Tilikum, the killer whale, according to Wikipedia on January 2, 2010.

“He is in fact very docile” — 173.18.247.14

And Tilikum, the killer whale, according to Wikipedia on February 24, 2010, after the fatal incident.

“Maybe, he’s not quite so docile…” — JoelWhy

Over 295,000 such biographies, or nearly 70% of all biographies of living people, are being watched by fewer than 4 registered accounts.  Not to mention, there’s no telling if those watchlists are in the possession of accounts who log in daily or weekly or monthly or not since Essjay said he was a multi-degreed theologian.

No wonder libel and defamation abound on Wikipedia.

The thing is, Livingston is not gay.

And “Lee Dennison” doesn’t exist.

Interestingly, the community at Wikipedia Review has done most of the detective work for lawyer Chad Fitzgerald, whether he knew about it or not.  It appears that the accused “John Doe” is actually one Mark Binmore, if even that is a real name.

Attorney Ben Sheffner has also commented on the legal brief and the related common tragedy of events like this — both the mainstream and the gossip media typically botch the details of any legal case involving the Internet.  Why is that?  Why do Internet issues having anything to deal with privacy and defamation seem so difficult to accurately report in the media?  Maybe it’s because most reporters have a mistaken understanding that on the Internet people are good, they don’t lie, they say who they are, and they don’t spread falsehoods deliberately.  Well, wake up.  Thanks to Section 230, I’m beginning to think that generally speaking, on the Internet the opposite is actually true.

People are bad.  They lie.  They don’t say who they are.  And they spread falsehoods deliberately.

Let me present my graphic version of the timeline (Swan’s didn’t look like this), and after you give it some thought and consideration, we can then discuss it:

Tribal Economy

I don’t recall that Swan went into detail about the earliest phases of human development, but my cursory knowledge of civilization between 100,000 and 10,000 BC would evoke images of Neanderthal men, women, and children using stone tools to fashion crude stone weapons – most significantly the spear tip. The society would be organized around an extended family or perhaps a close-knit handful of families that we would now call a “tribe”. The tribe would have a self-contained economy, and the most common interaction between tribes would be of a defensive or violent nature. Food would be gained through the “hunt and gather” technique, and homesteads would not be permanent structures because wild game migrates with the seasons. Sitting in our comfortable, heated homes with full refrigerators, it is very difficult to even imagine human life in the Tribal Economy.

Rural Economy

Then, around 10,000 BC, a revolution in civilization transformed the economy. People learned to grow crops that could be consumed, stored for off-season consumption, or traded to another tribe to keep them from attacking your tribe or to obtain some surplus product they had in their possession. This was the Rural Economy.

Industrial Economy

At about the time the crude steam engine was being made more practical and efficient (the years between 1700 and 1775), we can say mankind’s economy was transformed once again. Mechanical turning of wheels and milling tools was no longer dependent on horses walking in a circle or the cascading water of a mill race, so industrial manufacturing and processing could be located closer to centers of labor, resources, and distribution, and thus was born the Industrial Economy.

Consumer Economy

Swan suggests that after 200 years of the Industrial Economy’s accomplishments, manufacturing things that couldn’t be made by hand under the Rural Economy (railroad tracks, locomotives, automobiles, airplanes, and hydroelectric dams, to name a few), civilization graduated to a Consumer Economy, all about the household or the individual acquiring things that made life easier or symbolized status. This was the age of television sets, frozen dinners, Barbie dolls, and annual stylistic alterations to automobiles so that consumers would just have to buy “the new model”. It’s important to understand the Consumer Economy (and don’t turn to Wikipedia for help – its article about the Consumer Economy is abysmal), not only because it has so indelibly shaped our present urban and suburban culture, but because we are arguably still in it. More on that in a moment, though.

Human Economy – are we there yet?

Swan’s talk at the CTAM conference was not so much focused on this overall timeline upon which I’ve expended so many words taken from my crude understanding of each era, but rather Swan spent most of her presentation elaborating on the characteristics of the most recent stop on that timeline: the Human Economy. I wish I had taken better notes, however, it was clear that Swan characterizes the Human Economy as placing a capital and cultural emphasis on bettering and enriching the person. (Again, you will be lost if you turn to Wikipedia for a definition of “human economy”, which is a quaint irony, if you ask me.) Symbols of the Human Economy might include a fully booked yoga class at the local YMCA, the ever-increasing popularity of “continuing education” programs for adults and seniors at a community college or via distance learning, and of course, volunteer efforts that assist those less fortunate than they who provide the helping hand.

