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Welcome to the Newslines Blog. Check in here for news and commentary. Written by Mark Devlin, Newslines founder and CEO. For updates about the site please check Newslines Updates

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2 May, 2017

WikiTribune Will Sink

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A few days ago, it seemed that every newspaper in the world ran the story that Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, is starting a new ‘evidence-based journalism’ site, called WikiTribune, which will incorporate some elements of wiki-based collaborative fact checking. As Wales says:

The community of contributors will vet the facts, help make sure the language is factual and neutral, and will, to the maximum extent possible, be transparent about the source of news posting full transcripts, video, and audio of interviews. In this way, Wikitribune aims to combat the increasing proliferation of online fake news.

Many people who don’t know much about Wikipedia or news, or facts it seems, are hailing Wales’ site as a new force in journalism. Even Kyle Pope, the editor in chief of the Columbia Journalism Review says:

I’m really hesitant to say this is a dumb idea because Wikipedia turned out to be so brilliant.

I’m not hesitant. This is a dumb idea.

About me

I founded:

  • japantoday.com, one of the world’s largest news sites and the first site in the world to have user comments directly under news stories.
  • WeCheck, a collaborative fact checking site, which included a fact-check watch where I detailed fact check fails, and the techniques the fact checkers use to distort their findings to suit their narrative.
  • Newslines, this site, which is a social news agency that aggregates news for large social media fan pages.

I was also a Wikipedia editor for several painful years and have written multiple articles about the site’s software, policies, gender bias, its co-dependent relationship with Google, and the way it raises funds (see list at the bottom of this article).

So I know a little about news, fact checking, Wikipedia and new media. I believe that WikiTribune will fail at being factual and neutral, and that its goal of combating fake news is a fool’s errand, driven by a misreading of the market. Feel free to disagree in the comments…

Quality content is not a business model

Presumably, Wales doesn’t intend to compete with The Daily Mail, which was recently banned as a source from Wikipedia. Instead, he intends to compete with The New York Times or The Guardian, of which Wales was a director until the announcement.

But that focus on ‘quality’ journalism immediately shrinks the market, and makes the chances of success much smaller.

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel says that startups should seek a monopoly in a small market and use that to expand. Yet Wales thinks he can compete with well funded existing high-quality news brands in a small market? That’s not a winning proposition.

Distribution is King

Traditional news media is in full-panic mode. Their print readers are dying of old age, and they can’t survive on the web without Google and Facebook, who have taken all of their distribution and advertising. According to the trade association Digital Content Next, 90 per cent of growth in digital ad revenue over 2015 went to Facebook and Google.

Many people think that ‘content is king’, but publishers know that distribution is actually king. It’s to be expected that journalists believe great writing is what drives their industry. But they forget that a newspaper used to offer two things: content and convenience. The paper was conveniently delivered to your door, until the smartphone came along and delivered it to wherever you and your phone are.

The power of distribution over quality can be demonstrated if you imagine Facebook creating its own low-quality news service. In that case, Facebook’s readers wouldn’t need to go outside the site at all, and all external publishers would fail. In other words, it doesn’t matter how great your content is if you can’t get it seen.

WikiTribune offers no solution to the distribution issue, so it is doomed to the same fate as the media it hopes to replace.

‘Fake News’ is fake news

Wales says WikiTribune is an antidote to ‘fake news’. But the fake news controversy is itself fake news, manufactured by traditional news media to deflect attention from their own failings.

  1. Faced with the loss of their distribution to Google and Facebook, traditional news media has labelled Facebook as a purveyor of fake news, while maintaining that they have a lock on quality news. As if that will lure people back to their badly-designed, ad-filled sites. People will choose convenience over quality every time.
  2. To cover their own shenanigans during the election campaign.

Wales says he decided to launch WikiTribune when he heard President Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway defend the White House’s inflated claims about the size of the inauguration crowd as “alternative facts”.

While that was a misstep, much of the reporting on Trump by the traditional media, their factcheckers, and pollsters, has been skewed to fit their anti-Trump narrative. I lost count of the biased fact checks, skewed polls and outright lies and evasions in the establishment media against Trump.

But, I hear you say, ‘Trump’s a liar too!’ So we have a battle of the truths (or lies), between Trump and the media. A battle of “alternative facts” if you will.

The shocking part of this to me was that many of these distortions were directed to their own readers, who are quite willing to read fabricated stories if it suits their worldview. Lying to your own readers for profit. Now there’s a business model!

In any case, the general public were not impressed by the media’s efforts. In part, as a f-you to the media, they elected Trump. As for fact checkers, their work has been so successful that now only 29% of people in the U.S. trust fact checkers.

If Wales actually believes that there is a fake news epidemic then he’s not an upstart at all: He’s part of the system.

Wikis are terrible for determining facts

We want to bring [the] fact-based, fact-checking mentality we know from Wikipedia to news – Jimmy Wales

Only the most deluded of Wikiutopians could think that the news writing process can be improved by a wiki. Wikinews is a failure, and Wikipedia has a worldwide reputation for unreliability, so much so that schoolchildren in the U.S. are specifically instructed not to use it as a source. Apart from the many scandals about false information being inserted into pages, pages based on current events are rife with bias.

That’s because on Wikipedia the strongest group of editors on the page determine the narrative. I once spent months trying to get factual information onto a biography page. In 1994, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford took out a full page ad in The Times to say their marriage was strong. While they ended up divorcing a year later, the letter was a major incident in their marriage, which I thought should be on Wikipedia.

Even though Gere and Crawford had placed the ad themselves, a Wikipedia editor decided my information was ‘insensitive to the subject’. When I offered suggestions to change the rule I was told in no uncertain terms to back off by an administrator.

Not that it mattered; a few weeks later that same administrator injected themselves into a completely different topic I was contributing on, and blocked me from the site for five years.

That discussion about one sentence took two months. Ambiguous rules were arbitrarily applied by abusive administrators. All resulting in censorship of verifiable, factual material based on a bogus idea of sensitivity. How on earth can that work for news?

Even now, it’s practically impossible for new contributors to add anything to a Wikipedia page. Changes, however factual and verified, will instantly be reverted by bands of aggressive editors.

It’s worth noting that the whole ethos of Wikipedia was set up by Wales, and in the 15 years of operation, none of these issues have been fixed.

I abandoned my wiki-based fact check when I realised that – just like on Wikipedia — the narrative would be determined by the most powerful editors on the page. There’s nothing to say WikiTribune won’t have the same issues, and the lack of engagement on the topic indicates that Wales doesn’t even know it’s an issue.

Wiki + news = slow

Those who think Wales is some sort of genius for coming up with this idea might want to reflect on the other co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger. In 2015, Larry set up a site called Infobitt, which was — you guessed it — a fact-based news site. He didn’t get quite as much press though, despite having a better idea.

In Larry’s system, each fact in an article was reviewed for accuracy in a structured way, as opposed to Wikipedia’s might-is-right process. I actually thought Larry’s idea would have worked better for Wikipedia, where editors could take the time to review facts. But for a news site, it’s too slow.

Let’s say there is a plane crash in Asia. At first, 20 people are reported dead. Then a day later it’s updated to 40 deaths. The facts are correct, but the news value has passed. And in the meantime all anyone cares about is how many likes they get for reposting the crash video on Facebook.

To rephrase the popular saying, “A like goes half way round the world before the truth has time to pull up its pants”. By the time ‘the truth’ comes out, you’ve already moved on to the next piece of news that confirms your biases.

Infobitt foundered within a year.

Who pays wins

Wales says that those who contribute financially to WikiTribune will have a say in the topics they cover:

If you can get together a certain number of people who are interested in Bitcoin [for example] and you flag that when you sign up as a monthly supporter, then we’ll hire a Bitcoin person to do the beat full time. But it is going to be neutral. They can’t pick their favorite hack, who pumps forward their agenda.

Wales does not say how the site is ‘going to be neutral’. In addition to the might-is-right bias I mentioned above, another source of bias on Wikipedia is undisclosed paid editing by PR companies and other individuals, who are paid to massage corporate and celebrity news pages.

Yet, despite Wales making many proclamations about the damage such editing causes on Wikipedia, he is inviting the pushing of particular topics on WikiTribune based on how much money the topic raises. Paid news editing invites a multitude of ethical dilemmas:

  • What if the contributors want to investigate Wikipedia, Wikia, or even Wales himself?
  • What if they want to investigate causes he supports, or investigate ‘friends of Jimbo,’ like, say, Tony Blair?

