So, why?

On its surface, Facebook is not much different than the previous champion of social networking, Myspace. But it does have a couple of advantages. First, it’s quite hard to make Facebook look ugly, while it seems to be the default look for pages on Myspace. And second, it emphasises the sharing of information about your friends, to the point where the main page of Facebook is the one that gives you the information on what your friends have been doing o the site lately. This is quite different to Myspace, which is much more selfish in design.

So Facebook is a very creditable replacement for Myspace, and one that is going to appeal much more strongly to older users. And that’s worth a little bit of hype, given the hype around Myspace.

But what really makes Facebook so clever?

Part of the reason that Myspace targets teens is that they stay engaged on the site – posting pictures, blog entries and so on. Older users tended to peter out after a little while as the thrill started to fade. The same basic problem exists on Facebook, but with one clever addition: Applications. These little boxes you can put on your profile page provide games (many of them social in nature) to play, activities to participate in, art for your page and so on. They greatly expand the appeal of Facebook by providing a continual stream of new things to do on the site and your profile.

It won’t last forever, but by keeping users more engaged Facebook has been able to keep the usual turnover down and its growth has been phenomenal.

And that’s why the hype.

It is, in a word, bold.

Web 2.0 is getting pretty trendy now. Between Digg and Flickr the most common trends have become clear. But would anyone have expected that you’d see a mainstream, conservative website with a tag cloud?

The ABC certainly isn’t diving in head first. This is a small step in a lot of ways. There are very few opportunities for end users to participate, making this a principally one-way experience. And it might just be my familiarity with the old design, but I find the new look quite jarring so far.

Still, I think it’s a sign of how far Web 2.0 has come that some of its central concepts are being picked up in this kind of way. And with such a prominent website using them, I expect that they’ll begin to spread even more quickly within Australia.

Mostly.

There are a few fault points developing. And these may show the beginning of the end for Wikipedia as we know it. A couple of examples:

Exhibit one – the ongoing webcomics war on wikipedia.

There have been a strange, ongoing series of fights in Wikipedia over the question of notability in Wikipedia. The story in a nutshell (see Websnark for a few more examples. ) is that some of the Wikipedia editors are systematically deleting the articles for many web comics. Now web comics are probably not a hugely broad phenomena, but they’re certainly pretty popular with a large number of people (even if the proportion is small).

The argument for deleting is ‘notability’. The guidelines state that there need to be multiple, non-trivial mentions in newspapers, magazines and so forth. Given that there is little coverage of web comics outside of the community (which, of course, doesn’t count for this) then it’s very hard for even a relatively famous web comic to qualify.

(I could, by the way, go on about the strange anti-democratic nature of requiring some media gatekepper to decide what’s notable, but that’s not really the point).

The real problem I have with this is that the rules for websites don’t really match up with the rules for fiction.

There is, for instance a fairly long article on the Kobayashi Maru, a fairly minor plot point from a Star Trek film. There are almost five hundred articles on different Pokemon species. There are many pages of Harry Potter characters, including Sir Patricky Delaney-Podmore.

Personally I don’t object to any of these being included in the Wiki. They are, after all, of interest to some people. But what I find deeply perplexing is the low standard for inclusion set here compared to elsewhere. So long as an article is well written and encyclopedic, does it really matter how many people it’s of interest to? Just hit ‘Random Page’ a dozen times in a row to see what kinds of things do make the cut.

So, problem one: where do you draw the line about what to include, especially when you need lines that make sense for both apples and oranges?

Exhibit two – Microsoft hiring someone to edit articles in their favour.

A brief blog-storm came up recently over Rick Jeliffe’s revelation that Microsoft had offered to pay him for a few days work to correct entries on their OOXML file format. Microsoft was more or less asking him to go and improve the articles, without any editorial control. And, by all accounts, the articles were in a pretty bad state of anti-Microsoft hysteria (although Rick does not appear to be hugely impartial in the ODF versus OOXML fight).

