“Swiftboaters beware!”

The battle to control Congress is on and this election year the truth is about to get Truthier. Twitter - the social media network, twenty-four-hour news site, conversation and blogging platform, wedding and death announcement site, gossip patrol, and the general online information center that connects all of us across the world — is also the new frontier in political campaigning.

Just in time for yet another season of fabrications that usually beleaguers the polarized and partisan debates and elections in the United States, social media and science are attempting to come to the rescue - in real time. The internet has already become a massive organizing tool for people around the world on various issues - from politics to humanitarian fundraising — and this year it will also double as a real-time lie-detector with the help of the Twitter API and the enormous amounts of data flow it garners. Now that mid-term elections are less than three weeks away, the just launched Truthy infographic project, website and algorithm is here to weed out the enormous amount of astroturfing and flat out lies that spread like viruses on the web —particularly memes that are propagated through twitter (and eventually through Google search as well because of the way rankings operate and because Google’s real-time results are often generated from tweets).

A twitter based research tool, Truthy (the project gets its name from a term pumped up by Stephen Colbert, “Truthy” being lies calculated to deceive, because they take some nugget of truth and twist it into an unrecognizably muddy form [Cliff Kuang]) is a combination of data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing that was conceived by a group of researchers at Indiana University’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research to help uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation that will surely crowd the world wide web leading up to the Nov 2nd elections. According to Filippo Menczer, who specializes in the modeling of meme explosions and is also one of the researchers heading the project, the Truthy system will be evaluating thousands of tweets an hour to identify new and emerging bursts of activity around memes of various flavor — with today’s flavor being politics. By using the Truthy system to analyze and map the diffusion of information on Twitter, the data and statistics provided will aid in the study of social epidemics to see just how memes propagate through the Twittersphere and exactly what causes a burst of popularity.

Though still in its early stages of research, with this information in hand, Truthy will ideally be able to detect the difference between memes that arise organically versus memes that are engineered as public relations campaigns across industries. But the Truthy algorithm can not do this alone and to help identify suspicious memes the system is being trained and “supplemented” with the power of the people, by leveraging crowdsourcing and having users help flag suspicious hashtags (that often become memes) - with the simple click of the Truthy button.

How Truthy works:

Once a user report a Twitter hashtag as ‘truthy’, web crawlers at Truthy begin to start following the hashtag, tracking who is retweeting it, and also using language algorithms to gauge the sentiment (angry or depressed). Other stats that become available are who the most common retweeter is, the most influential retweeter, and how long the retweeters have been active on twiter. Conveniently enough, all of these stats (for each meme) are presented in a dashboard on the Truthy site (Cliff Kuang).

The visualization of all this data should makes it much clearer to understand how memes spread on Twitter and see a pattern in how a particular tweet evolves, how it starts in the first place and who is doing the distributing — making it that much easier to track artificially created memes that are often coming from fake accounts. (For example, see the visualization below for Top Conservatives on Twitter).

Truthy could have certainly been useful last year when a Twitter bomb campaign was led by the American Future Fund, a known conservative group awash in money from hidden sources and also an active player in this coming fall’s elections. The group set as its target for attack Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, who very possibly lost the senatorial seat following the nine fake Twitter accounts that were set up by the organization in the early hours of election day (AFF managed to send out 929 smear tweets in two hours and reach 60,000 people before Twitter realized it wasn’t a grassroots campaign but spam (SocialTimes). But at least the incident inspired Metczer with the idea for a website that would track Twitter feeds and sniff out such lies.

A lie-detector like Truthy, as it further develops and becomes more accurate in sniffing out lies, seems like an inevitable addition to the media revolution sweeping the world today. Much like television and radio changed the flow and pace of information to the people and influenced decision-making, especially around election-time, social media tools like Twitter are in their prime today to serve the same industry-changing purpose.

