August 7th, 2008
It’s August 8, 2008, the day the Olympics officially begin, and the weather is probably close the worst case scenario for the organizers. Hazy, hot, humid and smoggy. It’s not clear it’s “dangerous” per se, but it doesn’t make for good pictures. (Taken 5:50 am)
August 1st, 2008
It seems yesterday’s dispatch of sites being spontaneously unblocked was part of a larger move. Today, Hu Jintao held a rare pow-wow of media outlets in the wake of Internet restrictions being eased. From the WSJ:
The 66-year-old Mr. Hu’s appearance before foreign reporters Friday was a rare move into the public spotlight for a leader who has long shunned it. Mr. Hu has never given a news conference in China or abroad.
From the BBC:
Hosting the Games showed China’s desire for peaceful global ties, he said.
His comments came amid apparent concessions by Beijing in a row over internet access for journalists.
More sites which had been blocked in Olympic media centres - such as that of rights group Amnesty International - were accessible on Friday, journalists said.
Here’s a rather representative list of sites that are now available in China, which include newspaper, magazine and NGO web sites previously hard blocked. This is taken from some that were sent on a recent Great Firewall list, and some I’ve added.
This is actually quite remarkable for folks living in China. The “Big Three” NGOs that have been unrelenting critics of China have been reliably blocked for years. YZZK (Yazhou Zhoukan) and Apple Daily both in Hong Kong, have done some of the most critical journalism regarding China.
RSF, acknowledging the good news, doesn’t take much time to celebrate and continues to push hard.
“This partial lifting of censorship shows that the Chinese government is not completely insensitive to pressure. If the entire world had been pressuring China since 2001, even before these games were assigned to Beijing, the situation might have been different today. And perhaps imprisoned journalists would have been freed before the opening ceremony.
Let’s be clear though: these unblocked sites are still subject to the sophisticated keyword blocking system of the GFW, which looks at both URLs and the body of web sites. The sites above are no longer blocked, as a rule, but the content on the site might still trigger a block. On the plus side, it seems the keyword filtering of the GFW seems to be less sensitive than normal, but the big taboo subjects are still blocked quickly.
NBC Nightly News did a piece on the blocking yesterday (July 31). I was amused when Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn was on camera demonstrating how to use a virtual private network and noted that living with the net nanny wasn’t that big a deal.
Goldkorn: “I don’t see that it’s really going to impede anybody’s work.”
NBC: “Do you think the foreign media is just whining a little bit?”
Goldkorn: “Yeah. Absolutely they’re whining.”
I suppose one could make the argument that leaving the restricted GFW “harmonized” Internet as-is would have given foreign journalists a real taste of what China’s Internet users deal with every day. Now, they get a freed-up, “special” Internet to do their job and this issue goes away for the next three weeks. The question is, after the party’s over, will any of the sites above stay unblocked.
July 31st, 2008
On the evening of July 31, 2008, Beijing time, reports started to roll in on Twitter that Web sites previously considered hard blocked in China were suddenly accessible. Among the sites now allowed for me (using Beijing CNC as ISP) and others include:
These were all considered pretty firmly blocked for a long time, so it’s a pleasant surprise. Perhaps the cry of reporters in the Beijing Olympic Media Center finally made it through to the organizers that they should follow through on their promise.
Public relations-wise, putting a censored Internet in the press center simply seemed like a terribly dumb move. Yes, before the Olympics even start, why don’t you completely poke and upset the press corp and give them plenty of material for harping on human rights and censorship in China. Maybe they thought the journalists would be too busy writing about the bad pollution problems instead.
So for now, kudos to the authorities for opening up these sites, even though every indication is that the authorities will revert to pre-Olympic policies around October 17. John Kennedy suggested a betting pool as to when the sites will be reblocked. My bet: 8 hours and 8 minutes after the Olympic closing ceremony.
Let’s not forget though there are plenty of sites still blocked in China, including Tor Project, Amnesty International, Wikia, The Pirate Bay, AboutUs.org, and LiveJournal, for which Twitterer wangzhongxia could not help observing:
I don’t kno why Livejournal is a bigger threat to China than things like RFA mandarin edition
Sometimes you need a sense of humor to deal with the net nanny.
