Saint Patrick’s Day for All 2016

By bluerasberry on 2016-03-17

On Sunday 6 March, Fabian, his housemate and I went to “Saint Pat’s For All”, which is an all-inclusive Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. The complaint was that the organizers of the traditional Saint Patrick’s Day Parade restrict who can march in the parade, notably, by banning LGBT people. St. Pat’s for All is not an LGBT parade, but it is intended to be more fun for participants than it is to be an exhibition for organizers to present sponsors and propagate an ideology.

Mayor De Blasio was at the parade. He gave a speech from a raised platform. The parade started, and bands, community organizations, and individuals marched along the parade route. There was a good turnout of spectators and parade marchers. Various troupes went first, then the mayor was walking along in his own space between some other groups. The event was not so crowded, and the mayor was making eye contact with as many people as possible. Fabian blew him kisses, and the mayor blew kisses back to Fabian. That would not have been allowed in the other Saint Patrick’s Parade, and it is nice to see the major support this one.

Later, I took the day of my birthday off work. Fabian and I went to the Tenement Museum. They were offering an “Irish Immigrants” tour, and we took that one. The museum is in an tenement (low income housing) built in 1863. For whatever reason, this particular building survived until 1988 without major renovation and was re-opened as a museum at that point. Historians have done whatever they can to discover who lived in the building and when, and whatever details of their lives were recorded, and what the neighborhood was like in the past. For our tour, we were taken to some original apartment rooms. In one, nothing was restored, and the room is in decay. In another, the room is recreated in the style of the time as a family might have lived.

The tour guide shared information with us about an Irish family which had lived in the building. Apparently there used to be public address directories in which anyone could register their name, occupation, and address in the directory, and the entire book would be updated yearly and published for distribution throughout New York. I am not sure what I imagined, but the concept seemed to me to be like a phone book. Now I know that these sorts of directories existed before phones. She showed copies of the directory in two subsequent years. In the first, the man listed had one address. In the second, the address listed was of the tenement, and this was presented as evidence that in this year the man moved into the building. They found other records – birth certificates and maybe church records. I was surprised that they found enough to establish a narrative.

For this particular family, there were a husband and wife and 3 children in a 400 square foot apartment. That is the minimum apartment size in New York now. It is very tight, especially for that many people, and supposedly some families had 10 people in such apartments. The guide talked about how much work it was to carry up water, and how hot and cold the room would get, and how daily chores were so burdensome. She also said that the father was employed as a waiter, and the mother stayed at home. From one perspective, they were telling the story of hardships in previous times, and I have no doubt, times used to be harder. Something that I could not understand was how it could have ever been than the income of one waiter could support a family of five. I suppose the area of the museum was cheaper then, and that it was a bad part of town, but New York in any circumstances would have been more expensive than almost anywhere else in America. Surely also waiter jobs paid less then, right? Were the workers not poorly paid and oppressed for lack of social development and no history of demanding rights? How was it that ever in New York a single waiter’s salary could support a family without welfare, or did they have welfare? I am still thinking about that one.

The tour guide said that all Irish people in New York knew about the St. Patrick’s Parade, and that it actually started in 1762. That surprised me. I did not know that the parade was so old, and that it was founded as an Irish solidarity movement for demanding rights. The guide showed political cartoons of the time. In some, the Irish are depicted as drunken apes rioting for the day, and in others, the parade is presented as an orderly respectable affair. I suppose people have said all kinds of things about the parade in its history. I suppose also that it could never have been imagined in the past that non-Irish would want to march in the parade to raise awareness for any number of social issues, long after Irish identity was not anyone’s defining trait in New York.

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The strange structure of the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees

By bluerasberry on 2016-03-07

Every nonprofit organization says that they have a mission, but actually there is always another concern which they do not publicly discuss. The public facing goal is always to advance the mission of the nonprofit movement with which it is aligned. For example, an educational nonprofit organization might say their mission is to promote education, or a health nonprofit organization might say that their goal is to improve community health. However, the first goal of nonprofit organizations frequently comes into conflict with the second secret goal of the organization, which is to sustain the nonprofit organization itself to its own benefit and potentially at the expense of its stated nonprofit mission.

A nonprofit organization and its mission are not the same thing, and what is good for one may not be good for the other. One might assume that a nonprofit organization is a steward of some cause, and that is often true, and it can happen that a nonprofit organization for a cause needs long term stability so that its mission can develop over a long period of time. It is difficult to say what should happen when the self-preservation of an organization or its staff come into conflict with the nonprofit mission.

Conflict between nonprofit mission versus self-preservation

To give a simple example of conflict between organization and mission, consider the Wikimedia Foundation. An example of conflict in the past is that there have been software projects in development which have been released prematurely to serve needs within the Wikimedia Foundation, but in such a way that the software release created a burden on the Wikimedia community and was contrary to the best interests of the Wikimedia movement for the ill-will, bad press, and anti-community feelings that were generated in the process. From the community’s perspective, software ought to be released when it is likely to be most useful and least harmful for most users, and at the time when releasing it is likely to give more benefit than it is to cause harm. There have been software releases by the Wikimedia Foundation which have resulted in harm, and the Wikimedia community responded to the harm with a user revolts, and there were other costs to the movement as a result. There have been retracted Wikimedia software releases, and a retraction is only a negative outcome except that perhaps it creates closure on a development idea, and it demonstrates an outcome to avoid in the future. In thinking about retractions, a good way to reflect on the experience is considering whether the Wikimedia Foundation ought to have expected a user revolt in response to their actions. Because there have been several high-profile user revolts, and because anecdotally it seems like a lot of Wikimedia community members seem to be able to make accurate predictions about when a user revolt will be more or less likely as the outcome of an action, some people might say that the Wikimedia Foundation ought to be able to assess when its actions or more or less risky, and be conscious of when it is taking actions that are likely to lead to a user revolt. There are complaints in the community that say that many people can predict revolts, but for whatever reason, historically decision makers at the Wikimedia Foundation have seemed to be unaware of the degree of controversy they choose as they select different courses of action. I am not sure what the defense in the Wikimedia Foundation is – perhaps they say that community sentiment cannot be predicted, but whatever the case, so far as I know they never discuss such things publicly.

Another cause to explain Wikimedia Foundation willingness to do risky things against community approval could be that the blame is on a lack of coordinated decision making process, and that when bad decisions come from the Wikimedia Foundation, the bad decision is actually a consequence of certain individuals making their own decisions for their own benefit without regard for the organization or the nonprofit mission. For example, suppose that there is a junior-level software developer whose job it is to develop some software project. From this person’s perspective, they want to do coding. However, maybe Wikimedia Foundation marketing or funding development has been making promises to funders that certain software functions will complete on a certain schedule then be released at a certain time. Now pressure comes to the developer who ought not think about these things, and maybe they contact community relations to solicit for public support for the project even though on the demanded schedule the project is doomed. Junior level staff just want to do their jobs peacefully, so the major pressure on them is to do the best they can on the schedule and follow orders even if they can see a user revolt as a likely outcome. From the perspective of the Wikimedia Foundation, and to its own benefit, perhaps it would like to please its funders even if that threatens its “social license“. Bad decisions sometimes originate at the level of lower level workers and job morale. The Wikimedia Foundation has a history of sending good workers into projects without any paid staff realizing that the work products could not be useful to the Wikimedia community and would attract protest if they came to be seen publicly. I pity the workers – they want meaning in their work, and their own professional development, and they certainly do not want 6-24 months of their work to be described online as misuse of funds. Lower level employees need protection from management that if they do their work well as directed, then Google searches for their names will not lead to criticism that employers and colleagues read for the rest of their lives. If individual workers have been developing a doomed project that does not serve the Wikimedia mission, there is a conflict in that the Wikimedia Foundation is pressured for its own benefit to do whatever it can to make the project seem useful. Spinning the issue, of course, is further contrary to the nonprofit mission and further in support of the self-preservation mission. It is a difficult cycle to break and it is also true that if the self-preservation mission is not upheld, then that is bad for the nonprofit mission.

Social license to operate

“Social license” is the concept that an organization has the right to peacefully share in the commons with the support of the public. When an organization does not have social license, then the public restricts it from sharing in the commons. When a nonprofit organization seeks to fulfill its nonprofit mission, the public grants it a social license to proceed. If it happens that a nonprofit organization seems to focus too much on itself and less on its nonprofit mission, then the public might restrict that organization’s social license to operate. In the case of the Wikimedia Foundation, its community of supporters are especially sensitive to the boundaries of the social license in which the organization operates. The sensitivity is high and continues to grow because the community has various powers to grant or remove social license. One of the community powers is to elect some or all of the board of trustees.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees is organized in a strange manner as compared to almost another other similar nonprofit organization. Right now there are 10 seats on this board. 3 of those seats are elected by popular vote among Wikipedia editors. 2 of those seats are elected by Wikimedia community organizations; currently there are 42 of those organizations with a right to vote. 1 seat is called the “founder seat”, and is reserved for Jimbo. The remaining 4 seats are filled by consensus of whomever is on the board at the time they come for election. All seats are for 3-year terms. This entire system is bizarre. No other nonprofit organization would be established with this sort of management. The definitions of what the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees can or must do are not set, but in general, a board of trustees oversees the work of the organization’s executive director and it approves the annual budget. The board of the Wikimedia Foundation does this too, and the executive director needs continual approval of the board and the annual budget must always be approved by the board. The strange part about this that this structure leaves the nonprofit organization itself compromised against the ideals of the Wikimedia movement. With this structure, the Wikimedia community of volunteers will always be close to the board for the organization, and the organization itself is never too far from being beholden to the wishes of the Wikimedia community as expressed either in elections or in the wishes of those appointed by those who are elected.

We have a Wikimedia community contributor named Risker, whom I regard as one of the more respected commentators on Wikimedia community governance. Concerning the current “affiliate-selected board seat” process, commonly called the “chapter election”, this person says this:

…the two individuals selected by the chapters do not represent the chapters. They’re selected by them, but their job is exactly the same as that of every other Board member. They are not on the board to represent the interests or perspective of chapters. They’re there to look out for the best interests of the Wikimedia Foundation, and through that the Wikimedia movement. (See the mission statement for the exact wording of the WMF’s purpose.) Chapters, thematic organizations, and other movement groups are only one small part of the big picture – less than 10% of active Wikimedians are chapter/THORG members.

I agree with Risker from one perspective but disagree from another. I confirm that when anyone accepts an appointment to the board of a nonprofit organization, they make a commitment to serve in that role representing the interests of that organization over other interests. I disagree with Risker that the elected board serve the best interests of the WMF as a way of advancing the Wikimedia movement. Instead, I think that the board should advance the Wikimedia movement as a priority, and use the Wikimedia Foundation as a resource for doing that. Sometimes advancing the Wikimedia mission in the long term might mean a short term set back for stated Wikimedia Foundation goals or individual staff at the Wikimedia Foundation. It is unfortunate whenever there is a conflict, but when there is a conflict, the nonprofit mission should come first. The board serves the organization by advancing the Wikimedia movement because the organization is in better condition when the long term Wikimedia mission remains the goal for action. The Wikimedia Foundation has had community oversight on its actions as a founding principle and it was intentional and fundamental to the community’s granting of social license that this unprecedented governance system was put into place.

