When wikis won't work

I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this draft posting on wikinews.org about a diner in a Buffalo restaurant who allegedly found a rubber glove in his sandwich. Yuck. The story interested me for reasons other than the weirdness of it, though.

For one thing, the draft has no names. Neither the customer nor the store manager is identified. There is also a nonsequitir at the end of the second paragraph referring to the restaurant’s efforts to expand and tear down an old house in the process. I couldn’t understand what this information had to do with an unpleasant dining experience.

Standard journalistic practice is to seek comment from both sides, so I called Pano’s Restaurant and spoke to owner Pano Georgiadis. He was unaware of the Wikinews posting and vigorously denied that this incident had happened. He called it “fiction.”

I wanted to contact the author to get his or her side of the story but the author is merely an IP address at Adelphia Communications, so that was a dead end. Adelphia does serve the Buffalo area.

I looked a little more into the reference to the restaurant’s plan to demolish an old house as part of an expansion effort. There’s a website about the house that explains some of its history and mentions Pano’s expansion plans. It looks to me like this is a pretty contentious issue in that neighborhood.

So put two and two together and it starts to look like this “news story” may have been the work of a disgruntled neighbor who’s pissed off at Pano’s. That’s just speculation, of course, but there’s no way to find out since the author can’t be reached. Anyone could have made the story “news,” though, by simply changing a tag. Then it would have shown up on Wikinews’s front page, right up there with the Saddam Hussein trial.

It’s also interesting to noted that this story had been reviewed by other people. There had been 15 edits by four other people, who dutifully rewrote it, polished it and corrected grammar errors but never bothered to check its accuracy. Community journalism, in this case, was really community copy-editing.

The more I look at the Wikinews model, the less I like it as a mainstream information source. When it’s good, it’s very good, as I noted in an earlier analysis. I think it could be a great adjunct to existing news media – and some newspapers are experimenting with this – but the potential for damage through abuse or just plain ignorance is too high. There are certain journalistic disciplines that have to be enforced or the process just doesn’t work.

BTW, I checked the LA Times, which launched a wiki in June, to see how it was coming along. It’s been shut down “because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material,” a notice says.

The dark side of community journalism.

A rant on rants

Talking to a lot of people about community media lately, I notice one word that comes up often: fear. Part of it is fear of the unknown as in people don’t really understand community media so they’re afraid of it. But a more troubling issue is fear about the blogosphere as an arena for ambush and attack, a place where well-meaning people dare not tread for fear of their reputations.

I think this image is an embedded problem for the blogosphere that will hold back its potential as a socially acceptable medium for discussion and influence.

The First Amendment made my career possible and I wouldn’t think of advocating against free speech. But free speech and responsible speech aren’t the same thing. Bloggers don’t have editors, professional societies or codes of ethics, nor do they want them. That makes it incumbent upon bloggers to create their own ethical standards. That’s a tall order in a world that’s growing as quickly as this one without any underlying governance principles.

What are we trying to achieve? If it is just to speak, we’ve got that. If we want to spout off, we can do that too. Will people listen? Well, there’s no way to insure that but for most bloggers that isn’t really the point. They’re just digging on the freedom that the media provides.

But if we’re going to take blogging to the next level, then it’s up to the blogosphere to make itself a force that markets will want to listen to. We’re off to a good start but there’s still a long way to go.

It seems to me that blogging stands at a kind of turning point right now.

Down one path lies the road to places like Yahoo newsgroups and Usenet, which have degenerated into spam, chaos and character assassination. That’s what happens when the crazies take over and the good people basically run screaming.

Down the other path is the innovation created by cable TV and community publishing. While there are certainly problems with both those media, there’s no question they have created a richer information environment than the cartels they replaced. We are better off because of them.

A personal experience. A few years ago I had some brushes with a group called Team OS/2. It was a loose federation of users organized by some IBMers and sent out to evangelize OS/2 when it was still in a trench war with Windows. It was a good idea and I admired the group for its commitment. But over time Team OS/2 became less evangelical and more vigilante. Reporters and editors who criticized OS/2 were verbally ambushed and beaten by postings in newsgroups, forums and letters to the editor. If our crime was ignorance, then we were stupid. If we favored Windows, then we had been brainwashed. There was no middle ground with Team OS/2. And as the operating system slid further off the market share charts, Team OS/2’s tactics became more desperate, pathetic and ugly.