As Clay Shirky points out in his Ted talk, media has native support for groups and conversations at the same time, and as old media get digitized, internet becomes the mobile carriage for all other media. The information we find on Twitter (and everywhere else across the web today) is still accumulated from multiple media sources — tv news clips, newspaper headlines, radio links, live-streams, etc. — it’s just that Twitter has become the new medium and site of coordination for all this information circling the web, where people have their platform for exchange of ideas and conversation. It is great that we can now also be producers rather than only consumers of media, and that we have an environment for convening and supporting groups of different ideas (Enzensberger would surely be satisfied with this open and networked reality). However with us becoming contributors, citizen-powered news that ripples through the internet like wildfire can be a danger to real life by impacting results with fabrications that are often hard to keep track of. One can easily see that as more information is pumped into our social media networks (such as Twitter, and increasingly Facebook) — the untrained and non-critical eye can easily mistake leading headlines and trending topics as the truth, just as millions of people believe what they read in tabloids, which are known to sensationalize crime, gossip and scandals.

As we are already keenly aware of this, and as is further pointed out by danah boyd, prejudice, intolerance, bigotry, and power are all baked into our [social] networks. In a world of networked media, it is easy to not get access to views from people who think from a different perspective. I concur - you can go on Twitter and only be ‘streamed’ the information you have filtered out to receive — in a political example, from Republican sites, party members and organizations, versus the whole scope of opinions and news feeds. Beyond simple feeds of information is the aspect of trending topics - a topic that has gained traction in a segment of the network to broader awareness, very often out of context. And once a trending topics triggers reaction, it is really hard to get meaningful dialogue going across (boyd).

It will be really fascinating to see how Truthy evolves as it moves past filtering politics and becomes an application to tell the legitimacy of ANY information you find on the web. With Twitter as one of the main aggregators of real-time data and talk across the globe, a truth-tool layered with a visualizer for the massive amount of data it combs will become indispensible to all facets of life.

It is about time the Internet steps up to web pollution, even if it is one tweet at a time — for now.

Links:

• Truthy project at Indiana University
• National Public Radio Science Friday - Ira Flatlow interviews Johan Bollen, Truthy project researcher

Sources:

boyd, danah (UX Magazine, February 2010) http://uxmag.com/features/streams-of-content-limited-attention

Gladwell, Malcolm (New Yorker, October 4, 2010)  http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz124zBOHbU

NPR Science Friday (October, 8 2010) http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201010085

Shirky, Clay (Ted@State, June 2009) http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

Kuang, Cliff (Fast Company Design, September 2010) http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662400/infographic-of-the-day-truthy-maps-malicious-twitter-memes

[Note: This was cross-posted on the Masters of Media blog on October 15th, 2010) 

Water, water everywhere but not a drop to spare. Blog Action Day is upon us, and this October 15th, the world is taking to the web and talking water! Tweet me some water? Not possible. But we can talk water. It’s a problem and a big deal.

Did you know more people have access to a cell phone than access to a toilet? We don’t stop to think about it often enough that lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of infection and spread of disease, and it’s this continued lack of unsafe water that causes 1.2 billion people to have no facilities at all!

It’s safe to say a huge percentage of us are spending the bigger portion of our days sitting in front of and staring at our computer screens and scrolling through Twitter and our RSS readers to see what’s new in the world — we’re not spending hours collecting safe and clean drinking water from a well several kilometers away. But thankfully, we’re not just consuming widespread information while we interact digitally with the outside world — we also happen to do quite a bit of contributing, by joining and and pushing conversations forward to promote positive social change. This has fostered the internet as the perfect venue to raise REAL WORLD awareness for global issues…like today’s champion of internet ‘gossip’ or ‘trending topic’: water, our most sacred diminishing resource!

