User:Metaeducation

A user icon I drew, which represents my abstract notion of a non-useless factorization, a riff on the Windows logo but obviously different.

A user icon I drew, which represents my abstract notion of a non-useless factorization, a riff on the Windows logo but obviously different.

Although I know that there is a formal policy regarding what Wikipedia is not, it is at odds with my personal opinions. Here are two of the major reasons I think it is an important project:

• Wikipedia's politics provide a showcase for transparency in making and applying policies. It's not some kind of impractical social ideal, it's an attainable way of working that is fair and makes sense. I hope that it leads people to ultimately expect (and demand) openness and accountability from every government and corporation in the world.

• Wikipedia is one of few well-known projects that use software with built-in version control. By ensuring that old versions of information are available, there is less reason to fear making changes that lead to improvement. I hope that it leads people to ultimately expect (and demand) a full record of one's work in every program used for managing information.

This user page is somewhat strange, because I encourage you to improve it by editing...it's the wiki way! If you'd like to have a conversation about the material (or just say hello) then append those comments to my user talk page. Issues that are truly tangential to the work here should be directed to me via my user name on Yahoo or AIM.

(If you send me something and don't get a response, suspect foul play or an oversight on my part. Keep sending it through any available avenue—I'm notoriously dedicated to my quest to reduce isolation.)

First, An Important Notice

The words you are reading are supposed to be hosted on the Wikipedia. This free encyclopedia exposes the untapped potential of all those smart people who would otherwise be stuck reading the web instead of adding to it. Webmasters can't put up stale content on a wiki and leave it there forever—in the long run, someone will notice and be able to fix it.

Yet because the content on Wikipedia can be freely duplicated (per the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License), unscrupulous individuals on the web can abuse the model. Businesses hijack articles and place them on their own sites—littering the page with ads which cause blinking madness on every corner of our browser. Even worse, they prevent updates to information, so that it becomes old and inaccurate.

Though it's legal, this strikes me as very unethical, especially if they've taken writing I've done about myself and are using it for profit. Though there is a controversy brewing on Wikipedia's own usage of "subtle" paid advertisement, there is an open discussion about stemming that particular tide. Therefore I will still suggest that if you find this content anywhere else, DISREGARD IT and follow these directions to the canonical version:

Editing Philosophy

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File:Mac OS X Box.jpeg This user has a PowerBook G4 running on Tiger.

Articles here often tend to become jumbles of facts in no particular order. Since I think of myself as a decent writer, I'll often undertake restructurings merely to ensure articles sound okay when read aloud. I do this on topics I know nothing about—if I happen to find them interesting. I have several guidelines for writing style and editing, which I am constantly evolving as I learn more about this medium.

Eliminate Redundancy

One software concept I wish every non-technical person knew about (and that technical people would better act upon) is database normalization. Redundancy is bad, and hypertext gives us a fairly basic tool for avoiding it. Pursuant to that idea, a recurring aspect to my edits is to migrate parenthetical remarks into the article they expand upon. This also usually makes things more readable. So rather than saying:

"The lightbulb (invented by Thomas Edison) led to..."

...I would trust that those who want to know who invented the lightbulb could click and find out. So if I was satisfied that the lightbulb article covered the whole story of invention, then I'd change this to something like:

"With the invention of the lightbulb..."

Three Paragraph Introductions

I agree strongly with the general rule of the three-paragraph maximum for lead sections. Though some editors feel that this is "just a guideline", I think it shouldn't be taken lightly. There's probably also something about the 3-paragraph number that fits with experimentally verifiable aspects of cognition—such as the difficulty most people have remembering more than 7 digits at a time. There are also a growing number of applications which pull down the lead section (or just the lead paragraph) and put them in small windows—so we are helping enable that software by limiting the amount of text.