My own Team OS/2 encounters prompted me to write an editorial that was probably the closest I ever came to flame mailing someone myself. It was a disturbing experience.

The blosophere is full of people who just want to rant, protest and puke all over the institutions and people they don’t like. There’s always going to be a certain amount of that behavior and that’s fine. The challenge is to make those people the fringe. I believe that the real voice of this community lies in the leaders who are defining it: people like Dan Gillmor, Adam Curry and Dave Winer. They have a vision of the blogosphere as a kind of new manifestation of democratic speech, one in which thoughtful, rational and constructive voices rise above the noise and help the medium achieve its potential.

The only way we have to support their efforts is through our links. Linking is the currency of the blogosphere and it will choose the winners and losers. Ranters and flamers will always have their place (hopefully in a corner :-)) but I hope they aren’t rewarded with clicks and links. Choose the people whose opinions you value and reward them with your time because they’re the future of this new medium.

In-line blogger comments

Google has introduced Blogger Web Comments for Firefox, a plug-in for the Mozilla browser that embeds links to blog commentary right in the frame of a webpage. The feature appears as a small icon in the lower right-hand corner. Click on it and get a summary of what bloggers are saying about that page. This is a great tool for business marketers who want to track what’s being said in the blogosphere about their companies. In my tests, the utility didn’t distinguish on dates very much but it did a good job of scouring both Blogger and non-Blogger sites for information and it presented them cleanly and fast. I presume a version for Internet Explorer is on the way.

Corporate blogs gone bad

A friend of mine, a very successful public relations professional, recently told me that many of her clients are now asking her about blogging because they believe it’s a critical part of remaining competitive, that their clients are all doing it so they should be doing it too.

This came just after a chat with another friend whose boss started a blog because his superiors told him he had to. The problem is that the boss doesn’t have time to maintain the blog so my friend is updating it for him.

Both situations are emblematic of what’s wrong with corporate blogging today. Too many businesses are diving into blogging because they think it’s a checklist item, that they need a blog because their competitors have one or because it’s the “thing to do.”

Those strategies – if you can call them that – are doomed to fail because blogging isn’t about satisfying a competitive mandate; it’s about having something to say.

That’s what I told my friends. The culture of the blogosphere demands that people who blog should do so because they have a need to communicate that is unmet by traditional channels. It’s not a checklist item. People who blog out of obligation or resignation will fail because they will bring no passion or commitment to the process. It’s passion that makes blogging work.

I’m not denigrating the role of corporate PR. I think it’s appropriate that PR should create and enforce corporate standards for disclosure in any communications, online or otherwise. Microsoft and Sun both have very active blog cultures, but they also have strict rules on accountability, insider information, forward-looking statements and other activities that tend to draw the attention of the SEC.

There are ways that even publicly held corporations can blog successfully, though. Look at Stonyfield Farms, the yogurt maker. Its four corporate blogs talk about child-rearing, organic farming, healthy kids and women’s issues. They’re successful because they touch a nerve with customers and don’t necessarily involve promotion of Stonyfield products. You can get good information from these blogs about nutrition news and government programs without ever knowing or caring that it’s a yogurt company that’s providing the information.

This is the way corporate blogging should develop, I think. The topics should be selected because they resonate with customers who have similar values and interests, not because they promote a product. The corporate marketing strategy of the ’00s is all about this kind of “soft” selling because it promotes a brand without shoving it down the customer’s throat. Blogs are a way to pick up smart and interesting people within a company and showcase them to the outside world in a way that makes their interests and values a part of the public’s interests and values. It is, as Stonyfield’s website says, “a chance for you to get inside Stonyfield and get to know us, and us to know you.”

Smart companies increasingly will understand this.

