Wikis to books worth experimenting

I often make the point that we spend too much time clicking on links, rather than spending time on the meaning of what we read.

So I thought of experimenting with PediaPress, a service that lets you convert Wikipedia pages into a book.

The book? On Clark University - for my son’s graduation today.

Knowing fully well that information on the university will change, did not bother me. In fact, that’s precisely why I wanted to do it. After all, Wikipedia content is not exactly writ in stone, could be considered as relevant for a moment in time.

(If you’ve been watching how pages get edited, and the edit wars that ensue over single words or phrases, you’ll know that this ‘moment’ sometimes changes several times an hour as a result of furious edit wars!) I want the book to be a sort of  time capsule that he could one day look back on.

PediaPress is basically offering a print on demand (POD) service, but the beauty of this is how simple they have made the steps. There’s very limited customization (the cover and title, plus a preface), but the layout of pages and sections are very clean.

I would have liked a bit more customization, such as:

• The ability to move photographs and charts into separate pages
• Uploading my own photograph for the cover, and a few others for other pages
• An acknowledgment or title page
• Adding text to back cover

But as this was an experiment, I was willing to take the risk.

Other risks. For a different project, say trying to compile a short compendium of knowledge on a breaking news event, or a current topic, using Wikipedia as the source of content is more risky. While the Creative Commons license gives anyone permission to use and re-purpose content, one has to me meticulous about accuracy.

I began to wonder of there are other similar services that let you blend knowledge from multiple sources, and let you add chapters to the book. I’ve looked at Blurb, which offers a Blog-to-Book option. Lulu also has a great service. a cookbook/ A book of poetry/ Wikipedia has a rich selection.

Give it a try!

 

Wikipedia’s ‘truth’ formula needs tweaking. But by whom?

There’s has been a great discussion going on about what it takes for someone to edit an article on Wikipedia. I recently received an invitation to a survey of communicators on my experiences with editing wiki entries. Apparently this is connected to a point raised by Phil Gomes of Edelman Digital, who brought this up, creating a Facebook group to think it through. The group is called CREWE –which stands for Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement.

The story of who could edit Wikipedia goes back some two years, when Timothy Messer-Kruse tried to edit an article, and was rebuffed –scolded, really — by Wikipedia’s editors.  Read his article here. Messer-Kruse is an author of several books, including one on race relations. In other words, he’s not someone who just popped by Wikipedia and had an ax to grind.

Prior to that, there were more egregious cases where vandals, and  ’trolls’ changed biographies of people or created conflict within the editors.

Fast forward to what CREWE is proposing. There’s a task force of communicators from IABC and PRSA looking into Wikipedia’s policies. I was asked to join, and gladly agreed.

If you are interested in following this development, join the Facebook group. I also came across this page  that summarizes what Wikipedia expects of editors.

• Subjects require significant coverage in independent reliable sources.
• Your role is to inform and reference, not promote or sell.
• Write without bias, as if you don’t work for the company or personally know the subject.
• State facts and statistics, don’t be vague or general.
• Take time to get sources and policy right and your content will last.
• Be transparent about your conflict of interest
• Get neutral, uninvolved editors to review your content
• Work with the community and we’ll work with you.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate.

It’s more complicated than this, trust me, but it’s a start. There’s a line on this page that states “Be patient and open to cooperation: no one here is out to get you.” But hearing about some folk’s experiences, it sure feels like a tough space to operate in.

There’s also a page on Wikipedia that states Wikipedia is about verifiability, not truth. But there are other nuances, such as NOR – No Original Research– and Be Bold to master if you want to craft Wikipedia article that adheres to its formula for wiki truth. Worth reading, if your organization expects you to monitor and create content.

 

Where are the ‘conversations’ after the Tucson shootings?

The shootings last Saturday in Tucson set a horrific tone for the new year for all of us in Arizona.

The tone has all become politically charged, vitriolic, cascading into media finger-pointing, political caricatures, party bashing. It’s time for everyone to cool their jets, and rally together as a community. We are still in a state of shock.

Speaking of shock, this hit me when I ran into Walmart very early this morning to pick up a bottle of medicine for my daughter. There was hardly anyone in the store. I went up to a lady in the pharmacy stocking the shelves to ask for help and she shrieked! It must have seemed as if someone had crept up behind her. She apologized profusely, and pointed me to the shelf. But I went away thinking this might be the thumbnail of how we are all feeling as a nation, caught off guard.

We have seen a sad decline in discourse in this country. We don’t spend enough time engaging it it because, frankly, people don’t even know, or care, what discourse means. It’s not a synonym for comment wars. Or mocking wall postings and adhoc pages on Facebook. Or rude posters and Tshirts at rallies. I picked this definition (an archaic one for sure!) that says discourse is the “mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience that is rooted in language and its concrete contexts.” The word ‘conversations’ — a term we social media types use flippantly, sometimes — have a lot to do with it.