Those who favor long introductions are often passionate about subjects, and are afraid that a shorter introduction would bury important facts in the article body. Yet being selective about what to include in the lead paragraphs will make the subject more clear to a "casual reader". If the introduction is kept short enough, they'll read and absorb it—and be more likely to continue to the rest of the article. Even if a page is only rarely visited by disinterested audiences, they should be the targeted audience because those who are already wildly curious about a subject will slog through any stylistic decision.

It is also important to remember that a paragraph is not merely a visual convenience. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a spew of one-liners like Googlisms, and prose should be phrased coherently and in a way that eases absorption by the reader. Thus there is value in making sure that a paragraph has a "topic sentence" which gives a central idea that the following sentences are designed to support. (A good test of whether topic sentences have been properly used is to try reading the first sentence of each paragraph, and ensure that this provides an adequate overview of the writing.)

Constantly Refactor Talk Pages

I don't agree with the mindset of preserving full archives of discussions on talk pages. Unlike bulletin boards, discussions here can be refactored so that newcoming readers can skip dead-ends that were hit on the way to consensus. Examining debates for important ideas and forming them into articles of their own is the best policy—after all, we keep content pages updated to their most refined state and leave the chaff available in the history.

While old threads are evolving into genuine "editing guides" for each article, personal philosophy should not be lost in the shuffle. Everyone should be busy mutating their opinions and stances into their user pages, or into policy articles. Anyone who wishes to take an idea I've expressed and integrate it here may do so, though they should expect controversy and changes.

Dynamically Merge And Split Articles

Many inclusionists are opposed to merging short articles on related topics, based on the lack of technical limitation on the number of pages that Wikipedia can host. I point out that creating articles which simply redirect to a "holistic" discussion of related issues allows one the freedom to continue linking to those individual topics. This is often better than having several short articles which end up either being redundant, or forcing readers to keep flipping between pages to get an overview of the subjects.

I do, however, have one rule about merging topics that could reasonably deserve articles in their own right. Each term should appear in the introduction and be bolded. This way, those who reach the article through a redirect will quickly know they have reached the right place—even though the title does not match what they were searching for. If it is not sensible to introduce the term in the introduction this way, I would oppose performing the merge.

Suggestions for Wikipedia Technology

Many think that allowing any bozo on the internet to update web pages will never work in the long term. Human nature doesn't really seem to be "good" enough to sustain anarchy, especially since one persistent vandal could spoil a whole article (which happens all the time). Even well-meaning editors can argue forever—leading to the infamous "revert wars" where they overwrite what others have contributed in earnest. Plus when it comes to having threaded discussions, the wiki model has a horrible user interface...and it's tough to tell when people alter things you wrote after the fact to make it look like you said something you didn't.

I agree with all these points, and what we have is only going to be viable for a short-term. Hopefully we can learn something in the meantime, see the potential of the metaphor, and conceive better systems without getting bitter like Ted Nelson. He was working on an early hypertext system that failed and said:

"HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT—ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management."

Still, he's right about that, and Wikipedia is following the pattern of being too simplistic to stand in the long term. I lean towards a belief in something more like Wikinfo, which allows for multiple pages on a topic that reflect different points of view. This is the only desirable solution for pages (or sections, or sentences) that are controversal. Since this can become unwieldy, choosing a default perspective based on the direct (and implied) information that is stored in social networks will be the ultimate solution. But that's probably a distant future, as Wikipedia has a lot of catch up to do technologically with efforts like LiveJournal. (Please don't interpret this as dismissive of the people who write MediaWiki—they're volunteers, and they grapple with serious issues of scalability that I sure wouldn't want to be stuck with solving.)

All criticisms aside, here are some productive suggestions for making Wikipedia technologically better:

Automation of Disambiguation Pages

The lack of some kind of automatic mechanism of handling disambiguation pages strikes me as a major flaw. People are forced to manually mention at the top of a page that a term has other uses. If this were handled better, there wouldn't be any need to separate out things like Wiktionary from the Wikipedia. The point of the internet is that we are not limited by the boundaries or size of a book. This fits me squarely in the inclusionist camp...and I think a proper handling of disambiguation pages will be key in replacing domain names and growing Google monopoly. We should give ownership of Web portals back to "the people", instead of search engines or the squatter who registered the site name first.

