All's Wool that Ends Wool

Fundraiser Fun

2009-12-14T20:18:00.000-08:00

Well, the fundraiser is on for Wikipedia, and I find it pretty amusing to see a banner with Craig of Craigslist urging everyone to donate to Wikipedia. Craigslist's recent sex ads aside, does anyone at the WMF follow Silicon Valley news?

Iran's End Game

2009-06-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

So what's next in Iran?

I thought I'd put my predictions here to see if they unfold as I suggest. Reuters has just reported that Iran's air force is holding exercises over the Gulf. I believe that this is a key step in the Supreme Leader's strategy. Since Ahmadinejad can't suppress the protesters he needs to take a radical step. This is the invasion of Bahrain. It is actually a brilliant move.

a. Bahrain is across the Gulf from Iran. Control of Bahrain effectively means control of the Gulf, enabling Iran to block American sea access to Iraq and Kuwait.
b. Bahrain was part of Iran until 1783, and on several occasions the Iranians have offered the Bahrainis a chance to rejoin Iran, the last time I recall being 1970.
c. Bahrain has a Shiite majority but is ruled by Sunnis. There is also a strong Islamist movement in Parliament.
d. The US Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain.
e. An attack on Bahrain would therefore force the US to respond in kind with an attack on Iran. This would, in turn, cause a rift between many of the protesters and the Americans. War creates solidarity with the regime and refocuses attention against a common external enemy.
f. Without sea access to Iraq, the US would be forced to station more troops in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, pissing off local Islamists.
g. A war in the Gulf, no matter how short, could severely hinder the flow of oil and reduce supplies to the West. Prices would skyrocket, which is hardly desirable in the current economy. It would be a replay of 1973, but during a recession.
h. Pakistan would not be happy with the situation, given its current importance in the war against terror. If the US occupies Iran, Pakistan becomes less important to US strategic interests, its own economy takes a hit, and local Islamist factions are strengthened.
i. The Russians would be very unhappy with additional American encroachments on its former (Soviet) border. What results is a replay of the Great Game, this time with the Americans in the role of the British.

All in all, the protesters in Iran are taking a bold step that could eventually lead to real democracy in that part of the world. On the other hand, Ahmadinejad still has some really powerful cards that he can play. It will be interesting ...

In Defense of Cults?

2009-06-05T10:50:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of news about the Scientology issue on Wikipedia, and rightfully so. But today I came across something rather interesting: it appears that Scientology is not the only cult that has exploited Wikipedia with self-promotional articles. Another cult, no less dangerous, which has succeeded in doing so under the radar is Falun Gong.

The truth is that I know very little about Falun Gong. I've seen their protests when I lived in New York, and found them to be quite chilling. In my mind I identified them with other victims of Chinese repression: internet censorship, the occupation of Tibet (which is a rather complicated issue, despite Richard Gere and the Beastie Boys), and the Tiananmen Square massacre of twenty years ago.

Today, however, I cam across some information about Falun Gong on another site that I frequent. The person who posted is not Chinese, but American, and his concern is about his parents, who were also drawn in to the cult. I am copying here his summary of their beliefs:

*Belief that alien technology is used in computers and can warp people stopping them from taking up the faith. Falun Gong believers are of course protected from alien brainwashing
* Illness is caused by karma and if you use modern medicine it pushes the illnesses into another dimension and it will come back in another form. Only by following their book and doing their meditative exercises can you live an illness free life. If you do get sick that is just small amounts of karma coming to the surface. If you are seriously ill you should not take up the faith because your reason for joining will be to be cured and that is not a genuine reason.
* Attachments are evil
* Films and video games featuring demonic themes ie Buffy TVS and Anne Rice novels are evil and warp people
* Anti-homosexuality
*A rejection of inter-racial marriages (In my case this was very difficult for me to accept because their [his parents'] marriage is an inter-racial one)

Speaking with someone who knows more about them, I was told that Falun Gong also have plenty of money and that they don't disclose their business links. In that sense they sound eerily like Scientology.

The problem is that unlike Scientology, no one is watching their Wikipedia pages, so that the information reads more like promotional literature than anything else. In the opening paragraph I learn that they are a "spiritual discipline" and that they teach "the principles truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance." In the following paragraph I am told that this twenty-year old cult "has a heritage in a centuries-old tradition of "cultivation practice" and that a prominent Sinologist regards them as "one of the most important phenomena to emerge in China in the 1990s." The following paragraph is all about how these supposedly innocent people are being persecuted by the Chinese government. It is just propagandistic foreplay to Section 3.2: "Persecutions in Mainland China," a summary of a more extensive article, "Persecution of Falun Gong."

There is, all in all, just one paragraph about the controversy surrounding Falun Gong in the main article (at the beginning of the section on Academic Attention), and it is quickly countered.

So my question is: Why the disparity? Even if I wonder about the the consequences of banning Scientology, I can understand why it happened. On the other hand, why is Falun Gong allowed to use Wikipedia as a propaganda platform to promote its homophobic, racist, anti-technology, anti-medicine bullshit? Shouldn't it be accorded the same attention? According to Wikipedia, this is a group with 70-100 million followers (personally, I don't believe it, but that's another story). The imbalance is startling.

So, David Gerard and others, perhaps it's time to look into this as well. I'd do it myself, but you know ...

Scientological Aspirations

2009-05-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

I can certainly sympathize with the decision by Wikipedia to ban Scientology. If anyone deserves to be banned, it is them. On the other hand, I think it raises a lot of longterm issues that may or may not have been considered. Rather than condemn or condone the decision, I am going to go through some of these issues one by one, in no particular order.

1. The CoS has a reputation as a very litigious organization with lots of money backing it up. If they decided to involve WP in a protracted lawsuit, does Wikipedia have the resources to handle it? I am skeptical.

2. Who would the CoS sue? As I read it, the decision was made by the Arb Com, not the WMF office. That is a good thing. The WMF bases its legal claims on it being a service provider, rather than a content provider. As such, it has no say in matters of content. Could that be challenged? If so, the impact would reach far beyond the CoS. Anyone else with a gripe against Wikipedia could threaten the Foundation in the same way. In that sense, it is important that the Foundation remain as completely uninvolved in the ensuing debate as possible.

3. On the other hand, what would the WMF do if the CoS decided to go after the Arb Com members who made the decision? Would the WMF assist them with legal protection? Would it hang them out to dry? Could it afford the former? How would the latter approach affect the willingness of volunteers to assume various responsibilities such as Arb Com or even Board (actually, the Board is insured, but no one else is)?

4. What will the PR impact of the decision be? Right now it is good, but that could all be turned around rather quickly. Might Wikipedia get the reputation as "The encyclopedia that anyone except Scientologists can edit"? To be totally honest, that is not a fair assessment. Scientologists weren't banned: an IP address was. On the other hand, most people aren't that careful in making those kinds of distinctions.

5. Assuming that the CoS decides to forgo the legal route, are there any other strategies that they might use to fulfill their agenda, and is WP prepared for them? For example, rather than paying a lawyer, they might decide to pay the WMF some hefty sum--say $5 million--and ask for a seat on the Advisory Board in return. Heck, they could even ask for a Board seat eventually or a position as special adviser to the CEO. That is just one contingency that comes to mind, and I am sure there are others. Is the WMF prepared for that? Alternately, they might simply get the same people to use different IPs and have them slowly climb up the ranks: admin, bureaucrat, steward, etc. There is a lot that can be done if a large enough group is committed to it.

6. Banning a group is an almost unprecedented act in Wikipedia (though the Senate ban of a few years ago was fun). Is it setting precedent? Is there a slippery slope down the road? What other groups might get banned in the future?

To be totally honest, I don't know what to do in this situation. I don't even know how legitimate my concerns are, but they are concerns nonetheless. To quote Rachel Maddow, I hope that someone talks me down.

Just a mainstream news medium ...

2009-05-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

On the jacket of their album Aqualung, Jethro Tull wrote: "In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him." A similar sentiment could probably be used on the cover of any upcoming Wikipedia CD-ROM: In the beginning Sue recreated Wikipedia; and in the image of Sue created she it."

The reason I say this is a recent interview in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In it Sue "defined Wikipedia as a "just another mainstream news medium." Wikipedia, Gardner said, "will never say anything as Wikipedia. It will only quote relatively well-respected sources, including other media. So it's natural for Wikipedia to reflect public discourse as it fluctuates, and news is the first draft of history."

It's an interesting comment, no doubt, reflecting Sue's background as a pop culture journalist. But since when is Wikipedia a "mainstream news medium," instead of an encyclopedia? And is it really a "mainstream news medium" after all?

In a perfect world, mainstream news media take responsibility for their coverage. Is that something the Wikimedia Foundation is prepared to do? Will it publish "Corrections" like the New York Times and other newspapers do? Will it follow the first two rules of journalistic ethics, to: "Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error, and "Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing." I have yet to see another news medium argue that "I know that more or less the same mistakes can be found in the New York Times" (quoted from the same article). Will Wikipedia "Always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity"? Or are anonymous IP's, sock puppets, and user names not subject to that?

Then again, what kind of news medium has a policy of No Original Research? That is not a news medium, but rather a news aggregator, like Google News or Yahoo News. Is it a news medium that just depends on whatever stories come over the wire? I think this TEDTalk about trends in news coverage says it all (it's my favorite TEDTalk and well worth the time. It's also quite reflective of Wikipedia's focus on pop culture). And if Wikipedia is "just a news medium," what exactly is Wikinews?

Then there are the core foundation myths that Wikipedia so frequently promotes. Is it now "the newspaper that anyone can edit"? Will we start hearing stories about a young Jimmy Wales, sitting on the floor of his parents house and clipping out articles from the daily newspaper? Will Andrew Lih have to change his book's title to: "The Wikipedia Mainstream: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created a News Medium" (it's no longer "the Greatest" when compared to Google or Yahoo!, or even to CNN, Le Monde, or The New York Times).

In short, what the hell is she talking about?

Aussaresses

2009-05-01T22:01:00.000-07:00

I was discussing Frantz Fanon today, and I was suddenly reminded of Paul Aussaresses. I am pretty sure most people here haven't heard of him, but it was a fairly prominent news story about five or six years ago, so I thought it would be interesting to raise.

After World War II, France was involved in two overseas wars to maintain its empire: in Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and in Algeria. The war in Algeria got particularly nasty, and its repercussions can still be felt today, even though it happened almost fifty years ago. France wanted to keep Algeria, but the population, mostly Arab and Muslim, wanted them out. To achieve that, they launched a terrorist campaign against the French (there were over a million French people living in Algeria at the time), until De Gaulle finally gave up in 1962 (if you've read or seen "Day of the Jackal," the background story is that the people who tried to assassinate De Gaulle were French military men who thought he surrendered).

The French government declared that anything was legitimate to defeat the FLN(Front de Libération Nationale), including torture. After all, the FLN were terrorists. Sound familiar? Paul Aussaresses was a French officer in that war.

Now let's skip ahead almost 40 years. In 2000, Aussaresses defended the use of torture in Algeria in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde. He later repeated his assertions on US television on 60 Minutes, adding that the same techniques should be used against al-Qaeda. You can watch a piece of the interview at the bottom of this post. This interview was done in 2002. Back in France, Aussaresses wrote a book about his experiences, including a defense of torture.

Remember, this was forty years later! Nevertheless, Human Rights Watch insisted that he be tried for war crime--for waterboarding. President Chirac of France agreed.

At his trial, he was defended himself the same way that people defend torture today: if a bomb was about to go off, wouldn't you torture someone? Sadly, there is nothing original in what we see today.

The results were fascinating. Aussaresses was fined 7,500 euros, and his publishers were fined 15,000 euros. The court ruled that while the statute of limitations for torture had passed, he would be fined for what amounted to defending it in his book, and his publishers were fined for publishing it.

Personally, I am not comfortable with that. It seems like a gross violation of free speech. Nevertheless, it shows how seriously another democratic country took charges of torture, and even the defense of torture, for events that happened a lifetime ago. To quote: "Ironically, at least from a moral point of view, Aussaresses's crime was not that he had committed crimes against humanity (an actionable charge from which he is shielded by a general amnesty for military personnel issued by Charles de Gaulle) but for talking/writing about the deeds he committed in the name of France." When we discuss the US response today, it is probably worth considering.

Calling Jimmy Wales

2009-03-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

This is an unusual post, even for me. People familiar with Wikipedia know how kooks of all sorts can twist and turn articles to push their favorite pseudoscience, be it creationism, homeopathy, flat earthism, or the much verified fact that waving a pigeon over the stomach of a jaundiced patient is a tried and true remedy.

But Wikipedia is not the only website to attract these kinds of intellectual cretins. Recently, YouTube has faced the same problems, particularly with the rabid creationists. On the other hand, people who use YouTube as an educational medium to promote science sometimes have a hard time of it. Just ask Thunderf00t.

While reading Pharyngula's blog today, I learned that the James Randi Educational Foundation, which also had a YouTube channel, has been banned. I am not certain why, but the word on the street is that too many kooks complained about it, and if you click the link I just provided, you will see why so many kooks don't llke him.

Thunderf00t and others have responded boldly:

I would like to call on Jimmy Wales to respond too, and I will do it in a personal message here.

Jimmy, you have always been a supporter of Randi and his work, and one of the little perks I had when working at the office was skimming through your subscription to Skeptic's Magazine that was delivered there. You have also spoken time and again about the importance of free speech and the problems of internet censorship. You are also one of the few people who can pick up the phone and call Sergei and Larry (after all, Google owns YouTube), and tell them this is wrong.

We may not like each other very much. We may disagree virulently about just about everything. Still, I'd like to think that there are at least some basic values that we still share, and that this is one of them.

I'll probably never know if you actually did anything about this, but I hope you will.

D

BHPs (Biographies of Happy People)

2009-03-09T20:33:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

It's been a while, but that's actually a good thing. It means one of two things: either Wikipedia hasn't screwed up too badly recently, or I've been busy. Actually, it's a bit of both. And yet, there is something that I feel is worth commenting on about the Cuckoo's Nest that Wikipedia has become. And this comes straight from the desk of Nurse Ratched.

It seems that she has posted an email to the WMF mailing list bemoaning the sorry state of BLPs (for the uninitiated, Biographies of Living People). As the person who first came up with the idea of tagging those biographies (one very good thing that Jimmy did was to actually insist on this tagging, despite the controversy that ensued over the proposal), I would like to add my two cents to the discussion.

It seems from Sue's initial email that the problem is what to do about people who complain about their articles, or in some cases even threaten to sue the WMF because of their articles. Her solution is to have the Board discuss it and come up with certain guidelines. I was very pleased by an early response by Mike Godwin, who wrote: "My strong belief is that the Foundation can make *suggestions* to the community about what content policy should be, but that it must remain up to the community whether to adopt such policies and how to enforce them. This is a very sensible approach. Wikipedia has always relied on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to defend itself. Since I am not a lawyer, I should probably not be rephrasing it, but in short this protects sites from the actions of their users under the argument that the website is merely a bulletin board, and the people responsible for the content are the people who post it. As some bloggers point out, it is very difficult to sue Wikipedia. Personally, I do not understand how it can maintain their status as a bulletin board if the board gets involved in article content, but I am confident that Mike Godwin has figured that out.

The real problem, as I see it, is Sue's basic premise, summed up in her statement: "I am sure that BLP subjects have been complaining about their portrayals since Wikipedia's very early days." Of course they have. Just ask Jimmy. In fact, he wrote this foolish comment: "In my experience, virtually no BLP complaints that I have heard in person were invalid." Virtually none? Give me a break. Ask Brad about Miss Venezuela some time (a woman who called repeatedly insisting that the article on the reigning Miss Venezuela did not highlight every single aspect of her stunning beauty, and as such did not do her justice). Or Congressman Darrell Issa, for example, who was not thrilled over mention of his indictment for car theft. Or ask the Scientologists.

But the real problem is that the issue Sue raises is too narrow, and this seems to me disingenuous. You see, she is focusing on people (and groups) who complain about their articles and want them whitewashed, but at the same time ignores people who use Wikipedia as a platform for self-promotion ... and that is no less egregious.

In most cases, it is harmless. I recently worked for an award-winning film director, whose publicist posted an article about them on Wikipedia. It is a good article. Every day I read Joseph Romm's great blog http://climateprogress.org/. While I generally like his content, I do get a bit queasy when he points people to his article on Wikipedia as his semi-official biography (as he does in this post). While I like Romm, I recognize that he is a controversial figure to many, and having such an official-like bio makes it much more difficult to critique Romm or even discuss some of the controversy surrounding him. He is not one of the complainers, but does that mean that an article about him that he oversees is a good NPOV source.

Of course, these two cases are relatively harmless, but I do want to add one more to the equation. Since I live in St. Pete, I will pick a local article ... how about "Nationalist Coalition," described as "an American white activist organization." To quote more extensively about this group: "The Nationalist Coalition organizes and puts on family-friendly cultural events, such as barbecues, dinners in restaurants, concerts, and an annual Winterfest which includes music, poetry, and talks."

Sounds lovely, doesn't it? Unfortunately, I like to check anything I find on Wikipedia, I like to check with more reliable sources, in this case, the Southern Poverty Law Center. And there they are, listed in St. Petersburg. It turns out that the organizers of those family friendly poetry readings are a group of neo-Nazis (for Mike Godwin, this is not a case of Godwin's Law. When the SPLC says that they're Nazis, there is good reason to believe that they're Nazis).

Unfortunately, this is not one of the problems that Sue and the Board will be discussing. Their focus seems to be on who is complaining (remember what Jimmy said earlier about "In my experience, virtually no BLP complaints that I have heard in person were invalid."), rather than on right or wrong, accurate or inaccurate.

Of course, there is some logic behind that. A powerful person or group may lose in court to Wikipedia, but they could, theoretically draw out the case long enough to bring the WMF to bankruptcy. In fact, that is sometimes claimed to be a strategy used by Scientologists. On the other hand, the focus on "complaints" or "threats," and by extension, the potential financial damage they may cause, while real, is also the greatest threat to real NPOV.

Is Wikipedia about to become "the encyclopedia that is nice to everyone"? If so, it loses any validity it claims as "the sum of human knowledge."

Vox populi

2009-01-14T18:34:00.000-08:00

In contrast to my previous post, there are some positive trends in governance out there, including the Obama administration's Citizen Briefing forum. I urge anyone reading this to please check it out, and consider voting and/or commenting on my proposal, which, I hope, is not too controversial for most people: stopping the usurious practices of the credit card companies.

Thanks

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

2009-01-14T15:50:00.000-08:00

Today I read the most insightful comment about wikis that I have ever seen, and it wasn't from Andrew (Lih or Keen), a sysop, an admin, or a developer, not even from Owen or Cade or Seth Finkelstein. Nevertheless, I think it is important, so I want to give it the attention it deserves.

In a post on Wikipedia Review, Milton Roe wrote: "A wiki-dbase ... is simply a software version for a public meeting, with records kept by computer. That's it." It is essentially a means of using a computer to engage in one of the oldest human pastimes: sitting around and arguing until a temporary compromise is found. Essentially, it is to debate what the telephone is to speaking: a tool, rather than an end in itself.

But he goes on: "In a real public meeting the sound techs don't run things. It's either run in full authoritarian mode, a la judge-and-baliff, or else by some book of rules, like Robert's Rules of Order. Our present democratic meeting institutions are run by something more or less along the line of Robert's Rules," concluding with, "Wikipedia hasn't gotten even that far ..."

No, all too often the Wikipedia model has devolved into a lynch mob mentality, where the loudest and the crassest, or alternately, the most cunning and the most articulate, manage to sway the crowd, in ways that remind me of the den of thieves in that classic Fritz Lang film M at best (perhaps under the Arb Com). With all due respect to Howard Rheingold, a smart mob is still a mob, and as the Wikipedia article says: "Smart Mobs are sometimes manipulated by those who control the 'mobbing system' (ie, those who own the contact list and the means to forward instant messages to a group) and induced to cause distress and aggravation to individuals who have been targeted or singled out for whatever reason."

As both he and later GlassBeadGame point out, this culture has become deeply embedded in the wikiworld, leading to "central themes of identity obscuration, disregard for precedents and previous norms, atomized content production and most of all diffused (ir)responsibility." What seems to have happened is that in this technological aberration of social interaction, a new hierarchy favoring the technically savvy has come to replace one favoring those entrenched in established social norms. As they seem to indicate, the people who control the volume end up controlling the truth. The man who operates the boom ends up determining the outcome of the plot, while the writers and directors are stifled.

As the previous board has shown, knowing how to edit a wiki does not mean one knows how to run a social group. All that results is a vacuum, into which some powerful authoritarian force can easily step. In response to Milton Roe I would add that the authoritarian mode often emerges when Robert's Rules are abandoned. Then the fun really begins.

P.S. I want to personally congratulate Roger McNamee on his new appointment. I admit I was wrong, by an entire magnitude: he did it for under $5 million, not 50.

P.P.S. with these new changes, I leave with a question: Who will be the new Wikipedia's Ernst Roehm?

Headlines 1

2009-01-12T14:07:00.000-08:00

With all the news out of Gaza, I thought it might be interesting to offer the headlines from Israeli radio news, translated into English. This is from the midnight (Israeli time) broadcast of Galei Tzahal (Army Radio).

So, after the musical intro ...

One Israeli soldier was severely wounded and three were lightly wounded during a Paratrooper action in the northern Gaza Strip. The army is currently investigated whether they were injured by friendly fire.

A Paratrooper force uncovered a terrorist tunnel intended to attack a settlement adjacent to the security fence, near Kibbutz Kfar Aza (see red dot).

The Head of the Hamas government Haniyah says that his organization will cooperate with the initiatives that will bring to a ceasefire and the opening of the border crossings. Tonight, a delegation of the Hamas leadership in Damascus will return to Cairo and bring the organization's position regarding the ceasefire to Egypt.

In the prime minister's office, the Forum of Three (Olmert, Barak, Livni) is meeting to decide whether to expand military activity in Gaza or to work toward promoting a ceasefire. During a visit to Ashkelon today, Prime Minister Olmert said that Israel is ready to end the operation at any time, but also to strike with an "iron fist," to use his term.

Five Qassam rockets exploded this evening in the area of the Sdot Negev, Shaar HaNegev, and Eshkol regional councils. Earlier, a Grad rocket hit Beersheba. In all of the incidents there were no injuries or property damage.

High school students in the south who are taking their winter matriculation examinations will receive an additional 10 points to their grade, according to the Ministry of Education. Tomorrow, studies will resume in part at Ben Gurion University and at local branches of the Sami Shaul College in Beersheba and Ashdod.

Justice Minister Friedman announced that any claims issued against Israelis as a result of the operation in Gaza have no substance to them because Israel is operating according to all humanitarian rules.

The Central Election Authority disqualified the parties of Balad and Raam-Taal from participating in the upcoming elections to the Knesset.

At this hour, train service from Haifa northward has been stopped in all directions to allow for development work along the track.

There will be a slight rise in temperatures tomorrow.

After the news, they interviewed an Israeli woman from Sderot, who read an email from a Palestinian friend in Gaza, pleading for help. Perhaps that was the most telling part of the hour-long broadcast.

The Holy City of Gaza

2009-01-10T07:09:00.000-08:00

It should be no secret that I am disturbed by the events taking place in Gaza. I still remember how twenty-five years ago, I looked out over the city from Jabal Ali Muntar, a hill immediately to its southeast, topped with the tomb of a Muslim saint and an enormous sycamore tree. Despite the Occupation, Gaza looked like a tranquil seaside town with a beautiful white beach. The guide explained to my group that this beach could one day be the highlight of a thriving Club Med-style resort (the highlight for me was the seaside fish restaurant, which featured the catch of the day, grilled and served with french fries and a finely chopped salad). But Gaza remained under Occupation, a curse to the occupied, and also to the occupiers. Ten years later when a close friend of mine from Canada described the town as a modern-day Warsaw Ghetto, I immediately grew defensive. With the hindsight of this week's news, perhaps I responded too quickly.

Perhaps Gaza has always been a bad portent to the Jews.