Contributor bias

Wales could at least have added something new into the mix. For example, a system that pays people for their contributions. We have had some success with this model at Newslines, and an interesting side effect was that it completely reversed the gender bias that is so prevalent in Wikipedia. Wikipedia contributors are over 90% male, and despite a number of initiatives that ratio is not changing.

That’s because the system pushes out women and minorities in favour of young men who would rather write about the latest Simpsons’ episode or their favorite porn stars,  than any women scientist. Wales recent comments on the ‘Gender Gap’ show he is tone deaf to the issue, and has no understanding of the underlying causes.

But let’s say Wales manages to capture the same kind of contributors  as Wikipedia. How will a news site whose contributors are mainly young, white, male, liberal college students deal with issues relevant to the black community, or to women?

Work for free to make Jimmy rich!

Wikipedia was able to add contributors due to its social value. Put your work and knowledge into the system for free and we all benefit through the dissemination of free information unsullied by advertising.

Wikipedia itself only gains donations because it distorts its fundraising message, which says the site is in imminent danger of collapse. In fact, it has $100 million in the bank.

But little of that cash goes to Wales because the site is run by the WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit. Wales is not an owner of Wikipedia, and has not made much money from it, other than through his directorship and through speaking engagements.

But WikiTribune *is* owned by Wales, so when you contribute to the system, you are working for free for his for-profit venture. You may believe that’s a reasonable trade off. You may be happy to spend your money or to even donate because you believe in the big picture. Good for you. Here’s to the crazy ones!

And so we set sail…

Is there a plus side? Is there something that can elevate the content or the distribution of WikiTribune? I don’t see it. The project was launched on a false premise, has no competitive advantage, is slower and more complicated than current news systems, will be of dubious use to readers, and sets sail into a shrinking sea full of dangerous competitors.

It’s inevitable that WikiTribune will hit the iceberg of reality, and sink.


Related:

Wikipedia’s 13 Deadly Sins

The Sexists at the top of Wikipedia

Stop Giving Wikipedia Money

Google and Wikipedia: Best Friends Forever


Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines. Find out more about him here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.


Newslines is a new kind of new search engine that is a solution to media bias. Our aim is to summarise all of the world’s news, from the past to the present, strip it of bias and commentary, leaving just the facts, and organise it into news timelines. Our newsline of Emma Sulkowicz is a good example of a non-biased newsline, created from highly-partisan sources.

We currently have three million page views/month and aim to get to one billion page views/month within three years. If you are interested in helping us grow, please contact Mark at info@newslines.org. You can read more about Newslines here.

17 Nov, 2016

LinkedIn restores Newslines pages

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linkedin-logo-squareAfter a few weeks offline, our LinkedIn newslines pages are back! Since April 2016 we had built up around 20,000 followers by providing curated news on well-known entrepreneurs.

Our objective was to build the first such network on LinkedIn, and we thought the company would be happy for us to do so. But, just as the pages were beginning to take off they were taken offline, and despite protestations, I was not given a clear answer why.

Last week I was contacted by Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s executive editor, who explained that the company’s Trust & Safety team had initially flagged the newslines for not conforming to the way they believed their Showcase pages — which are intended to showcase a company’s product — should be used. However, after reading my blog posts, his team had ‘lots of internal discussions’ and decided that our use of Showcase pages was ‘totally fair’.

They only asked that the image for each page was adjusted to made it clear that the posts were from Newslines, and not from the subject of the line. That was done, and the pages have been restored.

I’d like to thank the people involved in reviewing our case, especially Daniel. I am looking forward to growing the lines again, and building a resource that benefits each line’s followers, and LinkedIn itself. Feel free to follow each page below:

Elon Musk Donald Trump Mark Zuckerberg
Elon Musk

Mark Zuckerberg
Jeff Bezos Richard Branson Mark Cuban
Jeff Bezos Richard Branson Mark Cuban

Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines. Find out more about him here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.


Newslines is a new kind of new search engine that is a solution to media bias. Our aim is to summarise all of the world’s news, from the past to the present, strip it of bias and commentary, leaving just the facts, and organise it into news timelines. Our newsline of Emma Sulkowicz is a good example of a non-biased newsline, created from highly-partisan sources.

We currently have 2.5 million page views/month and aim to get to one billion page views/month within three years. If you are interested in helping us grow, please contact Mark at info@newslines.org. You can read more about Newslines here.

30 Oct, 2016

LinkedIn newslines moving to Facebook, Twitter

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Update: LinkedIn Restores Newsline Pages


Short version: Due to censorship and excessively harsh treatment, we are moving our newslines off of LinkedIn. Please re-subscribe to our newslines on Twitter and Facebook.

Elon Musk Donald Trump Mark Zuckerberg
Elon Musk Mark Zuckerberg
Jeff Bezos Richard Branson Mark Cuban
Jeff Bezos Richard Branson Mark Cuban

It has now been almost 48 hours since I asked Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO, for help in resolving his staff’s deletion of multiple entrepreneur newslines, with 20,000 followers on his site. He has not responded nor taken any action to restore the feeds, which had been in operation for six months until the Donald Trump Newsline was targeted just as it was beginning to take off.

Firstly, I was told that the pages were not suitable as they did not “extend my company’s presence”.

This Showcase page was deactivated, not because of content, however, because a Showcase Page allows you to extend your Company Page presence by creating a dedicated child page for those aspects of your business. Interested members can then follow your Showcase Page as they follow any Company Page. This showcase page is better suited for a ‘group’.

This is completely false. Our brand is news curation. As a topic-based news aggregator, Newslines’ business is to curate news on topics. The showcase page allows us to show exactly how we do that. But then they changed their story to say that the pages were deleted because they were linking to “third-party” sites.

Showcase Pages are designed to establish a dedicated page to represent a brand, business unit, or company initiative. These showcases were of 3rd party brands.

This is also false. Showcase pages throughout LinkedIn link to third-party news articles That’s part of what makes it a “showcase”. For example, IBM’s showcase pages link to articles in online magazines like EWeek and CIOReview and others. Is LinkedIn really going to stop IBM and the thousands of other showcase pages from linking to external articles?

It seems very clear that they initially wanted to stop my Donald Trump page, and when I called them out on it they vindictively took away my other pages. All through this debacle these has been no concern expressed by LinkedIn support about the loss of six months work, and 20 thousand followers that I painstakingly selected news for each day. When I asked them to transfer the members to groups they said no. When I asked if they would reinstate the pages if I only linked to Newslines they said no. They never said at any point that they were sorry, or gave me any kind of advice, other than to say I should make a group, which is completely unsuited to either my company’s brand, and is unsuitable for use as a tightly curated news source

And it seems Mr Weiner doesn’t care. He’d rather talk about his election predictions than actually deal with a customer who has a complaint, or support someone who creates newsfeeds that can keep his users happy with their feed. So we cannot support a platform that censors its content, deletes months of hard work on vague technicalities, treats its content creators so poorly, and does not offer solutions or any real help. If you want to have quality hand-picked news, then I invite you to join our newslines on Facebook and Twitter, companies that, for all their faults, actually understand that content creators are the core of their business.

Thank you, I appreciate your support.


Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

28 Oct, 2016

LinkedIn deletes Donald Trump news page

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linked-outUpdate: LinkedIn Restores Newsline Pages

Over the past six months, as a way to promote Newslines’ news aggregation skills, I’ve been building news pages about famous entrepreneurs using LinkedIn’s “Showcase” pages. As Newslines curates news about people, products, and companies, a Showcase page is ideal to “showcase” what we do.

For at least an hour a day, I’ve been finding news for pages about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Donald TrumpRichard Branson, Mark Cuban and Hillary Clinton and posting it to LinkedIn, where people can follow and read it on their newsfeed. Ultimately as we build up the news on this site, these pages on LinkedIn will link directly to their equivalent page on Newslines itself (eg Donald Trump), but for now they lead to news on other news sites.

I’ve put in hundreds of hours selecting news for the pages. It was hard going at first. Some days I’d only get one or two new subscribers, but I persisted, and over the past few weeks the pages have finally started to get significant traction. We are getting about 50 new followers every day for Elon Musk Newslines, and now have almost 7000 subscribers to his page. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have around 3000 subscribers. In fact it’s the first news network of its kind on LinkedIn — you’d think they’d be happy.