Elections focus on the nonprofit mission

The election process for seats on the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees does not guide the voting process to consider the betterment of the Wikimedia Foundation in any way except what might spontaneously happen in the election process. In the case of the affiliate election, the motivation of voting organizations will typically be that they vote in a way that benefits the community of voting organizations as these organizations in solidarity advocate for their own collective development and their collective interests. The Wikimedia chapter system was established on the premise that local Wikimedia organizations around the world could identify and represent the needs of regional participants in the Wikimedia movement. When the board of trustees election process was established to give these chapters a vote for board seats, that process was established on the premise that when Wikimedia organizations have control of two of ten board seats by election, then that control would advance the Wikimedia mission and Wikimedia movement. There was never any concession in place to say that chapters should vote to some certain end; in the process, they vote as they like, for the candidates they like, by the criteria they like. In such a system, I think it is unreasonable to assume that organizations would seek to vote in any way other than for their own interest. I think that it is reasonable to assume that in the founding of this system, the intent behind doing things this way is that if the chapters vote to their own benefit, then that is to the benefit of the Wikimedia mission and movement. Even now I think this is still the common perception. Since the concept of “advancing the Wikimedia mission” is defined as “using 2 board seats to advance the interest of Wikimedia chapters”, the foundation of Wikimedia Foundation governance is a precedent for using the chapters as overseers for a share of the Wikimedia Foundation’s power.

The affiliate selected board seat process is designed to for the selection of candidates who would act in a way that gets approval from the constituency that elected them. When seats on the board are selected by election, then the design of the board must recognized that board members have some loyalty and obligation to meet voters’ expectations. Voters may not prioritize the goals set by the staff or leadership of the Wikimedia Foundation if those goals are perceived as misaligned with the nonprofit mission.

A few weeks ago Denny Vrandecic, board member, said in the mailing list “the loyalty of a Board member is towards the organization, not the movement.” Other people challenged his statement. What he said is a natural thing to say in the context of typical nonprofit governance, but in the Wikimedia movement, we need to develop thought further. Obviously when there is an election, the candidates in the election are selected to fulfill some desire of the voters. It is only reasonable to expect that the outcome of an election process is the selection of candidates who make promises to serve the interests of the voters. When the Wikimedia Foundation election process was established, then that also established the idea that the point of the election was to select candidates who would promise to act in a way that got the support of the voters. The voters are the Wikimedia community, and the social license they give guides the Wikimedia mission more than the Wikimedia Foundation itself.

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Lila from Wikimedia Foundation resigns following Wikimedia user revolt

By bluerasberry on 2016-02-25

Lila Tretikov (known as “Lila”), executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, just resigned. The cause of her resignation was Doc James‘ request that she directly state the anticipated cost of the Knowledge Engine project and publish and discuss the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation employee satisfaction survey. She and the Wikimedia Foundation Establishment declined to provide this information and a Wikimedia user revolt followed. The community sentiment around her resignation is that it advances Wikimedia community values and that it sets a precedent for defining how Wikimedia community resources should and should not be used. In the end, it seems that she found it preferable to leave rather than acknowledge community demand for these things. There is no public explanation of the WMF leadership seeming wish to hide this information. The information ought not be controversial to discuss except for the fact that Lila refused to discuss it.

I find no fault with Lila at all. She was dropped into a system of accountability to a community of volunteers. There must have been someone giving her poor advice, because it seemed like many actions attributed to her were designed to be confrontational and disparaging of the Wikimedia community of volunteers. I am baffled as to why she never provided information to the end, and wonder when or if she realized that in choices to either raise or lower tensions, she seemed to be making consistent choices to raise tension and declining choices to lower it. For future holders of her office, I recommend that they choose from any of the thousands of community members who watched her resignation approach and take advice. The board should do this. I am not aware of anyone wanting her resignation outside the context of resignation being an ultimatum to choose in place of information disclosure, and I think almost everyone only expected her to meet information demands. The people who wanted her to resign, so I expect, only came to want this because she seemed to mandate that communication not happen. I have no idea how this outcome came to be. It seems like such a waste – why not just talk for a few minutes?

First I want to share something which is both related and an aside to the story – it is unfortunate and inconsiderate that Doc James was dis-invited to the 2016 Wikimedia Conference. He got his invitation to the conference as a WMF board member in early December 2015. He registered at that time. Around this time, I helped about 5 Wikimedia chapters and usergroups plan to register their representatives for this conference before the January deadline. Toward the end of December, James was dismissed from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation. There was a window when I or others were supposed to realize that James’ dismissal silently and without notice revoked his invitation to the Wikimedia Conference. There are various groups that were depending on James to be at that conference to negotiate issues related to institutional partnerships, and I had already been organizing meetings which I expected that James would attend. The registration deadline came, and other people registered anticipating to meet James there. Just recently, in conversation some people were getting notices about the conference and James realized that he had been removed from the email notice list even though he had previously registered for the conference. James was paying his own travel and lodging, and only wanted to be let in the door of the conference. Now he was in a situation where he had no invitation, and who knows, if he showed up maybe someone would direct that security escort him out. If he cancelled his booking then he pays a cancellation fee. If the WMF reimburses him for the cancellation fee then that is a signal that the WMF would rather use donated funds to keep him away rather than have him attend. It would cause a scene to ask anyone if he is invited, but at the same time, he already registered and got a “see you at the conference!” response. It is also a problem for the community who was depending on him to have an invitation, and only a bureaucratic nonsense barrier to prevent him from attending when he has business as a community representative to attend, and which is unrelated to his previous WMF board relationship. In the end, he got quiet confirmation that his invitation was revoked despite no one telling him this. The idea was that he was invited as a member of the board, and when he was no longer on the board he lost the invitation. He could have come if a chapter had invited him, but since he did not register in that way during the registration period, he could not now get a chapter invitation. He canceled his trip, got the sort of refund which the airline offered him, and the people who wanted to speak with him will not meet him at that event. Overall, his being barred from attending seems like a petty punishment to me. The punishment is from social infrastructure which discourages communication, and not from anyone in particular. The most upsetting part about this to me is that it is a symptom of poor Wikimedia Foundation community practices. His invitation was revoked without communication, and there were multiple groups of stakeholders depending on that communication, but the communication was withheld as part of an esoteric shaming ritual against Doc James and anyone who collaborates with him. If the failure to communicate the invitation revocation was merely in error, then James should have been permitted to attend the conference anyway considering that so many volunteers were depending on him being there. It is really unfair that volunteers depend on paid staff labor to make their plans about the conference, but paid staff are willing to disrupt volunteer plans without apology, without communicating with other stakeholder groups, and at financial cost to Doc James. Then also if anyone raises the issue it could only hurt the reputation of Wikimedia projects – or at least it could have, but now Lila is gone so anyone is free to raise concerns as they like now.

Leave that aside, and back to the main story: Before the Wikimedia Foundation board dismissed James as one among them James had been talking to me over the previous months about my opinions on the costs of software development and how I would feel if the Wikimedia Foundation made major investments in this space. I think I am representative of the community in being supportive of software development, while at the same time being critical of previous Wikimedia Foundation software projects because I perceive them to only have been introduced to the community after deep investment and with no community or user feedback early in the development. This sentiment of wanting community notification and an opportunity for feedback on major investments is discussed elsewhere by various people. I think at this point everyone is in agreement that major investments in software ought to be discussed with community stakeholders, and that it is not acceptable to work at great cost for long periods of time without having public updates about how large amounts of money are spent.

In autumn 2015 James seemed to be worried about the cost of the Knowledge Engine. I know he was already interested in the idea. Before he was even on the board, he and I regularly discussed Wikidata applications, so when he talked to me at this time, I thought nothing of it and least of all about him being on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation. In retrospect, I could have recognized that some of what he discussed with me had to do with some of the budget options he had to approve or deny as a board member, but it was beyond my expectation that anyone at the Wikimedia Foundation would have considered making a major investment in a long-term software development project without community support considering so many previous unhappy precedents with software projects in that way. As things stand now at the time of Lila’s resignation, to the extent of my understanding and as a person who has read everything anyone has published on the matter, I think that the WMF public position is that the Knowledge Engine is a project mostly funded by a $250,000 Knight Foundation grant. Lila has more quietly said that $2,500,000 is committed to the project, but that is not entirely clear, as Risker (who in reviewing the budget) was able to get clarity that this amount was for a team but not necessarily just for that one project. The odd claim is from Doc James, who said that the Knowledge Engine was supposed to be a $35,000,000 project over more than 5 years. From my perspective, what would have calmed the community and answered almost all concerns was a statement from Lila about how much the WMF was budgeting for this software project and over what period of time. The only official statements given seemed to suggest that not much money was only being spent for a short amount of time. There were wild rumors that large amounts of money were being committed long term. It would have been useful to refute those rumors, but as they circulated since December through now, and when pressed no one at the WMF would deny them, and as supporting evidence of a big investment kept leaking, it started to seem like there was a plan to spend lots of community money without community support and for reasons other than community benefit. The especially strange part about this to me is that the Knowledge Engine as described seems like something that I think the Wikimedia community would support, if asked. Among other consequences, I imagine that it would make better connections between Wikidata and various language Wikipedias, and so many times in so many ways many people have supported such things. Why the secrecy? It is hard to say but troublesome that someone would choose it.

The other issue was the WMF employee satisfaction survey. Doc James wanted this discussed publicly. Seemingly other people on the WMF board thought it was best to suppress the existence of the thing. Since Doc James was dismissed and until now, so far as I know, there has been no official statement from the WMF about the existence of this survey. Its results have been leaked, and roughly, 180 of 220 employees did the survey and 90% of those said that they had no confidence in WMF leadership meaning Lila. To me, this is a signal, but I see the Wikimedia community as a supportive network and one that would have trained Lila. One of the things expected of Lila to get respect is transparency. It must be the case that one cause of low employee faith in leadership is lack of transparency, including how the scarce community resources are distributed. Employees of the WMF know that they will interact with the community in all things, and the community loves documentation and little notes, and when they are compelled to do secret work of the kind that ought to be proudly shared, they are doing something contrary to the values of the movement. It creates stress and cognitive dissonance to feel the moral need to do one thing but to work for an organization which directs staff to do another. People work in the nonprofit sector to feel good. I expect that anyone employed by the Wikimedia Foundation could get a 25% pay increase by working in the commercial sector, so when people do work there, they want to be proud of what they are doing and live by the nonprofit values. I expect that Lila’s seeming interest in institutional privacy contributed to low employee satisfaction.