In ancient times Gaza was the foremost town in the Philistine Confederation of the books of Judges and Samuel. The other four towns--Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, and Gath--are now part of Israel. It is best known for the story of Samson, who was brought to the temple of Dagon, the fish god, there: "Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there,and there were upon the roof about three thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport. And Samson called unto the Lord and said, 'O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.' And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and the other with his left. And Samson said, 'Let me die with the Philistines.' And he bowed himself with all his might, and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life" (Judges 16:27-30).

That's quite a lesson for modern Israel. Pyrrhic victory comes to mind.

From Gaza, my group went to Neve Dekalim, the center of the Jewish settlement block of Gush Katif, since dismantled in August 2005. The settlers offered a messianic vision of the region, at once inspiring and alarming. This was not the first time that Gaza was a center of false Jewish messianism. In the seventeenth century, Nathan of Gaza was a false prophet, the self-proclaimed incarnation of Elijah, who heralded the arrival of Shabbetai Zvi, an infamous Jewish false messiah. Rejected by the rabbis of Jerusalem, he declared Gaza to be the new holy city, the center of a new Jewish empire that would overthrow the Ottomans and conquer the world. The messianic settlers and the Israeli military could hardly compete with his level of insanity. Only, the Ottomans weren't that eager to comply.

Shabbetai Zevi eventually converted to Islam, and Nathan died in exile in Skopje, his dreams of world domination largely forgotten.

So is there hope for Gaza? One last Jewish figure comes to mind. Israel Najara, the Rabbi of Gaza's Jewish community was a mystic and a poet who died eighteen years before Nathan was born, but one of his songs, Yah Ribbon, is still sung by many observant Jews around the Friday night table. Najara is himself a controversial figure: most of his poetry is highly erotic (he claimed it was a metaphor), and it was written to be sung to the tune of popular folk songs in Turkish and Arabic. In other words, he believed in a synthesis of the cultural traditions of the region to create something that is greater than its parts. While he was condemned by the leading kabbalists of his day, most notably Chaim Vital, it is actually his legacy which perseveres, rather than Chaim Vital's, who is largely ignored except by a handful of scholars and pseudo-kabbalists like Madonna.

Perhaps that legacy of cooperation and mutual respect for the other can overcome the violence of Samson and the particularism of Nathan. Then maybe Gaza can be transformed from a besieged prison camp undergoing its baptism of fire into a genuinely holy city.

Note: Dagon may also have been a god of grain (from dagan, grain, rather than from dag, fish). Samson is clearly a personification of a solar deity (his name in Hebrew is derived from the term shemesh, meaning sun), and the biblical story could be a sanitized account of conflict between either a heavenly deity and a terrestrial or oceanic deity. While the former is first symbolically castrated (Delilah means "thinning" or possibly, "emasculation"--see notes 10 and 16) through lust, he eventually gains his revenge at a great cost.

I prefer the fish source, given the parallel between the names Samson and Dagon (-on being a diminutive form of the noun), and the Philistine origin as seafarers.

I'm delighted that Jett Travolta is dead.

2009-01-06T13:50:00.001-08:00

That's right. I couldn't be happier.

You see, I am glad that people are finally waking up to the problem of young children dying needlessly. For instance, how many children died today in the Gaza school attacked by Israel -- and if you know the number, try naming the kids.

Or how many kids died in Uganda today as part of the Lord's Resistance Army? And if, somewhere you're saying to yourself, that's Africa: what do those dumb niggers know (and if you're thinking that, you're probably thinking "niggers"), check out how many other countries enlist kids Jett's age or just a few months older, to do their dirty work. I see England, and the U.S., and the Philippines, while in the other countries, it is a veritable Romper Room.

Of course, it's not just the military that kills kids. Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. That's one child every five seconds. See if you can name them, and point to their pics in People magazine -- or are they not People?

And then there are diseases: not the diseases that come about because of the chemicals used to sterilize kids' carpets, but the basics like neonatal disorders, pneumonia, and diarrhea. Internationally, about 9.7 million children under five will die from these diseases this year -- that's 18 a minute, not counting the fun diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. How long have you spent reading this blog post?

Now, young Jett was lucky. Vinnie Barbarino could have afforded to buy his son the best medical care imaginable -- he could have bought him a friggin' hospital if he wanted, but for fear of the evil space monster Xenu, he decided against it. Jett was that much luckier than the 8.1 million kids (10.7 percent of all kids) in the US who don't have any medical coverage. Too bad Jett pushed them off the main page. Maybe it would help if they just died on vacation in the Bahamas.

So, yes, I'm delighted that Jett Travolta is dead. And I hope that Suri Cruise is next.

Gay Days in the Middle East

2009-01-05T09:32:00.001-08:00

With all the news about Israel and Gaza, I thought I'd try to highlight a different side to all the fighting and show how religious extremists, both Jewish and Muslims, can at least agree on their contempt for gays, lesbians, and transexuals, even from their own communities ... especially from their own communities.

Saar Netanel, who features in the first part of this clip, is an openly gay member of Jerusalem's City Council (and someone I once knew socially). Here he is visiting the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Meah Shearim. An escape like that only happens in the movies, but you'd hardly expect it in a documentary.

I don't know Bodi, the Palestinian drag performer, and there is no footage of the Hamas sticking a gun in his mouth and threatening to kill him. I can only wonder if they realized how phallic that actually is. His performance, however, is ... well ... something else.

I am showing this to highlight one simple point. After all the fighting is over, and the fundamentalist Jews and Muslims finish killing each other, you can be sure that they will end up turning on their own people.

I could be trite and quote Bonhoeffer here about how first they came for this group and that, but instead I'll quote this lesser known poem by him:

A friend is a gift to a friend,
Not from the heavy soil where blood and
Race and oaths are mighty and holy,
Where the earth itself watches over the sacred,
Hallowed, and ancient ordinances,
And defends and avenges them,
Not from the heavy soil of the earth,
But from free choice and the free desire
Of the heart, which are not in need of
An oath or a law.

Take that, Rick Warren!

Children and Fools

2008-12-29T06:10:00.000-08:00

There's an adage in the Talmud which says that in our times prophecy is restricted to "children and fools." Since I'm not the former, I'll take my bets with the latter and predict when the attack on Gaza will end.

January 26.

The reasoning is simple: given the rocket attacks on Israel, the country is forced to respond, and it is forced to do this in a way that makes the Israeli public feel that it is responding. The same is true of the Hamas leadership. They have to continue firing rockets, so as not to show their Palestinian constituents that they have been defeated. It's like poker, but with rockets instead of chips. Neither wants to be the first to fold. So someone has to call.

The only person who can do that is the President of the United States. Not the current president, W. He is a lame duck, and everybody knows it. Not Obama either: his staff keeps reminding people that there is only one president at a time, and at this time he is not it. But he will be president on January 20, and will then be able to move "full steam ahead," and bring some semblance of tense normalcy back to the Middle East.

Tuesday, January 20, is inauguration day; Tuesday night is the inauguration ball. On Wednesday Obama gets to sleep in, on Thursday he meets with his advisers, and on Friday he sends a high-powered team to the region to broker a ceasefire. Weekend diplomacy on Saturday (Hamas) and Sunday (Israel), and on Monday, January 26, Israel withdraws.

And everybody wins. Both Israel and Hamas score major brownie points with the new administration by showing themselves to be flexible and willing to cooperate. Hillary, not even confirmed yet, earns a reputation as a capable diplomat. But the biggest winner is Obama. He earns a reputation as a no-nonsense president who has resolved a major international crisis in the first week of his presidency--and foreign policy isn't even his strong suit! If he can solve the Middle East crisis in under a week, just imagine what he can do with the economy!

Of course, there will be losers too, but those are just civilians, Palestinians and Israelis, who will have to live in fear for another month. It's for their sake I hope that I am proved to be a fool.

Buy none, get one free

2008-12-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

In November 2005, the WMF held its first retreat in Frankfurt. This three-day meeting, attended by about 25 employees and chapter reps, was intended to determine the long-term direction that the WMF would take over the coming years. It was, at times, tumultuous, as one might expect, and many of the outcomes were eventually ignored, but there were also some important discussions and several areas of broad agreement. In fact, I would go so far as to say that everyone agreed on the ends, just not on the means of getting there. One of these ends was the commitment to "free as in freedom, not as in beer." In fact, Erik, who always had grandiose plans, spoke rather passionately about the WMF becoming the largest repository of free content in the world. And while the rhetoric may have been a bit too bombastic for my taste, the sentiment was one I think we all shared.

Or did we?

Today I came across an image associated with the recently deceased guitarist Davey Graham. It is, indeed, a lovely fair use image, but I am not sure I understand the copyright assigned to it, particularly the second statement:

In addition to the fair-use assertion shown on this page, the copyright holder has granted permission for this image to be used in Wikipedia. This permission does not extend to third parties (Bold in the original).

In other words, only Wikipedia may use this image. I did not look to see how many other images were similarly categorized.

When I worked in the office, a professional sports photographer called, asking that his photographs also be included in Wikipedia. I asked Greg Maxwell to speak with him, and Greg explained that Wikipedia could only accept the images if they were made completely free, even for commercial reuse. Otherwise, Greg explained, we could not accept them. Greg did a great job. He explained the advantages of free content, and the man agreed. We stuck to our values, and in so doing, were able to "liberate" more content for use by anyone for any purpose.

So, my questions are:
* Has the WMF taken a new position on free content?
* Is this in keeping with the WMF's missions, as expressed by JW's popular (and frankly, excellent) talk on the Ten Freedoms?
* Does including such images come with a price--not necessarily financial, i.e., could other people who might donate free content cite this as an excuse not to do so?

To be fair, Wikicommons is doing an excellent job collecting and organizing free content. The recent donation by the German government exemplifies that. But that was given thanks to the efforts of the German projects, which do not allow fair use.

And to any developers out there, would you allow any non-free components to be incorporated in the wiki-software as well, or can they only be allowed in content? If so, why?

Help Stop the Violence in the Mideast

2008-12-10T06:50:00.000-08:00

Many of you will have seen the story in the news about the confrontation between extremist Israeli settlers, the Israeli army, and local Palestinians in Hebron in the past week. In brief, settlers were evicted from the "House of Contention," a property in the West Bank town of Hebron, until its ownership could be rightfully determined. The settler's ensuing riots were deemed a "pogrom" even by the Israeli media.

In the wake of this, Baruch Marzel, a leader of the Kahanist movement in Hebron, is organizing a demonstration in the Israeli-Arab town of Umm al-Fahm for Monday, December 15. There can be no doubt that the purpose of this demonstration is to provoke ethnic and religious rioting and exacerbate tensions in this already troubled region.

As a result, a petition calling for the indefinite postponement of the demonstration is being prepared for Israel's Minister of Interior Security and the Chief of Police. The goal is to get 10,000 signatures by this weekend. I encourage you to sign.

The petition reads as follows (rough translation by me):

Israel will not become Hebron!

(Jewish settlers in Hebron)

Considering the recent events in Hebron, we call upon the Minister of the Interior and the Chief of Police to indefinitely postpone the demonstration planned by the far right to take place in Umm al-Fahm on Monday, 15 December.

The incitement that preceded the evacuation of the "House of Contention" and the riots that occurred in its wake pose a real threat that the demonstration led by [Baruch] Marzel, one of the chief rioters in Hebron, could become violent and lead to grievous harm both to the local residents and the security forces.

Marzel and his followers are the leaders of a violent mob that does not recognize the rule of law. They are likely to cause a provocation that will kindle violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in Israel, just as they did in Hebron last week.

We therefore call upon the government and police of Israel to show responsibility and prevent the march, before all of Israel turns into a "House of Contention."

The three boxes to sign are:
* Name (שם מלא)
* Place of residence (עיר / ישוב)
* Email (דואר אלקטרוני)

There is also a box for comments.

The petition can be signed here.

Thank you.

Stung by a Scorpion

2008-12-07T15:32:00.000-08:00

Given the title of this post, you would think that I would jump right in to the brouhaha surrounding the British block on a particular Wikipedia article about the Scorpions, because of its illustration. And I will. I will even offer a suggested compromise. But first ...

You see, the problem that Wikipedia is facing is not unique to it. People are waking up to the power of the Internet to convey ideas and images, not all of them popular. Just a few days ago, Youtube, one of very few websites that really competes with Wikipedia for popularity, announced changes in its search, which, as I understand it, would make it far more difficult to find "objectionable" material such as profanity, vulgarity, and obscenity. Many Youtubers are up in arms, including some very thoughtful individuals, such as Thunderf00t, who has created some amazing scientific videos. In his imageless video response ( a paean to Jarman's Blue, perhaps?) he talks about the value of freedom of speech, but also recognizes Youtube's advertising concerns: Youtube (hopefully, unlike Wikipedia) is a company whose clear objective is to make money, i.e., advertisers have a say too. Since I've sometimes commented on the evolution of McWiki, I was intrigued by his comparison of the emerging Youtube to Walmart: corporate and bland.

Wikipedia is in a slightly different situation. It has avoided that level of corporatism, and it can take pride in that.

On the other hand, let's face it: there's a world of a difference when the Iranians and the Saudis block Wikipedia and when Great Britain does it (even if it is only one article). The latter should certainly be a cause for much greater alarm. It should certainly be a cause for serious discussion. Here are the points as I see them:

1. The Scorpion's album Virgin Killer (1976) has an album cover that can be intepreted as child pornography.
2. An image of the album cover appears on the Wikipedia article about the album.
3. In fact, most Wikipedia articles about albums include images of the jacket.
4. None of these images are free images. They are included under supposed fair-use guidelines.
5. According to a strict reading of fair-use, these album covers should probably not be included unless the article specifically discusses the jacket art, Sergeant Pepper being the classic example.
6. Many language versions other than English do not allow fair use at all.
7. If there was ever a case to allow fair use, Virgin Killer is it.
8. This pisses off a bunch of prudish British people.

At first, my gut reaction is to say, "Big deal!" If Wikipedia gives in here, it will have to give in when it comes to the Muhammad cartoons, articles about sex, possibly even articles about religion, politics, music (Selfish Cunt, for example, is an amazing British band that reminds me of the early Talking Heads mixed with the Sex Pistols, as this video shows), etc. The problem is that this presupposes an "all or nothing" alternative, and I believe that this is a mistake. There are other options.

For instance, some people have long suggested that English Wikipedia remove random fair use unless it conforms to a strict interpretation of what fair use is. In other words, get rid of the album covers unless they are the subject of commentary in the article (and I don't mean, "The White album has an all-white jacket").

Still, that leaves Virgin Killer on Wikipedia. Yes, but it does not mean that the article needs to show the entire album cover. Can it show just the girl's face, to indicate her age? Can it show the cover with the "naughty bits" blacked out, with a comment explaining why that was necessary? Obviously, none of these are ideal situations, but sometimes the answer to either-or is neither.

Or perhaps Wikipedia should take a stand on behalf of the fully free and open exchange of ideas, if only because Youtube won't.

But if Wikipedia, like Youtube, succumbs, I can only close with the final remarks from Jarman's elegy in Blue, since I already mentioned it above: "In time, no one will remember our work. Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun."

Blasphemy

2008-11-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

I am interrupting my reminiscences on military prisons in Israel to link to an important blog posting.

In the past, Wikipedia showed considerable courage on a number of controversial topics, but the most notable one in my mind was the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. To refresh your memory, in autumn 2005 a Danish newspaper published several cartoons which were considered by Muslims to be blasphemous. Despite a wave of international protests other newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and the Observer, followed suit by publishing the cartoons, as did Wikipedia. They defended their actions citing freedom of speech--the right to speak freely includes the right to say things that others find distasteful.

The cartoons, and the violence they elicited, were just one more step in growing agitation against free speech, particularly in the Muslim world. They followed the footsteps of the infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie (which has never been revoked) and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Just two months ago, a journalism student in Afghanistan was sentenced to 20 years in prison simply for asking in a university classroom about the role of women in Islam (good thing we liberated the country from the forces of Islamic extremism) . And who can forget the teddy bear case in Sudan, with its calls for Gillian Gibbons's execution.

Will we eventually fall prey to the whims of extremists? It seems more likely every day. Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann is a suspended priest from his remarks two days ago at a UN conference devoted to the "Culture of Peace," Brockmann said: "Yes, I believe that defamation of religion should be banned." In other words, he is calling for an international ban against all comments, remarks, and reporting that people of religion might find offensive.

In an editorial in the Toronto Star, Haroon Siddiqui intimates that there is a conflict between freedom of speech and freedom of religion. This is not the case. In a society based on a free exchange of ideas, religion --any religion--should not be above the fray, safe from criticism because people "believe in it." As Robert A. Heinlein stated, "One man's religion is another man's belly laugh." And where does it end? Should we make the same exception for political ideologies? For people who think that women should be subject to men? Might creationists argue that teaching evolution in the classrooom is offensive and therefore defames their religion?

Most troubling is that this UN conference was sponsored by Saudi Arabia, hardly a bastion of religious tolerance. Perhaps they have stopped teaching that Jews and Christians are descended of pigs and apes, or that students should not "greet," "befriend," or "respect" non-believers, but do members of other faiths receive equal treatment there? Is conversion from Islam tolerated? Are women allowed to drive? Or perhaps the Saudis are using this to cover up their own mistreatment of religious minorities (which, by the way, includes Shi'i Muslims).

In short, Brockmann seems to be pandering to the most extreme religious states in the world, who mask their own intolerance by claiming victimhood for themselves.

For more about this ridiculous statement by Brockmann, see Jonathan Turley's blog.

And now, having said that, I can get back to writing about the military prison in Tulkarm.

Guantanamo I - Tulkarm (part 2)

2008-11-17T19:17:00.000-08:00

Like I said in my previous post, Tulkarm's prison was divided into two areas: the larger prison for men who were already convicted and were serving their time, and the more secretive prison where I was positioned. I should start by describing the main prison, though I really did not see much of it.

What I remember is a large courtyard, roofed with a barbed wire net. The courtyard was surrounded by cells, each housing a twenty or so prisoners. The prisoners spent most of the day in the courtyard, wandering around, exercising, and praying. The cells were all open, and they could go back and forth between them pretty freely. Some prisoners played volleyball, exercised, or practices martial arts. Others walked around in circles in pairs, talking about one thing or another. Still others attended classes or read. They basically had the whole day to themselves, with very little interference from the guards.

What marked the day for them was the five daily prayers from sunrise to dusk in which everyone participated, the three meals, and the two head counts, morning and evening. Other than that, they were more or less free to spend the day as they pleased, always under the watchful eye of the guards. They patrolled the perimeter of the roof and looked down on the prisoners from two towers at opposite corners of the compound. There was almost no interaction.

In fact, the prisoners lived fairly autonomously within the prison confines. They were allowed to wear their own clothes, and they even cooked all their own food in an open-air kitchen at the far end of the courtyard. The prison provided them with staples and they had a team that prepared all the meals for the prisoners including the prisoners in our compound. The kitchen was the only place where knives were allowed, but then again, you have to cut up the meat and vegetables somehow.

Where we were situated was very different. There were no walls, and the entire compound, including where we slept, was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Rather than cells, there were prefab cement block houses with no windows whatsoever, and just an iron door with a small window grate that was kept shut from the outside. Part of our job was to patrol the dirt footpaths between these dank holding cells 24/7.

It is impossible to tell how many people were in each cell, because it changed every day, and often several times a day. Often we were shuffling people around to disorient them, and without the chart that we had in our common space there was no way of knowing which prisoner was where at any given time.

The prisoners did not have names either. Instead each one was assigned a number, so if we needed particular prisoner we would go to the cell and call out the number. We were ordered not to talk to the prisoners or even ask their names too, and the idea was that none of the prisoners was supposed to know who was detained there at any given time. In fact, even the little windows on the doors were carefully positioned so that no window ever faced another.

But there were other precautions too. Whenever a prisoner was taken out of the cell, for interrogation or to be moved, we would handcuff them with their hands behind their backs and put a hood over their heads. The hood was an olive drab tube with a flat top (like in the picture), and we would move the prisoners by grabbing the bottom front of the hood and pulling them forward. It was very slow going, especially if it had rained and the path was muddy. The handcuffs were not standard handcuffs, which are round. Instead they were much narrower and made to fit the wrists, with about 5 cm of chain between them. I have never been able to find a picture of these handcuffs, but we were told that they were much less comfortable and violated international law. Though we had several pairs ready for use, we were told that if the Red Cross ever visited, we were to remove them and replace them with the more humane handcuffs that everyone knows. In fact, we did this once while I was there.

Some of the cells were rather crowded, with 8-10 people in them. Others were empty or almost empty with just a single prisoner in "solitary." Of course, the prisoners all knew who was in each cell, because they would call out to each other. Though this was not allowed, there was little we could do except bang on the iron doors with our wooden truncheons and tell them to shut up.

What the prisoners did not always know is which of their fellow cellmates were mashtapim, or as we called them, shtinkerim (from the English word stinker), used to describe collaborators or informants. Some of these were being paid to sit in prison and inform. Others broke down during interrogation and agreed to inform for a reduction of their sentences. We did not know who they were either, but usually after some cell-shuffling, a few people ended up in the interrogation room.

There was one other reason we assumed that we shuffled people around. The Intifada was largely a youth uprising, and while most of the prisoners were in their twenties and thirties, there were a few older and a few younger--as young as fifteen, in fact. Often, the older prisoners were in solitary, and on several occasions we were ordered to move one of the younger boys into those cells for the night.

The cells themselves were rather dark and dreary. They each had a single light bulb housed in a metal grid. Since there was no running water, they had black plastic jerrycans of water for drinking, washing, and ablutions before prayers. They also had no toilets. Instead, there was a kardal, a large black plastic trash can with a toilet seat cut out of its lid. This was kept in a corner of the room, and usually partitioned off with a black woolen military blanket that the prisoners rigged up for privacy. It did not partition off the stench, particularly of a kardal used by half a dozen men or more.

Every few days, two or three senior prisoners were given kardal duty. First the guard would go cell by cell and have them carry their kardal outside and leave it by the door. Then the senior prisoners would collect them, one by one, and take them to the dumping area, a pit some fifty meters from the compound. While we guards watched from a distance, doing what we could not to get splashed on, they would spill the foetid combination of urine and shit, vomit and rancid food scraps, into the pit, then rinse off the kardal with a hose. As disgusting as it was for us--and believe me, it was one of the grossest things I have ever seen--the men seemed to enjoy doing it. It was a chance to get out of their cells and into the sun without the hoods and handcuffs. When you have so little, even this could be a gift. They would laugh and joke, and occasionally even interact with us a bit. I felt a bit like a slave master doing that, and to ease my conscience I would usually reward the prisoners with chocolate or cigarettes. I guess it was my way of letting them know that I didn't want to be there either.

I apologize if this is coming out as stream of conscience. Each memory evokes some other memory, and there is no real order to this. In my next posting I'll write about the daily routine and interrogation. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Guantanamo I - Tulkarm

2008-11-15T03:44:00.000-08:00

In January 1991, when the first Gulf War erupted, I was in prison. Not metaphorically, but in an actual prison, with cells and bars and guards with guns and tear gas and clubs. I was a guard at the military prison in the West Bank town of Tulkarm, which was used to house detainees suspected of involvement in terrorism. It was the first time I'd done anything like that, but over the next ten years I spent several months serving in prisons holding Palestinians suspected and/or convicted of terrorism as part of my annual reserve duty in the IDF. With the ongoing discussion about closing Guantanamo prison, I thought it might be interesting to describe what life in similar prisons is like, from the perspective of a guard, if not that of a prisoner.

I don't mean to claim that the prisons I was in--Tulkarm, Ketziot (Ansar III), and Megiddo--were at all similar to Guantanamo. I can't say that with certainty, never having experienced the last. But the stories and images that appear in the news do evoke many memories, and the populations are roughly similar. Conclusions about one can be drawn from the other--at least I believe they can.

I should also add that the first of these experiences took place almost 18 years ago, practically a lifetime for many people who may read this. Some of the memories may be foggy, and the details I remember may be obscure. But there are some scenes that are imprinted in my mind, and will likely remain with me for the rest of my life. And while I hope people read this, the exercise of writing it down is largely cathartic, as it should be. It's not that I've been traumatized by the events; in fact, I actually have some fond memories of the times I spent in these prisons. Finally, I am not passing judgment on what I or anyone who was with me did. I am simply describing it as I remember it, and will let history be the judge.