While I was (and still am) wrapping up another post, and thinking and writing about real-world implications from the amounts of data and flow of often-false information we are exposed to today, I couldn’t resist joining Blog Action Day when I stumbled upon it…on where else but the Twitterverse? It’s one of the rewards of being enabled with one of the greatest organization tools society has had thus far — to be able to unite with thousands of bloggers from around the world to post about water with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action. Sparking discussion it certainly is accomplishing — with 135 participating countries and over 4,000 registererd blogs thus far.

                      /// See video below from the good people at Change.org:

                    Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo. ///

“Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted.”

“Access to clean water is not just a human rights issue. It’s an environmental issue. An animal welfare issue. A sustainability issue. Water is a global issue, and it affects all of us.”

Writing this post immediately after a nice hot shower in my apartment is fitting as I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to such a basic activity I often take for granted. To wake up in the morning, make coffee with water, drink a glass or two of water to battle the dehydration that follows my coffee, and cook with ingredients that undoubtedly required gallons of water to appear in my kitchen in the first place is something to be grateful for everyday. At the most obvious level, our second most basic human need — food — requires our first basic need — water.

We’re using more water than we think…just take a look at the water footprint of products we use daily and calculate your water footprint. (Really nice poster of our water footprint here)

You would think that with Earth being covered in water there’d be enough for us all. But even with water covering 97% of our dear planet Earth, there are very few drops to drink and we simply can’t live without water. Water as a human need for survival is here to stay, but given the diminishing supplies of water today, will there be enough to support us all in 30 years? In 50 years? What about in 200 years? We’re in a water crisis, and with everyday toxins destroying our least abundant resource, it’s a bleak look forward into our future that is drying up.

Water, like free education and free healthcare that is available in many countries around the world, is a human right to all! Help the cause and change the facts of our future!

Some water links to peruse:

Save Water!

Simple and unexpected ways to save water

Water footprint

8 Facts You Didn’t Know About Water

 My adventures in kaassouffle’ing have officially begun and the beloved Dutch streetfood snack has now triumphed to English Wikipedia status. Thus far, the bots have not attacked my entry and only a reviewer from the Czech Republic stepped in to align my photos to the right side of the page. Thank you, Vejvančický.

Though my first time in the Netherlands was five years ago as part of a Euro-trip, I was only introduced to this fried cheese delicacy when a Dutch friend was shocked to find out I had not experienced the ubiquitous greasy snack. To FEBO, and their nifty automat machine, we went and I did what every newbie does — I burned my mouth with the first bite of dripping hot cheese. So here I am a year later writing my first Wikipedia entry on kaassouffle — an entry possibly good enough to stay.

After my academic posting on Wikipedia a couple of weeks ago, it was time to make this assignment fun. I was curious about trivia relating to this snack and Googling it found there are very few ‘serious’ and factual entries about it. The Dutch Wikipedia page was quite bare, a few sentences long, and afterall, doesn’t this popular fast-food in the country I currently reside in deserve its very own (improved) entry in the English language?; I also thought of all the tourists who might be looking for Dutch cuisine (and experiences) they should try, and isn’t Wikipedia the first page nearly all of us go to?

My trivial Wikipedia page lives on for now and I am beginning to think it may be notable enough to stay. I can only hope fellow Wikipedians do not think it is a complete joke and instead decide to offer their own contributions as well as credible sources.

Stay tuned for updates…

There’s a new dimension in town. The physical spaces we inhabit are being transformed by cellspace technologies (also referred to as mobile media, wireless media, or location-based media), where data is constantly being delivered to and extracted from mobile physical space dwellers; for us, the result is an overlay of dynamic augmented data made possible by the always-growing and ever-more-connected network (Manovich, 2005).

The time has come for the virtual and physical to come together and the interplay of data is creating multi-dimensional and date-mined spaces; I know where you are, what you’re eating, who you’re hanging out with — and if I should check out your favorite lunch spot and have that sandwich you just melted over.

