect between high art and the values of Western society. Access to high art has been continuous in Western society from at least since the Renaissance, so typical people in big cities in Western countries have known that sculptures and paintings of nude sexy people are being produced in their communities. At the same time, there seems to be a longstanding tradition in Western culture of depicting nude sexy males then denying that the work is erotica. This raise a few issues –

  1. Why is there a Western tradition of saying that gay erotic art from before LGBT liberation is not gay?
  2. To what extent is it possible that artists and art purchasers collaborated to produce gay art without intending for the art to be gay?
  3. Do contemporary perspectives call certain art erotica, when in times past no one would have thought the work to be erotic?
  4. What historical records, if any, exist in the arts for establishing that any given historical art was intended to be for a gay audience?

an erotic image of Saint Sebastian

by Guido Reni, 1615


As an example, consider Guido Reni‘s Saint Sebastian painted 1615 and now in the Capitoline Museums. The painting is of a cute guy, healthy and fit is always attractive, wearing a loin cloth which is falling off, well old enough to have body hair but seemingly shaved everywhere including pubic hair and underarms, in an open body pose, shot with arrows but not having any response that introduces negativity to the work. In contemporary times, any photo taken of a person like that in any similar pose and dress would only be taken for the purpose of producing male erotica for a male audience. There are lots of similar depictions of Saint Sebastian, so this is representative of depictions of that Saint. There are lots of other historical artworks like this in other contexts. So far as I know, there is no history of saying that such artwork is gay. There might have been times when such things were said to be too exciting or prurient in general, but not any history of saying that there is a gay culture with works produced in a style that meets the demands of that culture.

In Italy I saw classical and Renaissance sculptures and paintings. Some were obviously gay and sexy. I just checked the Wikipedia article on Saint Sebastian, who is traditionally depicted as gay erotica. There seems to be some doubt that gay erotica produced as art is actually gay erotica, and that instead it might be some kind of symbolic artistic game which communicates deeper meaning through artistic conventions.

While I was in Italy I bought a 60-page booklet on Caravaggio which mentions sexual themes in his art on several pages. The book denies that Caravaggio ever intended his work to be gay erotica. It is silly to say so, since his work looks similar to that intentionally produced for the gay erotica marketplace. If the gender were switched, and females instead of males were posed as his figures, then there would be no doubt that the works were erotica. I think this is because of a double standard, and a dated presumption that male erotica targeted at males is not possible to produce. One of the image captions in the book says, “the splayed legs hark back to a symbolic code also used by Michaelangelo to signify resurrection, victory, and triumph” when describing the Amor Vincit Omnia. There are any number of other books and critiques which say similar things about similar works by any artists, and suggest that in the contemporary time of the work no one imagined eroticism. I think this is total bunk, and is the culture of another time in which everyone was under some pressure to believe unreasonable things about sexuality. Anyone who wants to read lots of essays about a single artist producing gay erotica can read about Caravaggio, because it seems like the academic consensus of his work is that it is not gay, which is a silly conclusion.

For considering subject matter by many artists which is said to not be gay erotica, check reviews about Saint Sebastian. The Wikipedia article on Saint Sebastian currently has almost no coverage of the gay interest of the figure as a gay icon. Nowadays, I think public taste for gay erotica is better established, because there is an open marketplace for defining the genre, and settling the taste for such art. When people are free and encouraged to produce gay erotica, they produce art that looks like traditional depictions of Saint Sebastian. Traditional depictions of Saint Sebastian did not influence taste for gay erotica, but rather, they both draw from deeper desires for this kind of imagery. Despite centuries of denying that Saint Sebastian icons are gay art, they are, and instead of believing the weird rationalizations of non-gay art scholars over the centuries, the reasonable thing to do is consider the views of communities which can say and express themselves without restriction or social pressure. In the case when an art critique might include addressing a taboo topic, I put more value on contemporary art critiques than those made before the advent of Internet. People who are under no social pressure can freely say that sexy Saint Sebastian icons would only be produced in a sexy way by someone who intended to make sexy art. It is a cultural curiosity that there are so many critiques of Saint Sebastian depictions which do not recognize, accept, and comment on this.

My best answers to the questions above are –

  1. Homophobia in society made it taboo to identify any nice artwork or respectable artist as having produced homoerotic work. Since it was not an option to say that any good art was gay, all that is left is communication which says other than that.
  2. I do not think that it could have been possible to produce homoerotic work or purchase homoerotic work continually over time without realizing the theme. For artists, I would expect that anyone who was more likely to produce male nudes was someone more likely to commit more time of their life to working with nude male models, and who had their own taste. I doubt that any artist was compelled to make male nudes for lack of artistic commissions to do otherwise.
  3. It is often said in older critiques that attitudes on nudity used to be different, and that more often, males were more visible nude in public more than today. The idea is that there are new modern privacy customs, and looking back, the lack of privacy might be viewed as a flirt instead of just daily life. Sometimes such explanations might be true, but also, these kinds of explanations should be considered in the context of being all that could be said. When there was more to say, like homoerotic intent, those parts had to be left out. Even historical critiques giving correct information are dubious for not being able to tell the whole story.
  4. Gay culture has not been developed yet and it is still uncertain what historical records exist. Cataloging what exists would be useful before drawing conclusions. As of right now, there are not clear authorities to be found among LGBT books. Something like “Survey of Male Erotic Art before 1930” probably has not been written. There ought to be research on this topic for every culture just to providing supporting evidence of norms.

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Last day for Venice to exist!

By bluerasberry on 2016-07-02

I was in Venice on Thursday 16 June. The city flooded unexpectedly, disrupting regular activities, and I imagined that that day was the last day for Venice to exist. I have heard that in contemporary times, people imagine the apocalypse and end of things more commonly than people in other times. The end of Venice was my fear and fantasy.

I wrote this when I was there on the day of the flood.

————–

So people say, the flooding season is from November to January, and it is unexpected that Venice should be flooded now. The effect is that buildings and public infrastructure are flooded and that usual business is disrupted. I am sort of joking about today being the last day, but too often lately too many people keep commenting on the strangest weather ever. I wish to talk about climate change.

Venice is a city of islands in waterways. I am staying in a apartment share near the canal. I do not understand how an apartment like this would be built, but it is actually under the water level. It has a window high in the room, and standing from the window, I can look out and see water to my waist on the other side of the apartment wall. One step outside the front door of the apartment is a drop into a canal. To get to my apartment door there are interior stairs up to the outside. Is such a design common in Venice? For a city which floods, why would there be basement building design?

Fabian and I arrived yesterday and our host put us in this apartment. We had not expected to see her again until check out. Today, I was in the bathroom, and I happened to notice that the bathtub was half filled with water. I asked Fabian if he somehow filled it and forgot to drain it, and of course he said no, and came to look also. When he stepped into the room, the drain in the bathtub dramatically began to propel water up also with silt or dirt or sewage into the bathtub. I began to message the host and found that 30 minutes earlier she sent me a strange message to “pull the alarm.” I had no idea what that meant, and as I discussed with Fabian, there was a knock at the door. We opened it and a man asked to be invited in without introducing himself. His English was not good and our Italian is horrible, but we presumed he meant well. He jumped into the storage to grab an odd looking board with fittings and, after putting that aside, began to move our bed. Behind the bed was a large pipe with a handle on it, perhaps a sluice gate if that is the correct term, that he pressed down with a mechanism that seemed to create a barrier to movement within the pipe. Then after he took the board outside and began to adjust fittings on the outside of our doorway. At this point we realized that in Venice such buildings install tall barriers in front of front doors, so that if water rises 2 feet over the bottom of a doorstep then still water will not enter a doorway.

Our host arrived and explained that this man was her father. Some minutes later her boyfriend arrived also to assist – apparently this was an emergency, and unexpected. I am only in Venice for a few days, but she told me that I could install an app on my phone to alert me of floods. Everyone here, she said, used this alert service. The water was higher than I had seen it in the last day, and even to my inexperienced eyes seemed higher than the building was designed to regularly manage, but things did not seem so urgent to me yet. Fabian and I decided to go out for a walk. Soon in the streets we saw flooding everywhere.

Some walkways were a little wet, then we saw shops had flooded interiors. Imagine any store you like, but with water on the ground to cover one’s feet. Soon we reached the limit of where we could walk without becoming wet, and a street hawker approached us to sell us boot covering to the knees. I was happy to remove my shoes to store in my bag, and roll up my pants. Fabian was not keen on the idea of walking in sewage water and said that he neither wanted waterproof boots nor to go around barefoot. I think it was an afterthought, but later this evening, he told me he was concerned about some scratches on his leg. I went ahead to explore a bit and Fabian went home.

Saint Mark’s Square was totally flooded. Earlier in the day we had seen pigeons, and now there were seagulls only. There were people splashing around in the strangeness of the situation. The coffee houses in the square were closed except Florian’s, and there, the musicians were playing to an audience sitting in courtyard chairs that had water just below their seats. When I saw this I thought that today could be the apocalypse for Venice – from today forward, the weather changes will make the city too expensive to maintain.

Climate change is discussed continually everywhere that such discussions can happen, and such discussions can happen almost anywhere. Lately in the present United States presidential election cycle there is a candidate running on a platform that includes denial that any climate change is occurring. To say that a presidential candidate would emphasize such a point is to say that approximately half of Americans might believe such a thing, and I think it is true that many or most Americans or people in general do not recognize climate change as a serious issue.

