Plagiarism and authorship

From a New York Times article, “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age“:

…these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

Remixing, building on the work of others, collaborating (often anonymously), challenging the very premise of intellectual property… these are all happening.  And yes, the web makes plagiarism easier than ever to conduct (and to discover).  But is student plagiarism really coupled with changing conceptions of authorship?

I haven’t seen much evidence of that.  In the NYT article, I see instead people using plagiarism to attack values and ideas they don’t like.  For example, anthropologist Susan D. Blum, author of My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture:

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

“If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade,” Ms. Blum said, voicing student attitudes. “And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit.”

So plagiarism is a way to cast changing concepts of authorship and originality (and the politics of free culture that go with that) as moral failings.

Wikimania 2010

Free Knowledge in the City of Freedom. Staying out until dawn was not uncommon.

I am writing wrote this on the plane back from my first Wikimania. Wow! An amazing experience!

First off, I couldn’t have written my ROFLCon blog post if I had been to Wikimania already. What is true of the social dynamic of Wikipedia meetups for (mainly) the English Wikipedia community–that we tend to be on the introverted side, and it takes a while for people to open up–doesn’t translate to the international scope and scale of Wikimania. Wikimedians there were warm and friendly from the get-go. Maybe it takes a critical mass of sociality before introverts start to open up, rather than merely time. So bigger is better.

Organizationally, things were modestly chaotic. For the most part this was fine. The one real fail was that many attendees were unexpectedly kicked out of their dorms early, and I heard that a group of them ended up spending one night in a public park.

It’s really a shame that Wikimania hasn’t been held in North America since Wikimania 2005 in Boston. That was before the real upswing of Wikipedia’s popularity, and the majority of active American and Canadian Wikimedians have never had a chance since they joined to attend a nearby Wikimania.

Filmakers Scott Glosserman and Nic Hill with Jimmy Wales

One of the highlights of the conference was the premiere of Truth in Numbers?, a documentary about Wikipedia that’s been about 5 years in the making. It’ll be released publicly later this year. Reactions from Wikipedians were mixed and complicated, although during the screening itself it felt like a very positive reaction. The film gives a lot of focus to some shallow or misleading lines of criticism, and on an intellectual level, it comes off as largely anti-Wikipedia, contrasting the reasonable-sounding arguments of mature critics with the naive optimism of youthful Wikipedians. (For the most part, the critics’ arguments are easily answered, but the counter-arguments are a little more sophisticated than what can be explained well in a documentary aimed at an audience with little Wikipedia background.) Emotionally, though, I felt that Wikipedia–or rather, the Wikipedians–win in a landslide.

The Truth in Numbers? filmmakers also plan on releasing all the used and unused footage–full interviews with Wikipedians from around the world as well as important critics and supporters–so that others can re-edit and re-purpose it. There are many stories that could have been told in Truth in Numbers? I think the film is emotionally satisfying and it’s strong by the standards of the documentary genre.  Comparing it with other documentaries about weird communities, it’s far better than, say, Revolution OS, but not quite to the level Darkon or Spellbound.  I’m excited to see what else might come of it. A film intended to tell the history of Wikipedia would be quite different, and a film about the politics and values and philosophy of the Wikimedia movement would be different yet again. Hopefully the licensing of the extra footage will be free enough that the Wikimedia community can actually use it.

It was so great meeting many of the people I’ve known only online.  Really, Wikimedians are the awesome-est people in the world.  A whole year is too long until Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, Israel.  Hopefully I’ll be able to make it to Wiki-Conference New York in August to hold me over; last year’s was great, and this year’s should be even better.

Open Space discussion on Strategy

I took a few pictures, which seem to have been well received.  They’re all on Wikimedia Commons, too, along with 1000 others.  As a default, I didn’t add names for anyone but Wikimedia board and staff, since many Wikimedians may not like having named pics publicly available.  But let me know and I’ll add your name to your pic, if you like.

New city, new job

Whew! It’s a been a hectic few months since I blogged last!


Pittsburgh, our new home

Faith, Brighton and I bought a house and moved to greater Pittsburgh in late May (Glenshaw, to be precise). I have to call Faith “Dr. Honey”, instead of just honey; she has her M.D. now and is serving an anesthesiology residency at UPMC. Pittsburgh is awesome. The people are quite friendly (if rather more sexist and religiously conservative than New Englanders, on average). The “Pittsburgh Left” is both charming and dangerous. And I started a vegetable garden!

