It was nice to see “wiki” as the 5th fastest rising search term here in Australia in Google’s 2008 zeitgeist which was published this week.
Wiki was also amongst the top 10 rising search terms in The Netherlands (5th), New Zealand (5th), Switzerland (6th), Italy (8th), Sweden (8th), Finland (9th), and Singapore (9th). The home page lists wiki as the 10th fastest rising for the UK as well, but the world page does not.
The only place where Wiki was within the top 10 most popular, rather than fastest rising, was Singapore. However, Wikipedia appears on the most popular list for a few countries, including Switzerland (4th), Austria (6th), Hong Kong (6th), Finland (7th), and Germany (7th).
For Russia, википедия (meaning Wikipedia) was the 3rd fastest rising. I didn’t recognise any other translations of wiki or Wikipedia on the lists (although I’m a bit surprised I would recognise википедия!)
In theory, it would be possible to extract similar data for Wikia Search. The metrics section contains info on the number of times each term was searched for and the trends section lets you compare multiple terms. Like the rest of Wikia Search, this data is available under a free license, making it possible for anyone to reuse the data to create their own zeitgeist. For example, the graph below shows the number of daily searches for the word “wiki” on Wikia Search.
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It’s 2 years today since I first arrived in Australia. I was here for the X|Media|Lab conference in Melbourne and I thought it might be the only time in my life I would visit Australia, so I decided to take a few days off and visit Sydney while I was here.
This was before Wikia had its first round of investment, and more than a year since I’d last had a job that paid a proper salary, so I stayed in the cheapest hostel I could find in the not-so delightful area of King’s Cross. The next day, I met the Sydney Wikipedians for what is still my best ever Wikipedia meetup. They took me on a great tour of the city, seeing the Town Hall, the Royal Botanical Gardens, the Opera House, and the Harbour Bridge.
Two years later, I’m still here! So much for it being my only visit. I’ve now arrived in Australia 10 times and I’m living in Sydney. I came back to Australia a couple of weeks after the conference and moved in with Tim Starling. We’re now renting a house in Hornsby Heights with beautiful bushland views and wallabies in our garden.
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A few wiki bloggers are reporting the misleading statistic that 97% of vandalism is done by “anonymous” users when they actually mean users who are not logged in to Wikipedia. Logging in doesn’t mean you are no longer anonymous since there is no requirement to use real names on Wikipedia.
The small scale Wikipedia Vandalism Study showed that out of 31 instances of obvious vandalism across 100 actively edited articles, 30 of the edits were by users who were not at the time logged in to Wikipedia. I’m not convinced the single occurrence of vandalism by a logged in user was vandalism or an edit made in good faith which may or may not have been accurate. The edit involved changing “Daisy Murdoch Cortlandt” to “Daisy Murdoch Cortlandt Cortlandt” which looks wrong, but is how IDMb have the name.
I carried out my own study looking at vandalism made to my user page. My page has had 182 malicious edits since I joined Wikipedia in February 2003. 47% of the vandalism was done by registered users. See my write up on the wiki for more details.
Even if most vandalism is done by unregistered users, I don’t see this as evidence that a wiki should force editors to register. Forced registration doesn’t prevent vandals logging in. The only difference such a rule would make is that you would then have 100% of vandalism made by registered users, which makes it much harder to spot. Vandal fighters can filter out edits by registered users when they look at recent changes, and anti-vandal bots can be programmed to watch for unregistered users. Removing that distinction only makes it harder to find vandalism – it doesn’t stop it happening. Vandals will sometimes log in if they have to. And genuine users sometimes won’t. I’m assuming vandals have more time to waste than the average Wikipedia reader, so there’s the danger that more vandals than normal people will have time to register, changing the balance of good users to bad.
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Perhaps you know these 20 things, but the press is very confused. In response to the ongoing cluelessness of reporters, Andrew Lih has revamped Wikipedia’s Press Kit and Erik Möller has created a page with “10 Things You Did Not Know About Wikipedia“.
Together, they give these 20 commonly confused points:
- We’re not for sale.