The first prison where I served as a guard was in the West Bank city of Tulkarm, located about 11 miles from the Mediterranean in the foothills overlooking the Israeli town of Netanya. Although the population of Tulkarm is about 50,000, it lacks the sentimental/historical significance of Bethlehem or Hebron, the rich culture of Nablus/Shechem, or the economic and political significance of Ramallah (all West Bank towns). It is just another city, like Qalqilya or Jenin. Unless you know the area well, you will likely never hear of it.

It was also considered a more moderate West Bank town, possibly because it was once home to a more diverse population, with a sizable Christian community. In fact, many Israelis from the coast would make the 20-minute drive to Tulkarm every Saturday to shop. But like many other West Bank towns, Islamism was on the rise in Tulkarm, and by the time I arrived there, only half a dozen or so Christian families remained and Israeli shoppers were few and far between. The town was changing rapidly.

The prison itself was situated on a hill along a main street. The towers along the perimeter fence were directly across from shops and residential buildings. We could see into their lives, and they could see into ours. On the other hand, once you passed the prison gate, it was as if you entered an entirely different world, an anomaly of languages and cultures, rules and morals.

The prison itself was a whitewashed, two-storey, rectangular building dating from the British Mandate. In fact, these kinds of buildings are ubiquitous throughout Mandate Palestine, where they are known as Taggart forts. One of these, the Muqataa in Ramallah, eventually served as Arafat's base of operations in the West Bank. They all follow the same basic architecture--thick cement walls, narrow windows, an imposing guard tower, and a large, central courtyard. If you've seen one, you've seen them all, and by then I'd seen quite a few. In Ramallah, the fort served as headquarters for the border police that patrolled the town, but its primary purpose was as a prison for locals convicted of terrorism in one way or another.

What none of us knew was that right behind this prison fortress, obscured from the street and surrounded by a barren hill, was a separate prison complex for people under interrogation. In some ways this separate prison was as different from the regular prison as the regular prison was from the world outside its fence. This prison was run by the ShaBaK, Israel's General Security Service (a euphemism for Secret Police), and very few of the rules applied there. In fact, if I were to compare the circumstance to Dante's Circles of Hell--Netanya, Tulkarm, Tulkarm Prison, ShaBaK prison--this would be well in there. It was not quite the Ninth Circle, but certainly the Eighth. Panderers and Flatterers had their place here, along with False Prophets and Sowers of Discord ... and their victims. To us, the Ninth Circle was little more than a door.

For some strange reason, still unbeknown to me, the handful of native English-speakers in my reserve unit were sent to guard this part of the prison. We were trusted, so we were popular with our commanders, and perhaps they thought they were doing us a favor. Discipline was far more lax up there, and we could essentially do what we want: set our own schedules and establish our own routines without the annoying scrutiny of the military police who ran the prison proper. So they took away our guns and sent us up there to guard the most dangerous people in the area, and even to come into intimate contact with them, something absolutely verboten to your run-of-the-mill reservist prison guards.

It was a tense time. Within two weeks Iraqi scuds would fly over our heads to land in Netanya and Tel Aviv. We sensed the war was coming, and so did the prisoners. So did the people of Tulkarm and the surrounding areas, who dared to hope that Saddam's missiles might liberate them from Israeli occupation. And we were caught in the middle.

I know that this is a little bit off the beaten path for this blog, but if people are interested I'd like to continue by describing life in the prison before and during the war. Let me know.

Easy Street?

2008-11-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

I never thought it would happen, but today I am forced to write a post longing for the days of Jimmy Wales. The fundraiser made me do it!

Today, the banner atop Wikipedia read "Wikipedia: Making life easier." What do I take from this? That the goal of Wikipedia, once an institution devoted to two principles, "freedom" and "knowledge," has been reduced to "making life easier." Is the goal no longer to "spread knowledge" and "liberate content"? Has it evolved into something very different, very cynical, a modern-day version of Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine?

And whose life is getting easier anyways? The staff's? The sycophants? The stilted minds? During the last fundraiser I questioned the sincerity behind "If you (and 99 others) give X dollars, we can give X books to Africa." I asked how many books would ever end up in Africa because of the donors' gifts, and in fact, none did. On the other hand, while the goal may have been unreasonable, the sentiment behind it was noble: spread education and learning to the places that need it most. Now, however, the goal is simply, "Give a bunch of well-to-do kids pat answers so that they don't have to think."

I would blame Sarah Palin, er, Sue Gardner (sorry, I get the two of them mixed up a lot). She came in to her job without any understanding of the project's goals and ideals--in fact, disdain for its goals and ideals--and simply saw it as a way to relocate to the US and get a nice, high profile, high paying job. If she can leech off the ideals and commitment of contributors, why not, as long as she can bring in her own thugs to control the show. At least Jimmy offered a commitment (feigned or otherwise) to the principles of freedom and knowledge. At least he spoke about them, and even continues to speak about them (for a price). I look back fondly on the talk he gave at the first Wikimania about the Ten Freedoms that Wikipedians should be struggling for, and am disappointed that it has all been boiled down to "Making Life Easy." I can only hope that when he thinks about it, he will be disappointed too.

Perhaps it's time for the people who really care about the core principles of Wikipedia-As-It-Was and who want to see "Wikipedia-As-It-Should-Be" begin "Making Life Difficult" for Sue and her sycophants (Ecclesiastes 3:3).

Gimme, Gimme Never Gets

2008-11-05T18:16:00.000-08:00

So Wikipedia has launched another fundraiser, and padded the results by starting with $2 million dollars.

It is unfortunate though. At one time, fundraising for Wikipedia was a lot like Wikipedia itself--based on the belief that every little bit helps, that a $5 donation from an impoverished student is just as important as a $500 thousand from some corporate entity. That is not to disparage the larger donations, but rather based on the principle that every donor and every donation counted. That's why, when I oversaw the donations, there was just as much excitement over a touching note that came with $5 as there was from the occasional check for more than $5,000. That was one reason that I attempted to send a thank you note to every donor--a practice that has since been discontinued. The thought behind the donation was just as important as the donation itself.

That is not the case today. On the actual donation page, the lowest suggested sum is $30, an amount that is slightly higher than the average donation just two years ago. I wonder how the poor student who gave up lunch to donate five bucks in gratitude feels when confronted with the $30 sum. Sure, they can click "Other," but do they feel that their donation has the same weight as it did with the message that every little bit helps?

It is also curious when I consider the original debate about membership. For those not familiar with Wikipedia's early history, Florence was originally elected to represent WMF "members," even though there was no membership apparatus in place. In fact, when discussions were underway to create a membership apparatus, Brad stepped in and said that the only way to measure membership was with a membership fee, and the discussion stopped there. While I, and shortly afterwards, Delphine, made a small donation ($5) in return for membership, there was extensive discussion about the amount we could expect other members to pay. Florence insisted that for people in Poland or Africa, even $5 was too much money, and membership would effectively be limited to North Americans and Western Europeans. (Membership eventually became a huge debate between Brad and Erik, with Brad insisting that being a membership organization meant that the Board would be responsible to its members, something they should avoid. The Board eventually took Brad's advice and voted against being a membership organization.)

All of this is interesting when I compare the WMF fundraiser to various other organizations I have donated to. Let's take the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). When I go to their Donate page (which is up all year), the two options I find are "Become a Member" and "Members: Renew or Donate." More interesting is the starting sum: not $30, like the WMF, but $10. And you get a handy dandy tote bag!

For the record, the NRDC took in $90 million in 2007, and spent 78.4 percent of that directly on program expenses. This is according to Charity Navigator, a site which ranks charities according to their efficiency. With the motto, "Find a charity you can trust," it is no wonder that the Wikimedia Foundation is not listed there. To compare the NRDC to Wikipedia, I have to depend on Wikipedia's Annual Report, particularly page 9: only some 10 percent is listed as Programs. Of course, one could argue that Technology and even, generously, Wikimania, are programs, but that still leaves just 56 percent spent on programs.

Reading the Annual Report, it seems to me that the big problem is overbloated administrative costs on the part of the WMF: in fact, the Annual Report lists Board expenses, Office of the ED, Finance and Admin, and Legal as separate items, with no indication of what Fundraising costs are. In fact, I am not exactly sure what "Programs" are, except that on p. 22 of the report, Programs are listed as Cary Bass, Delphine (who has since left), Frank Schulenberg, and Jay Walsh. So, Cary the In-house Troll and Jay Walsh the Propaganda Minister are Programs? Is the goal of WMF's fuindraiser simply to pay their salaries? That is hardly a charity (though in the case of Cary, it can be argued that it is).

As for Administrative expenses, should a charity that lives on $6 million be paying bloated salaries to the ED and her office, i.e., 8 percent of the budget? In his day, Brad made the obscene amount of $160 thousand and Sue started with even more than that. Is that what people should be donating to support? Please donate to Wikipedia, so that Sue Gardner can be among the elite few whom Obama admits he will raise their taxes? No wonder the WMF doesn't want the small donations any more.

In the meanwhile, I will encourage anyone who considers donating to the WMF to read their Annual Report and compare it with the charities listed on Charity Navigator. You may wonder whether the WMF is really where your money should be going in this down economy.

Jimbo the Plumber

2008-11-01T12:07:00.000-07:00

If Jimbo was, err, president ... what would he, err, do? I mean like, err, besides fucking interns in the, err, Oval Office?

Hmmm.

But then again, Jimmy-boi, are you sure you wanna go through the, err, vetting process? Olberman and Maddow, Hannity and, err, Colmes ... they would have a field day. In fact, "I went to a massage parlor in Moscow" is actually a tad more ridiculous than some other candidate being able to see Kamchatka from her trailer.

So, do run, Jimbob. It will be fun to see the vetting. And I know a long list of people, Republicans and Democrats alike, who would be happy to go on CNN and share their thoughts.

End Racism Now

2008-10-31T21:23:00.000-07:00

I just sent an email tonight. I will share a copy of it here. The email is in response to one David Storck, the GOP chairman of neighboring Hillsborough County, who sent an "emergency email" out, complaining that too many African Americans were voting for Obama.

As someone who spent many years teaching the Holocaust, yet pondering how it could possibly have have happened--how otherwise intelligent people could have fallen for racism and hatred--I am grateful to you. Thanks to you, I finally understand. I finally understand how fascism and racism are possible, even in an ostensibly free society.

Thanks to you, I know who the enemy is, and I know who should be defeated.

Danny Wool
Former Museum Educator
Museum of Jewish Heritage--A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City
Current Resident of St Petersburg, FL

Ecocho

2008-10-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

In the past couple of months, we've seen Jimbo try and use his internet savvy to make money off the worldwide web. First there was Wikia search, with all its hype; then there was Wikia Green with even more hype. The problem is that apart from the hype, there doesn't seem to be much to these sites apart from the association, via Jimbo, with Wikipedia. What Jimbo doesn't realize is that winning a lottery does not make someone a financial expert--in fact, many people who win the lottery end up squandering their new-found wealth.

Frankly, that is unfortunate. While Google is a real giant, it is also emerging as a monopoly, and there is certainly room for search alternatives. At the same time, the internet and its information revolution could be, should be, at the forefront of the next great human revolution--the Green revolution.

That's why I was happy to read about a new, green search engine, Ecocho. Based in Australia, the website is carbon neutral, and uses part of its profits to plant trees. In fact, as I write this, Ecocho has already planted 6249 trees, and I am sure that more are on the way (5 trees for every 1000 searches you do). To quote them: "The crux: if people use Ecocho as their search engine we will donate money towards growing trees. Trees store CO₂ and give out oxygen, which helps the environment to reduce carbon pollution levels."

To be forthright, Ecocho is not a non-profit; it is a business, and seems to have a viable, simple business model, based on Yahoo search results. I wish them the best of luck, and hope that other websites are inspired to follow this model. So please check it out.

Priceless

2008-10-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to link to an amazing blogpost about some people's response to the economic crisis. God must be rolling in his grave.

Wikipedia Fucks Up

2008-10-22T22:05:00.000-07:00

I always thought that Sue Gardner was a stupid choice for ED of Wikipedia. In fact, the only person who reminds me of Sue is Sarah Palin, except that Sarah Palin has more class. In other words, they are both fuck ups of the first degree. Go kill some moose, instead of human knowledge.

I also thought that Mike Godwin is a babbling idiot with attitude.

And, of course, Erik Moeller is a first class asshole with a chip on his shoulders.

Looking at the new version of Wikipedia for schools, I feel that I have been vindicated.

I don't care that the entire Middle East doesn't get listed in countries. I don't care that their military section lists Husein Gradascevic but not Douglas MacArthur or the Duke of Marlborough, that their religious section lists John Sentamu but not John Knox, or Isaac but not Ishmael (or their mythical father Abraham, or their mythical descendants Moses or David--assuming Joseph Smith should go under scam artists and not religious figures, eh, Mikey?) or that they have Du Fu (but not Li Bo) in literary figures, but not in the section on China devoted to Chinese literature, or that they have Shakespeare but not Marlowe (who was, undoubtedly, far superior)--Khan Abdul Wali Khan is far more important to literature than Steinbeck, who won a Nobel Prize or Flaubert or Balzac or Dumas (fuck the French!). I actually find it amusing that Lego and Star Wars get listed under wars in their index, but the civil wars of the US or England do not.

But for Chrissake, you idiots, you could at least follow the GFDL and have an obvious link to the people who contributed to those articles! I guess you just don't give a shit about compliance.

Kat, if you have any dignity left, resign from the Board in protest.

This Week 38 Years Ago

2008-10-12T07:18:00.000-07:00

Though I spent many years in Israel and the West Bank, my earliest memories of seeing the military in the streets actually come from Canada, our peaceful neighbour to the north. I was seven years old in October 1970, and my family lived in Montreal, on Kent Street, to be specific, near the wealthy Anglo neighborhood of Outremont.

With fears of a terrorist uprising in Quebec, Prime Minister Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act. Some background: the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) had recently kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebec's Vice-Premier and Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte. Seven days later, Laporte's dead body was found in the trunk of a car. He had been strangled by his kidnappers. In response, Trudeau granted extraordinary powers to the police, in an effort to hunt down the terrorists.

At seven, I didn't really care about the breach of civil liberties, especially during peacetime. On the other hand, I still have vivid memories of tanks on the streets of Montreal.

I remembered that today as I read a Wikinews article, "Bush deploys military in the US for active duty as federal response force." I immediately read the links as well, hoping against hope that this article was exaggerated. I could discount Alternet or Democracy Now! as websites with an agenda; I could argue that Representative Brad Sherman (D - CA) was taken out of context, or pandering to fear in much the same way he claimed Bush was doing. But Army Times, which offered a more moderate version of the story, was much harder to discount. To quote:

"They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack."

Civil unrest and crowd control? Considering Representative John Lewis's (D - GA) controversial statement, this is pretty worrying:

"George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights."

I don't know what to make of all this, but I still believe that the U.S. government, for all its problems, is not the monster that some people make it. Still, there can be no doubt that the timing of this news item -- and perhaps of the decision as well -- was not very fortuitous.

1932

2008-10-10T19:52:00.000-07:00

I'm waiting for a book to arrive: Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932, by Donald A. Richie. I'm hoping it will help me understand this ugly election from a historical perspective. After all, when you think about it, the parallels between 1932 and 2008 are striking:

Economic decline: Every newscaster is asking whether we are entering a new Depression;
Hostility overseas: The rise of fascism and Stalinism, v. the rise of Islamism and Putinism;
Disasters caused by the weather: The Dust Bowl wiped out an entire region (see Timothy Egan's award-winning book), while Katrina devastated a major American city;
New media: While the internet is obviously shaping the current campaign, the rise of home radio played a similar role in the 1930s, often in insidious ways--my father often talked about Father Coughlin, for instance;
A complete lack of trust in the country's leaders.

The problem is that after the past few days, maybe I should be looking to the 1930 elections in Germany instead. Hitler was not elected then, but the country saw a brutal campaign between the National Socialists and the Social Democrats--a campaign style that would mar the next two elections, and eventually bring Hitler to power in 1932 with 33.1 percent of the vote.

To be clear, McCain is not Hitler and the Republicans are not Nazis. It is stupid to make that comparison. But what allowed the Nazis to come to power was the virulent street rhetoric and scapegoating that sometimes turned violent. We are seeing the first signs of that again right here in America. Watch for the woman who says "He's got the bloodlines."

I'm glad that McCain stood up to that today, and told the crowd that Obama is an honorable man. That took courage, especially in the face of the boos that he received from his own supporters. On the other hand, I am not happy with McCain's initial response to Gayle Quinnell, 75, who doesn't trust Obama because "he's an Arab." McCain's response: "No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen ..." It's a very strange juxtaposition: Arab v. decent family man; Arab v. citizen. I wonder how Arab Americans are taking that.

In 1941, right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, country singer Carson Robison came out with this hit song:

We're gonna have to slap the dirty little Jap
And Uncle Sam's the guy who can do it
We'll skin the streak of yellow from this sneaky little fellow
And he'll think a cyclone hit him when he's thru it
We'll take that double crosser to the old woodshed
We'll start right on his bottom and go to his head
When we get thru with him he'll wish that he was dead
We gotta slap that dirty little Jap

Thankfully, there were no popular songs like that after 9/11. America had grown up.

Or has it?

Oil to grease the wheels of censorship

2008-10-08T16:41:00.001-07:00

Sorry, but this post is completely nonpartisan. I am simply copying an email I receive from the We Campaign to repower America.

"Did you notice the ads after last night's presidential debate?

"ABC had Chevron. CBS had Exxon. CNN had the coal lobby. But you know what happened last week? ABC refused to run our Repower America ad -- the ad that takes on this same oil and coal lobby."

It's ironic, because both candidates called for energy independence. Both candidates spoke about the importance of energy independence--they may differ on the means, but not the final goal. "The We Campaign" was prepared to pay for the advertisement.

If this upsets you, please sign here.

Thanks.

The Right to Act Irresponsibly

2008-10-03T17:25:00.001-07:00

Elie Wiesel once stated that "The opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference." By extension, one could argue that "The opposite of love for the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitition--those same freedoms for which the U.S. has already spent over half a trillion dollars and 4177 American soldiers' lives--is not hatred of those freedoms but indifference to them. So if the First Amendment of the Constitution declares that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press," the opposite of "embracing a free press" would be "ignoring a free press."

And while the GOP may argue that the press is acting unfairly toward Palin, I quote verbatim from Wikipedia: "The courts have rarely treated content-based regulation of the press with any sympathy. In Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974), the Court unanimously struck down a state law requiring newspapers criticizing political candidates to publish their responses. The state claimed that the law had been passed to ensure press responsibility. Finding that only freedom, and not press responsibility, is mandated by the First Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that the government may not force newspapers to publish that which they do not desire to publish" (the italics are my own).

I was happy to hear Palin's concluding remarks at the debate last night: "We have to fight for our freedoms, also, economic and our national security freedoms." She is willing to fight for the basic freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, including freedom of the press.

That's why I'm confused by her indifference to the press, as seen by the way she avoids interview after interview. A true appreciation of freedom of the press would have her taking all those interviews, even the most hostile ones, not ignoring them dismissively: "I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter, even, of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they've just heard" (just a few lines above the previous quote). That is, at best, indifference. It is certainly not love.

I would only hope that the WMF, as represented by Wikinews, condemns Palin's "war against the media." It is not a question of the hostile media effect. By "stoking resentment toward the media among conservatives," Palin is rejecting the very freedoms that her own son is fighting for.

Bailing Out the Poor

2008-09-25T22:01:00.000-07:00

I'm a little disappointed with Bill Gates right now, and it has nothing to do with Microsoft. Now, truthfully, Bill Gates is a charitable man, whose Gates Foundation has done more than most to alleviate suffering in the Third World. I can respect a man who puts his money where his mouth is (unlike Jimmy Wales, for instance, who always seems to put his mouth wherever he thinks the money is).

But my gut response to the latest AP headline about how Gates stated that "the UN's goal to fight poverty has grabbed the world's attention" is that this seems rather callous, especially today. According to Ban Ki-moon, the world has responded to the war on poverty with a whopping $16 billion. I'm not impressed, especially considering the $700 billion bailout price tag still being debated for Wall St.

No wonder there is so much poverty: when you consider that American banks could come away with $700 billion to help them, $16 billion to help the poor doesn't sound that impressive. As such, I'd like to be the first to suggest that these numbers be reversed. Although it is more than some banks deserve, let's give them the $16 billion, and give the poor the $700 billion. They are probably much more deserving of it.

All the News that's Fit to Ignore

2008-09-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

You may not believe it, but there are things I still like about Wikipedia. No, I don't mean Jimmy Wales or Sue "Barracuda" Gardner.

No, I like reading the front page and getting all the news stories that would not appear anywhere else. I like Wikinews too, but for really unusual, eclectic news coverage of events around the world, I can just hit the main page of Wikipedia for a decent rundown.

Until today, that is. You see, any idiot can tell you that the shit has hit the proverbial fan. The banking crisis in the US is quite possibly the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, with an impact that will be felt around the world--that is being felt around the world. In fact, you don't need a PhD in history to see how the Crash of '29 impacted world history over the next two decades, and the events of the past week are often compared to Black Tuesday. Meanwhile, the government is talking about an unprecedented bailout in sums that none of us can even imagine (what does $700 billion even look like?). How will that impact all our lives, considering that someone, somewhere, will end up paying it?

And in the Arctic, as reported by The Independent, millions of tons of methane gas may be being released into the atmosphere. I am certainly not a climatologist, and lack the knowledge and tools to make a scientific assessment of the debates surrounding global warming, but from my layman's attempt to understand the issues, the problem seems pretty damning, and this newest bit of information is particularly worrying.

And yet, when I turn to the main page of Wikipedia to get some news, what do I learn? Well, there is no mention at all of these key stories. Instead, I can read about a school shooting in Finland and a new prime minister in Vanuatu, the Wasilla of the South Pacific. I'm not even going to talk about how the daily newspapers are more up-to-date than this. I am going to talk about priorities. Because with the world in economic and climatological upheaval, news about a golf tournament is about as relevant to me as the last time Levi Johnston scored (and for you with dirty minds, I meant in hockey!). Is Wikipedia dragging down news as well, and transforming it into a collection of arcane trivia. For a website with an ostensible mission to save the world through free knowledge, I can only wonder about what it means by knowledge.

One last note. I am sure that there may be some who will comment that I am taking an American-centric stand here. Actually, I am not, because believe it or not, the collapse of the world economy will have a greater impact on little Vanuatu (pop. 215,446) as a third-world nation than whoever is elected prime minister there (or in Japan, for that matter--who was Prime Minister of Japan during the Great Depression?). And if sea levels do indeed rise as a result of global warming, the only way people will find Vanuatu is with scuba gear.

With presence comes power. With power should come prioritization. Wikipedia, whether I like it or not, is a major web presence. Its main page is viewed by billions of people every month (and if we had a dollar for each of them, we still couldn't resolve the banking crisis). I just hope it reconsiders its priorities when it presents the headlines to the world.

P.S. This post is based on "In the news" as it appeared at 1:33 pm EST, on Wednesday, September 24.

A Palin is a Palin by any other name

2008-09-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

Track Palin got his unusual name because his mother likes running. Trig Van Palin got his name because his mother likes Van Halen. I can only wonder what Levi "I live for hockey" Johnston and Bristol Palin will name their child. Puck? Or perhaps some other activity that rhymes nicely with that. We know it won't be Condom.

But my question is really about Track, the boy whose first tattoo was "a big Jesus fish." Now that he's on his way to Iraq, I can't help thinking about Prince Harry, who went quietly to Afghanistan, and was then forced out when the press revealed that he was there. After all, the third in line to the British throne would be a very tempting target. Would Track, Jesus tat and all, be another tempting target if his hockey mom became VP? Is it even safe for the troops around him to be in the vicinity of such a target? Or are they safer because the "pit bull with lipstick" outed her own son to support her candidacy?