Our Donald Trump Newsline didn’t have many followers to begin with, but the page had by far the most engagement, with hundreds of likes and comments every day, so I knew it would take off soon. By contrast, I stopped making news for Hillary Clinton — after six months the page had only has 89 subscribers. Take from that what you will.

Then last night, just as I was excited about a jump in followers for Donald Trump Newslines, I saw that the page had been removed from LinkedIn without explanation.

After two emails, two tweets and 16 hours I finally got a response. LinkedIn Support said that:

This Showcase page was deactivated, not because of content, however, because a Showcase Page allows you to extend your Company Page presence by creating a dedicated child page for those aspects of your business. Interested members can then follow your Showcase Page as they follow any Company Page. This showcase page is better suited for a ‘group’.

I don’t believe their claim that content was not a factor. These pages have been going for six months. Yet only the Donald Trump page was targeted? I don’t think so.

There’s been a lot of discussion about Facebook’s human staff censoring news, and Twitter cutting pro Trump accounts; it appears that LinkedIn is now doing the same. This was a decision made by a human. The fact that only the Donald Trump page was targeted, just as it was about to take off, smacks of censorship. Whichever candidate you support, you should be appalled that any platform picks sides.

Our business is news curation. The best way to “extend our Company page presence” is to show how we curate news. No disrespect meant to LinkedIn group managers, but most groups are shit. I cannot use a group because we specifically curate only the most useful news about a topic. We don’t want anyone to post any old crap to the page. A group does not guarantee the quality of sources, selection of stories, and their timing. I also don’t need the hassle of dealing with spammers. I seriously doubt that LinkedIn would ever tell CNN, The Guardian, or any other news media to use a group instead of a Showcase page.

Instead of trying to shut me down LinkedIn should be ecstatic that I am using their platform to provide multiple curated news timelines about famous entrepreneurs FOR FREE. Instead of being dicks, they should be helping me promote these pages as a way for their users to cut through all the low-quality motivational messages and actually get value from the LinkedIn newsfeed. And instead of censorship, they should be making a commitment to fairness for all.

I await their response and hope to get the page back up. I apologise to the page’s followers and hope that LinkedIn will do the right thing.


Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

21 Oct, 2015

The Article is Dead! Long Live the Feed!

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Death of the article bloodThere have been a couple of articles (here, here) in the past few days about “The Death of the Article”. While it’s gratifying to see thought leaders catch up to what we have actually been doing here at Newslines for well over a year, it’s frustrating to be so far ahead that no-one has understood what we’ve been up to!

Such is life.

Making History

In 2012, to understand how events unfolded, I created a news timeline of the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi. It rapidly became the number one resource about the attack on Google’s search results, beating every major newspaper.

But there was a problem: I made the timeline of events in a text file. The 100 news events I had added could only be read from start to finish. As new events happened I had to copy and paste them into the document.

To solve this, I spent many months investigating different content management systems, eventually settling on WordPress. With the help of some custom code, I was able to add each news event into a database, which sorts all events on the same topic into a timeline. My news timeline was the seed of Newslines.

As we began to build up the newslines, I began to compare what we had with another crowdsourced site, Wikipedia.

The Web is Not Paper

Skeuomorphism is when digital interfaces replicate real-life interfaces. For example, a diary app that looks like a real-life diary, complete with leather stitching, gives some familiarity and comfort to users who are used to the real-life version.

However, the familiarity comes at the expense of the digital diary’s functionality. A digital tool is not the same as a real-life object.

Wikipedia is what happens when a book-based encyclopaedia is replicated on the web. Despite the innovation of its original killer feature (the crosslinking of articles), the site continues to act like a paper book.

It’s not just that it actually looks like a boring gray textbook, where each page is presented as an over-long text article; it also functions like a book. For example, Taylor Swift’s page has thousands of words, but the page doesn’t include a single video or music clip.

Pages about movies don’t even have trailers. This has big implications for kids brought up using visual media like Instagram and YouTube. As the saying goes: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

And there’s the References section, which breaks the web’s standard way of linking, to mimic the kind of linking you see in a textbook: footnotes. There are over 550 footnotes in Taylor Swift’s page!

But, on the web, you don’t need footnotes because you can link directly to the source. I solved the reference problem on Newslines by linking to source articles from the verb.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Archive

Newspaper articles on the web suffer from many of the same problems as Wikipedia articles, but there’s an interesting distinction: a paper newspaper is meant to be thrown away each day. That means that every newspaper article is full of repetition, because yesterday’s paper might as well not exist.

Think about this: until recently you had to go to a library and pull out a huge big book of newspapers to read the archive. Even now, you have to wade through pages and pages of Google search results to pull together a decent archive on a topic.

For example, this timeline of Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s ex-manager, took over a week of research to compile from hundreds of separate news sources. When researchers have to look up literally hundreds of different searches it calls into question the usefulness of Google search.

So, every time we read a newspaper story about Yoko Ono, we have to be reminded that she was married to John Lennon and that Lennon died in 1980. But on the web we don’t need to be reminded. Ono’s marriage to Lennon, and his death, can be represented as just two news events in a database of news events about their lives.

A Database of News

Newslines is built for the web. Our contributors summarize each news event in 50-150 words, add a quote, a YouTube video (if available) and tag it with the topic and the event type. News event types run from births, deaths and marriages, through interviews, performances, arrests and legal issues and many more. We source from news articles, video clips, and Facebook and Twitter posts.

In effect we are creating a database of news events, organized by topic. We currently have over 10,000 interconnected newslines made up of over 30,000 events.

Because the events are in a database it’s easy to create different views of the data. By default, each page is sorted to show most recent news first, but simply hit the sort button and the news events reverse to show a ‘biography’ view, for example, Freddie Gray latest news, or by biography view.

We can also filter each newsline by Event Type. For example, here are all the apologies on the system, or the deaths, or arrests. This gives the user an unprecedented amount of control.

Data-driven Pages Reduce Bias

The major advantage of building news through news events is not the extra control the user has over the data, but that each news event, and therefore each newsline, has far less bias than traditional articles.

This is because articles are often (consciously or unconsciously) written with a particular result in mind. By contrast, each newsline is built up piece by piece with no goal in mind. The story is revealed to the reader as more events are added. The ability to influence the entire article is minimized.

This is particularly true in cases where the sources are highly partisan. Our Newsline on Emma Sulkowicz (Mattress Girl) was compiled by extracting only the factual information from highly biased articles on both sides of the debate. The result is not only the most complete account of her case on the web, but the most unbiased account.

The Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “The medium is the message,” resounds strongly through my experience building Newslines. Each media creates its own kind of communication.

When you have paper, you make books and newspapers, articles, and print photos; TV uses moving images; The web uses databases, interlinking, filtering, and video.

While the final forms have not been developed yet, just as Wikipedia is stuck trying to replicate a paper encyclopaedia, newspapers are stuck trying to replicate the look and feel of a paper newspaper.

The beauty of the web is that it isn’t restricted to paper, and the data can be re-imagined to better suit the new media. The article is just a dying artefact of that past.

Long live the feed.


What’s Next?

  1. Newspapers will switch to news feeds
    The article, at least for breaking news, is finished. Instead, each topic will have its own channel, updated with only the latest news as it happens. I see two streams: A live stream for Twitter-like real-time news, and another for the curated archive.
  2. News gatherers will not need to repeat background information
    News gatherers only need to find the most recent events and add them to the database. There is no requirement to present old information unless it is for analysis.
  3. Analysis will be completely separated from data
    A database needs structured data. It doesn’t make sense to mix news, analysis and commentary. Expect to see interesting ways to link news events to create analysis.
  4. Short raw video clips beat talking heads
    Unlike TV news, which is mainly commentary anyway, a newsfeed doesn’t need long video clips. Just some raw footage to enhance the curated text.
  5. Archives become very important
    Traditionally newspapers haven’t cared about their archives. But the archive is the core of an interactive news feed. It brings depth and context. To quote Orwell: Whoever controls the past, controls the future.
  6. Archives have to be rewritten to match feeds
    It’s also not enough to take some old news article, add a topic header and call it “curation”. Each curated item must work as part of the whole. It’s not enough simply to curate a list of existing articles, because those articles are filled with repetition and background information that annoys the reader. The archive must be custom created to avoid repetition.
  7. Fluid feeds
    The feed isn’t a one-way street. It’s not just current news flying by and discarded, but a collection of data that can be manipulated to give a particular view that the reader wants. For example, Bill Cosby’s accusations, Tom Hanks movie roles.
  8. Better tools
    The first stage is to collect the data, then to give users the tools which allow them to get meaning from it. Expect interesting tools for readers so they can analyse the data themselves.

Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

8 Oct, 2015

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

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There has been an enormous amount of discussion about Twitter’s new Moments feature. Moments, previously known as Project Lightning, is Twitter’s attempt to curate tweets. As usual it has been met with gushing praise by the press. In the real world I suspect it is getting a much poorer reception, and I think it is doomed to fail. Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments…

1. Twitter’s audience is interested in real-time posts, not the past

Twitter is a real-time platform that condenses news facts, or links to news stories, into 140 characters. Twitter users use the service to find real-time news. I know that I now start my day by looking at Twitter, rather than say, Drudge Report. Rather than static content, I see what people are talking about over multiple topics that suit my interest, and can go directly the linked sites from their recommendations. The posts are written specifically to showcase realtime information. It’s like going into a room of learned acquaintances, who are saying “Hey, have you seen this thing that you’re interested in?”

2. Is Twitter a news organization?

Jay Rosen, NYU professor, says that Twitter is a becoming “an editorial company, a maker of news products,” but I seldom see any original reporting on the site, and almost all of the posts are links to commentaries. That may be different from other users’ experience. I don’t see Twitter as a news site at all, but as a social news promotion site. This is an important distinction, because the curation of Twitter posts is not curation of news, but the curating of the promotion of news.

3. Conflict of interest

A news organization has to be free to report as freely as it can. But what happens when newsworthy Tweets are deleted by politicians and celebrities? How can Twitter curate these posts against its users’ wishes?

4. 140 characters is not enough for past events

The intent of Twitter posts is not to say here is something to be preserved, but here is right now. Curation implies after-the-fact compilation of news events and giving them context.

Rosen also says the initiative will succeed because Twitter, the business, “loves news” — doesn’t every news organizations love news? But each news organization works within a particular format restriction that works for its content. The medium defines the message. TV reports are different from print reports.

When companies step outside of their format, bad things usually happen. This is also a concern for the removal of the 140 character limit — when the medium changes, will the message still be the same? I think it won’t. These kind of core changes have the ability to destroy the site, which is then easily replaced by a newcomer who understands the format better.

5. Curation should tell a story

This last point is often forgotten in curation, where it is often deemed good enough to collect some stories or facts as-is, add a title and claim that it is curated content. Take these Moments examples: Hillary’s Trust Problem For a start the headline is biased, and the content is barely readable. Or FIFA suspends Sepp Blatter. Who wants to read a bunch of semi-random old tweets? There’s no context. There’s repetition. There’s bias. There’s no extra meaning. It’s a disaster.

I believe that the original story itself has to be crafted to fit the curation. This is again a result of the medium matching the message. The message is curation. The question is “how do we curate news?” not “how do we curate the marketing of news?”. These are two entirely different things. You simply cannot curate Tweets on their own without context and expect it to be interesting to readers. The original tweets were written to promote news, not to be curated.

By contrast…

At Newslines we set out to curate news from the get go. We don’t need to square a circle. Our contributors curate news events by sourcing the original reports and writing original summaries of the events. The objective is that the curated posts make sense as part of a timeline. We would never just add a tweet on its own. Each news event, whether it is from a newspaper, a YouTube report, a Twitter or Facebook posting needs context, which we add with a short summary and meta data, such as links to other people involved in the event, or classification of the event type.

Check Donald Trump to see some examples of posts with tweets amongst other curated news. Or Troy Carter, where our contributors scoured the web to find this information. We could have created a list of links to each news article, as some algorithmic services try to do. That might be easy for the producer, but it’s very bad for the reader. Readers need just the right amount of context so that they can understand the news without having to go elsewhere.

Super investor Chris Sacca says I have a conflict of interest in saying Moments is rubbish. First of all, I’m glad he thinks that Newslines can compete with Twitter — that’s quite an endorsement. But conflict or not, Moments misjudges its audience, and tries to squish its format into something unsuitable. It’s the ugly sister trying on the wrong shoe. The result, unsurprisingly, is weakly-formed content that’s simply boring.

As a major Twitter investor, Sacca should be concerned not with this messenger, but that Moments shows that Twitter’s management don’t understand their own site. If this is the best Jack Dorsey can do, then Twitter itself is headed for failure.

26 Aug, 2015

I Am Not Vester Flanagan’s Accomplice

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Alison Parker shooting screen captureToday I was accused of being an accomplice in the Vester Flanagan shooting. This morning around 6:45, Flanagan killed Alison Parker and Adam West while they were conducting a live TV report in Moneta, Virginia.

The news that I was an accomplice came as quite a shock because I was not in Moneta at the time. In fact I’ve never been there. I also have never met Flanagan, which would make it impossible for me to help him with the planning of the crime, or to help him in carrying it out. As far as I know, he carried out the crime alone. I didn’t sell him the gun, nor did I write to him to tell him to target the victims. I didn’t drive the getaway car.

But still, despite all of this, I was labelled as an accomplice. Not by the police, but by Jeff Jarvis, a well-known media blogger and professor and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

According to Jarvis, I am Flanagan’s accomplice because I showed his video on my site. By this logic I’m also helping ISIS and Bill Cosby. I am also helping Taylor Swift and El Chapo get free publicity too. I wonder if I should ask them for royalties.

In the discussion that followed, Jarvis asked if I have any limits, to which I said: No limits, just appropriate warnings. It’s true that some people will click a link to a murder video and then feel bad. But the responsibility for viewing is also on the reader’s side. No-one is forcing them to click. And just who are we protecting? Kids? They’ve grown up on instantly accessible hard core porn and beheading videos.

The idea that media causes violence is a well-worn trope. Even if it can be shown that Flanagan wanted fame, rather than just a record of his act, showing the video will not encourage others to follow. People have wanted fame since before the newspaper existed. Many conflicts have been started with fame in mind throughout history. Adding an extra moral judgement that the media actually encourages violent acts is to put the cart before the horse. It’s a call to censorship and control.

As a professor of journalism, Jarvis should know better than to teach his students to self-censor their reporting. The reporter’s job is to show the best and the worst of the world. Their job is to report what happened today, and let readers make up their own mind up about what it means.

Basic news reporting (as opposed to opinion pieces) should be dispassionate, reporting factually what happened. That doesn’t mean that we don’t care about the victims or their families, but our concern is with letting people know what happened.

As it stands, hundreds of media are currently showing the videos — it’s not a heroic act, it’s just what news people do. I’m no accomplice. The shooter made his own decisions. If you want to see what he did it’s up to you.

Our newsline of Vester Flanagan is here.


Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

7 Jul, 2015

Reddit and Wikipedia Share the Same Disease

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You broke redditOver the past week there’s been a revolt by moderators at Reddit. Moderators complained when one of their number was fired. An apology by the sites’ CEO, Ellen Pao, promised more tools to help moderation.

There’s an interesting parallel between Wikipedia and Reddit. Both sites’ content is created and moderated by volunteer users. Both have a management system that is divorced from the actual content. Both have weak leadership.

Wikipedia can never introduce advertising because the compact with the contributors is that they add their time for free to make a free resource. If the site added ads then its credibility would be shot, even though the site would easily be worth billions. Jimmy Wales realized this early on, so handed the leadership of the site to the community and the WikiMedia Foundation (WMF). One of the main problems that resulted from this, is that the community not only crowdsources the site, but crowdsources the governance of the site, without having the ability to create the tools that would improve governance. The site is effectively “managed by wiki”, which, as a flat system, results in mob rule.

The WMF has nothing to do with the content. None of the over $50 million in donations it raises each year go towards the content at all. Only $2.5 million goes to hosting, the rest goes to the WMF itself – for international travel, expensive office equipment and a large team of engineers that does not produce much. Recent software introductions have been received very poorly. This is, in part, because the sites’ users have a big say over all aspects of the site, and paradoxically, they are extremely conservative. Long term users are highly resistant to new software. Even a recent font change on the site generated a mountain of negativity. The result is a site that is stuck with 1990s technology, presentation and functionality. The WMF is trapped because the users don’t want change — all it can do is collect the money. But this is an unsustainable position. As more people find out that the money doesn’t go to the writers, and the site continues to degrade, the money will dry up.