One unsolved mystery of this affair is Jimbo’s criticism of Doc James’ concerns. Doc James said that he was forced to resign for wanting public discussion of the Knowledge Engine budget and the employee satisfaction survey. Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, publicly said, “James has made a lot of noise about why he was dismissed which is utter and complete bullshit.” Right now, it does seem very true that Lila and Jimbo and the establishment side of the board wanted to avoid public discussion of the Knowledge Engine and the employee satisfaction survey. It seems true that Doc James was the first person to publicly call for community discussion of these two things, and this after months of private board discussions that if these issues were not discussed the community would come to know eventually and be upset about the secrecy. Had Doc James not raised these issues, they would have been raised anyway, because in the past few months more than 10 WMF staff who were public figures resigned. I get the idea that those people resigned because they felt their concerns were not being acknowledged, and they would not have resigned had their concerns been addressed, and that they perceived Doc James’ public shaming by Jimbo one among other signs that the WMF establishment would not address their concerns. The strange part of this is that I do not know what Jimbo was thinking here. On the face of things, he seems to be saying that James was dismissed for something other than wanting to talk about the Knowledge Engine and satisfaction, but the strange thing is that it is difficult for me to imagine any bigger problem or controversy than these two things. Jimbo must be referring to a personality conflict. I can only imagine that James wanted to discuss these things, Jimbo+Lila+the establishment thought that any discussion would only be a minor inconvenience and confusion, and that the community mostly would not care one way or the other about such matters. I think that James so lived Wikipedia community values that he could predict what would happen. If it had been possible to be transparent, then I think Lila would be well supported by the community to continue to lead the organization. Since for whatever reasons Lila’s plans to the end were to avoid transparency then I think this is the reason that community feelings could not reconcile with her budget plans.

The community cares a lot about maintaining partnership and it has repeatedly shown this. I suppose that the employee satisfaction survey is moot now. Still there is no statement of how much investment is committed to the Knowledge Engine. I think it would be a good idea for the next director to report the WMF budget in a way that is granular to something like 1-2% of total funds. I know this is a large amount of transparency, and I feel like most organizations are transparent to publicly describe their operations on the order of 15% budget sections, but I think the Wikimedia community needs a little more in some creative way. If there is a USD $100,000,000 budget, then for every $1,000,000 spent, then one time a year someone should spend one hour writing 3-5 sentences about how that one million was spent. This would be a crazy innovation from one perspective, but in line with Wikimedia community values from another. I think this kind of transparency would prevent a lot of grief and raise spirits.

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Dismissal of Doc James from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation

By bluerasberry on 2016-01-14

In Wikipedia’s The Signpost this week there are multiple articles about the dismissal of Doc James and tension in the Wikimedia Foundation board. Anyone who wants to know more about the issue could read this very interesting issue of our Wikipedia newsletter.

I came to know Doc James in 2012 when I first started at Consumer Reports. Before then, I mostly edited medical research articles and not general health articles, so if our paths crossed, I had not become aware before then. Since then we became friends and colleagues. My first memory of him is providing a lot of criticism of my editing that I did not like and thought was not good, but over time, I came to feel that he was right about lots of things and that he had deep intuitive understanding of the Wikipedia community.

Among other things in this issue of The Signpost, Doc James gave some reasons why he was dismissed. So far, the Wikimedia Foundation board has not given any clear indication of why they dismissed him. James suggests that he was dismissed for a difference in values. Like so many others, I have been reading discussions in mailing lists, on-wiki, off-wiki, and then whatever articles summarize things in The Signpost. Just last Saturday at the Wikipedia Day celebration, Resident Mario from The Signpost said that the articles on James’ dismissal are the most popular ever. Doc James is well liked and we all are worried. For the past few weeks we have all been left to gossip and speculate and read tea leaves to find meaning in this tragic event.

As background to James’ dismissal, my perspective is that the Wikimedia Foundation board is designed for tension. I only started following wiki-politics a bit in 2009 at the earliest, and only became deep in them in 2012. The history of the Wikimedia Foundation board is documented, but the interesting part to note is that it is designed to be under community control. There are ten seats. Three of those are elected by popular vote of the Wikimedia community, two are elected by Wikimedia community organizations, four are appointed by the board itself, and one is reserved for Jimbo. For whatever reasons, currently the appointed seats and Jimbo are usually discussed as the establishment and the other seats are called community seats. My perspective is that tension in the board is about money. The Wikimedia Foundation, like any organization, has a bias for directing its budget to benefit itself as an organization. Its nonprofit mission, however, is to benefit Wikimedia project users, and when the community votes, the intent is that the vote will empower the community. The community has the perception that the Wikimedia Foundation has funded and publicized high-profile software projects that either became vaporware or were managed in a way that benefited WMF staff to the detriment of the Wikimedia user base. There is also the perception that the Wikimedia Foundation withholds information about budget and project development from the Wikimedia community, which is an especially harsh accusation considering the engagement of the community and the supposed shared commitment to transparency. Regardless of whether these things are true, I feel that transparency of how money is spent is the root of tension and the Wikimedia user base sees the board as an opportunity for the Wikimedia users to overcome the encroachment of financial interests into management of the Wikimedia community’s funds.

Back to James’ dismissal – From what I see, the nicest way to explain the conflict is to say that it is a personality clash. In this narrative, everyone on the Wikimedia Foundation board shares common values. However, without assigning any particular blame to anyone, it happens that James’ personality is difficult to make compatible with the personalities of others on the Wikimedia Foundation board. The difference in personality leads to needless arguments unrelated to governance or the business of the board, and because the tension is based in James’ nature, and because he is one naturally agitating person against the rest of the board, it is for the greater good that he be dismissed. I like this narrative because it is neutral. It also is a little implausible. James is an emergency room physician, which means that he has enough experience having groups of people come in on the worst day of their lives then watch one among them die. In these kinds of situations, it is James’ business to be an ocean of calm, and to tolerate any sort of attitude from anyone because if people are going to die anyway then they might have any kind of behavior. I have only seen James to act as a person who listens for as long as anyone cares to talk, and who evaluates when decisions must be made and when they can be referred, and who in any situation never loses his cool, sense of etiquette, or his kind and even compassion. It is difficult for me to imagine that he could have a personality clash with anyone. I have heard him say that he can be stubborn and arrogant at times, but sometimes saying those things are an act of humility and I would never hold anyone at fault for apologizing. People who apologize often and quickly are often not people with many faults, but rather they are ones who are quick to take a little blame to bring quicker peace.

Another possibility could be that James and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation board had a clash of values. This would be the more worrisome circumstance. If James was dismissed from the board for his personality, that is not such a bad thing as compared to the possibility that the board has a bias to people with values like the ones James has. In this last popular election, the number of votes grew about 3 fold as compared to the last election. This does not represent a great increase in the number of people contributing to Wikimedia projects, but rather, it represents an increase in interest in the governance of the projects. James especially was chosen because of his reputation as being the ideal Wikipedian. James edits Wikipedia continually, has for years, but he also balances a professional and personal life, and somehow does other things like commenting on policy, doing Wikipedia public speaking, and makes it all seem easy like a hobby that any volunteer could have. The inside story is that probably James spends more time on Wikipedia than a typical person with a casual hobby, but other than that, James is the Wikipedia volunteer ideal.

I worry that the board’s dismissal of James might be the board’s dismissal of the Wikipedia volunteer ideal. I know that there are community elections, but elections which happened longer ago had a less engaged community base, and I see a future with more community engagement in every election. I worry that some part of the establishment may want people like James to not be on the WMF board, and that establishment interests might become increasingly tempted to gain access to Wikimedia community funding now that it has grown to nearly USD 100 million yearly.

I perceive James’ actions and concerns as being aligned with the Wikimedia community and I have a lot of fear that his dismissal represents a misalignment of the values of the Wikimedia Foundation with the values of the Wikimedia community. I believe that the best way to govern Wikimedia projects is to develop the values of the Wikimedia community and to hold those dear, and I worry a lot that somehow other influences might creep in and try to manipulate or inappropriately capture the good will that the community has for Wikimedia projects. From one perspective the Wikimedia community has a lot of power, but from another perspective, it is vulnerable to division and infighting because small investments in disruption can greatly upset volunteer community organizations, and it does seem a little unfair that the Wikimedia Foundation has financial power to direct and control conversations. The very design of the board makes it friendly to community – 5 elected seats which elect the other 4 – and it seems to me that this design is likely to seat 9 people just like James in the long term. As board composition develops to include mostly people like James, or if that happens, I wonder what will change. Right now, the establishment side of the board dismissed James, and is getting a pass for doing this. There are so many people who might be elected in the future who are not as kind as James, but next time I think a dismissal will not be tolerated so gently.

I wish for more peaceful conversation and collaboration. I want the board of the Wikimedia Foundation to encourage conversation and to have direct discussions about how the Wikimedia community budget is allotted.

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Housing auction in Manhattan

By bluerasberry on 2015-12-17

Fabian has been interested in buying a home in New York City. The situation is that for all living memory, buying a home is usually less expensive than renting in New York City because monthly payments are comparable and housing prices have gone up every year. Apartments in New York that are near transit might rent for something like 2500-3500 a month if they can bring a person into nice places in Manhattan in 20 minutes. To own a one-bedroom apartment in a desirable location might cost $600-800,000 at the lower end.

For some months Fabian has been talking about a housing auction. The situation is that he had a friend who lived in Manhattan in a housing cooperative in a nice location. There was someone in this co-op who was defaulting on the terms of their stay, and their apartment was about to go for auction. The inside information was that the former occupant was a crazy hoarder, and the apartment was unlivable. After the apartment was sold, several tons of garbage would have to be removed and then the walls, floor, and ceiling of the place would need to be replaced. No one was allowed to see the apartment before the auction and people interested in the property were invited to imagine the worst they could but even still to expect to be surprised.

Fabian wanted this apartment. It was a nice fantasy. The apartment was in an old building and was a modest room when it was constructed, but now was in a patch of earth that made it one of the most desirable places to live anywhere. The promise of the auction was that this fantastically luxurious location was going for auction under appalling conditions that most developers would not tolerate, but somehow, because of the nature of co-ops, a non-developer who sincerely wanted to join the community of the co-op for their own sake could get some kind of social concession to move in to the place if only they would tolerate cleaning the mess and being human about the experience. Whatever the case, the auction was happening, and Fabian wanted to bid on it, and I joined him for the experience.

The auction announcement said that the auction would be held in a rotunda of a courthouse at the Brooklyn Bridge – City Hall subway stop. The advertisement said that anyone who wanted to participate should bring cashier’s checks equal to 10% of their bids to this open public place and that the auction would be managed in the courthouse. I did not know what a public housing auction was, or how it worked. In this case, there was a busy courthouse and during the day among all the foot traffic a group of about 20 people gathered in the middle of everything. At the appointed time, two real estate lawyers came, and they took questions and led the auction.

So far as I could tell, at least 5-10 people there only came to see if they could buy the apartment for about 30% of market value. I wondered if that ever worked. There were some more serious participants who might have had ties to investors, and they bid something like 60% of what a room like that would be worth. Everyone knew the market value of a normal apartment in the area. What was left to be decided was how much of a discount in the price there would be to clean the mountain of garbage inside. The presumption was that the mess would cost 100-300,000 to clean. The mess belonged to one little old lady, and the entire experience was strange to me because I was seeing all of these bids around and everyone was afraid of this horrible mess that this elderly woman had brought into her home and like everyone else, I was wondering how bad it could be in a modest family apartment.

