Quickly on wikis

This is one of the #23things which links today's internet with its historical origins. It is based on:

"collaborative websites which can be directly edited merely by using a web browser…by anyone with access to it". 

That quote comes from Wiktionary, "the free online dictionary", whose entries are built, and later built upon, by its users. It's related to the famous Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia.

Attitudes to Wikimedia projects have tended to be derisive and elitist, exactly because it's common people contributing their knowledge freely, bit by bit, in their own language, relying on other volunteers to check its authenticity. Anecdotal evidence supports this; we all must have heard a story of someone logging into Wikipedia to change an article, just to win an argument at the time.

That argument broke down for me after realising two things:

1. Wikimedia material is updated faster than professional academia, and
2. The information in it is surprisingly detailed, and surprisingly high quality, since it's not aimed at any particular audience.

At this point, I remember a time in primary school where we had to look up the meanings behind days of the week and months of the year. I had the Oxford dictionary, which was different to everyone else's, and told me this much:

" The day of the week after Tuesday and before Thursday".

By contrast, Wiktionary tells us this much:

" The fourth day of the week in many religious traditions, and the third day of the week in systems using the ISO 8601 norm; it follows Tuesday and precedes Thursday".

Its page goes on to discuss the etymology (word origin), audio clips for pronunciation, as well as writing guide in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The online entry also lists informal and derived terminology, translations, and how its use and spelling has changed over time [in English]. As said on the homepage:

" Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics and extensive appendices. We aim to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it".

Just like Wikipedia, the homepage for Wiktionary has an introduction, and some content to help people begin: a featured word of the day in English, and the "foreign word of the day". They also include links to the standards they use, and an experimental space for new users.

Extensive use of hyperlinks is a distinguishing feature of Wikimedia, making them more interactive than standard articles or other pages of text. For this reason, I kept the links in both previous definitions. In this way, it took only four clicks/links to go from the homepage to the Wikipedia article about "play as therapy" for small children. Linking so many unrelated articles this way has led to Wikimedia being recognised as a massive, though useful, time sink, both for users and contributors. The way that different Wikimedia entries link to each other also forms a very well-connected data empire of its own.

Because of their simple design and construction, and the intensity of engagement by the target user community, wikis are popular on other social media. The urban dictionary should get a special mention, since it helps anyone with a net connection to keep up to date with slang, both in a contemporary and historical sense. In the same vein, fandom.com gives as much detail as you can handle about any particular game, movie, TV series, or other pop culture obsession.

In short: Wikimedia are a great resource for anyone generally, but especially those of the information professions. They're free, easy to use and understand, and as thorough as we allow them to be.

Diversity and Self-Representation

The question of how people represent themselves online has been fraught with complexity since the earliest days of social media. I have been intrigued by this for a long time, especially after living in parts of the world which use modified versions of the standard roman alphabet – or a completely different one altogether – and still navigating the technology and online spaces. I want to now present my thoughts and experience about digital diversity, as part of #23things.

Self-identification is an issue which people need to address in their earliest days of internet access, like what should be your first email address, and user names for different online fora. I for example was so boring that my first email address was the suggested gordon_douglas@hotmail.com. When the time came to replace it, the first idea that came to mind was to represent that I was born in Canberra. This has the added benefit of making it easier for other people to remember, after I give it out.

Curiously, communities form even at this early stage: I remember a friend – whose address was an numbered variant of doorhandle_@hotmail – being approached by other people with doorhandle_ addresses, organising out of spite for whoever had claimed the original doorhandle of hotmail. This included “hacktivists” from vastly different areas, including him in suburban Brisbane.

Social media and games further allowed the potential to customise a virtual character so that it appeared nothing like you. You could be part of the Orcish Horde in World of Warcraft, or one of various alien races in Mass Effect, and no one would really care about your real-world demographics like gender, height, or ethnicity. Virtual worlds like Second Life took character customisation to its extreme, allowing people to express themselves as having giraffe heads walking on springs instead of legs. 