July 28th, 2008
The job of a journalist is hard. New subjects crop up each day, and the task by the deadline is to demystify a topic for the general public. A common technique is to use familiar markers to interpret new ones. Give the reader something they know to help understand things they don’t: “The KitchenAid stand mixer is the Cadillac of cooking equipment,” or “The new Blackberry Curve is the answer to the iPhone.”
But the seduction of this technique poses some serious problems.
This has been the case with Google’s new offering called Knol, the so-called “Wikipedia rival,” which is meant to “highlight authors” creating user-generated content.
The recent general reporting around Google Knol has been rather atrocious. For the lack of any better metaphors, most journalists (including professional “tech journalists”) saw the “user created” part of Knol and lacking any significant understanding about either project, immediately labeled it a “Wikipedia rival.” A quick Yahoo News and Google News search sees an overwhelming number of headlines trumpeting Knol as this Wikipedia “rival” or Google’s “answer” to the free encyclopedia.
But besides simplistically sharing a “user generated” Web 2.0 pedigree, the comparison is flawed in so many ways.
The head-to-head matchup seems obvious because Wikipedia is the only thing that immediately comes to mind to most writers when thinking “user generated.” I contend it’s lazy journalism, where respected tech outlets also fell for this trap. It seems it was too tempting to stick by the story, portraying nonprofit David competing against corporate search king Goliath.
The result, is we’re stuck with this fallacious “media narrative.” And from now on, Knol will always be seen as Wikipedia’s foil. Even when it’s not.
Have you heard of Associated Content, Squidoo, Helium or WikiHow? No? If you haven’t, you shouldn’t be writing about Google Knol. These are exactly the working models that Google Knol is up against, not Wikipedia’s.
To see exactly why Wikipedia is such a bad comparison, consider the main aspects of Google Knol [1] [2]:
As a result, most of the content that has emerged so far resemble the “practical” content sites as listed above:
how-to guides, health and medical advice, consumer/buyers guides, business/career pointers. These are exactly the things Wikipedia has insisted it does not want to be.
Don’t take my word for it, see the guidelines at [[What_Wikipedia_is_not]]
The guidelines of Wikipedia also prohibit: personal essays, advocacy, opinion pieces on current affairs or politics, scandal mongering or gossip columns and self promotion.
Although Knol has been touted as a more responsible, moderated Wikipedia the above policies actually makes Knol much more liberal and uncontrolled than Wikipedia, which has many guidelines about what constitutes an article, what is acceptable content, and how to abide by its neutral point of view policy.
By throttling collaboration through a single lead author, you lose what has been Wikipedia’s hallmaark — the “piranha effect” of people building off each others’ work and evolving content beyond a single author’s knowledge.
Let’s put these criteria up side by side again:
| Google Knol | Wikipedia | |
| Barrier to entry | High Real names Verification |
Low Anonymous editing |
| Authorship | Single | Multiple |
| Personal opinion | Yes | No |
| Multiple similar articles | Yes | No |
| Deletion/editing among articles | No | Yes |
| Copyright | Variable | Free, GFDL |
Let me pull out my journalism professor’s ruler and whap all the tech journalists on the wrist who have used this comparison. Let’s please stop pitting these two against each other.
From my feed of Yahoo News reporting on Wikipedia and Knol, here are my three tier ratings of how folks did on this story. I will not even bother hyperlinking to the stories I considered faulty analysis.
Poor
Average
Good
And for those still debating the quality of “blogging vs journalism” issue, consider all the best sources for reporting on the Knol launch are, yes, blogs.
July 28th, 2008
I take back my gripes about paying Accor hotels US $30 a night for Internet access. We have a new winner, namely the Beijing Olympics Media Village. My wife who is staying there already told me they were going to charge reporters for Internet access (and a censored one at that) but now the details have been posted to Slashdot, the online tech salon:
“Working for the Olympics as an IT contractor, I recently moved to the Media Village (where all of the reporters live) and was surprised the there was no free internet. BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games) is charging a ridiculous amount of money for ADSL service: for
- 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1,131.20 USD);
- 1M/512 it costs 9156.25 (1,342.95 USD);
- 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1,716.05 USD).
