Presentation for the Columbia Business School Transitioned Media conference May 21, 2010.

1. The Wikipedia Revolution:
Crowds, Collaboration, Content
and Curation Remaking the News
Transitioned Media
Conference
Columbia Business
School Andrew Lih
May 21, 2010 University of Southern California
http://andrewlih.com
Twitter: Fuzheado
Friday, May 21, 2010 1

2. Problem with Wikipedia...
Works in practice,
but not in theory
by bored-now@flickr, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NC License
Friday, May 21, 2010 2

3. Ranking
ComScore Top 5 (Nov 2009)
Alexa Top 6 (Feb 2009)
Since 2006, overtaken
NY Times, Amazon, Fox Interactive,
eBay, Time Warner sites
Photo by: victoriapeckham@flickr, Creative Commons
Friday, May 21, 2010 3

4. Friday, May 21, 2010 4

5. Larry Sanger
by SimSullen, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License
Friday, May 21, 2010 5

6. Jimmy Wales
By WiLLGT09@flickr, file is licensed under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
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7. Ward Cunningham
This file is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License
Friday, May 21, 2010 7

8. Friday, May 21, 2010 8

9. The Crowd at work
Given enough eyeballs,
all bugs are shallow
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10. Wikipedia Lessons
How has “the crowd” become
part of the news process?
Friday, May 21, 2010 10

11. User generated media
Viewer-contributed content
or
Community-curated works
Friday, May 21, 2010 11

12. Citizen journalists
Are bloggers journalists?
Some are, most aren’t.
Friday, May 21, 2010 12

13. Pro-Am Journalism?
Amateur Professional
standards standards
Noncommercial Most blogs and
(amateur) usergen content
Commercial
(pro)
Friday, May 21, 2010 13

14. OpenStreetmap
Like Wikipedia of maps
Contribute GPS “trails”
and traces to project
Creative Commons
license
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15. OpenStreetmap
Friday, May 21, 2010 15

16. OpenStreetmap - Haiti
Using:
Yahoo imagery
CIA maps
AFTER GeoEye
BEFORE
http://brainoff.com/weblog/2010/01/14/1518
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17. Content Creation vs Curation
Works
Creation
Works Curation
Friday, May 21, 2010 17

18. Dan Gillmor
Journalism is no longer a lecture.
It is a conversation
Friday, May 21, 2010 18

19. Lawrence Lessig
“weirdly totalitarian”
communications of the 20th
century yields to “read/write”
Friday, May 21, 2010 19

20. Leo Laporte, TWiT
Mass media is not natural to
the human condition...
An artifact of a certain
technological age
Friday, May 21, 2010 20

21. Jay Rosen
The people, formerly known
as the audience
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22. Information Pyramid
wisdom
knowledge
Information
data
Friday, May 21, 2010 22

23. Information Pyramid
?
wisdom
context, historical analysis
knowledge
press releases, live coverage, photos
Information
sports stats, weather metrics, financial
data
Friday, May 21, 2010 23

24. Impact of Internet Media
?
wisdom
context, historical analysis
knowledge
commodity press releases, live coverage, photos
user generated Information
multiple sources
sports, weather, financial
data
Friday, May 21, 2010 24

25. Journalism Values
editing fairness
?
research accuracy
storytelling wisdom balance
curation transparency
context, historical analysis
knowledge
commodity press releases, live coverage, photos
user generated Information
multiple sources
sports, weather, financial
data
Friday, May 21, 2010 25

26. Values
What is true, credible?
Arbiters, processes,
systems
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27. Working the crowd
Content...
Creation vs Curation
Friday, May 21, 2010 27

28. Citizen Journalists
CNN iReport
YouTube, Ustream.tv
Flickr, Wikimedia
Commons
Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 3.0 Wikimedia User:Didoundp
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29. Crowdsourcing - Discrete tasks
Open Streetmap
NASA Clickworkers
Guardian UK
TPM Muckraker
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30. NASA Clickworkers
Volunteers,
identifying and
classifying the
age of craters
on Mars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickworkers
Friday, May 21, 2010 30

