Reflections on WikiConference USA

This past weekend I attended WikiConference USA at the New York Law School in—you guessed it—New York City. Not counting Wikimania 2012 in DC or Wikimania 2006 in Cambridge, this was somehow the first national meeting of US Wikipedians (and Wikimedians) to be organized and, with any luck, it seems likely to become an annual thing. The bulk of this post was written on the Vermonter back to DC, and completed upon my return. With the event still fresh in my mind and not in fact fully concluded at this writing, what follows is a non-exhaustive and yet non-brief summary of what I saw and thought about it.

My trip actually commenced on Thursday morning, when I hopped an 8:10 train out of Union Station with Andrew Lih to make a 1:30pm tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized by digital collections specialist (and Wikipedian, natch) Neil Stimler. We got a tour of the extensive archives—from current art auction portfolios to folios hundreds of years old—saw the specialized camera equipment they use to capture old books to digital file, and enjoyed a brief tour of some pieces in the public collection. This was my first visit, and I was impressed, especially by the Temple of Dendur exhibit, imported from a soon-to-be-flooded Egyptian valley in the 1960s:

Following a good night’s sleep at a Club Quarters location in the Financial District (seriously, best business commuter hotel ever), first-day events included a morning keynote by Sumana Harihareswara, that I didn’t see all of, but which she generously recapped for me afterward. I wasn’t previously familiar with the Hacker School social rules, but they’re worth checking out (especially “No well-actuallys”) and applying elsewhere in life.

Other events before lunch included a presentation by Andrew on the state of video on Wikipedia (Video in Wikimedia) which, sadly, is not strong. (We also discussed some aspects of this on Bloggingheads.tv last September.) Long story short, Wikipedia’s commitment to using only copyright-free media formats prevents it from using the MP4 codec, which is the global standard. Want to shoot a video on your iPhone and upload it to Wikipedia? Nope, not gonna happen. That RfC failed pretty decisively.

Another was Jake Orlowitz presenting the results of his work on a project called The Wikipedia Adventure (The Wikipedia Adventure: Play with Learning). Jake’s project uses “gamification” to teach newcomers the basics of Wikipedia editing, and his talk included results showing the game has promise. Following that was Amanda Levendowski talking about Wikipedia and the legal profession (Wikipedia for Lawyers: Researching, Citing, and Contributing To Wikipedia). Did you know celebrated federal judge Richard Posner has cited Wikipedia in rulings far more than any other judge? It’s a fact—indeed, the 7th Circuit has cited Wikipedia in 62 opinions, most by him, far more than any other US circuit. Next was Lianna Davis talking about lessons learned from the early days of the Wiki Education Foundation (The 7 biggest mistakes the Wikipedia Education Program has made — and what we’ve learned from them). Among the learnings? College students plagiarize… a lot.

The entire second half of my day was spent in one room, encompassing two panel discussions on the messy subject of paid editing, paid advocacy, COI and PR on Wikipedia—the topic is so thorny, in fact, that the community cannot settle on one term to describe it. This is also fair: in fact it does bring together several related and seemingly-but-maybe-not-related topics.

The first hour in fact was the panel I had submitted (How the PR Industry Views Wikipedia), featuring myself (of course) with real-deal PR executive Michael Bassik (formerly of Burson-Marsteller, now with MDC Partners) and Andrew Lih again. Besides the main topic, I also talked about my experiences as a Wikipedian and a consultant, and the three of us talked about a meeting between representatives of public relations firms and Wikipedia editors which I organized earlier this year. (More about that fairly soon, but not quite yet.)

The second half operated mostly as a discussion involving most of the room (Paid Editing Moderated Discussion). While this topic is one Wikipedians haven’t addressed well in the past, I thought it was a really productive day. As one of the participants put it during a Wikipedia Weekly recording afterward, it seemed like we managed to get this down to a “manageable pool of ideas”. You can view the Etherpad notes from the discussion here.

Speaking of which, I joined in an impromptu, audio-only recording of Wikipedia Weekly, talking about the first day. We recorded standing around a microphone in the main event room after the first day’s schedule concluded, and it went about 45 minutes. You can listen to it here:

Afterward, a decently massive group (about 15 of us?) convened at Sing Kee Seafood in Chinatown for a tremendous feast of things I have no idea the name of, except it consisted of different combinations of pork, chicken, shrimp, noodles, dumplings, vegetables, tofu, and Tsingtao beer (note: the Tsingtao was not combined with anything else).

I slept in a bit on Saturday, and arrived in time to hear Newyorkbrad talk about the problem with BLPs—articles about living persons, specifically articles about living persons that have had serious problems, causing anxiety and sometimes resulting in legal threats, media coverage and (usually) eventual resolution (The current state of the BLP problem). Before that was finished, I hopped over to see Librarygurl talk about “social drama” on Wikipedia, invoking anthropological theories to discuss the 2011 incident where Sarah Palin’s supporters edited Wikipedia to make her “right” about a spurious Paul Revere claim (Social Dramas of Wikipedia).

The next session was one of my two favorite sessions (that I did not participate in). This was a presentation of results from a study by Jason Q. Ng from the University of Toronto comparing the Chinese-language Wikipedia to the other two Chinese online user-edited encyclopedias, Hudong and Baidu Baike (Rethinking Censorship via a Comparison of Chinese Wikipedia with Hudong and Baidu Baike). Chinese is one of the few languages where Wikipedia is not the largest online encyclopedia, and this owes to the fact that most of its speakers are in mainland China, where censorship is an everyday fact of life, and where other global platforms have Chinese-created equivalents (think Weibo for Twitter). For some reason, China has two encyclopedias, and they differ greatly from the Chinese Wikipedia, which is mostly edited by users in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ng showed lists of articles on the Chinese Wikipedia for which there are no equivalents in the other two, as well as articles that are much shorter there.

The last session I attended was my other favorite, a presentation by James Heilman, a “small town ER doctor”, as he put it, who also happens to be the top contributor to medical articles on Wikipedia (Wikipedia and Medicine). Even more than that, he leads an organization called Wiki Project Med Foundation, which is involved in some really incredible projects: determining a core base of the most-needed medical articles and working with Translators Without Borders to bring them to (eventually) every language. Another is a collaboration with UCSF creating an elective course for med students to work on Wikipedia articles. Among the many fascinating statistics and data points he brought to the presentation, the most striking point was summed up in a slide I quoted as follows:

One nit to pick: while the conference itself was a success and no great technical disasters befell it, the up-front organization was not so impressive. For one thing, I never actually received a formal notification that my proposal had been accepted; instead I heard it secondhand, and then saw it on the published schedule. It’s a good thing I was keeping tabs on it! Of course the whole thing was rather ad hoc, more of a Barcamp un-conference kind of thing, but hey, that’s the wiki way.

So that’s not everything, but it’ll have to do for now. I didn’t mean to write 1300 words, I swear! Let’s do this again next year, shall we?