Fabian made bids to the limit that he planned, going up to a huge sum that was absolutely crazy for a 800 square foot apartment or whatever it was. The bidding went forward with an investor bidding against a recently married couple moving into New York. The investor came to a round number, then the couple bid $5,000 more, and then the bidding stopped. The person who “wins” an auction is the person willing to pay more for something than anyone else, and to the extent that auctions can be won, this couple won an apartment. They paid a huge sum of money for it but also got a big discount on the place. I think no one present was certain that the mess inside could be cleaned for the difference between the market value of the property and what they bid, but whatever the case, they now owned one of the most envied apartments in the world.

All around the auction other people in the courthouse went about their business. I suppose these kinds of auctions happen several times a day in the lobbies and public spaces of courthouses.

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Is Wikipedia traffic dropping?

By bluerasberry on 2015-11-25

Some news outlets report that Wikipedia traffic is dropping.

In the links above, SimilarWeb started the rumor. Other media outlets, including the one I provide above, picked up the story from SimilarWeb. The SimilarWeb writer continued to speculate in a second post, and in the third post they report some information from the Wikimedia Foundation. The overall narrative is that Wikipedia traffic is dropping suddenly and drastically, and SimilarWeb and other media outlets question why this might be. Some of them speculate on the demise of Wikipedia, which is a popular story for any media outlet to report.

One of the oddities about this discussion is that insight and comment are not available on demand from “Wikipedia”. Most media would expect the Wikimedia Foundation to have its public relations department comment on this, but in fact, the comments which have come from the Wikimedia Foundation have gone to electronic mailing lists where developers and researchers have discussed the issue. This is not a traditional channel for popular communication, so I understand why the public would be confused. The Wikimedia community likes this system and of course the current way things are done is the consequence of how things used to be done. What is different now, and why it seems odd that there is no coordinated communications response to the traffic decline, is that increasingly Wikimedia projects are competing for audience attention on par with the world’s largest communication and media companies. Wikipedia is the only nonprofit in this space and by far the least funded. Wikipedia cannot afford polished metrics at this time, or at least, it is less obvious that public relations of the sort that say Facebook has should be something that Wikimedia projects should emulate.

I do not have the informed perspective of an inside developer but as a Wikipedia communications professional my daily routine puts me into conversations about Wikipedia’s metrics. Some things I understand and most things I do not. My perspective is that I do not think Wikipedia traffic is declining. The evidence is unclear. Wikipedia traffic reports themselves have always been unclear, and for some years now I have wished for better metrics about Wikipedia viewership. I am going to provide a little information which outsiders to Wikipedia might not have. What I have to share will not clear confusion about Wikipedia’s traffic trends but also are points which could be researched as factors to consider when discussing Wikipedia traffic.

Here are some possible causes for the seeming traffic drop:

Google changing Wikipedia prioritization in SERP

Most media outlets which consider the Wikipedia traffic drop say that Google changed PageRank or some other feature of Google Search with intent to lower Wikipedia’s prominence in the search engine results page (SERP). There is speculation that this is done to benefit Knowledge Graph, which is a Google product which completes with some uses of Wikipedia and a lot of the imagined uses for Wikidata in development especially now that Wikidata has consumed Freebase.

It is true that most people enter Wikipedia through Google. Wikipedia historically has been popular because it is the website which Google served as the answer to any query that matched the title of a Wikipedia article. If Google deprioritized Wikipedia in its rankings then Wikipedia would become less popular. Wikipedia’s claim to fame is that it is popular, and it is popular because the concept of SEO is sort of defined around the existence of Wikipedia. Wikipedia should be considered to have perfect SEO, or SEO as a standard and off the scale with competitors.

I cannot give any informed opinion about what Google has planned for the future of the Internet or for the future of Wikipedia. I am not sure who could give a good opinion on that matter. I hope that Google will always support Wikipedia by sending people there for information. There are perspectives that Wikipedia is to the benefit of Google and indeed all other websites, because part of the mythology of the Internet is that it is a marketplace of humanity and that human interests are all represented online. This mythology is hardly true – there is only one popular nonprofit website, and it is Wikipedia. There is only one popular website which is not supported by advertising, and again that is Wikipedia. Sue Gardner promoted this sentiment she got from Wikipedia community philosophy when she said, “Wikipedia is like a park. It’s a public space, accessible and used by everybody.” Wikipedia is in a weird enough marginalized unattractive space that for-profit interests have not seen fit to capture it as they have with the content service of all other websites. It is the last nonprofit information source and if it did not exist, the public might increasingly question who controls the Internet. While Wikipedia exists people get the idea that nonprofit presence in the media exists. There must be agreement among the major players (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook) that Wikipedia is allowed to exist as the only nonprofit peer. Maybe in the future Wikipedia will not need to be so self-deprecating as it stands with the others. Right now, I think Wikipedia’s influence is hidden, not known, and not clearly supported with data.

HTTP to HTTPS

The Wikimedia Foundation introduced a high-profile shift from serving websites using HTTP to HTTPS. Websites choose to deliver pages as either encrypted or unencrypted information. In his information disclosure Snowden revealed that the NSA monitors what people read on Wikipedia. Because of various privacy social movements, and because in the United States there is long-standing pre-Internet consensus among libraries that people should be able to check out books without having government or police monitor them, the Wikipedia community also takes the position that people should be able to read Wikipedia articles without having governments monitor them. The Wikimedia Foundation made hasty changes on a limited budget to move website functions to an encrypted service. For technical reasons related to that, Wikipedia traffic monitoring began to have failures in detecting when articles were being read. The recent major stories are at “Banning data encryption is ‘moronic’” and Wikimedia v. NSA. These do not talk about traffic because only organizations tracking metrics would care, but the encryption changes causing difficulty in detecting pageviews are the major reason for the seeming traffic drop. The Wikimedia community supported these changes, and few contributors to Wikipedia care about metrics, so a drop in reported metrics and introducing inaccuracy into metrics collecting processes was a serious concern to either the WMF staff or the Wikimedia community. I noticed, because I am one of a handful of people who regularly reports Wikipedia metrics to stakeholders who care only because I directed them to care about Wikipedia metrics.

Mobile traffic has never been counted

Wikipedia traffic seems to be dropping because more people are reading Wikipedia from mobile devices, and pageview and traffic counts in this Consumer Reports project have never included counts of pageviews from mobile devices including cell phones and tablets. Those counts were not included because the dataserver provided by the Wikimedia Foundation never included those counts, because when the system was set up years ago mobile traffic was insignificant to count and difficult to measure. In 2010 mobile traffic to Wikipedia was perhaps 2%, and as of 2015 it is about 50% – see “Traffic to Wikipedia’s mobile site is growing fast“. In November 2015 the Wikimedia Foundation analytics team posted that they were changing their traffic measurement protocols to do, among other things, better count mobile traffic. In those changes there is no acknowledgement that what they are doing should matter. I am linking to their changes because they are remarkable for not caring so much about talking about lack of mobile data collection. A drop in detected Wikipedia traffic could be because more readers are using mobile devices instead of desktop computers and mobile traffic is not yet countable.

Even with major traffic drops the dissemination through Wikipedia is a significant audience size. However, because a drop in the traffic count can be caused by things other than a decreasing audience size, and because there are reasons to believe there are technical problems in counting lately and no reason to believe that fewer people are reading Wikipedia, it is a fair assumption to make that Wikipedia traffic is staying the same if not growing as has been usual over the past approximately 15 years until earlier this year during the technical changes.

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My views on a typical exchange with conflict in editing health content on Wikipedia

By bluerasberry on 2015-11-10

At the 2015 WikiConference I met Diana Straussman, chair of the board of the Wiki Education Foundation. We had a conversation which I would describe as having two focus points – civility and non-medical information in Wikipedia health articles. As an example in our conversation, she told me that she had a student participating in her own instance of the Wikipedia Education Program who was seeking to edit the autism article. She asked for my thoughts. I looked over what was happening. I saw nothing unusual happening there, and that the events unfolding were typical. Because Diana was interested, and because I would like for her and anyone else interested in Wikipedia in the classroom to be informed about how medical content on Wikipedia is managed, I am going to give my views on what is happening here and why.

Here is a breakdown of events:

  1. Diana as a professor creates an assignment for her students to contribute to Wikipedia in autumn 2015
  2. One student makes a new Wikipedia account and plans for their first edits to be in the article on autism
  3. Immediately before the student edits, the autism article is in a certain condition that Wikipedians call “featured“, which is the highest quality designation that the Wikipedia community assigns to anything. Since the article is featured, one can presume that some of Wikipedia’s most thoughtful and knowledgeable contributors will be at hand to respond to any comments on this article.
  4. The student makes a proposal on the talk page to do a certain kind of editing, and immediately the student gets what seems to me to be status quo advice. All further conversation referenced below happens here. There is an exchange in which Diana joins in, and staff of the Wiki Education Foundation joins in, with Diana and the staff person proposing that something unorthodox happen. The conversation sort of halts with the student + two unorthodox positions on one side, and the one status quo Wikipedian on the other, with neither side really acknowledging the other.
  5. The student makes these edits to the article contrary to the Wikipedian’s advice.
  6. As is routine, within a day a Wikipedian (Doc James, the omnipresent health reviewer) reverts the content for being unorthodox.
  7. This is a point where the Wikipedia volunteer wanted conversation to proceed to its end. There is a hope among regular Wikipedia reviewers that when new users have their content removed and get a note about why, those new users will pick up conversation and ask “What is the problem, and what is the quickest and easiest resolution?” In this case and in lots of others, for whatever reason, the outcome was that the new user whose content was removed simply quit communicating. This response is especially common from new editors like students, and is one of the reasons why the Wikipedia community hesitates to support a lot of student groups. Far too often, students feel comfortable requesting Wikipedia community volunteer time, but when they get it, they cease communication if it includes any criticism. This is true even when there is a sincere praise and only a little criticism – students in classes who feel watched by teachers are super sensitive to criticism. Not getting a response makes volunteer Wikipedians feel bad because they feel like the student is using them and their time without considering them as a human. In this case the conversation did go forward a bit but not in a way that satisfied anyone.
  8. The student dropped out of the conversation on October 8. Because of the activity here and number of people looking, on October 21 a Wikipedian reviews what happened in a narrative (search for “for the record”, a comment by Flyer22). Other conversation had been happening but for various reasons the student did not appear again till October 30, which makes for a disjointed conversation.
  9. I will stop here – at this point, student and professor are likely asking, “What happened – is this normal?” and also thinking, “Who are these reviewers, what do they know, and what gives them the right to remove my good information?”

Here are some questions that, if answered, could give insight to this exchange:

  1. To what extent will any contribution to a Wikipedia article be precisely processed by Wikipedia’s crowdsourcing?
  2. What would be the Wikipedian assessment of the content submitted?
  3. Who reviews content submitted to Wikipedia?
  4. What is “WikiProject Medicine” and to what extent does it matter?
  5. How can anyone review content on Wikipedia?

I will take this points in turn.

To what extent will any contribution to a Wikipedia article be precisely processed by Wikipedia’s crowdsourcing?

