User:Victuallers/wikitown

Oxford Internet Institute

Roger Bamkin and ...

Wikipedia articles in Scandanavia as they were geotagged

Abstract

In only eleven years Wikipedia has grown from being the education resource that dare not speak its name to the universal arbiter of arguments in both pubs and staff rooms. This year has also seen the first County Council partner with Wikimedia to create the world's first Wikipedia Town: Monmouth. In one place we can see the real world matched up with its virtual counterpart, allowing people to play with augmented reality throughout an entire town. What new business models can emerge from this creation? Can British institution adapt to new ways of obtaining and sharing information? Roger Bamkin discusses examples of how Wikipedia projects now allow all of us to define "received wisdom."

Geotagging

This shows Wikipedia articles in Scandinavia as they were geotagged. I'm showing it because it shows what openstreetmap people call "The State of The Map" - it shows how Wikipedia is documenting the geography of the planet. As Mark Graham says “How the [lines] change are crucial questions”. Knowing how the lines change gives you a chance of getting a drink from the information fire hose.

So the reason that I showed this work is that it relates to the idea of what I'm going to talk about - the idea of indexing information based on geography around where people live or where they are visiting. I don't mean just a map as in the pictures that Ordnance Survey create or that you see on Google Maps - but a rich map. A map where I can use my position to find out about where I am, the history of this spot, what the geology is, and the opportunities that are available. A map that can create an augmented reality. The world has changed very little since our species arrived on this planet. What has changed is our description of that world. Our ability to control the world depends on our ability to retrieve and understand the information that is available. Augmented reality is the latest realisation of what we have always done to our environments. People understand and can access data easily based on geography.

... and my third reason for showing this diagram is because Mark is because UK Wikimedians have been impressed by his work and his work earned the Oxford Internet Institute the accolade of best educational institution in a competition organised by Wikimedia UK. OII's work is responsible for our most recent project having the by-line “Bridging Europe and Africa”

What I want to tell you is a story. It involves Wikipedia which as you may know is the best way to get your Professor's full attention - if you "use Wikipedia to do your homework". All you need to do is to cut and paste your next assignment. Wikipedia is an efficient way of demonstrating that we have so much information at our fingertips that its difficult to understand why Professors don't just cut and paste the information into the assignment for each of their students. That would save all the hassle to students attending lectures. Hands up if you think that's a good idea? Some years ago there were tutors who got annoyed at Wikipedia. They argued that Wikipedia was a temptation to cheat and that was the problem. They thought that If Wikipedia went away then all the students would start to read textbooks for fun, stop trying to find the easiest way and concentrate again. It has always been possible to copy an answer out of an encyclopedia.... and its rarely a good idea.

However at a recent conference that brought together Wikipedians with academics it was the Wikipedians who were saying never quote Wikipedia, however the academics were using quotes from Wikipedia as an example of what one section of society thought about particular issues. So maybe not “never” but “rarely”.

ICT teacher Ian Russo demonstrates that Gibraltar Westside Girl's School is already using wikis. Good preparation for GibraltarpediA training sessions.

Actually Wikipedia is being used in Universities and Schools as people realise that it is a great way of finding out what needs to be researched about a subject and to get some idea of what the best sources say. Wikipedia is also being used in some universities where students are set the task of creating or improving a Wikipedia article on a subject relevant to their course. Students learn how to do research, they learn that they must include references to reliable sources of information. They learn that they cannot cut and paste and they learn that the Wikipedia community will help them achieve their goals and criticise them when they fall short. It could be said that you should "use Wikipedia to do your homework!" - Academic staff just need to readjust their syllabus to exploit the opportunity. Wikipedia lets you drink without being blown away by the information fire hose.. So lets just step back a moment and find out what Wikipedia is. [pic of QRpedia code] Its in the top ten web sites in the world and the site gets less that half a billion users per month. It is the largest non profit web site and the largest encyclopedia ever created. The site has over 20 million articles in what could be 280 languages. European languages have by far the best coverage with English having twice the number of articles as the second language (which is German). English is the most popular as it is not only created by Americans and people from the UK. Over a third of the content is created in not just Australia and India but also in Germany and other countries where English is not the first language. The UK has more articles per square kilometer than nearly every other country.

Even in minority languages Wikipedia's contribution can be significant. Wicipedia is the most popular web site in Welsh and it attracts 2.5 million people each month. Recent meetings with Welsh ministers shows that they see the Welsh Wicipedia as an important contributor to their cultural objectives.

