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Wikipedia Zero piracy in Bangladesh; bureaucracy; chilling effects; too few cooks; translation gaps

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By Andreas Kolbe
The Bangladesh National Assembly building in Dhaka


Wikipedia Zero piracy in Bangladesh

In a follow-up to his story on Wikipedia Zero-based piracy in Angola (see previous Signpost coverage), Motherboard's Jason Koebler reports (April 27) on very similar problems with piracy in Bangladesh, arguing that "Wikipedia's piracy police are ruining the developing world's Internet experience":

Wikipedia Zero users in Bangladesh are now being monitored, banned, and threatened by Wikipedia editors who are engaged in a continuous game of whack-a-mole against piracy on the site.

Last month, I wrote several articles about the creative (if illegal) ways that people in Angola are using the free Wikipedia Zero and Facebook Free Basics services to share copyrighted files with each other. Both of these services zero rate data uploaded and downloaded from those sites, meaning users don’t have to pay for that data, which would normally be very expensive. Users upload files to the Wikimedia Commons database, link to them in closed Facebook groups, and, bam – free ad-hoc filesharing network.

Wikimedia Bangladesh has become involved in the dispute
As in Angola, Bangladeshis are using zero-rated Wikimedia sites to upload copyrighted material and then share the links in filesharing groups on the equally zero-rated Facebook.

Koebler says the "arms race" between the pirates and Wikimedians trying to stop them is "significantly more advanced" than it it is in Angola:

A task force of editors in the developed world are desperately trying to get Bangladeshis play by Wikipedia's existing rules by closely monitoring and banning people who upload pirated content. They're invading Facebook groups to monitor and determine how and where people are uploading files. They're keeping a running tally of the number and names of accounts that have uploaded content. They've blocked entire IP ranges from uploading files, and have created filters that monitor all uploads that come from Wikipedia Zero accounts and from new accounts in general.

Meanwhile,

the Bangladeshi operations that I've seen appear to be much more sophisticated than the Angolan ones – they have posted specific guides to converting videos to smaller and harder-to-detect file types, have started using Wikipedia test sites, and have started using free sites online that automatically upload YouTube videos to Wikimedia Commons.

Wikimedia Bangladesh has become involved, pleading with users to stop the uploads, telling them they are contributing to an "increasingly negative perception of Bangladesh in many different sectors" by treating Wikimedia sites as a sort of free YouTube. But, Koebler argues,

Commons is YouTube for Wikipedia Zero users out of necessity, not choice. Because they can't afford access to YouTube and the rest of the internet, Wikipedia has become the internet for lots of Bangladeshis. What's crazy, then, is that a bunch of more-or-less random editors who happen to want to be the piracy police are dictating the means of access for an entire population of people ... there's no simple way out of this situation. When you create two entirely different tiers of internet, those in the second tier will rightly aspire to get into the first tier.

Study: Wikipedia is basically a corporate bureaucracy

The Kafka index, named after Franz Kafka's The Trial, represents the complexity of a bureaucracy

Gizmodo reports (April 25) on a new study by Bradi Heaberlin and Simon DeDeo arguing that Wikipedia has become a corporate bureaucracy, "akin to bureaucratic systems that predate the information age."

Wikipedia is a voluntary organization dedicated to the noble goal of decentralized knowledge creation. But as the community has evolved over time, it has wandered further and further from its early egalitarian ideals, according to a new paper published in the journal Future Internet. In fact, such systems usually end up looking a lot like 20th century bureaucracies.

Even in the brave new world of online communities, the Who had it right: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

One of the study's most striking findings, Gizmodo reports, is that

even on Wikipedia, the so-called "

Iron Law of Oligarchy
" – a.k.a. rule by an elite few – holds sway. ... "You start with a decentralized democratic system, but over time you get the emergence of a leadership class with privileged access to information and social networks," DeDeo explained. "Their interests begin to diverge from the rest of the group. They no longer have the same needs and goals. So not only do they come to gain the most power within the system, but they may use it in ways that conflict with the needs of everybody else."

DeDeo and Heaberlin note Wikipedia's conservative nature: over 89 per cent of its core norms, created by a small pool of around 100 users, have remained unchanged; they have achieved a "myth-like status" even as they inevitably conflict with each other. Resolution of such conflicts is made more difficult by the fact that editors form central "neighbourhoods" organised around "article quality, content policy, collaboration, and administrators" that are "increasingly separate and interact with each other less and less", leading to the emergence of tribalism.

DeDeo and Heaberlin performed a purely mathematical analysis of broad trends in the Wikipedia data, connecting this hyper-quantitative approach with sociology and political science. The next step is to collaborate with cultural anthropologists to undertake a close reading of all those inter-linked individual pages.