An aspect of Wikipedia which I find attractive is its ability to institutionalize a large number of strangers in a decentralized way to deconstruct complicated situations to parts which can be managed objectively and give a consistent outcome. By this I mean that Wikipedia has a large number of rules, some more or less subjective, and it has no straightforward way of teaching these rules to its participants, but somehow all of its participants seem to converge on uniform interpretations of how Wikipedia should be. There is something gratifying and compelling about passing a complicated judgment on a complicated situation, then getting confirmation from a large number of strangers that they would have done the same thing. Likewise, it is gratifying to see a complicated problem and to imagine how one would respond to it, but then to see another person resolve the problem just as if they had shared the same thoughts and ideas.

One of the reasons why Wikipedia’s community of editors trusts it so much is that participants have a deep sense of community with each other, which builds over time as every day participants see acquaintances and strangers alike seemingly making all kinds of subjective decisions but which all lead to the same resolution. The trust that builds over time is that when there is a problem, someone in the crowd will manage it in a way which no one in the group could improve, given the context of the rules and near universal acceptance of those rules. So often, when something happens on Wikipedia, it looks like one person did it, but in fact, any number of people would have done the same action in the same way had they been the ones to encounter the situation first; and also, no one in the crowd would have handled the situation in other ways.

It is sometimes said that Wikipedians argue a lot with each other. It is definitely true that in Wikipedia’s massive scope and huge number of participants, there are lots of arguments to be found at any time. However, disagreement is not the norm, but rather it is just easy to spot. Wikipedians do not congregate to affirm each other’s decisions, which has its pluses and minuses. A plus to quiet confirmations is that without voiced agreement, multiple Wikipedians redundantly review the same agreed-upon actions and leave no mark on their review, which means that a lot of review goes into each action. Minuses to this system include that it grows doubt that review ever happened at all, and is a waste of labor after enough people have confirmed that an action is good, and also it does not permit research on efficiency in using volunteer labor.

What would be the Wikipedian assessment of the content submitted?

Taking the student’s contribution as an example, here is are my thoughts on this content. I feel that I am probably close to the Wikipedia hivemind on all of these points.

  1. The student is failing to use citations when making assertions. This must mean that they came to Wikipedia with insufficient editing advice and were not prepared to accept feedback when it was offered. When mingling multiple sources in paragraphs and making bold claims Wikipedia reviewers expect a citation after every sentence. Without that, verifiability of information quality is impossible.
  2. Failing verifiability is a deal breaker. It is one problem for the student to not perform the technical action of citing sources, and another for them to not engage in conversation that demonstrates some appreciation of the value of citations. There are two impasses here – one is improper editing, and one is lack of indication that the student knows why their edits cannot be accepted. The student really must come to understand this or further discussion will have no point.
  3. It is not the student’s fault, but when they are making citations, it has to be in a way that Wikipedian can follow. Standard academic citations are fine. Wikipedia’s own automated tools will generate citations from a doi or PMID. If the student was at least attempting to use enough citations then the Wikipedia community will fix this.
  4. The student was given advice to not do something but then they did it. That is fine. For whatever reason, a common response on Wikipedia when someone is directed to not do something, and they engage in conversation about doing it, and they are still told no, then they end the conversation and then do the thing anyway. This does not surprise me at all. It happens all the time. Their content gets removed then hopefully they will participate in further conversation. In my experience, people who engage in this behavior somehow have their minds go blank and forget having the conversation which is documented in print, and really expect the outcome they want. The unfortunate part about this is that when someone is told “do not do that”, then when they do it, they seem surprised that other people undo their action. There is no aggression here, because Wikipedians expect this illogical behavior even if it is inexplicable. However, the person who did the action often behaves awkwardly after this.
  5. If printed on paper, the previous version of the Wikipedia article would be about 13 pages. With the student’s addition, it would be about 15 pages, meaning the student added at least 1.5 pages of text to this document. As I said, the article already had been reviewed as really high quality and well balanced. Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” policy talks about due weight to subjects. In my opinion, the student’s contributions were biased and would break the neutrality of the article. Whereas the status quo version of the article gave a global presentation of the topic of autism, the students contributions discussed autism in the context of middle class America, detailing autism programs in the classroom, talking about US autism law, local certifications or programs for special needs students, and some context on US federal law with two mentions of how Mexico also follows some of this. When I see this, the thought that comes to my mind is “What does this have to do with India?” Since the information is not globally useful, it should not appear in this article, and the article definitely should not suddenly become weighted to serve the minority privileged class in the United States by taking about 10% of the article real estate.
  6. There is plenty of room on Wikipedia, but it may not be in the place a person first posts. Good Wikipedia articles are about 8-15 pages when they are fully developed, with anything more than that requiring a the split or forking of the article into shorter concepts that can be considered independently. The student’s content, in my opinion, would be great for an article like “Management of autism in the United States”, because in an article with that title this kind of localized focus is more appropriate than an article for an international audience.
  7. Another way to deconstruct the student’s contributions would be to look more deeply at the use of educational interventions as a way to treat, address, or manage autism. If the student had been writing about that, then that kind of content could have gone into the main autism article, but instead, the student was citing local case studies (primary sources). If the student used secondary sources or review articles to describe “effects of educational interventions on students with autism” then that would be appropriate to include. This did not happen.
  8. Sometime else that the student could have done, even if it were United States focused, was started a length-proportionate section on policy and practices of autism in education, separating that from claims about its efficacy.
  9. One of the most problematic aspects of the student’s contributions was that each claim tied to another in the tone of a persuasive essay. It seemed to me like saying, “This is the United States, and this health intervention is effective, and these policies bring these results.” It is a series of bold and persuasive claims to describe the state of US practice as a whole, and also to make health claims on what is “proven to be helpful” without good medical sourcing, and also to make claims about the outcomes of legislation. I understand why writers do this – people tend to want to see patterns and to derive narratives when they read multiple papers on the same topic. However, Wikipedia does not encourage these kinds of personal insights to be expressed in Wikipedia. Instead, Wikipedia presents the facts, and if it presents any interpretation, then it only does so by presenting and citing an interpretation that some expert already published. Student researchers get coaching to try to draw their own conclusions about the significance of research. In university culture, interpretations tend to bias toward believing that meaningful conclusions can be drawn from intuition about research data, and in Wikipedia culture, the community says “no essays” and is conservative about not ascribing meaning to primary data when the researchers who published it have not themselves explicitly drawn a conclusion from it.
  10. Consider this source – it is a primary study by two researchers on about 30 students. The student said, “One study on the joint attention of autistic children in a classroom, showed that teachers “did not adjust their teaching to address” the issues of decreased play and joint attention behaviors.” and cited that paper as a source. From a Wikipedia reviewers perspective, this is not information worth sharing, because no conclusion can be drawn from primary research like this except to say “in this one case something happened”. There may well be a primary research paper which gives exactly the opposite result, so presenting information like this provides no reliable context for understanding anything except that the issue is being researched. Newspapers may tolerate writing which describes what happened to 30 people and leave the reader to wonder if those results might have broader implication, but Wikipedia in talking about health outcomes forbids original interpretations about primary studies or presenting results suggestively in a way that would lead people to believe there is a meaningful way to look at the data and draw a conclusion. Primary studies are great as a foundation for proposing more primary studies or making review articles, but especially in health they are not good as a basis for describing the state of health practice. This is not only a Wikipedia rule – this applies to all research. Wikipedians instinctively scrutinize health claims made based on primary sources. I would not want anyone making assumptions about the state of US health education based on what this one study reports.

Who reviews content submitted to Wikipedia?

The best answer to this is probably “Volunteers who are in sync with the Wikipedia hivemind”. There are broadly two kinds of Wikipedia contributors – content creators and functionaries. Most Wikipedia contributors are casual users who submit content, and may not engage with the project regularly. They do not routinely do things like copy editing, new user welcoming, mediating talk page discussion, or quick quality review in response to automated signals. In this case and in most cases, when someone is reviewing content for quality, they are probably an experienced Wikipedia and probably they have already gone through several thousand rounds of social vetting by not less than 100 other Wikipedia contributors. This level of review can be presumed for anyone who has made, say, 1000 edits to Wikipedia, which is the equivalent of about 3 months participation by someone who has given good consideration to about 3-5 articles. That level would still be called “new” but probably not called “newbie”.

What is “WikiProject Medicine” and to what extent does it matter?

WikiProject Medicine is a forum where people who edit Wikipedia’s medical content meet. This community also reviews edits to Wikipedia medical content. This community matters when anyone submits content to Wikipedia’s medical articles, because this community will review those edits and engage with the editor who posted them.

Among demographics who embrace Wikipedia community practices, like using citations, citing reliable sources, and keeping conversation brief, WikiProject Medicine is respected. The most common criticisms that I see directed at WikiProject Medicine is that it enforces the use of citations, is biased to evidence-based medicine, and that its members avoid conversations with people who want compromise on those points especially before trying the standard practices.

How can anyone review content on Wikipedia?

WikiProject Medicine members are mostly not experts. Internal surveys have shown that a qualified demographic does participate there, but that is not the point. The review process on Wikipedia is simplistic, and by following some simple rules, a person of almost any level of education can direct powerful, insightful, and compelling criticism at the work of people with the most technical knowledge. Here is the basic review process. For any given content –

  1. Are citations presented for every statement made?
  2. Are the sources presented reliable?
  3. Does the content submitted mirror the presentation of that content in the cited source?
  4. Is the content written in a way that a typical reader can understand?
  5. If there is problem or doubt, will the editor discuss with the reviewer, keeping focus on the above questions?

Note that comprehension of the text is hardly a qualification for the person reviewing it. Asking these questions is a good life skill for assessing any sort of information, not just in Wikipedia.

An additional concern of reviewers is “Is this submission in the right place?” In the case of this student submission, it was eventually moved to its own page about education in the United States for people with a medical condition. The content was too specific to be of general interest. For example to the majority of people reading this are not in the United States, and have less need for information about US-specific resources. Also there is not supporting evidence that general readers want a major focus on education, instead of a summary as with other subtopics and links to more information.

Conclusion

After resolving the discussion and getting leave to post into an autism article focusing on “society” issues, it seems that the student left Wikipedia without posting their content. I do not think there was a good bye or explanation. They even said that they would do more, but did not go through. Maybe class ended, or maybe they lost interest. Maybe they did not like the Wikipedia review, or maybe they did not enjoy Wikipedia editing. Maybe they did not know what happened. Maybe they had second thoughts about the sources they were citing, because the discussion about their sources had hardly begun and there would have been problems with their statements not mirroring the conclusions of the primary sources they cited.

This did not come to a desirable outcome for the Wikipedia volunteers. It must not have been entirely positive for the student or teacher. It was a positive outcome for Wikipedia, because the quality control process worked as it should.

I regret to say that I have heard some people in Wikipedia and education say that medicine should be avoided, so that what happened here is not repeated. I think this is unfortunate, especially since what sometimes happens instead is that students are directed to try to edit unpopular, low-impact articles in Wikipedia on the premise that other Wikipedians will not review their work closely there during the class. To me, having peer review is a benefit of using Wikipedia, not a drawback, and posting content which gets read is the point of posting on Wikipedia instead of any private, unpopular media. There hardly has been any community or educator discussion or essays on what ought to be normal, and how the Wikipedia Education Program ought to be. I am not aware of anyone else trying to present a typical case of problems with student-Wikipedian interaction, as I am doing here.