Wikipedia was an accident, it was never meant to be a world class encyclopedia, it was intended to be a way that gifted amateurs might suggest encyclopedic content to paid professionals for a now long abandoned project called Nupedia. One of my favourite quotes is that Wikipedia "is impossible in theory". Its creators never intended that Wikipedia would be used by the general pubic as an encyclopedia.

Wikipedia was unusual because anyone can edit it. Before you can read information from the most trivial of web sites you frequently need to register your name, make up an email address and tick a terms and conditions box that replaces the idea of small print with never-read clauses. However anyone can anonymously edit nearly every page on Wikipedia. Every time I explain this to teenagers or people who don't communicate via the internet then they immediately spot that Wikipedia is not going to work. Is it a good thing that they naturally believe that humans don't usually co-operate and that Wikipedia will not work? .... or are they right to be disbelieving? Has Wikipedia discovered a method of working together that creates a small victory over our species natural tendency to allow a few people to mess up cooperative tasks. That is an interesting question and some people think that Wikipedia's ability to allow people to co-operate is one of its most important achievements. If anyone wants to find out more then go and read Wikipedia's five pillars or third party assessments of our organisation. They are not perfect but they have kept tens of thousands of people co-operating for over 11 years without destroying the encyclopedia. The task has burnt out may people and it occasionally creates disagreements in the real world. The organisational complexity has not surprisingly resulted in a massive growth of rules and a growing proportion of the volunteer effort gets used in politics and maintenance.

I'm still impressed that over a thousand people decided to take the English Wikipedia down for a day. They met on a talk page, they didn't vote, they discussed and persuaded and then three Wikipedians took it upon themselves to work out the consensus. A few staff in San Francisco heard the result and did as they were told. This kind of power lies somewhere between a perfect example of democracy and "We rule the skool?".

A History of the Virtual World in 100 articles

I was a secret Wikipedian and I "came out" when I saw an advert to go to a backstage pass at the British Museum. I'd never been to the British Museum, I wasn't particularly interested in museums but it seemed like a cool thing to do. I went and met Liam Wyatt and dozens of other Wikipedians at the museum. Liam was an Australian and he'd paid for himself to come to the British Museum to work as a volunteer as the first Wikipedian in Residence. That was surprising and the British Museum had also decided to do something barely credible - it had decided to partner Wikipedia (a site that I edited without giving my full name). I needed to align myself more publicly with the idea that we might be able share all of the world's information with everyone on the planet. I decided to join the UK Chapter. (picture of hells angels). Each country in the world can apply to the Foundation to have a Wikipedia chapter.

After the first British Museum visit I was invited back to work with nine other Wikipedians and a similar number of curators to write what is known as a Feature Article - on a Roman gold hoard that was now in the British Museum. I helped a bit with that but I was particularly interested in writing short articles about the "History of the World in 100 Objects" which was another of the British Museums important collaboration that year. That collaboration create 100 short BBC Radio 4 programmes. In each programme, Neil Macgregor, used an important museum artefact as a means of telling human history. One of my articles based on an object in that series inspired 38,000 people to read about an old carved mammoth tooth on Wikipedia. By the end of the summer we had a description, usually an article and and picture of each of the 100 articles.

Wikipedia editors worked together for the British Museum and they competed to write articles about the British Museum's artefacts. The articles created made the front page dozens of times and the story of this work at the British Museum made the New York Times. I had never seen wikimedia UK get so much publicity.

Derby Museum's main claim to fame is the paintings by Joseph Wright e.g. A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery

I decided I wanted to do what Liam had done. However I could not afford to give up my work as a teacher and the London museums were a (ridiculous) £100 pound train journey away. I became a (part-time) Wikipedian in Residence at my local Museum in Derby. The idea was to create smaller articles about objects in the smaller Derby Museum. I wanted to find out what effect we could have on a smaller museum. We would still hold a backstage pass and we would have a competition where we would invite the wider community in Derby to create new Wikipedia articles in different languages. What I really wanted to do however was to replace the labels in the museum with stuff from Wikipedia articles. That seemed simple but actually museums don't want help with their labels - you have to go on a course. Someone suggested QR codes .... I had no idea what these were. I got lessons from Wikipedia.

QR codes were invented by someone at Toyota many years ago. They are suddenly more useful now because everyone has a camera and a computer in their pocket. The easiest way to use them is to store a URL in the QRcode. Great! .... but what about the languages? Do we have a different QR code for each language? That is going to look very confused.