In Reddit’s case, the management also has a problem with the site’s contributors. They want to try to make money off of the free work of the writers and moderators, yet haven’t supplied them with the correct tools. But tools don’t just take the form of better buttons to delete trolls and manage comments — they should go deeper. As Gina Bianchini points out the key to the discussion is revenue-sharing with users.

This site, like Wikipedia, crowdsources biographies and news-based events but we decided early on that we would pay our contributors. We started off paying direct cash ($1 per post) and then moved to revenue-share. We have created tools, not just for people to add information easily to the site, but that give them revenue share for their contributions. In fact, we are the first crowdsourced site to give revenue share to contributors to asses the quality of other users’ work — revenue share for moderators. As the site becomes larger, some of our contributors will make a lot of money.

Wikipedia can never add revenue-sharing tools because of its culture and the way its content is created, but Reddit can easily add revenue-sharing tools. In fact there’s a Reddit clone that rewards contributions, although I don’t think it rewards moderation. As an aside, Tsu.co tried to make a revenue-share Facebook but got their model wrong, whereas YouTube has done a great job of turning some of its contributors into millionaires.

In short, if a site is making money from user content, its tools should include those that help the contributors make money too. Reddit and Wikipedia may share the same disease, but only one has the potential to be cured.


Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines, a new crowdsourced news search engine. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

20 Jun, 2015

The Fake Sincerity of Remembering the Victims

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Charleston Shootings VictimsI’ve been around a lot of news sites these past few days, gathering information for our newsline of Dylann Roof. All over Facebook I see large numbers of people posting pictures of the victims with the message “Don’t give him publicity, remember the victims!

These people don’t care about the victims. They objectify them by posting their picture without their names. They won’t learn anything about the victims at all, and have forgotten them the instant they reposted the image.

All they care about their own egos. In a rush to show they care to the world, they feign moral outrage about the news — the same news that told them about the shootings — while making a meaningless, zero-effort gesture that does nothing in real life for the victims..

Reposting an image is not action. If you want to support the victims donate money to their families, or support the causes they cared about. Whatever you do, don’t feel good because you posted something on Facebook. It’s the laziest way to make a statement ever, and it’s completely meaningless.

You can donate here

 


Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

23 Apr, 2015

The Sexists at the Top of Wikipedia

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On April 5, 60 Minutes ran a special on Wikipedia, called Wikimania. It was soft stuff. The presenter, Morley Safer, glossed over many of the the site’s problems, presenting the site and its contributors as a slightly weird and harmless cult. But one thing stood out – the incredible sexism of Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the site from 2006 to 2014, and Jimmy Wales, the site’s co-founder and spokesperson.

It’s well known that Wikipedia has a contributor ‘Gender Gap’. A survey in 2010 said that the site had only 6% female contributors, others say up to 15%, depending on what you read. This is despite a huge amount of discussion about the Gender Gap on Wikipedia and on external sites, such as the New York Times: Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List.

The Gap has led to a host of initiatives trying to get more women to contribute to the encyclopedia. In the NYT article, Gardner set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25% by 2015. She failed miserably.

Symptom or Cause

Much has been said about why the Gender Gap exists. In a 2011 blog post, Gardner (Nine Reasons Why Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia) gives nine reasons why Wikipedia is unappealing to women. I have rearranged the order slightly.

Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because:

  • the editing interface isn’t sufficiently user-friendly
  • they aren’t sufficiently self-confident, and editing Wikipedia requires a lot of self-confidence
  • they are conflict-averse and don’t like Wikipedia’s sometimes-fighty culture
  • the information they bring to Wikipedia is too likely to be reverted or deleted
  • they find its overall atmosphere misogynist
  • they find Wikipedia culture to be sexual in ways they find off-putting
  • social relationships and a welcoming tone are important to them, and Wikipedia offers fewer opportunities for that than other sites
  • women whose primary language has grammatical gender, find being addressed by Wikipedia as male, is off-putting
  • they are too busy

At first glance this list seems plausible, but it’s important to note that the first eight reasons are symptoms, not causes. I will talk more about the reasons these symptoms occur later in the post.

Given the magnitude of the problem, and the seeming willingness to try to understand and fix it, one would think that Gardner and Wales would have prepared better answers for 60 Minutes.

Safer: Rank and file Wikipedians today are still mainly men, reflecting the tech world at large.

Gardner: Women are less likely to kinda geek out at their computer for 10, 20, 40 hours. I mean, there’s a reason that the stereotype of the hacker is a guy in a filthy T-shirt eating Doritos, right? Like, that’s hard. A woman is less likely to get social permission to be in a dirty T-shirt eating Doritos.

Safer: The gender imbalance was at the heart of a significant internal dispute at Wikipedia.

Wales: When William and Kate got married – the royal wedding – someone created an entry about Kate Middleton’s dress. And somebody nominated it for deletion. And some of the arguments were, you know, effectively, “This is stupid. It’s just a dress. How can you have an encyclopedia entry about a dress?”

Safer (voiceover): Wales intervened, pointing out that there are thousands of articles about computers and software programs.

Wales: And we don’t think anything about that, “cause we’re a bunch of computer geeks”. So we decided to keep it. But there was an interesting moment in that debate, where people were saying “Oh, I don’t know about this, therefore it’s not important.” And that is bias. And that is something we have to be careful about.

Deconstruction

Let’s break that down:

Gardner: Women are less likely (than men) to kinda geek out at their computer for 10, 20, 40 hours.

Gardner sets up a false equivalence by comparing all women to some men. She implies that Wikipedia contributors need to be “geeks” who must have a huge amount of spare time to contribute.

In fact, neither of these is true. You can spend as much or as little time editing Wikipedia as you like, and you don’t need to be a geek of any kind to contribute.

Gardner: I mean, there’s a reason that the stereotype of the hacker is a guy in a filthy T-shirt eating Doritos, right?

Next she doubles down on the geek image, saying that Wikipedia is created by hackers, despite most people’s image of hackers as men who know a lot about computers, and that they illegally break into computers. In Gardner’s mind, the stereotypical Wikipedia contributor is filthy, unhealthy, male hacker eating Doritos – for 10-40 hours at a time.

Is this really the image she wants to project of the people who make up one of the world’s leading sources of knowledge? This is a smear on the people who actually contribute, who at least according to the 60 Minutes footage, look fairly clean.

Usually, you would expect that a person making this kind of argument would then say, “But no! We are different from that!” Something like: “People think that Wikipedia is made only by dirty computer geeks, but there are actually lots of women, who contribute to all kinds of pages.”

Instead, Gardner makes things worse.

Gardner: Like, that’s hard. A woman is less likely to get social permission to be in a dirty T-shirt eating Doritos.

She confirms that the contributors are, in fact, filthy Dorito-eating male hackers, but they are not the problem. The problem is that women don’t have “permission” to be as dirty as them!

According to Gardner, the reason there’s a Gender Gap is because women can’t get permission to wear Dorito-stained T-shirts. In Gardner’s world, its ok for men to wear dirty, filthy clothes, but women don’t have permission to be dirty. And because they can’t be dirty, they can’t contribute.

In other words, women can only edit Wikipedia if they take on the same dirty behavior as men. But who is giving this permission to dress down? Men? Society? Why does she think women need any kind of permission to edit Wikipedia at all? It’s completely nuts.

Jimmy Doubles Down

So let’s see how enlightened Jimmy Wales is. Remember, this interview was broadcast in April 2015, not in the 1960s, and in real life, not an episode of Mad Men.

Safer: The gender imbalance was at the heart of a significant internal dispute at Wikipedia.

Wales: When William and Kate got married – the royal wedding – someone created an entry about Kate Middleton’s dress. And somebody nominated it for deletion,

Four years after the wedding, with all that outreach, and all Wales can cite is an article about a wedding dress? The implication here is that women are only interested in women’s stuff: dresses, and perhaps make-up, and shoes.

No mention of the various programs to add more women scientists, more women poets, more women in general. No mention of women trying to edit articles about science and history. A dress. That’s Wales’ go-to example.

Wales:…and some of the arguments were, you know, effectively, “This is stupid. It’s just a dress. How can you have an encyclopedia entry about a dress?”

