Cyde Weys Musings

Wikipedia has been accused of being a cult by a wide variety of detractors. And frankly, it’s true. But it’s not quite the kind of cult that most of its detractors allege. For instance, it’s not a cult of Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia’s remaining co-founder), as most of the everyday editors barely even know who he is; they are so far isolated from his influence that they don’t even come close to sipping the Kool-Aid. It’s only at the top echelons of Wikipedia governance where Jimmy’s influence makes itself known, but that has been waning heavily in recent years after a long series of missteps from an aloof “leader” who, every time he steps in, seems to do so with only half knowledge, and is as likely to inflame a conflict and leave it unresolved as he is to resolve it.

No, the only way in which Wikipedia can be truly be described as a cult is in the manner in which nearly all of its members value knowledge. I have never seen such a uniformly inquisitive group of people before. Wikipedia is the largest collection of free knowledge on the planet, and a cult of knowledge has grown up simultaneously with it. Simple informal discussions amongst Wikipedia participants have a palpably different feel than anything else I’ve experienced. Everyone relishes learning new things. Wikipedia articles are linked frequently, not only because Wikipedia is the common thread linking the participants together, but simply because reading Wikipedia’s articles is an excellent way of learning new things. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the more anti-intellectual American society at large.

In the past few days I’ve read about everything from naval armaments in World Wars I and II to local towns in my area to science fiction novels. Scarcely a day goes by in which I don’t refer to Wikipedia on something. When I’m not in front of a computer and someone mentions a topic that I have insufficient knowledge of, I keep it in my mind until I next get in front of a computer and then look it up on Wikipedia. Most of the Wikipedians you will interact with do likewise. Thus, there’s never a dull, silent moment in a conversation amongst Wikipedians, because there is never any lack of subjects to discuss in a cult of knowledge.

I stopped actively editing Wikipedia more or less one year ago. Naturally, I haven’t stopped editing completely, as I still read Wikipedia nearly every day in the pursuit of my own edification. But I no longer seek out thankless administrative tasks to perform, nor do I browse articles solely to find a way to contribute some writing. In that way I’m much more like the casual reader who occasionally fixes a typo, though the casual reader also doesn’t have the ability to delete articles, block users, and protect pages (ah, the privileges of being an administrator). But I don’t much use those abilities anymore, so it matters little.

In addition to doing lots of editing and administrative tasks (page may take awhile to load), I also spent a good amount of time hacking on programs for Wikipedia. Some, such as the userbox generator (don’t even ask), were purposefully silly. Others, such as my work on the PyWikipediaBot free software project, were more useful. In addition to my work on that bot framework, I wrote quite a few bots, which are programs for making automated edits. By the time I (mostly) retired from Wikipedia, I had put many hours into those bots, and I couldn’t bear to just shut them down. So I left them running. They’ve been running now for over a year, unattended for the most part, and have been remarkably error-free all things considered. I have variously forgotten about them for months at a time, and only remembered them when my network connection chugs for an extended period of time (long “Categories for deletion” backlog) or when my server’s CPU utilization pegs (bot process gets stuck in an endless loop). So yes, there is a zombie bot editing Wikipedia, and it even has administrative rights that it uses quite frequently!

All of these bot programs that I wrote run under one Wikipedia user account, Cydebot. That account was the first account on any Wikipedia project to break one million edits. The total currently stands somewhere at a million and a quarter (proof), though it has been out-edited by one other bot account by now. But just think about the enormity of that number. At one point Cydebot had a single digit percentage of all edits to the English Wikipedia. You can’t say that’s not impressive, especially considering how ridiculously massive Wikipedia is. Yet being a bot operator was largely unsung work. The only time I really got noticed for all the effort I was putting into it (and never mind the network resources involved, especially when I was running AntiVandalBot, which downloaded and analyzed the text of every single edit to Wikipedia in real time) was when yet another person thought they were the first to realize that Cydebot was using administrative tools and deemed it necessary to yell at me about it. Wikipedia has this cargo cult rule that “admin bots aren’t allowed” — even though people have been running them for years. I’ll grant that it’s schizophrenic.