- Our work belongs to everyone.
- We speak Banyumasan.
- You cannot actually change anything in Wikipedia.
- We are deeply committed to quality.
- We don’t want you to trust us.
- We’re not alone.
- We are only collectors.
- We’re not a dictatorship.
- We’re in it for the long haul.
- The Wikipedia does not have volunteers worldwide.
- The university did not start a Wikipedia for its students to collaborate.
- The Wikipedia Foundation did not announce a new project.
- People should not view the wiki article for the latest information.
- Wikipedia does not have 1.7 million articles.
- Admins do not have editorial authority in Wikipedia.
- Wikia is not a Wikimedia project.
- One person or group of people are not in charge of particular articles.
- Wikipedia was not hit by surge in spoof articles or vandalism.
- Wikipedia.com is the wrong address.
How many of those did you already know?
See the press kit and 10 things page for explanations of these.
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Wikimedia Advisory Board member Danny Hillis launched Freebase this week, a startup that TechCrunch says is aiming to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful“.
Like Wikipedia, Freebase will allow participants to add to and edit at least some of the content. Content is also brought in from other sites, including Wikipedia. User contributed content will be freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
Tim O’Reilly, coiner of the term “web 2.0“, calls Freebase “the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web.”
Freebase is a project of Metaweb which used to host Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver Wiki (see archive.org for April’s version). Wikipedia noted the wiki’s disappearance in January.
See Wikipedia’s article on Freebase for more information. See also Wikimedia’s meta page on the related Semantic MediaWiki.
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Today, January 15th, is Wikipedia’s sixth birthday, and also the final day of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Fundraising Drive.
So far, the total raised is $980,903. Less than $20,000 to go to make a million dollars.
If you haven’t donated yet, give Wikipedia a birthday present and contribute towards its reliability and sustainability.
Donate here!
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I’m not sure I want 2006 to end. It’s been a great year.
Here’s what happened:
January
I spent New Year with my family in England after spending my first Christmas away, with Tim in NSW. At the start of January, I visited Florida for the first time and spent a couple of weeks at the office Wikia and Wikimedia were sharing in St. Petersburg. This was when Wikia got its first round of investment. The news was leaked in February and announced in March (blog post). Tim and Kate temporarily joined Wikia’s technical team.
February
The $4m from Wikia’s first investment round allowed me to hire the first two Wikia Community Team members, sannse and Mindspillage, in February.
March
In March, I visited Austria for the Content for Competitiveness conference in Vienna. Back in Australia, I visited Perth for the first time and met Mark Ryan from Wikipedia and Tim’s sister. Wikicities rebranded as “Wikia” and finally announced the first round of investment.
April
I made another trip to the US in April for the very interesting Forum on Digital Transition in Santa Barbara. That was followed by the smallest Wikipedia meetup I’ve been to since only one other person (Antandrus) showed up! I was back in Australia for Easter and Tim’s birthday. KaurJmeb joined Wikia’s community team and John Q Smith joined Wikia’s technical team to lead ops, support, and development.
May
Tim visited England for the first in May. We stopped off for a two day trip to Hong Kong on the way.
My first nephew, Alex, was born in May whilst I was in England. The book I part-authored, Wikis: Tools for Information Work And Collaboration, was published in May. Back in Australia, we attempted to find a new place to live but never got round to moving. Emil Podlaszewski, Wikia’s new head of product development in Poland, was introduced to Wikia but didn’t actually start until later in the year. The Polish team has been expanding every month since.
June
I attended the iX conference in Singapore and appeared on TV for the first time, doing three televised interviews about Wikipedia whilst I was in Asia. Gil Penchina officially became Wikia’s CEO this month and Rieke and Solensean joined Wikia’s community team. I resigned from the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation after a bad decision by the rest of the Board. WikiZine made my resignation public in July and it took effect in September when Erik Möller was elected to replace me.