That is for only one month! For extra features like a fixed IP? That costs an additional 450 RMB (66 USD). I just can’t believe that not only do I have to deal with the Great Firewall of China, but also pay through the nose to use it!”
While I can imagine that it is “noise” for NBC and the big guys, it is not inconsequential for other news outfits.
I suggest someone be kind and bring an Airport Express or other Wifi router and share the Internet love.
July 15th, 2008
My Wikimania 2008 experience in Egypt so far in two words: not fun.
My problem perhaps was thinking there was a reasonable way of getting from Cairo airport directly to Alexandria by some means of conveyance. The Cairo airport isn’t very welcoming from the outset. Note to CAI airport: cramming both departing and arriving passengersthrough one small doorway is not a smart idea.
After exiting the airport immigration/baggage area, I’m hounded by scores of limo and taxi drivers trying to scam visitors into a hotel or a cab ride. I try to lose these hangers on and head right to the Information counter. The one guy with a computer screen of flight info knew nothing about buses and trains to Alexandria, and it seemed like he barely understood my English question. After seeing my failure to get anything useful from INFORMATION the limo drivers slapped the “clueless fresh meat” label on my forehead, and again swirled around me giving dubious information and trying to ply their wares. Even when I said no, they trailed along like Pikmin asking to “help.” I’ve travelled to too many sketchy places in Asia to fall for that trap.
I do a lap around the airport terminal and there is no tourist information booth or other helpers, only paid services counters who I never trust for general info.
I finally found a security guard who points to a location in the distance saying buses to Alexandria are out there. Walk across the sky bridge to an adjacent modern mall, drag luggage up steps, down steps, through sand, under a railing and across broken pavement. Along the way two drivers insist they can drive me to Alexandria for 400 LE. After tailing me for a while, they realize they’re not going to get me. They turn tail and give up.
I stumble around the parking lot asking a few folks about the mythical bus to Alexandria, who keep pointing out on the horizon. Maybe they were saying, “Walk to Wikimania.”
After finding two different sets of buses, neither the ones I’m looking for, I got to a covered depot with no English destination signs, only Arabic. One person said a bus to Alexandria leaves at 7am, one said 730am, one said ticket was 35 Egyptian pounds (LE) another said it was 10 LE (hard to believe for a four hour bus ride). Buses looked rickety and rusty. Couldn’t find anything for the life of me. Went back to fellow who pointed it out, and said, “I can’t find anything there.” He laughed in annoyance, held out his hand to grab mine, and dragged me to one white shack, among many, that had only an Arabic sign and coach bus photo. Walked to the back, cracked open the door to find some attendant sleeping on a makeshift cot. “Hey, this guy want Alexandrina.” Laconic attendant rises slowly, insists the bus was coming in 5 minutes. “How long it would take to get to the destination?” He said four hours. Ouch. “Doesn’t train take two and a half hours?” I said, optimistically. “Yes, but you have to go to downtown Cairo to take that, by that time might was well take four hour bus.” He has a point. If it’s true.
So I wait, in the hot open air depot with the snarl of rusty diesel buses, all of the commuter type — no air conditioning, open windows, plastic fiberglas chairs. The only “coaches” look worn and aren’t going where I’m going. Twenty minutes later of a “five minute” wait, I knock on the shack again and ask, what about the 5 minutes. He says bus should be there at 730 for the ride. Wait a bit with him, and nothing shows. He said one comes every hour. But I’m not convinced.
I figure it’s all too risky. My time is better spent doing the book edits I owe New York, something I thought I could do later that night in cozy Alexandria in a hotel by the beach. I’m not even sure nightfall is practical on this supposed four hour bus ride. (It might actually be more like 6-8 hours, as my friend who visited Egypt/Alexandria recently said she endured because of traffic and closed roads.)
So instead, I wimped out and opted for a “first world” solution. Remembering the beacon of hope, the Novotel sign out in the distance, I dragged my luggage across the parking lot to the police station, asked for the Novotel airport hotel. Took three tries to find a police guy in white military outfit who spoke enough English to understand what I was talking about. Doing sign language for “sleepytime” (hands clasped together, head cocked left, eyes closed and snoring sound) helped.