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit Southeast Texas and Southwestern Louisiana, which is the region where I spent my childhood. Everyone I knew there was affected by this storm. A strange part of the experience for me was that in the media cycle, all reports that I saw talked about how the storm affected New Orleans, which was the major city in the region. However, damage of the sort that happened in that city also happened in every other city in the region, but small cities do not get media coverage, and the people in those cities get less support. Most people who would watch the news just think about the city in the reports. People from New Orleans and the surrounding area traveled hundreds of miles east to my own hometown, perhaps looking for work or to start over by settling there, and perhaps not hearing in advance of the damage everywhere in the region. A friend from my youth, Adam, had extensive damage to his home in the storm, and insufficient insurance for this. Some years later he committed suicide. He had various problems in his life, but certainly, having damage to his home equal to at least a year of his salary is a stressful, life-changing event. Years after the storm the financial obligations which the storm put into his life were a contributing negative factor to the general loss of pleasure in life and diminished his will to live. A worrisome part about that hurricane has been the fear that it would happen again, and perhaps that such storms could happen regularly. People will have the will to rebuild and start over if it seems that there can be a bright future, but if there is climate change, and regular storms of this sort are a likelihood, then rebuilding in the same place in the same way would not make sense.

From about that year to the present, weather in Seattle has warmed, and so far as I know, most people like this. I am not sure that anyone says about the effects of warmer weather on wildlife in the region. The sakura festivals in Seattle have seemed to be mis-timed, because the blossoms never seem to happen when the festival is scheduled. Has it always been difficult to predict when plants will bloom?

In 2012 I was living in New York City when Hurricane Sandy hit. The Long Island beaches were disrupted. New Jersey was flooded, and I even visited the downtown areas with my boyfriend Marcus of the time to do disaster tourism. There is a sort of spite in New York that the Long Island beach houses are vacation homes for the rich, but I am not sure if that is true, and that New Jersey in general can tolerate any misfortune, but I think that bad weather affecting anyone in a region really affects everyone in the region. The major problem in New York City was the unprecedented flooding of the subways. If NYC did not have subways, then NYC as currently imagined could not exist. If the subways flood once then that is probably okay because New York finds a way to manage. Could climate change make subway flooding more regular? Could NYC tolerate floods like this every few years?

If it could happen that a slight weather change could have some effect on public infrastructure, like for example, suppose that Venice, Texas, or New York flooded once every 10 years instead of once every 50, could that make an entire city unlivable? Natural disasters are expensive and not something for which any city has budget. When scientists talk about climate change, is this what they mean? A small bit of water coming in when it is unexpected, and over a matter of water covering one’s feet, an entire city might shut down?

Venice is a lovely city. I hope it remains intact another thousand years.

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Trip to Italy June 2016 – itinerary – Venice

By bluerasberry on 2016-07-02

On Wednesday 15 June we went to Venice. Venice is a city of waterways, but it is also a regular boring city on the water. All tourists go to the island part of Venice, but there is another part of Venice on the Italian mainland. I learned this because there is a trainstop there. I suppose that many people who live and work in Venice actually live on the mainland.

The night we arrived we walked to Saint Mark’s Square, a few blocks from where we are staying. In the time that we were there I think that we did not see any dirt ground. The city seems to be made of stone and concrete, or maybe marble.

On Thursday we visited the Doge’s Palace and the Correr Museo. That night Venice unexpected flooded because of strange weather.

On Friday 17 June we visited Saint Mark’s Basilica. We had very expensive coffee in the Caffe Florian, which is one of the oldest coffeehouse in the world. We walked across the Rialto Bridge. We had a lovely break at the Caffe del Doge, which is a contemporary coffeehouse in a quiet off-street.

On Saturday Fabian was feeling inspired after meeting his namesake Saint Fabian, and now wanted to visit Saint Anthony to pay respect for watching over his youth in San Antonio. Saint Anthony is in Padua, an hour from Venice, and suggested as a day trip in our guidebook. I made reservations the night before to visit the Scrovegni Chapel to see the works of Giotto, and we left in the morning.

I had first read about Giotto when I was 19. I had a college professor whom I liked, and I asked him how to come to learn as much as he seemed to know. He gave me some of the best educational advice I have ever gotten. He told me to go to the university’s collection of children’s books and read them all. I did this, and came to realize that children’s guides to science and humanities are often excellent introductions to new topics. It was at this time that I discovered Dorling Kindersley or DK, my favorite publisher, and began to read most of their works and all of their Eyewitness series. The first DK book that I read was a guide to Western art, and the book began with Giotto. I remembered all this when I realized that we were going to see the chapel featured in this book that I read in 1999, and which lead me to read so many other children’s books and then onto many other books.

The chapel is more protected than many other art works. Reservations are made for 15-minute slots. Booking a day in advance worked for me. We arrived at the appointed time and were taken into a temperature-controlled antichamber to acclimate for 15 minutes. From there the door opened for our 15-minutes in the chapel. The work is beautiful but had I not known its historical context I might not have appreciated it. Apparently it is an early use of perspective, and an uncommonly major commission for its era, and the use of the blue pigment everywhere was a major luxury, and finally the chapel was built partially in response to criticism of the senior Scrovegni in Dante’s Divine Comedy and elsewhere. The museum attached to the chapel was nice also, but not the finest examples of Italian art, and overwhelming at this point in relation to what we had already seen and done.

Going on to Saint Anthony’s basilica – there were religious shops nearby for those walking from the direction of the train station. Among the shops was a blessed Saint Anthony sweet shop, which I thought was odd, but the shopkeeper knew the word “vegan” and actually explained to us using the few words that we knew that she had cookies without butter, eggs, and animals. We got our first Italian sweets here.

Upon entering the basilica a mass was starting, and Fabian was a good sport and suggested that we do the mass. I wanted this so we did and I had communion again. After the mass we queue to the side of the church to visit the tomb of Saint Anthony. Near the tomb, instead of lighting candles, there was a crate into which people could donate candles, which seems practical but also is something that I had not seen in other churches. That explained the many vendors outside selling candles. Moving along the side of the church we entered a reliquary to see the lower jaw, vocal cords, and especially the tongue of Saint Anthony. The story is that after Anthony died, he was buried for some time, but when his body was recovered later his tongue was intact. This was a miracle supposed to be supporting evidence that his tongue was used to say good things about the church. We visited the gift shop, and there they sold third-degree relics of holy linen which had been pressed against the tongue. I bought some of these for 0.60 euros each to share with friends who would appreciate licked linens.

I noticed that the confession booths were open, and I thought it was time. Fabian waited outside for me. It had been three years since my last confession. The priest told me to go at least once a year, and I intend to do at least that much from here forward. The entire experience was meaningful to me.

Fabian and I had visited San Antonio in March 2015 and done tourism there, and we remembered that San Antonio was founded by Franciscan friars. At this church we learned that Saint Anthony and Saint Francis were contemporaries and colleagues, with Anthony himself being a Franciscan. Fabian suggested that this is why Franciscans named the city “San Antonio”, and with Anthony’s birth name being Fernando (he was Porteguese), that is why the basilica in San Antonio is Saint Fernando’s Basilica.

On Sunday we went to Milan.

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Trip to Italy June 2016 – itinerary – Florence

By bluerasberry on 2016-07-02

On 10 June when we arrived at our apartment in Florence our host presented us with a map and some visiting suggestions. Among other things, he recommended that he have dinner at Santo Spirito, which is a plaza where people hang out at night and there are also restaurants there. We decided to go there that night.

Fabian was walking slow but seemed to be improving, and wanted to walk. Our apartment was just outside the Accademia, so we walked south to the the Duomo and Baptistry. The Duomo was striking for how loud the color and decorations were, and for the size of the thing. It dominates the city and can be seen from anywhere, as it seems there is a building code that prevents any structure from rising above the base of the dome.

When we arrived at the plaza it was crowded. It was 11pm and the restaurants had one-hour waits for outdoor seating where the music and crowds were. We wanted to eat immediately, and found a restaurant called Tomare which seemed like it had vegan options and which could seat us. This was a noodle restaurant advertising contemporary presentations of traditional Italian meals.

We asked for “vegano”, “vegetariano”, “senza animali”, “senza formaggio”, and “senza latte”, which I thought would cover things. In the end, there was only one item on the menu which was available to us, which was noodles with vegetables. We both ordered that as the only possibility. We should have said “senza uova”, because eggs were served on top. Fabian was a sport and put them aside because it was almost midnight and we wanted to eat. We try hard to avoid any animal product and this might have been the first time that we compromised by removing the animal product from the food. After the food the waiter offered limoncello, and we had some. It seems that many restaurants here offer limoncello after meals. We wandered a bit in the plaza with the crowd and went home. The city has a lot to see at midnight and is pleasantly walkable.

On Saturday June 11 we woke up late and looked outside. At the Accademia, the line was slow to move and was very long. I presumed that the line would be simliar at the Uffizi. We had not made reservations and did not want to pay for the local pass to these and other museums, so we resolved to visit these two most popular museums first thing on other mornings by coming a bit before each opened to avoid lines.

Instead, we went to the Duomo Museum. I thought this was one of the better curated museums for English speakers because exhibit notes were translated into English and they were thoughtful for giving information that was interesting to me. They also had an English-language video about the production of the Duomo that I thought made it easier to understand what we were seeing.

After the Duomo Museum we thought to take it easy and go to the lookout at Piazzale Michaelangelo and the San Miniato Church. We arrived at the church in time for a 5:30 service that included Gregorian chant. I attended the service and had communion. Fabian explored church grounds on his own. There were posters advertising a night event at 8:30, and we decided to stay for that. In the meantime we went back to Piazzale Michaelangelo, then later back to the church, and ended the night by taking a bus back at the plaza. The Michaelangelo plaza has vendors selling typical snacks but also any kind of booze from beer to wine to liquor. It seems that anyone can buy a bottle of wine or liquor, and the seller will give them also plastic cups. The cost is not much more than from a liquor store, and apparently kids can drink there. Cops are everywhere so I guess that keeps order.