The question here is how did Wales build a site that had a significant part of the users that would think that way?

Safer: Wales intervened, pointing out that there are thousands of articles about computers and software programs.

Again the false focus on technology. I have very rarely used Wikipedia to check up on computers or software programs — that’s what review sites are for. Like most people, I use it to find information about people and things. Y’know, like a normal encyclopedia.

Wales: And we don’t think anything about that, “cause we’re a bunch of computer geeks”.

Wales joins Gardner tripling down on the typical Wikipedia users as “computer geeks”. Not only that, but computer geeks who don’t think about other viewpoints. One has to wonder why Wales is presenting this image of the contributors.

While most people editing Wikipedia do so on a computer – you don’t have to be a “geek”, a computer expert, or a geek in any way, to edit the site. In fact, expertise in a topic is looked down upon in Wikipedia. In most cases, people are simply adding and comparing sources. Much of the work is spell-checking.

And note the present tense — this is what they think now.

Wales: So we decided to keep it.

How generous! Four years ago, Wales and his gang of Dorito-stained hackers decided that an article about a princess’s dress should be kept in. The implications of this are obvious: women’s topics (as defined by men) are going to be vetted by men.

Wales: But there was an interesting moment in that debate, where people were saying “Oh, I don’t know about this, therefore, it’s not important.” And that is bias. And that is something we have to be careful about.

Translation: But there was an interesting moment in that debate (by men), where people (men) were saying “Oh, I don’t know about this (female thing), therefore, it’s not important.” And that is (male) bias. And that is something we (men) have to be careful about.

But there’s nothing that says how Wales fixed the problem. No mention of how procedures were improved to include women. Nothing to say how bias is prevented. No updates about what has happened in the four years since. Because nothing has actually changed.

Wales’ attitude is typical of someone who doesn’t know he is part of the problem. In another segment, Gardner describes Wales as the “Queen Mom in the parade”. It’s an apt comparison: He sits at the top like a distant monarch, waving at the men who cheer as he passes in his gilded carriage, totally unaware of the women they crowd out.

As I like to say, Wikipedia editors talking about the Gender Gap, are like the lions at the watering hole wondering why the zebras aren’t thirsty.

It’s the software, stupid

Here’s the truth: Wikipedia can never be inclusive because the core wiki software is designed to give power to the powerful. In Wikipedia, might is right, and the biggest power group by far is men. There is no way for women or minorities to tilt the playing field in their favor.

But software is a choice. Software is simply a set of commands to do things. If you want software to draw a line on the screen, you program it to do that. If you want software to work for a diverse group of users, then you make it happen, by designing the software for inclusivity.

But Wikipedia was not designed by Wales — it was given to him as an off-the-shelf solution that could possibly work to create an encyclopedia. It was never designed as an inclusive system, and as it grew, it was never updated to give balance to the different types of people who could use it.

Now, due to the huge external success of the site, Wikipedia’s software is seen as perfect by insiders. Instead of understanding that the cause of Wikipedia’s problems is the software, they focus on the symptoms.

Instead of blaming the software’s flaws, they blame the people who use the software. If only we could get rid of the sexists, the harassers, the abusers, the PR people, the vandals, then our perfect system would be pure again. But it’s the software that lets all of these groups flourish.

Gardner’s reasons why women don’t participate, are all symptoms of bad software design. Women don’t contribute to Wikipedia, NOT because they aren’t confident, or are conflict averse, or need a welcoming tone, but because Wikipedia is designed to give and maintain power to its first group of users, who were men. It doesn’t help that Wikipedis is designed to benefit those in that group who are the loudest, most fanatical, and those most likely to abuse power

Women don’t edit Wikipedia, NOT because their edits are more likely to be reverted or because it’s misogynist, or sexist, but because nothing has been done in the software to stop harassment and bullying for both men and women.

Women don’t contribute to Wikipedia, NOT because the interface is bad — but because Gardner, in her seven years as Executive Director, didn’t change the interface to make it easier for all users.

In fact, other than some window dressing, Gardner, who describes herself as a “Feminist Wikipedian” didn’t do anything to improve the software to include more women contributors.

In all the time Jimmy Wales has been involved with the site, from co-founding it, through today, he has done nothing to fix the software to include women. And it shows by the way he talks about the issue. Women are an afterthought.

The question is whether they know what the problem is, and won’t fix it, or whether they are completely ignorant of how their own site works. If it’s the first, then they are hypocrites, talking about diversity while doing nothing. If it’s the latter, then they are incompetents who don’t deserve their positions.

The promise of the Internet is that it can break down power structures. Instead, Wikipedia is a system designed to give and maintain power for early users, almost all of whom are men. And the people at the top don’t seem to know why it happens, and are not prepared to make the hard choices to change it.

How do I know this?

Because this site, Newslines, even though it creates broadly similar crowdsourced content to Wikipedia’s news and biography pages, has had up to 80% women and minority participation. The main differences being a software design that stops entrenched editors taking “ownership” of pages, randomizes the editors who approve posts, and allows for fully anonymized assessments of edits. Combined these measures stop groups of editors ganging up to fight other users and stop harassment of individual users. The other difference is that we pay our writers, and when people are paid they don’t want to waste endless time fighting and instead, concentrate on getting the job done. For more on Wikipedia’s flawed software design read my posts: Wikipedia’s 13 Deadly Sins

What they should have said

Safer: Rank and file Wikipedians today are still mainly men, reflecting the tech world at large.

Gardner: You don’t have to be technical to edit Wikipedia — the site is open to everyone who loves knowledge. It doesn’t take long for people to learn how to add information to the site, and we have a great community that helps anyone who wants to participate.

In fact, most people simply start by fixing typos or making small changes. Women are welcome to add information and edit any page. We have done significant outreach to attract women over the past few years and value their contributions in all areas of the site.

We believe that the more women, men and minorities work together on pages, the better the site will be for everyone.

Safer: The gender imbalance has caused significant internal disputes at Wikipedia.

Wales: The original software we had when we started ten years ago wasn’t that great, but we improved it so that everyone can contribute their knowledge easily, without the fear of harassment minorities and women often experience online.

Over the past few years, women and men, working together, have made great contributions to pages about science, art and history. This is especially important for groups who have been under-represented in traditional encyclopedias.

We believe that an inclusive environment that attracts all kinds of people makes the encyclopedia much better for everyone. After all, we wouldn’t want to be in the situation where women — 50% of our readers — feel they are getting something served up that’s predominantly written by men, edited by men, and approved by men.

Ok, I added that last sentence in. But how would men feel if the encyclopedia was written 90% by women? How credible do they think it would be? Well, that’s the feeling women have.

And now to the strangest part of this story…

Nobody Cares

I’m sure you all saw the headline: “Geeks, Not Women, Welcome At Wikipedia”. “Jimmy Wales 60 Minutes Gender Fail”. “Wales Wedding Dress Disaster”. No? Neither did I. That’s because there wasn’t a single article, blog post, or even tweet about what Gardner and Wales said on 60 Minutes.

“So what?”, you might say. “Nobody cares”. Well, I care, and you should too.

An encyclopedia written and edited by white men simply cannot represent the “sum of all human knowledge”. Instead, we are left with an encyclopedia that has thousands of pages on female porn stars, and few on female poets. Pages and pages on video games, and hardly anything on female scientists.

Consider if Apple’s Tim Cook had made these statements. “The people who use our computers are dirty hackers. Women might like to use them, but they don’t have permission to be like them.”

He would have been hammered by women’s groups and the tech press, forced to apologize and may even have lost his position (For example, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich, resigned after he gave money to oppose the legalization of gay marriage in California).

But there hasn’t been a single report about Gardner or Wales’ comments anywhere.

Why does the world’s fifth largest site get a free pass? Perhaps there are three reasons:

1. A press that is generally uncritical about Wikipedia’s underlying problems

Too many people are in awe of what Wikipedia represents and what it could be, instead of what it actually is. This cult-like fawning extends to Wales, Gardner, and other senior WMF (WikiMedia Foundation) figures, who should be under far more scrutiny for their statements and actions.

Isn’t it time the press started to write more about the actual problems of Wikipedia instead of holding it up as a model for collaboration? What kind of “collaborative” model excludes so much of the population?