There’s more to it than just this, though. From what I can tell over the past 5 or 10 years, the phrase “human economy” has become inextricably intertwined with the concepts of “sustainability”, “green living”, and the “human ecology”. With wind energy fields springing up in the marketing nexus of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and solar energy farms sprouting up in erstwhile oil-rich Texas, one would be hard-pressed to argue that we are not in the midst of an economic shift of some degree. But, is it transformative? Would we be correct to say that the Consumer Economy (or, for that matter, even the Industrial Economy) are fully behind us, even in the most advanced American urban centers like San Francisco, Boston, or Portland? I would argue not. In other words, I am here to say that Shari Swan may have prematurely placed our society into a Human Economic era that we have not yet truly entered.

I’m willing to be called a curmudgeon or a cynic for saying this, but I do not believe that a significant number of us are dedicating our time and resources toward “bettering and enriching the human”. Though many of us would like to be doing this (or imagine ourselves to be doing so), the Consumer Economy still has us trapped – more than ever – in debt, in paycheck-to-paycheck budgeting, and indeed in federally mandated bail-outs of entire consumer-driven industries. I think we’re still mostly stuck in the Consumer Economy, and we need look no further than the sub-prime lending fiasco, or the debacle of the Iraq War which went off with nary a protest from American citizens who might bother to ask how we’d pay for such a war, or the fact that Craigslist.org is now most notorious for enabling sexual prostitution, possibly even of minors – and our legal system is forced to exempt that website from punishment or even self-restraint, thanks to a 1997 law that our Congress passed without really understanding that the Internet is just another channel of publishing.

The proof is in the Internet

In fact, I think the Internet is the best proof that ours is still a Consumer Economy and not a Human Economy. If you look at the 10 most popular websites, four are devoted to ad-supported search and e-mail communications (Google, Yahoo!, MSN & MSN Live); and three are devoted to consumer transactions (eBay, Amazon, and Microsoft); leaving just three that could be described as oriented toward the Human Economy (Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia). Take Facebook. It has surged over the past two years to become the # 3 website by including more and more folks of my generation rather than the Britney Spears generation, bringing together long-lost high school classmates and former co-workers to talk about what’s important to them. But, what seems to be actually important to them? Apparently, the current rage is playing viral marketing games like Mafia Wars , FarmVille, Farm Town, and Sorority Life, where enterprising code developers are capitalizing on the unwitting willingness of consumers to open their wallets to feel connected. Sorority Life offers the following for your human betterment:

“Create the perfect look for your avatar. Hit the mall for the latest fashions. And get a job to pay off your shopping obsession.”

Farm Town’s value proposition to the consumer?

“Design, grow and maintain your farm and even send gifts to your friends. Play now and share the fun with everyone!”

This is not a return to the Rural Economy, folks.

What are your thoughts? Have we entered the Human Economy phase of civilization? Are we still in the Consumer Economy? Is the Human Economy something we should be striving for? Or, is there a better way to model our human timeline? I look forward to your comments below.

Image credits:

This Is a Photoshop and It Blew My Mind

Even if this is an elaborate video hoax, I have no doubt that some team of ex-Google engineers will have something like this in prototype before the year 2015.

And then what?

There is currently an argument underway on Wikimedia Commons about whether someone captured in a photo among a private party crowd dotted with a gay pornography producer, actors, and fans is or is not actually David Saranga, an Israeli diplomat and former Consul for Media and Public Affairs of Israel in the United States.

Of course it is David Saranga in the real photograph on Fire Island, but the prevailing administrative culture at Wikimedia projects is to protect those who have been quietly authorized to self-promote on the project, even if this means suppressing the verifiable truth to the unsuspecting public.  This is yet another example of a continued neglect of ethical accountability.

Imagine what an instrument like PhotoSketch could do to our understanding of amateur photo-journalism and “truth”.  It is not an altogether encouraging prospect.

• Lido Palace

The story of a thoroughbred racehorse, this article has about 5 other articles linking to it, and it gets about 3 page views per day.

• The Bohemes

This is a rather promotional article about a Dutch indie rock band, having no other articles linking to it, and getting about 3 page views per day.  The band members are nicknamed Dingers, Doodles, Bongos, and Whiskers.  How cute.  The article was created by a new User named “Libertine33″ who had never before made an edit on Wikipedia, and hasn’t made one since The Bohemes.  The author made it a considerable point to attest how The Bohemes have been compared to English rockers, The Libertines, although no source supporting that claim was provided.  Indeed, if one were to search the legitimate news archives, no independent source makes this claim.  But this is typical for Wikipedia, a great compendium of unsubstantiated opinion.