At the end of the evening we had learned something about social trends. Older people like the lookout at the church, and hang out there. Students hang out at the Michaelangelo plaza at night. People aged between older and younger can go to the Santo Spirito.

On Sunday 12 June I was ready earlier than Fabian so I went to stand in line at the Uffizi to be a little earlier than Fabian. There was hardly a line there 15 minutes before opening, and I was able to get tickets quickly after they opened. Immediately after that there was a long line. Fabian arrived just as I was getting tickets. There was a place nearby that sold vegan sandwiches, so that was breakfast, and then we went inside. We stayed in the Uffizi for five hours, which is a bit beyond the usual tolerance either of us has for museums but this place lived up to the hype. By this time a lot of the museums were becoming an endurance task of wonders. We were seeing wonders and laughing about things, and we wanted all we could take, but also by this time we had clocked many hours every day of historical thought and artifacts. I felt like I was seeing so many things that I recognized, and Fabian wanted to photograph so much. After we got out we went home for a nap. When we woke up it was raining heavily, so we stayed in and cooked and talked.

Many museums in Florence are closed Monday so on that day we decided to day trip to Pisa. Fabian wanted to see the tower, and I was interested because he was excited. It is about an hour from Florence, so we went to train station and hopped over. The interesting context from me is was that the Tower of Pisa and surrounding complex was from a few centuries before the height of Florence, so I was able to learn something about art and design from before the Renaissance. Both Florence and Pisa have huge baptismal buildings separated from the church. I learned that the custom in the past was that only the baptized might enter the church, so the baptistry must have been kept separate as a place to prepare a person to be allowed in the church.

In Pisa there was a cemetery included in the complex with the tower, church, and baptistry. I did not know what to make of the cemetery. It was said to be old, but it had open-air frescos which seemed to be in better condition than what I expected old paintings could be. I did not know if they were original, restored or replaced. There was a museum for the complex, and in the museum, they had a virtual world restoration of what the cemetery would look like when it was restored. I suppose it will be a trend to create virtual world restorations of every ruin to preserve a representation of its ruined state, propose restoration plans, so it how it was in its imagined original state, and to share the appearance of the place with people who might only visit virtually. Their software for demonstrating restoration plans was in poor shape for having graphics that seemed like video games from the early 00s but I suppose these kinds of things lag behind the contemporary standard. I wonder if their demo could have been made with a contemporary game engine by employing people who reskin games, and if reskinning video games with places is even an occupation.

On Tuesday 14 June somehow Tuesday we looked at the schedule and decided that we could see a lot of museums in a day. We were around the corner from the Accademia, but did not have reservations. As with the Uffitzi I went there before they opened when the line was short and got tickets quickly. I think anyone unable to show up so early should get reservations. That museum is small, and really is only a venue for showing the David, but the crowd and line is huge.

David lives up to the hype. I had seen the replica in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006, where it is placed in a crowded court of statue replicas. I like the idea of replica distribution, and wish that it replica collections could be in circulation to make the art more accessible. I am not sure that I would say that any portable, replicable artwork is best seen in its original form when most of the value of the work can be duplicated in a nice copy. I am not going to say that the original David should be seen in the Accademia if it is possible to see a copy in an appropriate setting, but this gallery does do the best presentation of this single work that I can imagine anyone doing. The David probably is the most interesting statue I have seen. The quality of work is obviously beyond what anyone else of the era was able to accomplish for representing the human body in a realistic way. The pose is emotional, the concept is simple enough to not distract from the experience, and the monumental size and unnatural changes to the body are interesting enough to make the work more attractive than a replication of what could be seen in flesh. Other people have said enough and I do not need to say more, except that the gap in quality between this and other sculpture is something that is not difficult to recognize. I look forward to the day when this and other sculpture can be virtually replicated, and 3D printed and carved, and for when future sculptures become finer than this one through technology.

The Bargello Museum has amazing sculptures. It and the Duomo Museum are fantastic museums, but it seems that neither of them have the reputation of the Uffizi or the David, so neither museum have many visitors. The Donatello David is in the Bargello, and is said to be the first nude male statue in the Western world since Roman times. It is a lovely statue that I knew already but when I saw it here I began to wonder about the circumstances of its creation. There are other Donatello works around Florence that I saw, and as I remember, they were all religious figures looking haggard. I do not know what is typical for this artist, or what was typical for the time, or if it seemed like a big deal at the time to cast a large male nude. But by the story that I got, some guy who made his way doing wood carvings of the most desperate religious penitents was asked in this conservative age to create an adolescent male nude in a self-assured pose while wearing a frilly hat. Is this how the Western world was reintroduced to nudity in art? I think that this work was exhibited after creation and has always been admired, but to go from being conservative about nudity to this is not the kind of transition that I would expect. For its subject matter, the statue would be bizarrely placed almost anywhere in public today were it not for its history. It sort of reminded me of a nude Final Fantasy character or fan-made comic book erotica of the sort at DeviantArt.
Pitti Palace is great for being a huge palace and for having good art. It was a fun museum to wander. Everywhere I went I wanted to see the Caravaggios, and in every museum on this trip when I found where they were supposed to be there was only a note saying that the painting was on tour. I wonder if these works are often on tour, or if I just happened to come at a time during an infrequent tour. It must generate income for a museum to send its most demanded works on tour. Almost every exhibit at every museum I visited in Italy seemed underfunded for having noticeable wear in its location, or insufficient curation, or just being in a building that could have more care. In 2006 when I visited the British Museum for the first time and as my first major museum visit, I thought it was a perfect museum. Since moving to New York, I suppose that I have visited the Met on average twice a month, and although I could still criticize the Met it is always clean, the exhibit cards are kept up, the in-house advertising of exhibits is apparent and useful, the staffing is excellent because information desks are everywhere, and the displays of all works always seem like they are maintained in a clean, orderly, and updated way. When I visited the British Museum again in 2014 I saw that even this museum must be lacking in staffing and order, or at least, presentation comparable to a storefront commercial product standard was not their priority to the extent that this sort of presentation is to the Met. There are exhibits in the Met which seem to have been barely changed for years or longer, and perhaps decades. I felt the same way visiting the Louvre, and in Italy none of the museums seems to have capacity to care for art in the way that the Met does. At practically all the major museums in Italy touching ancient statues is possible, and tourists throughout the day actually do this. In Rome at the Capitoline Museum, for example, I saw tourists regularly touch the Capitoline Wolf bronze. I thought of speaking up when people touched it, but when I saw someone do this to pose with a picture, then someone else do the same thing immediately after, I realized that daily for years this and many other statues would be handled and this is just how art is managed here. I feel like art should not be touched because that is the American rule. I suppose that ancient things are not so scarce here to encourage anyone to keep such strict rules. The Pitti Palace gave me a personal experience – Fabian and I seemed to have the place to ourselves, as we only sometimes crossed paths with other visitors, and only a fraction of the rooms seemed to have any guard. The day must be coming when all such museums at least have video cameras in every room. Probably this museum has this, but if it did not, I would not be surprised, and I know that cameras will become standard within a few years.

As the Pitti Palace was closing for the evening at 7pm, it happened that in the courtyard there was some rehearsal for some opera. We sat out and watched it. They had an orchestra and actors in street clothes, so in this palatial setting we saw the most informal looking bunch perform beautiful music in a place designed for shows of another era. I know that orchestras dress up to perform, and I wonder if that makes them extra-casual on their days off. In general, I think, people on the streets in Italy are better dressed than people in the United States. For this performance though everyone seemed dressed for comfort of the sort that Americans like.

This was our last day in Florence and the Pallazo Vecchio stays open till midnight and it was on our way home, so we stopped in to be more thoroughly exhausted with wonderful things to see and experience. We climbed the tower to see the Duomo again. It can be seen from everywhere. I have never seen a city so designed to favor a single building in a way to make everyone continually recognize the building. We saw palace apartments, and art, and enjoyed the museum. It happened that there was another concert here in the main hall, and so again, we heard more music. There seemed to be chamber music everywhere we went.

The plan was to cool it with the curated collections after Florence, and for Venice and Milan, we would slow the pace of consuming exhibitions and only be more reflective of where we were and what we were thinking.

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Trip to Italy June 2016 – itinerary – Rome

By bluerasberry on 2016-07-02

On the evening of Thursday 3 June Fabian and I began a vacation to Italy. Wikimania is in Northern Italy later in the month, so I had planned to go to Italy for that. Both of us arranged our work for a pause and talked about what we wanted to do, and we agreed that we wanted to see typical tourist sites and learn history. I used AirBNB to book all of our rooms. We both like to stay in the gay neighborhoods, and for Rome, that meant to the northeast of the Colosseum.

On the day we arrived, Friday, we went from the airport to Roma Termini, the main train station, and from there walked south to our place which was about 20 minutes away. We could see the Colosseum from our roof, and from there walked to the Colosseum. The lines were long but we got entry passes in advance and it was easy to get in quickly. For many tourist sites in Rome it seems like planning for lines and getting advance tickets is necessary. The Colosseum is a wonder – it is large and it is striking to wonder what sorts of shows might have been performed here. Fabian and I were unable to tell which parts of the Colosseum were original and which were replaced. We talked about that throughout Rome. There were more ruins here than I expected, as structures from about 2000 years ago seem to remain throughout the city. I had not realized the placement of sites – the Forum is next to the Colosseum, so the entire district is mostly structures from ancient Rome.