I went to look for a solution and I "met" a guy called Terence Eden online and together we created a QRcode that senses the language of your phone and takes you to the correct Wikipedia article. We called this idea QRpedia. Due to the partnership wth Derby Museums we were given the offer of installing QR codes in the museum. The work at Derby Museum assisted when I stood to be the Chair of the board of Wikimedia UK in 2011. Based on this technology and the help of Andrew Dalby in France we ran the multi-lingual challenge to get some short articles on artefacts in Derby Museum. We had hardly any interest from the people of Derby (nevermind any racial minorities), we did get some interest from people who came to our backstage pass, but the outstanding success was on a wider scale. We were getting ten new articles a day. We had 1,200 articles in over a dozen languages. We had 50 volunteers working for Derby Museum. We did not make the papers however and I'm not sure the museum understood that they are the only museum in Britain that you could tour in Indonesian, Esperanto or Catalan. However we did make the Wikimedia Foundation annual report. However its not mentioned on the Derby Museum web site and we failed to train their staff. What we did show is that Wikipedia editors are interested in documenting the planet in minority languages although we see that most articles in Portuguese are about places where they speak Portuguese. The QRpedia idea did take off and it was used for a Joan Miro exhibition in Barcelona and for a Children's museum in Indiana.... and I was invited to give a TEDx talk in Bristol with another Wikimedia UK director. I told them what I told you and some guy says "Why don't you do a whole town?". That was a crazy idea... so we asked John Cummings, who asked the question, to gather all the important people in his home town and we would pitch the idea to them.

We told them what I'm telling you and we told them how Google rankings work and we told them why their town museums would not appear on a French map. The town in question was Monmouth. Its just inside Wales, it has 10,000 inhabitants, its nominally the county seat but actually the main offices are elsewhere. What Monmouth had going for it was that it was brimming with culture. Lots of listed buildings. It was a town with bronze age, Roman and later inhabitants. It had a history worth sharing including a Chartist Trial with three men sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

The representatives said “Yes” and project was designed as it was created. As time progressed we found funding, developed plans and solved problems. John was the project leader and he was part funded by Wikimedia UK and the County Council. John worked enormous days to bring together the community, deliver training and create the simple ceramic plaques. An important decision of his was to turn down an office so that he could work in the community. This showed that this was not a County Council initiative. By the time the project was mostly complete we had even created legal agreements between the chapter, the foundation in San Francisco and Monmouthshire County Council. Importantly Monmouthshire County Council was the first public body to partner Wikipedia. Steve Virgin had also returned to the project to lead a PR campaign for MonmouthpediA. He put together a team of volunteers which included an off-wiki web site to explain to the press what was going on. We never managed to get Jimmy Wales to open the town and I had some difficulty persuading the board to have a board meeting there. the reply was that "There is no railway station" and its "hours from London".

Monmouth the World's First Wikipedia Town

The project was delivered and we distributed guides to most of Monmouth's population. A key partner was the Monmouthshire Beacon who ran a story most weeks. It was their initial story that delivered the first wave of international publicity whilst the project was just our aspirations. The project was eventually announced in over 300 newspapers and as a result the UK chapter were talking to British and Welsh Ministers who were keen to see what Wikipedia could do. I am told that the publicity is worth several million pounds if you compare it with bought publicity. Remember I told you that Monmouth does not have a railway station, well it does not have a conference centre either, but the most important National conference on Welsh digital Heritage is coming to Monmouth. Many suggest that MonmouthpediA caused this. The Wikimedia UK board did come to Monmouth and they were welcomed by a town decorated in practically every shop window, dozens of lamppost and the town's by line was proclaimed as “World's first Wikipedia city”. The following weekend the Olympic Torch came through the town and tens of thousands were given guides and they saw that a town had partnered an online encyclopedia.

Was there problems? Yes, an important one was getting free Wi-Fi installed in the town which was announced in May but it was still not installed in September. Another was getting the skilled resource we need to run the project's core. I had to stand down as Chair of Wikimedia UK to become a consultant and help complete the project. That was an easy choice, but a tricky one for a new charity as they needed to make sure they were managing my conflicts of interest. Another issue was commercialisation. The profile of the project had managed to involve a number of universities and 200 businesses, and several museums. National cultural bodies were keen to see how they could help. The local Chamber of Commerce were keen. As the project became more successful then some wanted to know how we could link Monmouthpedia and its publicity to commercial sites and commercial objectives. That is a big problem in Wikipedia. Wikipedia does want to talk to everyone. It invites commercial exploitation of its content, but it avoids getting the web site itself involved with commercial interests. You won't see an advert on Wikipedia and there have been no adverts that mention more than Wikipedia's name. We never solved the problem. However we did consider some possibilities. Usually wikiprojects don't have businesses queuing up to exploit them but MonmouthpediA was not only important in the virtual world but it was important too in the real world. Monmouth itself used the Wikipedia logo to remind visitors that it had a virtual presence and conversely the virtual world had a real presence in Monmouth.