There are a bunch of questions about the ethics or otherwise of this. But the bigger issue is that it’s pretty much impossible that a lot of companies are not actively out there doing exactly this sort of thing with far less disclosure than we see here. It is pretty trivial, after all, to use an anonymising web surfing service to disguise your point of origin. And with the number of fanboys (and -girls) out there for pretty much anything these days (I’m looking at you, Nintendo and Sony!) it would be very hard to tell for certain that a person was an actual company shill.

This is a very important issue for trust in the Wiki. A very wise person once described Wikipedia as being:

a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn’t exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant (…) mob for my information.

If you’ve got agents in the system trying to actively mislead this problem can become a lot worse.

The objective of ‘Neutral Point of View’ that Wikipedia espouses can help, but it’s very hard to achieve in the real world. Sometimes even attempting to create balance can itself violate NPOV – for instance, should pure creationist arguments be given equal time with evolutionary arguments? And if not, exactly how much less should they get? ‘NPOV’ is a lovely ideal, but it’s not really practical.

Exhibit 3 – Wikipedia hates experts

This is a simple case – there’s an article on a fairly abstruse bit of theoretical philosophy. A genuine expert in the subject (tenured, wrote one of the books the article refers to) comes along and make some suggestions. But gets (effectively) jeered out of the room.

Under the Wikipedia model all input has equal weight. So if I go and edit articles on economics (with a background of a degree and seven years work experience) I get the same weight as someone who can barely remember high school economics. I was actually a bit involved in Wikipedia for a while, but gave up because getting quality edits to stick was just too hard. The normal answer to this is that the expert has an obligation to convince people, which is fine – no one should take my word for it just because I say so. But on the other hand, these are complex areas, which can takes years of study to understand fully. If I wanted to teach my subject to people I’d be at university, and I’m not prepared to conduct a tutorial online just to improve an article on Wikipedia – I just don’t care enough.

This problem is particularly acute in areas which appear to be accesible to lay persons – economics is one case in point, philosophy is another. These are both complex subjects with a lot of theoretical background to them, but there are also both subjects where a lot of people think they have all the answers.

The requirement for citations helps a lot here, and things are a lot better than they were 12 months ago. But in cases where there are two conflicting citations, how do you decide what version is right? You need experts to make Wikipedia work, and Wikipedia makes it very hard to be an expert without getting very cranky.

So what does all this mean?

The three examples here all about the ‘meta’ layer of Wikipedia, the governance mechanisms that make the whole thing keep ticking over. I think these three examples are all signs that Wikipedia is not scaling well. When you have an encyclopedia of a few thousand articles it’s easy for everyone to build a common consensus across the whole system about the rules that apply. But when there are (as of the most recent count) over 1.6 million articles it’s not longer possible for a single group of people to look over them all. Instead you end up with a collection of overlapping communities within different sections of the Wiki. But different communities end up with different rules and values, even if they operate within a common set of formal, written rules.

The breadth of wikipedia makes abuse easier, makes policing it far more difficult.

Can Wikipedia survive? My guess is that it can’t, not in its current form. More formal governance mechanisms will be needed, a greater distinction between the ‘live’ sections of the site and the ones the public see by default, and more accountability for those people who work in the governance structure.

I hope it does survive – I don’t think there’s a site (other than Google) that I use more frequently.

Here’s another picture of the kitten, as well as a quick test of a new way of posting photos to the site. Update: Hmmm, the picture seems to be blocked from Treasury, but everything else works well.

There’s also this handy guide to how to set up a new rails project into a subversion repository. (From Maniacal Rage).

Ruby is a nice little object oriented programming language (with perhaps a little bit too much in the way of ‘philosophy’), and Rails is a framework that rests on top of it that makes developing applications for the web easy.

It’s a very nice little framework that’s finally allowing me to play with some of the ideas I’ve had in my head. You spend most of your time working on the logic rather than the implementation. There are some rough edges (like the poor quality of the documentation), but so far it’s been a lot of fun.