BtoB takes on Social Media

I’m delighted to report that the editors at BtoB Magazine have relented to my ceaseless badgering and agreed to let me take on a monthly column about social media beginning in January.

This is good stuff because BtoB is a well-read and respected publication in the advertising and media profession with 45,000 paid subscribers, two-thirds of them marketers. The decision to give regular space to analysis of the world of blogs, wikis, podcasts and other community media is an important endorsement of how important those influencers have become to mainstream business.

I need your help. If you’re a marketer or PR professional, please write or post here and tell me what you want to know about working with the blogosphere. If you’re a blogger who regularly writes about businesses, tell me what information and support you need from them. Help me choose the best conferences on this topic and help me find the best bloggers and podcasts in this area.

With all due respect to my friends in high tech, I am particularly interested in hearing from people outside of the computer industry. We know that a lot of computer makers “get” social meda but they don’t reflect the real world. Since 3/4 of BtoB’s audience is non-tech, I’d like to hear more about their concerns so I can educate myself and target the column to a broader audience.

I’ll post links to the column when it starts in mid-January. Please contribute your comments and ideas so the column reflects as wide a variety of topics as possible.

Wiki quality check

The science journal Nature performed a head-to-head comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Britannica was only slightly more accurate than its online, community-edited counterpart.

The average science entry in Wikipedia had four errors to Britannica’s three. What I found surprising was the Britannica had three errors on average to begin with. Didn’t we used to pay thousands of dollars for bound copies of that reference work?

So if you’re the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica, how do you respond? Here’s what the Britannica spokesman said: “It is not the case that errors creep in on an occasional basis or that a couple of articles are poorly written. There are lots of articles in that condition. They need a good editor.”

Um, maybe so. But you charge $70/year for your service and Wikipedia is free. What’s more, Wikipedia is less than five years old and is going to get better. Britannica’s been around since 1768 and still has three errors per article.

The Britannica spokesman doth protest too much. Maybe a better approach would be to emphasize the superior quality of writing in Britannica (that’s a structural weakness of wikis), the top-name authors and the links to other proprietary information within Britannica’s reference source family. Attacking a free competitor that’s almost as good as a paid service is dumb.

Oh, and Britannica just cut the price of the 32-volume encyclopedia set to $995 for the holidays. Such a value. If I’m Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales, I’m already talking with O’Reilly about publishing a competitor.

What would you do if you were Britannica? Post your comments here.

Seeing the world view

I highly recommend that you download and listen to this podcast with Professor Thomas Barnett of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. It’s nearly an hour long but worth every minute.

Barnett talks about global politics in the context of technology. He points to one of the most dramatic developments of the last 15 years: the reordering of global priorities from superpower confrontation to containment of individual madmen and the opportunity it presents for the U.S. economic and political model to become transcendent.

Barnett, who’s written two influential books on the changing nature of global politics, notes that the issues facing governments and economies have changed dramatically in just a short time. As late as the mid ’80s, the threat of nuclear annihalation was a very real force in our day-to-day lives. The end of the cold war erased that threat and refocused our attention on state-to-state conflict as epitomized by the war between Serbia and Croatia. But that threat has vanished, too, he argues. The only major major inter-state conflict in the world today is between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Today, the political priority has turned to containing madmen like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, who disrupt global stability through targeted attacks but who don’t threaten the supremacy of market economies. This is an important and very positive change.

Barnett argues that the U.S. economic model has won and that means the political model is winning as well. About 2/3 of the world’s population lives in countries that have bought into capitalism and these countries will be tied closely to the U.S. in the future. In fact, he suggests that Americans may actually have more in common with China and India than we do with Great Britain and France because those Asian countries are embracing free market economies over government protectionism. Opposition is weakening. The Taliban promises a return to the past, which is unappealing to most people. These dissonant forces will fade with time as the superiority of the global free trade model triumphs.

Where’s the tech angle? Not where you’d expect. Barnett believes that Y2K was a watershed in global politics. The date-change phenomenon created a heightened sensitivity that global networks could be disrupted and global commerce compromised, he says. Whether Y2K was a real problem or not is almost unimportant. The fact is that it forced people to confront the possibility of a world without computer networks and that created awareness of the importance of connectedness to the global economy. That awareness convinced people that maintaining supply chains and business linkages between countries was vital their well-being. And that undermind the power of local dicators.