Successes included the changed image of the town and local understanding of emerging digital technology. We demonstrated that editors did want to describe a Welsh town in different languages. Researchers who only speak Indonesian can study a museum in the UK in their language. Indonesians can visit at least one museum that has descriptions available on their mobile phone or tablet.

The project investigated whether you would run out of things to write about and whether you would end up with lots of articles that need deleting. The current status quo is that 99% of the new articles have been accepted with only two being either merged or deleted. Some observer even dared to ask whether Monmouthpedia was the Future of Wikipedia. Monmouth and Derby showed how projects could be crowd sourced not just locally but throughout the internet. The small African country of Myanmar has little internet access but it has more geotagged articles per 100,000 internet users than most countries. This is thought to be due to Wikipedians who do not live there editing articles about that country. As Graham has noted we have more articles about Antarctica than most African countries. Could we do a bit for Africa...

Why might it be?

Community involvement - This was important in the real world where John trained and talked to various groups. We spoke inside the schools and we trained all the council staff. We had a leaflet created that was given to about 20,000 people. The council put 60 banners on street lamps and they had "Welcome to Monmouth" extended to include the strap lie - "World's First Wikipedia Town." Community online involvement - This was just as important as local support. We created project pages on the wiki that anyone can update. The competitions supervised themselves.

Multi-lingual support in Monmouth was useful because Welsh is a legal requirement but there are few Welsh speakers. In fact we had a techno-political issue as none of the popular phone systems support Welsh. You can display Welsh on the screen but the phone's operating system does not offer Welsh as an option. We did find out that our success with Monmouthpedia meant that we could be access to top civil servants and ministers in Wales, but meanwhile Terence Eden had to create a work around. The top phone operating system countries have now been asked to support Welsh. It will be interesting to see who will be first to support Welsh.

Multi-lingual support in the real world could be exploited more. It is possible to print out guides to the town now in say Hungarian and Welsh at little cost. One impressive use of the new information has on the Monmouthshire County Council web site. Jo Shenton has been able to create a web page with the small amount of important information that they control about a museum such as opening times and charges. However most of the information on the Shire Hall and the Museum are now supplied by Wikipedia - and if there is an error in the article then the reader can fix it. This represents a very important transfer of power and responsibility. The council are trusting their voters not to vandalise the site making preoperative comments about the council and its work. They don't. In return the council have given the power to correct information to the public. If you are irate that the coverage in Welsh or Hungarian is incorrect or incomplete then you can fix it yourself.

Gibraltarpedia

The Gibraltarpedia project is interested in covering this area in particular

The idea for Monmouthpedia was written up and there was a lot of interest from around the world from people who wanted to use QRpedia and the Wiki Town idea. Some have tried to do similar work using QR codes and they have not had our success. There are lots of places now where QRpedia is used from cemeteries to Zoos and even the "Occupy" movement, but no one we know of has yet added hundreds of codes as we did in Monmouth and Derby. There is a lot more to a wiki town than creating some ceramic plaques and sticking them on buildings.

Feeders

Tyson Lee Holmes tries out a new plaque design at The Convent Guard Room in Gibraltar.

No one claims that Wikipedia is the coolest looking web site but I think it is so popular because it offers few surprises. The user interface can be improved and volunteers and paid staff are working to improve the editor, but meanwhile you know where to find a death date in a biography and you know that there should be a short summary at the start of the article. The improvements that I'm most proud of is not the mobile phone support but the free access to Wikipedia that companies like Orange offer in some of the poorest countries in the world. If you have a dollars credit on your mobile phone then you can surf Wikipedia all day. Moreover companies in every country can freely exploit our content.

If you are developing content for your internet application then do consider whether you would be better adding your improvements to wikipedia. Wikipedia content is exploited by hundreds of applications.#

References

How to create a Wikipedia Town, The Story of MonmouthpediA. Click to download .pdf

Bibliography

1. Reagle Jnr., Joseph Michael, Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia, MIT Press
2. Lovink, Geert and Tkacz, Nathaniel (Eds.), Critcal Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, Institute of Network Cultures
3. Shirky, Clay, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, Penguin