Social media  both informed us and confused us over the past few days. You probably saw this in the wrong ‘reports’ that were quickly repeated and re-tweeted. Things were less heated at Wikipedia, on the entry for Gabrielle Giffords. The editors were more civil, debating the reports that she had died, and whether to use the Sarah Palin map, just because other media were mentioning it. In short, there was –and still is — some restraint.

Maybe we could learn a thing of two from the discourse, based on established guidelines, at Wikipedia. Maybe we should all calm down a bit, and not feel the need to shriek when something of this magnitude creeps up on us.

Sidebar:

Here are some thoughtful commentaries on how social media has played out so far:

• Social Media on Full Display in wake of Gabrielle Giffords shooting - Carli Brosseau, writing for the Tucson Citizen
• Social media is like an all-you-can-eat buffet after the Tucson tragedy - Violet Blue, writing for ZDNet

 

Fear of Wikis may grow after Wikileaks

Have you ever edited a Wiki, let alone created one? It’s a lot of work at the front end to start one. I used to create small wikis on WetPaint for projects just to let a handful of people collaborate, since it eliminates the back-and-forth emails, and the friction that may arise about editing rights to a document.

But each time I recommend creating a wiki, I see a lot of blank stares; eyes begin to roll. No surprise. After all, it still involves understanding a bit of code, and is not as sexy as say a blog platform. But I suspect that the fear-and-loathing factor will now come into play, with the latest round of Wikileaks.

The media covers it more as a cat-and-mouse game with Julian Asange on the run. The Wikileaks.info site itself has been under attack appareantly, and is being mirrored elsewhere.

The site carries this line, “Have documents the world needs to see?” which is all about contributing and sharing. Wikipedia, whose central tenet is centered around sharing (“People of all ages, cultures and backgrounds can add or edit article prose, references, images and other media here.” ) is all about creating information that people may need to access.

There are other Wikis worth taking a look at, if only to diffuse the anxiety about sharing documents online.

• Take Open Congress. It claims to be ”an online encyclopedia about Congress, but more than that, it’s built entirely by readers like yourself. You can write about the importance of a particular vote on a critical piece of legislation, or document your senator’s position on issues like foreign policy, taxation and the environment.”
• There are Education Wikis like this, created by Librarians, Charter schools, drama teachers. There are platforms such as Knol, and Open Education Wiki.

And I am only scratching the surface of how wide and deep Wiki use is. I just hope, once the WikiLeaks rumpus blows over, we will see a lot more valuable work on wikis.

 

Wikipedia appears to beat media in Chilean miner rescue

By chance I checked Wikipedia on the Chilean  miner rescue operation underway now (9.15 PM Pacific), and was pleasantly surprised to see two things going on:

The first was that Wikipedians are updating the site faster that Google results of news of the rescue operation.

San Jose Mercury News, Yahoo and others come up on search for ‘miner rescue’ with news

that one miner has been rescued.

Wikipedians noted that there have been two miners brought to the surface.

It took about another 10 minutes for the rest of the media reports to show up with this detail.

Meanwhile CBS News is streaming video via Ustream! http://ustre.am/2bWW

The second curious phenomenon will probably be discussed at length in the weeks after this. In what is clearly a sign of the times, where everyone is now a reporter,  the video from the mine captures at least two of the trapped miners photographing (or videoing maybe?) the event that they are part of!

Who’s watching what here? Who’s updating whom here? This is breaking news, and the subjects are reporting the story!

 

Still thumbing your nose at Wikipedia?

Cross posting this from the IABC Blog.

I’m not sure what you think of Wikipedia, but there are many people -communicators and business people – who are still deeply suspicious of it, even though they continue to dip in and out of it to ‘check on something.’Students use it but sparingly, it seems. Most people I asked said they use it a lot. I was curious about this ambivalence, and wanted to find out how distrust can work alongside usefulness. But the more I looked, the more I became convinced that it’s time for serious communicators to put those early notions aside and take a second look at something that has changed knowledge sharing in a remarkable way. This is the topic of my article in the upcoming July-August CW magazine, but before it hits your mailbox, here’s something that might whet your appetite.

• Did you know that over 50 percent of edits are made by less than one percent of Wikipedia users?
• Did you know that there are hundreds of articles waiting in a queue to be edited, completed, fact-checked, etc.?

If you’ve been one of those people who have complained loudly that some of the articles are patently written by some 14-year old, then here’s your chance to do something about it. If you’re one of those folks who proudly inserts the term ‘crowd-sourcing’ into a PowerPoint presentation or discussion on social media, then here’s a great opportunity to get some dirt under your fingernails and see how it really happens.