"We need to understand how these systems work if we're going to understand how the economy of the future will run. They don't have laws, they have traditions and norms," said DeDeo when asked why this kind of research matters. "I think what we're doing is investing research into a problem that, 200 years from now, could be the biggest problem in the world – if we don't destroy ourselves first."

In its article, Gizmodo references a study published earlier this year in

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which came to similar conclusions about Wikipedia. The Korean study received a German-language write-up in taz
this week (April 28).

DeDeo's and Heaberlin's study was subsequently also covered by The Washington Post as well as by Sciencealert.com (April 28).

Chilling effects

Edward Snowden's revelations have had a marked effect on Wikipedia users' reading habits, a study finds

The Washington Post, along with many other media outlets, reports that according to a new study by Jon Penney, "Snowden's disclosures about NSA spying had a scary effect on free speech":

Internet traffic to Wikipedia pages summarizing knowledge about terror groups and their tools plunged nearly 30 percent after revelations of widespread Web monitoring by the U.S. National Security Agency, suggesting that concerns about government snooping are hurting the ordinary pursuit of information.

The study, titled "Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use", is

focused on Wikipedia pages related to sensitive topics specifically flagged by the Department of Homeland Security. In a document provided to its analysts in 2011, the DHS listed 48 terrorism terms that they should use when "monitoring social media sites." Penney collected traffic data on the English Wikipedia pages most closely related to those terms.

The collected data showed that pageviews dropped immediately after the June 2013 news stories about Snowden and never recovered to previous levels.

"You want to have informed citizens," Penney said. "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate."

Too few cooks in Wikipedia ...

[[File:|center|300px]]

... and not enough gorgeous, ...

The New Statesman covers (Apr. 17) a project kickstarted by Bee Wilson, chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, to bring more women editors to Wikipedia in order to improve its articles on food. The article's writer, Felicity Cloake, visited a related group editing session at the British Library.

[Wikipedia's] "egregious gender imbalance" is especially notable in matters relating to food, because, as Polly Russell, the library's curator of food studies, explains, "we're such a new area of serious study". Most food throughout history has been cooked by women, "but if you can’t name them, they get forgotten."

... sumptuous ...

Commenting on the under-representation of notable women on Wikipedia,

Wilson ... cites the example of Philippa Glanville, a former chief curator of the metalwork, silver and jewellery department at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a world expert on historical dining practices, whose achievements were recognised by the Queen before the online encyclopaedia ("Presumably getting on Wikipedia should be easier than getting an OBE").

Facilitating this process is the goal of Wiki-Food, which groups academics, students, experts and enthusiastic amateurs with the aim of improving and expanding Wikipedia's coverage of food-related topics, especially but not exclusively those relevant to women, with support from Wikipedia.

... food!

Finding translation gaps

VentureBeat reports (Apr. 28) on a collaboration between Wikimedia and Stanford University to help point translators to significant content gaps in other language versions of Wikipedia:

finding out which topics or articles are in particular shortage in specific tongues is a challenge, which is why Wikimedia is partnering with Stanford University researchers to design a new recommendation system. This will rank Wikipedia articles in order of priority across languages. The ranking is based on a number of factors, including editor interests (using contribution history data), language proficiency, and anticipated popularity if an article was translated. For example, a native Swahili speaker is unlikely to care about the history of a U.K. baking business, but they may care about WrestleMania 32.

University news site Futurity also has an article (Apr. 15) on the project; a Wikimedia blog post (Apr. 27) is available here.

In brief

Indian writer and ecologist Madhav Gadgil is due to lead a Wikipedia workshop in Kerala this week
Beyoncé's fan base, the "Beyhive", descended on Wikipedia on April 24
Hong Kong, home to the "youngest group of Wikipedians in the world", according to Jimmy Wales – some editors started contributing while still in primary school