Yes, this is the power of today’s connected information culture - of being plugged into the social web enabled by our handy and ubiquitous mobile smart phones that are becoming the digital sensors of our physical spaces (why can’t a phone be just a phone?). In the time that we, the united citizens of the world wide web, got used to the idea of sharing previously private information about ourselves and our whereabouts publicly from our desktops and laptops, phone data speeds have expanded, device functionality has improved and access to the internet has transcended former boundaries where you could only connect to the ‘web’ through a computer. Now we’re not only getting online via a phone but we are no longer just connecting to the web when we ‘go online’ - we connect to people and the information they’re sharing, and more of the time we are connecting to social networking applications that dictate these fluid interactions today - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,FourSquare, and the like.

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Power in the People
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While we are way past the large open network of free flow of information sharing envisioned by Hans Enzensberger in 1970, and are further expanding the network by the increased connectivitiy of each node or ‘user’ in the network (Thacker and Galloway), we’ve managed to come closer to Deleuze’s “societies of control”.  This new phase of an inevitably monitored society - one dominated by status updates, checking-in and communicating more online/virtually than off - is undoubtedly evolving our social relationships, both negatively and positively. The advent of the mobile world has fostered a new type of social interaction for generations to come, and the social of today is no longer the social of tomorrow; we’re becoming less face-to-face social and connected to earth but more virtually social.

As we are witnessing first-hand today, people already desire to share an immense amount of data — from music to news — with the world, analyze it with various statistics, compare it with their ‘friends’ and now even visualize it (now possible with the numerous data visualization tools readily available (google visualizer, gapminder). Sharing is the incentive, and the present game-changer is this mobile information sharing is becoming the new form of being social.

What to do with the never-before-experienced availability of real-time data from around the world? Funnel it to build a crowd-sourced world, of course!

As much as I have a laundry list of reservations and suspicions about geo-location type of services - most relating to privacy, control and surveillance issues — for the purpose of this post, I would like to focus on the positive cultural aspects of a mobile social network, such as FourSquare.  There is a potentially meaningful higher purpose in the service other than checking into locations. As it overlays more and more dynamic data over our actual physical spaces, Foursquare, and other location based services that have popped up in the last couple of years, is slowly bridging the gap between the physical and digital space — between experiences that happen online and offline; augmented reality mobile applications like Layar will also undeniably be huge players in the field as the technology further develops. It is precisely this connecting of our virtual and physical spaces that is potentiating the possibility of crowdsourcing the way people can experiences cities, enabling our cities to be more social offline and ultimately make cities easier to use.

Enter Dennis Crowley , co-founder of FourSquare.  In his talk at this year’s PICNIC festival in Amsterdam he spoke of how we should think of FourSquare more as a location based service of recommendations, rather than simply a tool to check-in and see where our friends are; we should also view the world as a game, get ‘points’ for getting to places we’re already going, and have this ‘digital candy’ make us feel good about finding new places and leaving tips behind.

That’s not such twisted thinking — millions of people around the world are already doing this every day by posting reviews, tips, and appropriating star levels to restaurants and venues they visit via sites such as Yelp and Menupages and iPhone apps like UrbanSpoon. More of these posting are happening everyday via a mobile browser rather than from a computer — all without any actual incentive other than to share their personal opinion and experience with millions of other strangers around the world. It is a give, give, give mentality, for the good of available information! [I personally love that aspect of locale information sharing: many of my now favorite places I’ve discovered in my hometown of NYC were actually thanks to other people’s reviews —- choices abound and recommendations are priceless in narrowing down a world of overwhelming options; and as someone who’s always looking for the local experience when I travel and live abroad, sites like SpottedByLocals as well as the apps mentioned above become indispensible and true and tried favorites.]          

The crowdsourcing revolution is fully ON.