I love the idea of crowd-sourcing myself, and quite frankly, I had stayed off the Wikipedia edit pages for awhile -after some very simple edits many years ago. The coding (wiki syntax) is not easy to remember unless you dabble in some HTML. But you don’t need to know a lot to start. When I got back to it, what I found was fascinating. Even outside the realm of serious ‘collective intelligence,’ one of the great side effects of Wikipedia is that it has turned into a site to go to for event coverage. Like a global team of citizen journalists, passionate editors quickly add detail to a breaking story like some back-room iReporters. Their bylines are cryptic usernames, and they don’t seek recognition. Some news tidbits don’t always show up in the main article –until the edit wars and discussions are settled– but they are a rich source of information. Maybe you could be one of those contributors as well!

But as I explain in the article, there is a lot of serious content you may be able to contribute to. Wikipedia needs more editors, writers, and good content specialists. Even persnickety fact-checkers, punctuation freaks and content curators. In other words, people like you who yearn to inform and are natural collaborators.

If you like to get an idea of where you could start, Wikipedia has some areas for you waiting to be worked on. Check these out:

Requested Articles: these are internal links (known as, and seen as, ‘red links’) that go nowhere, so basically they are articles waiting to be created.  Type WP:RA into the search box to find them. Plenty of topics to choose from.

Articles for Creation: Type in WP:AFC to get started on an article. It takes you thgrough the basic steps and policies, and points to an article wizard.

There’s work to be done in updating small things, if not writing full-blown articles. Consider your local IABC chapter perspective. Of the 100 or so IABC chapters, only 13 have been listed here, with external links, that is. This is up from 10 chapters when my article went to print.

Go for it!

 

Look for ‘Curators Needed’ signs –clues to your next job?

“The web needs editors,” someone remarked quite aptly when TMI (the acronym for that modern syndrome, Too Much Information) was beginning to drive people nuts.

Today the web needs curators more than editors. Lots of them. Corporate feedback sites are sprouting all over the place, so,

• Who’s gonna sift through the comment streams for good ideas?
• Who will prioritize which complaints need to be responded to before it flames out in other places?
• Who might be the next breed of Principal Investigators –sleuths, rather than project managers– who turn this data into reports? And I mean well-written, business-case reports?

You will! (Or someone in India, if you’re slow to find these opportunities.)

As I continue to write about and support crowd-sourcing and citizen journalism, I come across many hidden ‘help wanted’ signs for curators. Not in Craigslist, but buried deep in the comments of YouTube, Facebook, the 98 heated exchanges at the bottom of the New York Times article etc. The 200-plus tweets and re-tweets with a hash tag (especially the tag #FAIL).

Yeah, I know who has time to read through these? CEO’s do, that’s who. And they are wondering why their marketing and PR teams are not telling them about it, despite all the analytics money being spent. The trouble with analytics and algorithm-generated charts is that they don’t translate into action items. A Curator with the attitude of an analyst) who can also come up with ideas will be hugely valuable in my reading of this trend.

I just recorded a podcast for GreenNurture on what crowd sourcing as an internal communications app might look like, and serendipitously ran into this story by Marc Gunther. Truly timely piece on curated crowd-sourcing by by Genius Rocket. (Wonderful headline, too: “Why 13,956 heads are better than one.”)

Why do I think this is timely and huge? I’ll give you three clues:

1. Feedback sites are big: And there are attempts to tap customer sentiments: http://uservoice.com

2. Customers are talking back. take a look at Mills Advisory Panel –soliciting feedback for General Mills customers. My Starbucks Idea - a great site for tapping into marketing and product ideas. But who’s gonna take all those ideas if it is another company? Take this comment:

“I am a Canadian partner and I have experienced a lot of frustration, confusion and grief since the new teas have been unveiled. The biggest concern is the lack of consistent pricing for tea lattes….”

It goes on with too much detail, possibly revealing too much inside info that would make some VPs cringe.

3. Wikipedia is a back-channel: Lots of  ‘Curators’ Needed’ signs hanging out here. Noisy debates go on in the Talk Pages, and looking at these in your vertical will tip you off to other things.

You get the point. Everyone wants to listen to the customer but there are not enough people who can translate the conversations into actionable knowledge.

Sidebar: If you are interested,in why social media is so ready to gather front-line intelligence within a company, check this podcast I recorded with Derrick Mains recently.

 

How fast should you update history?

OK, so the headline was a bit provocative. Maybe we don’t update history when we update a wiki. But in the case of the newly minted president of the US, changing his profile meant turning the page of history.