Walking across the auto toll lanes that don’t have a crosswalk, I ambled to the airport hotel at 8 am. Realize I’m going to have to pay full rack rate for a room at 116 euros, but that sounded much less painful than hypothetical bus arriving “real soon now” to who knows where arriving hopefully some time before sunset.
Asked the hotel checkin guy, “Is Internet included in the price?”
He chuckled and said, “No no no…” What a dense idiot I am, an Accor business airport hotel *giving* you Internet?
OK, lay it on me you scam artists. What was the Internet pricing. He looks it up and quotes 147 LE.
That’s around US $27.75 for 24 hours of Internet access.
Yes, for the price of nearly two months of broadband Internet access in China, give me 24 hours in an Accor hotel. Why not. I’ve got no fight left in me. It’s already 20 hours of travel into this endeavour, and I’ve been foiled at every turn to get to Alexandria — no English language help, no clear signage, conflicting reports and waiting at a hot smelly bus depot. (And I haven’t even mentioned the obscenely high price for 3G web surfing while roaming that zapped nearly US $20 from my phone card when accessing just a handful of web sites.)
So I’m tired and defenseless. Am I going to argue? I slap down the Amex. Just throw it all on there. At least they’ll check me in this early in the morning.
I’m in the Novotel lobby awaiting my room. Just ticking the minutes down when the formal Wikimania bus arrives tomorrow to get me to the conference, when I get to see some friendly faces, and don’t have to deal with this whole slog.
I get up to check to see if the room’s ready.
“Not yet. Five minutes, sir.”
June 1st, 2008
As you may have noticed my blogging has dropped off in recent weeks, and so has my Facebook activity. Much of it is due to editing in the final stretch of the Wikipedia book, and I encourage all Wikipedians to help edit the final chapter, which can be found at the Wikipedia Story web site.
The idea is to have the community write about the future of Wikipedia. What are the challenges? Where will it be 1, 5 or 10 years down the line? The product will by licensed as CC-BY-SA, so it can continue to evolve.
One thing that is different than Wikipedia is that you can indeed have an opinion! You can’t predict the future “neutrally” in any meaningful sense of the word, so instead I’ve come up with a CRAFT policy, that is more like a code of “responsible journalism.” It consists of being:
Coherent, Reasoned, Accurate, Fair and Transparent
I hope you’ll agree it’s a good starting point.
We already have a nice buzz of activity, so hope to see you there!
June 1st, 2008
Since I’ve gotten so many inquiries on the fate of the dog in the last post, you’ll be glad to hear that it’s been adopted by someone in the complex until the owner can be found.
May 11th, 2008
URGENT as of Monday afternoon, May 12, 2008.
Large sheepdog found in Central Park (新城国际) in Chaoyang district: appears to be a Shetland Sheepdog, found 24 hours ago on Sunday afternoon. Will be turned over to the police in the next day, according to Central Park management, and fate will likely not be good.
Details: Dog was found Sunday afternoon at west gate of Central Park, near The Place (世贸天阶), Global Trade Mansion, the new Eton School branch (伊顿新城国际社区中心) and Shanghdu Soho (SOHO尚都). Identifying characteristic: it was found with a colored collar. Responds to Chinese commands. Pictures follow. If anyone has any idea whose dog it is or can pass along this information please pass along this info.
Contact: Go to the management office at Central Park, or I can be contacted at +86 1365 108 1662
The Beijing authorities have an edict against large dogs, hence the urgency. [1] [2]
UPDATE: “Good news everyone.” The dog has been taken in on a foster basis by a resident until/if the comes and claims it. Thanks to all that spread the word.
May 8th, 2008
For the last week, gossip web site Valleywag has been dressing down Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, about his previous essays and thoughts about — and let’s use the most ‘neutral’ term we can for this — “child sexuality.” The “Wag” links to his postings of yesteryear on his own web site and the tech/Internet discussion site Kuro5hin. The inventory of their headlines is vintage Valleywag:
Among the sentences that has caused the most buzz is the one from Erik’s essay “Pleasure, Affection, Cause and Effect,” where he states:
“But if there was any doubt, yes, I am defending that children can have sex with each other. Not only adolescents, but also children of earlier ages — whenever they want to.”