And perhaps the local al-Qaeda folks wont be good enough to slit his throat. Perhaps they'll let him have another shot at that favorite Palin-family pastime. Strip him naked and let him run through the desert while they chase after him with helicopters. Then, when he gets worn out, they land and mercifully put a bullet in his head. Sure, it sucks to be on the losing side, but at least Mom will be proud (before she nukes 'em).

Speechless

2008-08-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

No words necessary.

Neo

2008-08-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

Andrew asked me if I wanted to write something for the last chapter of his book. I did, and I do, but I decided to put it here instead and let Andrew do with it as he pleases. Copy, paste, cut, edit, or delete. Why not? It's free.

With the Democratic convention going on, I can't help thinking of a quote by Edward R. Murrow that "Our major obligation is not to present slogans for solutions." It goes well with another favorite quote of mine, which Elie Wiesel attributes to a Hasidic master, Israel of Ryzhin (1796 – 1850): "The greatest enemy of a revolution is its success." While I've always believed the latter quote, I never quite understood why it was, until I combined it with the quote by Murrow: The greatest threat to a successful revolution is that its solutions become slogans." For a revolution to maintain its vibrancy, it must renew itself constantly and ensure that the solutions it offers never become trite.

We see this time and again in the history of ideas. When Plato's philosophy began to wane in the West, a new generation of neo-Platonists—Aquinas, Avicenna, Maimonides—rekindled the smoldering embers of intellectualism and brought about a philosophical renaissance. In China, where Andrew is writing his book, Zhu Xi spearheaded the movement to revive a moribund Confucianism with his neo-Confucianist philosophy, while Wang Pi's neo-Taoism did the same for Lao Tzu. Departing from obscuranta, it's impossible to ignore the role of neo-Conservatism in shaping American life today, for better or for worse.

Why the digression? Because in each case these individuals breathed new life into solutions that were once revolutionary, and prevented them from becoming mere slogans.

When I look at Wikipedia today, I can't help wonder whether the solutions of the past have become slogans in some pseudo-intellectual MMORPG. Does "Assume good faith" really mean what it once did—a way to embrace newcomers—or is it now a bludgeon to badger people with? Is NPOV really about fairness, or is it an excuse to include every quack opinion? Are puerile statements like "wikilove" a tepid replacement for accuracy and integrity? If so, then perhaps its time to add a new Neo to my list above—neo-Wikipedism: a philosophy that embraces and revives the values of the past, while learning from their failings.

Can neo-Wikipedism be achieved? I don’t know, but I'd like to think it can. The problem as I see it is the existing hierarchy, particularly among the elected board members, who sit idly by. In fact, the major qualification for being elected as a board member (or an arb com member or an admin, for that matter) is to have upset the least amount of people.

In that sense, I am remind of Buntsche Zweig, the protagonist of a story by Yiddish author Y. L. Peretz. You see, Buntsche was a good man who suffered, a modern day Job, so to speak. When pogroms and wars ravaged his town, he would not raise his voice against God or Man. When disease carried off his wife and children, he would not raise his voice against God or Man. When fire destroyed his business, he would not raise his voice against God or Man.

So when Buntsche died, the angels all waited to greet him in Heaven. Only Satan, ever bitter, claimed that Buntsche was a fool. To God and the angels Buntsche was a saint, tested time and again, and never once raising his voice. A seat was prepared for him by the Divine throne, and God himself descended to reward Buntsche for his years of unquestioning loyalty. "Buntsche," God smiled, "you have never once complained against me or your fellow Man, a trait that even Moses did not share. Ask anything of me as your reward, and you shall have it."

The angels all leaned in, waiting to hear Buntsche's respone. "Anything?" he asked. "Yes, anything," God answered." All of Heaven stood silent in anticipation. What would he ask for: an end to war? to poverty? to hunger? an end to death? Would he dare ask God to send the Messiah?

"Well, Buntsche answered, "There is really only one thing I want. Each morning when I wake up …" The angels leaned in even closer … "I'd like cup of coffee and a hot croissant by my bed."

And God and all the angels sobbed. And Satan laughed.

So today we have our own team of Buntsche's, too timid or too self-absorbed to shake up the order of stagnancy and sloganeering. But if revolutions upset the existing social order, then perhaps a new neo-Wikipedist revolution can upset the existing hierarchy.

I can only hope so.

The Bitter Irony

2008-08-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't blogged in a while, but work has kept me remarkably busy. Still I thought it might be worthwhile to point to one small but bitter irony in the new article about Jimbo Wales that appeared in W magazine. I actually found it quite amusing that Jimmy discouraged Pam from pursuing nursing, essentially arguing that helping people through nursing was "evil." You see, the first trip Jimmy made to South America was to deliver a speech at a nurses' conference. I guess it's better to have them help him than to help their patients.

Oh, and one small correction too, before he claims the story isn't true. It was Desmond Tutu's orange juice, not Nelson Mandela's. It happened the first time JW went to Nekker Island.

A "Peculiar" Choice

2008-07-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

Though I am hardly a Catholic, I am always inspired by progressive Catholic leaders (not of the Bill Donohue type), who attempt to restore a certain humanity to the Church. In Europe, one such leader was Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, Archbishop of Utrecht in the Netherlands. "When religion sanctifies hatred," he wrote, in response to the U.S. Boy Scouts' policy excluding homosexuals, "it lends to that hatred a special ferocity."

But homosexuals aren’t the only group excluded from the camaraderie of the American Boy Scouts. So are atheists and members of non-traditional religions, such as Wiccans and pagans "because they would violate the organization's code of conduct and beliefs." In the past they discriminated against Blacks and Native Americans, and it was only in the mid-1970s that these policies were overturned, largely because of a law suit by the NAACP (1974) and the threat that they would lose federal funding. In fact, as recently as Adams v. Boy Scouts of America, "the BSA argued before the appellate court that they were not subject to any anti-discrimination laws, even those relating to race" (Nov. 21, 2001).

Ironically, this turnabout occurred at about the same time (1978) that the Mormon cult lifted its ban against African Americans (or rather, Blacks in general) entering its priesthood. While they are proud to boast that Gladys Knight has donned the sacred underwear and joined the Mormon cult, Brigham Young did write:

"Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so." (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 10:110) It took prayer and prophecy and threats by the federal government to finally decide that it would not always be so.

Instead the Mormons focus their hatred on gays, atheists, and religious others. You see, this happy, smiley, Leave It to Beaver/Stepford Wives gang has an undue influence on the Boy Scouts of America. As Newsweek wrote on November 24, 2003, "The Boy Scouts are the official boys' youth group of the LDS, and more than one in nine Scouts are Mormons. Critics say the church exerts disproportionate influence through membership on the national advisory council and vigorous fund-raising." And they have threatened to cut funding to the Boy Scouts if the movement changes its policies.

Sadly, I write this in the wake of the recent announcement that Michael Snow has been appointed as the new Chair of the WMF Board. Snow was appointed to the Board just six months ago to fill a temporary vacancy. Now he is chair, and there is no more talk of community or even chapter participation in his appointment.

Now, to be fair, Michael Snow is a really nice guy: clean cut, clean living, a regular Boy Scout. In fact, he probably was a Boy Scout, and he certainly was a Mormon missionary—in Germany, as a matter of fact.

Of course, Wikipedia is not the Boy Scouts, but there are enough gays, lesbians, transexuals, bisexuals, atheists, agnostics, humanists, Wiccans, Africans, Native Americans, and others for it to raise some red flags. So, Michael, are you prepared to state your own positions on homosexuality, atheism, agnosticism, race, sons of Ham, and the vile teachings of that false prophet Brigham Young. Because while you may be part of a "peculiar people," too many of the excluded others might argue that the self-proclaimed persecuted are actually doing the persecuting.

I'll close with a story by LeGrand Richards, told in A Marvelous Work and a Wonder. On page 3, he quotes Elder Orson F. Whitney's pamphlet, The Strength of the Mormon Position, which describes a Catholic scholar as saying: "You Mormons are all ignoramuses. You don't even know the strength of your own position. It is so strong that there is only one other tenable in the whole Christian world, and that is the position of the Catholic Church. The issue is between Catholicism and Mormonism. If we are right, you are wrong; if you are right, we are wrong; and that's all there is to it."

Given that option, I, an atheist, will throw my lot in with the Catholic Cardinal Willebrands.

Under the Bright Egyptian Sun

2008-07-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Lenny Bruce, "Take away the right to say 'Fuck,' and you take away the right to say 'Fuck the WMF.'"

Wikipedia had always been an environment that prided itself on free speech and openness—or to quote Jimbo Wales, "radical openness." But, Jimmy-boy, most of us thought you were talking about openness of words, thoughts, and ideas, not random women's thighs. That is why the Foundation was able to smear the reputations of so many innocent people, while hiding under the protections afforded by Section 230.

In May, we learned that this did not apply to Wikinews's coverage of the WMF. Sweet as saccharine, Sue suggested that she and her thought police have final say over how the Foundation is covered, without a thought toward anyone else. In yet another Orwellian revelation, we learn she did the same with Signpost, a supposedly independent web paper that reports on events in the Foundation.

Ral315, the editor of Signpost, made a bold move by expressing his reservations about this, and asking for other users' insights. He should be commended. In contrast, those who commented that keeping stories under wraps was the "right thing to do" either fail to understand the freedoms offered to them by Section 230, or believe that you can criticize anyone except the Wikimedia Foundation. If the former is the case, any admins among them should be stripped of their powers for failing to understand the very underpinnings of Wikipedia. If the latter is the case, they should all be banned for being two-faced hypocrites.

It is worth remembering the words of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, noted for his firm adherence to the Bill of Rights: "The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to bare the secrets of government and inform the people." Sue and Erik, the power whores who have taken over the WMF, seem more concerned with Thomas Jefferson's sentiment: "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." Their strength comes from community ignorance.

Normally, I would close with that, but since they are probably getting ready for the VIP party in Alexandria, I will close with a quote by Naguib Mahfouz, the only Egyptian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature: "Freedom of expression must be considered sacred and thought can only be corrected by counter thought." Even in Egypt, not known for its free speech, people understand that. Maybe Sue and Erik can take that sentiment back to San Francisco with them.

P.S. Jimmy, that quote is just perfect for your talk on Free Speech this week. And I know you read this blog ...

An Active, Mythical Belief

2008-07-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher who commented extensively on the threat of "technological tyranny" and the danger of mass media as a tool for propaganda. He wrote: "The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion, but to arouse an active, mythical belief." Though he died in 1994, his writing foreshadows some of the dangers inherent in Web 2.0. It certainly speaks volumes about the current state of the Wikimedia Foundation.

In the past 24 hours, Wikipedia has featured in two major news media. On CNBC's Squawk Box, Jimmy Wales spoke about "building the rest of the library" to complement Wikipedia. His focus, of course, was the World of Warcraft Wiki, which, he states proudly, is about to surpass the New York Times. I can only wonder whether Britannica will take a lesson from this and start handing out WoW manuals with every encyclopedia they sell. Jimbo sure looked amused when one interviewer joked with the other about some imaginary boyfriend taking pictures of her and posting them on a website. More important, however, was that the Founder, President, and Chair of Wikia admitted publicly that he knows nothing about sales or the business end of things in his for-profit company. That, coupled with his own admission about the vandalism the journalists found (in their own articles), that "some of these kind of minor errors can creep in" made him look like an absolute idiot. And yet he is teh God King: omnipotent, omniscient, "an active, mythical belief."

The problem is that the WMF is now focused on creating Ellul's active, mythical belief. Jay Walsh, the current Propaganda Minister, will be attending his very first Wikimania to give a talk entitled "Telling Our Global Wiki Story." It's remarkable how someone who never participated in the Wiki world—who has been around for all of half a year—feels sufficiently confident in his experiences that he can "arouse an active, mythical belief" in things he knows nothing about.

His inexperience is well reflected in his response to the LA Times about the relatively poor turnout at Wikimania this year. "About 600 people will be attending," he said, "a bit lower than usual." Apparently Mr Walsh did not attend the same Wikimanias that I did (Frankfurt and Boston), or else, maybe, he's counting all and sundry, including the waiters at the VIP parties. He attributes it to "high airfares and the economy." In contrast, Andrew Lih suggests that there is a "malaise" in the English-language community, which is certainly worth considering.

So who do I trust? Andrew Lih or Jay Walsh? Five years or five months? Every previous Wikimania (including in an organizational capacity) or no Wikimanias to date? Academic or CBC answer boi? Writing a book or writing a press release. Researching toward a historical overview or attempting to construct an "active, mythical belief"? Jeez, this is a tough one!

In the end I suppose that Jay will take pride in working for "encyclopedia that anyone can edit." I'd like to remind him of George Bernard Shaw's observation: "Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it."

Checkbook stubs

2008-07-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

Some people have asked me to comment on the Board elections. Frankly, they were about as exciting as the upcoming Pinellas County elections for Property Appraiser.

On the other hand, since my previous post we have learned that the WMF saved large sums on hardware this year in anticipation of a major grant that would cover the purchase costs. If this is the case, it is good news indeed, and I will assume that Erik, who brought in the previous grant, was responsible for this too. If so, he should be congratulated for his work, and I mean that with all sincerity. In fact, it seems that Erik has been doing a rather good job overall.

Nevertheless, there are still some questions that need to be answered, not by Erik, but by Sue. In a recent email, Jay Walsh announced that the Foundation will be hiring two new staff members: Rebecca Handler as Major Gifts Officer, and Rand Montoya as Head of Community Giving. So let me get this straight. Now that the Foundation has lots of money, it is hiring people to get it more money. Now that the Foundation is rolling in dough, it is doing what it can to get even more. Priorities, priorities! Some questions that should be asked:
1. While I am not a part of the Erik fan club, obtaining donations seems to be a natural niche for him. Let's face it, he has proven himself to be good at it. Why then is this being handed over to someone else--two people in fact? Otherwise, the role of Deputy Director of the WMF is a lot like that of the Vice President of the US without a Senate to babysit. There is no doubt that Erik wants to play an active role, and this should not be cause to introduce the Peter Principle.
2. If this gift of approximately $1.5 million comes through, the WMF will have raised over $4 million this year alone from three major gifts, and have reserves of $ 2 million for the next two years. That said, I can only wonder whether this is the time to focus on community giving, and try and squeeze more $10 donations out of students and content contributors. While I think an annual fundraiser is still important even if only to foster a sense of participation, how much more work does it need besides getting rid of the spooky video of Jimmy's eyes? And with these new people now working on it, what's left for Cary to do?
3. Where is all this money going? In a series of posts in Foundation-l, GerardM has written about projects in Africa and the development of free fonts, etc., etc. While I think his approach is naive, his underlying question isn't. How does all extended spending on staff really fulfill the mission of the Foundation, which is not to staff some office in the Bay area, but to fulfill the Foundation's mission of spreading free knowledge. It would be reassuring if official pronouncements about spending would at least give a tip of the hat to that. Alternately, there has long been talk of an endowment fund to ensure longterm operations. Is that being planned for?

So, office people (and I know you're reading this), what's up? We know about the plans to expand the office and spend millions on staff and travel. And Board types, you are charged with two things: fiduciary responsibility and compliance with mission. I ask you both: Is the money being used wisely; and Is the money being used to further the mission? Well, actually, those are the questions that you should be asking, aren't they? Gloria Steinhem once said that "We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs."

An Apology to Jimbo

2008-06-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

I owe a very heartfelt apology to Jimbo. I used to think that he was the bullshit artist extraordinaire, a man whose moral rectitude had deteriorated since the days of Bomis Babes, and who considered masturbation to be the only legitimate form of fidelity. Now that may all be true, but when it comes to unintegrity Sue Gardner's got him beat. In fact, I had to invent a new word for it—unintegrity. Or perhaps it should be wikitegrity: the 'tegrity' that anyone can edit.

In an email to Foundation-l, Canada's answer to Imelda Marcos (and it goes beyond their shared fondness for shoes) described how she wasted donation money, whether from the little people who give their lunch money or the big foundations who have been hoodwinked. She starts with the statement that there was very little historical record, a point I addressed in a previous blog post. Yes, Dumbo Patrick was incompetent at finances. Yes, Carolyn was not the person for the job. Nevertheless, all the records were there: receipts numbered, scanned, and filed in hardcopy, and very precise records kept. Not by me, mind you. I just tried to make sure they were all scanned and filed by Monica and Barbara. As I mentioned in that earlier post, all she had to do was ask; I even gave the dates on which I offered to help. But if you want to present yourself as a savior, first you have to bitch about how bad things were first … and bitching comes naturally to Sue.

I will not comment on the tech budget overestimate of $1.673 million. I suppose the hardware and stuff is hunky dory under Erik's eagle eye. Nor can I critique the legal department's overspending, because frankly, it seems reasonable given that Brad, who was largely responsible for overseeing trademarks, preferred changing his daughter's dirty diapers than coming into work (for which he was finally fired). Underspending on the programs ("mission") budget is also understandable, given that the mission now seems to be "hoard as much money as possible, and screw the little African kids who are dying of AIDS anyways." Let's face it: the classic fundraising statement "If you (and 99 other people) give $100, we can send a Pokemon sticker book to Africa" was never meant to be taken seriously.

More intriguing to me was the fact that her office's responsibility, Finance and Administration, overspent by $60 thousand … because of consulting and auditing costs. So, Suzy, how much of that went to pay off your buddy Mona from the CBC, the one you tried to strong-arm on to the Board? I'm sure you Board members remember that vote: Michael Snow, Domas, Mona. Thankfully, you had the temerity to resist. And at least Sue's friend got paid off well.

It is also quite interesting that this amount is precisely the sum that the Board saved by avoiding one face-to-face meeting. That's right, $60,000. Of course, that makes me wonder where they were planning this meeting that cost $60,000. Madagascar, perhaps, so that they can drop off the Pokemon sticker books. Since nothing came of that, they could cancel the meeting. What I do know is that a meeting for about 30 board and chapter heads in Frankfurt, which I attended and signed checks for, came to less than half of that sum. But as we all know, gasoline prices are skyrocketing.

So yes, Suzy's got Jimbo beat. Of course, there is no competition, which is obvious since JW didn’t even merit a mention in her email. The squanderer is dead! Long live the squanderer!

It Ain't Necessarily So ...

2008-06-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

While circling for an hour over Houston this Thursday, I was able to catch up on some magazine reading. An electrical storm prevented us from landing, so I pulled out my Newsweek and came across this headline: "God's Word According to Wikipedia." Lightning, thunder, the wrath of the Almighty—it was enough to intimidate the atheist out of me. Until then I had always thought that Joseph Smith was the most ridiculous "translator" of any supposed religious text (and not for the garbled crap that is the Book of Mormon; he also attempted to retranslate Genesis and various other biblical texts). It appears I could have been wrong. The award goes to a new generation of translators with names like JoeNYCBoi (I wonder if the Boi is a tribute to King James) and Yemenim (his user page says it all: "without qualifications of any kind).

The problem is that the current translations which we use—from the Septuagint to Jerome; from the the KJV to the JPS translation—were all done by scholarly types who knew what they were doing. They understood the messages of the text, their place within the whole, their shifting language, their metaphors, and even their puns (if you pick up on all its puns, Jonah can be a funny, cynical text mocking prophecy). And even they made mistakes. The fact that half of all the biblical sentences seem to begin with "And" is simply a mistaken reading of vav hahipuch (ו״ו ההיפוך), an obsolete grammatical marker of tense, not a sign of God's especial fondness for the word and.

And I continue. Coming home I decided to check out some of the current translations. Since Richard Friedman, one of the great biblical scholars of today, found plenty of mistakes in Genesis, I decided to start with Psalms. Psalm 1:1 to be precise:

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.

Compare with KJV:

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.

So, the WikiBible version has a contemporary ring to it. In fact, both translations are remarkably wrong. Starting at the end:

WB is more accurate than KJV. The word used is רשעים, which does indeed mean "wicked men." Ungodly is an editorial choice, used to identify wickedness with ungodliness. In an era when Europe was plagued by religious wars and England was busy forging an identity to distinguish it from the ungodly papists (or one generation later, from the ridiculously godly Puritans), the authors had their reason for this particular choice of words. It does not, however, reflect the text. 1 point for the WikiBible on that.
On the other hand, both are wrong when they say the wicked/ungodly. The word the does not appear in the original. What's the big deal, you ask? Well, as a direct article, it identifies a certain group as wicked, even if that group is not named. In more modern terms, there is a difference between some fundie preacher warning his flock to Stay away from sinners! and Stay away from the sinners! In the latter case, you have to wonder exactly which sinners they are talking about. In comes the preacher to explain exactly who he means.
Tense can make all the difference in a sentence. In these translations we have the choice between does not walk and walketh not. Both are present tense. Both are wrong. The Hebrew says לא הלך, which is very much the past tense. In other words, it says has not walked. Again, what's the difference? The message of the verse, which seems to be that association with the wicked remains with the person, even after they have abandoned the wicked. One might argue that this has theological overtures: the stain of sin remains—unless, of course, we consider the second verse, which, in the original, switches to the future tense: Unless his pleasure is with the Law of God, and in his Law he will meditate day and night. This was, of course, my translation, but it more accurately reflects the actual text.
Worst of all is the opening word Blessed, which seems to imply to Divine support. That's all very nice, but the actual word is not Blessed, but Happy (אשרי), from the Hebrew word אושר. The word 'osher (happy) is a great Hebrew word, because it is almost synonymous with `osher (עושר), meaning wealth. One begins with a glottal stop; the other begins with a guttural throat clenching. In fact, it is common for people to bless each other with 'osher ve-`osher, happiness and wealth, taking great care to distinguish between the two sounds of choking. Now, even the Jerusalem Bible follows the KJV error, which is strange because in Psalm 84:5, where the same word, אשרי, is used, they translate it as happy. Go figure. I guess a bad translation sticks. The Roman-era Aramaic translation uses the term טוביה, which roughly translates as good, but can also refer to happiness. Blessed has theological overtones, just as the wicked does. Unfortunately, none of those overtones appear in the actual verse.

So what's the point of all this? Well, I covered the translation of seven Hebrew words, just one-third of the entire verse—and managed to find four mistakes, four biased readings which lend an unnecessary religious overtone to the verse. As for my own translation:

Happy is the man who has not followed the advice of wicked men;

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.

Even after I took the liberty of replacing walked with followed (which I can easily justify in a footnote), my translation is more accurate. More importantly, however, I believe that the more accurate translation has a certain poignancy that might even speak to a complete non-believer like myself. Or else, we can carry on copying mistakes and promoting theological fallacies, all in the name of divinely inspired amateurism.

It’s a good thing no one on the Wikipedia staff has any clergy in the family to knock some sense into them, eh, Sue?

The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years

2008-06-18T04:45:00.001-07:00

Chingiz Aitmatov died last week. For those of you who don't know him, Aitmatov was a Kyrgyz author whose masterwork, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, is a haunting account of life on the Central Asian steppe. It is the story of Man's nomadic nature, whether as itinerant warriors galloping camels across the plains in search of fortune and glory, or as exiles during the great Stalinist purges, when entire ethnic groups were forced from their homes in the name of state security and progress (the long war in Chechnya is a consequence of that), or as ultra-modern cosmonauts leaving the confines of Earth in search of new worlds and new life. Aitmatov weaved these all together with the intricate detail of a Central Asian rug, as if to remind us that our stories, like the nomad's carpets, can be rolled up and carried wherever fate takes us.

I read the book about ten years ago, soon after I had finished editing the original draft of Zisserman-Brodsky's Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union. I was already steeped in the world of ethnic and cultural alienation, forbidden languages, and forced assimilation. Dina's book described the role of samizdat literature in keeping identities alive. Aitmatov's book brought it all home to me, not as some complex political theory but in its core component, as the overwhelming power of simple stories passed down from one generation to the next.

Kyrgyz is a modern Turkic language, so Aitmatov could be reasonably classed as a modern Turkic author. But rather than finding similarities with Pamuk (except, perhaps, for the opening scene of Snow), the book echoed with the saga of Dede Korkut, capturing the fervor of bards plying tales to war-weary men around a dimming campfire. For a more modern comparison, the book most reminded me of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath: the fox crawling across the grasslands in the opening scene evoked images of Steinbeck's turtle and its futile struggle to cross the road. Tom Joad's wanderings are echoed in Yedigei's, and the Okies in more affluent California are very like the Kyrgyz in the Soviet Empire, victims of power, greed, and affluence. For all of them, there is no going home.