As Dennis explains, the evolution and growth of social cities becomes possible when we are finally crowdsourcing questions about cities back to the communities that own those same cities. We already frequent recommendation sites for a whole slew of activities we partake in the offline world — from trip itinerary planning and restaurant reviews to party nights out and service providers — so FourSquare and other emerging location based social networks are working to take all of the inside knowledge and expertise out in the physical world and build up a service of recommendations targeted for us. Don’t we always want the ‘inside scoop’ and aren’t we already more likely to visit a place or try a dish if a friend personally recommends it to us, especially if it’s outside our home city?

FourSquare, powered by a history that builds out from every place you’ve been to, hopes to become a smarter service this way — it can remember and make recommendations based on a precise formula: [places you’ve been] + [people you’ve been with and where] + [number of times at a given location]. As the app heads into this direction of becoming a go-to recommendation service (and it looks like that’s the plan with all the data they are provided with by users) the app, a.k.a ‘the machine’, will comb though all the data, analyze and generate recommendations based on whats popular for your very own targeted recommendation. Undeniably, the app will also learn an incredible amount of information about us. According to Crowley, FourSquare hopes to become a passive location tracker, so that, for example, a message will pop up if you’re near a place you marked you wanted to go to in the past, or next to a cafe your friends often go for dinner. Becoming a passive location tracker will not be too difficult — we are already conditioned to check our phone for texts, calls, directions, but now the phone also becomes a sensor that is aware of all opportunities near by. That also bestows a kind of creepy power to the phone - it knows where you are, that you last checked-in for breakfast and that you might be hungry for lunch now.

                               “Chance favors the prepared mind” -Louis Pasteur                          

Some other interesting aspects to keep in mind with location based social networks are the associated third-party applications that are developed. Take the very silly Assisted Serendipity app for example - a service that notifies you when the male-to-female ratio turns to your favor at venues you have marked to watch and also let’s you know when the optimal ratio you’re seeking has been met. So I suppose you can become more lazy and rely on FourSquare to let you know when you need to get your “game on”.

Time check: 2010. We’re on the cusp of location based social networks becoming as mainstream as text messaging on our phones. Let’s see how people and the cities they live in will take to the crowdsourcing technology and augmentation to come — afterall, even the remote possibility of the service existing depends on our participation in the first place.

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COMPARE Location Based Social Networks

Most social cities infographic

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Sources:

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of control” (1990)

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media”, New Left Review 64 (Nov. - Dec. 1970)

Galloway, R. A. & Thacker, E. (2007). The Exploit. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Howe, Jeff. (June 2006). The Rise of Crowdsourcing. Wired. Issue 14.06. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html

 Manovich, Lev. ‘The Poetics of Augmented Space” (2002; Revised 2005). http://manovich.net/DOCS/Augmented_2005.doc

PICNIC is certifiably special and cool. There’s a lot of love for ideas there and I’m happy to share that yesterday I finally had the chance to experience this unique festival first hand for the first time. Immediate impressions? I want to go again and again. And not just because of the awesome venue where it took place - the culture park, Westergasfbriek , my new favorite spot in Amsterdam. A dynamic program guided by the theme and principles of ‘Redesign the World’,  it featured an overwhelming amount of interesting sessions, speakers and hands-on workshops — many of which were happening at the same time — so attending for only one day was a real challenge for me in terms of fitting everything I wanted to see and not staying for more of the good stuff on day two and three. My brain is still buzzing after all the cognitive stimulation experienced there but it’s refreshing to experience the minds of the world coming together and brainstorming solutions.

To start off on the right foot, Amsterdam decided to warm up for the festivities of PICNIC and we were blessed with a fine sunny day in late September :).

With the fellow Masters!

It was awesome to have so many practical ‘Redesigning the World’ activities to do at PICNIC, like fabbing funky glasses (Video: FabGlasses FabGlasses2)               

digesting the web by eating fine pizza made by Instructables Restaurant (a complete online DIY resource), and playing around with virtual art (scroll down..)

