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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What do the Wikia sites on events, POV editorials, photography, the Polish RPG Wolsung, and the Fallout series of games have in common?
Add a guess in the comments.
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Inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s call for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct, we’ve started a draft Code of Conduct on Wikia’s Blogging Wiki. Brad Stone reported on this in the New York Times today in “A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs“:
“The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.”
“Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.”
The draft is a starting point which may evolve into more than one set of guidelines, with logos that bloggers can use to display which set they aim to follow (like the new buttons developed for the Definition of Free Cultural Works) .
I encourage you to read the draft and join the discussion on the wiki or mailing list. Like all Wikia sites, the Code of Conduct is open to editing and to creation of alternative versions, so please get involved and help us to reach a consensus on what should be included in these guidelines and how we might define “civil behavior” in the blogosphere.
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Happy Easter!
Here are a few Easter Wikia pages I found testing out Wikia’s new cross-wiki search tool.
Find out about Easter on the Christianity wiki, religion wiki, or the Churches of Rome wiki. The calendars wiki describes the controversies around the date of Easter. Easter in literature and fiction can be found on the Muppet wiki or on the Harry Turtledove’s Literature wiki. Wikiality and Uncyclopedia have Easter parodies. Easter Bunnies can be found in many of Wikia’s gaming and comics sites, including Penny Arcade, Creatures, Runescape, and Gaia Online. Find out about Easter eggs in Star Wars or discover a different type of Easter egg on the Easter eggs wiki.
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If you’re in either London or Palo Alto on April 4, be sure to attend Wiki Wednesday. The London event is starting at 6.30pm at Microsoft House, 10 Great Pulteney Street. The Palo Alto one is from 6pm at 665 High Street following on from Socialtext’s Wikthon the same day.
The Wiki Wednesday Wiki decribes the event as one where “people get together to chat, learn about wikis, find jobs, talk deals and generally cavort.”
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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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“A type of web page designed so that its content can be edited by anyone who accesses it, using a simplified markup language.“
I’m not too impressed with this draft entry from the Oxford English Dictionary for their new word “wiki“.
A wiki is more than just a web page and doesn’t even need to be a page on the web. It can be offline or internal. A wiki is also the collection of those pages, the software that runs it, and the community that creates it.
It is rare that all content on a wiki can be edited by anyone who accesses it. Most wikis have at least some protected areas and many wikis are far more restrictive about who may edit, restricting it to people with accounts and even putting limitations on who is allowed to make an account. Some people choose to completely lock their personal wiki, not permitting anyone else to edit.
The idea that wikis use a simplified markup language misses the recent development of wysiwyg editors for wikis. The markup language is sometimes not required or even not present. Wikia is developing a wikiwyg system where users will be able to choose wysiwyg editing or wiki markup, but other wiki engines have moved completely to wysiwyg so that all the advanced features that wiki markup allows are not even available.
So, a wiki is not necessarily a web page, can not always be edited by anyone, and doesn’t always involve wiki markup.
The best description I’ve seen of a wiki is on MeatballWiki’s page about Ward’s Wiki Way book:
“A wiki, at its most efficient and most stunning, is not a category. It is not a technology. It is not a notebook. It is not a website. It is not a medium. It is not a community. It is not a place. Rather, it is the sum totality of everything, including all those things; and all those things centre around the dynamic of its essential parts and dimensions: community, content, code, network, atemporal, place.“
A wiki doesn’t have to have any of the things the OED says it has, and instead is so much more than their new definition implies.
See Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and the Urban dictionary for other definitions of wiki.
Reuters: “Wiki” wins a place in Oxford English Dictionary.
OED: Other words added March 15th.
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Gil Penchina, Wikia’s CEO, was part of a panel on Open Knowledge vs. Controlled Knowledge at SXSW today. Via the bloggers who were there, I found out that Gil explained that Wikia suffers fewer problems with vandalism than the Wired wiki experiments because Wikia has always been, and will always be, open.
Arvind Grover, an editor of the School Computing Wikia, has a detailed post about the panel.
According to Dawn Foster, Gil explained that Wired suffered the “principal for a day” mentality where those visiting the wiki wanted to mess with the control of the content, as opposed to a wiki which was built up by a community that feels ownership for their content.
Laura Porto’s report on the panel says that Hemai Parthasarathy, Managing Editor of the Public Library of Science, said that the fear with openness “is that the bad comments will rise to the top”. This is something Wikia is aiming to solve with our new our new wiki magazines. The home page of each magazine displays content that the visitors and contributors have highly rated, which can be useful for ensuring the best content is highlighted. Of course such ratings are gameable but we’ll be developing tools to allow the community to magage that.
This ties in nicely with our launch of four new wiki magazines today. Joining our magazines on sports, places, politics, and entertainment, are tunes.wikia, cars.wikia, health.wikia, and gaming.wikia.
Compare gaming.wikia with our gameinfo wiki which is a traditional knowledge-base style site. Whilst gameinfo remains the best place to find a game guide on The Battle for Wesnoth, the new magazine lets you find out about new features in Fable 2 and provides a place where you can write opinion articles like “World of Warcraft is Addictively Frustrating!” as well as a place to share the latest news, opinion, gossip, and events related to gaming.
Also at SXSW: Evan Prodromou on the commercialization of wikis.
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The $3 million domain Wiki.com is back. It closed down in January and the wikis hosted there were rescued by Wikia, migrated to Mindtouch’s new wik.is site, or lost forever.
The new wiki.com features a Google Co-op powered search on its home page and, less prominently, a link to a page about starting a wiki at Central Desktop. The site still seems to be owned by Dynamo.
Update: 14 March: It’s gone again! A password is now needed to access the site, but wik.is which includes the active wikis from the old wiki.com has relaunched.
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If Liz Henry’s notes are anything to go by, Evan Prodromou gave an interesting talk at SXSW this weekend on the commercialization of wikis. He apparently said that the wikisphere needs a healthy ecology. I’m guessing the implication was that the commercialization of wikis could provide that.
Evan defined four types of wiki businesses and I was so happy to see Wikia in with wikiHow and Wikitravel and not the sites people usually think of as Wikia’s competitors. Unlike simply providing a hosting service, Wikia focuses on particular topics and on “managing the wiki itself and developing its culture and community”.
The four types Evan defines are service provider, content hosting, consulting, and content development. I actually Wikia has elements of all of these, and more… there are surely more than four types. I’ve started a page on my wiki to list some more.
Here’s Evan advice for commercial wiki companies (which could actually apply to anything and anyone):
- Have a noble purpose.
- Demonstrate value.
- Be transparent.
- Extract value where you provide value.
- Set boundaries.
- Be personally involved.
- Run with the right crowd.
I must remember never to use the word “crowdsourcing“. Here’s one of Evan’s slides: 
See types of wiki businesses to help define these.
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