I can't attest to the quality of the book's English translation. I read it in Hebrew, which somehow managed to capture the epic quality of the original … perhaps the language of the Bible has a knack for evoking the rhythms of other ancient folktales. Still, in a world characterized by quick fixes—whether fast food or fast info (the quality is often the same)—it is worth recalling the protracted joys and disappointments of Man's essential wanderlust, whether a thousand years ago or today. And Aitmatov succeeded in capturing this.

Rain Man

2008-06-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I discussed the Great Lisbon Earthquake, and pointed to various problems with the related articles: their factual inaccuracies, lack of internal consistency, and outdated information. Some people might argue that the Earthquake is an obscure bit of history from some remote corner of Europe, but when it comes to pop culture, Wikipedia comes out consistently on top.

I beg to differ. Just today, Fox News reported on the AFI tribute to actor Warren Beatty. Beatty's friend, Dustin Hoffman, reviewed Beatty's career based on his Wikipedia article. To quote: '"I guess not everything there is right," he said, when Beatty corrected some other facts in his toast. The crowd of Hollywood types, many subjects of erroneous Internet info, roared with laughter.'

So the question is, when will Wikipedia get its facts right? One would hope that a website which prides itself on being the sum of all human knowledge would actually contain correct information ... or is that less important than trips around the world and VIP parties for all the people who are careful to make it known that they assume no responsibility for the content ... credit, yes; responsibility, no.

Does Wikipedia Deserve to Survive?

2008-06-11T22:55:00.000-07:00

There was a time when Wikipedia was fun. In fact, what initially drew people to the project was the sense of accomplishment at seeing articles written, often sentence by sentence, by dozens of people adding snippets of information found in their home libraries or by searching online. For me a classic example of that is the article "Clown," or "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," a former featured article, which began its path as a simple piece of vandalism, "xyz." Watching these articles gradually emerge was exciting, especially for those who participated in it. In fact, I would venture to say that it is what caused top contributors to stick around, and spurred Wikipedia's phenomenal growth. It was a time before bots, when articles were painstakingly crafted, and the contributors felt like craftsmen and women. It was a time with rules, without Arb Comm, and 3RR. It was a time that too many of the present contributors—and none of the new hires from Die Hexe on down—know very little about.

That's why I was pleased when last night MessedRocker posted to the Administrator's Noticeboard (a phenomenon that did not exist back then either) a new section entitled "Time for a twist!" He wrote: "Think of all the good things Wikipedia has done for you. Think of all the good times you have had on Wikipedia. Share with us the best memory you have from Wikipedia." Rather than having every idiot post about stalking, death threats, spam, fringe theories, jaywalking, nose-picking, public flatulence, and a failure to assume good faith, he hoped to get people to focus on the positive, if even for just a few brief moments, in the tension-ridden morass that Wikipedia has become.

Less than two hours later, the section was gone, removed by User:ThuranX, whose focus is movies based on Marvel comics characters. To quote ThuranX, who was quite obviously not around in the pleasant past of Wikipedia: "This is just trolling; move for closing or blanking." And so, we've reached a strange new reality, where taking pleasure or pride in Wikipedia is now considered trolling.

And if there's nothing to take pleasure in, nothing to take pride in, does Wikipedia really deserve to survive?

P.S. Several people did respond positively to MessedRocker's suggestion, and began listing some moment of pride. It is too bad some anonymous idiot whose hero is the Hulk managed to erase that too.

The Day the Earth Shook

2008-06-11T15:41:00.000-07:00

At 9:30 am on All Saints' Day, November 1, 1755, while the faithful were in church, three successive earthquakes struck the city of Lisbon. Whipped by the wind, fires raged through the city, incinerating survivors trapped beneath the rubble. Just ninety minutes later, three tsunamis struck, drowning those that fled to the docks along the Tagus. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water had conspired against the ancient port, leaving between 15,000 and 60,000 people dead.

Though we live in the shadow of the recent China earthquake and the tsunami in Southeast Asia, the Lisbon earthquake had reverberations throughout Europe and the Americas that can still be felt today as well. While Wesley could attribute the devastation to the horrors of the Inquisition, which was centered in Lisbon, Catholics were at a loss to explain how the most devout city in Europe could have suffered such tribulations, while licentious Paris and avaricious London survived unscathed. While Leibnitz had posited in his Théodicée that we live in "the best of all possible worlds," the calamity inspired Voltaire to reject Leibnitz's optimism in his Candide. In his history of the earthquake, Nicholas Shrady writes that "After Lisbon, the world appeared to be suddenly and irrevocable transformed—God had ceased to be just and Nature to be beneficent—and everyone from staunch clerics to enlightened philosophers was compelled to reexamine his most cherished dogmas" (p. 207). The world would never be the same.

Like any tragedy, historical and fictional, the Lisbon earthquake had its heroes and its villains: Don José I, the Marquis of Pombal, Gabriel Malagrida, and even the Count of Távora play prominent roles in the event and its aftermath. And while most people know little about Portuguese history, this was a seminal event in the history of Enlightenment Europe. In fact, I'm sure some of the people now reading this have already started looking up their names in Wikipedia. Don't bother. Just for fun, I will go through the respective articles and point to one or two little problems.

Don José I was king of Portugal at the time of the disaster. His article states that "He succeeded to the Portuguese throne in 1750, when he was 35 years old, and almost immediately placed effective power in the hands of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, better known today as the Marquis of Pombal." Bzzt. Caravalho was called back to Portugal from Vienna in 1749 at the recommendation of Luís da Cunha, though it helped that his wife was a close personal friend of the José's Austrian queen. He was appointed Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, a fitting position for a diplomat who had served his king in both London and Vienna. In fact, it was only after the earthquake—five years later—that he was granted near absolute power, even at the expense of the Church. The reign of Don José and the tenure of Carvalho are so completely intertwined that such an error is inexcusable.

Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Count of Oeiras, 1st Marquis of Pombal is another problematic article. If you doubt what I said above, check out the section on Political career: 1749? Check! Prime Minister in 1755? Check! Foreign minister? Check! It is only too bad that the opening paragraph states: "He was Minister of the Kingdom (the equivalent to a [sic] today's Interior Minister)." Interior, Foreign, Prime? Who cares? It's just some guy in a wig. (Off the record, and something I am not sure about—he is referred to in the article as Melo, though other sources I have seen refer to him as Carvalho—Melo was his mother's maiden name; Carvalho was his father's).

Gabriel Malagrida's article makes no mention of his role in the earthquake, which he blamed squarely on the sinfulness of the people of Lisbon. Sadly, most of the article is based on the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913, which considered him a saintly Jesuit martyr—Carvalho later expelled the Jesuits from Portugal. One thing to note in the article is the final paragraph: "The accusation of heresy was based on two visionary treatises which he is said to have written while in prison." Visionary indeed! One was an argument that the earthquake was an act of Divine retribution; the other was a mystical meditation on the uterus of St. Anne, mother of Mary. Visionary if he was scraping the magic mushrooms off the dungeon walls. In fact, when Carvalho finally executed Malagrida, most people were upset that he was killing an elderly man who was obviously demented.

The Távora affair was one of the most shocking attempts by Carvalho to curtail the power of the nobility in the wake of the earthquake. What the article fails to mention is that Carvalho was rejected in his youthful bid to marry one of the Count of Távora's daughters, because he lacked the noble lineage of that ancient family. More telling, however, is the sentence in the Aftermath section, which follows the section, Arrests, trial and sencence [sic]: "Gabriel Malagrida was burned at the stake a few days later and the Jesuit Order outlawed." Since you've already read the Malagrida article, you will know that he was executed on 21 September, 1761. That was quite a few days (two and a half years) after the Távoras were killed, on 13 January, 1759.

Now, you may ask, "Why the nitpicking? Who cares about what happened in Portugal 250 years ago?" Well, apart from the fact that this was possibly the most significant natural disaster in the history of Europe, it is a story that is little known today, although its impact can still be felt (see, for instance, the transcript of Walter Benjamin's 1931 radio broadcast for children on how the earthquake influenced Western thought, especially the philosophies of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant). Since most people know next to nothing about the event, its protagonists, and its heroes, it is likely that they will turn to Wikipedia to find out more about it.

One might argue for an eventualist approach—one day all these problems will be fixed—and I actually do hope that this blog post results in that. On the other hand, I've picked just one major historical event, and shown how problematic its coverage can be—and this is an event that I myself know very little about. Luckily, I have read a bit about the subject and can identify the factual problems. I wonder how many other people can … or do. For them, is Wikipedia then recording history or rewriting it?

Are experts really that bad, after all?

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

2008-06-09T09:58:00.000-07:00

In a recent Twitter comment, Rachel Marsden posted: "Why Wikipedia sucks: "Stephen Hawking has to reconcile his views on black holes with Bob from Idaho who thinks they are portals to Narnia."

Only that in the wikiworld, Bob could Hawking wheeled before the Arbitration Committee for severe violations of the Neutral Point of View, and get him disconnected from his voice synthesizer for being a troll ... just because Bob can type faster. Such is the world where truthiness outweights truth by 10 letters to 5, or to quote the English satirist Charles Churchill, "So loud each tongue, so empty was each head, / So much they talked, so very little said."

P.S. It seems the line is originally from Urbandictionary.com.

Au revoir les enfants ...

2008-06-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

The elections are almost over, and we will see the end of an era. Florence will soon step down from the Board and from her position as Chair. I have mixed feelings about this: on the one hand, I have been critical of Florence on many occasions, and feel that she stepped into a position that completely overwhelmed her; on the other hand, no one can question her commitment to the projects and their values, her devotion to the community, and her intense desire (if not always ability) to do the right thing in the face of adversity. In that sense, she is the exact opposite of Sue, the ruthless "professional," determined to build her media empire even at the expense of Wikipedia's values or the people behind the site's success. In this new constellation of power, the loss of Florence's integrity, even if coupled with her maddening naivete, is actually quite sad (Florence, before you get all huffy, this was meant as a compliment).

For those who do not remember, it is worth recalling how Florence first became Chair of the Board. It happened in Frankfurt, after a three-day seminar for the Board, staff, and chapter heads. Though Jimmy was the Chair back then, everybody realized that if you gave him an enema he would fit in a matchbox, so the Board set out to replace him. Tim Shell had just announced his planned resignation, Michael Davis was unwilling to do it, leaving either Florence or Erik--and after three days of Erik, everyone realized how inappropriate he was. That left Florence, the only person with the integrity and courage (or foolishness, depending on how you look at it) to assume the position (double entendre intended). I think even she will now admit that she did not realize what she was getting herself into. It was not an ideal choice or even the best choice; it was the only choice, and she rose to the challenge.

So who will take over after Florence is gone? Jimmy's integrity has not grown substantially since that meeting in Frankfurt. Jan-Bart is essentially an outsider, and already does quite a bit as the Deputy Chair. Likewise, Treasurer Guy is an outsider with little experience in the wiki world to date--and who would be treasurer if they pick him? Kat and Frieda are both lovely people, but they would first need to develop vocal chords to take on the role, while Michael Snow and Domas were appointed temporarily, and will soon be replaced by the Chapter appointees. So who is left?

There are, of course, some possibilities. For instance, Florence has resigned as an elected member of the Board, but that does not preclude her from serving as a Chapter-appointed representative. She knows the territory, is familiar with the routine, and knows what she is dealing with. And it resolves another issue: what is to happen to Florence once she resigns her Board seat. Angela, who was elected with her, was made Chair of the Advisory Board (snicker!), so there should be some post for Florence as well, honorary or otherwise.

Alternately, perhaps she could replace the crystal meth addict who currently dysfunctions as the Volunteer Coordinator. Perhaps she can even get a salary for it, and a title like "Deputy Director for Community." She certainly knows the various communities, and would work well with Delphine, the Chapters Coordinator. Furthermore, she certainly has contributed on par with Erik, and her commitment to "the children" is focused on her own brood. Of course, that leaves open the question of who will serve as Chair of the Board, but the way things are going, is the Board really doing much anyways?

Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding

2008-06-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

In a popular Jewish prayer, God is asked to grant חכמה בינה ודעת, which can be roughly translated as wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. Ignoring the God bit for the moment, the distinction made between these three functions of the mind is often overlooked, or worse, obfuscated, in contemporary society. When people talk about the "democratization of knowledge," do they really mean some massed-produced aggregate of facts, or is it assumed that this leads to understanding and wisdom? When people talk about "the sum of all human knowledge," do they really mean a massive anthology of dates, figures, and statistics, or are they referring to some deeper understanding of the human condition that might or might not result from this? There is a difference.

When I was young, my family would sing medieval Hebrew poems around the table every Saturday. By the time I was seven or eight years old, I knew all the words by heart, but it was still meaningless gibberish that I could recite by rote. In fact, it wasn't until I was in my mid-twenties that I sat with a group of friends who had shared the same experience, and asked them if they knew what the words actually meant. None of us did, so we spent a few hours going through a dictionary trying to figure them out. And if that sounds weird, think of the millions of Muslim children learning to recite the Qur'an by heart even though they don't speak Arabic, or even the American elementary school student who pledges allegiance to the flag of "one nation, indivisible," without the foggiest idea of what indivisible means. As for wisdom, you might even ask the high school student why Francis Bellamy, the author of the pledge, consciously spoke of "liberty and justice," but not of "equality and fraternity" (if you don't know, you can look it up on Wikipedia).

As we learn from Monty Python, knowledge without understanding can have us blessing the cheese-makers, or (with considerable wisdom) any manufacturers of dairy products.

We may live in an era of the "democratization of knowledge," Wikipedia may offer "the sum of all human knowledge," but what seems to be lacking is understanding and wisdom. While I don't know how this can be resolved, it seems worth considering.

24

2008-05-31T20:57:00.000-07:00

I have now gone 24 hours without a cigarette (25.5, but who is counting). I have no cigarettes in the house, but i have walked around the block looking for butts in the gutter that are smokable (yes, I know it sounds disgusting, but such is an addiction) and did not find any. I am irritable, fatigued, and feel like someone is sitting on my chest.

What can I say? I have been smoking since before half the WMF Board candidates were born, and I can even remember cigarette ads on TV. I am rationalizing my need for a cig--How bad can lung cancer actually be?--and thinking of all the wonderful double entendres i will now be missing--"Can I bum a fag?" is not quite same in England and the southern US. And then I am convinced that Jimmy-Sue et al wish I would keep smoking if only because it would eventually shut me up.

I will get through this.

Wikipedipus Rex

2008-05-30T07:57:00.000-07:00

Mahalo may still be a small website, but it is gradually emerging as a viable alternative to Google, especially for those who get tired of sifting through patently unrelated junk links or mirrors of Wikipedia entries. Like Wikipedia, it is also pretty up-to-date on most current events (and that is bound to improve), and directs you to the actual sources, so that the user can make an informed decision about whatever it is they are looking up. Best of all, from an ethical perspective, the site has abandoned Jimmy Wales's "sweatshop" mentality), and actually rewards its contributors. I check out Mahalo's new search results a few times a day … and this morning I hit gold.

When I was in my late twenties, my friends and I would get together every weekend, eat well, drink better, watch Winnie the Pooh videos, and deconstruct, deconstruct, deconstruct till 4:20 am. We were the quintessential Generation X. Mahalo introduced me to Generation Y, the Wikipedia generation. CBS News probably explained it best.

It's a strange new illusion that the Millennials have created. The sad thing is that reality isn't a world with "no winners or losers, where everyone is a winner." I can't imagine the UN saying: "Hey, you may have lost World War II, but here's a trophy just for trying" (though the Generation Y phenomenon may offer some insights into the Iraq War controversy). Save that for Little League.

It was only inevitable that this "extension of the teenage babysitting pool" would have made its way into Wikipedia. When Erik first ran for the Board, he called me at home one night to elicit my support for him taking over the Foundation. "What about Jimmy?" I asked. Back then I thought his answer was a throwback to Jerry Rubin, but now I understand it as typically Generation Y: "Jimmy is old. He's almost forty. Now it's time for the next generation to take over." And indeed, this attitude is reflected in the current Board election, where the most common occupation of the 19 and 20-somethings is "in or about to attend" law school. Say what you will, but when push really comes to shove, I would rather have the already-educated Mike Godwin as a lawyer, or as a Board member for that matter. John Dewey said it best: "Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living."

In a culture of "narcissistic praise hounds" (to use CBS's own terminology), perhaps the barnstar represents the "teeniest awards," equivalent to the baby blue teddy bear that some loafers get for selling loafers on Zappos.com. But where will it end? Frankly, I can't imagine Sue Gardner writing an email: "Dear Mrs. Rocker, Your son Messed caught an egregious typo today. You must be very proud. Please forward this note to his grandparents for them to stick on the refrigerator." (To be fair, Messed is more X than Y.) Though in retrospect, back when I worked at the WMF I did get a call from an irate mother whose son's edit had been reverted.

Y is a strange generation, but I, for one, born on the cusp (1963) between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, find a lot of common sense in the call for a "Generation Slap." I may be a "stoic nihilist" with "few heroes, no anthems," but perhaps that is the much needed "style" [I] my generation can truly call its own.

And I can honestly say that I've never skipped work or shirked responsibility to prance in a tutu drinking light beer. Me with a light beer, or me in a tutu ... I don't know which would freak me out more.

YouTube Peg in a Square Hole

2008-05-28T16:40:00.000-07:00

I happen to love YouTube. Where else can I find classic videos ranging from the Pretenders (you heard it here first—one day I will marry Chrissie Hynde) to Mongolian rap (one day I will learn all the lyrics) to Prokofiev's Sonata no. 3 (one day I will play that on the accordion).

But YouTube also has immense cultural, educational and edutainment value. I happen to love Pat Condell's video diatribes against the idiocy of religion, while Thunderf00t and DonExodus2 have done some outstanding pieces that make evolutionary theory accessible to anyone. Meanwhile, MaidMarian has preserved some remarkable films from the silent era (including Cecil Hepworth's 1903 Alice in Wonderland—one day I will watch that while tripping on acid), and made them freely accessible to the public. Preserving the arts, promoting the sciences, and fostering public discourse! Isn't that what the Internet is all about?

But occasionally even YouTube can slip up, and free and open discourse gets mired in the muck of cults.

Mark Bunker is an Emmy Award-winning television journalist who happens to live in my county. He is also a critic of the "Church" of Scientology, which has its headquarters in my county too. Unfortunately, when Bunker promised a video interview of actor Jason Beghe, who has recently abandoned his über-Thetan status, Bunker's channel, XenuTV was suspended. And despite the efforts of countless others to keep his message alive, Bunker's channel is still off the air … six weeks later.

Now you might think that a website that allows Muslim clerics to justify why women should be beaten by their husbands and forbidden to drive, or that has no problems (ostensibly) when Bill Maher and some Southern preacher take the piss out of another, slightly more established cult, the Mormon Church, no one has a problem. When the Scientologists themselves launch an expensive YouTube channel to spread the Gospel according to Saints Ron and Tom, no one bothers to complain, even if that very channel may violate the site's Terms of Service.

So tonight I am calling on people to contact YouTube and voice their disappointment at the suspension of Mark Bunker's channel.

And for those who are disappointed that I didn't slam Wikipedia—hey, I am an equal opportunity critic (you heard it here first—one day I will right at least one stupid injustice).

Election Fever IV (some humor)

2008-05-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

Let's start with an old joke:

Somewhere in the steppes of Central Asia, far away from turbulent Tashkent and bustling Bishkek, a shepherd is tending his flocks, when suddenly a Jeep Cherokee screeches to a stop next to him. Out of the vehicle steps an impeccably dressed young Westerner, his Raybans glistening in the sun. He turns to the shepherd and says: "Asalam aleykum! If I were to guess the number of sheep you have, would you give me one as a gift?"

The shepherd stares at him in amazement, and answers, "I will."

The young man pulls out his laptop, connects to the Internet, hooks up with NASA's website, scans the hill with his GPS system, pulls up Excel, and produces a report. "Aha!" he says to the shepherd, "You have exactly 2036 sheep."

"You are right," the startled shepherd says, and the young man picks an animal and puts it in the back of his jeep. Desperate to recoup his loss, the shepherd turns to the young man: "If I guess your profession, will you return it to me."

Always eager for a challenge, the young man agrees.

"Well," said the shepherd, "I would guess that you are a management consultant."

This time, the young man is startled. "How could you possibly know that?" he asked the grinning shepherd.

"It was quite simple," the shepherd responded. "First, you come up here, though nobody asked you. Then you demand payment to tell me things that I already know. And third, you know absolutely nothing about who we are and how we live." The young man starts to sputter a protest, but the shepherd just continues, "Now, give me back my dog!"

* * *

The Wikimedia Foundation already has its fair share of "management consultants" in the form of Sue Gardner and her cronies.

But with the upcoming Board election, there is a chance to turn the tide. It's unfortunate that none of the candidates have called for a review of hiring policy and the performance of the current ED (is Sue Jimmy's bitch, or is Jimmy Sue's bitch?). What is the purpose of an exorbitant budget, when Wikipedia actually got to where it is on a shoestring budget and minimal staff? Of course, to answer that you'd have to have been around long enough to remember the heyday of Wikipedia. I would hope that the next person elected has the common sense of the shepherd, even if that comes at the expense of the consultant's magic laptop.

And a final note for Andrew Lih, who should be finishing his book these days: Seek inspiration from Edward Gibbon.

P.S.: Though I had heard the joke before, I paraphrased its telling in Rob Ferguson's The Devil and the Disappearing Sea, a fascinating, funny, tragic account of byzantine intrigues in the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia. It's a quick read, but well worth it.

Election Fever III (quotes)

2008-05-25T10:32:00.000-07:00

Oscar Wilde once said, "Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people." Too often it is true, not only in community projects like Wikipedia (ever watch a Request for Administrator Status vote on Wikipedia?), but in the real world as well.

My cynicism is kicking in not because of some new wikiscandal, but because of a real-life event that happened not too far from where I live. It seems that a five-year-old boy, currently being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, was put before his kindergarten class, which then proceeded to vote on whether he should be allowed to stay. Each of the students was given an opportunity to state what they feel about the boy, and their comments ranged from "he's annoying" to "he's disgusting." Kids can be very cruel.

In the wiki universe, I wonder whether votes are always the way to reach decisions, on Biographies of Living People, for example. Are we exercising informed democracy, or are we simply engaged in an exercise in power, regardless of the casualties.

Is it really fair to claim that an offensive article has consensus, because it happened to to get sixty keep votes, out of the thousands and millions of participants that Wikipedia claims to have? To quote politician Walter Judd, "People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by the majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote--a very different thing."

Perhaps as the WMF nears elections, it is worthwhile to rethink when voting is effective and useful, and when it is simply an excuse to act maliciously, when it reflects the will of the majority, and when it is simply a soapbox for the most vocal.

Kids can be very cruel. So can Wikipedians.

Election Fever II

2008-05-24T19:57:00.000-07:00

During the last election, Kelly Martin did a great summary of the candidates. Since I lack her wit and insights, I will not attempt to compete with her on that, but I will comment on a few of the candidates, beginning right at the top. So tonight, my target is Ad Huikeshoven, better known (and more pronounceable) as Dedalus. I encourage everyone not to vote for him.

The reason for this is actually quite simple: he is probably the most qualified candidate running. Not only is he a long-time Wikipedian, he is also an accountant and, I believe, an auditor--two traits much in demand on the Board. And, while I have only met him once or twice, I can honestly say that from my encounters with him that he is a genuinely nice person who cares about the Foundation and has quite a lot to offer. So, please do not vote for him.

Now, if that sounds hypocritical, allow me to explain my reasoning. First of all, I truly believe that Ad would be a great addition to the WMF Board. In fact, he already serves on the audit committee, having taken my former seat, which he is far more qualified to hold.

