At the beginning of this year, I was sad to learn of the passing of Peter Kollock. He was one of the first to carefully think about cooperation and online communities. I've been citing his 1996 paper "The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace" for a long time now.

Unfortunately, while checking Web references, I discovered the above link to his paper no longer works (i.e., 404). This is the link that appears on his Wikipedia page and dozens of online bibliographies. It appears UCLA yanked his whole web space. The lack of institutional commitment to preserving work and providing stable URIs has always been a great irritation (e.g., see my entry on digital posterity about the links in my dissertation that were soon broken); at the W3C we would frequently talk about this frustration and how to best maintain our own commitment to preservation. And it's not only in death that our work soon disappears. After my time at the Berkman Center, subsequent to a Web site reorganization, I noted all the links to my work there were broken. They were able, and kind enough, to restore the HTML files though my biographical page looks screwy because of broken CSS and relative links -- so I don't even link to that anymore.

In the case of this particular paper by Kollock, it was fortunately published in a book, and I found a PDF version as well -- though I preferred the HTML.

Kollock, P. (1999a). The economies of online cooperation: Gifts and public goods in cyberspace. In Smith, M. and Kollock, P., editors, Communities in Cyberspace. Routledge Press, London. URL http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/archive/00002998/

Chris Anderson's "apparent plagiarism" of Wikipedia has prompted me to post something I was experimenting with last week about citations and URLs. Anderson claims that his text, which is very much like that of some Wikipedia articles, previously quoted and cited Wikipedia as a reference. However, in discussions with his publisher, there was some uncertainty about how to treat URLs (since Web pages might change) and Wikipedia (since it is collaboratively authored). Hence, he attempted a "write-though" for the "case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia)." This is obviously problematic and Wikipedia, on every article, gives guidance on how it can be cited, including the use of a permanent link to a specific version.

However, I can sympathize with the ugliness of long URLs and "last accessed" requirements. Since I began work on my Wikipedia manuscript an aspiration has been to create a work in which the vast majority of historical and ethnographic sources are readily accessible to the reader. This means I have a lot of references. So, as I give thought to the book in print and online form, I wonder how to strike the best balance. I've moved on from the dissertation's APA author-year towards Chicago Manual of Style notes format. Yet, I noticed that notes with URLs can get rather ugly. Particularly if one has more than one citation in a note. (Otherwise it looks like a law review paper.) My notes only implementation of Chicago, where the first reference is a full citation and subsequent references are short but include the oldid since I make use of different versions of the same article, is below. Imagine pages of this stuff, it's not easy to read:

53. Wikipedia, "Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View," Wikimedia, September 16, 2004, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia: Neutral point of view & oldid = 6042007 (accessed March 5, 2004); Wikipedia, "Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View," Wikimedia, November 3, 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia: Neutral point of view&oldid=249390830 (accessed November 3, 2008).

    ...

54. Wikipedia, "Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View (oldid=249390830)."

In the context of the Chicago notes variants, I've made the following experiment in my manuscript:

1. Long (end) notes upon first instance (including URL) and subsequent short notes (with version number noted in title of Wikipedia pages, such as in note 63 above) subsequently yields 396 pages.
2. Exclusively short (end) notes followed by bibliography with full citation (including URL) yields 452 pages.

Option 2 is more readable, but requires another redirection by the reader if they want full bibliographic detail, and adds pages (and weight and cost) to a book. Another option is to use an adaptation of Option 1: standard long-then-short Chicago without URLs in the printed book, which are provided online. This make a practical sort of sense (and this is what Anderson says he was planning to do), but is non-standard and I'm not sure how it would be received.

However, this difficulty doesn't mean that one should simply "write through" one's sources (whatever that means) and remove the attributions all together.