On Saturday we went to the Borghese Gallery. This museum is in the main park for the city. Small sets of people visit it in two-hour blocks, so to go, one needs a reservation and to be on time. After two hours, everyone is directed out of the museum and the next group enters. The attraction here is sculpture. One of them is the Sleeping Hermaphrodite. This is a nude laying on a bed, and the museum has the reclining body facing a wall and behind a rope. In the museum it is possible to see that the body seems female from shape and breast, but the surprise in the sculpture is supposed to be that the female body has a penis. The museum hides the penis. It seems that history has had conflicting ideas of penises, because in these scuptures and those elsewhere, sometimes there are penises, sometimes they are chiselled off, and in the Vatican they are patched over with stone fig leafs and plaster. We went from the Borghese Gallery in the morning around the park for a bit and later in the afternoon went to the Palazza Massimo, which is one of several museums that are collectively called the National Roman Museum. Fabian and I were surprised that on the ground floor the usual collection of ancient Roman marble heads had been curated by a hair stylist, and that practically all of the curation notes critiqued the hair styles by describing technical execution, commonality, and significance. He collected pictures in case he needed them for work and I thought about checking Wikipedia’s coverage of hair styles from that era. There were two bronze statues said to be Greek originals here, and completely intact. One was a boxer and the other was a gladiator. I had never seen images of these before. The boxer had cuts on his face that seemed to be chiseled after casting. The gladiator had grooves on his face to present a beard, which is not something that I imagined could be done based on having seen photographs of similar statues in which such detail could not be shown. That night we went to Gay Street across from the Colosseum and attended an LGBT film festival for short films. Themes in the film were familiar as compared to American films – difficulty coming out, experiences of homophobia, and starts to relationships. The festival was part of Roma Pride, and there would be events on Gay Street nightly. There were drag performers as hosts.

Sunday we went to the Capitoline Museums. We walked there from home, as it is on the edge of the forum and so close to where we were. We saw the ruins of a temple to Minerva and a statue of Emperor Nerva, who is said to have had the temple made. Trajan’s column is just beyond that, then a huge memorial to Victor Emmanuel, and the museum is just beyond that. The museum is fine. There is a huge original equestrian bronze of Marcus Aurelius there, made presumably by someone who saw his face in person. In that same room there are some remains of an Etruscan temple. I do not know much about Etruscan culture, but by the ruins, the exhibition is about how Etruscans worshiped the same gods and Greeks and Romans and they had an established city in what later became Rome. That night we went back to Roma Pride on Gay Street and attended a chamber music performance. This was the first time that I have ever seen classical musical performance presented as an LGBT pride event attraction.

Monday we slept in a bit, then went to the Ara Pacis with plans to walk from Piazza Navona to the Spanish Steps later in the evening when it was cooler. The Ara Pacis is an altar and I wondered what happened during a Roman ritual. At this altar it seemed like it must have been an intimate experience, because the design of the template and altar do not allow much of an audience to witness anything. Below the Ara Pacis is another general museum, and when we went, they had an exhibition of the work of the Japanese photographer Ken Domon. He has images of Japan before and after World War II, showing daily life and urban scenes. I imagined that this pairing of contemporary art draws local people into this museum, because the altar does not change and with it being alone it is unlikely to be a regular draw in the way that other museums can be seen repeatedly. Outside the Ara Pacis it seems that skateboarders are welcome because they all seemed so cosy there to bounce around. Outside and out of the way of the hangers around there is a tomb for Roman emperors, fenced in when previously it appears people were allowed to approach. There are so many ruins here that sometimes preservation must mean fencing things off until such time other projects are done and funding is available to care properly for places. We walked from here to Piazza Novona, finding the area to be walkable in general. The police at Piazza Novona wore medieval looking caps with feathers in them, and were continually telling tourists not to photograph them. It is sort of strange that they dress in a way that attracts maximum attention, looking like a guardsman from centuries ago but outfited with a semiautomatic rifle, and yet their duty includes discouraging the natural tendency for people to photograph odd and amazing looks. Anyone seeking to do terrorism need only to wait until a tour group passes them, then they are completely distracted telling everyone “no pictures”. They say “no photos” continually. From here we went to the Pantheon. As we continually did, Fabian and I talked about which parts of the building were original and which were replacements. Perhaps all? Perhaps none? It is hard to imagine a building like this standing for so long, and hard also to imagine how anything could have been repaired with pre-modern tools. It was a little sad to see it turned into a Christian church, but in checking Wikipedia, it has been a church longer than it has been a temple, and I suppose that is why it is still intact. Why is Raphael’s dead body in here? Victor Emmanuel has his own garish monument – why is his body here? I wish they would restore this to be a Roman temple. I did not feel passion for the Christian church to be in there – obviously it is not a Christian building. Next to the Pantheon is a coffee shop called Tazza de Oro and Fabian and I had nice coffee. We went to the Trevi Fountain, then to the Spanish Steps.

Tuesday we went to the Vatican Museums we arrived at noon and left at five. Everything was a wonder. One surprise for me was that the museum was arranged for tourists like any other. I am not sure what I expected because of course large numbers of people have to eat, but in a holy place I might have expected that they serve something somber. They provide burgers and pizza like any other tourist establishment. We brought lots of snacks and ate a lot before going but were still hungry, and tried to find something vegan to eat. Apparently the Franciscan pope in office, lover of animals though he is imagined to be, has not regulated the menu. Typically vegetarian food is hard to find here, and even food claimed to be vegan might have eggs or fish or milk in it. Whatever the case, it was hard to find compatible food in the Vatican, and I wonder if things will ever change. In the Raphael Rooms I had not anticipated that the paintings would be so large – the people in The School of Athens and others are life-sized. There was gallery entirely of maps that I had not read about – The Gallery of Maps – I do not know if these were originally art or for study. I really liked the sea monster deeper in the ocean. The Sistine Chapel has an amazing roof and back wall, as is well known, and as others say, this probably is the single most amazing artwork anywhere. Something that I did not anticipate was relatively poor quality artwork on other walls in the Sistine Chapel. I wonder if those walls were painted before or after Michaelangelo. It would have been a horrible commission to get after he did the roof, because there is no comparison to that. Even though the walls are well-executed and could be called masterpieces, I suppose, they look so dopey when seen in context. In the Sistine Chapel talking is not allowed, so very loudly over megaphones, guards there make shhhh sounds. I have never heard shhhhes amplified over loudspeakers before but I suppose it is the best thing to do. Since people come in continually these very loud shhhhes happen every minute at least. We excited the Sistine Chapel to outside where we went to the cupola of Saint Peter’s Basilica to look down. The stairs were made with a low incline so it was fun to walk up and nice to be at the top looking down. We saw a bit of the church, went down and bought some medals from the gift shop, then we had to cross town to pick up paper tickets from a church that arranges for papal audience tickets for Americans.

Wednesday we went to see the pope. Many Wednesdays he has general audience in the courtyard of the Vatican. People with tickets may go hear him. The experience is that people arrive in advance, probably no later than 8am to get a seat for the 10am presentation. Around 9 there are announcements of which church groups are visiting and from where. Sometime around 10 the pope drives around the court in the popemobile, waving and smiling. Everyone is eager to see his face even though he goes by so quickly. Pope Francis looked at Fabian and me when he passed, and he was smiling. He eventually makes his way to the front. There are prayers and a reading from the Bible. The reading for our day was the story of the marriage of Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, and how typically at parties the host serves the good alcohol first so that drunk people take less notice when the cheap wine comes out later. In the miracle, everyone at the party drank all the wine, then Jesus made a lot more, and people commented that this wine was the best. Fabian and I were talking about the meaning of this. He said that the moral was that at parties it is fun to bring out the good stuff even to drunk people. I said I was unsure of the moral. The lesson was translated into lots of languages, as many of the people there spoke neither English or Italian. The pope blessed our religious artifacts, including medals and Christ child doll that Fabian got. Following the service we sat in the shade on some steps and wrote postcards and letters, with me mailing some medals to some friends. There was such a crowd going into the basilica after the pope’s talk, but as we had stepped aside to do other things for a while, it was easy for us to get in. On the way we climbed the Holy Stairs, and to get into the basilica, we got to go through the Holy Door because Francis designated this year as the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. It was fortunate that we got to visit at all, but then more fortunate still that we came in a year of Jubilee.

On Thursday 9 June we went to the the Appian Way. Tourist attractions there include two sets of catacombs and the ruins of a villa said to have been built by Maxentius. One of the catacombs used to hold the remains of Saint Sebastian, until those remains were moved to a church built on top of the catacombs now presenting Sebastian in a more extravagant way. In addition to having his body, the church also has one of the arrow that shot him. For some reason, the church also has some clay into which Jesus stomped his footprints during the “quo vadis?” miracle.

Saint Sebastian is a gay icon and Fabian and I had been noting when we saw paintings of him on this tour. The standard format for depicting Saint Sebastian is to show an attractive guy in his underwear or less standing around looking bored with his hands behind his back and not reacting to arrows piercing his body. Presumably each image, especially when the faces are more detailed, are depictions of someone’s boyfriend.

In the Callisto Catacombs we were surprised to find that the remains of saint and martyr Pope Fabian were kept. Neither Fabian nor I knew that there was a Pope Fabian, but we thought it was fortunate that we were able to visit the site of his namesake’s remains.

