I just finished an excellent biography of Ayn Rand and her philosophy in the context of American political culture. While reading, I couldn't help think of Wales' expressed interest in Objectivism and the next to the last page actually comments on this issue:

One of the many ironies of Rand's career is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of community. Among her high-profile fans as Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seemed to both embody and defy Rand's beliefs. The website's emphasis on individual empowerment, the value of knowledge, and its own risky organizational model reflects Rand's sensibility. But its trust in the wisdom of crowds, celebration of the social nature of knowledge, and faith that many working together will produce something of enduring value contradict Rand's adage "all creation is individual." (Burns 2009, p. 284)

For the most part, I wrote my dissertation and book manuscript using a simplified version of markdown complemented with biblatex citations. Because it was a simple text file, it made managing the edits to the manuscript very easy. I could do global textual replacements trivially. Also, obviously, it was trivial to generate PDFs, HTML, etc. Using Mercurial, I could take advantage of some nice features like the "attic" extension which allows me to keep change sets on the side to be applied only when appropriate. So, for example, the changes necessary generate HTML were kept in the attic and would only be applied when I wanted that.

Unfortunately, once the manuscript went into the MIT Press system, I had to use Microsoft Word. As much as much as the Word document format annoys me, I understand it is widely used, and I can't think of an easy alternative that also provides the capability for editorial annotations. Nonetheless, I had a difficult time seeing changes in Microsoft Word, and want to backport the changes into my source files. And, there does not appear to be a nice textual difference tool for Word documents.

I have posted a small Python script that makes use of antiword and dwdiff but also gives me context on either side of the change. It, of course, doesn't work well with formatting, but is useful and will generate output like the following:

   reflects {-the-} [+a+] stabilization
   a {-number of pragmatic questions: it-} [+project was conceived. It+] would
   there {-will-} [+would+] be
   article {-will-} [+would+] be
   linked {-to from-} [+via+] a

This week I've been reading the reports from camp KDE 2010 and looking forward to attending a few hours of Wikipedia Day NYC. So it was a great pleasure to read Biella Coleman's "The Hacker Conference: a Ritual Condensation and Celebration of the Lifeworld". I haven't seen anyone else address this issue, but as a sometimes participant and scholar of related communities, I think she is right to highlight the importance of this venue. In my forthcoming book I note that in addition to virtual spaces "there are the physical spaces in which some community members interact."

Through Wikipedia "meetups" I've attended in New York and annual Wikimania conferences I've met a couple dozen contributors. Many of these people I've spoken to more than once, and it's quite easy to speak to a newly met Wikipedian about issues of concern to the community. These conversations were informative, but casual.

So, while formal face-to-face interviews played a very small part in my work, the opportunity to meet with people, to participate in conversations, to see playfulness and laugh at jokes was essential to interpreting what I saw happening online. In Biella's work I particularly appreciated the inclusion of some history (though I wanted more detail, including whether fandom conferences might've had any influence), and how Debian women in part rose out of the opportunity of face-to-face interaction.

Coincidentally, in the last year I have been particularly interested in questions of gender representation and participation at geek conferences. There were a number of instances in which the "playful" discourse of men were said to be predicated on sexist assumptions, and at the least had an alienating effect (e.g., Stallman, Aimonetti, Mouette ). In fact, in a conversation with Biella this summer I noted that 2009 was probably the "Year of [Something]", where "something" connotes a greater gender consciousness or willingness to confront alienating discourse in open content communities -- but I couldn't come up with a good word!

One of my favorite blogs is MIT's Tomorrow's Professor, and I particularly appreciate the essay on Explaining the Reasons for Criticisms of Students’ Academic Performance. Barbara Walvoord spends some times discussing both student and (end of year) teacher assessment. It seems to me that the question of how to make feedback connect and count with the student is central to the exercise of teaching. In the past year, I have experimented with breaking my final assessment feedback on an assignment down into four categories: engagement, understanding, writing, and scholarly support.

I think this works well, though it can be difficult to ascertain in the course evaluations. While the majority of students assess the completeness of the syllabus and my feedback as relatively high (one student likened the point-based system and frequently e-mailed assessment reports as being "like a science") I still do have the infrequent evaluation where this is not the case. It is a puzzle to me how student could say my syllabus was not complete, or why after I give feedback on one assignment they repeat the same mistakes in the next assignment. So this semester I'm going to try two more experiments: a quiz and self-evaluation. I plan to give a quiz on the actual syllabus (e.g., how many freebie absences are students allowed, do medical notes count against those freebies?) and as part of the first assignment ask students to evaluate what they are submitting in term of the four categories. I'm very interested to see the results.

I have tagged a new release of Thunderdell, the Freemind mindmap to biblatex utilities. Improvements include:

• The ability to emit biblatex or BibTex.
• More consistent/improved Unicode support, particularly in bibliographic keys.
• New feature for requesting either the long or short URL for Wikipedia sources.
• New feature for requesting that only URLs for exclusively online sources be emitted.
• New test for online sources.
• More biblatex fields, such as original publisher and year.
• Faster processing by using lxml, but can still fall back to etree.
• Use of optparse.
• The "essential node" function was removed.

My sense in teaching over the past four years is that I have been assessing higher grades. (I shy from the term "giving grades" as it sounds like a gift based on character or my fondness for the student.) Beyond an anecdotal report on what the department median grade is (for which I appear to be one half letter grade above), I have no other information for the grading distributions in other classes in my department or at NYU, including other sections of the classes I teach. So, my philosophy is to tell students that if everyone performed excellently, that would be accordingly reflected. I then remind students frequently of how I evaluate their work, based on the departmental criteria, and at the beginning of the course provide exemplars of what I consider to be excellent work.