Rich Formats Precluding Multiple Language Editions

Developing multiple language editions of Wikipedia—which don't even try to make articles use a consistent format or the same pictures — does not seem very forward-looking to me. Though I know machine translation isn't ready yet, it would be more worthwhile to have writers composing articles in a format that is more understandable to computers — just as XML is doing for other kinds of data. If a sentence (or part of a sentence) proves inpenetrable to the machine, give it a hint and then leave that hint (invisible) in the article. The more hints you have, the better the translation should be able to get — even in languages that aren't explicitly mentioned in the hint structure.

Heuristic Determination of What to Hyperlink

In the radical extreme of using hyperlinks, every single word and phrase would be linked. On Wikipedia this is discouraged because it makes editing and reading articles unwieldy, so writers are encouraged to be selective about which terms to call out within a given context. I am very interested in the idea of making it easy to link *everything*, and then use some kind of heuristic which will decide whether to offer the user a visual cue to a particular article. This could be achieved using a comprehensive analysis of article clusters, and whenever a link would lead to a sufficiently tangential subject then the link would be highlighted.

Personal information about the individual browsing can help this process, such as noticing that an American probably doesn't need to see a hyperlink to an article about a U.S. state while someone living in Africa might. Even further tasks would use data encoded in social networks so that topics which are relevant to people you know are visually distinguished. (I'm sure this sort of capability is being explored by many search engines and portals, that want to munge pages you are reading instead of handing you the site directly, but the legal issues of doing this to non-free content are extensive.)

Management of Article Length

I like assembling lots of short stubby articles together into an article which represents a better overview of how they relate, in a way that makes it easier to mentally assemble. So though I'm not always a fan of disruptive templates that show up on articles, I am very fond of the cute merge tags. Working on this kind of restructuring feels good, and I like the way the refinements become organic...if they merge and split again, that's fine.

A specific feature that I think should be implemented is the ability to transclude the lead section from one article into another. If a page has gotten too long and then broken up, people are stuck writing a second summary in the main article—which becomes out of date. An extension of this facility could have a target article length expressed by the user, and then visually break up or merge the sections of articles automatically.

Projects Here

My Wikistress level!

The very first article I edited was to provide some findings on Doritos, based on a debate in a bar over where they got their name. It's something about frying and gold (oro means gold, -ito suffix means little, etc). I'm not entirely sure we've gotten the official word on this, and one day I'm going to call the Frito-Lay hotline and find out for sure, and possibly lobby them for a bag of free chips.

These days I have several projects, as well as some pending campaigns for improving the Wikipedia experience. I think about these issues from time-to-time. This is a summary for those interested, as well as a sort of task list to remind me of what I'm supposed to be doing.

Featured Article Meddling

I've taken to checking in on the upcoming featured articles of the day and cleaning up the introductions (if necessary). I imagine that featured articles get viewed a lot by newcomers to the site, and my hope is to ensure that their first impression is positive so they don't dismiss Wikipedia outright. Sometimes I'm duly impressed by the existing introductions, but my poetic sensibilities usually lead me to feel troubled by repetitive sentence structures and poor word choice. Just as importantly, I don't see an attempt for these introductions to leave out details which are best left to the article body. If I perform a rewording and make a mistake, please correct me.

Put "See Also" Templates In Article Body

There's a growing practice of placing templates at the head of an article that implementa fancy "See Also" boxes (such as this one on the History of Poland). I think the existence of these graphical sidebars and the ability to re-use them on several pages is neat—like a webring for articles that are related. Yet when it comes to introductions, I'd rather see a good picture and a salient caption. That way the lead is not being compromised by yet-another-mechanism for cramming details that belong in the body into the very beginning of the article.

