Blogs and Wikis: Ushering in an Era of Change

Q: How is Wikipedia encouraging use of its applications and tools in developing countries?
Wales: The biggest obstacle in reaching people in developing countries is their lack of access to computers. Like all Wikipedia contributors, the people who are contributing from those countries are smart people who want to make a humanitarian contribution. They are also volunteering on Wikipedia because it’s a lot of fun and an intellectual pastime. We have volunteers around the world who have worked to develop open source software in 100 languages. We are very strong in all the European languages, particularly English and German, as well as Japanese and Chinese. Many of the communities in all these languages are active, with about 62 languages containing more than 1,000 articles. These are not translations, but independently written articles entered in those languages.
Some languages in developing countries take longer to work out. Creating the Wikipedia in Hindi was complicated because in India most current contributors speak English and work on English keyboards. You can’t type Hindi on an English keyboard, so that needed to be resolved. Many African languages have only about 1,000 articles entered. Another example is Arabic, where it took us more than a year to develop the right-to-left reading and writing functionality. We now have about 5,000 articles now in Arabic. Within the next year, Wikipedia is planning to hold a conference to promote contributions from Arabic academics and users in Arabic-speaking countries.
One of the most important things in this area is to not re-invent the wheel. What I see sometimes is that people imagine that, in order to enable this kind of work, they need a very complicated content management system that will cost millions of dollars to create. In reality, all you need is a wiki and social rules. People are always concerned about things like “Who is allowed to do what” and “we need the software with permission models to support all that”. You don’t really need all that. You just tell people “don’t edit this unless you’re authorized” and then they don’t, especially if you have some kind of log-in passwords. Wikis work great because they are very quick and easy.
Q: What are the most innovative licensing arrangements a developing country can adopt to allow decentralized knowledge production?
Wales: In most cases, free licenses, such as those available through GNU and Creative Commons, should be the focus to allow people to modify and redistribute versions. This is particularly important for educational material. One of the worst things I’ve seen is when government funds are spent on an educational project where people cannot use the end product because they are not allowed to.
Q: Will Wikipedia format its content for e-learning so that every person in the developing world can have access to a Wikipedia?
Wales: We have an ongoing discussion within the community about how we can identify particular versions of articles to be part of a stable product for print or for burning CD-ROMs or DVDs. This would be absolutely applicable to the developing world because, in a lot of places in these countries, people only have access to old computers where they could use CD-ROMs but not affordable Internet access. We have volunteers who are promoting this idea. For instance, there’s a gentleman in South Africa who is a school volunteer normally fixing printers and so on. He is also taking along a Wikipedia CD-ROM and installing it locally so that kids can use it!

Congress 'made Wikipedia changes'

Online reference site Wikipedia blames US Congress staff for partisan changes to a number of political biographies.
Computers traced to Capitol Hill removed unpalatable facts from articles on senators, while other entries were "vandalised", the site said.
An inquiry was launched after staff for Democratic representative Marty Meehan admitted polishing his biography.
Wikipedia is produced by readers who add entries and edit any page, and has become a widely-used reference tool.
'Liberal' to 'activist'
Using the public history of edits on Wikipedia, researchers collected the internet protocol numbers of computers linked to the US Senate and tracked the changes made to online pages.
The site lists half a dozen prominent biographies that had been changed by Senate computers, including those of Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, California Senator Dianne Feinstein and Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa.
Senator Coleman's office has confirmed that staff there had made a number of changes to his online record.
Where he was described as a "liberal" back in college, this was changed to "activist".
Among other changes, staff also deleted a reference to Mr Coleman voting with President Bush 98% of the time in 2003, despite running as a moderate the year before.
Wikipedia said staffers of Senator Tom Harkin had removed a paragraph relating to Mr Harkin's having falsely claimed to have flown combat missions over North Vietnam, and his subsequent recantation.
A handful of miscellaneous vandalism edits had been made to some senators' articles, it said.
One example was the entry for Republican Senator Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, who it was falsely alleged had been voted "most annoying senator".
Bush editing block
Senator Coleman's chief of staff, Erich Mische, said editing was done to correct inaccuracies and delete information that was not reflective of the politician.
The article on President Bush has been altered so many times - not just from within Congress - that Wikipedia's volunteer monitors have had to block further "editing"
"They've got an edit provision on there for the sake of editing when things are not accurate," Mr Mische told the Associated Press.
"I presume that if they did not want people to edit, they wouldn't allow you to edit."
Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it.
It said the Congressional computer network has been blocked from editing for brief periods on a number of occasions in the last six months due to the inappropriate contributions.
The article on President Bush has been altered so many times - not just from within Congress - that Wikipedia's volunteer monitors have had to block further "editing".
But it also says its investigation showed the vast majority of edits from Senate IPs were "beneficial and helpful".
Massachusetts newspapers disclosed last month that staffers for Representative Marty Meehan had polished the boss's Wikipedia biography.
Deleted were references to a long-abandoned promise to serve only four terms, and to his campaign war chest.
Accuracy study
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and has since grown to more than 1.8 million articles in 200 languages. Some 800,000 entries are in English.
It is based on wikis, open-source software which lets anyone fiddle with a webpage. Anyone reading a subject entry can disagree, edit, add, delete, or replace the entry.
A December 2005 study by the British journal Nature found it was about as accurate on science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
But it has been criticised for the correctness of entries, most recently over the biography of prominent US journalist John Seigenthaler - which incorrectly linked him to the Kennedy assassinations.