After returning to home we were tired. There was a gay pride event that night just a few minutes walk away, and although I wanted to go I really wanted to sleep. Fabian said that he would go alone just for a bit. Immediately after walking outside of our door, Fabian twisted his ankle and was in pain on the sidewalk. He had a serious sprain and could only stop to recover and assess the seriousness of it. I had no idea – I was not checking my phone, and I later found that Fabian could not have contacted me because he left his phone behind anyway. He told me that he sat on the sidewalk in pain, until eventually he felt like coming back up the stairs in a hurt state. He said that he felt good enough to sleep. I had no idea what to do because his ankle was swollen and I did not know if he would need medical attention or anything else. We went to sleep. In the morning he wanted Ibuprofen so I found some for him and he said it helped. We had planned to go to the Roman Forum that morning but he could not walk. I regretted that he was injured, but he was nice to encourage me to go to the Forum without him. I did go, and I was glad for the experience. Actually visiting the Forum was meaningful for me as it put things that I had read into context. After I returned Fabian said that he was well enough to walk to the nearby subway, which we did, then we took the train to Florence.

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The Met, Wikipedia, and the Bangladesh National Museum

By bluerasberry on 2016-04-29

I think that the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) is mostly the best museum in the world. It is called an art museum, but like the British Museum or the Louvre, I think of it as a museum presenting the history of various cultures in art objects. When I think of art, I usually think of creative expression, but with the Met covering so many cultures over so many centuries, my experience of the place is more to think about what a culture was trying to express than what any individual artist was doing. For the first two years I was in New York I am sure I went to this place at least twice a month. Beyond the collection, the curation, explanatory notes, tours, and website are excellent. I still go there as much as I can. I go there more than I go to any other place in the city.

A group of Wikipedians including me attended a Thursday 21 April 2016 meetup at the Met Breuer. This branch just opened the month before in the space left behind when the Whitney Museum moved to their new location. I expected that the Met wanted a relationship with Wikipedia, but going into the meeting, I anticipated that they were interested in a chat about the basics and also that they wanted to meet the group to socialize. For the meeting they offered a tour of the new space. In itself would not be such a powerful draw, but as a group we asked more people to come to make a friendly show to the Met just because it is the Met. Wikipedians at this meeting included Michael Mandiberg, Richard Knipel, Sherry Antoine, David Goodman, Evan Amos, Mike Feist, Nate Feist, Chanitra Bishop, Jim Henderson, and Jeremy Baron, which is a super-star lineup of attendees for a chat.

group of wiki and Met people looking at camera

this is @sree’s pic

Upon arrival someone at the door escorted everyone who came into the boardroom. Like any boardroom, this was an intimate space for about 20 people. The table was a single slab of stone about a foot thick and they had expensive snacks on the table. Typically when Wikipedians are invited anywhere the hosts put them in side rooms with tap water and maybe a bucket of coffee, but for this meeting, obviously catering set out snack and $5 bottles of water. It was a nice welcome to demonstrate that they reserved a room for respected guests and that they made a point to plan for an expense in someone’s budget. What we noticed more than anything is that all this planning meant that this chat was not someone’s side project, but rather, multiple people must have decided that Wikipedians were welcome.

In the lead up to the event there was no listing of the hosts or any particular speakers. When we got there, the hosts were Sree Sreenivasan and Thomas Campbell, which was a flattering surprise. I was expecting a communications intern. Other Met staff in the room were curators and well pressed partner relations staff. I had never heard of a more gracious welcome for Wikipedians anywhere in any context before this. Sree and Thomas were grateful that we all came, and they talked about future plans for the Met.

In various ways, they talked about how digital media was important to them. I have heard that before, and of course with Sree at the Met I expected that he was pushing Thomas as much as he allowed himself to be pushed. What surprised me was that as the conversation went forward, I realized that the provocative ideas were coming from Thomas more than Sree, and that Sree was giving him space to speak. There came a point in the conversation when Thomas said that he imagined that the Met’s organization team gave a comparable level of attention and development to all the Met’s venues, then he listed off the 5th Avenue location, the Cloisters, this location on Madison Avenue, and the website. I stopped him while he was talking and asked him how he felt about the website. He replied directly enough to leave no room for misunderstanding. He said that the website was as important as giving people access to the physical museums. That included the 5th Avenue museum which is a research center and everything else. He said that guests to the Met’s website are just as important as visitors to the museum because they are just as eager to use the Met’s holdings, information, and curated content.

I was shocked. This is exactly what any Wikipedian wants to hear from a museum, and yet so many museums have little regard or much nice to say about their online visitors. Mostly museums present a website as a vehicle to recruit people to visit in person. I have never before heard of a museum which said that serving guests online is as important as serving them in person. Practically all museums spend much more money on their physical location as compared to their websites. Of course investment needs to go toward making their holdings presentable, but beyond that, it is the norm for museums to favor in person attendees. Museums typically want “footfall”, or increased counts of people coming to the museum. The website is imagined to be something which competes with that. The Met’s position seemed very aligned with Wikipedia values.

In 2013 I was fortunate to visit the Bangladesh National Museum in Dhaka. Dhaka is a huge city and this was a nice museum with a great collection showcasing the local culture. On an upper floor of the museum, though, was an exhibit to present arts of different cultures. The idea was that anyone might be coming to this museum to learn about cultural differences, and so they needed representative examples to have conversations about different art traditions. Bangladesh is currently going through a rough time economically, and they have limited budget. It is actually a financially poor country, with Dhaka being relatively wealthy but still a place with significant poverty. In a way comparable to how the Met has its collections arranged as European art, and Chinese art, and galleries of the Middle East and so on, this museum in Dhaka had a gallery of tourist posters from various major museums around the world. These posters were on the wall spaced and treated in the same way that better funded museums would hang their paintings. Any art class could visit the museum and view these images if they like, and reflect on these reproductions to get a close enough approximation of the original work. I bring this up because I have never seen any museum do such a thing. It is unthinkable for me that a museum like the Met, for example, would ever order tourist posters from major museums around the world then invite its guests to learn about the art displayed. The Met has a huge amount of money though, and not all museums have that luxury. Most geographic regions which have demand for a museum are not served by a gallery of any kind because of the immense cost in establishing one and keeping it relevant.

I regret the injustice that so many museums which have enough money to reasonably operate have an improbable fantasy of monetizing prints or derivative works of their public domain collection, when any museum’s collection is so meager compared our shared global heritage. When museums restrict access to high quality digital copies of physical objects which they hold but which are in the public domain, then that lessens the international access to these works that all people in the world have a right to use and enjoy. I do not believe that any museum anywhere actually gets a return on licensing their public domain content, even though they all talk about doing so and use that as a rationale for not sharing digital copies with the Wikimedia community or anyone else. There is a theory among Wikipedians that all museums lie about the success of their licensing programs, telling other museums that they are making money when actually none of them do. No museum openly reports its revenue from such programs. What money there is in gatekeeping the public away from digital copies of public domain works, the effect of restricting access means that museums like one in Dhaka which has an audience for reproductions will find themselves compromised by the selfish practices of museums who claim ownership and control of the public domain. I think that if any gallery anywhere in the world would like to produce prints of public domain works and curate art in their own show, then they should feel encouraged to do so.

Since coming to NYC in 2012 I have been bewildered by the excessive pretentiousness of the the commercial fine art scene here. It imagines that exclusive access to particular artworks is something to desire and restrict at great cost. While I want artists to be financially supported, and I think that artists need professional compensation for their work, I do not think that the art sector as an industry respects artists more than art brokers. I also think that it generates disparaging concepts about sharing art, reproducing art, including the public in art, and presenting free art. The museum sector has a long relationship with the fine art industry. That is all right, and I understand the history. But going forward, we are coming to an age when 2D art is becoming easy to replicate on paper, and 3D art is getting easier to print also. Right now, it is taboo to respectfully suggest that viewing high quality reproductions of an artwork is comparable to viewing the real thing. The Victoria and Albert Museum has its Cast Courts, but those copies are from another era that made single duplicates at great cost. The museum of the future might be more like the Bangladesh National Museum, in which a docent can present replicas of pieces from any museum and guests can appreciate the art in the context of it being a treasure for all humans instead of it being the exclusive holding of a single organization or individual. It never will be possible for all the local residents of Dhaka to visit the Met, but there could be a program for the art of the Met to appear in prints or on video screens or in any other form at any gallery, anywhere in the world, for a manageable cost.

I said at the beginning that the Met was mostly the best museum in the world. I will credit the Met for being extremely brave for expressing its commitment to its own website, and also by extension some kind of commitment for outreach to Wikipedia. No other museum has ever done such a thing for Wikipedia. However, I will also challenge the Met for cowardice, and ask it to answer its own fears. I understand that the Met will be encouraging all kinds of people to visit its website. However, the real best museum in the world is the National Museum of Bangladesh, because that museum was the first to take the logical and practical step of buying tourist posters of various famous artworks from various museums in the world and hanging them in its international gallery. To study art, there are some works and styles which are so important that every art student should be able to see them to begin conversation on a common ground with other people discussing art, and any museum who cannot purchase an original old master should feel comfortable displaying a life size print. The National Museum of Bangladesh does this so that puts it at the forefront of the digital revolution. The cowardice which is still in the heart of the Met is that the Met has not yet held an exhibition of the cheapest possible reproductions in its galleries. The museum of the future and of global experience is one that anyone can visit in their own neighborhood and gain some understanding of art held at any other location anywhere. If the Met ever has such an exhibition, then I think they would be setting an excellent example for all current museums. Anyone who has access to a public room of any size anywhere who wishes to respectably host an art showing of any works from any museum should get as much respect and appreciation as the worthy exhibit in Dhaka.

