Similar to Stowe Boyd and Jack Vinson I’m not a big fan of wikis: while they are good for collective writing when authorship of specific contributions is not important, there are much more cases where it’s essential to know who makes what changes. Of course, the history of edits is there, but it’s just too unhuman to be used systematically.

However, given that the traces are there getting tools to analyse them is just a matter of time. WikiDashboard (thanks to Jane McConnell) is a good example of what is possible: if you use it to browse Wikipedia, each page is enhanced with a visualisation representing top ten users who edited it.

Motivation: The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

I was curious to see how it works, so I used it to check who edits Knowledge_Management page:

And then click on User:Snowded:

The second screenshot is more interesting: it’s a user page that shows what pages he edits most. As I was suspecting, the user is Dave Snowden and you can see not only which pages he edits, but also that he seems to have given up editing KM page (or that visualisations are not up to date, since this is not the case).

Well, on one hand I’m happy to see tools that add transparency and give credits to individual contributors. On the other hand, I wonder what Dave thinks of it. It’s not only about privacy concerns, but also about the potential of tools like this for messing up contributor motivations and all other consequences of measurement.

The people behind Wikidashboard are interested in the patterns that it might show, also inside companies:

We’re curious of how the Web community will use this tool to surface social dynamics and editing patterns that might otherwise be difficult to find and analyze in Wikipedia. We are also interested in applying this tool to Enterprise Wikis.

I’m interested in those patterns too, but even more in the secondary effects of having tool like that in a corporate settings. I still remember the feedback we’ve got on our innocent prototype that visualised some patterns in a corporate discussion forum. Then I was surprised not that much with the “Big Brother” title for our application, but with a little detail: community members didn’t want to have visible the number of messages they wrote next to their names, the feature that you can see often in public forums. Funny enough, they didn’t mind having a list of messages they wrote displayed next to their names. Numbers are easy to judge and easy to turn into targets, while it’s pretty clear that contribution it not about that.

See also:

• WikiDashboard visualisations explained
• Bookmarklet for WikiDashboard
• WikiDashboard search engine plugin for Firefox/Mozilla Browsers

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/16.html#a1965; comments are here.

• My del.icio.us tagroll
• Bloggers cited in the dissertation
• Bloggers cited in my dissertation

Ton in Weaving Webs: How to Quickly Find Somebody’s Online Traces?:

As I do after each conference I am currently busy finding people on-line and adding them to my ‘social filter’ after BlogTalk Reloaded. Basically that means finding their on-line presences and adding them to my feedreader, and connecting to them in different environments such as Plazes, Skype, Flickr, OpenBC/Xing, LinkedIn, 43People etc. Weaving them into my social web so to speak.

Ton is not alone in that: each f2f meeting I participate in follows with a surge of “let’s be friends” requests over many platforms. It’s becoming a practice that eventually will be supported by some tool that Ton wants:

Would there be a way to create a search agent that takes the name of a person you’ve met? Ideally you would provide such a search agent with your own account data of all the environments you are part of that you want to have searched. And then it comes back with a number of likely search results that might contain any or all of the following for instance:

Possible blogs of that person
Possible Flickr Feed, or 23 feed
Possible Skypename
Possible IM names
Profile in OpenBc.com
Profile in LinkedIn.com
Profile at 43people.com
Possible Plazes account
Possible del.icio.us account

I have a very mixed feelings about it, similar to those in the comment by Marc Canter:

Clearly their is a need for such a search function, but it steps right onto the issue of privacy and security on the web.

For me, as someone who wants to ‘bookmark’ digital bits of people I met offline, having a tool like that would be great. For me, as a one ‘being searched for’, it sounds like a nightmare: I’m not happy when others connect my online dots on one page, especially if I don’t know them.

For me leaving my bits online is a conscious choice, but leaving them disintegrated ‘all over the place’ is a consious choice as well: if I make choices to share specific things in specific contexts and not put all on the same page I have a reasons to do so. And I’d like those reasons to be respected by whatever search tools (as they currently supposed to respect NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW of web-pages). At the end I want to have at least some rights over my own bits (e.g. digital traces not being aggregated without explicit content)…

So, coming back to Ton’s problem – one of the options that I could imagine is ‘Plaze-based’ search, an advanced version of something I experienced at SHiFT:

• there I could easily see others on the same network and add them as contacts
• once they confirmed I could get their basic info (like IM names or web-site links)
• I can also see ‘plazes we have in common’, which could provide some context on the specific location (often associated with an event) where we have met

Of course, this is yet another centralised system (with all the problems of that), but at least it does a few things:

• makes ‘search’ much easier (by showing only people who are at the same location with me at the moment)
• provides people with choice of how much ‘aggregated in one space’ information they want to share with me
• provides me with some clues about the history of our relationship (if you want to get into that deeper – make sure to check danah boyd’s Master thesis for the idea of Digital Mirror, pp. 53-59)

So, two questions regarding all these:

• Can my Plaze-based search be generalised to any cross-platform search?
• Are there any chances that eventually I will be able to add NOAGGREGATE tag or something like that (‘aggregate only for my contacts’, ‘ask first’, etc.) to my digital bits to control how they are displayed? Anything practical I can do in that respect? [pinging Suw at ORG]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/10/09.html#a1842; comments are here.

• Feed your blog to tOKo and see what comes out
• extisp.icio.us: visualisation of your del.icio.us tags
• The high cost of not finding information: Reinventing is more fun than reusing