I’m not yet finished with my dissertation, but with the necessary move to Pittsburgh and the need to pull in at least some income, my options seemed limited. Academic positions were basically a non-starter. I was looking into jobs as a lab tech or a photographer or an in-home child-care provider, and there are actually some jobs in the Pittsburgh area (moreso than in much of the country). None looked too appealing. But the perfect opportunity opened up for me at perfect time.

I can has job?

In June I took a position with the Wikimedia Foundation: “online facilitator” for their 17 month “Public Policy Initiative“. In short, I’m part of a team focused on creating a Wikipedia Ambassadors program and developing good ways to get professors and their classes involved with improving Wikipedia content. (As a pilot, we’re starting with public policy professors in the U.S., but we hope to expand the scope of the programs we’re starting after the basics are in place.) I tell people I’m the head of the Pittsburgh Office of the Wikimedia Foundation. If you’re a Wikimedian in the Pittsburgh area, let’s get together some time; I’m going to try to start having regular Pittsburgh wiki and free culture meetups, which have never really happened before.

Finally, Wikimania. It deserves a post of its own…

Them and us: ROFLCon folks and Wikipedians

geeks of a different flavo

This weekend, I went up to Cambridge for ROFLCon II (see my pics).  It was a wonderful, happy, fun, smart conference, and I was really struck by the sense of solidarity among participants, who all consider themselves part of “Internet culture”.

Being part of a culture means drawing lines between “us” and “them”, and whenever Wikipedia was discussed I got the distinct impression that for ROFLCon folks, Wikipedia clearly falls into the category of “them”.  I was one of very few Wikipedians there that I know of (Stuart Geiger was there; I found out that Tim Pierce, a panelist who played a big role in Usenet history, is a Wikipedian; and I saw Benjamin Mako Hill briefly).  That’s not to say that ROFLCon folks don’t like Wikipedia; respect–including respectful criticism–was the dominant tone.  But as one of the Know Your Meme folks lamented in the final panel, “Wikipedia doesn’t care about memes”–and, by extension, a lot of other significant aspects of Internet culture that are not being documented by mainstream sources.  In a lot of ways, especially through policy, Wikipedia explicitly distances itself from Internet culture.

It’s also striking how different the ROFLCon social atmosphere was compared to virtually every Wikipedian gathering I’ve been to.  We–Wikipedians–are, on the whole, geeks of a different flavor.  ROFLCon is a conference of extroverts; Wikipedians tend to be more introverted.  At Wiki Conference New York City last year, one outsider suggested after hanging out with us for a while that maybe one reason for the gender imbalance among Wikipedians is that males are more likely to be aspies–and by implication, that Wikipedians, or at least the ones who come together to share their passion for Wikipedia, don’t seem like neurotypicals.  In my own experience Wikipedian gatherings can be wonderful, they just usually take a while for everyone to get comfortable with each other and start to let their personalities out.  ROFLCon (which at least gave me the impression of being closer to gender-balanced, although I didn’t try to calculate) was a conference of fast friendliness–even for people with rivalries and bad blood between them.

Ben Huh hugs moot, after harsh words
Ben Huh hugs moot after harsh words

How can so many people be so wrong?

Is this a representative sample?

I came across an interesting and disturbing poll yesterday: a post on The Daily Beast reports the results of a new Harris poll that finds staggering levels of disconnection from reality among Republicans: 67% think Obama is a socialist, 57% think he’s Muslim, and 24% think he might be the Antichrist.

I dented (like tweeting, but with a free network service) my initial reaction:

57% of Republicans think Obama is Muslim, 24% think he may be the Antichrist? Really? I just can’t wrap my head around it.

American public political discourse has gotten bad, but is it really that bad?  As a friend reminded me, you should always be skeptical of “scientific” data presented in unscientific ways.  I’ve been to a Tea Party; there really are a lot of people who believe that stuff, even in Connecticut.  But 57% of Republicans, and 32% of all Americans, think Obama is Muslim?  It just doesn’t compute that in an age of such powerful and ubiquitous media, so many people could be so wrong.

Fortunately, it looks like unreason and willful ignorance aren’t so widespread as this poll indicates.  In short, the poll is surely crap.  Pew polls in October 2008 and March 2009 found that a stable 17% of Republicans and 11% of all Americans thought Obama was Muslim.  It’s still depressing that there was no decline in misinformation between the campaign and the early months of Obama’s presidency, but 17% is a far cry from 57%.  And it’s just not believable that it could have gone from 17% to 57% in the last year.

The ABC polling blog has a helpful analysis of the methodological flaws in the Harris poll:

The purpose seems to have been to see how many people the pollsters could get to agree to pejorative statements about Obama.