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Expanded access conference at New York Academy of Science

By bluerasberry on 2015-10-29

On Wednesday 28 October I attended a half-day of a two-day conference on “expanded access” at the New York Academy of Science. Johnson & Johnson sponsored the event and I felt that what I saw was guided by their pharma influence.

“Expanded access” is a term referring to a pharma company’s provision of an experimental drug to be used for treatment of an individual in dire circumstances when that drug is likely to be efficacious and there are no other options. Historically, this has been an unlikely convergence of circumstances. There is only a small window when there is evidence that a drug is safe and effective but not enough evidence or review to bring a drug to market. During that small window, there are few cases when that drug’s administration to a patient could be argued as so critical as to merit special consideration including review at the federal government level. Assuming that an experimental drug exists and the ideal patient requests it, beyond that the patient has to demonstrate extraordinary understanding of the risk of using a pre-market drug and the pharma company has to be persuaded that it will not be damaged by likely outcomes – harm to the patient, excessive demands from other people wanting the drug through expanded access, and lawsuits from people who want the drug but cannot get it through expanded access. Now further assuming that patient understanding is demonstrated and the pharma company agrees, in the United States the government has to approve the dispensing of the drug. This rarely happened in the past. This conference talked about how this process can be hurried.

Presenters at the conference spoke with non-traditional premises behind expanded access, including these new ideas:

  • Nowadays it is more likely that researchers can predict drug effects and safety more quickly and accurately with less research
  • Patients are more informed and can make better decisions to choose to take experimental drugs
  • A more informed public is collectively making more informed decisions to request expanded access, and this society-wide trend should be addressed
  • At any given time now, there are more safe and effective drugs in legal limbo than there were in the past
  • The good clinical research practices developed in the 1960s are becoming an outdated legacy in the case of expanded access, and their pace of the development is increasingly becoming more distant from the public demand for reform
  • Demand for change is a patient demand and not encouraged in any direct or roundabout way by industry influence in pursuit of pharma industry profit

I challenge all of these ideas. Definitely none of them are orthodox, and my personal opinion is that there is not sufficient evidence to give wholehearted support to any of these ideas.

To the conference – it was titled “Pre-approval access: can compassion, business, and medicine coexist?” “Pre-approval”, “compassionate use”, “right-to-try”, and “expanded access” are terms used interchangeably. From the beginning the conference gave me the creeps because I felt that the word “ethics” ought to be more prominent in guiding the discussion. “Compassion” is ignorant and rash, “business” means profit in this context, and “medicine” sort of supposes ethics but as an insider to this I know that “medicine” in this context is taken to mean that the doctor is a script monkey who dispenses the drugs available when pressured by someone panicked by death and demanding life from the hapless doctor. The traditional doctor-patient relationship rarely can provide useful information to guide patient decisions outside of evidence-based medicine, which means that for this to work a patient must leave either get their drugs from someone other than their doctor or their doctor must approve or condone their patient taking drugs which no one understands. The most troublesome part of this is the money value in doing research with experimental drugs on sick people who are willing to sign away the traditional medical protections. I understand that people who are about to die anyway have less risk in taking strange drugs when their lives already are as bad as they can get, but that will not be the usual case. The more usual case will be people who are sick but have pleasures in life, and they might risk what health they have to entities who have money in mind first and patient needs in mind beyond that.

The narrative that comes from patient advocacy groups calling for expanded access is that there are valuable drugs in laboratories which are likely to be effective, and where it not for needless bureaucratic delay, then their doctor (or a clinical researcher, or a pharma company) could give them the drug which would surely save their life. People who are threatened with death are panicked, and people become bitter and emotional after watching their loved ones die even while they believe that bureaucracy keeps lifesaving drugs out of reach. The emotion is real, and the concept of a lifesaving drug is compelling. I get that story. What bothers me is how patients are getting the idea that the drugs they want are really lifesaving, or even likely to have any effect, when based on historical precedent there almost never is any reason to think that an experimental drug could be helpful.

The numbers are probably changing, but the way that I learned things, if 10,000 drug concepts are considered, not more than 1000 are tested in animals, 100 go to humans for safety testing, 10 are tested for efficacy, and at the end none of those 10,000 ideas go to market because only 1 in 100,000 drug concepts proves safety and efficacy in the end. Most scientists who are employed in drug research finding new drug candidates spend their careers never having a single success and only finding dead ends. It is not easy to develop a new drug. With the advent of computers and genetic testing, I anticipate that it will be easier to predict what effects drugs will have in certain people, but so far as I know, technology has not advanced to point where it is safe to advocate for reform because of trust in computer magic. I know that day will come, and it likely will come suddenly, but I do not think we are there yet.

In the expanded access model, the usual premise is that after safety testing (phase 1 research) there might be some reason to anticipate benefit from using the drug as a therapy before phase 2 or 3 research. Any clinical researcher would say that it is very unlikely to have this information, because in phase 1 research the doses are typically so low and short that the research would generate no insight into efficacy. Also in early studies the drug is only tested on healthy test subjects who have no disease, so since they have nothing to cure, there usually would not be proof that the drug could treat a sick person. Without evidence of safety and efficacy it is hard to argue for expanded access. I worry that somehow patients and advocacy groups get the idea that safety and efficacy evidence exists, and are making a demand for expanded access when they do not have good information about the likelihood that expanded access will not benefit them and unnecessary use of a drug is more likely to cause them harm. Other circumstances calling for expanded access might use data from phase 2 or 3 research, but usually, the largest time window is after phase 1, and also “expanded access” usually is not the term used to describe participation in a clinical trial like a modified phase 2 that checks some efficacy or a phase 3 trial which definitely would check efficacy in the traditional way.

The canonical case advocating for expanded access is the period from about 1985-1995 when people with AIDS organized as a community to get access to antiviral medications to treat HIV infection. The circumstances there were that a sufficiently large number of people all shared the same disease, and that HIV was an odd disease which left people healthy for about five years but then killed them around seven years from infection. It was an interesting set of circumstances – people with HIV could become aware of when they would likely die some years later and talk about what they as a community might like to do in response. The response was that they participated in a lot of clinical research and made commitments as a community to share drugs which showed efficacy. Because death was so certain and so predictable, the community’s members could make uniquely informed decisions about how much medical risk to take with which experimental drugs and in which doses. Likewise, the medical research community could be confident that their pool of research participants were well informed to an unprecedented extent. Research study participants even hijacked the clinical research process by lying to pharma companies about who was getting what drugs, circumventing the randomized clinical trial process, spoiling the research data, but thereby sharing lifesaving drugs among each other in individual sacrifice that was good for the entire community. Another strange circumstance about this was that, especially closer to 1995 at the advent of AZT, this really crazy set of events actually found a lifesaving drug which was highly effective quickly and was described as bringing people back to health even after they were bedridden at the end of life. It is a powerful story with lots of circumstances which could not apply in other cases because so much about HIV is different from other cases which call for expanded access. At this conference – and indeed, I expect at all conferences like this – the precedent of HIV and expanded access was invoked and I did not feel that the circumstances around researching and treating HIV/AIDS could be referenced as generally applicable to other uses of experimental drugs. It is sad when a few hundred people have an unusual medical condition that a drug might treat, but the size of the HIV epidemic, closeness of the community of people with HIV, obviousness of antiviral drugs as a research direction, the unprecedented huge amount of money poured indiscriminately into early HIV research and community organization, and predictability of the illness are not characteristics that other communities of people with a given disease will likely have. I also have my own bias that people who did activism in that era are heroes and I resent anyone trying to tap the social cache of that demographic, their work, and their sacrifices.

I worry that some of the demand for expanded access is an effect of the brainless machinations of the pharma industry, which is a driving force toward deeper access to more human test subjects who will give themselves more willingly at more personal and community risk for the benefit of corporate profit and with decreased liability to corporate reputation. It worries me that when a patient advocacy group demands expanded access, they also decrease the pharma company’s liability to protect the safety of individuals, communities, and taxpayers who cleanup medical harms. I am the biggest proponent of clinical research, but at the same time I always dislike that volunteer test subjects want to give their data and test results to “science” but instead this data is always captured by certain commercial interests and their very anti-science motivation to compete with other corporations by not sharing research data or insights so as to suppress the competition. I feel strongly that corporations themselves are choosing to avoid doing their fair part to meet the interest of health advocacy groups, and my own niche complaint is that they apply restrictive copyright over information which is supposed to be public but which they do not actually want patients and health advocates to easily access. I especially want information including basic company information, drug safety data, basic data about their clinical research (like the AllTrials request), and my special demand the informed consent documents. When I see corporations sponsor events like this that ask for the patients to give up some rights in exchange for benefits, I immediately look for what the corporation is also giving. From what I saw at this conference, I would say nothing – the corporation wants to assume no risk but to become more profitable, and among all of the things they could give to empower patients more, those things are not offered.

In the parts of this conference that I attended, I was not hearing anyone talk about the harms associated with increased use of experimental therapies which lack evidence of safety and efficacy. I heard much too much about the rights of individuals to choose to take the drugs they want and my interpretation of the rationale backing this was that people should be free as they like and they have the “right to try”.

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Pat’s knee replacement

By bluerasberry on 2015-10-26

My housemate Pat had her knee replaced on Monday 12 October. I have been surprised about her recovery.

She told me that she had pain since her 20s when she had an injury playing rugby. She had an ACL replacement in response to that injury, and some disability since then. For the past 15 years she has lived with special pain. In the three years that we have been living together, on most nights I have seen her raise her knee in the evening to sit with it horizontally expended, perhaps suspended with her foot resting on a chair or audoman. She would put ice on her knee and said that it reduced the pain. She could not run. Of course she was very athletic with her kayak.

She had been planning the surgery for about a year, then scheduled it some months ago. Her plan was to have the surgery then be in recovery for the rest of the year to return to work in January. She was in the hospital for a few days, then transferred to a nursing home for a little rehab and care. I visited her at the nursing home on Tuesday 20 October. Her friend / our friend Michael took me there. When I visited her she was obviously among the most health residents. Many of the people in the nursing home seemed mentally vacant. Many were obese and must have been limited in their mobility on that account. Others could have had any illness. It made me sad to see such little people sort of huddled together in community areas, all watching a television together, but not really socializing other than by being together in the same place and sharing the same television show that I doubt they were following. Some of them were wearing jewelry and even fashionable clothes, which made me think that either recently they had different lives or perhaps someone is still maintaining their appearance. Others of them seemed quite institutionalized, wearing plain impersonal clothing chosen for comfort and uniformity.

The idea of a large number of strangers silently watching a television together struck me as a fate I would like to avoid for myself and my loved ones. I had the idea that each of these individuals was brought into this designated community area which was mostly an open space with chairs pointed in the direction of a television. Some people came to this place in wheelchairs. It seemed to me that the activity here was to face forward, expose oneself to the television, and be stimulated. No one talked to each other. I suppose anyone who was there must have been placed there. Anyone with agency and free will would presumably have thought to choose a personal activity, like reading, watching video of their own choice on their own device, socializing, walking around, or doing anything other than being alone with strangers in front of network television on small screen in a big room with a hallway in it. All of the people in this place must have had middle class money at some time. This was not luxury care but it was far from the worst, having private rooms, lots of happy staff, and generally a well-run appearance. I was also struck that not only would I not like to spend much of my life in a place like that, but also if I were pressed into needing care I would not be able to afford even this much considering my social class.