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WikiReporter.org – hackathon project

By bluerasberry on 2016-04-13

On Friday-Saturday April 8-9 I participated in the The Huffington Post and Change.org Editors Lab] with Richard Knipel (user:Pharos) and a new friend, Pablo Duboue introduced to me by user:JeremyB. The theme of the event was, “Impact Journalism”, with the question to address being, “How can news organizations develop innovative and interactive ways to create impact by connecting audiences with issues they care about?”

I was invited for my relationship with Consumer Reports and Open Knowledge, but was representing Consumer Reports. I needed a team of three, and as it happened, it seemed better for me to join with two other Wikipedians and do a project that advanced interests of Consumer Reports, Wikipedia, Open Knowledge, and the hackathon target. Our project did not qualify with a ranking. First I will describe the winning projects, then our project, then the event generally.

Winning projects
The other projects are better explained on their own project pages. Please excuse any misunderstandings I have in presenting them.

The team from Mic won with their project called “Offsite“. Offsite is a concept for an advertising system which presents a link or tool to the second-tier social media platforms, including change.org, eventbrite, and kickstarter. The idea is that social media platforms of this tier need a tool which interfaces with their APIs so that if someone wanted to generate ads from a given project on their platforms, then a tool like offsite could be readily placed wherever an ad might normally be placed except that it can be made to safely and clearly direct the readers to these other social media platforms. I like this concept because it imagines that there is a level of social media platforms which could be imagined as a collective and peers to each other, and that they could share a tool for other websites to direct to anywhere in the collective. I also like the idea of publishers being able to run ads to these other platforms. There could be more discussion about how this would work – surely this concept has already been discussed somewhere.

The team from The New York Times was a runner up with a project called “involve.me“. Their idea was to have a browser extension which annotates websites hoverboxes in key places describing activist causes. I think browser extensions which do Genius-style annotation and more are part of the wave of the future. I have been hearing variations of this concept for years and I continue to like it every time I hear it. There are so many ways to make the base idea of annotation to be fresh and compelling.

The team from Huffington Post was a runner up with a project called “pick 4“. Pick 4 is a tool for allowing the reader of a news article to send the link to any of a suggested four Facebook friends who might be interested in it. The tool is based on a new Facebook functionality which allows developers to call a database of all the interests for a given reader. Suppose that any publisher has a news article. As the reader reads the article, somewhere in the article a Facebook tool is present which checks that reader’s Facebook friends, and chooses four of them who are most likely to also be interested in that article, based on how Facebook’s algorithms match them with keywords in the article. The reader can then manually choose to share the article with those people, if they like.

The team from Buzzfeed was a runner up with a project called Otus. Otus is a tool which watches mostly boring websites for changed text, then alerts subscribes when text changes. One thing that this would detect is warrant canaries, but it might be useful for monitoring any body of text which ought not change.

Our project – WikiReporter.org
See the tool live at WikiReporter.org. See hackathon documentation on the hackathon page, or repeated here:

Wikireporter.org is a wizard for assisting citizen journalists in publishing news articles about events to Wikinews. Examples of events which might be covered include protests, political speeches, academic conferences, and parades. The citizen journalist who uses the tool gets the benefit of an easy way to publish text and images of public events that they attend. Behind the scenes, the use of a form also creates linked data. Since the system publishes to Wikinews, it is suitable to pair with other Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia and Wikidata. Having access to the Wikidata knowledge base permits assisted translation, categorization, and machine reading of data associated with each event documented with this tool.
Technologies used for this project:
The project various Wikimedia projects and their respective Wikimedia volunteer communities for crowdsourced support of every user submission. Wikinews is the news community and publishing platform, Wikimedia Commons reviewers check and host image submissions, Wikipedia provides links to reference information, and Wikidata manages the linked data. See further documentation on English Wikinews at Wikinews:WikiReporter.

At the beginning, Pablo suggested a Wikinews project, and Richard and I agreed. For Consumer Reports, I wanted to have a project that made it easier to bring coverage of protests and academic conferences to Wikipedia. Richard had the idea of covering parades and speeches. I am not sure how we came to discuss events, or how we came upon the idea that all events could be imagined in the same way for the purpose of journalism, but we did. The tool we developed would be a form which asks the user questions about an event. The questions seek basic event details, and as the user answers them, the form generates text which start a Wikinews article. The target demographic for using the tool would be either a new user to Wikinews who wants to write an article, but who has no idea where to start; or alternatively, someone who wants to generate a Wikinews article through their phone and can only do limited typing.

The tool cannot generate good articles, but at least, it establishes a minimal floor of quality in that if someone answers the questions, then basic event details will be presented. Also, there is functionality to add a picture to the article, so for example if someone were at a parade, they could publish the details of the parade, and pictures, and publish something immediately. Other Wikinews requirements still have to be met – sources have to be noted, and there has to be a way of confirming journalists’ notes, and there has to be some journalist insight beyond just presenting facts. A Wikinewsie has already been aggressive in pushing back against the project on the talk page and I would expect that others would be too if they saw it, just because people in small Wikipedia projects are generally so attacked that they remain in a defensive posture.

I think the major innovation of the project is that it creates a channel for the assignment of an authority control to every event. With that in place, then information coming from that event can be cataloged and cited. So photos, videos, documents, transcriptions, presentations, and data about the event can all be matched with the unique name for the event (authority control) and from there, connect to all other information about the event. The Wikidata part of this project does not yet work, but it could be as automatic as everything else. Here is how that plays out in the event examples:

For a conference –

  1. WikiReporter prompts someone to start an entry with basic conference details, like the point of the conference, where it is held, and the main speakers. A news article is made.
  2. WikiReporter prompts people to share photographs or videos and puts those into a holding category.
  3. A Wikidata entry is made for the event.
  4. The Wikidata entry establishes the authority control, which itself establishes how to categorize all media created for this event.
  5. Other data could be connected to the Wikidata entry – “papers presented”, for example, so that anyone who finds any photo, news item, or anything about the conference can follow to the source and get as much published information as exists about what was presented at the conference.

In this case, the Wikinews story would be the public face of all this data and the entry point for anyone to find more about this conference.

For a parade the Wikipedia article for the parade would be the entry point for most readers to learn more. Parades are typically more significant for repeatedly happening over years, so most readers would likely want to see the Wikipedia article for historical context. From the Wikipedia article, they might want to connect to get information about parades in any given year, and coverage of each year’s parade would best be in Wikinews.

For a protest the Wikipedia article for the controversial would be the entry point for most readers to learn more. People wanting to learn about a protest are usually more interested in the social issue than in the event itself. From the Wikipedia article, they might want to connect to get information about all of the protests that have ever happened related to the topic, including counter protests or protests in other places. Coverage of individual protest events would be in Wikinews.

For a speech the Wikinews story would be the public face of all this data and the entry point for anyone to find more about this conference. We have been discussing in the Wikimedia community about the copyright of speeches. Scripted talks are copyrighted, of course, but unscripted talks have been imagined to be not copyrighted. It is a troublesome situation – Wikisource editors would like to archive the text of every speech given in every language. For political speeches especially, it would be nice to have the right to publish what politicians say. Even in the United States this is legally uncertain. Some time ago some of us Wikipedians talked with PBS when they hosted the 2016 Democratic Presidential Debate. Works by employees of the US Federal Government are in the public domain when they produce them as part of their work. Work by government officials not representing the central government is not in the public domain, so without a copyright release, Wikimedia projects cannot host them.

There is more to consider and discuss!

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Should prison inmates be permitted to edit Wikipedia?

By bluerasberry on 2016-04-05

Should prison inmates be permitted to edit Wikipedia? I assisted a prison inmate in placing a request for Wikipedia edits, and my action was examined in a post at The Wikipedian, which is the blog of Wikipedia commentator William Beutler. I will explain what I did, what context this action has in Wikipedia culture, who made the edits, and my own motivation for being involved.

In the context of Wikipedia, nothing extraordinary happened with this, and the matter does not merit special attention. If this matter gets extra attention, then that is because someone chose to make it special among their other options. If anyone outside of Wikipedia wishes to look into Wikipedia culture, then the surprise in this incident might be that Wikipedia seeks to avoid discriminating against any person who follows Wikimedia community rules. I would not have thought to write a blog post about it except that a few people have contacted me about this, and I thought that it would be helpful to deconstruct the story to its basics if that would help anyone understand Wikipedia better and participate in constructive conversation.

When I processed the request, I did so casually without much thought and without expecting attention to the action. Any case can be made into a case study, and any case study can be generalized to its essential points. If there is an issue to discuss here, then I wish that it could be discussed outside the context of this particular inmate making the request, and outside the context of my responding to it. The general issue of inmates engaging in Wikipedia might interest some people but my view is that the request examined by Beutler has enough characteristics in common with other similar cases that it need not be considered alone, and might not even be an ideal case to discuss with other similar ones.

In summary, I performed the routine action of posting an editing request on Wikipedia on behalf of a person who asked that any Wikipedia volunteer assist them with this. The request was in a volunteer queue that could have been answered by anyone, and mostly by chance that I was looking, I pulled the ticket for this request and managed it with some minutes of thought and labor. There is no special need to make a case study of this, but since Bill has already started a discussion, I will continue the conversation here by confirming that it is unusual or perhaps unprecedented on Wikipedia for an incarcerated person to request edits in Wikipedia. I treated this request in the same way that I would treat any of the hundreds of other requests that come to Wikipedia in this task queue every week. In the narrative of Wikipedia, I hope that I did not do anything remarkable or surprising here except perhaps be standing for Wikipedia duty. Another person taking this ticket might have negotiated it to the same end, or any person with a conviction in their background and access to a computer might have posted their own request. In either of those cases, Bill would have made the same blog post asking the same question: should prison inmates be permitted to edit Wikipedia?