• Jesse Neal

An article about an American professional wrestler.  This page has about 75 other Wikipedia articles linking to it, because pages about pro wrestlers are a very prolific and important component of Wikipedia’s effort to document all things related to fan-based culture.  The new article has been getting about 300 page views per day, by far the most popular of these 10 new articles.  It was authored by Richard “Wrestler” Lopez, who claims to be a retired professional wrestler and now a “wrestling journalist” by dint of his past work for a failed magazine, which led to a job as a waiter, which led to his opening a Blogger account.  As you read this self-written tale of Lopez, you begin to take more interest in his life story than that of his subject, Jesse Neal.  Another characteristic of Wikipedia — the drama of the editors often outweighs the story in situ.

• Nico samaras

This was an interesting case.  The article didn’t last long (46 minutes) before being deleted by a Wikipedia administrator.  It had been getting about 1 page view attempt per day.  This was apparently the second time the article’s creation had been attempted in several months, and both times, the sole purpose of the content was to defame and attack the subject.  This is one of Wikipedia’s most criticized flaws — it is a powerful online defamation platform.

While I will not repeat the entire content of the deleted article, it may be useful to the reader to see just how Wikipedia was exploited in this case to tarnish the reputation of Samaras.  The article described him as surrounded by “fraud allegations” and in the public eye for his “open homosexuality”.   The article closed with a rather outlandish claim, that Samaras “recently engaged with various aquatic and beachcombing business enterprises, most notably a singular idea to establish a chain of seaweed restaurants across Holland and France.”  This is an encyclopedia, they say?

• Ian Sinclair (voice actor)

This article showcases the fact that Sinclair is a voice actor for the Funimation production company.  Actually, other than listing the roles Sinclair has played, this is about all the article mentions about Sinclair.  Only two other articles in Wikipedia link to this one, and it’s garnering only about 6 page views per day.

• Bytown Railway Society

After about two weeks, this one was also deleted by a Wikipedia administrator, as the content was found to be a copyright violation, released under a free license without permission.  Nobody seems to have broken a sweat about that, since the article was getting only about 1 attempted page view per day.

• Eco Trend Incorporated

Deleted within an hour, as the importance of the subject wasn’t substantiated by the article.  Virtually no attempted page views.  Another waste of time on Wikipedia.

• Yitzhak Coren

A fairly extensive biography about an Israeli politician.  Unfortunately, he is about 150 times less interesting to readers than the article about the pro wrestler, as Coren’s article obtains about 2 page views per day.

• Saari Raat

Deleted speedily as an outright copyright violation.  About 1 attempted page view per day.

• Ian Kwok

This one was almost certainly a spoof, a joke.  It was getting about 330 page views per day while published, then only about 1 or 2 attempted page views per day after deletion.

The article discussed the accomplishments of one Ian Kwok, a professional badminton instructor, purportedly the coach of the Singapore national team.  He was also a volleyball coach and a Frisbee coach (for the non-existent Singapore Frisbee International Team).  He enjoys playing the violin.

The rundown

So, out of ten new articles on Wikipedia, how did they fare?

One article (Jesse Neal) seemed to be quite popular and accurate enough.  The other four remaining legitimate articles are not very popular at all, so you have some level of accomplishment, but very little recognition or overall utility.  Fifty percent of the ten articles survived more than two weeks.

The other fifty percent did not exist after two weeks.  One was likely a complete joke, another was a deliberate attack page, and the other three might arguably merit inclusion if only they were authored properly without violating copyright — though you’d suspect that even if this were done, the pages wouldn’t attract more than a handful of daily page views.

Were a larger sample to have been taken, do you suspect that only 50% of new Wikipedia articles survive for more than a week or two?  Do you suppose that only 10% actually survive and garner a level of traffic that sets them apart from the odd curiosity, as was the case with the Jesse Neal article?

One thing is clear.  With over 3 million articles in place on the English Wikipedia, the heady days of “help us build the encyclopedia, create the article you were looking for” are well bygone.  Another thing is fairly clear.  The articles that I personally created recently seem to serve more people’s needs than at least 80%-90% of Wikipedia’s other new articles.  But, now that I’ve been blocked from editing Wikipedia, the encyclopedia won’t be getting any more such useful, well-written articles from me.

While this might be a good idea, the possibilities for abuse seem quite apparent to me. All it would take would be a couple of blog posts and some drive-by, Wikipedia-style vandalism to completely trash somebody’s website… and perhaps without the owner ever knowing that it’s even happened.

So, good idea? Bad idea? What is the take on this?

What these two studies underline is that we might be giving away much more personal information about ourselves than we realize. As Jason Kaufman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University said in the Boston Globe article, “Potentially everything you ever do on the Internet will live forever. I like to think we’ll all learn to give each other a little more slack for our indiscretions and idiosyncrasies.”

Little old me managed to stumble upon a major Yahoo! security vulnerability.