I recently finished two works about the "free culture" movement, each of which are polar opposites -- and in a way that is unsettling. The most recent is Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism: a Writer's Manifesto. I have long found it ironic that critics of "Web 2.0" -- to use a problematic term for this larger new media phenomenon -- end up adopting the evils they attribute to their subjects: visceral, from the hip, slapdash. Lawrence Lessig excoriates Helprin in a review so I need not waste any words here; even so, I continue to be surprised at what passes for informed criticism. On the other hand, David Bollier's Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own is an excellent history of the Creative Commons and Free Culture movement.

However, am I only praising those works that are congruent with my sympathies? While Bollier is not presenting criticism (pro or con), it is a favorable portrayal. But I don't think I'm being unfair. I consider myself allergic to unalloyed "Net boosterism" and the "Boing Boing" crowd. In my work on Wikipedia, I admit that I am fond of it but I try to take a "Neutral Point of View" as a scholar and an intellectual hobby. By this I mean that beyond academic concerns, I personally enjoy learning about different perspectives and trying to understand how people come to differing opinions. (So I'm identifying as a "skeptic" more so than an academic.) In fact, I was delighted to read Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Is Stupefied as Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future: or, Don't Trust Anyone under 30. While it sounds like another rant, it is a well-founded critique of how digital media is damaging literacy and civic preparedness in youth. He argues that while screen-based technology might further spatial cognitive skills, knowledge is being replaced with a narcissistic preoccupation with social peers and popular culture. And he actually makes logical arguments based on citations to research. One doesn't have to agree with his argument, but it deserves one's full consideration.

This is why I was disappointed a few semesters ago when I recommended Bauerlein to an otherwise excellent student who was a Net enthusiast. She treated Bauerlein as if he were a Keen or Helprin, cursorily brushing him off as someone who didn't "get it." This was counter to the spirit I was trying to inculcate in that class and began my musing on whether we have a genuinely informed and vital discourse.

Given my interest in Wikipedia, pseudo-science, and skepticism I'm fond of works which at least help us identify the implicit (social) concepts we invoke when we talk about knowledge, authority, and expertise. Evans and Collins (2007) Rethinking Expertise is an interesting treatment of the topic: well-written (though more explicit definitions of the terms would be useful), engaging (via examples from the literature on the sociology of science), and satisfying (solidifying some of the things I've been thinking myself).

In order to best understand the terms of their "Periodic Table of Expertises", I reproduce it in my (mindmap) notes with hypertext where appropriate. I thought I would share it here too. For those interested, but not yet convinced, there are a number of reviews [1,2], the one by Michael Lynch and a response from the authors are evidence of some of the theoretical differences in the Sociology of Science (i.e., the distance between the "ground" of actual practice and analytic categories).

Interdisciplines is running a forum on "Scientific Publications 3.0", where Kathleen Fitzpatrick speaks to the implications of "Peer-to-Peer Review." Beyond pointing out that I think Citizendium is getting short shrift, I conclude:

In any case, one of the alleged benefits of free and open source software (i.e., Linus' Law) and "Web 2.0" is one of peer review. Consequently, and simply, the question to consider is to what extent has the definition of a "peer" changed? In my work in code and prose I have received excellent feedback from non-credentialed peers. While getting feedback from credentialed peers is extremely valuable, it can be difficult to obtain in a timely fashion. (I appreciate, we are all busy, and these new technologies don't really change that, they might even make it worse.) One of the effects -- if not implicit purposes -- of traditional peer review is to define a discipline: to establish sensibilities, formalize methods, and develop a canon of literature. Therefore, a possible consequence in the opening of what is considered a peer (including colleagues from other disciplines and even expert lay practitioners) is a possible smudging of the disciplinary boundaries.

I am indebted to the help I received on comp.text.tex in formatting my dissertation and dealing with bibliography issues. When I turned to the book manuscript, I decided I wanted to move from APA parenthetical citations towards Chicago footnotes. Unfortunately, this is a complex system, and nothing was up to the task. Fortunately, the biblatex package, an absolutely brilliant piece of work by Philipp Lehman for defining bibliographic styles, became available in beta form. Unfortunately, there were very few styles available in this format. Luckily, I found a work in progress by Charles Schaum, and began making my own changes to improve compliance with the Chicago Manual of Style. I worked on this through a number of revisions, but eventually came up short. Now, David Fussner has published an amazing package using and demonstrating the power of biblatex. I don't imagine there is any bibliographic system out there that is as accommodating to the nuances of Chicago footnotes style.