So after continuing to run Cydebot for this long, I’m not going to stop now. I haven’t put any effort into Cydebot for over a year besides occasionally updating the pyWikipediaBot framework from SVN, killing pegged bot processes, and rarely modifying the batch files for my bots when someone points out that the associated pages on Wikipedia have changed. I don’t have the time (nor the desire) to put any further serious development work into Cydebot, so at some point things will finally break and Cydebot will no longer be able to do any work. But it’s already gone for over a year performing all sorts of thankless tasks on Wikipedia that no human wants to be bothered with; why not let it continue going and see how much longer my favorite zombie bot can continue at it for?

If you want to track the continuing edits of a zombie bot on Wikipedia, you can do so here. So the next time you are idly reading Wikipedia, remember that, not only are there bots behind the scenes that are making millions of automated edits, but some of them are zombies that have been running largely unattended for months, if not years. Wikipedia is built, in no small part, upon zombie labor.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which you will most likely know as being the folks responsible for Wikipedia (and a whole host of other projects), has a bit of a problem on their hands. Specifically, I’m talking about their recent hire in the Deputy Director position, Erik Moller. More specifically, it seems that has a rather … deep interest in child sexuality, and some “interesting” positions on it to boot.

I’m not the first to pick up on this, either. Valleywag quotes Erik as saying “What is my position on pedophilia, then? It’s really simple. If the child doesn’t want it, is neutral or ambiguous, it’s inappropriate.” Obviously, that’s leaving something important unsaid — namely, are children really mature enough to decide if they do want sex; and if they say they do, does that make it appropriate? And then there are his rather interesting essays on the subject.

But there are some other things that haven’t come to light yet. I’ll just list them off and let his words speak for themselves.

Erik created the Wikipedia article on Child sexuality in 2003, and it was definitely not a stub article (Wikipedia’s parlance for short, introductory articles intended to be expanded upon by others).

He inserted the following text into the article on Human sexual behavior:

It is generally acknowledged that children are capable of feeling sexual pleasure, even if they are not yet able to engage in sexual intercourse with each other, and/or are not yet biologically able to reproduce.

In the article on Homosexuality and morality, he writes:

“A small minority believes that children are capable of consenting to homosexual acts with older men, but all major pro-homosexual groups have rejected that view.”

And he has a rather curious definition of pedophilia:

Again, someone who sexually abuses a minor is not necessarily a pedophile (”exclusively” ”attracted” to ”preadolescents” — emphasis on every word), but may simply be acting out of opportunity. The title “pedophiles and pederasts” is redundant — pedophilia ”includes” pederasty. This does not in any way mitigate the definitional problems of this article.

So, why am I bringing this all up? I don’t think Erik is a pedophile, but he has some very wrong and dangerous views on the subject that cannot bear to be left unopposed. There is no room for sophomore philosophizing and moralizing on such a damaging subject, nor should we allow the subject to be normalized by turning a blind eye to such outrageous claims as those made by Erik. Erik embodies one of the main problems with Wikipedia: it allows people with no real training or knowledge in a subject area to nevertheless insert their own personal views into the encyclopedia by sheer force of being a prolific Wikipedian. It’s bad enough when such a person is writing the articles, but it’s terrible when they’re #2 in the line of people running the whole place!

Erik needs to speedily retract and denounce his earlier comments on the subject, not defend them. They are indefensible. If this keeps going the way it is, it puts the Wikimedia Foundation on a collision path with a huge PR nightmare that we really do not want to face; after all, can you really think of a subject that plays more badly in the media and in the general public than pedophilia? Erik needs to get apologetic or he needs to get out, and if he does not make that decision soon, it needs to be made for him.

A week ago, Newyorkbrad of English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee fame (and if you don’t know what that means already, it’s not worth your time to delve into the intricate internal workings of Wikipedia to find out) asked me why I retired from Wikipedia. It’s a question I get asked fairly often and I’ve even heard it was being discussed on one of the ex-Wikipedian forums. So here’s my well put together answer that I can proceed to link to from now on whenever the question is raised again.

First of all, the basic presupposition of the question is false. I have not retired from Wikipedia. I still retain all access levels and keep in constant contact with many Wikipedians. I still run all the same bots. What is true to say is that I have “mostly” retired. If you look at my contributions, you’ll see that they’ve drastically decreased from their once high former levels.

The simple reason is that I’ve become bored with managing the inner workings of Wikipedia. Too much drudgery, not enough fun. Even the drama, which used to captivate me, has simply grown lame. I have some form of long-term ADD that leaves me progressively more and more bored with any single activity. Any sort of online community has a very limited shelf life for me. I can’t even remember all of the online communities I’ve been part of, including various newsgroups, web forums, chat rooms, online games, clans, etc., that I departed from just as quickly as I got involved in in the first place. Most of them I never look back at.