Pat liked it well enough in this place and remarked that room service was nice and they washed her back in the shower. She said that the daily physical therapy was nice attention and useful and that she appreciated that their occupational therapist evaluated her and could give insight into her condition as compared to similar other cases. When I came to see her she had two stacks of books, one in processing and the other being completed. Her laptop was at hand. I asked her how she plugged it in and she said that she did not in her room, because rooms do not have electrical outlets because residents cannot be trusted with them. Pat seemed able to walk well and at almost a normal pace, even though she did get tired and sore when she took us for a walk. She showed me her knee. It had a huge cut in it with about 30 staples, but did not look inflamed or even like a wound in any other state than mostly healed.

On Friday 23 October Pat came home. I went to work that day then on to Sarah Lawrence College to talk with some health advocacy staff there about contributing to Wikipedia. When I came home she had a friend with her and was happy to be at home. She was walking around with a cane and felt comfortable going up her stairs. She was interested in her cats and I had sent her some updates about what they were doing, which was mostly sleep. They paid more attention to me while she was gone and I petted them more and brushed them too.

I often go to Fabian’s house on weekends but I asked him to come to Yonkers so that we could be with Pat just in case she needed anything. He came late Friday night and stayed Saturday and Sunday too. It was a peaceful weekend and we stayed in cooking and talking. Pat looked better every day.

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Wikipedia, open access, and The Wikipedia Library

By bluerasberry on 2015-10-24

Wikipedia is built by summarizing and citing what reliable sources already say. Academic journals are reliable sources, but often prohibitively expensive for Wikipedia contributors to access. There is a social movement called “open access” which demands public access and reuse rights from academic journal publishers. I feel strongly about this movement. I stepped up the Wikipedia community outreach I had been doing after the 2011 arrest of Aaron Swartz, which happened because of his open access advocacy. About a year after he was arrested I set up a Wikipedia article on The Cost of Knowledge protest against Elsevier and set up WikiProject Open Access on Wikipedia, which was my attempt to help people organize to promote the idea of open access. “Open access”, for various reasons, is a difficult concept to express. I care for the idea, and I care about the state of the advocacy movement.

Jake Orlowitz established The Wikipedia Library in a Wikimedia Foundation grant-funded project in 2013. The Wikipedia Library is a program to connect Wikipedia contributors to source materials to which they can refer with citations when adding content to Wikipedia. In theory, it would connect contributors to any kind of source. However, before The Wikipedia Library existed Wikipedians had their own systems for sharing access to some kinds of reference materials, and were already adept at sharing access to content which was free to read online. Considering its mission, and considering the gap in ability between an independent volunteer and a collective project which could speak for the community, The Wikipedia Library skewed its work focus to provide a service that Wikipedians could never crowdsource. That service was to solicit publishers for free online subscription accounts to commercial publications and then provide those accounts to Wikipedia contributors who seemed likely to use them to develop Wikipedia articles. Here is the process:

  1. The Wikipedia Library asks a publisher for free accounts to their publication
  2. The publisher providers those accounts to The Wikipedia Library
  3. The Wikipedia Library advertises the availability of free accounts
  4. Wikipedia contributors request those accounts in a public forum
  5. The community comes to consensus about who gets the accounts – in practice there have been enough accounts for all or most eligible requestees to get them.
  6. Account recipients use them to develop Wikipedia articles sharing a subject field with the content of the publication
  7. After some time, The Wikipedia Library seeks to report outcomes following issuance of the account. In practice this has been difficult, but everyone presumes that Wikipedians engage with the subscriptions like they do with other sources, and cite them in Wikipedia articles. Those Wikipedia articles are read by Wikipedia’s usual huge and engaged audience.
  8. Then end result is that better content gets into Wikipedia with better sources. Subscription recipients are gratified to have better research support. The Wikipedia Library is happy to be a vehicle for delivering donations to people who need them. Publishers presume commercial benefit from having their publications cited in Wikipedia projects.

So this process has been ongoing, and hundreds of Wikipedia contributors have used subscriptions from this service. Still, I would call it a small project in its infancy. These days it has 2-3 staff supporting it, but most of its foundation is Wikipedia’s usual volunteer labor pool and crowdsourcing process. While Jake was establishing the project, I met him for coffee and we talked about open access. He was not a passionate adherent to the open access social movement even though he respected it. Overall, Jake has always been understanding of my pressing need to communicate through conspiracy theories about open access and other things, and has a patient, moderate, sensible soul. I talked to Jake again last summer – he is as gracious as ever, and The Wikipedia Library is still awesome, and he is still a major open access supporter without having a fight or flight response every time the topic comes up in conversation. Maybe some of his practicality could guide my own actions.

In September Michael Eisen, co-founder of PLOS and giant in the open access social movement, tweeted criticism of The Wikipedia Library. As a result of that that, Glyn Moody came to know about The Wikipedia Library and criticized it in an article. Jake followed with a response on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. In response to that post, Michael posted more criticism on his blog. As a result of all this, my colleague Pete Forsyth arranged for a public discussion to be convened in which Jake, Michael, and a UCSF open access guy (Rich Schneider, with whom I am not acquainted) will have a discussion about open access and Wikipedia and The Wikipedia Library. This happens next week in the context of Open Access Week, which has always been a flexibly scheduled commemoration.

So that is the context. I wish to give my own responses to the ideas in the critical blog posts and provide my own criticism of Wikipedia. I am sharing this with the panelists before their talk next week. At the end I give suggestions for how Wikipedians and the open access community could work together more effectively.

“Wikipedia” does nothing or very little. Better to say, “Some guy on Wikipedia did this…”

The critical open access posts talk about “Wikipedia” as it is a unified entity. Lots of news media does. This is mistaken and misguided. Whenever anyone says, “Wikipedia did this and that…” replace the word “Wikipedia” with “some guy”, as in “Elsevier and some guy had struck a deal”. The Wikipedia Library is sort of an official effort of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is also an institution backed by a little Wikipedia community consensus, and probably better to call a “community project” than a Wikimedia Foundation project. The Wikipedia Library is not founded on any great thought, manifesto, new order, or ideology, and is more of an individual’s project than part of any unified brand identity of the Wikipedia project. It is an improvised solution born of poverty to reach a goal of providing content access in desperate circumstances. It is Jake’s organization derived from the community demand. From one perspective, it makes sense for Jake to speak on behalf of The Wikipedia Library, and The Wikipedia Library would not exist were it nor for him, but from another perspective, he is meeting a crowd demand and speaking on behalf of needs at the level of individuals. Jake’s position as staff of the Wikimedia Foundation does not imply – as it would with a traditional corporate entity – that there should be a philosophical ground for The Wikipedia Library’s place in a concerted organized social movement. Jake put a lot of work into establishing The Wikipedia Library, and maybe it will grow into something bigger, but at this point in its development criticism of The Wikipedia Library has to be recognized as the criticism of individual users wanting access to subscription publications. Follow the blame through the people requesting access, and not through The Wikipedia Library for providing it, because whatever is driving people to seek access to closed access sources is the problem.

Remember – Not even the Wikimedia Foundation speaks on behalf of the Wikimedia community or “Wikipedia”.

The Wikipedia Library’s direct impact is not a big deal

Building from the idea that The Wikipedia Library should not be considered as part of the Wikipedia brand, except in the sense that the brand is something that anyone can edit, critics of Wikipedia’s projects too often assume that Wikipedia projects or events are comparable to ex cathedra actions of a corporate power and backed with a lot of influence. Definitely The Wikipedia Library is a project with impact, but to say that it is popular would be an overstatement. First, Wikipedia is not popular. It hardly has any content contributors as compared to its peers in high-profile new media. It has a huge number of readers, but the number of people targeted by The Wikipedia Library is tiny. The Wikipedians eligible to get subscriptions from the library is about the same as the number eligible to vote in Wikipedia’s steward elections, so about 12,000 for English language. Among those 12,000, about 3,500 people make 100 Wikipedia edits a month, which is really the base audience which The Wikipedia Library serves. I am going to venture a guess that there are fewer than 100 people who use The Wikipedia Library subscriptions to make 5 edits a month for a six-month consecutive period- if I am wrong I still think my guess is close. Whatever actions The Wikipedia Library is encouraging are probably not the most significant part of the library project. Rather, the significance of The Wikipedia Library is to ideologically convey the idea that Wikipedians seek to use good academic sources in Wikipedia, and that Wikipedians as layman have ideological interest in getting access to pay-to-read publications and citing them in Wikipedia. With the major criticism of Wikipedia being that it is low quality content, an ideological alignment with projects to increase access to scholarly content is a boost that Wikipedia needs far more than contributors actually getting direct benefit from using The Wikipedia Library’s subscriptions.

For the most part, Wikipedia contributors use scholarly sources in two ways: either they already have access to them, or they are resourceful #IcanhazPDF copyright circumventers who can get copies of whatever academic papers they want without subscriptions through The Wikipedia Library or otherwise. Personally, I do not believe that the number of people using The Wikipedia Library’s content is making a significant direct impact on the quality of content Wikipedia, but indirectly, I do feel that The Wikipedia Library is raising awareness that Wikipedia seeks to include the best available sources. I also feel that recipients of subscriptions from The Wikipedia Library feel very lucky for the privilege and grow a new appreciation for the privilege divide between those who have access to subscription content and those who cannot afford to make subscription purchases. The existence of The Wikipedia Library also communicates that people with access to the best information are welcome to contribute to Wikimedia projects.

Wikipedia contributors deserve access to academic papers more than any university or library

There is a “Wikipedia is the lesser evil” argument. If any organization deserves subscriptions, then Wikipedia’s need is foremost, because Wikipedia is the single most popular general information source in the world and the only popular nonprofit media outlet. No one has offered Jake or the Wikipedia community any alternative to making the The Wikipedia Library a beggar project that grovels for donations from publishing houses. It is difficult for me to take criticism of The Wikipedia Library seriously from anyone who thinks there is any other library on earth that has more right to exist than The Wikipedia Library. When people want to criticize Wikipedia they often treat it as a world institution and when they are asked to support it they treat it as insignificant.

A few years ago Encyclopedia Britannica still had annual revenue of not less than USD 50,000,000 and is in decline from a 1990 legacy when its revenue was 650,000,000 yearly. In contrast, The Wikipedia Library might be operating on a staff of three at most with no budget for library content. There is a conspiracy against Wikipedia in the sense that every university in the United States pays for access to Britannica (part of a bundle, but they do), but has no support for Wikipedia. Britannica is the mega-power. Britannica’s staff gets access to journals. The University of California pays for Britannica access – I just checked their library website, and see Britannica listed as a resource they purchase but of course I cannot read it because they restrict access to their students. Just a guess, but perhaps they are paying 10k a year for this while giving nothing to Wikipedia, and of course Wikipedia is more valuable as a resource than Britannica.