However, the new Board structure distinguishes between seats allocated to volunteers and seats allocated to professionals. As I said in previous posts, I believe that if the Foundation really wanted to, it could find the necessary professionals among the members of the community. In fact, when I wrote that, Ad was precisely the person I had in mind. As such, Ad should be appointed to one of the professional seats, regardless of whether he wins the community election or not. In fact, that would be an ideal way to show that there are professionals committed to the ideals of the WMF among the actual volunteers who made the projects successful.

So, to break down the barriers between professionals and volunteers, do not vote for Ad as a community representative. Instead, insist that he is appointed to one of the Board seats designated for professionals. We can get the best of both worlds.

Election Fever I

2008-05-23T20:52:00.000-07:00

Since the new Board elections are almost underway, I thought it might be worthwhile to reflect a bit on the first elections, which took place four years ago. I think I am actually well-placed to do that too: while Jimmy tossed around the idea of community elections, I was one of the more vocal people calling on him to give a date as to when these elections should be held, then, together with a user named Imran (gone but not forgotten), I organized the elections and set the standards for most of the ensuing elections--for better or for worse.

In many ways the first elections were amateurish. We didn't really know what we were doing, and much of it was an experiment. For instance, back then we voted on two board positions, Contributing Active Member Representative and Volunteer User Representative, since those were the positions defined by the bylaws. In other words, the assumption was that the WMF would be a membership organization, with all of the ensuing implications--for instance, the Board would be responsible and answerable to the Foundation's members. Members would have one representative (the Contributing Active Member Representative), but even non-members would have a voice on the Board through the Volunteer User Representative (see this email for details). Needless to say, the creation of a membership organization never really materialized, largely because of a rather silly debates like "How can you expect someone in Africa to pay the same amount as someone in the US?" Finally Brad Patrick, in what was probably his only legacy to the Foundation, convinced the Board to away with membership, so they would not be accountable to anyone. (In an odd footnote, two people, myself and later Delphine Menard, actually did pay $5 each in membership fees, though it was never recorded.)

In several elections, people commented on the method of voting. What people may not know is that the election was planned to be run as first past the post. This too received quite a few complaints--it was claimed that this would result in opposing sides, the abandonment of the spirit of consensus, and the general decline of Western civilization. In the end, the current system of approval voting was chosen to replace it, though I still maintain that this was a mistake. For instance, in the Election that brought Erik, Kat, and Oscar to the Board, Erik won with about 42 percent of the vote, while Kat and Oscar had about 30 and 28 percent respectively. On the other hand, in an election were you can vote for as many candidates as you want, the fact that people did not vote for a particular candidate is far more telling than when they are forced to choose between multiple candidates. In other words, if people could have voted for Erik and any other candidate and 58 percent made a conscious decision not to vote for him, your really have to wonder whether he (or Kat or Oscar) should have been declared the winner. In some sense, it could actually be interpreted as an overwhelming "No" vote (though, to be fair, this was after the midway results were leaked, and Jimmy made a public effort to prevent Erik from being elected). In any event, I hope that this problem is addressed in the coming election.

Another controversial feature of the first election was that candidates' statements were limited to 500 characters only--this was a time when the focus of Wikipedia was actually writing an encyclopedia, and not scoring points on the Administrators' Noticeboard (which did not exist back then). After a riveting debate over whether 500 characters should include spaces (yes), in jumps Erik, a master of brevity and precision, with a scathing complaint that Florence's statement was (gasp!) 512 characters. By allowing her to get away with this, the election was needlessly biased in her favor, because with those extra 12 characters he could expand on his brilliant platform in countless ways. Florence responded that English was not her native language, but Erik would not relent, and Florence trimmed her post. You can't make this shit up. Of course, the only thing I could think of that Erik might have added in 12 characters is I am an ass. (Please note that the 12 characters includes spaces and punctuation.)

One last thing to consider: just before the election, I created a page defining the duties of the new Board. Four years have passed since then, and a lot has changed. So I wonder--what on that list has really been achieved, because that could well be the measure of past Boards' success.

Free Credit Report dot Org

2008-05-22T20:46:00.000-07:00

One of the great debates of the Internet today is who founded Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales has one story, and Larry Sanger has another, but I want to suggest the third story—Danny's story—and offer an entirely new perspective.

"Danny's story?" you ask. No, I have absolutely no right to claim credit for Wikipedia, to go on the speaker's circuit, and to receive awards for some brilliant insights that I did not have. Instead, I'd like to mention three remarkable people whose contributions are too often overlooked.

The Number One spot in the saga should certainly go to Rick Gates. "Rick who? Is that Bill Gates's little brother?" I have no idea about the latter question, but as for his role, I will cite Wikipedia: "On October 22, 1993, Gates presumably proposed in the Usenet newsgroup alt.internet.services to collaboratively create an encyclopaedia in [sic] the Internet." It seems as if Rick Gates first raised the idea of putting an Internet encyclopedia together through a collaborative process—though he called it Interpedia, it sounds a lot like Wikipedia to me.

The Number Two spot should go to Ward Cunningham, one of the nicest, most unassuming people I have ever had the honor to meet. To quote Wikipedia, "he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, …" In other words, as the developer who created the very first wiki, Ward Cunningham can be credited with adding the Wiki to Rick Gates's Pedia.

But that is not all. In 1999, free software guru Richard Stallman proposed "a project to create a free content encyclopedia (licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License) under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation." His GNUpedia was actually launched in January 2001, the same month as Wikipedia. In other words, RMS added that essential byline, "The Free Encyclopedia" to the project.

Believe it or not, I am not denying the role of Sanger and Wales in developing Wikipedia. But like most ideas, there's a lot of history leading up to it, and that history is too often overlooked. Perhaps it's time for everyone to give credit where credit is due.

Imagine

2008-05-21T21:36:00.000-07:00

I remember where I was when John Lennon was shot. I was lying in bed, listening to Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother on 8-track. My father thought I was sleeping, so he didn't tell me right away, and it was only when I sobered up a bit (ah, to be seventeen in 1980!), and turned on the radio that I figured out what happened. CHUM-FM and Q-107 were pretty decent stations then, and you could usually depend on them not to play treacle like "Imagine" repeatedly.

Almost 28 years later, and "Imagine" is back in the news again, and this time it's a double whammy. First comes David Archuleta, who sang it and lost American Idol by a whopping 12 million votes. Well , gosh, golly gee, and jeepers! The Mormon milksop may have thrilled his eleven-year-old audience with a bowdlerized version of the song, but singing "Imagine" with the parts about no Heaven and no countries expurgated really seems to miss the point. But apparently he's not the only Bible thumper to abuse the song.

The subtitle of Expelled really sums up the film--No Intelligence Allowed. Here is yet another attempt by fundie yahoos to push their Creationist agenda on the American education system, this time with Ferris Bueller's teacher as their spokesperson. The problem is, as I learned from Wikinews, that the God Squad behind this film has incorporated about 20 to 30 seconds of the song "Imagine" into the film, citing "fair use" as their defense. I hear that Yoko, now in her mid-seventies, isn't very happy about it.

For me, this case poses an interesting dilemma. One the one hand, in the Wikiworld, this could be a classic example of fair use--a fragment of a song used to illustrate a point. To quote the excellent Wikinews article: "Judge Richard Lowe ... asked ... why the film's producers did not read the lyrics to the song or flash the lyrics on the screen." In other words, there are alternatives, perhaps not as exciting as a fragment of the song, but viable alternatives nonetheless. I wonder if this statement by the judge will have any implications on the extensive abuse of fair use on Wikipedia--for instance, just the other day I found the full version of a copyrighted song in the Bianca Ryan article (someone has since cleaned it up).

But fair use has a place, when used wisely and in moderation. One could, perhaps, argue that Expelled is a documentary, and the John Lennon song is used only in part to illustrate a point. As such, perhaps, the producers' claims should be defended. On the other hand, from a moral perspective, a film that attacks science and promotes "intelligent" design is hardly something I would like to defend.

So that's the problem: defend fair use by defending "intelligent" design, or let the ongoing law suit prevent distribution of the film. What do you think?

Ordinary People

2008-05-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

Well, Jimmy is now in the Middle East, in the town of Sharm el-Sheikh, from what I gather, and he is pontificating about that region's problems. There are two possible reasons for this: 1) he can't seem to resolve his own websites' problems, so he figures he'll tackle something a bit easier, or 2) he went scuba diving, and has a bad case of nitrogen narcosis.

You see, in a press event, Jimmy gave his views of the Middle East's problems: "We're going to start hearing from ordinary people." Whatever you say, Jimmy. "I think that ordinary people are far more moderate and far more ordinary than the unfortunately polarised views of extremes you see coming out." Of course, his own experience with Wikipedia would hardly indicate that, given all the fighting that has gone on over Middle East pages from time immemorial (and boy was that a fight). Most recently, CAMERA, an Israeli advocacy group, that has has "apparently organized more than fifty editors via a mailing list to correct what it sees as bias against Israel," is up before the Arbitration Committee, in what may be one of the most egregious abuses of Wikipedia's open editing policy. To be fair, all sides in the many disputes that make up the Middle East have been gaming WIkipedia to promote their agendas. In fact, the only question I have is this: What contact has Jimmy ever had with the "ordinary people" of the Middle East? If memory serves me correctly, European royalty has not counted as ordinary people in the region since the Crusades.

My only hope is that Jimmy actually learns one thing from his experience in the Middle East. Since I know he reads this blog, I will post it here, and he can ask his hosts what it means: 'Amal kheir wa-ilqahu fi-il bahr. It's a lesson he stands to learn. And the sea is so beautiful in Sharm ...

The Truth Is Out There

2008-05-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

So many people have called Jimmy out for lying, from Board and Staff, to other Internet personalities, like Larry Sanger and Jason Calacanis. Jimmy has lied to the community about his role in Wikipedia, and he has lied to his wife about his various affairs. You see, in Jimmyland, the motto is, "Say whatever you need to get a fuck; say whatever you need to not get fucked." So when the Board can't find Jimmy in Rotterdam because he had gone whoring in Amsterdam, a Jimmy response like "I didn't get your calls" is absolutely legitimate to him. And when Jimmy promises his wife that he will no longer fool around with Elisabeth Bauer, he means in Florida, and not in Tunisia, and in Jimmy-speak it is not even a lie.
And when Jimmy responds on Foundation-l "I did not de-sysop Erik, ever. To the contrary, actually," he means, "I simply told Danny to do it," and he absolves himself of all responsibility. After all, he believes the people in the know will likely be quiet. So, that means the IRC channel on where it was discussed (Allison Wheeler, Amgine, Kelly Martin, James Forrester) will be quiet. And the people in the office (Brad Patrick, Terry Foote, Michael Davis, Monica Guerrero) will be quiet. And the people he had dinner with that night (Kat Walsh, Greg Maxwell) will be quiet. And if you don't get caught, in Jimmy's world, you can say whatever you like.
So, Jimmy, since you said: "It is bound to come to a head with Erik at some point or another. It may as well be now," followed by instructions to ban him, it is rather disingenuous to say otherwise now. In fact, even Erik understood it, when the situation was explained to him in Boston. Actually, Andrew Lih has pictures of the exact moment when he was told what really happened. So, for the record, here is when Erik was told what really happened. And here is when it was confirmed.

(For background to the incident, please see here.)

All the News that's Fit to Censor

2008-05-16T17:54:00.000-07:00

… Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.

This isn't just some idealistic vision. As the three self-proclaimed journalists of the Wikimedia Foundation—Sue Gardner, Mike Godwin, and Erik Möller—could probably tell you, this is the opening statement of the Preamble to the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. The Code is a bold statement which insists that journalists

Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.
Give voice to the voiceless …
Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. …
Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.

I would venture to say that the citizen journalists of Wikinews have attempted to maintain these values, even if the "professional" journalists at the Wikimedia Foundation make it difficult to do so. Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation has pulled two Wikinews articles: one concerning the Bauer Agency law suit against the Foundation, and the other concerning allegation of pornography in Wikipedia, which also referenced the Erik Möller story. According to Mike Godwin: "What probably needs to happen is some kind of process in which initial versions of news stories are vetted before they're made publicly available for further editing." Sue Gardner is perhaps the highest ranking journalist of the troika: as the head of the CBC website, she had arts/media and sports journalists reporting to her. She chimes in with a comment about how she is "really interested also in helping Wikinews construct some guidelines or policies around covering the Foundation."

The disturbing thing about this is that Godwin is partially correct. Perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation should vet stories before they are made publicly available for future editing. I cannot comment on the legal ramifications, since at first glance it would seem that such vetting would transform the WMF into a publisher. On the other hand, why stop at Wikinews? It should also be true of Wikipedia, which publishes some very personal "articles" about people who happen to make the news for some scandal or other. Rachel Marsden, for instance, has been adamant that the Wikipedia article about her is an unfair portrayal of her career and recent events, yet no one is discussing a vetting process about it.

People would likely condemn me for suggesting that the Foundation is only interested in protecting its own reputation and not the reputation of others. Of course, they would then have to explain why Sue is concerned about "guidelines or policies around covering the Foundation" but no one else.

Of course this falls in the face of the last section of the Code of Ethics—Be Accountable. I quote:

Journalists should:

Clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.
Encourage the public to voice grievances against the news media.
Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.
Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.
Abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.

As a member of the public, I am now voicing my grievances. I hope that the WMF will now admit mistakes and correct them promptly, and abide by the same high standards to which they hold others.

Wikigate 1984

2008-05-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

"The most potent works, observes the oppressed and haunted Winston Smith in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, … are the ones that tell you what you already know" (Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, p. 24). This astute observation resonated when I read the Wired story, "Who Is the Wikimedia Leak?" One might imagine from this that some W. Mark Felt type was lurking in the darkest alleyways of the Internet, waiting for the intrepid Owen Woodward to shuffle his flower pots. As is often the case, this imaginary portrayal trumps the lackluster reality: "There is no Deep Throat—only Google."

And while people may be shocked at the number of Googlers looking into the Erik story, what I find really disturbing is the Wikimedia Foundation's response: a wall of silence, with some poorly aimed potshots by arch-communicator Jay Walsh: "You could say this is a credit to the project supporters overall [that the topic has not come up]." Yes, indeedy! How wonderful that the Wikimedia community does not ask the burning—but potentially embarrassing—questions. As Orwell put it, " Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

I find it ironic that this view is being promoted by an organization that prides itself on "transparency" and even "radical transparency." Perhaps the transformation from Newspeak to Wikispeak simply requires the insertion of one or two lines to the Orwellian mantra: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Transparency is Opacity. Radical Transparency is Really, Really, Super-dooper, Top Secret Stuff.

Perhaps it's time for us to reread 1984. Here are some quotes to get you started.

Time for Erik to Go

2008-05-11T20:29:00.001-07:00

Some friends of mine just sent me a series of links regarding Erik. Sorry, but it is time that someone brought this very sick individual down. We will start here. And then here. "If it's for the pedophiles" he is "willing to reconsider?" And how about all these "cool ways" to save porn? Wonder who he means there.

There will be more to come.

To the Board: If you allow this to go on, you are equally responsible in my book, and, I hope, by law as well.

To Sue: You are already responsible in my book.

Disgraceful!

Sing along with the Scorpions

2008-05-10T06:03:00.000-07:00

It is impossible to deny that some disturbing sexual imagery of children, both graphic and verbal, have become cornerstones of our culture—and this extends far beyond Lolita. Everyone is familiar with Alice in Wonderland, for instance, but this book (and the twenty-three film versions) was the culmination of Lewis Carroll's two passions: chess and little girls. Since most of the correspondence between Carroll and Alice was destroyed by Alice's mother (Alice was aged six to ten while it took place), there are still many mysteries surrounding their relationship. Considering the photographs that have become public, a line in Carroll's diary describing a boat trip with Alice and her sisters—"a pleasant expedition, with a very pleasant conclusion"—can suddenly sound rather sinister. And yet Disney has locked Song of the South (I started that Wikipedia article!) in the vault, while continuing to make Alice in Wonderland available.

No one bats an eye when they realize that Romeo was fourteen and Juliet was thirteen, and yet their story epitomizes romantic love in the Western world. In a Jewish tradition cited by the medieval commentator Rashi, Isaac was forty and Rebecca was three when they married. When I first learned this, at age eight or so, I was too young to put two and two together, but now I can only wonder why Rebecca was so upset that she was barren during the first twenty years of her married life.

Given this, what can we make of the Virgin Killer image from the Scorpions' LP that has evoked some controversy recently? Certainly, the image is disturbing, and I have no doubt that the band chose it for precisely that reason. In fact, the controversy surrounding this image would make for a reasonable fair-use rationale for inclusion—more so than, say, the current album cover.

On the other hand, I glimpsed at other language projects on Wikipedia and how they handle this image: Finnish and Ukrainian have it, while Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese do not (I could not find an article on the album for German, even though the Scorpions were a German band). When I discussed this with GerardM on the Wikipedia Weekly podcast last night, he argued that this is only because they do not allow fair use, and that this trumps the inclusion of the image. On the other hand, English Wikipedia, which does allow fair use, must include the image (at least this is how I understood his argument). At the time I argued back that just because something is allowed does not mean it is required. I tried to distinguish between censorship and self-censorship.

When I thought about it later, I realized that there was some merit in his argument that "rules trump possibilities." If it is legitimate to argue that the German Wikipedia's rules disallow the inclusion of the image because it is fair use, then perhaps federal pornography laws—regardless of whether I agree with them or not—should be able to trump the policies of the English Wikipedia too. In that case, the image—and others like it—should not be included.

Prudence trumps prurience. Now it only remains to convince people that this prudence should come from within the community, rather than from without.

Just for fun ...

2008-05-09T16:27:00.001-07:00

How many can you get right? I got 6/10 ... but I remember the Summer of Sam very vividly.

Help

2008-05-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

When the Tsunami hit Southeast Asia, a flood of international aid was organized to help the survivors. Because of the repressive regime in Myanmar, we still don't know the full impact of Cyclone Nargis, but some news sources are already speculating that the death toll may be just as high. Some reports put it as high as 100,000 already, with over 2000 sq. miles of land under water.

It isn't easy to help. The regime is preventing aid and aid workers from reaching the devastated region, while survivors scavenge the ruins of their homes to find anything that will keep them alive. Since the region provides 65 percent of Myanmar's rice, the impact will be felt throughout the country. The regime itself is in crisis.

There is one organization that can help, the IDE, and I have linked to a place to donate to their efforts on the sidebar. For a brief summary of their work: "IDE Myanmar opened in 2004 and is one of the few organizations that has both activities in all of the affected areas and permission from the government to provide assistance. 24 members of the 80 staff are currently missing. Donations will be used for relief aid to survivors of the cyclone, many of whom have no shelter, food or fuel. We will initially focus on providing immediate relief but will also plan for rebuilding communities to be self sufficient in the long-term."

In recognition of their work, I urge everyone reading this to consider having your Mother's Day gift include a donation to this group, in honor of the many thousands of Mothers in the Irrawaddy Delta who have lost their children, and the many thousands more children who have lost their mothers. As for the regime:
In Faith and Hope the world will disagree,
But all mankind's concern is charity.
(Alexander Pope)

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

2008-05-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

Erik Möller has made some disturbing comments, but I think that we all need to be reminded that people are innocent until proven guilty. What more, if the issue is to be discussed at all, it should be done rationally, dispassionately—it should not be allowed to deteriorate into the type of witch hunt that Erik himself decries as being conducted against innocent people suspected of pedophilia.

It is no secret that I have little sympathy for Erik. I find his comments disturbing; I find his arrogance unnerving; I find his opinions abhorrent. But that does not make him a predator. I believe his ideas should be held up for scrutiny, and that the Foundation (Board and Executive Director) should rethink whether he is the right person for the job he now holds. To be fair, I thought this long before this news broke, and the current revelations only solidified my opinion. Nevertheless, it is important to be accurate when discussing this topic, and not to jump off into speculation or insinuation. If there truly is a problem, the facts, as they come forth, will speak for themselves.

What would help, of course, is some reassuring words from the Foundation, rather than some second-hand comments or disparaging remarks: "Oh, it's just Valleywag. Who cares?" By now it should be obvious that plenty of people do care, and plenty of people rightfully expect nuanced discussion, rather than platitudes or vitriol. If the Foundation believes that Erik is blameless, as I assume it does, it should speak up. "In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends" (Martin Luther King, Jr.).

Wikiporn: The Reality Show

2008-05-07T15:21:00.000-07:00

It seems as if some people are now claiming that Wikipedia is a porn site. I wonder how they will react to this blog post by Erik, written May 16, 2006, just four months before he was elected to the Board.

How odd that he seems to be chastising Jimmy for not being permissive enough. To quote: "It’s the Wikipedia community, not Wales, which has set and enforces a liberal standard of inclusion."

Wasn't it D. H. Lawrence who said: "Pornography is the attempt to insult sex"?

My Next Post

2008-05-07T10:57:00.000-07:00

I tend to agree with a lot of what Doc Glasgow said in his comments to my last post. For the record, I do not believe that Erik is a pedophile. Rather, I think that he is fundamentalist in his libertarian view that just about anything goes, and in the past he made the unfortunate mistake of focusing on sexual issues to express these opinions. It is my hope that his views have moderated themselves somewhat, though sadly, I see little evidence of that. A simple clarification from him would go a long way toward helping to resolve the situation.

As many people have pointed out, the Internet has an endless memory, and past indiscretions can come back and bite you in the ass. Coupled with this, people tend to be fascinated with the lurid, often at the expense of one's more notable achievements. As Doc has stated time and again, this combination of fascination with the lurid and an infinite memory can be lethal. Because the Internet is so young (relatively speaking), we have yet to develop the necessary mechanisms to prevent or even undo the potential damage. Rather than work in that direction, I believe that Wikipedia's current policy regarding BLPs actually tends to exacerbate the problem, instead of solving it. As Nabokov said, "Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it." In that sense the web can literally stink.

As for Erik, he should clarify whether his previous writings were simply the armchair ramblings of a child psychologist (i.e., a child playing at psychologist), or whether he still maintains these views. Only then can we form a genuine opinion of what the next step should be.

In the meanwhile, this entire episode has raise several issues that should concern Wikipedians in general.
1. As someone already pointed out, Erik's early posts to Kuro5hin and other places illustrate the dangers posed by a dismissive disdain for the expertise of academics and scholars. He found some sources and quoted them to the hilt, while berating the vast majority of experts on the subject. Does this ever occur on Wikipedia? Certainly.
2. Whatever the genuine truth value of some statement, sources can usually be found to back it up. In other word, sources are manipulable, and even if Erik were the Janusz Korczak of the Internet, there would be plenty of quotable "evidence" to discredit him. Is this true of any other subject of a Wikipedia biography? Certainly.

Finally, some have argued that Erik simply spoke his mind, and indeed, in those unfortunate posts Erik voices his indignation at how many of the researchers he cites were castigated by the academic mainstream. He should not be surprised. As Foucault said, "Freedom of conscience entails more danger than authority and despotism," and they were, he believes, simply speaking their conscience.

I would argue, however, as William James did, that "The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths." One may have a Utopian, libertarian ideal, where just about anything goes, but we also have other truths--such as the need to protect children and the weak--which impose reasonable limits on our other truths. For we all have multiple truths, but they do not fit neatly together like a jigsaw puzzle. Rather, too often, they tend to overlap or even to conflict. "Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemma" (H. L. Mencken).

One thing is certain. Instead of focusing on one small subset of ideals, we have to place them in the context of some larger picture, and negotiate between them to create a holistic world view. Failing to do that was Erik's big mistake, and if he is to continue on at the Foundation, one would hope that he has learned that by now.

Tommy, Can You Hear Me?

