NYT: Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar

The Annals of Open Source Culture

A skirmish on the frontlines of the open source revolution...




December 4, 2005
Rewriting History
Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
ACCORDING to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler's biography, true?

The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby."

"Nothing was ever proven," the biography added.

Mr. Seigenthaler discovered that the false information had been on the site for several months and that an unknown number of people had read it, and possibly posted it on or linked it to other sites.

If any assassination was going on, Mr. Seigenthaler (who is 78 and did edit The Tennessean) wrote last week in an op-ed article in USA Today, it was of his character.

The case triggered extensive debate on the Internet over the value and reliability of Wikipedia, and more broadly, over the nature of online information.

Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.

Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.

The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, 39, a former futures and options trader who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla. He said he had hoped to advance the promise of the Internet as a place for sharing information.

It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.

Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

And beyond reliability, there is the question of accountability. Mr. Seigenthaler, after discovering that he had been defamed, found that his "biographer" was anonymous. He learned that the writer was a customer of BellSouth Internet, but that federal privacy laws shield the identity of Internet customers, even if they disseminate defamatory material. And the laws protect online corporations from libel suits.

He could have filed a lawsuit against BellSouth, he wrote, but only a subpoena would compel BellSouth to reveal the name.

In the end, Mr. Seigenthaler decided against going to court, instead alerting the public, through his article, "that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool."

Mr. Wales said in an interview that he was troubled by the Seigenthaler episode, and noted that Wikipedia was essentially in the same boat. "We have constant problems where we have people who are trying to repeatedly abuse our sites," he said.

Still, he said, he was trying to make Wikipedia less vulnerable to tampering. He said he was starting a review mechanism by which readers and experts could rate the value of various articles. The reviews, which he said he expected to start in January, would show the site's strengths and weaknesses and perhaps reveal patterns to help them address the problems.

In addition, he said, Wikipedia may start blocking unregistered users from creating new pages, though they would still be able to edit them.

The real problem, he said, was the volume of new material coming in; it is so overwhelming that screeners cannot keep up with it.

All of this struck close to home for librarians and researchers. On an electronic mailing list for them, J. Stephen Bolhafner, a news researcher at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote, "The best defense of the Wikipedia, frankly, is to point out how much bad information is available from supposedly reliable sources."

Jessica Baumgart, a news researcher at Harvard University, wrote that there were librarians voluntarily working behind the scenes to check information on Wikipedia. "But, honestly," she added, "in some ways, we're just as fallible as everyone else in some areas because our own knowledge is limited and we can't possibly fact-check everything."

In an interview, she said that her rule of thumb was to double-check everything and to consider Wikipedia as only one source.

"Instead of figuring out how to 'fix' Wikipedia - something that cannot be done to our satisfaction," wrote Derek Willis, a research database manager at The Washington Post, who was speaking for himself and not The Post, "we should focus our energies on educating the Wikipedia users among our colleagues."

Some cyberexperts said Wikipedia already had a good system of checks and balances. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford and an expert in the laws of cyberspace, said that contrary to popular belief, true defamation was easily pursued through the courts because almost everything on the Internet was traceable and subpoenas were not that hard to obtain. (For real anonymity, he advised, use a pay phone.)

"People will be defamed," he said. "But that's the way free speech is. Think about the gossip world. It spreads. There's no way to correct it, period. Wikipedia is not immune from that kind of maliciousness, but it is, relative to other features of life, more easily corrected."

Indeed, Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0 and a longtime Internet analyst, said Wikipedia may, in that sense, be better than real life.

"The Internet has done a lot more for truth by making things easier to discuss," she said. "Transparency and sunlight are better than a single point of view that can't be questioned."

For Mr. Seigenthaler, whose biography on Wikipedia has since been corrected, the lesson is simple: "We live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research, but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects."


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

NYT: The Gamer as Artiste

December 4, 2005
Pixel Canvas
The Gamer as Artiste

By JOHN LELAND
LAST week, I spent several days living - and dying - inside the new Xbox 360 console, with four popular games pegged as particularly cinematic. I entered as a curious novice, less concerned with breaking the games than with exploring the worlds they opened, and the worlds you die in.