It’s still astounding (and depressing) that poll wording and plausible-sounding but biased methodology can so distort public opinion.  Not to mention that so many people are happy to run with it.

silly videos and obscure post-structuralist terms

Evgeny Morozov has a new review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, and he spends a fair bit talking about Wikipedia, the touchstone for how the Internet is changing culture.  (Wikipedia researcher Ed Chi offered to review it for the Signpost, but Knopf publicity has so far ignored my every attempt to request a review copy.)  As I understand it, the book is in part an extension of Lanier’s Wikipedia-centered 2006 essay “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism“.  I haven’t read the book, but I trust Morozov’s assessment.  His central point is this:

Technology has penetrated our lives so deeply and so quickly that the only way to make sense of what is happening today requires not only drinking from the anecdotal fire hose that is Twitter, but also being able to contextualise these anecdotes in broader social, historical and cultural settings. But that’s not the kind of analysis that is spitting out of Silicon Valley blogs.

So who should be doing all of this thinking? Unfortunately, Lanier only tells us who should not be doing it: “Technology criticism should not be left to the Luddites”. Statements like this establish Lanier’s own bona fides – as a Silicon Valley maverick unafraid to confront the cyber-utopian establishment from the inside – but they fail to articulate any kind of vision for how to improve our way of discussing technology and its increasingly massive impact on society.

Morozov says that our understanding of the legal dimensions of the Internet have been elucidated by the likes of Zittrain, Lessig and Benkler.  But humanist and social scientists, he says, have let us down in their duty to explore the cultural dimensions of the rise of the networked society, by either ignoring it or relying “obscure post-structuralist terms” that occlude whatever insights they might or might not have.

The overall point, that the academy hasn’t done enough to make itself relevant to ongoing techno-cultural changes, is right on target.  But I think Morozov’s glib dismissal of work in media studies, sociology, anthropology, etc., is unfair to both the main ideas of post-structuralism and the writing skills of the better scholars who do work on technology and culture (Henry Jenkins and Jason Mittell come to mind, but I’m sure there are plenty of others).  Lanier’s epithet of “digital Maoism” is crude red-baiting; I’m not sure whether Morozov’s jargon jibe is red-baiting (post-structuralism being the province of the so-called academic left), he genuinely doesn’t think much of how humanists have analyzed the Internet, or he is just being contrary.

Post-structuralism is complicated (and I don’t pretend to be an expert) but what’s relevant in this context, I think, is (as the Wikipedia article obtusely puts it) the idea of “the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united; meaning itself inheres to the play of difference.”  Put another way, culture (that is, a work of culture) is valuable in whatever ways culture (that is, a culture, a group of people) values it; what matters is not the work itself (and its inherent or intended meaning) but the relationship between a work an its audience.  Related to this is a value judgment about what kinds of culture are better or more worthy of attention: “writerly” works that leave more opportunity for an audience to create its own meanings vs. “readerly” works that are less flexible and open to reinterpretation.  The relevance of these ideas for the Internet’s effects on culture should be obvious: audiences now have ways collaborating in the creation of new meanings and the reinterpretation of cultural works, and can often interact not only with authors work, but with the authors themselves (thereby influencing later works).

So when Lanier sneers at ‘silly videos’ and Morozov complains that Lessig doesn’t address “whether the shift to the remix culture as a primary form of cultural production would be good for society”, I can’t help but see it as the crux of a straw man argument.  You would have us give up our current system that creates such wonderful culture (left helpfully unspecified, since there’s no accounting for taste) in exchange for remixed YouTube tripe? But humanists are starting to place more value in the capital intensive products of the culture industry precisely because of the way that audiences can remix them and reuse them and create meanings from them.

YOYOW vs. privacy and anonymity

Laura DeNardis, in her presentation for the “Technologies of Dissent” panel at the Access to Knowledge and Human Rights conference today, illustrated the dangers of too much openness and access to certain kinds of knowledge by pointing to eightmaps.com, a mashup of Google Maps and donor data for the Prop 8 anti-same-sex-marriage campaign in California: you can find out right where these donors live in San Francisco.

Later in the panel, Eddan Katz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was emphasizing the virtues of online anonymity for facilitating free expression and dissent (with EFF’s Tor software, for example).

Obviously, most people at this conference think Prop 8 is a bad thing while anonymous communication between dissidents in places with oppressive and censorious governments is a good thing.  But is there a principled argument that eightmaps.com is good and legitimate and those Prop 8 donors ought not be able to hide from the public, while dissidents in Iran or China ought to be able to organize and speak out and push for their favored kinds of political change behind the cloak of anonymity?