2008-05-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

By now it's pretty much impossible to ignore the stories coming out in Valleywag about Erik Moeller. Regardless of all the excuses we will hear, it is up to the Board, and particularly those Board members who are also parents, to take the appropriate steps. Next time they look for a babysitter, they should probably think of Pete Townshend's question (slightly paraphrased), "Do you think it's alright to leave the boy with Uncle Erik?"
Of course, Erik is not the only one to blame here. After the Carolyn Doran incident Sue Gardner made it abundantly clear that she had instituted changes in the Foundation's hiring policy, and from now on all employees would be subject to extensive background checks. It is unfortunate that she then went on to rush through with the hiring of Erik, speeding up the visa process, and taking steps that raised many an eyebrow not only among the community, but among the Board too.
Well, it seems her judgment was less than perfect on this one. Only time will tell what the consequences are of having a person with Erik's views about children (and I personally do not believe he is an actual pedophile) representing the Wikimedia Foundation to other foundations or educational institutions. In fact, much of the damage caused to the WMF by this whole episode rests squarely on her shoulders, and the Board should respond accordingly.
They can no longer afford to just "Fiddle about, fiddle about ..."

Time for Florence to Quit

2008-05-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

In an email to Foundation-l, Florence, Chair of the Board, wrote one of the most remarkably convoluted and stupid comments imaginable. I can only hope that it is some inability to express herself in English that resulted in these remarks, and they do not really represent the intentions of the current Board of Monkeys that governs the WMF:

She wrote:

The way I understood it when we drafted the text is this: We felt that various people considered that the board was not supportive of the creation of a USA chapter. From the moment when the chapters have a say in the Board membership, it seemed likely that part of the community could have complained that American citizens would not be able to have a voice about these reserved chapters given that the board did not allow US chapters.

In other words, to translate her statement into simple English:

The Board decided to give the chapters the right to appoint 2 Board members (in some way which is yet undefined).
The Board recognized that the American community would feel disenfranchised since they have no American chapter.
To resolve this, the Board announces that it is not opposed to the creation of an American chapter.

I have no qualms in saying that this is a crock of shit. In fact, each statement is stupider than the next. So, let's go through them one by one.

The Board is announcing a restructuring without having fully thought it through.
The Board recognizes that this new restructuring will leave out the community of American Wikipedians, representing the largest and oldest national community of Wikimedians.
The Board resolves this by saying, "They do not oppose the US making a chapter." Whoopee! Does the Board also make ridiculous statements like "The Board does not oppose the creation of a Chinese chapter," or "The Board does not oppose the creation of a Madagascar chapter, or a Canadian chapter, or a Russian chapter, or an Iranian chapter." In fact, the only national entity for which it feels a need to clarify that it does not oppose a chapter is the U.S. It's kind of like Congress saying, "The government does not oppose the right of Negroes to vote." Of course, it will be too late for that by the next elections, or whenever the chapter appointees are decided. But the Board is, at least, absolved, because they "do not oppose."

And they wonder why so many people are annoyed at them. Well, in response to these comments, I have three points of my own.

I call on Florence to resign from her position of Chair and from the Board, effective immediately, for making such ridiculous excuses and thereby disenfranchising such a significant segment of the community.
I call on Kat and Frieda to resign from their positions on the Board, effective immediately, for blatantly failing to protect the rights of such a large segment of the community, which voted them in to their positions. Their deafening silence during this whole fray only serves to show their complicity in this ridiculous exercise, or their impotence in representing the rights of the people who first elected them.
I call on all the chapters to refuse to participate in this exercise, which sets their members above all the other contributors. Wikipedia once prided itself on its commitment to the equality of all its participants. Or does that only mean that trolls are equal to contributors?

Perhaps it's time to paraphrase the pigs: "All Wikipedians are equal, but some are more equal than others."

Dead Poets' Society

2008-05-04T03:50:00.001-07:00

What do Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde have in common? Well, these two great humorists in the English language both happen to be dead ... and for a while now too. In fact, it would stand to believe that since Wilde died in 1900 and Twain died in 1910, their works, their images, their likenesses, have all entered the public domain, and can be used and reused by anyone. Wikisource, Project Gutenberg, and countless other websites take advantage of this to share their works with the public.

But there's something else these two men have in common that few people would expect. If you are guilty of the unauthorized use of their name and likeness, you might be tracked down by CMG International, self-proclaimed "global police," devoted to aggressively "monitoring and pursuing any unauthorized use of their clients' name and likeness." And they've got an impressive list of clients too, a virtual Who's Who of twentieth-century arts and entertainment, with the Vatican Library tossed in for good measure.

The problem is, can they really be the "exclusive business representative for Oscar Wilde ... work[ing] with companies around the world who wish to use his name or likeness in any commercial fashion," as they claim on their "Official Oscar Wilde Website"? I don't contest that they have the right to represent many of their other clients, "whose name or likeness" may still be protected by copyright." And I do wonder what they mean when they say: "If you are interested in using Mark Twain in a promotional or product campaign, please submit a business inquiry form" on their "Official Mark Twain Website."

Are they invading the public domain, offering false hopes of riches to these writers' descendants, who stand to profit whenever anyone posts a picture of their ancestor? Or do they really have these rights, in which case projects such as Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource, and Project Gutenberg could be in violation of their (dead) clients' rights, especially as they allow commercial reuse?

Not being a lawyer, I don't know the answer, but I do hope Indiana-based CMG is a scam. There are a lot of dead poets out there who could, just as easily, be brought under their corporate umbrella. further extending already lengthy terms of copyright. Fortunately, their clients don't include Rupert Brooke, my favorite poet from that long-gone era, but who knows how long that will last. Perhaps it's time for groups and organizations devoted to the promotion of free culture to put their foot down and protest these attempted incursions into the public domain.

Or else they'd better clear their databases, because CMG may be out to get them.

100 of the Best

2008-05-02T19:24:00.000-07:00

It should come as no surprise that I didn't want Jimmy Wales to make the Time 100 this year--especially not this year--with such an amazing group of people to choose from. He didn't because the people who decide for Time had the insight and courage to look beyond the myopic world of pop culture fly-by-nights who dominate Internet memes. The 100 selected by Time have a place in posterity, for better or for worse. They will certainly merit extensive coverage, not only in Encyclopedia 2008, but even in the 2108 edition, when their longterm impact can be better assessed. It's a world of a difference from the Internet-generated popular list, which shows the remarkable short-sightedness of the average teenaged web-geek.

On the latter list, Jimmy made #17, three behind that other famous stud, Eliot Spitzer, but two above the Google Guys, whose search engine he is feverishly threatening to replace. More important, perhaps, is that he's sandwiched between Shinya Yamanaka, who revolutionized stem cell research, and Nelson Mandela, who revolutionized South Africa. Of course, the competition was fierce, and it stands to reason that he would be beaten by such stalwart visionaries as Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks. It's especially interesting when you compare Jimmy's place with Time's #17, Baitullah Mehsud (though admittedly, the list is not ranked by popularity in Time). "Bait-who?" you say. "Is that the guy who lives in his car who tried out for American Idol?" No, he was, apparently the mastermind behind the Benazir Bhutto assassination, one of the most chilling events of the past year.

Republican and Democrat alike will admit that this is one of the most fascinating presidential elections in recent memory. We will soon have either the first African American candidate or the first woman candidate for a major political party. Yet who came first among the "popular" candidates? Dumb-as-dirt fundie governor Mike Huckabee (#9), far ahead of nominee John McCain (at #56, ranked just below the all-star cast of High School Musical), Barack Obama (#63), and Hillary Clinton (#183) In fact, Hillary was narrowly beaten by Singaporean businesswoman Ho Ching. I can only surmise that in the "popular" world of the Internet, women are still judged more for their looks than for anything else. Or, more succinctly, if Hillary really wants to win this demographic, she should pose for Victoria's Secret.

The second most influential person of the year, at least according to the popular list, was some guy named Rain, the Zac Efron of the DMZ. And the number one person in this tumultuous year which saw the assassination of a key reform candidate in a nuclear power (Pakistan), a troop surge in Iraq, sabre-rattling between the US and Iran, a hotly contested American election, genocide in Darfur, violent protests and repression in Burma, and the end of the Blair era in the UK and the Howard era in Australia is ... Shigeru Miyamoto, the inventor of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers. He even beat that crotchety old monk from Tibet who somehow made the Time #1 spot--but then again, Miley Cyrus beat him too.

And as I ponder this I can't help but wonder, which of the two lists does Wikipedia best present: the real Time 100 or the popular vote ...

P.S. Thank you to an anonymous friend who first drew my attention to these lists.

Truth Commission

2008-05-02T02:49:00.001-07:00

Someone asked me the other day what I thought about the idea of an Arb Com devoted specifically to content-related issues. I will answer briefly here, with a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

Wikiwalmart

2008-04-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time I stepped into Walmart. It was in Gulfport, Mississippi, a month before Katrina, and my friend needed to use the restroom. I never got past the cash registers then, but let me tell you, Walmart was BIG!!! There were miles and miles of shelves! Miles and miles of crap! Since moving to Florida from New York, I've been to Walmart many times. It is my primary source of boxers and t-shirts, of Irish Spring soap and of clean socks.

But for all their variety of boxed wine and American cheese, there are still certain things I would never buy there ... I could never buy there ... like wine and cheese, for instance. When I lived in New York, I once went to Kim's down in Greenwich Village, and asked if they had The Color of Pomegranates, one of my favorite films. Without missing a beat, the clerk answered, "Sure, Parajanov is over there, in the Soviet film section." Can you imagine that ever happening at Walmart? Or how about the music section? Sure you can find American Idol's Cheeziest Rewind, but when it comes to some obscure album by the Eels or Illinois Jacquet, you don't stand much of a chance ... and forget about Prokofiev's Toccata, one of my favorite pieces of music. Now, I may sound like a snob, but can you imagine buying a business suit there, or perhaps formal wear for a wedding?

For the finer things in life, you go to the boutique shops, the specialty stores, the places where salespeople know all about their wares, and are genuinely happy to share that knowledge with you. In fact, often, if you keep going back, the salespeople get to know you and your tastes, and will recommend some real treasures to you, or, as happened to me in a Cambridge book store, even slip you one for free (a first edition Barbusse). Sadly, over the past few decades, these specialty shops have begun to disappear, overwhelmed by ubiquitous Walmarts and Targets and all the other big chains. And we are none the richer for it.

I thought of this as I explored a new site, StumbleUpon, which links you to countless little known websites, based on your particular interests. While bookmarking dozens of new sites I discovered, I realized how much high quality content there is out there in cyberspace, and how little attention it is getting because ~~Walmart~~ Wikipedia is everywhere. Sometimes you have to go through pages of Google hits till you find something that isn't Wikipedia, or some mirror of it. Now, if you wouldn't buy your high-end items at a place like Walmart, isn't it surprising to see so many people seeking "knowledge," the most valuable commodity of all, on Wikipedia, the Walmart of cyberspace.

Now don't get me wrong. Wikipedia is a great place for certain things, just like Walmart is. If you need a quick fact, you can always run to Wikipedia, just like if you need some Cheezwhiz, you can always run to Walmart. But for the finer things in life, wouldn't you want to take it to the next level?

(For more comparisons between Wikipedia and Walmart, consider this article by Seth Finkelstein, one of Wikipedia's most astute critics.)

P.S. Enjoy the videos.

20 grains per word

2008-04-29T15:41:00.001-07:00

I just found a cute little site that is making a difference in the world. Freerice.com offers a vocabulary quiz which starts easy but gets harder as you go. For each word that you get right, the site donates 20 grains of rice to help alleviate poverty. While that is not a lot, it certainly can make some small dent: in fact, the site, which already has a Wikipedia article, was listed as the UK Charity Find of 2007 by Yahoo.

So, whether you want to give or just want to improve your vocabulary, I encourage to visit Freerice.com. Oh, and tarmacadam means pavement and eructation means belch. See if you can work those into a sentence ...

In any event, according to the Wikipedia article, it takes 20,000 grains of rice to provide adequate nourishment for one adult per day. Let's see if people reading this blog can feed at least one person today. If you decide to play, please list your totals (with the date) in the comments. Who knows? We may actually make a difference.

A new proposal for the Board

2008-04-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

I've griped and I've complained about the current shift in the Board, but now I think I will do something useful and propose an alternative structure for Board governance. The proposal I offer is a little complicated, but bear with me as I muddle through it.

The underlying assumption of this proposal is that the Board fulfills two roles: 1) ensuring that the WMF maintains its long-term vision, and 2) fiduciary responsibility (audit, budget, etc.). Now, I really do like Florence, but let's face it: for all her good intentions, she is no expert on GAAP, for instance, nor should anyone expect her to be. On the other hand, I do believe that she is much better at understanding community dynamics and WMF vision than, say Stuart West, who may be a very nice guy and an outstanding Treasurer, but is a complete novice when it comes to the intricacies of the community. Nor should these two distinct fields of expertise collide.

What I therefore propose is a two-tiered Board, or rather, a bicameral Board: one to focus on vision and community building, and the other to focus us on financial and legal matters. Inevitably, the former would consist entirely of community members, while the latter would consist of professionals and experts.

To be more specific, each Board would consist of seven members, and each would meet separately, as they deem necessary, with two joint meetings.

Why seven members each? Here is my breakdown: The Community Board would consists of 4 elected members and 3 chapter representatives (I can live with 5 and 2 as well). The elected members would be selected from the community of editors and developers, with at least one, but no more than 3 representing the English-language projects. Why at least one? Because face it. English is by far the largest project, with the largest number of contributors, and the greatest public visibility. It should always get at least one representative (note that I said English-language, not US—for all I care the rep can be from India), but it should not be allowed to use its power to dominate this board. That is balanced by the chapter appointments and a cap on how many English-language representatives may be seated at any one time. At least one other project, and potentially 3, should be represented by community election. The Chair of this Board will be selected from elected representatives and serve as Vice Chair of the WMF.

The Professional Board will likewise consist of seven members, consisting of at least three members of the current advisory committee, and other external professionals, such as Stuart West. This Board will meet at its discretion (it is likely that they will not go for 3-day meetings once every two months because they have real lives) and oversee financial and legal matters, which fall under the scope of fiduciary responsibility. This Board will also provide the Treasurer of the WMF.

As I said earlier, they will meet with the Community Board twice a year to discuss and decide on matters that involve both groups. Among the joint Board's responsibilities will be a regular evaluation of the ED's performance. Mike Godwin, as Legal Counsel, will also act as Secretary for both Boards and take minutes of their meetings (in fact, it is quite common for an external attorney to take Board minutes). He will not, however, be entitled to vote, since he is acting as staff, rather than as a Board member.

So where does this leave Jimmy Wales? He will be a non-voting member of both Boards with the responsibility of facilitating between them. In the event of a tie in a vote between both Boards, he will be the deciding vote, but his main role will be to facilitate communication between the two groups.

The advantage of this proposal is that it brings together the four groups that should be represented: 1) Community; 2) Professionals; 3) Chapters; and 4) Advisory Board (i.e., people who are professionals, but who share the core values of the Foundation, based on their work in related free content fields and who, theoretically, already participate in governance in some way). As I said in an earlier blog post, it is a crying shame that the Board has not begged Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wikis, to serve. As someone commented in Wikipedia Review, it would also be quite good if someone who has experience working in developing nations is asked to join the Professional Board as well. Perhaps someone from Teachers without Frontiers could be asked.

I realize that my voice may carry little weight with the current Board. On the other hand, I would ask them to look behind the messenger and consider the message. I believe that this offers the basis (and sure, it can be tweaked some) for a viable compromise.

Redirect

2008-04-28T12:43:00.001-07:00

Rather than post again, I will simply redirect to here.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2008-04-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

Some people have asked me why I haven't commented on the new board announcement regarding restructuring. Well, the fact is that a few people have done a better job than I ever could, so I advise everyone to read SJ, Birgitte, and David Goodmann's posts, which really hit the nail on the head. I don't think there is much more to add.

Having said that, there was one post that really moved me just now.

Angela wrote in response to SJ's request to forward his message to the Advisory Board: "I have forwarded your email to the advisory board members. However, I should point out that they were not asked about this either and know less about it that readers of this mailing list. All I get from the board of trustees is announcements after they've made their decisions behind closed doors, not any requests for advice."

It is no secret that I do not always see eye to eye with Angela. Nonetheless, her description of the current state of affairs with the advisory board was a bold challenge to what is happening now with the WMF, and I am grateful to her for that.

Especially when there is the attitude: "Almost every volunteer organization has a hierarchy and "gives orders" to its members to some extent. Its members are, of course, free to ignore those "orders", but the organization is then free to disallow them from further participation."

Sorry, but perhaps we forget how these projects got here. "Be Bold" and "Contribute where you want" by volunteers around the world were the very cornerstones of everything the WMF has done. It is not the result of some "received authority" delivered from on high.

P.S. A new petition questioning the Board's actions can now be found on Meta (the WMF's organizational site). I encourage you to sign. If you do not have a meta account, you can sign here.

Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength

2008-04-27T12:40:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that doublespeak is pretty common in government. But is this manipulation of language making its way into Wikimedia governance too? Is transparency (or its cousin radical transparency) just one example of many in the new and improved WMF? Will we start hearing that lessons can be learned from industry as the WMF trims its essential services, so as to be more efficient? Will we start engaging in digital rights management or eliminating non-core promises to the community? Or perhaps now is not the time to discuss personal responsibility. Perhaps we should just move on. (For a complete translation of the italicized terms, see Sourcewatch.)

Reading recent WMF content, I have been finding more and more examples of what can only be termed as doublespeak:

Transparency: that which the Board/Office determines that the community may know.
Assume good faith: assume that those in power unselfishly have your best interests at heart.
Neutral Point of View: conventional wisdom as determined by informal polling.
Atmosphere of distrust: community responses to things that they have no right to know in the first place.
Chapter appointed: everyone but the Americans.
Sum of all human knowledge: Perhaps it is really just a typo for Some of all human knowledge.

What examples of WMF doublespeak have you encountered recently?

Liberate the license plates

2008-04-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

When I was young, I'd spend my family's frequent, boring car rides from Toronto to New York peering out the window to try and find license plates from all the different states and provinces. Ontario and Quebec, New York and New Jersey were everywhere, but Nevada or Saskatchewan were great finds, and I remember begging my dad to speed up so that we could verify whether some passing car was really from Hawaii or the Yukon.

It's harder to do that in Florida today. Here we have about one hundred different license plates, from the standard, "cheapo" Florida oranges to "Save the Manatees" to "Tampa Bay Devil Rays." There is even a very colorful plate for the pro-lifers, while Brad once checked the possibility of creating Wikipedia license plates, with a percentage of the purchase price going back to the WMF.

Now the state legislature is debating whether to add a new license plate, "I believe" (with a large cross set against a stained glass window) to appeal to the state's born again crowd. After all, if you can say you love the Dolphins (whether ocean mammals or football field greats), you should be able to say you love God too. I couldn’t disagree more. There is nothing wrong with license plates being fun or reflecting personal interests, but they should also be innocuous. And it is certainly not the role of the state legislature to mandate which religion people can promote on their vehicles.

This is a state with a significant Jewish population (3 percent), and a growing population of Muslims. It is also home to the world headquarters of the Church of Scientology, but I doubt many people would feel comfortable with "Operating Thetan" or "Tom Cruise kicks ass" on Florida state license plates. In 2006, Reverend O'Neal Dozier of Broward County, an advisor to George W. and Jeb, publicly declared that Islam is a cult. He explained it by adding "… everyone is not as astute about religion as I am" (Miami Herald, 13 July). Astute as he may be, I wonder how he would feel about license plates proclaiming Allahu akbar. In fact, a very casual AOL poll that I just saw shows that while 69 percent of respondents support the "I believe" license plate, 52 percent—over half—would oppose license plates promoting other religions. So much for diversity.

So, if people feel some urgent need to make a public statement about their religion, they can put it on a bumper sticker. Just leave the license plates out of it.

Germany, 12 points; L'Allemagne, douze points; Deutschland, zwölf Punkte

2008-04-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

Two big news stories today from the WMF:

1. The German Verein is apparently behind a new, print edition of the German Wikipedia to be published by Bertelsmann.
2. The Foundation has announced a new treasurer, Stewart West, for the Board. I do not know if he was hired to fill this position or if he is a volunteer. I suppose we will find out soon enough. If he is a volunteer, it would be nice to know where he works now.

I think the two news stories are related. You see, over the past year, the Foundation has been introduced to a whole slew of new people, who are now essentially running the show: 1. Sue Gardner, 2. Mike Godwin, 3. Jay Walsh, 4. Kul Wadhwa, 5. Veronique Kessler, and now 6. Stewart West. While Mike Godwin does have a strong background in the Free Culture movement, none of these others do, and none of them have background in the WMF's projects per se. In fact, exactly a year ago, no one had heard of any of them (with the exception of Mr. Godwin). They are essentially corporate types who simply found a job. (Sorry, but I take a more cynical approach to anyone starting off at the WMF saying: "Oh, I love Wikipedia!" If they said "Wikipedia sucks!" do you think they'd be getting their salaries?) For better or for worse, the trend in the office is to move away from the projects, away from the community--that actually made the projects a top ten website--and to step in once Wikipedia is everywhere and say, "Hey, great work! I'm in charge now."

Enter the Verein. Here is the most successful chapter, doing some great work that the other projects can only dream of. They are running academies, putting out books, pushing for improvements, and getting the job done. And, perhaps most importantly, all of this is derived from the community. Their staff is from the community. Their Board is from the community. Their success is from the community.

Now, sure, there are vast differences between the English-language community and the German one. But on the other hand, I can't help wonder: Wouldn't it be great if the Verein took over the WMF?

So Fix It?

2008-04-20T14:00:00.001-07:00

A reminder to those who cite WP:SOFIXIT to absolve themselves of responsibility.

No less important is WP:DICK.

Oh, and thank you for making it obvious to all why the Board was advised against making you ED.

Is She Who Wikipedia Says She Is?

2008-04-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

Monique Davis is not on my buddy list. The Illinois State Representative acted repulsively this month in her famous outburst against atheist Rob Sherman, when she responded to his testimony at a State Government hearing:

This is the land of Lincoln where people believe in God... What you have to sprew and spread is extremely dangerous... It's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists... Get out of that seat! You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying!

It would seem that Ms. Davis believes that atheists do not share the same rights in Springfield as those who believe in some god. Listening to Freethought Radio, I later learned that Abraham Lincoln, who once served as an Illinois State Representative, was also condemned as an atheist by his political opponents, right there in the State Capitol. I suppose he had no right to be there either.

Curious about Monique Davis, I determined to learn a little more about her. Was this outburst typical of her politics? Had she been elected for her strong religious views, and if so, how had they affected her political career? Seeking information, I turned to Wikipedia, like most people anyone would. And there I found: "Monique D. Davis is a Democratic member of the Illinois House of Representatives, representing the 27th District since 1987." Hmmm, twenty years in government? Surely she must have had some other outbursts?

Sadly, I couldn’t find any. While the article went on about the recent events, there was no information about anything else that Monique D. Davis had done. Discounting the sources, discounting the info box, discounting all the tabs and such, the article came to 465 words, of which just 19 words had anything to do with her career as an educator and a state representative. That's roughly 4 percent.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the biographies of living people on Wikipedia, and how they often appear slanderous or biased. I feel an affinity for these concerns; in fact, I was the person who first raised the idea with Jimmy Wales of tagging these articles (amid considerable opposition), so that they could be more carefully watched. It was one small step forward, but in hindsight it seems a very small one indeed. The Monique Davis article is well-sourced and ostensibly accurate, but at the same time it totally misses the point of this woman's long career (she's been in politics since half the admins were in diapers), and sums it up with an unfortunate episode that happened to make the headlines. She later claimed she was frustrated by some gun violence in a school in her district, but based on this article I know nothing about her stand on firearms, her position on education, or anything else about her. It is almost as if her career began on April 3, 2008.

While it is not quite Youtube, Wikipedia will play a role in the upcoming American elections. If only because of its daunting ubiquity, people will turn to Wikipedia to find out about the candidates. There is nothing more worrying to me than hordes of misinformed voters, and if this is the kind of information they find, frankly I am scared.

In a coming post I hope to offer some suggestions as to how fix the problem. Hopefully by then someone will have fixed the Monique Davis article.