I died as a princess in a green miniskirt, as a space warrior, a World War II soldier named Vasili and a humorless F.B.I. agent tracking a sadistic killer. My deaths, rendered in state-of-the-art detail, were not illustrious or mourned. They consisted of the limited repertoire of gestures assigned to death by the game makers. In the virtual world of games, players get to invent their own unique lives, but when they die, even the greats cede control to their maker.

The release of the Xbox 360 game console last month, with its sharper graphics, is likely to renew debates about whether games are too violent or too mindless, or whether children should be outside running around.

But as video play occupies more and more of American imaginative life, the games themselves raise other provocative questions: Can games be something more than games? In other words, can they move people emotionally or intellectually in the manner of great art?

Steven Spielberg last year offered one model for the medium to follow: cinema. In an address to students learning to be game developers at the University of Southern California, Mr. Spielberg, who has since contracted to create three games, challenged the industry to improve the storytelling, character development and emotional content in the same way it has enhanced the images and action. The medium will come of age, he said, "when somebody confesses that they cried at Level 17."

But movies are just one model for games to emulate. Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that they are equally close to dance, as a medium of performance, or architecture, as a medium of creating unique spaces.

Museum exhibitions, academic conferences and university curriculums have examined games as art. A 2004 conference at Stanford University called "Story Engines" looked at game play as a way of creating narratives, at a time when the audiences for established story vehicles like books, newspapers, movies and network television are in decline.

As games gain attention as an art form, it remains to be determined just what sort of art they can or should be. Are they like movies, projecting the vision of an auteur like Mr. Spielberg or Peter Jackson, who recently collaborated in "Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie"? Or are they more like the song "Frankie and Johnny," which is performed in different ways by many people, and in which the art lies in the sum of performances?

In a $10 billion industry, the stakes are high. Like the television set before it, the game console is now colonizing American living rooms and the lives therein. Americans spend more money on video games and consoles than on movies; nearly half the country plays. Thirty-three years after Pong, video games have become "the major cultural activity of the generation 30 or 35 and below, the way movies and literature were for earlier generations," said James Paul Gee, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy."

Even among children who don't grasp the lessons taught in their schools, Professor Gee said, they "can all discuss the stories in video games at a very sophisticated level."

Like previous new game consoles, the Xbox 360 allows games to look more like movies. Walls have textures; battle scenes show remarkably detailed characters moving independently. Such advanced technology, made possible by increased processing power, also raises the cost of developing games, which now run budgets of up to $25 million, including the expenses of licensing characters and music. This in turn influences the type of games that are produced: Of the 10 top-selling games of last year, all were sequels to successful games, tie-ins to hit movies or both.

This emphasis on realism, in what is inherently an artificial medium, misreads what is special about the game experience, said Douglas Rushkoff, author of "Playing the Future: What We Can Learn From Digital Kids." Video games, he said, should be less like movies, not more.

"This is an age-old thing going back to Pong," said Mr. Rushkoff, who describes himself as an enthusiastic gamer. "What made Pong so exciting was not its accurate depiction of Ping-Pong or its relationship to reality. It was the ability to move pixels around on the screen, and an appreciation for the way the game designer is working in metaphor. "

The relationship between the movie and game industries has always been bumpy. Though there have been lucrative crossovers between the two media, movies based on hit games are often duds, like the recent "Doom," as are games based on hit movies.

"The press treats Spielberg's announcement as the second coming," said Professor Jenkins of M.I.T. "But game designers remember how the game based on 'E.T.' nearly killed Atari, and is considered the biggest failure in game history."

In its emphasis on filling games with scenes and dialogue to establish character, Professor Jenkins said, "Hollywood puts its effort into things gamers don't care about."

He compared the video game industry to Hollywood of the 1930's, when studios created standards for their products but also imposed formulas for the movies they churned out, with rising budgets and diminishing creative risk-taking.

