Wikinews interviews Umberto Eco, and more

Umberto Eco during the interview

Aubrey (at Wikimania 2010)

Wikinews interviews Umberto Eco: "I am a compulsive user of Wikipedia"

User:Aubrey from Wikimedia Italia interviewed famed novelist, critic and semiotician Umberto Eco in his Milan home on April 24, 2010, as part of the chapter's WIKI@Home project. An English translation of the interview was recently made available on the Italian Wikinews (Wikinotizie).

Professor Eco described himself as "a compulsive user of Wikipedia, also for arthritic reasons: the more my back hurts, the more it costs me to get up and go to check the [Encyclopedia] Treccani .... When I write, I consult Wikipedia 30–40 times a day, because it is really helpful". However, he questioned its reliability. He stated that Wikipedia is good for the (intellectually) "rich" and bad for the "poor", explaining that as an educated person, he knows how to filter the information on Wikipedia, checking and comparing multiple sources rather than accepting a fact while a less well-educated user might not be as discriminating.

Asked whether it is better to have more people involved on a topic, as it is stated to be the case (under certain conditions) by the "wisdom of the crowds" theory of James Surowiecki, Professor Eco replied:

“

I don't quite agree with this. I am a disciple of Peirce, who argues that scientific truths are, ultimately, approved by the community. The slow work of the community, through revisions and errors, as he put it in the nineteenth century, carries out "the torch of truth". The problem is the definition of truth.

If I were forced to replace "truth" with "crowd", I would not agree. If you make a statistical analysis of the 6 billion inhabitants of the globe, the majority believes that the Sun revolves around the Earth, there's nothing you can do. The crowd would be prepared to endorse the wrong answer. This also happens in a democracy: we are noticing it these days, the crowd votes for [the Italian politician] Bossi.

We must therefore find another criterion, which I think is the motivated crowds. People who work on Wikipedia ... are not the indiscriminate crowd [but] are the part of the crowd who feels motivated to work with Wikipedia. Here it is: I'd replace the theory of the "wisdom of the crowd" with the theory of the "wisdom of the motivated crowds." The general crowd says we should not pay taxes; the motivated crowd says that it's fair to pay them. In fact, it's not the ditch diggers or illiterates who contribute to Wikipedia, but people who already belong to a cultural crowd for the very fact they're using a computer.

”

The interviewer observed a cultural difference on Wikipedia between the coverage of "hard" and "soft" sciences, and related it to a similar difference between the corresponding academic communities. Eco agreed that "hard" sciences place more value on collaboration and less on authorship than humanities. "Science is cumulative-destructive, it stores what it needs and throws away what it doesn't require. Humanities are totally cumulative, they don't throw away anything: in fact, there is always a return to the past." He also agreed that the strong collaboration on Wikipedia, facilitated by the use of free licenses and a culture of pseudonymity or even anonymity, might be part of a larger trend, which in 50 years would probably lead to "a cultural situation similar to the one in the Middle Ages, where [...] the authoriality was lost." However, he doubted this development would reach total anonymity, which, while it might give the appearance of democracy, "gives the idea that just one and only one truth exists".

When asked about free licenses and intellectual property in general, Eco said he did not consider piracy to be a tragedy, at least not for himself. The interview touched on the copyright controversy about Google Books, the e-book market, Adobe Reader and free software (Eco praised Open Office). Aubrey concluded by stating that Wikipedia, too, comes from the open source world.

A thread on Foundation-l contains background information on the interview and the "Wiki@Home" program. Apart from Eco, several other notable people have been interviewed. Questions are prepared collaboratively on a page on the Italian Wikinews; Wikimedia Italia then contacts the potential interviewee and chooses the interviewer (usually one of the chapter's members).

Briefly

A large number of media outlets reported on the efforts by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation to make Wikipedia take down the image depicting the FBI seal. (See full coverage in this week's News and notes section.)

British musician M.I.A. was recently asked by The Guardian to comment on the Wikipedia article about her (MIA takes on Google, YouTube and Wikipedia): "I hate my Wikipedia page. It's really boring to look at. I'd get rid of all this white space. And I'd make the font a bit more interesting." The Guardian remarked that "If you've ever seen the fluoro overload of her own website or Twitter page this should come as no surprise." When asked to examine the text for possible inaccuracies, though, she found none. However, she noted that "the section on Diplo got removed when we stopped working together. He emailed me about that; that's why I know that section's missing", and that she had "no idea" who removed it (it appears to refer to this edit). She said she had never edited the article herself: "I really don't know how to do that."

In a The New York Times article, "Plagiarism lines blur for students in digital age", Trip Gabriel wrote that "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." She went on to say that "at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries—unsigned and collectively written—did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge."

"Facebook, Wikimedia and the rest are making millions from the value created by users, acting like a cooperative but paying itself like a private company", freelance creative Richard Buchanan argued in The Guardian on August 4. Open-source advocate Felix Cohen says in the comments: "I was halfway convinced until you conflated Wikimedia and Facebook".

On Reddit last week, many users responded to the question Who here actually contributes to wikipedia articles?. On the Foundation-l mailing list, Sue Gardner called it "a really interesting thread [with] lots about deletionism and notability."

An analysis published on Reddit (US Army intelligence report copied wholesale from Wikipedia) found that a 2007 report by a US military unit in the Afghan War Diary (a collection of documents recently published by Wikileaks) appears to have copied verbatim from the Wikipedia article HN-5, to describe a type of missile the unit had secured from locals. The posting noted that the apparently copied content had been added to Wikipedia some months earlier from an IP registered to L-3 Communications, a US government contractor. It did not examine the possibility that both might be based on a third source. The posting was noted by Wikileaks on Twitter and received more than 9,800 hits.