It would be good to figure out how to establish a user setting by which these boxes could be placed in different positions based on a user's preference. One option would be to have them at the top, another would be to pop it up as a separate browser window, or yet another would be to make it the head of the "See Also" section. Personally, I'd set mine to indicate the presence of such sidebars with an indicator like the portal template. This would appear at the top of the article, and if I were interested I could click through to see it.

Film Projects

I and some other editors once had the Film article quite readable. Now someone migrated a bunch of "related articles" into Film, while leaving those other articles intact. The result is a mess which outright duplicates the contents of other articles, and really pushes the reasonable length for the entry. I've kind of given up but I might go back and try to fix this...if the person who made that change has truly gone away and lost interest.

I've thought about maybe contributing some of my notes from school to the Movie-Making Wikibook. Though I'm no genius on the subject and lack any convincing credentials, I think I could make an entertaining and memorable introduction that would suit someone with a casual interest. So far I've been working on that offline, with some vague notions of trying to publish it as a non free-content work. If no one wants to publish it and pay me enough to feed myself for a day or two, then I'll certainly hand it over.

Trying to Stop Redundancy Between Wikis

I investigated how to organize an Interwiki project, and wantonly interfered with pages pertaining to the Homestar Runner cartoon — as there's a separate Homestar Runner Wiki. The "Hrwiki" is is so thorough that it obviates the issue of redundancy between wikis. I tried putting cute little ads which linked to the other wiki to try and steer people away from putting excessive detail about the cartoon on the Wikipedia. Those were shot down — with the general consensus being that only WikiMedia Foundation projects could get that kind of attention, even with a small graphical banner. I might try to write a policy page on the precise guidelines so that people in the future have a place to debate this, it needs to be addressed.

Moving Misplaced Humor to Uncyclopedia

If I see someone add a funny thing, I'm moving it to Uncyclopedia and noting that in the version history, so that when the vandal visits the page again they realize that there is a place for that kind of thing. Some people disagree with the idea that there's a need for all information to be dry and serious—even in an encyclopedia—and these people aren't necessarily bad. Glad there's a place for it, but I do sort of wish the Wikimedia foundation were running it, though I'm sure they don't want to touch the subject matter with a ten foot pole.

Taking Excessive Disclaimers out of New Age Articles

You wouldn't continuously reiterate in the Super Mario article that he's fictional, he's not real, and that people can't really shoot fireballs or grow twice their size from eating mushrooms. This is adequately covered by mentioning he's a video game character. In a similar vein, if you say Reiki is a New Age belief, you can then provide the details and let people decide if it is interesting or relevant to them. The bias of Wikipedia's technical users against spiritual or religious issues lead to droning disclaimers about what a hoax these topics are, often burying the netural point of view description of the belief. That isn't going to change anyone's opinion, and it's just going to send people to the extremes instead of really examining the issue. (Not to mention irritating people like me who are reading the article because we already know it's controversial and we want to know the main ideas so we can better make fun of it on Uncyclopedia.)

Reading About Hoaxes

Clarity is crucial for our own sake, as well as that of others. I'm interested in figuring out how to stop the acceptance of jargon which makes knowledge inaccessible to those who would like to pursue it. Like Niklaus Wirth said, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. So I'm strangely drawn to the likes of Bogdanov Affair and Time Cube. I check in on the Bogdanov Affair talk page from time to time...and it's a testbed for my thinking about how we might solve contentious topics. Recently I've been pleased to see the article is miraculously getting better, so peer review might work after all.

About Me and my "Ideals"

File:Meetup LA 1 Ben Brian Ben.jpg

Some bald guy making ridiculous gestures at the Los Angeles Wiki Meetup .

I'm a simple electrical engineer and film school dropout living in Hollywood, who is ostensibly interested in education. Wikipedia is not intended as a soapbox for issues that aren't relevant to writing an open-content encyclopedia, but sharing a few ideas here helps collaborators to understand my biases and goals.

My Philosophy of Education

A genuine education is the only way to prevent someone from being exploited by those who wish to limit and control them. The quote I came up with that best summarizes my philosophy is:

"It should never be more profitable to exploit a market than to educate it."