Augmented Reality + Stedelijk Museum = ARtotheque. Ever wanted to place a famous work of art anywhere you pleased? That’s exactly what you do by selecting your favorite Masterpiece, scanning it with an AR Layar application and placing it anywhere on the PICNIC venue for others to see. I can say it’s also been more visual eating lunch out looking around at all the virtual paintings. Have you found mine?

Everything you know about Transmedia Is Wrong: We hear the term being loosely thrown around, but what is transmedia and what makes something transmedia? At the core, we learn that transmedia is telling a story without boundaries or borders, across multiple media platforms. This special session’s fine speakers who included Dan Hon, Tommy Pallotta(ultimate in remix) and Anita Ordine took us into the world of how transmedia is happening today and how we can apply it to our future for positive social change.

I was especially happy to see and hear Tommy Pallotta speak about his creative transmedia film projects and look back at some of his films I love so much, A Scanner Darkly, and my personal favorite, Waking Life . The film experience is clearly extending out to us, the audience, and a perfect example is how Pallotta took to the web and let thousands of people and fans produce the winning trailer for A Scanner Darkly by way of remixing. He shared a sneek peak of his newest transmedia film project that he’s currently working on, Collapsus - the ultimate in remixing by combining film, animation, documenteary, narrative, internet, conspiracy theories and everything else in between. The rules of using transmedia to augment a story is start with a film and then push out across multiple platforms. There you have it.

Anita Ordine, representing a global transmedia production company, took us a deep step further on how we can go beyond entertainment (as in films) and use transmedia as a tool for social change. A key element to transmedia is audience participation and inviting the audience to enter and influence the story from all perspectives -in concept and framework — and across every platform. More than creating a better story in the end, this approach creates a new energy in the audience where the story becomes the engine for emotional experience.

 There are many questions that must be answered if you’re thinking of producing a transmedia project and one must ask themselves these essential questions that ultimately drive the motivation behind this kind of project:  What does this story mean to me? Why does the story need to be told? What’s the best way to tell the story? Which are the best characters to tell this story through? What themes will help amplify my story? what emotional journey will the audience experience? What is the path to action at the end? How will audience involvement impact the story outcome?

One big reminder out of this session is that social media is just one small element of what transmedia is about. More than just connecting with people, transmedia is the conversation, content, gaming element and real world all integrated together. In the end it’s all about mixing things up and so I’m really fascinated and curious to explore this further and see how it develops as we become even more connected globally.

That’s right, a funky mobile DJ vehicle. 

Revenge of the electric car is coming! 

Other PICNIC highlights…

Service Design with Tim Kobe , who spoke about making design real and ultimately striving for experience design for people to connect on an emotional level.

Meet Your Maker brought us Matt Stinchcomb of Etsy in Europe who shared the inspiration for it  — connecting nature and community, and reconnecting consumers with the makers. You do not just own a piece of jewelery when it comes from an Etsy maker, you are connected to a human being who made that piece, and it is precisely that type of connection to humans that enable true community. So choose people, not products. Choose connection and you will get community.

A transformation in automotive design: a local connection.

Jay Rogers is doing cars differently and shaping the way cars are designed, produced and distributed. He is the founder of Local Motors, a co-creation company that is attempting to revolutionize every part of the hardest industry out there and change things drastically by making C.O.O.L Cars = Community, Open, Ownership, Local.

He believes co-creation, not crowd-sourcing, is key, and so Local Motors is by the community and for the community. This means everyone from the community are the engineers, designers, producers and users of this vehicle, and according to Rogers, this community-powered structure produces a car five times faster and ends up being one-hundred times less expensive – both for the company and for the car. The first vehicle out of Local Motors was a vehicle specifically designed for the New Mexico desert community who were literally asked what they think about making a desert car and what they want and need it to be like. It’s an interesting concept and certainly brings customization and efficiency to communities - and a market - desperately looking for fresh ideas.

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A bamboo structure built outside for people to ride on (all built that first day!) - check out the video.  There was also a helicopter in development.       