Not many people look at Wikipedia the way I sometimes do –at the Discussion pages –but on the night before the inauguration (Jan 19th) I learned some unusual things about how information gets written, edited, and in many cases fought over.

The Wikipedians managing Obama’s profile faced one nagging question –apart from the expected edit wars over how to describe his African-American heritage: At what point should the word ‘elect’ be dropped? At the oath, or at noon?

We saw how in other quarters, particularly on the White House web site (and blog) and the State Department’s blog, Dipnote, how timing was everything. On WhiteHouse.gov on Tuesday, a few seconds after noon, there was a message from Macon Philips the new media person behind the web site. He announced that ‘change has come’ to the official web site.

Back to Wikipedia, the question arose if a ‘bot’ ought to be assigned to do change Obama’s information, saying the official time he would assume presidency was 11.56 am. One said his photo was creepy and needed to be changed. While the debate raged, it was agreed that “If stuff starts to get out of hand requests for page protection” would be made.

Meanwhile, Wikipedians wait, fingers poised over keyboards, for Hillary Clinton to be approved by the Senate. As of this morning there’s the word ‘designate‘ after her Secretary of State title’ waiting to be scrubbed, among other things!

 

Clay Shirky on the power of web collaboration, media

Experiments in communication take off when they create ‘social capital’ rather than take that “big bang” approach, says Clay Shirky. He discussed this and more in an NPR interview and call-in last week.

Of course Shirky has written extensively on this subject of social capital, especially in Here comes everybody –the the best book on social media, to-date, in my opinion. His analysis of new media is spot on. As in observing how technology needs to become ‘technologically boring‘ before it gains social traction. It has to first lose its geek stigma, then become ‘normal’, then ubiquitous, to finally become pervasive enough to start a revolution.

And for those grappling with how much PR and media presence is necessary I love this quote from the book:

“All business are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences – employees and the world.”

Which opens a rich debate on the blurring line between internal and external communiction, whether PR should be taught in business schools etc, but that’s grist for the mill for another post.

 

2008 in Retrospect: The Good, The Bad, and The Absolutely Hilarious!

We said goodbye to some extraordinary people this year.

• Arthur C. Clarke, si-fi writer, father of the communications satellite, permanent resident of Sri Lanka – 19, March, 2008
• Hal Riney, advertising man extraordinaire – 25 March, 2008
• Charleston Heston, of “Ten Commandments” and NRA fame – 5 April, 2008
• Tim Russert, journalist extraordinaire, of NBC’s Meet The Press – 14 June, 2008
• Tony Snow, – former White House press secretary – 12 July, 2008
• Randy Pausch, best known for his Last Lecture – 25 July, 2008
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, former exile, and 1970 Nobel Prize winner – 3 August, 2008
• Harold Pinter, British playwright and 2005 winner of Nobel Prize for literature – 24 Dec, 2008

PR disasters and signs of the times

• Bill O’Reilley’s studio performance over a teleprompter
  

• Miley Cyrus‘ photo shoot with Annie Leibowitz, that was apparently misinterpreted!

• Scott McClellan‘s unconvincing tell-all book on his White House years.

• New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer busted in prostitution scandal

• Alaska Senator Ted Stevens found guilty of ethics violations

• Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich charged with corruption

• The Hollywood Writer’s Strike ends

• Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona launches immigration busts.

• Sarah Palin flounders media interviews and blows her debut in serious politics

• Sarah Palin ‘pranked’ by two Canadian radio DJs, into believing she was speaking to French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

• Motrin ad featuring baby-as-fashion accessory got slammed by mommy bloggers.

• The Big Three car makers, GM, Ford and Chrysler, arrived in DC to ask for a bailout in their corporate jets. They were sent back and returned, driving hybrid vehicles. One even car-pooled. Honest!

• Iraq journalist throws his shoes at president George Bush, at a press conference in Baghdad.

• TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington declares the “embargo’ dead.

• The Guardian in London, declares Gillette ad featuring (Roger) Federer, (Tiger) Woods and (Thierry) Henry the worst ad in 2008.

Milestones:

• The 15th birthday of Hypertext – Tim Berners-Lee
• Barack Obama elected the 44th president of the U.S.
• The iPhone cuts its price, and adds a new model
• The New Yorker‘s controversial cover on the Obamas
• The 2008 Olympics in China
• Dipnote celebrates one year as a blog
• Blackberry introduces Storm, the answer to the iPhone
• ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Comm celebrates 25 years
• Saturday Night Live‘s YouTube skit on Sarah Palin
• Arizona governor, Janet Napolitano, picked to be new Sec. of Homeland Security
• Christian Science Monitor – shifts from daily to Weekly
• bizAZ Magazine folds due to downturn in economy
• The horrible Mumbai terrorist attacks, which now have a Wikipedia entry