What happened
I reiterate that what actually happened here is quite ordinary. A person made a request on Wikipedia for article changes. Beutler described what happened well enough in his blog. To back up to the fundamentals of the process I will summarize:

There is a process by means of which anyone may request edits to Wikipedia outside the website. This process is managed by the “Volunteer Response Team“, commonly called the OTRS team because of the “online ticket response system” software that the team uses to manage tasks. I volunteer for the OTRS team. There is nothing prestigious about managing OTRS tickets, but people who are granted the userright to do this are expected to know their way around the wikis and I fit that description. The major right granted is that whenever anyone emails “info@wikimedia.org”, those emails go to this volunteer team and not – as many people imagine – to paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation or any other organization.

All sorts of people write into OTRS. People commonly request that someone edit Wikipedia on their behalf. While OTRS volunteers typically do not do Wikipedia editing on request, they might relay the request by posting in on Wikipedia’s boards and asking if any other volunteer might like to fulfill it. In this way, the OTRS role means transcribing a request from email into Wikipedia somehow, so that people who are not engaging with the Wikipedia website can still have a presence on-wiki by email. This is rarely ideal. The standing request from the Wikipedia community is that people just go to Wikipedia and make their request directly, without a mediator.

There are cases when there is no alternative. Perhaps for whatever reason, a person cannot access Wikipedia, or they have an urgent request and are unable to learn Wikipedia well enough to do a task in a timely manner, or maybe they just felt like emailing despite Wikipedia telling them in every way that the normal and expected behavior is to engage within the website. It is not possible to email Facebook and ask any team to assist making a routine Facebook post, and not possible to email Twitter and ask them to publish a tweet in some general Twitter account, but just as a catch-all in Wikipedia if someone needs to communicate something they can take the extraordinary step of emailing and talking by email with whatever volunteer they get. No volunteer gets any customer service training and the entire team presents the face of the Wikimedia community however they feel like doing it, with the major restriction being that the OTRS team manages itself to an amorphous standard of quality.

In this context, I as an OTRS agent logged into the private queue for the volunteer response team and saw an OTRS ticket making a routine request. The request was for someone to edit the Wikipedia article which featured the requester as the subject. There were a few odd things about this request. The editing request would be mailed to me on paper. The request was from a public figure whose name I recognized. The most unusual thing was that the person making the request behaved as if they had read Wikipedia’s rules and had made an effort to follow them. I doubt that I see 1 in 100 of these requests from a person who even acknowledges the nature of Wikipedia, which is “Wikipedia is a summary of published sources. Information not backed by a reference can be removed. Information added to Wikipedia should be backed with a citation to the source from which it came.” I feel that the person making the request in this case made a properly formatted request.

I processed the request as I would any other and as I have many before. I posted the request to the appropriate discussion queue in Wikipedia, which is the talk page for the article on this person. By the procedures, this was a straightforward process. But should prison inmates be permitted to edit Wikipedia? Should there be a special rule which keeps certain people out of Wikipedia based on their off-wiki behavior? Perhaps, but in this case, I pass no judgement on the person making the request. They are incarcerated, which is where their society wants them to be, and they are free to write letters. I treated them as I would treat anyone else making a request.

Context in Wikimedia culture
As a Wikipedia reviewer, here are the concerns that came to my mind when I saw the ticket:

  1. Is the request formatted in the manner that Wikipedia’s bureaucracy can accept?
  2. This person is requesting edits to an article where they have a conflict of interest, which in this case is the article about themselves. The common view of conflict of interest editors in Wikipedia is that they are deranged. Is this request being made in a reasonable way?
  3. Is this a libel issue, or can this request be treated routinely?
  4. This person is a prison inmate. Does that mean that there is a safety concern to the Wikipedia community?

My answers to these questions are as follows:

  1. Yes, the request is good and in line with the bureaucracy.
  2. The request seemed neutral. It was clear enough and was formatted as a typical request. Most attempts by companies and individuals to edit articles about themselves are quite wild and rude, and many people avoid looking to those items because often there is no way to resolve them amiably.
  3. No, there is no libel complaint here, so this request can be treated as any other editing suggestion.
  4. I made the subjective judgement that there is no safety concern here.

Questions that did not come to my mind at the time are “Is this person who they say that they are?”, because Wikipedia editors do not typically take identity or credentials into account, or “Should I treat this person differently because they are a public figure?” because if identity is uncertain by default then it follows that individuals do not get treated differently then they use Wikipedia services.

The issue about safety concerns is that some people imagine that Wikipedia has a code of conduct that prohibits certain kinds of people from editing Wikipedia based on their conduct off-wiki. Wikipedia does not currently have a code of conduct. It will eventually. I have participated in the development of Wikimedia safety policies since 2012. Meta-Wiki is the place where the most abstract rules for the Wikimedia community are curated, and on the Meta-Wiki page “Code of Conduct” I noted that there is no project-wide code of conduct and still none has been adopted. As with everything in wiki-world, rules are written by the community, but because no one in the world has been able to write constructive community rules (including big players with money like Facebook and Twitter), the Wikipedia community has not adopted any particular community expectations for morality and ethics. This is not to say that Wikipedia is without social expectations, or miscellaneous rules, because those things are there. The rules that exist just have not been codified into a manifesto that the community can use. I used the placeholder “codes of conduct” page to link to every other online community that I could find, and eventually, when there is a Wikipedia code of conduct, it will be at that page. I have proposed just copying all the existing draft codes one after the other in one mega-document, then parsing down, and calling that version 1.0. The lack of a code of conduct has not been a pressing issue yet, so since 2013 or so, we have just talked about adopting a code of conduct guide eventually.

I bring this up to say that there is no rule on Wikipedia which says, “If you have been convicted of a serious crime, then you are not allowed to participate in the Wikipedia community.” People ask whether that might be a rule someday, and there is no clear answer yet. If there were such a rule, then its intent would be to create barriers for safety between the Wikimedia community and certain people associated with risk or negativity. My thought is that such a rule is unlikely to be accepted in Wikipedia. One reason for in-wiki opposition to this idea is that there is a Wikipedia community value that contributors to Wikipedia should be judged by the quality of their editorial contributions, and not by their off-wiki life, to the extent that this is possible. There is a Wikipedia cultural value that there should be no hierarchy in the community and that there should be a culture of equality. There is no special rank or privilege awarded in Wikipedia to people with advanced education or experience, except to the extent that if they are talented and follow Wikipedia’s rules, then they might have more editorial effectiveness with the same effort as compared to someone with less talent and less willingness to follow Wikipedia’s rules. In the same way that there is no pressure in Wikipedia to assign ranks of privilege, the community avoids devising markers of humility to indicate lower classes like for example incarceration status. There is lore in the community of reference work developers that it is best to accept good contributions from any source. The Oxford English Dictionary is perhaps the world’s most respected English language dictionary, and popular narratives have recounted that convicted murderer W. C. Minor made essential contributions to the work while an inmate in prison and a sanitarium. To Wikipedians, this story teaches some openness to accepting ideas even from people at the bottom of society.

About the conflict of interest issue – subjectively, this request seemed reasonable. If I had to guess, I would say 20% of all public figures known to the Western world have at some point made some request relating to Wikipedia’s coverage of them. It might be a more shocking story to recognize that every company in the world has paid a PR agency to do something about them on Wikipedia, and that everyone in the world with an agent managing their online image has had their agent engage with Wikipedia somehow, and that there is a mass disconnect between the world audience all being Wikipedia readers while larger media houses disparage Wikipedia and pretend that Wikipedia has no major role in the communication sector. Various companies also pretend that they do not pay and commission deranged covert agents to try to edit Wikipedia about themselves in ways that are consciously contrary to the site’s terms of use. I live in New York City, and so far as I know, every major organization with a headquarters here has a communication department which has paid communications consultants $$$$ to cause mischief in Wikipedia and bother Wikipedia volunteers. Having a desire to request edits about Wikipedia’s coverage of things close to one’s self is common. In the case of this inmate request, an ordinary request went through the usual channel and I processed it in the usual way that I would sane and friendly requests.

Right now, in April 2016, there is other cultural context to consider. Presently there is a discussion on Jimbo’s talk page (Jimbo is Wikipedia’s benevolent dictator) about the weight that ought to be given to people with academic credentials. This is a discussion ongoing since 2006 with the Essjay controversy or even since 2001 at Wikipedia’s founding or before. The status quo is that the Wikipedia community does not check credentials or identity in any way, because the quality control process in Wikipedia requires that reviewers check the reliability of sources cited and the quality of research without regard for who submitted it. This is relevant to the inmate situation, because just as credentials do not grant favor, so would a negative record not by default be cause for in-community discrimination. In the March 23 2016 issue of The Signpost, the Wikipedia community newsletter, there is a profile of a case in which a convicted sex offender is blocked from using Wikipedia. In that case, the context I read in the reporting is the Wikipedia community is safer with this person being prevented from engaging socially in the Wikimedia projects on the argument that the person is at high risk to offend again based on the past conviction. I do not know the facts of that case and I have hardly read the story, but I understand the sentiment. To the extent that the Wikimedia community defines any class of person as “dangerous”, I also want such people to be blocked from Wikipedia. If the Wikimedia community draws a line and says, “These sorts of people are not allowed”, then I would follow that rule.