I don't often post CFPs and I won't be able to attend WikiSym this year, but I am looking forward to reading the submissions and papers. I've been mulling over what it means when people describe "interdisciplinary" -- or "multidisciplinary" -- research and haven't reached any definitive conclusions, but as Inigo Montoya once said to Vizzini, I sometimes think: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." In any case, I hope this workshop might shed some light on the question in the context of wiki community studies.

Interdisciplinary Research on Wiki Communities, September 8, 2008

The array of approaches to studying wikis is a source of wealth but also a possible source of confusion: What are appropriate methodologies for the analysis of wiki communities? Which are the most critical parameters (both quantitative and qualitative) for study in wiki evolution and outcomes? Is it possible to find effective interdisciplinary approaches to augment our overall understanding of these dynamic creative environments? This workshop intends to provide an opportunity to explore these questions by researchers and practitioners willing to participate in a "brainstorming research meeting".

I have over 1000 primary sources in my Wikipedia research mindmaps. In accumulating some of those sources, I have already been confronted with their ephemerality. (And these are public sources only; I know lots of e-mails I would've liked to have access to by the likes of Wales, Sanger, and Stallman that apparently no longer exist.) So, doing a quick check-link analysis of the largest mindmap I find the following: 941 of those resources are "OK"; 21 are "404" (no longer there); and 10 "Timeout". So, just within a few years ~2% aren't readily available. For example, the link to Sanger's 2005 information about his (then) new Digital Universe project is already broken; but I must say news sites are the worst. Then, there are the URLs that don't have what they use to, those that are now password protected, and those that have new URLs because of a site reorganization -- blogs seem to be the worst on this front. Of course, I don't know if this rate is a linear trend and I would be interested in any research that shows longitudinal decrepitude rates of an existing corpus of links.

In any case, I expect my own modest historical inquiries are only the beginning; I think people will be writing histories of Wikipedia and the larger free culture movement decades in the future, though I am not sure how much of what we have today was still be there for them. I was surprised, and happy, to find that someone else is already making use of my Nupedia-l archive, so I thought it would do something similar for my other sources. I don't think this would be of much use to anyone today, and is somewhat "tainted" in that it is my own analytical take and selection of sources -- absent summaries, annotations and excerpts -- but it might be of use in the future.

This archive includes the HTML versions of two mindmaps and a copy of the online resource to which they link to. If you do make use of it, you can continue to refer to it as part of the "Reagle Wikipedia Archive."

This collection wp-sources.tar.bz2 was made by placing the HTML version of the mindmaps (wikip-primary.html and field-notes-cat.html) on a Web server and then issuing:

wget --restrict-file-names=windows -c --recursive --level=1 --span-hosts --convert-links --execute robots=off -t 4 http://reagle.org/joseph/2008/02/wp-srcs/field-note-cats.html

I recently read Andrew Ross' "No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs: Behind the Myth of the New Office Utopia" in remembrance of my own brief time as consultant in New York's "Silicon Alley" during the booming 90s. I even had a few meetings at Ross' study site: the ever-cool design/strategic/Web firm RazorFish. I like Ross' portrayals of American culture, including the "Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town," but I encountered him first in the Sokal Hoax affair -- and was disappointed with his defense of accepting a Po-Mo goobly-gook hoax submission to the prestigious Social Text journal. I expect I am sympathetic to Alan Sokal in this affair because as a former computer scientist I've been acculturated with the maxim of K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple Stupid. This sensibility persists into my engagement with humanities and social sciences -- though it sometimes causes me to feel alienated and distressed. Similarly, I've always been fond of physicist Richard Feynman's freshman principle regardless of the discipline: if something can't be explained in a freshman lecture, it is not yet well understood. (He was quite a character, and is also alleged to have said that the philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.)