One might ask – what triggered critics to point to Wikipedia, when they would never be so confrontational in their own university or even to Britannica? There is a societal tendency to criticize nonprofit projects for being in poverty, then disparage the desperation of those projects to grasp slightly out of the reach of poverty. The targets of criticism should be the rich inefficient projects and not the scrappy almost unfunded projects. Wikipedia is more worthy of access to subscriptions than any library or university in the world. There is no such thing as a university which is making better use of its library subscriptions than it would by cutting all local access and turning over control of the entirety of their resources to The Wikipedia Library. There is no such thing as a university or library that matters as much as Wikipedia. If any library or university imagines being more, then it is matter of vanity. Good content is easy and cheap to find, but only Wikipedia has good distribution which is the expensive and scarce resource. If the goal of any library is to distribute information to the largest audience in the deepest way, then having a process to channel information into Wikipedia is low cost, high impact, and contributes to the persistent commons of free accessible information. I am a big fan of libraries but I also think that the world would be a better place if any given library dissolved and transferred its resources somehow to get content into the hands of Wikipedia contributors.

Wikipedia is a sneaky snake of a project which counters corporate control over information access

There is a tradition in the Wikimedia community of smiling Wikipedians approaching institutions and saying, “Share your content with us. Wikipedia will distribute it, and this will drive traffic to your media channels.” This is a nice idea, and I say it too sometimes, but it is not the whole truth. The research backing this idea is inconclusive. At its core, this Wikipedia outreach strategy develops because it seems to speak to the aspirations of content providers who wish to increase their audience. It is less established that sharing content on Wikipedia is a good short or long term strategy for driving traffic to other publishers. It definitely is not the case that the Wikipedia community cares at all about the traffic metrics to any other publication, despite what any outreach pitch might promise. Wikipedia is great for sharing ideas and information. It makes no promises to pump life into decaying business models which anyone wishes to support beyond their usefulness, even though sometimes “some guy” might promise that Wikipedia does this.

The Wikipedia community imagines itself as the last stop for most people’s needs. Yes, people who wish to go more deeply into a topic should follow the sources which a Wikipedia article is citing, and yes, they might read the original paper for more information. In general, though, Wikipedia strives to be the information source which gives people the reference context that meets whatever need they have. Wikipedia contributors frequently drive their actions toward free media, minimizing commercial bias, and nonprofit publishing. Along with feelings of support for those things, Wikipedians instinctively grow habits to use Wikipedia as a tool to consume and assimilate all media. Wikipedians especially like using Wikipedia to adapt and republish ideas from good media which is less free, more commercial, and more for-profit.

Traditional academic publishers might have the idea that if their work is featured in Wikipedia, then readers will click through their links, hit the paywall, then make a purchase decision to read the paper. That is one theory, and in outreach sometimes even the Wikipedia community suggests that this is plausible. Personally, I do not buy this. Information wants to be free. Bolstering paywalls is probably not a viable business model, and I doubt the business wisdom of increasing the number of people who hit them or strategies to make people crash into the paywalls in a more surprising way. A publisher which has their closed access publication cited in Wikipedia is building supporting evidence that they are a dinosaur in a changing world, and as time passes, public opinion will not become kinder to them for being more cited over more time in Wikipedia. Saying that a given closed access publisher is highly cited in Wikipedia is not a marketing strategy – it is a target to be attacked by people who would sink their enterprise. It is supporting evidence that a lay public demands the content, which is an idea that neither the open access movement nor traditional academic publishing is prepared to address. Lay public access is so great, so disrupting, and so completely outside the professional experience of scientists or the commercial experience of scholarly publishers that they would not even know how to respond to a public demand for this content.

Getting one’s content featured on Wikipedia is no favor to traditional publishing. Wikipedia seeks nothing less than openness beyond even the comfort of the open access movement. It would be a hasty focus on short-term benefit to presume the long-term predictability of matching the minor business decision of sharing a few subscriptions to the wild and limitless radical open ideology of the Wikimedia community. There is no end to Wikipedia’s appetite and demand for content, nor is there any end to its demand that content be processed to become more free. There are already experiments for Wikipedia to devour all PubMed Central open access publications, deconstruct the text and non-text media they contain, auto-upload the media files to Wikimedia Commons and post the text to Wikisource. From this point all the content goes in every direction on Wikipedia’s never-ending assembly lines, where it is processed typically by integration into Wikipedia articles in all languages. Wikipedia does not want that just for open access publication – it wants the closed sources too somehow. The natural instinct of Wikipedians is to look at the sum of all academic publications ever published, say “Really? Only terabytes?” then think about eating it all.

The future of Wikipedia’s relationship with publishing is probably that base concepts with minimal subjective interpretation are presented in Wikipedia. Traditional publication loses its monopoly on dry presentation of information as more outlines and overviews become free to remix online. At the same time, there is still space for commercial sales of expert interpretations, context presented with humanity, cleverness in publishing for targeted demographics, and the upcoming knowledge explosion that will follow universal access to basic information. This might not benefit established corporate interests but Wikipedia and the free content movement are the biggest supporters of the arts, publishing, and the creation of new copyrighted creative works overall.

Open access is only a means to an end

Open access was always a lie. No one ever cared about open access. It was only imagined as a route by means of which we get to open science. As shocking as open access has been, it is much less confrontational to the controllers of power than open science. Open access is the palatable first-step strategy by means of which open science is sought. Even if Wikipedia is a little in conflict with open access, it does more to advance open science than the open access movement, and for that reason little conflicts should be tolerated because both projects have the same endpoint.

Academic publishing is a tiny commercial field of merely many billions of dollars. Activists behind the open access movement developed open access as a way of deceitfully positioning large groups of scientists in such a way that they would come to believe that opening data, notebooks, and all science would be the next step. The resistance to open science is so great that the concept is hard to even imagine in contemporary society. So many corporate interests and drives to commercialization stand against the spirit of scientific thought that scientists in the same field but working for competing commercial organizations are unlikely to closely collaborate. Eventually, the day will come when some technological communication development will happen that will enable scientists to communicate efficiently with each other, and when that happens, it might be the case that corporations will have to contend with the fact that humans doing the same thing like to build on each others’ work. I want to manifest open science. The open access movement is one strategy for expediting the advent of open science. Other strategies include public dissemination of layman interpretations of the science, and The Wikipedia Library as a big boost to dissemination and at most a small pushback to open access for the greater good. For a lot of reasons I do not worry too much about open access. I would prefer it to come sooner than later, but I take it as an inevitability, and I am not convinced that the incoming generation of scientists have the capacity to tolerate the anti-science nonsense in which the leading thinkers of the current and last generations seem to be comfortable. Open access advocates, because they are a subset of academics, generally have few opinions about sharing scientific information with the public, so I do not fully trust that demographic to speak impartially about community strategies to advance open science. It would be nice to collaborate in mutual efforts to destroy barriers to open science, because both OA advocates and community groups are underdogs in their challenge to commercial barriers to free science. Still – the open access movement should not be so inwardly focused to think that the movement matters of itself. There is a greater goal of open science to which The Wikipedia Library and Wikipedia are advancing with the open access movement.

As closing thoughts, here are the things that I think each perspective should ask of each other-

Open access activists should ask for this from the Wikimedia movement-

  • Leaders of The Wikipedia Library should be able to recite the talking points of the open access movement
  • The Wikipedia Library should conform to the jargon set by the open access movement. “Open access” as a term should be used to refer to only academic literature, and only for the ability to both read and remix that literature.
  • The Wikipedia articles on open access and related should be maintained and distributed.
  • The Wikipedia Library funds certain benefits to their closed access partners, including metrics reports. These reports come as a consequence of the business transaction – since closed access partners are making a “donation”, they expect an impact report in return to demonstrate an exchange of value. If any open access partner were to request and value an impact report from Wikipedia, then ask The Wikipedia Library to provide this kind of report. Ask for the following – how many times is a given journal cited in Wikimedia projects, in which Wikipedia articles do those citations appear, and how many Wikipedia readers read the Wikipedia articles which are presenting information from the cited sources. Any publisher who does this proves dissemination of their content through Wikipedia and gets a closer relationship to the Wikimedia community.
  • Open access enthusiasts should keep their reserved places in The Wikipedia Library, even if no one can be identified to sit in the empty available roles in that project. Considering the present climate, there is almost certainly a path to Wikimedia Foundation funding. I even contributed to a draft proposal for a PLOS enthusiast to enter Wikipedia.
  • Seek coaching on using the resources of Wikipedia, including the ability to use the name and brand image. Michael criticized the negotiation that The Wikipedia Library did with Elsevier. Fine – I am sure that Jake would be happy to deputize Michael or anyone Michael chooses to be the official ambassador to Elsevier. More titles, ranks, and accreditations can be provided on request if they are useful, or anyone can just make up their own title and say “I am from Wikipedia…” and negotiate whatever they like with whomever they like. The authority of The Wikipedia Library is crowdsourced consent, not diktat from the Wikimedia Foundation or any other hierarchy. Lots of individual Wikipedia community members can predict the response of the Wikipedia hivemind to any given proposal, so if anyone has an idea that helps Wikipedia, float it by the community and if it seems cool then go out with it into the world. If some open access movement activist wishes to negotiate outlandish deals for The Wikipedia Library and Wikipedia with intent to benefit Wikipedia while having a side effect of compromising academic publishers, then there is place for that person in the Wikipedia community.

Wikimedia community members interested in open access should ask for this from the open access movement-

  • Scientists, especially people with opinions about academic publishing, need to have good familiarity with how Wikipedia works. The world is cold and lonely and Wikipedia is this generation’s only popular friendly player in nonprofit media. Wikipedia training is available internationally. Considering the good track record Wikipedia ideology has in changing individuals’ world outlook, it is worth a little time to understand how it works.
  • It is probably time for some leaders of the open access movement to fork movement ideology to call for business sense in marketing. The open access movement’s commitment to jargon is intolerable. “Open access” is an incomprehensible term without having its counter-intuitive meaning explained. The related terms “green” and “gold” are not usable and should never have been coined or marketed. The blur as commercial publishers put “open access” labels on content which is barely free to read is harming the movement. The open access movement is only 10 years old and only has a few million supporters at best. Scrap all the jargon usage which has been taught to these people over this time. Start over with plain English. Make the Wikipedia article on open access comprehensible, then let’s have Wikipedia present the core idea – “scholarly publications and backing data free to read and remix” – to the world beyond direct users of academic publishing. Wikipedia is the world’s most consulted source of information on “open access” as a concept so it is an ideal platform for the open access movement to present its ideology.
  • Someone with business sense in the OA movement would be doing the Wikimedia community favors by requesting a little funding from the Wikimedia Foundation while also using the Wikipedia brand name to solicit a lot more funding for development of Wikipedia as a vehicle for disseminating research. Please exploit Wikipedia as a vehicle for meeting your research grant’s communication and dissemination requirements.
  • Wikipedia needs more content of better quality. Please provide.
  • Wikipedia needs more access to more sources to cite.
  • Open access enthusiasts should check out the many delightful open access projects which the Wikipedia community has developed, and consider participating.

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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.