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Bureaucracy

  • The bureaucracy news item is worth reading. Wikipedia has become increasingly bureaucratized over the years (see
    it isn't. All you need to do is look at a deletion discussion at AfD or elsewhere; unique arguments are rarely brought up, replaced with linkspam to whatever WP: pages a person can find to support their argument. Honestly, I don't think that is much of a problem myself - I think the current system, particularly for notability, works quite well. People reference the relevant guidelines but IAR can come into play when needed. But there is some benefit to being honest with ourselves, if for no other reason than making it easier for new people to become involved by being straightforward with them about how to contribute. Just some random musings I've had on the topic. Ajraddatz (talk) 04:37, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    • I feel the same way about Wikipedia's "bureaucraticness". Though the system works quite well in a lot of ways (especially notability), I think it's pretty important to realize that Wikipedia really is a bureaucracy at this point. In my experience, this is most aggravating when someone opposes to changing a guideline because said guideline clearly states that it's a guideline. I think we're doing alright. ~Mable (chat) 05:42, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • Calling Wikipedia a bureaucracy or not usually isn't relevant unless in context. Wikipedia's bureaucracy is usually beneficial in that it functions as an expedient to complex discussions: given the precedents established in policies and guidelines we avoid having to argue everything ab initio, ad nauseam (albeit at the cost of implicitly requiring users to learn or look up said precedents). In theory, Wikipedia is relatively democratic, in that anyone can propose new precedents, or changes to existing ones, by seeking consensus to add, change, or remove a policy or guideline. In practice, Wikipedia's body of precedent is largely static; this raises the question: is it a result of a sensible, stable body of precedent that few care to contest, or is it, putatively, bureaucratic oligarchy? {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 18:15, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
      • A fascinating question to be sure, and I'm not sure how one could go about answering it. You also touch on a point which I believe the article looks at (though it might have been a different article), that most of these precedents are established by a very small subset of users. For example, the local guidelines on username usurpation were established through a discussion between 11 users. Even more recent discussions, such as the current one to establish the new 'page mover' usergroup, only has the participation of some 100 users. There are 131,163 individual accounts that have edited Wikipedia in the last 30 days. Can Wikipedia be democratic without widespread participation? In theory there are no formal barriers to entry, but there are many informal ones, including technical knowledge and a desire to participate in the meta-level of the project. So I think that there are two answers to your question, based on which group of individuals you look at. When considering the "politically-active" portion of the community, it's probably the former - that the current guidelines have established a consensus which most users agree with, and thus which they commonly reference. But when looking at the "politically-inactive" supermajority of the community, it's hard to say. It is worth noting, however, that various studies of politically-inactive groups within countries show that they tend to a) favour the status quo and b) feel that their own voice would not make a difference, so I'm not trying to suggest that the politically-inactive portion of the community here would be suggesting any revolutionary change. Ajraddatz (talk) 18:45, 2 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • I figure "bureaucracy" does not precisely describe our position or even our direction, because nobody in particular is in charge of most things. Bureaucracy has someone to manage this particular movie house, others assigned to selling tickets, taking tickets, selling popcorn, pointing the way to seats, scraping the gum off seats, running the projector, bringing the film-can back to the distributor, and so forth. Most of us just flit around doing whatever needs doing. This means, some things that ought to be done, aren't. Our political system is similar. It's complex, weird, boring and optional. Thus, few participate in rule making, electing the few who are in charge of something, and so forth. Egalitarian? Of course not. Yes, many thousands are equally allowed to participate, but we don't equally know, or care to know. That's why only a small minority, an elite, actually do it all. Dreadful disappointment? Not really, unless you expected to combine equality, quality, and complexity. Jim.henderson (talk) 19:09, 3 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • Lets be honest, we all know who the corrupt and unblockable Wikioligarchs are. So keep your head down and work silently, unless you want to get boot.--Catlemur (talk) 17:34, 4 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't think that the researchers really understand what a bureaucracy is and/or are throwing the term around for shock effect. The finding that Wikipedia's core norms have been sustained is certainly interesting and important, but the light-touch governance of Wikipedia is far from being a bureaucracy as normally defined (most internet forums have much more active governance arrangements). Could it not be the case that people are self-selecting to initially participate and then choose to remain active in Wikipedia because they like its norms, leading to a self-supporting effect? The interesting message from the research for me is how Wikipedia has managed to keep its core norms with so little active governance. Nick-D (talk) 10:23, 6 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Filesharing

"What's crazy, then, is that a bunch of more-or-less random editors who happen to want to be the piracy police are dictating the means of access for an entire population of people"

If Wikimedia editors don't do that, we would have trouble with authorities. It's not our fault that it's illegal to share copyrighted files. --NaBUru38 (talk) 13:59, 5 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Too few cooks in Wikipedia ...

I added the wikilink for Philippa Glanville - is there one for the "Wiki-Food and (mostly) Women Project" mentioned in the article? DuncanHill (talk) 16:58, 5 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I looked around for a wiki page on the project and couldn't find one. --Andreas JN466 08:55, 6 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OBE?

"Getting on Wikipedia should be easier than getting an OBE..."

Maybe... if people step up and do the work see 2009 New Year Honours to get some idea of the scale. If every member of the commentariat wrote as much on Wikipedia as they do about Wikipedia, it would help enormously.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:17, 7 May 2016 (UTC).[reply]

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