But Wikipedia is different. The reason I came to Wikipedia in the first place — that it is a great source of knowledge — hasn’t changed in the least, so I still find myself using Wikipedia every day on a purely educational basic. Wikipedia thus has some intrinsic value to it that everything else I’ve abandoned doesn’t, so I cannot foresee ever leaving permanently. So while I don’t go seeking out administrative tasks to perform anymore, I still reply to messages on my talk page within a reasonable amount of time. And if I come across an error while reading a Wikipedia article, I fix it. This level of activity probably puts me in the same boat as most Wikipedia users, but compared to my previous highs, it is a precipitous decline, leading people to ask the question why I quit Wikipedia.

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Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, is still in the crosshairs. When I last I wrote the story of his messy break-up with Rachel Marsden was hitting major media outlets. But I lamented that they weren’t tackling the conflict of interest and misuse of financial resources angle. Well, now the San Francisco Chronicle is.

This story definitely has legs on it, and the inconsistencies between what members of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees are saying to each other and then what they’re saying to the media really isn’t helping. Everyone knows the Wikimedia Foundation leaks like a sieve, so why in the world are you writing completely incriminating emails revealing that you know the categorical denials given to the media aren’t true? Just be honest with everyone. Stop circling the wagons around Jimmy Wales — he may have co-founded Wikipedia, but he doesn’t have much to do with it anymore. Don’t insist on bringing down Wikipedia with his ship.

If you haven’t been following the ongoing breakup saga between Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Rachel “Canada’s Ann Coulter” Marsden, then you’re really missing out on a lot of drama. The Sydney Morning Herald article does a good job of explaining what’s going on, though it does kind of miss the conflict of interest angle that Valleywag covers.

All I can say is Jimmy’s relationship with Rachel definitely ended in much lulz, complete with his dirty clothes being auctioned off on eBay. Now that is quality. Oh, for such a “great” man to confront such pedestrian troubles, and then get steamrolled by them.

Sorry, no specifics, but big things are going down right now in the Wikimedia Foundation (the foundation that runs Wikipedia). A year from now we’ll all be looking back on how things are now and wondering what in the hell happened. Keep your eyes peeled on the technical news websites.

Yesterday I was linked from Slashdot in an article about the launch of Veropedia, a project that I did some development work for. I will admit to being happy about it; I’ve been reading Slashdot regularly for at least seven years, and I always wanted to get on the front page. I tried my hand at submitting some stories, and even got one published in the Gaming section, but I never made the front page. I gave up on that and eventually moved onto Wikipedia and then blogging. I was hoping one day something I wrote would end up being linked from a high-profile site like Slashdot or Digg; doesn’t every author want to be read? But of course, the web is entirely unpredictable, and I didn’t end up getting linked to for the kind of post I would have expected.

Slashdotting just isn’t what it used to be. Sites linked from Slashdot used to go down hard and fast. But over time, the ability of computers has grown exponentially (and web server software has improved), while Slashdot’s traffic has stayed relatively steady. Traffic from Slashdot used to be like a visit from a shark to a small pond. Now it’s more like a visit from a shark to the ocean. You don’t notice it much. Admittedly, this site isn’t very high traffic, so yesterday’s visit numbers were quadruple the daily average. But my hosting service, HostMonster, didn’t even blink, giving me no problems whatsoever with network slowness or the dreaded “CPU usage quota exceeded”. So for the price and the level of service they provide, I would highly recommend them (and why yes, that is a referral link).

Now keep in mind I was the third and last link in the article, so I didn’t get quite the level of traffic as the first link, Veropedia. Veropedia was having some issues loading. Ironically, that was the fault of the Amazon affiliate ad, which couldn’t handle the traffic (and since it was near the top of the page, prevented the rest of the page from loading). I got an urgent message from Danny in the middle of the day, so I logged into the server and temporarily excised the ad, and that fixed all of the problems. My web hosting with HostMonster is standard “many sites on one box”, whereas we’re hosting Veropedia on a dedicated server. So if this blog can handle the traffic, then Veropedia certainly could. It just stumbled a bit because of that damn ad.