If there is an improvement over the initial semester, this doesn't surprise me in that I feel like my classes are now more honed, with exemplars students have a better sense of my expectations, and I've debugged assignment specifications. I also feel that while the material and assignments in the Media, Technology, and Society (MTS) class are more difficult than Conflict Management (CM), the students are more consistent. So, I performed a five number summary and generated the following box plots (with outliers below 70 truncated):

My conclusion is that while I assessed lower grades in my first semester of teaching each course, there is otherwise no consistent trend. Also, my sense of the MTS students being more consistent in performance is confirmed.

In the past few weeks there's been much discussion of news stories based on Felipe Ortega's dissertation; the concern is that Wikipedians are abandoning the online encyclopedia “in droves.” (What is a drove you ask? According to Wikipedia, it is an ancient route by which livestock were herded.) However, Erik Zachte, with the help of Felipe, shows how in such analysis the way that one constructs one’s parameters significantly affects the conclusions one can draw. For example, the alleged drop-off (deaths) of Wikipedia editors may be more the result of when and how the analysis is done. If you assume that an active Wikipedian is someone who did one edit (i.e., someone who was just experimenting), rather than five, or some other number (i.e., actual Wikipedians), this can significantly affect the outcome. Or, if you assume that a "death" is when someone has not been active for a month, you will naturally have a lot of deaths at the end of the analysis period because these people may have been simply "sleeping" for that month, but come back in the next month and you weren't there to see it. (Like the line from Twin Falls Idaho, a favorite movie of mine, "The sad ending is only because the author stops telling the story. But it still goes on. It's just untold.")

Wikimedia’s lesser noted response to the story claims significant efforts are being made to improve the recruitment and retention of users, but on the numbers side:

On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000. (See WikiStats data for the English Wikipedia.) Many other Wikipedia language editions saw a rise in the number of editors in the same time period.

Successful open communities must occasionally interact with closed worlds. For example, Wikipedia's openness and transparency sometimes conflict with their obligations to be responsive to the law (e.g., defamation, copyright, and human safety). Such is a consequence of becoming a notable and established institution.

A new source of tension is the "professionalization" of Wikipedia administration -- a move I otherwise commend. It appears professional marketers were asked to develop a marketing/fundraising campaign, yielding the "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER" slogan. Some Wikipedians feel this is inappropriate, arrogant, and loud -- a sentiment with which I agree. A more wiki-typical discussion of appropriate slogans can be found here.

In the previous analysis, of the 174 women from the National Women's History Project, Wikipedia lacked articles on 23 of the women, Britannica missed 65. Hence, I found no support for the idea that gender imbalance in Wikipedians leads to similar imbalance in biographical coverage. However, this did support the (unsurprising) fact that Wikipedia has greater coverage in its number of subjects and article length. Therefore, as noted, on the gender question it would be nice to have a sense of relative proportions.

Consequently, in the second analysis I look at Time's "100" most influential people from 2008. (There are more than 100 subjects because there are a few couples that I break out.)

43 entries are missing from EB; 4 from WP. 4 entries are in neither. For articles existing in both, WP articles are 7.66 times larger on average (median of 6.81).

Of the 105 entries: I guess that 23 are female, 82 are male and 0 are unknown. That is, the ratio of females to males is 0.28. Of the Wikipedia articles, females are 0.29 (23/78) of males; and 0.27 (13/49) at Britannica.

That is, while one might claim that this ratio of 0.28 is evidence of a bias -- on the part of Time or the world at large -- it is a base line from which we can judge the reference works: neither Wikipedia nor Britannica are disproportionately better or worse. If the reference works were biased towards coverage of men, we would expect that ratio to be lower than 0.28 (e.g., if all missed articles were females).

Of course, I'd like to run this over a larger corpus, but in terms of easy to find lists of notable persons, these "100" lists are all I've found so far. Also, I'm relying upon heuristics again to guess the gender of subjects, but they seem to be working well. (EB's Mia-Farrow article is guessed as male because it's actually a stub/sentence in the Woody Allen article.) Finally, an additional feature my approach has is to augment the table with the content from both reference works, but I expect Britannica would not be happy about that so I don't provide that version publicly.

I have fallen out of the habit of posting updates at the beginning and the end of the semesters. (Mostly because I'm not a student anymore, so I'm not taking new and exciting classes and posting the resulting term papers; instead, I've mostly been focused on the book.) Yet, perhaps it's worthwhile to give it another go.

I've been speaking with a lot of people about Wikipedia, and two such interviews will be up by the end of the day.

• Bryan Crump on New Zealand Public Radio. I really enjoyed this one, Bryan was a great interviewer and I appreciated the non-rushed format (40 minutes!). (The audio files will only be available this week.)
• Natan Edelsburg, of NYU Steinhardt's Communication Club. Natan asks about studying phenomena like Wikipedia from the perspective of a communication student at NYU.

On the academic front:

• I'm doing the job search again, and the market seems much quieter than last year, but hope abides.
• I am teaching Conflict Management and Media, Technology, and Society.
• I've been asked to give two talks this semester: one on Wikipedia as a Reliable Source of Health Information for Professor Ralph Katz's honors seminar "Ethics, Pointillism, Epidemiology & Epistemology: Dueling with Health Science Information" and one on Wikipedia, Plagiarism, and Copyright for Fred Benenson's "Copyright, Commerce, and Culture" course.

Finally, for those interested in the New York City free culture scene, James Vasile is running a Planet NYC aggregator.