31. Clickworkers vectorizing craters
“accomplished in a week
what a single graduate
student would have
needed a year to
complete”
The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
Friday, May 21, 2010 31

32. Crowdsourcing - Document dump
UK expenses scandal
(Guardian)
US DOJ attorneys
(TPM Muckraker)
Friday, May 21, 2010 32

33. UK Parliament expenses scandal
20,000
volunteers
comb through
PDF documents
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/four-crowdsourcing-lessons-from-the-guardians-spectacular-expenses-scandal-experiment/
Friday, May 21, 2010 33

34. Wisdom of Crowds Online
(Derek Powazek, SXSW2009)
Small simple tasks
Large diverse groups
Design for selfishness
Result aggregation
Photo by: iskanderbenamor@flickr, Creative Commons
Friday, May 21, 2010 34

35. Attorneys scandal
TPM Muckraker readers
combed thru 3,000 emails
In hours, crowd ID’ed
“compromising passages”
Result: MSM news stories,
Polk Award
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9083501
Friday, May 21, 2010 35

36. Robert Niles (Theme Park Insider)
“Crowdsouring...
will stand along the
traditional ‘big three’ of
interviews, observation and
examining documents”
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070731niles/
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37. Journalism Values
editing fairness
?
research accuracy
storytelling wisdom balance
curation transparency
context, historical analysis
knowledge
press releases, live coverage, photos
Information
sports, weather, financial
data
Friday, May 21, 2010 37

38. Clay Shirky
The problem is filter failure, not
information overload
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39. Understanding
Content Curation
Crowd/
Audience
Content | Curation Corporate/
Govt
? ? ?
wisdom
context, historical analysis
knowledge
press releases, live coverage, photos
Information
Wikipedia CNN iReport
sports, weather, financial
data NASA Open TPM ThemePark
Clickworkers Streetmap Muckraker Insider
attorneys
scandal
Credit: Andrew Lih, University of Southern California
Friday, May 21, 2010 39

40. Impact of Internet Media
?
wisdom
context, historical analysis
knowledge
press releases, live coverage, photos
Information
sports, weather, financial
data
Friday, May 21, 2010 40

41. News industry
Journalism not doomed but
it is shifting to a permanent
beta mode, disrupting
legacy media
Fortune at the top of the
pyramid
Friday, May 21, 2010 41

42. Journalism Values
editing fairness
?
research accuracy
storytelling wisdom balance
curation transparency
context, historical analysis
knowledge
press releases, live coverage, photos
Information
sports, weather, financial
data
Friday, May 21, 2010 42

43. THE WIKIPEDIA REVOLUTION
U.S. $24.99
HOW A BUNCH OF NOBODIES
CREATED THE WORLD’S “Imagine a world in which every single person
on the planet is given free access to the sum of
see
GREATEST ENCYCLOPEDIA all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”
—Jimmy Wales
With more than 2,000,000 individual articles on
y-
e
everything from Aa! (a Japanese pop group) to
nd Zzyzx, California, written by an army of volunteer
n- contributors, Wikipedia is the #8 site on the World
Wide Web. Created (and corrected) by anyone with
3]
it access to a computer, this impressive assemblage
]
of knowledge is growing at an astonishing rate of
d more than 30,000,000 words a month. Now for the
How a Bunch of Nobodies
Greatest Encyclopedia
Created the World’s
rson
first time, a Wikipedia insider tells the story of how
it all happened—from the first glimmer of an idea to
the global phenomenon it’s become.
Andrew Lih has been an administrator (a trusted
user who is granted access to technical features)
at Wikipedia for more than four years, as well as a
ANDREW LIH
regular host of the weekly Wikipedia podcast. In The
Andrew Lih
Wikipedia Revolution, he details the site’s inception
in 2001, its evolution, and its remarkable growth,
while also explaining its larger cultural repercussions.
Wikipedia is not just a website; it’s a global commu-
l
ANDREW LIH nity of contributors who have banded together out of
a shared passion for making knowledge free.
Featuring a Foreword by Wikipedia founder Jimmy
andrew@andrewlih.com
Wales and an Afterword that is itself a Wikipedia
creation.
Twitter: Fuzheado
Friday, May 21, 2010 43