July
I went to the Brisbane for the first time for the Students of Sustainability conference. Splarka joined Wikia’s community team as an intern. Bill Kaufman joined Wikia as head of verticals. Wikia had a lot of press regarding Jimmy’s launch of the Campaigns Wikia.
August
My third trip to the US this year was for Wikimania (blog post), Wikimedia’s second annual conference, which was held at Harvard. Tim and I stopped in New York for a few days before it and I rushed back after it for the X|Media|Lab event in Melbourne – it was last year’s event in November which led to me staying in Australia so it was great to be there again. I fitted in a second trip to Brisbane this month, for an Open Innovation Round Table discussion. Next in August, I made a very long trip to Denmark for WikiSym where I gave a keynote on how and why Wikipedia works. Then it was back to Melbourne to talk about Future Directions for Free Content at the Churchill Club (blog post). Mindspillage and Solensean left Wikia this month and Splarka joined as a permanent staff member.
September
Juan David joined Wikia’s community team. Tim was ill for most of September and needed surgery so it was an otherwise quiet month.
October
I made few plans for the rest of the year since Tim and I weren’t sure when we’d be going to England, but events nearby kept me busy. I visited Brisbane for the third time, this time to talk about Copyright Challenges and User Generated Technologies. I went to Canberra the next day to take part in the Digital Culture series of talks at the National Library of Australia and then attended James Dellow’s Rebooting the Enterprise talk before returning to Melbourne.
November
We’d hoped to leave for England before November but it was too soon after Tim’s operation for him to fly so far, though we did fly to NSW for Tim’s mother’s birthday. The English Wikipedia reached 1.5 million articles.
December
Wikia’s first big announcement this month was the acquisition of ArmchairGM. Robert Lefkowitz, Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis and David Pean joined Wikia as part of the acquititsion and began work on OpenServing (blog post). Wikia announced its second round of investment – all of it from Amazon – on December 8th (blog post). We had two big hits in the press shortly after this – firstly with OpenServing which is still in testing, and will be more widely available very soon, and secondly with “Wikiasari“, which didn’t really exist before the press made it up, but may well exist at some point next year. 
I started WikiChix, a new community for women involved with wikis, in response to concerns that women were not comfortable posting to Wikipedia’s mailing lists. Anthere invited me to chair Wikimedia’s new Advisory Board. After attending the fun Stirr Sydney event, I packed up and left Australia, at least temporarily. We spent a day and a half in London before going to see my parents. Tim spent his first Christmas away from home, with my family, and we’ll be spending new year’s at my sister’s.
2007
My New Year’s resolution is to make no plans. I don’t know if or when I’ll be back in Australia and I have no idea where Wikia will be in a year from now. I wouldn’t have predicted a year ago that we’d now have 40 staff, two rounds of investment, 60000 registered users, and more than 400000 articles, so I’m not attempting to predict next year. I just hope it’s as amazing as this year was.
Happy New Year!
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You can give the gift of knowledge by donating to the Wikimedia Foundation!
If you were thinking of donating to the Wikimedia Foundation, then today is a good day to do that since your donation with be matched by Virgin Unite, the charitable arm of the Virgin Group. See “Wikimedia thanks Virgin Unite“.
This is the Foundation’s first fundraising drive since January this year. Unregistered users have been shown a permanent link calling for donations since then, which has decreased the need for quarterly fundraising drives. This drive is focused on the reliability of Wikimedia’s content and the long-term sustainability of every Wikimedia project.
You may have to read about Virgin Unite on Wikipedia since unfortunately their site went down within 12 minutes of being linked from Wikimedia’s site notices (these appear at the top of every page of every Wikimedia project – see “Slashdot effect“). If the site stays up, you can also donate to Virgin Unite’s projects.
This is the first time any organization has been allowed a logo in Wikipedia’s site notice. The thanks to Yahoo for the servers in April 2005 included a controversial link (but no logo) to Jimmy’s post on the Yahoo Search Blog and wasn’t attempted again until now. Wikimedia’s FAQ on matching donations is hoped to allay the concerns people might have about whether this constitutes advertising, with the official view being that it does not.
Donate here
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