My message to the world is on the balloon reaching for the sky!

What a satisfying day with so much to think about! PICNIC should be monthly.

More pictures will follow..

Check out the Masters of Media Blog at UvA

Signage @ UvA underground bike parking lot :)

“Take any article on Wikipedia. Who wrote it? Where did it come from? Now take a closer look at those unconvincing, badly written sentences in the middle. Why did someone add them? How long will it be before someone else deletes them? And how many people will have read them before they are removed?” -Andrew Dalby

Who, What, Where, When and Why — the questions that lead us seeking Wikipedia’s wisdom time and time again; after all it is our beloved, co-created public knowledge database.

Ever wondered why a Wikipedia entry is usually the first result in a Google search? Or who are the masterminds editing our reality? Or how the concept of an encyclopedia came to be? From the eyes of a Wikipedia contributor and Vicipaedia administrator, Andrew Dalby, in his book “The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality”, takes you on a journey into the fascinating and intricate world of this very handy circle of knowledge. The read was an insightful, thorough and inner perspective into the massive exponential growth of the world’s most popular knowledge database that we the people read and write, and closely examined why people hate it, why they use it and we love it. Traversing from the history of encyclopedias to today’s Wikipedians, it was a revealing look back for me at how Wikipedia has completely transformed information and made it: available to all, manageable, easily-found, at your finger tips, and always self-improving in real-time. And it is thanks to its participatory culture that Wikipedia has changed our lives by reinventing the way we search and where we go for the latest reports in news, politics and current events.

“Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language.  Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal.” - Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

Considering there are more than 10 million articles in 270 languages (which includes 240 active editions) and millions of articles multiplying daily, that mission set by Jimmy Wales is not very far from being accomplished today.

Just remembering where we were ten years ago before Wikipedia came to be and where we are today with the amount of instant information available you would imagine that only a miracle could produce this. But alas, it is the people of the world coming together in real-time and collaborating online for the greater good of free information. It’s quite the social experiment.

But community-enabled donated content doesn’t come without its problems. As much as Wikipedia strives to have verifiable, neutral, and no original research articles, things always have to get political. Luckily, for the reader, the author provides a well-balanced argument from both sides of the spectrum of the major concerns and missing bits raised about Wikipedia and the way it works. These include: accountability, reliability, vandalism, authority, accuracy, scrupulousness and scholarly credentials.

There are clearly issues in Wikipedia:  incorrect biographies, controversial pages, questionable resources used by anonymous users and heated topics on administrator rights are aplenty. And of course there are many more reasons why we don’t trust Wikipedia but why we continue to use it; for where else is the obscure, pop-cultural and obsessive information people are writing about? But there are just as many reasons why we should trust Wikipedia and why we need it in our lives — for despite its challenges, Wikipedia has been a rare and successful experiment of Earth’s community mobilizing for the sake of open knowledge. As Nicholas Carr said, “Despite its flaws, the amateur-written encylcopedia has beomce the world’s all-purpose information source. It’s our new Delphic oracle. The net is being carved up into information plantations”.

All in all, this is a great read for someone interested in all the intricacies of what makes Wikipedia tick everyday.

So will we continue to trust it? Only time will tell. But while we know that Wikipedia is not perfect, it will always grow, evolve, mature and self-improve as knowledge spreads further and reaches more people around the globe. Just always keep this thought in mind, especially when reading Wikipedida:

“There’s no absolute truth, but some things are more truthful than others. In the Internet Age, we can no longer rely on publishers or other gatekeepers to put their imprimatur on The Truth. Instead, each of us must navigate our own way to truthfulness.” -Cory Doctorow

And remember, in the end you can contribute and choose to edit reality too.

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For some interesting facts on Wikipedia I turn you to this infographic.

Irresistible Wikipedia link

Purchase Book

Statistics of How Wikipedia has Changed