One should read the whole thing in context to understand his larger argument through the prism of his libertarian stylings. Erik’s is an intellectual argument, in a style familiar to the user-created “diaries” of the nearly forgotten Kuro5hin tech community. (People today may know a site that was inspired by the same diary model and Scoop software — DailyKOS.)
Some Wikipedians have expressed deep concern about the nature of Erik’s writings and the lack of discussion about this in a normally open community. Others think that simply because the story broke in Valleywag, it should be discounted altogether.
My view? As they say in basketball, “Play the ball, not the man.” Nevermind your feelings about Valleywag’s style, if the links show it, deal with it.
To be fair, it is nearly impossible to publicly discuss the topic without quickly degenerating into a bitter emotional exchange. The mailing lists for Wikipedia have withered in terms of traffic and usefulness. And we’ve seen recently there has been a tendency to pull the “moderation” trigger on lists such as Foundation-L. Even with mandatory moderation lifted, the standing threat is still there, putting a lid on any dialogue that goes outside the mainstream. And we thought self-censorship was a only a problem in China.
Instead, the places it’s being discussed are personal blogs such as with Ben Yates, Danny Wool and Ben McIlwain (Cydeweys), and their comment threads. Yes, trollish banter from anonymous commenters are inevitable, but you will see there is also honest dialogue and true concern for the plight of Wikipedia.
These blogs are now being picked up upon by sites with more sway than Valleywag. Mashable, the influential tech blog covering Web 2.0, has now published about this and did not hold back:
So long as you’re desired profession is underwater basketweaving, fry cook at McDonald’s or tomato picker at country farm, I doubt your employers are going to do much of a reputation search to see what sort of objectionable positions you’ll go at great lengths to play devil’s advocate for on the web.
The only question that remains is how long Wikimedia will fail to go through and do these sorts of reputation background checks. For a company in the public eye, these things do matter (particularly when they have to do with your second in command). Given the predilictions for the directors at Wikimedia though, I get the impression that such background checks that look for shady behavior might be a case of pot, kettle and black.
This is going to be an ongoing PR problem for Wikipedia if it does not respond. It’s already under fire for hosting “pornographic” images, if you believe WorldNetDaily which you normally should take with great skepticism. This only makes the issue of public trust even more pressing.
So while Valleywag does bring up an issue worth reviewing, it also has its flaws.
Just today, it got a story all wrong about Erik’s past edits. In their juicy headline, “Wikipedia’s Erik Möller on the history of child sexual abuse: All Greek to him!” Valleywag claims that he was responsible for introducing text into the article [[Child sexual abuse]] that started with
Pederasty in ancient Greece took on mystical significance…
It went on to attribute this to Erik:
Since the practice was so widespread in ancient Greece, and there is no indication of any detractors at the time, many do not consider this an example of child sexual abuse (see moral relativism)
The problem is, it’s not Erik’s edit.
The link they provide [diff] shows nothing of the sort, and instead displays what changed between Erik’s edit in 2003 and today’s version. An analysis of the article’s edit history shows that the text in question was added by an anonymous IP user [1] on June 1 2002 and elaborated upon by User:Gretchen [2] two weeks later. This was one full year before Erik’s first edit to that article.
Valleywag needs to retract that post.
I’ve been watching the fallout of this story via Valleywag, blogs, personal mails, Twitter and IMs over the last week. Taste and preference notwithstanding, Erik’s comments butt up right against the line of generally accepted views in Western society regarding relations between minors and with adults. Does it cross the line? I can’t tell you, but I can help navigate the field of evidence and people’s views.
The community should have a say in what this means for projects that Erik has been involved with, such as WikiYouth or Wikimedia Youth Camp. It’s what’s demanded when volunteers make up the project. Ultimately, though, it’s the board and the executive director that have the final decision as to what implications this has. And it behooves them to be mindful of the sense of the community.
We will be discussing this issue in this week’s Wikipedia Weekly podcast in a fair, balanced, responsible manner that is fact-based and non-sensational.
It may be our toughest show to produce yet.