As ongoing projects, Kiwix is an offline version of Wikipedia. The Swiss Wikipedians are able to provide this in some jails, as in that country, there is a philosophy that jails should encourage the reform of inmates to help with their rehabilitation back into society as people who ought to contribute constructively. There is a “Wikitherapy” project, and while it only targets people who are bound to their homes or hospitals, it could target any sort of incarcerated person. Wikitherapy’s team has stated no interest in convicted populations but I have watched the program and thought it was interesting for all kinds of people.

The editor in question
I know of the editor, Charles Watson. He has been in prison since 1969, so 47 years, and since age 24. He is remembered for his role in a high-profile murder case that is still popularly discussed in the United States and beyond. I studied this case in the context of my own spirituality and my sexuality. The spiritual aspect was because of my interest in the advent of Indian culture to the Western world. Donovan introduced the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to The Beach Boys and The Beatles, who in turn popularized Indian culture in the Western world heavily influencing counterculture of the 1960s. Manson, Watson’s colleague, had well-known social connections to the Beach Boys and used the Beatles in his philosophy. I read the popular book Helter Skelter to learn more. Regarding sexuality – there was a time not long ago when the LGBT public figures were fewer. Director John Waters in 1981 wrote a book called Shock Value, and in the “All my trials” chapter he talks about being in the audience of the late 1960s Manson trial and about visiting Watson in prison regularly thereafter. Waters talked about Watson’s conversion to Christianity and acceptance of his crime and conviction. Waters’ presentation of Watson is that he is a quite ordinary person, except that he did a horrific crime, but in prison everyone is the same. I was moved at the time to think that anyone could care about what happens to strangers in prison. Because Waters cared, I felt like maybe I should care too, because Waters was an LGBT icon. I did not solicit this sort of case from anyone, but when I saw the ticket in the task queue, I did recognize the name. I never expected anyone to make anything of the processing of that ticket.

My motivation
I am not sure what my motivation is or what my philosophical positions are, but I have worked and volunteered in criminal justice and have experience with the systems.

  1. When I was ~19 I was arrested. The charge was one thing, but I was in rural Texas, and I feel that the best explanation of my arrest was that I appeared gay.
  2. Until 2003 it was illegal to be gay in the United States, and even in the LGBT community there used to be more negativity and fear of discrimination. When I was younger I sometimes felt like a criminal, and met other people who felt the same way. Now I think that even though there are different and serious pressures on LGBT people, feeling illegal is not among them for people in the Western world. I have had friends who were gay bashed by police. When gay bashing happens now, it is only because of discrimination, and not because of vigilante justice, so that is better. Homosexuality is still illegal in India for example, and my gay friends there tell stories like relics from my past.
  3. I have a relative who is in prison for gay bashing.
  4. I was an investigator for a public defender office
  5. I taught math and science to boys in jail through AmeriCorps
  6. I did fulfillment in a “books to prisoners” program
  7. I did clinical research with a demographic including many guys in community sentencing after conviction
  8. I have a long history of involvement with HIV research, which includes not passing judgement about any medically significant behavior that anyone might do, regardless of legality.
  9. In college I lived in a 10 bedroom house with all rooms individually rented. One new housemate was on parole. He had to ask everyone in the house – all strangers and mostly college age like him – for permission to move in. When his parole officer dropped in for visits, I was comfortable talking with her. This is what happens to people on parole – they go somewhere to live in the community, and either they are accepted or else they go elsewhere. I hardly interacted with this person, but it was still an experience of making a decision about whether to treat a convicted person in a different way.

I present these experiences to establish that I am a person who has some credibility for being thoughtful in making a decision about judging the safety of a request from an incarcerated person. None of these experiences are qualifications, but most people have no interaction with concepts of law and justice and I have had some. At different parts of my life I have wondered what it means to be an outcast, and to be outside the law. It is my own personal bias that I associate compassion for LGBT people with compassion generally. I cannot make an argument that compassion for one group of outcasts ought to be generalized to everyone, but for me personally, having some outsider experiences has made me try to be more sensitive to issues of fairness in the criminal justice system.

I want peace, justice, fairness, and compassion. If people are convicted of crimes then they do a service to society with their incarceration. Some people say that a prison sentence meets a debt to society, and some people say that even after prison convicted persons should experience additional consequences. I have no opinion except that somehow in the end I wish that everyone involved in a crime could get whatever acceptance and resolution is possible.

When I had the letters from Watson at home on my desk my boyfriend Fabian saw the envelopes and he thought they looked strange, and he asked me about them. I told him that I posted a message on Wikipedia from a prison inmate. He became upset, and asked why I would do a favor for a convicted person and empower them. I told him that I felt that people in prison, especially people in prison for decades, had low social status and that most people would consider incarceration to be among the most wretched and lowest sorts of lives. He had a close friend, Angel Melendez, with whom he spent a lot of time and who among many other adventures had officiated his marriage to his boyfriend of the time at an NYC Pride March. Angel was murdered, and the people convicted of the murder were released from prison after what some would call a short amount of time. Fabian was asking why I was helping bring comfort into the life of someone like the person who killed his friend.

I have no answer. I do not wish for any pass for anyone’s conviction, or softer sentencing or any particular criminal justice reform. I want fairness, even though I do not always know what that means. When I processed the Watson request, I wished for it to be taken for what it was – a Wikipedia request in a community that tries to treat everyone equally – and not for anyone to consider this case specifically any more deeply.

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Content accuracy versus accessibility

By bluerasberry on 2016-03-24

Wikipedia’s content typically has at least okay accuracy and its audience is huge, plus its accuracy is inexpensive to improve to the quality level of any other source. Other communication channels may or may not have more accurate than Wikipedia, but almost always they serve a smaller audience, and it is expensive to increase traffic to them. There is less cost to increasing Wikipedia’s quality than there is to increasing another communication channel’s traffic, and in some comparisons for some messages, Wikipedia is the least expensive communication option.

Suppose that someone wanted to communicate information to a mass audience, and they were considering how they should invest their limited resources in having a good communication plan. This might mean publishing and distributing papers, or it might mean establishing a webpage and directing traffic to it, or communicating in any other way.

I communicate through Wikipedia. I consider how Wikipedia compares to other communication options. Previously, I wrote about how people compare the relative value of online communication channels, and discussed the “exchange rates for communication metrics“. Everyone considers their communication strategies of choice. The basis for my preference for Wikipedia is my observation that Wikipedia articles get a large audience. When I speak with other communication professionals, they often will not come to share my interest in Wikipedia. In my opinion, the basis of most criticism of Wikipedia is that its media content is low value and that its large audience accessibility is irrelevant. There is a counterpoint to that perspective, which is that other publishing platforms host content of relatively high value, and that even if that content has a smaller audience which uses the content less frequently, then still somehow there is more impact from having a communication strategy which disregards all communication except to channels which get esteem for their quality.

Even if Wikipedia’s content is lower quality or lower accuracy than alternatives (there is almost no research comparing Wikipedia’s quality to alternatives, and arguably, what exists says that Wikipedia’s quality is as good or better than alternatives), Wikipedia’s high accessibility and history of use makes it a powerful communication tool. In contrast, I think Wikipedia’s media competitors in similar spaces should be less confident about the relative quality of their information, and also, should recognize that their accessibility, reach, and audience share is low in any comparison with Wikipedia for any subject on which people seek online information.

Makovsky, a New York City-based public relations company, recently published Pulse of Online Health, a report based on surveys that they did. This report seems to be related to another report called Pulse of Online Search, published around the same time. Here is more information:

  1. Kelton (February 2016), Pulse of Online Search Survey: Initial Data (PDF), Makovsky PR, retrieved 25 March 2016
  2. Bernstein, Arielle (10 March 2016), Trust Me / I’m Easy – Makovsky Pulse of Online Search Survey 2016, Makovsky PR, retrieved 25 March 2016
  3. Sixth Annual “Pulse of Online Search”
  4. Fifth Annual “Pulse of Online Health”

I wish to present one finding, then I will discuss the methodology of that finding.

Their finding was that survey respondents ranked Wikipedia as the least-trusted health information resource, and that that people reported using it last among other options, but that it ranked as best for ease of use. (for best and worst, Wikipedia actually ties by 1% with others). This also means that respondents felt other health information resources had better quality, and were used more, and had higher ease of use. The methodology that they used was a ranking of various online health information sources by “trust, usage, and ease of use”.

I am pleased with this result, and I think most Wikipedians would expect to see data of this sort. There is nothing surprising about large numbers of people saying that Wikipedia’s content is low value and that they do not use it. What is surprising to me is that this PR company is presenting content value as information which should be taken in context with use and accessibility. I will share my perception of the historical context of this:

  1. Before the Internet, reach was determined by number of paper items circulated or sold, or the presumed audience which was physically exposed to media
  2. After the advent of the Internet, there was an idea in the communication industry that media views should be quantified. Since that time, there has been driving pressure on everyone who communicates anything to have access to a count of metrics and to treat that count as a proxy for conversions or impact.
  3. As metrics counting is becoming an industry practice, then over time, more people are considering the concept of the “communication metrics exchange rate“, by which I mean the relative value of communication reach in one channel versus another.

I like that the field is developing in a way that more people in communications consider relative merits of communication channels beyond simple getting high counts and taking those counts without considering their deeper meaning. As more people insist on evaluations of quality to be tied to counts of reach, I think the profile of Wikipedia will be raised.

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purpose of this blog

This is Lane Rasberry's personal blog. None of the information on this blog is private, but it is personal and I have not written it with the intent to make it of public general interest. Anyone visiting this site has my permission to use anything they find here for friendly, share-alike purposes.