When I clicked the formatted messages’ titles to read the complete posting, I discovered the reason behind the inconsistent formatting: this particular poster had a habit of using the ‘<’ symbol when quoting the content of previous messages (a variation on the more typical ‘>’ convention). On those occasions when the quoted content began with the single letter ‘I’, the summarized search result for that post – though not the full post itself – appeared italicized. When the quoted content began with the single letter ‘u’, the summarized search result for that post appeared underlined.

I soon realized that solely on message board search results pages, Yahoo was allowing my browser to interpret ‘<I’ as the html tag ‘<i>’, which instructs a browser to show what follows as italics, and ‘<u’ as ‘<u>’, which causes what follows to be underlined.

A bit of experimentation revealed that, after accounting for a few quirks, any html code, up to and including i-frames and JavaScript, could be embedded on Yahoo message board search results pages. With that, I realized that I had discovered a big, fat, honest-to-goodness, cross-site scripting security hole (which was only recently fixed, as you can read here).

This is odd for two reasons.

First, while I may be naturally inclined toward geekdom, I’m hardly an expert on internet security, much less a trained network cracker. Nor was I actually looking for a security hole at the time I discovered Yahoo’s.

Second, having worked for a major internet retailer, I’m sufficiently familiar with the rigor of security testing to know that this sort of thing is only supposed to happen to small sites lacking the resources to conduct extensive quality assurance, not to Yahoo, a multi-billion-dollar company.

Taken together, what this tells me is that the web is probably a much more dangerous place than I had imagined.

I also suspect it’s getting more and more dangerous, instead of less, thanks to Web 2.0.

In the old days, websites were static things created by an entity intent on handing out information to the users. Web 2.0 upended that paradigm by making the users themselves the source of the information. As great as that may seem, from a security standpoint asking users to add content to your site is a bit like inviting a group of strangers into your home, with all your valuables stored under the bed in the next room.

Even the open source MediaWiki software has more than its fair share of security vulnerabilities

Initially, this inherent vulnerability was held up as a strong argument in favor of open source software, the theory being that large communities of developers are more likely to spot security flaws. That may be true, but open source is by no means a panacea. Indeed, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s National Vulnerability Database, there have been 37 security holes identified in Mediawiki — the software used to power Wikipedia — including 26 cross-site scripting holes.

The most recent of these was identified just a few months ago, by the way.

That Web 2.0 had security issues at inception is not terribly surprising. After all, the deployment of new technologies is almost always dictated by market demand, not by the extent to which the technology is considered mature. Consequently, the early adoption period is usually marked by the hurried development of countermeasures.

That Web 2.0 security continues to be a  problem, some five years into its existence, does surprise me. Maybe more to the point, it suggests to me that security flaws may simply be endemic to this iteration of the internet’s evolution.

The Internet Review Corporation has discovered that the Wikimedia Foundation plans to open up its office space at 39 Stillman Street in San Francisco for sub-lease.

Our inside source at Grubb & Ellis says they’re asking $25 per square foot, for the 3,000-square-foot space.  (We presume that’s an annual rate, which derives $6,250 per month.)

Why is this interesting?

It seems a bit strange that as recently as January 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation was lamenting how they had “outgrown” their current space, and to solve that problem, they conducted a competitive search for some overflow office space that they could rent.  When the bids came in, the prices were all over the place, but they really thought the shiniest apple in the bushel was the offer from Wikia, Inc., which is the for-profit enterprise co-founded by the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation.  While Wikia didn’t present the lowest rental price (indeed, it was above the average of all bids collected), Wikia was extended the exclusive opportunity to lower their price to closer to the average of the other bids.  Wikia complied, and that’s how tax-advantaged money from the Ruth and Frank Stanton Fund ended up in the pocket of Jimmy Wales’ privately-held company.  Some have called this a “wired deal”.

And this struck some people (those with brains) as a conflict of interest.

Now, only eight months later, are we to understand that instead of having “outgrown” its office space on Stillman Street, the WMF is swimming in surplus floor space, that they need to hire Grubb & Ellis to sub-let it out to someone else?

(Author’s note: The Wikimedia Foundation has clarified that they are not swimming in surplus floor space.  In fact, the entire staff plans to move soon to new space that reportedly offers more than three times the flooring of 39 Stillman Street’s WMF-apportioned space.  The “sub-lease” plans are still in place, but the contract is for the entirety of the soon-to-be-former WMF footprint.  I also understand that the rented office space at Wikia, Inc. will be canceled and those code developers brought under the “home” roof of the Foundation.  Apologies for making the above suggestion; although, in my defense, my initial e-mail about this to my Internet Review Corporation brethren expressed my first hunch that all of WMF was moving.  I should have stuck with my initial gut instinct.)

Since we appear to have scooped this story, maybe the Internet Review Corporation should move its Akahele blog staff to San Francisco, so we can be closer to the action?  What do you all think?  Comments welcome below!