Real-world demographics do penetrate these virtual worlds, however. English is easily the dominant language of Internet users, with Chinese as a strong second [I suspect that this is only modern simplified Mandarin, but may also include Cantonese and Taiwanese]. Russian is only meant to account for 109M users globally, but seems to be very active in a number of specific communities. These include several of my favourite computer games, as well as Bitcoin mining. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Internet subcultures have also developed over the past decade, with a stereotypical link between Koreans and Star Craft 2 for example, and other games being released explicitly based on Chinese and Japanese history and mythology, to counter the traditional European default.

What this means is that language barriers still arise. How do you join or join a conversation with someone you met online, but whose name you can’t read? 

Indeed, default Internet users are still assumed to be people like myself: younger, Caucasoid, Anglophone, able-bodied, and male. Even with evidence that females gamers make a growing portion of the market, and that 50% of all internet users are from Asia – not to mention growing numbers of people with disabilities – old habits die hard. The major producers still see North America as their main market, and so continue to populate their characters with Caucasian and African Americans. 

Robertson, Magdy, and Goldwater, in their 2018 study on use of skin tones in emojis, found that the lightest skin tones were the most popular in personal communications, particularly in Asia. This may have a relationship to how anime traditionally depicts otherwise distinctively Japanese ways of life, but with characters of Caucasoid appearance. They noted however that people with regular and reliable internet access are more likely to be of lighter skin-tones themselves, and so are more likely to be digitally active and visible. In North America, with 94% internet penetration, the use of various skin-tones is markedly more equal than in other parts of the world, further reinforcing the existing relationships between ethnicity, poverty, and access to technology. 

The above study was based on the difference between uses of digital icons where the skin-tone could/not be changed. The default is still a bright yellow, such as in the Simpsons or the typical smiley-face stickers. There is still a great case to be made for virtual escape-zones, where the characters or avatars are so far removed from real-world ethnicities as to be meaningless, in terms of working backwards. 

Online spaces were not intended to be political, and indeed, there is fierce backlash against “political correctness gone mad” and “social justice warriors” taking over. Real-world politics has also become fixated with denouncing “identity politics”, and yet, what is politics if not about identity? We commonly describe ourselves to others by our occupation, which carries a range of demographic assumptions. We are encouraged - at least in traditional political institutions - to self-identify by where we live, but we will curiously tell people which sports team we support freely, while information like ethnicity or country of birth has to be actively sought. People have always been diverse, and it should be no surprise that their diversity carries over to the internet.

Commonwealth of Data

One of the funny things that's come up in my readings is the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (A. A. C. R.). The idea behind it was that people should be able to read and decode any catalogue/library entry, by use of a common format. The fact of the existence of these standards might sound dry as a bone to you (and it was to me too), except that I learner a few cool facts, which got me thinking.

As well as providing a standard format, it also standardised features of the language. From my training as a TESOL teacher, I know that the difference between British English and American English is as different as say French and Quebecois. These rules standardised which spelling is used for what, and which punctuation is used.

Then there are the countries where it applies. Originally of course,it was a collaboration between the British Library and the Library of Congress, based on initial standards from the British Museum. Canada naturally joined in too, and so did Australia, and (West) Germany. To my knowledge, Ireland and New Zealand didn't adopt these rules.

These rules were also brought into line with the International Standard Bibliographic Description (I. S. B. D.), published in 2007. These rules and standards were brought about by collaboration instead of regulation, which could be why they are not widely used outside of the concerned profession. The organised network which drew these up recognises wider applications for information transfer and protection (copyright).

With my previous work in market research, I also came across standards for statistical classifications between Australia and New Zealand. Given that, I wonder if formulation and implementation of rules like this should be a role for the Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth is a natural place to co-ordinate and harmonise information transfer, short of a authority like UNESCO. We already have applications that can link libraries from Australia to Uruguay, as I discovered using public libraries in Melbourne. Using intergovernmental panels could not generate extra goodwill and cohesion amongst their member nations, and strengthen professional networks. It would also make institutions like the Commonwealth more relevant.