Tyranny of the Ignorant

2008-04-18T05:07:00.000-07:00

When Stephen Hawking was invited to meet Pope John Paul II, he asked to be shown the transcripts of the trial, before the Inquisition, of Galileo Galilei. It was a bold move, a reminder to the pontiff that the tyranny of popular notions cannot impede the march of science. And not for lack of trying either. Where would we be today if Galileo, Bruno, Copernicus, or Darwin had succumbed to popular opinion, as represented by the Church? And while we know that Darwin still struggles to defend himself against an onslaught of fundamentalist kooks … while my own state, Florida, has only now accepted the teaching of evolution in the classroom … even Galileo is back in the docket. Former Grand Inquisitor Ratzinger, the current Pope, is infamous for his statement: "The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just."

So where does Wikipedia stand on this? Well, a noted mathematical physicist from the Centre de recherches mathématiques is precisely the kind of "expert" that Wikipedia claims it would like to attract to give credence to its content. Yet, when such a scientist attempted to edit the Myrzakulov equations article, a field in which he has considerable expertise, he was rebuffed by the "community." To quote one Wikipediot: "One may be an expert in one's field, but not an expert in collaborative, volunteer development of an open encyclopedia using wiki software." In other words, collaboration, volunteerism, openness, and wiki software trumps knowledge, accuracy, and a lifelong devotion to one's field of expertise. Well, let's all put on our pajamas and sing a round of "Kumbaya." Then we can put science up to a vote, and let the uninformed determine the outcome.

Isn't it ironic that the page is now tagged with "This WikiProject Physics article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject"? Sorry, guys, but you just chased the expert away.

To quote the expert, who left in disgust: "It is truly a "Tyranny of the Ignorant."

(Thank you to Wikipedia Review for bringing this to my attention.)

Prophets Trump Priests

2008-04-17T18:13:00.000-07:00

The news seems to be contradicting itself tonight, but I wonder how many people are catching it. Larry King is offering a very sympathetic picture of the FLDS church, a group of polygamist kooks who impregnate young girls at the behest of their "prophet." The trial is underway, and the mothers of these girls are defending their right to treat children as sex objects in the name of the religion ... and the media is buying it.

Meanwhile in Boston, the Pope is under fire for the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic church just a few years ago. To be fair, the Pope is breaking new ground by recognizing and reaching out to the the victims, something that even his predecessor, John Paul II, would not do. "We are deeply ashamed," the Pope just said, "and we will do all that is possible that this cannot happen in the future." Even David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network, recognized that this is "a very long-overdue, small step forward."

How odd! It seems the tables have turned. While once parents spoke out against sex abuse and a conspiracy of silence on the part of the clergy, today in America mothers are defending their right to submit their children to sexually abusive situations.

Could it be that the priests' victims were boys, and the FLDS victims are girls? Or is it that prophets always trump priests?

Congo

2008-04-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia Review has been discussing my last post, but I would like to comment here on some objections raised both there and in the comments here, by Wikipedians I admire.

Lar, it may surprise you but I agree with you more than you imagine. I believe that providing knowledge is the answer, but, as I posted—rather cynically, I might add—in my post, it is best to first find out what kind of knowledge people need and then respond by providing that. Unfortunately, when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail; when all you have is a wiki, then everything looks like a laptop.

For example, I would be completely and fully in support of wiki-produced agricultural manuals that promote sustainable agricultural techniques for the various climates and geographical conditions of Congo, recognizing that the Democratic Republic of Congo is slightly larger than Western Europe. In other words, if what works in Denmark may not work in southern France, then it is reasonable to assume that what works in Ituri might not work in Kasai or Haut-Katanga. Of course, this requires an understanding of local indigenous crops, climate, soil conditions, water availability. etc. This is not the kind of content that a group of dilettantes can put together at their leisure—or rather it may be, but the results would be devastating for the people they are trying to help. And I'm not even getting into the impact of an edit war on the best way to grow cassava.

Yes, more than just a wiki is needed. This demands expertise, professionalism, people intimately familiar (on the ground?) with local conditions, etc. While you may have this in French, it would be most helpful in Lingala, Kikongo, and Tshiluba; the first two have wikis with some 1500 articles between them, while Tshiluba does not have a wiki yet. Then it must be provided to the people, farmers, who need it most, either in print format (in a country with a relatively high 67 percent literacy rate, mostly in urban centers, but only 55 percent of male children and 49 percent of female children actually attending primary schools), or electronic format (phones per 100 people = 5; internet use per 100 = 0). For more information, see UNICEF's country profile.

So, I repeat the question I asked in my last post: While helping developing nations is an admirable goal, has anyone at the WMF given any real thought to the challenges involved in this? Statements about cows, mud, and Wikipedia may make some Westerners feels good about themselves, but they fail to confront the genuine challenges that other, more established and experienced aid groups face every single day. To many, myself included, they are simply condescending and trite.

For examples of some of these challenges, see Doctors without Borders, Engineers without Borders, and Teachers without Borders.

White Fathers of Silicon Valley

2008-04-15T08:35:00.000-07:00

Between the Lions' Gate and the start of the Via Dolorosa in the Old City of Jerusalem lies a wonderful church, dating from Crusader times. Known as the Church of Saint Anne, it is a popular tourist stop because it overlooks the ancient pool of Bethesda, where Jesus healed an ailing man. The church itself, which also served as a madrassa is renowned for its remarkable acoustics, so that any visiting group that sings a hymn can sound like a celestial choir. I once loved visiting there to climb around the ancient pools and hear the tourists singing. My only problem was a statue near the entrance, showing a white monk surrounded by little African children, hugging him and pleading for his blessing. You see, the church is run by an order called the White Fathers of Africa, a group of brethren committed to "saving" the heathen Arabs and Africans. Colonialist condescension is alive and well, if only you know where to look.

It isn't that hard to find either. In a recent article by the BBC, Jimmy Wales speaks of a trip to India, where he met a young man who used Wikipedia to pass an exam. "Wow, that's like really something," he commented, "Here I am standing in a street with mud and a cow and we had touched his life in a positive way. That was pretty cool." While no one denies that poverty has a devastating effect on so many people in so many countries, there seems to be this naïve belief that the answer lies in quirky technological advances—that laptops and wikis will pave the way for a brighter future, and who better to bring them to the miserable masses than the successful white fathers of Silicon Valley.

Rachel Marsden said it better than me when she commented on ValleyWag: "How about we get the "little black kids in Africa" some, oh I don't know, perhaps some RUNNING WATER, and maybe some vaccinations, before we start focusing like uneducated, naive idiots on the fact that they don't have access to the "world's largest compendium of pickup lines"? Mommy's dying of malaria in the corner of the hut, but HEY, life's fabulous because I can read all about how John Seigenthaler killed Kennedy on a computer whose screen I can't see because I have no electricity!"

One hundred years ago, colonial powers and the Church believed that they had all the answers to the problems of the developing world. "Embrace us, and we will save you." Today there are some in Silicon Valley who feel that their gadgetry is the new answer. While I believe that there are wonderful aid organizations out there, I am nonetheless cynical of those who offer solutions without first asking the very people who they are ostensibly trying to help. "What do you need? A goat? Don't have any. How about a laptop?" "Clean water? So passé! Try this wiki instead!"

I'll end with a quote from a book that Erik Möller first introduced to me back in 2002. In The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice Christopher Hitchens writes: 'The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate. The great white hope meets the great black hole; the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale. As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden" (pp. 49–50).

P.S. I have changed the donation widget to reflect Rachel Marsden's comments. Here is a chance to help provide clean water to people in Uganda. Thanks for helping.

Who's the Boss?

2008-04-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, the Board held one of its frequent meetings, this time in San Francisco. During that meeting, the Board rejected a proposed confidentiality/non-disparagement agreement that was presented to them. Frankly, I am very proud of them that they refused. From what little we know of it, the document was a sham, and the Board should hold the people behind this document fully accountable for this attempted power-grab and cover-up.

Let's take a look at Florence's email. Here are some quotes, with my comments:

1. The document we were presented was received differently depending on board members. Does that mean that different Board members were asked to sign different documents depending on how much the Foundation trusted them? If so, who determines this level of trust? The staff? I thought it was the Board's job to oversee staff, not the staff's job to oversee Board.

2. It also made it mandatory for all board members at the end of theiremployment (yeah, that was the text :-)) -- Since when are Board members employees? See my point above. BTW, Florence reiterated this later in the email. And if they are employees, who are they answerable to? My understanding was always that the staff is answerable to the Board, not the other way around.

3. To give a copy of all documents, emails, etc... shared during activity, and to destroy our own personal copy. -- While this may be acceptable in some circumstances, especially for staff, essentially what it says is that only the Foundation has control over Board documents, minutes, etc. Transparency aside, essentially, what this looks like is an attempt to cover up various internal problems that were raised, some of them on this blog. Gold-plated washing machine email? Deniability obtained, because only the Foundation now has copies of the email (or do they?). Jimmy fucking around with donations? Deniability obtained. Brad Patrick fired for incompetence? Deniability obtained. Etc. With the Foundation's ethics called into question recently, essentially, what Sue and her henchmen are doing is calling on the Board to destroy documents--destroy evidence.

4. Still, when someone has signed a document where it is stated that should he disparage (whatever that means) a board member, a staff member or the Foundation generally, he will be led in court, I expect that a board member will think double before raising a touchy issue; and might prefer closing his eyes to possibly getting in trouble. -- Is the WMF now implying that it will sue any Board member who might speak out against them? In other words, is it attempting to protect the unholy troika of Jimmy, Sue, and Erik by threatening a law suit against any former Board member who says, "Wait a minute. Something wasn't quite kosher"?

Personally, I find all of this quite shocking, especially for an organization that prides itself on transparency ... or is that just a codeword for "Follow the leader"? Are U.S. libel laws insufficient to protect the members of the Board from disparagement? Is free speech, the cornerstone of Wikipedia, utterly irrelevant when it comes to the current management?

My one consolation is that the Board had the good sense to reject the damn thing. Good work!

Jimmy and the Undertaker

2008-04-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

I'm enjoying the Dutch documentary, The Truth According to Wikipedia, which is available on the web. Nevertheless, I am still trying to get my head around the apparent contradiction between Andrew Keen, who claims that Wikipedia is part of "the fragmentation of mass society" (27:33), and the Tanzanian blogger who talks of Ujamaa (18:13), or collectivization, which was an underpinning of African socialism. (I can only wonder why Jimmy, a libertarian Objectivist, is modeling himself on African socialism.)

One thing that really demands comment is this statement by Jimmy: "There is no position within the knowledge of the world where anyone can say, 'This is the way it is, and this is the last word on it, and no one can ever change anything that I've had to say.'" In other words, Jimmy is rejecting the concept of any absolute truth. While one may be tempted to bring up the Sokal hoax ( a common defense of Social Text reverberates with wikifluff: "We read it more as an act of good faith of the sort that might be worth encouraging than as an exercise of the intellect whose scholarly work had to be judged"), I prefer to go to Ayn Rand herself:

"Does the Undertaker know that he exists yet?"

Does he, Jimmy?

Or perhaps we should remove any references to Objectivism in Jimmy's wikibio. African socialism? A postmodernist view of truth? It would seem as if Rachel Marsden has emerged as Jimmy's Patrecia Scott.

(Apologies to all for some obscure references. I suggest looking them up on Wikipedia.)

Peace in our time ...

2008-04-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

Well, both ValleyWag and the Register are covering Jimmy Wales's jaunt to Sharm ash-Sheikh, where he will be using his legendary (or should that be mythological) business acumen to spread peace and prosperity to the Middle East. Let's see, Bomis was a minor porn site, Wikipedia is a not for profit, and Wikia wisely replaced him early on with Gil Penchina. I am sure there is a strategy there: "None of the competent players in the international arena have succeeded in really helping the region, so let's start trying the incompetent ones."

I was amused by the comment by "Sceptical Bastard" on the Register: "What next? Sergey Brin and Larry Page to co-preside over the G8?" and even tried to match it with a comment of my own on ValleyWag: "Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could chair the next conference. He certainly made more money than Jimmy, i.e., he's a better businessman than Jimmy, and he can put a 'face' on the protagonists." Or perhaps they can send the lovely Sue Gardner, who actually specialized pop culture journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (see her summary in LinkedIn). She may have a soothing word for the disgruntled masses ... But I digress.

I do wonder whom else they might send from among the heroes of geekdom to save the world by chairing international conferences. Any ideas?

Wikipedia for Atheists

2008-04-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

Since my post Irony of Ironies, I have been introducing my good friend Chad to the writings and ideas of Richard Dawkins. To help me along, I decided to reread The God Delusion, in which Dawkins lays out his philosophy with regard to God, religion, the Bible, and morality. One particular passage struck me:

"To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other." (p. 237)

I can't help wondering whether the word 'Bible' could not be replaced with 'Wikipedia.'

Super Mario Tenors

2008-04-04T19:45:00.000-07:00

Wikisource is a wonderful project. It is an opportunity to enhance existing Wikipedia articles with older, public domain texts on a wide range of topics, including letters, books, and yes, even old encyclopedia articles, like the New Student's Reference Work or older, public domain editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In some cases, Wikisource is the only source online for unusual, rare texts, including some great contemporary accounts of historical events as they happened. My favorites include The Christian Science Monitor's account of the Titanic, which soothes the readers' concerns by assuring them that all the passengers are safe, and the ship is being towed to port.

To help the Wikisource effort, I have been slowly typing in texts from various public domain books that I have, including several volumes of the University Musical Encyclopedia (1912). Having finished the first volume of Great Composers, I decided to work on Great Vocalists, and just added the article on the Italian tenor Mario (Madonna and Cher were not the first to go by just one name, it seems). I had never heard of him before, but even more importantly, the article was short and I was tired. As with all the other articles, I decided to link it to the Wikipedia article to see what contemporary scholarship has to say about this important singer.

Bzzzt!!! The Wikipedia article Mario is about the Nintendo mascot, star of Super Mario Brothers. And a thorough article it is! In fact, it is the main article of an entire portal devoted to Mario (a subportal of Nintendo), and links to a complete collection of quotes by Mario, taken from Super Mario Brothers. Exactly what one would expect in an academic reference work.

Continuing on in my search for my Mario, I finally found his Wikipedia article on a disambiguation page. By now I was curious. How had scholarship about this tenor improved in the past one hundred years, since he appeared in the University Musical Encyclopedia. Sadly, I cannot tell you. You see, whereas my text is from 1912, the Wikipedia article was lifted from the Encyclopedia Britannica 1911, so my text is actually a year more current. Of course, the Wikipedia text has been edited and expanded, particularly in the past two months, but it is still tagged as a Britannica article, and there is no way of knowing what the sources of information are for any changes, because there are no references (and the edits were made largely by anonymous IPs). In contrast, Nintendo Mario has 27 references, explaining where the information came from. It is one of many thousands of pages taken in some way from EB 1911. Usually, there is no way of knowing what is updated and what is not, though it stands to reason that things have changed in the past 97 years, especially in fields like Geochemistry, but also in such subjects as Russian history (see, for instance, Alexander I, II, and III) or the French region of Anjou.

This leaves me with several questions:

Why are so many Wikipedia articles so out of date, except in issues relating to pop culture and current events? Is it the encyclopedia that was written collaboratively, or that was copied willy-nilly from other, older sources, many of them outdated?
Why are genuine encyclopedia articles, like Mario (tenor), relegated to second class status because of pop culture topics? Shouldn't Nintendo be paying for all this free advertising?
Wouldn't all the Mario information be better placed in Wikia?
When (if?) stable versions come out, will hundred-year-old articles be locked as stable without any consideration of their quality in today's world?

Or is encyclopedic quality not something to worry about?

Waiting for Godot

2008-04-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

In 1981, when I first arrived in Israel, I was about as far to the fundamentalist right as they come. It was just before the withdrawal from Sinai, so I moved down to a makeshift settlement, where I grew tomatoes and fought off Israeli troops so that Sinai would remain part of the Jewish state. In the end, I actually sat in jail for a week, while the final withdrawal took place.

Twenty years later I left Israel, disappointed with the reality behind the Zionist idealism I had as a teen. I had seen the Lebanon War and the eventual withdrawal, the murder of Emil Greenzweig and later the assassination of Rabin—in fact, the only reason I wasn’t at the demonstration where he was shot was that I had to get back to reserve duty the next morning on the Sinai border. I had certainly experienced a political transformation: the Rak lo Netanyahu ("Anyone but Netanyahu") campaign of 1999 was run out of my living room. I had seen a chance for peace, and I had seen that chance shattered. I left five days after Sharon was first elected. I was an arrogant, naïve teen in 1981, when I first arrived in the country, but while I had grown up and exchanged that naïve idealism for a harsh dose of reality, it seemed like too many Israelis had not.

And people on both sides, Israelis and Palestinians, are still waiting for peace …

And people on both sides will still have to wait …

This May the World Economic Forum will be holding a meeting in Sharm ash-Sheikh, a coastal town in the southern Sinai, to foster a new economic vision for the Middle East. Its Chairs include Khalid Abdullah Janahi of the Ithmaar Bank, Kuwaiti industrialist Muhammad Alshaya, the Duke of York in his capacity as the UK Special Representative for International Trade and Investment, and none other than Jimmy Wales, Chair Emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation.

To quote that old Sesame Street song, "One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong …" Has Jimmy been asked to attend because of his deep understanding of the cultures and economics of the Middle East, or is it because the organizers think that like Wikipedia, they can edit the history and change things at a whim, without anyone being accountable? Does Jimmy actually think he has what to contribute to this forum, or is he going with the hope that he can edit an article on camels in exchange for a new wife? Is this really about peace and economic prosperity for people who have lived in a never-ending cycle of poverty and violence, or is it about photo opportunities and more chances to name drop with the big shots? Do the children of the refugee camps in Gaza need more Pokemon articles in Arabic, or do they need infrastructure, wise leadership, and a chance for a future?

Over at Wikipedia Review, they are quick to point out how people's lives and reputations can be ruined by hordes of arrogant, naïve Wikipedia idealists, many of them a lot like me when I was eighteen years old. With Jimmy Wales, the snake oil salesman, involving himself in the future of the Middle East, I can only wonder how many more lives will be ruined.

And people on both sides, Israelis and Palestinians, are still waiting for peace …

And people on both sides will still have to wait …

Or to quote Israeli singer Shalom Hanoch: משיח לא בא. משיח גם לא מטלפן.

Irony of Ironies

2008-04-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

It seems like all the Google ads on my post Where the Power Lies are fundie-related, and include such gems as GodTube (kinda like XTube for the feeble-minded). So, to counter the influence on anyone who may have clicked, check out one of my personal heroes ... or simply pray for my salvation here.

A Really Good Question

2008-04-01T15:43:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to see the Foundation, in the person of Mike Godwin, acting wisely with regard to the Wikicouncil proposal. In his most recent post to Foundation-l, he asks: "Has anyone conducted a legal review of the proposal for a Volunteer Council (including review of the Florida "Corporations Not For Profit" statute)?"

At least someone is asking the right questions. Thank you.

Where the Power Really Lies

2008-03-31T19:56:00.000-07:00

It seems that Effeietsanders has decided who should be on his proposed Wikicouncil. Not that anyone knows exactly what said Wikicouncil is intended to do, but at least we now know who they are, and how they can expand their little circle--by deciding among themselves.

So who are these new people with a title, and an as-yet-to-be-determined modicum of Wikipower? Ladies and Gentlemen, I present:

Michael Bimmler, Mbimmler (Main project: de.wikipedia)
Yaroslav Blanter, Yaroslav Blanter (Main project: ru.wikipedia)
Lise Broer, Durova (Main projects: en.wikipedia and commons.wikimedia )
Jesse Plamondon-Willard, Pathoschild (Main projects: en.wikisource and meta.wikimedia )
Sydney Poore, FloNight (Main project: en.wikipedia)
Milos Rancic, Millosh (Main project: sr.wikipedia)
Ray Saintonge, Eclecticology (Main project: en.wikisource, en.wikipedia)
Andrew Whitworth, Whiteknight (Main project: en.wikibooks)
Michal Zlatkovsky, Timichal (Main project: cs.wikipedia)

Nine new people; nine new rassaphores about to enter the sanctum sanctorum of wikipolitics extraordinaire. The truth is, I like many of them, but still, I can only wonder about some of the choices.

Are all the people of legal age to make decisions regarding the Wikimedia Foundation? It could be decided that their power rivals that of the Board itself: if so, they should all be eligible to serve as Board members?
Have they maintained clean reputations on their respective projects? For better or for worse (I think for better), a bad reputation on her home project prevented Aphaia from being elected Steward. Should that not be a consideration here as well? After all, these people are appointed in lieu of elections in which they may not be electable.
Do they have other responsibilities (members of chapter committees, arb coms, the boards of local chapters, etc.) that would prevent them from giving their all to this new task? We don't want to seem like we are just adding titles to the already entitled.

Yet, while those are three points to consider, there is another, more important point that cannot be ignored. In a recent post to Foundation-l, Aphaia spoke out sharply about "American arrogance" ("I daresay I sure was not chosen to mimic US arrogance"). Now normally, I refuse to take anything she says seriously, but when it comes to the Wikicouncil, I'm afraid she has a point. Of the nine members, five are from English-language projects, while some of the most prominent projects have no representation whatsoever. I mean, sure Pathoschild speaks French, but he is not representing the French Wikipedia, nor is anyone representing Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, or any of the other most prominent language projects. Wikimania is being held in Egypt (2008) and South America (2009), yet there is no one representing the Arabic, Spanish, or Portuguese projects. In fact, there is no one from Africa, Asia, or Australia either. All this does is tell me that despite the righteous indignation about why Wikimania should be in Alexandria/Buenos Aires, what really matters when it comes to governance is a hefty dose of Europe and North America--and sorry, but adding an Asian now will really smack of tokenism.

I hope that people will join me in denouncing this absurd proposal. In fact, given my last point, I expect to see GerardM and Aphaia on the barricades, opposing this resolution as vigorously as anyone. This is not the way to ensure the democratization of the WMF.

Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.

2008-03-30T19:57:00.001-07:00

Well, it seems as if Wikimania 2009 will be held in Buenos Aires. While there is certainly none of the uproar that surrounded the Alexandria decision (what's happening with the security consultant?), there are some people raising objections about the cost of traveling to Buenos Aires as compared to somewhere in North America or Europe. Just for the fun of it, I checked some prices on Expedia, and found that if I book now, I can go Frankfurt-Buenos Aires round trip (Wed 7/30/2008 — Thu 8/7/2008) for as little as $1441, with a stopover in scenic Sao Paolo. If I flew from New York, it would cost $1033 with a stop in Mexico City. All in all, that's not too bad, considering the strange Travelocity results I got (Berlin - Buenos Aires, $9,000). And Buenos Aires is a beautiful city, with lots of great food (steak three meals a day), fabulous yerba mate (I am polishing off a bombilla as I type), and wonderful dance clubs (who will Jimmy tango with?).

Still, there are concerns about the cost, and whether the jury really considered this adequately. After all, Wikimedia has a high concentration of students, for whom these prices really are prohibitive. Perhaps there is a solution, though, which will address these concerns fairly. The jury consisted of 13 voting members, 2 advisors, and 3 moderators, for a total of 18 people. Perhaps it would be best if the Foundation announced that except for current Board members (Board and not Advisory Board) and Sue, all other participants in the decision will not have their airfare compensated by the Foundation. If they want to go, and they think the price is reasonable, they can pay their own airfare, leaving scholarships for run-of-the-mill Wikipedians who don't happen to have friends in high places.

As for any arguments that they are needed to help in planning and organization, that seems not to be the case, because it is a great organizing team. And so what if some of them are staff? When the WMF has a staff of fifty, will they all be flown around the world for each Wikimania? I am sure they can find something to do in the office while Sue is away. Nor is it a question of money: I am sure the donors who just gave so generously didn't intend their funds to have the favorite few tramp to exotic locations for parties. In fact it would be much more meaningful if the available funds were used to bring people from smaller projects to Wikimania, and make this a truly international event.

So, Angela, Achal, Dror, Britty, Titan, Yu, Austin, SJ, Damian, Delphine, Cary, Phoebe, James ... How about making the commitment here and now by stating unequivocally that you will not accept any money to attend Wikimania, and you are doing it so that other Wikipedians who have never attended a single event will have a chance to go? Besides, if you do choose to go to Wikimania, remember, it's not that expensive after all.