It’s the tension, as panelist Anupam Chander explained it, between the Foulcault and the Habermas versions of the Internet’s potential: universal panopticon surveillance state vs. universal public sphere for rational discourse.

My own view is that there’s a balance to be struck between the classic net principle of YOYOW (“You Own Your Own Words” meaning both that you can say what you want to say and you are responsible for what you say) and the right to speak anonymously.  The balance (one of the driving tensions in the history of the Wikipedia community, incidentally) is essentially the question of  the limits of anonymous speech and action.

(Shooting from the hip here) I suggest a rule of thumb: the closer the political environment approximates an ideal Habermasian public sphere, the stronger the imperative that that people own their own words when they choose to engage in public discourse.  Likewise, the more limits on what people are allowed to say, the more right they have to engage in a wider variety of anonymous speech and action.  (For speech that is not intended to be part of the public sphere, things are quite different and there is more of an argument for privacy and anonymity.)

[A summary of the whole panel is up on the Yale ISP blog: A2K4 Panel II: Technologies of Dissent: Information and Expression in a Digital World]

“Minds for Sale” (or, “Clickworkers of the world, unite!”)

This recent lecture by Jonathan Zittrain is long, but well worth it.  It’s about various forms of crowdsourcing and clickwork, and their scary potential for exploitation, political manipulation, political repression, and other bad stuff, related to what I’ve blogged about Demand Media vs. Wikimedia and the psychology of fun and games.

The send-up of Wikipedians and why Wikipedia isn’t on Subvert and Profit is kinda cute at 39:20.

Demand Media vs. Wikimedia: the battle for the soul of the Internet

There’s one company I’ve been talking about more than any other lately: (the demonic) Demand Media http://jr.ly/mmzt and http://jr.ly/mxtp

–Jay Rosen on Twitter, 27 November 2009

When journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen discusses Demand Media and its business model, he always includes the parenthetical adjective demonic.  Demand Media is the answer to the question, what would Internet content look like if it was entirely and solely driven by advertising revenue?  Content is commissioned based on an algorithm that calculates the lifetime value of the ads that could be run against it.

Demand Media takes the routinization of knowledge work to its logical extreme.  (For those with a Marxist bent, is there any clearer example of the knowledge worker alienated from the products of his labor than Christian Muñoz-Donoso, from Rosen’s first link?)  And Demand Media expects to be producing “the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year” by next summer.

Wikipedia and other free culture projects, sometimes pejoratively described as “crowdsourcing” projects, have been criticized for undermining the economic viability of traditional, professionally produced media.   But what if the real choice for the future is not between the Wikimedia model and the traditional media model, but between the Wikimedia model and the Demand Media model?  Media driven by love versus media driven by money.  Editor-driven media where everyone is an editor versus demand-driven media where no one is an editor.  Media built from soul versus media with no soul.

Wikipedia blog posts I want to write

I have a bunch of ideas for more “Wikipedia in Theory” posts, but I’ve been too busy to write any of them lately.  So maybe if I jot down some of the ideas, I’ll get around to them before I forget about them.

  • “Wikipedia in Theory (postmodernism edition)” – how does the idea of metanarrative, and the postmodern condition of “incredulity toward metanarratives”, apply to Wikipedia, where readers are free to construct their own narratives as they weave from one article to the next (creating their own larger stories from the small ones in each article)?
  • “Wikipedia in Theory (economic governance edition)” – the recent economics Nobel was for work on economic governance of the commons.  How does Wikipedia look in the light the work of Nobel laureates Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson?
  • “Wikipedia in Theory (philosophy of technology edition)” – this could actually be several posts, but the key thing to explore is how the technology of Wikipedia shapes its social environment and vice-versa.  A related point that Erik Moeller drew my attention to a few years ago is how the wiki is an environment that allows even fairly novice users to extend and modify the technology, broadly interpreted as not just the base MediaWiki code but also the templates, interface, and even policy and process.
  • “Wikipedia in Theory (media studies edition)” – if there’s some truth to the idea that “the medium is the message”, then what messages is Wikipedia’s medium sending?
  • “Wikipedia in Theory (cyborg theory edition)” – Donna Haraway’s powerful-but-challenging Cyborg Manifesto (1991) lays out many themes that resonate strongly with Wikipedia and the cultural effects of the net more broadly: the importance of affinity over identity; the blurring of lines between social organisms and social machines; science fiction-inspired utopianism; the “informatics of domination”, and more.

Other suggestions are welcome.  What theoretical perspectives do you find interesting or provocative or useful when applied to Wikipedia?