This past week saw the launch of Veropedia, a quality-oriented, stable version of Wikipedia (see What is Veropedia?). A select cadre of trusted contributors go out and identify good versions of articles on Wikipedia and upload them to Veropedia. The idea is that if you want to read an article about a certain subject, go to Veropedia first to see what has been identified as the best version of the article, and if Veropedia doesn’t have it yet, it just links you right through to the newest revision on Wikipedia. This is an awesome feature because Wikipedia articles are constantly in flux, and it can be a headache trying to read Wikipedia and running smack dab into vandalism or a chopped up article in the midst of an edit war.

I bring up Veropedia because I had a not insignificant role in its creation. I’ve been involved from the very beginning about seven months ago. I wrote roughly half of the back-end code (not the interface stuff). Specifically, I wrote the code that grabs articles from Wikipedia, parses them, inserts them into the Veropedia database, and munges them to conform to the Veropedia style. A learned a lot about databases and XML and HTML parsers while writing the code for Veropedia. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do nearly as much with Veropedia since I started my job, which has taken up most of my free time. But I’m still up in the rafters, keeping tabs on things, and wishing it much success.

The neatest thing about Veropedia is how it feeds back into and improves Wikipedia. Veropedia has a very comprehensive article checker that points out just about every flaw with an article that a computer program can find. But articles aren’t edited on Veropedia. Veropedia contributors must go and edit the article on Wikipedia, fixing up all the flaws, until a quality version is ready for importation to Veropedia. So everyone wins: both Wikipedia and Veropedia get improved articles. The Veropedia article checker even finds many flaws in Featured Articles on Wikipedia, such as broken external links.

Update 2007-10-29: Awesome, it looks like the news of Veropedia’s launch made Slashdot’s front page. And a link to this blog post was included in the write-up. Color me surprised that my site hasn’t gone down already. Anyway, if you have any questions for me about Veropedia, feel free to ask me here and I’ll respond ASAP. Or come chat with us in #veropedia on irc.freenode.net. Also, feel free to check out the rest of this site. You might find something interesting.

When discussing on talk pages on Wikipedia, comments are customarily tagged with signatures that link back to the user page of the person who wrote them, as well a time stamp indicating when the comment was made. Wikipedia allows users to customize the look of their signature. I first became really active on Wikipedia in December 2005 and ended up playing around with different signatures for awhile, until I settled on one that I haven’t changed since April 2006. Here’s what my signature looks like:

–Cyde Weys 02:02, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

I called the color “light red” at the time that I picked it, but realistically, everyone thinks it’s pink. I chose the color on a lark (and then proceeded to not change it many times on a lark), intending to convey a sense of “don’t-give-a-fuckism” about the usual connotations of the color. It only succeeds in conveying that impression once others get past the initial confusion. The name “Cyde Weys” doesn’t exactly have a lot of gender cues in it, and with nothing else to go on, people usually associate the color with femininity, so they tend to think “female” rather “male who doesn’t care” when they see the signature. Also, because some homosexual Wikipedians use pink inverted triangles in their signature, I have gotten the occasional confusion over sexual orientation, but for the most part, people don’t associate light red with male homosexuality.

The color is also disarming and harmless, which is in pretty stark contrast to my comments. They can get pretty abrasive and argumentative during heated debates It’s like the color is used ironically. One nice advantage of having a signature of that color is that almost no one else uses it. Blue signatures are a dime and dozen, and very hard to distinguish from one another without actually reading the link text. But my signature stands out from the sea of typical comments. I can skim over whole pages at a time, instantly seeing where all of my comments are (and where they are not). This helps to avoid replying multiple times to the same comment as well as helping to identify areas of discussion that I may be interested in commenting in, but haven’t yet.

I’ve long since grown numb to the confusing nature of my signature, so I’m always taken by surprise when another person raises questions. I just forget that, even though my gender is incredibly obvious to me, the signature itself isn’t nearly so unambiguous, and at any given time, multiple people may be harboring various suspicions or mistaken beliefs about me. I don’t mind though. I always get a laugh out of someone mistaking me for a female, so the signature provides a continual source of amusement. And, in some small way, I suppose it is helping to challenge traditional color-based gender identification. Wikipedia isn’t exactly small fry, and I’ve left my signature across thousands of talk pages. The people I’ve had interactions with on there have been forced to come to the realization that heterosexual men can choose to be identified by a light red color for no other reason than the fact that most do not.