Undercurrent

That’s the motto of Tim Berners-Lee’s latest initiative, unveiled yesterday. The World Wide Web Foundation seeks:

to advance One Web that is free and open,

to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,

and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.

Worthy goals that won’t be reached without effort and good policy choices (see for example Jonathan Zittrain’s worrying message about the future of the internet). From Berners-Lee’s opening speech:

Our success will be measured by how well we foster the creativity of our children. Whether future scientists have the tools to cure diseases. Whether people, in developed and developing economies alike, can distinguish reliable healthcare information from commercial chaff. Whether the next generation will build systems that support democracy, inform the electorate, and promote accountable debate.

This last point is expanded upon in a BBC interview. Berners-Lee is worried that the web enables effective distribution of disinformation. The web is a good tool for cults and all kinds of enemies of reason. I think this is a built-in problem, and Berners-Lee’s ideas here — “new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources” — sound unpractical and exceedingly difficult to manage. But let’s wait until we see what that initiative is really about.

Related: An article by Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt in Scientific American: Web Science: Studying the Internet to Protect Our Future.

Though it remains unclear if the McCain campaign or the Republican party initiated it, the editing work done on the Sarah Palin article just before she was announced as candidate again throws light on the importance of Wikipedia:

In total, YoungTrigg – whose user name is a reference to Ms. Palin’s infant son, Trig – made 30 “edits” to the article, all positive and largely unnoticed, since they came at a time when few were discussing her as a possible running mate of Senator John McCain’s.

This surely looks like a version of what I was circling in a post about the war in Georgia. Wikipedia as first stop for many users = Wikipedia will be a battleground. As the NYT articles also notes:

While ethically suspect, the idea that a politician would try to shape her Wikipedia article shouldn’t come as a surprise. In modern politics, where the struggle is to “define” yourself before your opponent “defines” you, Wikipedia has become an important part of political strategy. When news breaks, and people plug a name into a search engine to find out more, invariably Wikipedia is the first result they click through to; it is where first impressions are made.

From September this year, the complete archive of classical music magazine Gramophone will be available for free on its website. The archive goes back to 1923 and includes gems, as the editor explains:

There are some amazing contributions, such as Rachmaninov on the state of piano playing when he was around.

After seeing the latest comments from Metafilter vs. YouTube users side by side, the Freakonomics blog asks if the $5 membership fee on Metafilter is the reason behind the obvious difference in quality. The comments to that question clarify things. The pair is rather odd — it would be more instructive to see similar, competing entities such as newspaper websites side by side – but it’s anyway clear that the entrance fee itself can’t be decisive. As Brandon Blatcher says:

Metafilter’ls success and generally better comments are probably due to a number of factors, and the $5 admission fee is just one. There’ls also the presence of the mods, how they’lre moderating, how many people are posting links, how many people of are posting comments and more importantly, the quality of the those two things (a crappy post of a controversial subject tends explode), timing (if a crappy post of a controversial subject happens when the mods are off somewhere, the explosion tends to last longer, sparking other explosions), the state of the world in general and the United States in particular (most Mefi members are American and with the elections going on, there’ls a tug of war about whether to post political links) and just sheer luck. All of these things and more are at play in particular moment, so Mefi’ls light moderation touch tends to work well. There’ls also a certain X-factor that comes from the mods, in that they actually seem to care about the site and it’ls goals and the sum of those parts make it more than a job, which tends to shine through in the site’ls darker moments. $5 ain’lt got nothin’ on that.

The Crimes of War Project has published a new version of the already essential and classic anthology simply titled “Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know”. From the press release:

The book is an A-Z guide to the laws of war and their application in today’ls world, written by some of the world’ls leading journalists and scholars, in clear and compelling language. The revised edition includes detailed coverage of all recent developments and controversies, including the “war on terror,” Iraq, Darfur and the rise of international courts and tribunals.

The new edition includes articles on Afghanistan, Occupation, Detention and Interrogation, Guantanamo. Best of all, the book’s articles are also online, so the knowledge has been made easily available. You have to buy the book to see the photographs, and it’s worth it as many of the world’s best photojournalists have contributed.

“Wikipedia isn’t generally useless, but its usefulness is rather limited, especially when one needs information that can be trusted,” Norwegian Associate Professor of philosophy Lars Fr. H. Svendsen claimed this week.

I’m afraid this is a representative attitude among Norwegian scientists and scholars to Wikipedia, if they have an attitude at all. Wikipedia is kept at arm’s length. A study would probably find that few of them know how Wikipedia is edited and how the process of quality control works.

More constructive approaches are possible. German public service broadcaster ZDF reports from a seminar called “Wikipedia-Academy” in Mainz on how some humanities scholars in that country engage with Wikipedia (the German language version is the second largest overall). Translator of literature Josef Winiger (64) received a prize from the German Wikipedia community for his work on the article about the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Now there’s a challenge for Svendsen and his colleagues.

In another ZDF article, Professor Peter Wippermann says that the scholars in reality need Wikipedia more than the encyclopedia needs them. The humanities are facing a growing legitimation pressure — the ivory towers that scholars can retreat to are getting ever more scarce. Because of that, scholars in the humanities need to market their knowledge through Wikipedia, he says: At Wikipedia they can legitimate themselves again and give something back to society. (Thanks to Daniel for the tip).

UPDATE: Svendsen’s article is being discussed at the Tinget (Village Pump) page of no-Wikipedia.