So reading Ross again prompted me to peruse his Wikipedia article, which then led to the Sokal hoax article, and then to a wonderful list of similar hoaxes in other disciplines, including the fascinating tale of the Bogdanov brothers:

The Bogdanov Affair is an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twin brothers Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (alternately spelt Bogdanoff). These papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a proposed theory for describing what occurred at the Big Bang. The controversy started in 2002 when rumors spread on Usenet newsgroups that the work was a deliberate hoax intended to target weaknesses in the peer review system employed by the physics community to select papers for publication in academic journals. While the Bogdanov brothers continue to defend the veracity of their work, many physicists have alleged that the papers are nonsense, considering this evidence of the fallibility inherent within the peer review system. The debate over whether the work represented a contribution to physics, or instead was meaningless, spread from Usenet to many other Internet forums, including the blogs of notable physicists and both the French and English Wikipedia encyclopdia projects.

While perhaps not as common, the natural sciences too can suffer from incomprehensibility masquerading as erudition. In fact, some of the worst excesses in the humanities go hand in hand with speculative takes on cosmology and quantum physics. And, I am putting aside the interesting issues of the efficacy of peer-review and the extent to which a discipline can trust its members not to flat out lie -- such as the case of disgraced Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk. My main point here is to the extent that we should strive, and hold others accountable to, a standard of simplicity, or as Einstein said "as simple as possible, but not simpler."

For my own purposes I've come to view that which is incomprehensible to me as perhaps like medieval Scholasticism -- famously parodied with the question of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?". Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard were no doubt far smarter than me, but if one starts with particular set of assumptions (e.g., textual inerrancy), fetishize a logic over a broader rationality (e.g., dialectics, be they Christian or Marxist), and lack an understanding of how we fool ourselves (e.g., confirmation bias) I feel we can end up with brilliant nonsense. (Frederick Crews is famous for his criticism of Freudianism along these lines and his latest book is aptly titled "Follies of the Wise.")

And I now have a new term for describing those works that are manifestedly learned but for which I'm confused as to whether I'm too dumb to understand or they are simply incomprehensible. Herman Kogan (1958), in the "The Great EB: the Story of the Encyclopaedia Britannica," writes of the Britannica's editors difficulty with the "Algebraic Forms" article which was so complex that it was referred to different experts to assess whether it was sensible. In the final review, Simon Newcomb of Johns Hopkins University wrote, "It's magnificent, although I am not sure it is all clear to me but it's really magnificent." Consequently, the editor rejected the article as being "too magnificent" (p. 90).

I recently finished Peter Heather's (2006) The Fall of the Roman Empire. This popular, though no less rigorous, history is widely praised. The narrative is engaging and I appreciate the glossary, dramatis personae, and timeline; these help given the scope of the book spans 150 years, dozens of emperors (East and West), generals, and barbarian Kings. What most impressed me was Heather's treatment of sources. Many histories, particularly of ancient societies, are written in the third person objective. Yet, as I learned in my historical methods course, the practice of history is more than a recounting of events, but a substantiated argument about people and events in time. Heather presents his arguments as such: identifying when he agrees or disagrees with others or scholarly consensus, and addressing the circumstances of his sources. Rather than being simply a footnote, sources come to the foreground and become part of the story. A history of the source, such as Pullodius' commentary on Ambrose written in the margins of De Fide, or the listing of fourth century military and civilian offices, the Notitia Dignitatum, are interesting in themselves and contribute to a much deeper understanding of the ground on which Heather's arguments rest. While a popular history might present a more accessible or exciting version of an old tale, it is rare for it to communicate the challenges and excitement within the discipline -- because popular history often obscures its scholarship. But Heather brings it forward and what I thought might be a rather staid field -- don't we already know all we can do about the ancients? -- is shown as alive with new archaeological finds, textual fragments, analysis, and argument.

I know this will influence the next revision of one of my historical chapters with respect to how I speak about some of the primary sources I found.