2. The WMF is not accountable to the market

The WMF is not interested in how the content of Wikipedia is made, as long as the donations — none of which go to the contributors of the site — keep rolling in.

Last year they raised over $50 million, even though it already had $50 million in the bank. Instead of money going to the people who write and edit the site, it goes to First Class travel, expensive offices and a huge team of overpaid and underperforming engineers.

Even WMF insiders think the claims that the encyclopedia is running out of cash are alarmist and misleading.

However, the main problem is a lack of accountability to the market, allowing Gardner and Wales to continue to make sexist comments, and take no action, with no fear of backlash. But how many women would continue to donate, knowing that the site is built to exclude them, and that nothing has been done to improve the conditions of women contributors?

3. A lack of passion about the site from anyone

Women contributors are tired of pushing and getting nowhere. Editors, in general, are tired of harassment, arcane editing processes and arbitrary rules, abuse and harassment. People are tired trying to have their say. It’s too hard. They’ve given up trying to improve the site.

The number of editors is declining, and as it does, hoaxes, incorrect information, vandalism and spam are increasing, creating a trust death spiral. This can’t be fixed, because to do so, will require a complete overhaul of the site — something that just doesn’t seem possible.

The fault can be traced directly to Wales and Gardner, who over many years, decided to ride the gravy train, instead of updating the site with the tools to match its status.

What Wales and Gardner said is inexcusable, but their lack of action to create an inclusive environment is even worse. Combined, they give a clear message: Women are not welcome on Wikipedia.


For more on how poor software design is the root of Wikipedia’s problems, please read: Wikipedia’s 13 Deadly Sins

Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines, a new crowdsourced news search engine. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

4 Mar, 2015

Google and Wikipedia: Best Friends Forever

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GooglepediaA few days ago, in an article in The New Scientist, Google researchers said that Google will soon rank webpages based on the quality of facts on a page. The idea is that Google will use the billions of facts they have collected from Wikipedia, and other people’s sites without their permission, (facts aren’t copyrightable) and match those facts with the content of a site’s webpages to give a “trust ranking” for every page. This ranking will then influence the page’s position in Google’s search results. As many of the facts come from Wikipedia, this most likely means Google results will be fact checked with Wikipedia facts.

There are many problems with this approach: Wikipedia pages are often unreliable. They are easy to vandalize. The toxic environment means editor numbers are rapidly declining, making many pages unstable and out of date. Pages are also easy to game, both by external forces (spammers) and internal forces (bias seekers). Building a trust network on the top of such mutable data is like building a skyscraper on sand.

The bigger problem is that this initiative turns Wikipedia’s editors into Google’s unpaid fact checkers. It’s true that people edit Wikipedia for a variety of reasons. There’s some satisfaction to be had in working for months to get a particular nugget of information on a page, but for many contributors the site was supposed to be a free resource: contributed to for free with the promise that the content would be free to the reader and free of advertising.

Instead, information from Wikipedia, in the form of Google’s Knowledge Graph, is being used to build Google’s profit, and not in a small way. Knowledge Graph data — shown in the top right hand corner of search results — is shown on around 20% of the page, and certainly accounts for many internal clicks. Certainly, if new Wikipedia editors were told “Please contribute to our free encyclopaedia. We will use your content to enrich Google”, they would think twice about their contributions.

Co-Dependent Search

The Knowledge Graph is just the most obvious part of the co-dependent relationship between Google and Wikipedia. The relationship most obviously benefits Wikipedia by giving it traffic. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, said in 2010 that the site received 60-70% of its traffic from Google. Wikipedia is almost always in Google’s top three results, and more often than not it’s the top result. The top result is clicked 36.4% of the time and one of the top three results is clicked 58.4% of the time. I pointed out in my last article that there is practically no need for the second page of results as 94% of readers click on a link on the first page of results.

This means that Google is giving Wikipedia around one third of its traffic. But how is this good for Google? Surely Google would rather keep people in Google than let them go to Wikipedia? Well firstly, the Knowledge Graph does keep people in Google longer. For example, instead of going to IMDb for movie data, owned by competitor Amazon, the Wikipedia snippet is right there on the page as well as the list of movie roles. The searcher stays in Google’s system.

A more important reason is that the Wikipedia link keeps Google’s competitors off of the top result. For example, the fight between IMDb and Wikipedia for the top spot for movies benefits Google immensely. If Google can shift IMDb from first to second place then IMDb gets 66% less clickthroughs, an enormous number of potential customers lost. Google can then defend itself by saying that Wikipedia has a “better” ranking, but that’s self serving.

But the most important benefit that Google gets is a high-quality link that its users trust at the top of its results. For many users the Google -> Wikipedia chain is their standard path to check the background on a topic. We’ve all heard someone’s name, gone to Google and then clicked the link to Wikipedia, to find out more. This relationship is gold to Google.

If Wikipedia was not in the top of Google’s results, Google’s utility would decline substantially. Given that almost 60% of clickthroughs are from the top three results, and Wikipedia is always one of those results, it’s fair to say that Google is the search engine for Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is Google’s (free) content provider.

Page rank is rank

To make this relationship work, I believe that over the past years, Google has changed its ranking algorithm to make Wikipedia its “gold standard” for ranking. This means:

  1. Sites that are not Wikipedia will be ranked lower, no matter the independent quality of their content. There are a lot of problems with Wikipedia content and format that I outline here, but let’s take as an example the recent 2014 Ebola outbreak. The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association says “Most Wikipedia articles representing the 10 most costly medical conditions in the United States contain many errors when checked against standard peer-reviewed sources. Caution should be used when using Wikipedia to answer questions regarding patient care”. So, when half of the results for the keyword “Ebola” are going through Google -> Wikipedia rather than the Center for Disease Control, who benefits?
  1. Sites must conform to Wikipedia-style content to get high rankings. To compete with Wikipedia, you don’t make a site that’s better than Wikipedia, you have to make a site that Google thinks is better than Wikipedia. But, if the algorithm is tuned to Wikipedia, to compete you must have Wikipedia-like content. Even if you did make a site like Wikipedia it would be just be like Wikipedia, so why would people go to it? Let’s say a new website comes out that uses video instead of text to let people know about topics. It would rank lower than Wikipedia because it doesn’t have the Wikipedia-style format Google likes.

That’s what happened to Jason Calacanis’ site Mahalo. Calacanis says he believes that Google deliberately changed its ranking to destroy his human-generated search engine.

Mahalo was an awesome effort by a killer team. We hit $10m a year in advertising (all networks), 15m uniques and we were in the top 150 sites in the USA. Matt Cutts killing the business really pissed me off as well. He just smiled and told me “you don’t have a penalty” with a shit-eating grin…. they targeted us for destruction and I had to lay off 80 americans working from home full-time.

The Google-Wikipedia nexus gives us inferior search results leading to inferior content. That’s not good for users, and isn’t good for the web.

Who Benefits?

Despite Google using Wikipedia as a buffer against their competitors, using Wikipedia’s data, and using the site to enhance its status, none of Google’s $70 BILLION a year revenues goes back to Wikipedia.

Except that, in 2010, Google donated $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation and in November, 2011, Sergey Brin (net worth $30.4 billion) donated $500,000 to the Foundation, followed by another (not highly publicized) donation of $1 million in 2013. Brin’s Google co-founder and current CEO, Larry Page, (net worth $30.9 billion) donated nothing. These donations must surely be the deal of the century.

It’s important to note that none of Brin’s donation goes to the people who write and edit Wikipedia, it goes to the Wikimedia Foundation. Even though the Foundation has over $51 million in the bank ($27.9 million in cash and another $23.3 in investments) it collected $50 million in donations last year from people who, misled by alarmist advertising, think the site is in imminent danger of collapse. Instead, the money was spent on first-class travel, highly-paid ineffective programmers, and expensive office furniture. Only 5% of the donations went on hosting. (Stop Giving Wikipedia Money).

Last week Jimmy Wales defended this excessive fundraising as necessary to give the site “reserves”, but that reason was invented after the donations were taken.

Wales is now employed by Google to help them in their “right-to-be-forgotten” negotiations. Wales appears to be Google’s spokesperson on the issue and is regularly quoted in the media defending Google. One has to wonder why Wales has taken on that role, when Brin, Page, or any other high-profile Google employee should be defending their own company.