Barnett uses terms like “open source” and “operating system” to describe characteristics of the global economy. If you’re a techie who wants to understand the value of your work on a macro level, I recommend listening to this podcast.

Prankster unmasked

A Tennessee man has admitted to posting a spurious biography of veteran editor John Siegenthaler, Sr. on Wikipedia.org. I described the incident in a post about a week ago. There’s a story about the admission here. Apparently, there was no harm intended. The story said the prankster changed the entry to play a trick on a co-worker, although why he chose Mr. Siegenthaler to be the victim isn’t explained. Wikipedia got a lot of grief over the incident and event went so far as to tighten its submission rules to prevent a recurrence.

Wiki Power


In the hours after a series of explosions rocked an oil storage facility north or London this morning, the place to turn for the most comprehensive coverage of the incident was not CNN, not NYTimes.com, not even the venerable Times of London.

It was Wikinews, a free news source written by hundreds of volunteers from around the globe.

Wikinews carried the first news of the explosions at 6:21 a.m. GMT, about 20 minutes after the incident occurred. In the eight hours following the blasts, the website’s account was updated more than 150 times by more than 15 contributors, most from the U.K. By 2 p.m. GMT, the site had posted detailed information about the intensity of the explosions, their location, injury reports, likely causes and contact information for people who were affected.

Equally significant, the site linked to eight stories from other news sources, several photos of the explosion and more than 20 other sources of information on the region, the British petroleum industry and oil pipelines.

Wikinews is a new project by Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to supporting the dissemination of free information, principally through Wikis. The group is essentially replicating the reference section of a library through community publishing. It has about 10 reference projects in the works.

As a news wonk, I’m fascinated by Wikinews and what it does and doesn’t do better than traditional media. Comparing the Wikinews account to others by CNN and the Associated Press, I was struck by Wikinews’ focus on report the facts of the incident rather than providing context. For example, both the Times and CNN noted near the top of their stories that Great Britain has been on alert for terrorist attacks since the recent subway bombings in London while Wikinews made no mention of terrorism fears at all. The mainstream news organization also took pains to quote eyewitnesses and government and industry officials in their stories. Wikinews provided no such information, although it’s fair to say that many of the contributors to Wikinews were eyewitnesses themselves. In general, I thought the mainstream media did a better job on reporting the context and the human tragedy of the event while Wikinews was more effective at reporting the facts and linking to other sources of information.

A lot of the discussion around Wikinews has focused on whether community journalism could come to replace traditional media. At this point, it appears that both have their place. Wikinews “reporters” don’t have access to the official information channels that the mainstream media do. Community journalism also doesn’t lend itself to contextual reporting because there’s no professional editor overseeing the coverage. There is value to having that one person at the top who can package and prioritize information coming in from multiple sources.

However, Wikinews did an outstanding job in this case of serving as a nexis point for coverage of the event. No other coverage that I saw even came close to linking to the variety of information sources that could fill out a reader’s understanding of the story. This is where community journalism excels. It is news as a collection of facts, supplemented by exhaustive references. In many ways, it’s the essence of journalism as the “first draft of history.”

Dan Gillmor, by the way, has done a lot of thinking about this topic as he works to launch a company around the citizen journalism idea. You can read about it on his blog.

Yahoo rolls out Answers

Yahoo’s got an interesting new service called Yahoo Answers that just launched this week. It’s a very simple but potentially powerful community concept. Members post questions and answer questions. That’s all there is to it. There’s a points system but the points aren’t redeemable for anything. It’s more a bragging rights thing.

Browsing the categories, there’s a chaotic mix of stuff, ranging from questions that can’t be answered (“Is there a God?”) to very specific topics like the best hotels in Milan. I tried posting a question about cameras and got two useful responses within a couple of hours.

It takes someone with the throw weight of Yahoo to make this work. I wish them luck.