That's a little more complex than "do not practice deception", and perhaps it is unrealistic to think that society and its legal structure could be designed in a way to enforce the policy. I still believe that we could achieve this if people would commit to the objective. I'm disappointed with those who justify their participation in the existing flawed system, and though we all perpetuate it (in some way) the situation won't improve until we can at least share the goal.

On Freedom of Information

I'm an advocate of Free Software (though I've been skewered into running Mac OS X due to the tragic allure of PowerBook hardware, it's not entirely open although thankfully some parts are). I agree with Eben Moglen when he says:

The great moral question of the twenty-first century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?

To paraphrase the eloquent songwriter Michael Penn, until other important things become free—such as food, shelter, and medical care—producers of new creative kinds of information must be paid for their work. I am empathetic to this argument, but think that it only proves that we must stop the greed and inefficiency that makes it currently impossible to offer those things to absolutely everyone.

My Paranormal Leanings

I was raised to be skeptical—even hostile—towards the supernatural and those who believed in it. My own experiences with things like lucid dreaming have expanded my perspectives. I'm still not very impressed by most writing on metaphysical topics, and the sad state of their Wikipedia articles reflects that believers have a lot of work to do in putting their claims under scrutiny. Yet given the current balance of power, my focus has shifted to being more worried about the strangle-hold that the nearly amoral objectivist movement has over our institutions.

Although many watchdogs decry the fairly "surface" mixture of Christian influence on our government, the psychiatric establishment has quietly (and possibly subversively) integrated itself into laws and courts. Their dismissive attitude towards currently unproven phenomena are a serious threat to America's freedom of religion. However, it is important to note that the anti-psychiatry movement has its own agenda—and organizations like the Citizens Commission on Human Rights are controlled by the interests of movements such as Scientology. Like psychiatry, they force limited viewpoints on their victims, and charge them huge amounts of money for assistance that is largely ineffective.

My hope is for those who claim themselves to be "rational" to become less delusional themselves—so that they will not scare intelligent people away from medical treatments which might actually benefit them.

The Importance of Reliable Communication

I've noticed a growing tendency of people to use silence to indicate a rejection of a message, and a cultural assumption that this is the intention when a response is not received. This sets a dangerous precedent—especially in an era where internet services are automatically throwing away content that has been mechanically analyzed as spam. The practice facilitates interpersonal misunderstanding, as well as the abuse of power by governments or corporations that wish to suppress information about competitors (this has happened on major sites).

You would think that senders would get some kind of indication when an automatic mechanism sweeps a message under the rug. It is claimed that this is not done because it would multiply the impact of spam—since the networks would now have to carry the traffic for the mail AND the receipts. The second argument is that giving the feedback would allow spammers to quickly evolve their messages until they beat the tests. This is faulty reasoning, and I think we should be very wary of relying on an infrastructure which is not able to provide a bounce message to blocked mail.

Ideally each person who received a question would respond. This response doesn't have to be as lengthy as what was received, but should at least depend somehow on what was written. Any formulated and automated response—no matter how instant and "informative"—leads to the same systematic weaknesses as giving no response. Being "overwhelmed" with messages is not an excuse for ignoring these policies, because if someone is that popular (perhaps due to celebrity status) then they shouldn't have trouble delegating the duty of responding. A policy of not being upset by those who repeat attempts to communicate is also a very important key to the process.

The Dangers of Badly Designed Technology

Not wanting to rewrite the Unabomber manifesto or anything, here. But technologists who cast their wares out into the world without thinking the whole thing through...man. They're only accelerating the rate at which human nature's emergent properties are going to destroy the universe. If they spent as much time thinking of how to build in safety systems to their inventions, and going to first principles of what's right before doing things wrong, we'd be in better shape. I believe perfect and self-balancing designs are possible, and I wish we saw more of them. Don Knuth pays a finder's fee of $2.56 for any typos/mistakes discovered in his books, and I admire that kind of thing. Æ