"What you need now is a garage band aesthetic, or independent film aesthetic for games," he said. "You're building the world from scratch. Why does it have to look like the world we live in?"

In fact, an indie aesthetic is starting to develop, cultivated by academia, online journals and a movement toward low-budget, "casual" games that stress simple images but complex game play. Eric Zimmerman of gameLab, which created a casual game called Diner Dash, said that the big companies were afflicted with "cinema envy." The impulse to make people cry, he said, was a "misguided idea of what emotional depiction is." He said, "Games are by nature incredibly emotionally engaging. Look at poker. There's emotional engagement, strategy and a Zen-level involvement. Games are dynamic, participatory systems. That's a level of storytelling that a film can't do."

So what can video games do that movies can't? For starters, it is a mistake to overlook the raw experience of play. But beyond the blockbusters that dominate the industry, some developers are taking advantage of the unique properties of games to tell stories. Professor Gee of Wisconsin cited a game being developed to help children sort through traumatic divorces, or an online game called Second Life that allows users to invent their own simulated environments, which other players can visit.

"If all we're doing is making the 17th version of a movie you've already seen, our culture isn't going to look very good," he said. "We haven't begun to scratch the surface of what games we could make without somebody shooting someone."

Though games may not produce Mr. Spielberg's tears, they are the one medium that allows users to experience guilt, because they make the player responsible for the actions of a character on screen, Professor Jenkins said. "If you do something despicable, you have yourself to answer for."

Few games exploit this potential, but there is nothing preventing future developers from doing so, he said.

But my own experience inside the box raises a different narrative possibility. In a culture that is squeamish about death, games are the first major medium that makes one's own mortality a central element in the experience. In many games, to reach the last level alive is to put the game behind you.

A challenge for game makers, then, is not to make users cry at the death of another, but to find meaning in their own. This is, after all, the one universal human condition. To which games add the one antidote: the ability to press restart.

Copyright 2005 New York Times

NYT: Deadheads Must Be Satisfied With 1,300 Audience Tapings

The Annals of Open Source Culture:
Although I supose one shouldn't look a Dead horse in the mouth, it's nonetheless unfortunate that the Dead are now placing limits on access to recordings of their live performances.



cf. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/arts/music/30dead.html


December 2, 2005
Deadheads Must Be Satisfied With 1,300 Audience Tapings


By JEFF LEEDS
Responding to a rising revolt from its famously loyal fans, the Grateful Dead has partly reversed a decision to prohibit fans from downloading free copies of live-concert recordings.

The shift, announced late Wednesday by the band's spokesman, Dennis McNally, means that the Live Music Archive, part of the independent Web site archive.org, will once again allow the band's followers to download recordings made by audience members at their performances. But high-quality live recordings made from the band's concert soundboard will be available only for online listening, not downloading.

Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian at the Internet archive, said yesterday that the audience-made recordings - which number more than 1,300 - had been made available for downloading. He added that the coveted soundboard recordings would be on the site and available for listening in the next few days. The total number of Grateful Dead recordings on the site is expected to number roughly 3,000.

For decades, the Grateful Dead has encouraged its fans - Deadheads - to record its live shows and trade tapes. But its lucrative touring days ended when the band disbanded in 1995 after the death of its guitarist and lead singer, Jerry Garcia. And so sales of the band's music, especially digital music in the era of iTunes, became increasingly important to its bottom line, as did sales of other Grateful Dead merchandise.

In the last several months, the band began selling downloads of its performances through its own official Web site, dead.net. And the week before Thanksgiving, representatives of the band asked the Live Music Archive to remove the recordings of the band's work.

The removal of the files stirred outrage among fans, and the furor and partial reversal exposed disagreements over business philosophy among the band's surviving members.

In an e-mail statement yesterday, Mickey Hart, one of the band's drummers, said, "I was one of the first supporters of the tapers and the creation of the Grateful Dead taping policies and I continue to believe that the tapers play an important role in expanding our community."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company