Billions for them, nothing for you

None of Google’s or Brin’s billions or the Foundations millions go to the people who actually built Wikipedia. Writers and editors get nothing, other than an imaginary pat on the back. Ordinary people who gave their time and effort to build up a free resource, and have worked with the best of intentions, now find themselves being used as Google’s unpaid fact checkers, and see their work filling the content of Google’s highly-profitable search results.

So, next time you think of adding or updating something on Wikipedia, think of Jimmy Wales clicking champagne glasses with multi-billionaires Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in one of their many private jets, flying high above you. Google and Wikipedia might be BFFs, but they’re not your friend.


Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines, a new crowdsourced news search engine. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

13 Feb, 2015

Lessons from Tsu

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TsuThere are many things to consider when building a revenue-share system, from the payout percentages, to the amount each contributor should earn for different actions. As part of my research into different systems, I came across Tsu (http://tsu.co), which is a clone of Facebook, where you get paid for posting and sharing. I had actually thought that a revenue-share Facebook would be a good idea. Now I’m not so sure.

Please note that this post is not an attempt to convince Tsu contributors to come to Newslines. Newslines contributors have to do specific newsgathering tasks to generate income on the system, and while I have concerns about the model, Tsu remains an experiment worth watching.

Show me the money

Tsu shares 90% of revenues, split 45% between payments users receive for creating and sharing posts, with the other 45% going to earnings based on the earnings of friends and friends-of-friends invited into the network — a big incentive to grow the site. Since October 2014, Tsu has added over one million registered users.

There’s just one big problem: It appears that no one is making any money. Google and forum searches reveal a pitiful lack of payment and low earnings. I  was also surprised that Tsu’s earnings reports are private, meaning earnings reports are second-hand and anecdotal. Sure, some people are making $1 a day, and while that is $360 a year, is the amount of effort worth it?

As I looked more deeply at the site I noticed several issues that make it extremely difficult for ordinary users to make substantial money on Tsu.

1. Misalignment of incentives

Like everyone else, my Facebook feed has news from friends (a recent engagement and wedding), plenty of pictures of cats, some viral videos, motivational quotes (you know who you are!) and some political commentary (curse you!). I also subscribe to various fan pages for bands an TV shows (Forever) and some local businesses. Here’s the truth though:

Your friends are not that interesting, and neither are you

I lead a fairly interesting life, I live in a foreign country, have loads of friends from all over the world, have a couple of kids, run a cool Internet startup, and watch a ton of movies and TV. You’d think I’d have a lot to say. I don’t. I write a couple of blog posts a month if I’m lucky, and I post to Facebook at most twice a day. Most days I don’t post anything. I have 350 people on my Facebook feed. None of them posts more than five posts a day. Most post every few days. Many never post.

When a friend posts on Facebook you assume that it is because they genuinely thought their comment is funny or interesting. They know that if they post too much crap they will be blocked or even defriended, which will impact on their real-life relationship. The trend is to post good stuff infrequently.

However, on Tsu, because the more you post the more you earn, the trend is to post low-quality posts frequently. Feedspam on Facebook is bad enough when it is not incentivized, but Tsu users tolerate it because they are all doing it too. “Let’s get rich spamming each other” is the opposite of being social, and certainly doesn’t fit the ethos of a social network.

But Tsu users are more interested in the money than the relationship, so they rationalize that more content is better content. This is no surprise because most people joined the system because they are interested in making money.

It’s worth contrasting Tsu with YouTube’s revenue share system. YouTube has no inherent conflict between the production of content and what readers are exposed to. When other people upload too much content, or bad content to YouTube it doesn’t affect your feed. On Tsu it degrades the feed.

2. Too many contributors

When everyone is a contributor no-one can make any money. On Tsu there are too many people chasing too little revenue. As more people join, the site’s revenues may increase, but they will be divided between more people. Let’s say Tsu is doing well, has two million users and has earnings of $2 million/month. Even if it distributes 90% of that revenue it still means that each user is getting only $0.90/month.

Compare this to a site like YouTube where the number of people uploading videos (in fact the number of people uploading videos that become popular) is much, much less. Let’s say that there are 1000 popular videos on YouTube in a month. With the same $2 million revenue on a 45% share, the site generates $900,000 divided by the 1000 uploaders, or $90 per person. Which system would you rather be in?

3. Short-term content

Everyone has heard stories about the lucky few whose viral YouTube video earned them a fat check. However, the real money in YouTube is in building a channel. There are many channels with millions of subscribers and many millions of dollars is being distributed by YouTube to the creators. But in Tsu’s case, not only is the content not that interesting, almost all of the content is short-term and disposable:

  • Most of the content is not original. It’s reposted memes, viral videos, and the kind of content that clutters your feed. It’s also worthwhile to note that any Tsu contributor who earns money by reposting copyright material opens themselves to damages claims from copyright holders.
  • It’s extremely short term. The whole point of a feed is that it doesn’t last.
  • Remember that bit about not being that interesting? Intersting people are, by and large, already making money and could make more on Tsu, but that doesn’t help the ordinary user, does it?
  • More recently Tsu has been promoting itself as a great way for brands and musicians to earn money. But this further dilutes the earnings for ordinary users.

4. $100 payment threshold

There is a big difference between earning and being paid. The high threshold means that most people will not get payouts at all. I have seen a few reports of people getting handwritten $100 checks, such as that of Kevin Hinkle, who is one of the highest-paid people on the site. There is no reason not to have a lower payment threshold and there is no reason not to pay with PayPal, especially when the person receiving the payment takes the transfer fee. For example, since May 2014, we paid out $26,000 in payments, all through PayPal to hundreds of contributors (and we actually paid the transfer fees).

5. Opportunity Cost

In the meantime, Tsu users are rationalizing the lack of income, with many pointing out that earning $1 a day is better than earning nothing on Facebook. But there are two parts to the cost of creating content: How much it costs you to create the content, and how much would you make if you did something else?

Kevin Hinkle spent weeks 10 – 12 hours a day, building 14,000 followers and 5,000 friends to get his $100 check. Assuming he spent two weeks building his followers for 10 hrs a day (140hrs) that’s an equivalent hourly rate of $1.40/hr. And he is one of the top earners. Then there’s the opportunity cost. Seriously, if you want too make more than $1.40 an hour – get a real job.

This should be obvious: No-one will pay you for work that doesn’t take extra effort, and if you don’t make extra effort you won’t get paid. Tsu attracts those who think they can get rich doing nothing, but actually demands that its users do a ton of unpaid work. It’s ironic: at least Facebook contributors know they are working for free.

6. Clone Wars

So you’re not making money. Will you stay in the system? When users realize that they’re left with a spammy clone of Facebook that doesn’t have their Facebook friends, what’s the incentive to stop them going back to Facebook? If Tsu offered a new way to organize the feed or better ways for companies to engage readers then it could retain users even if they weren’t being paid. This is something we have to consider deeply at Newslines, as we build in more social features.

Who benefits?

It seems that Tsu’s owners realized that a lower revenue-share percentage would not enable contributors to earn money, so they pushed it up to 90%. But, as Amanda Blaine points out, you simply cannot run a business with only 10% of revenues. This may explain the high payment threshold of $100, so that hardly anyone ever gets paid.

Once the honeymoon is over, and people realize that, because of all the spammy posts, they cannot convince their friends to come over from Facebook, and that they are working for pennies, the number of participants will drop (it seems to already have peaked on Alexa).

Remembering that the site took in $7 million in investor money, my feeling is that the business was made to be flipped to a large corporation who will buy Tsu for the millions of user details in its database. The investors get a big payday, and the contributors get pennies. If so, that’s not revenue share — it seems to be just another example of investors taking advantage of contributors.

Lessons for Newslines

At Newslines, we don’t think like that – we believe the people who help build the site should be treated like investors, who put in their time and effort, instead of money.

The best systems are those with little conflict between the reader and the writer and the owners. We should all have the same goal: to create great content that attracts readers and makes us money. Our contributors, by creating content that readers love, have the opportunity to build a portfolio of long-lasting content that can give significant long-term earnings. We can’t make everyone rich, so we have made it clear that only those who are willing to put in effort have the chance.

As for reporting, we think that everyone should be able to see what everyone else is earning.  You can go to any contributors’ profile and see their earnings. Even though this will make it more difficult to attract contributors while our earnings are low, we believe it builds trust when we can all see how much contributors are really earning.

Finally, there’s really no need for a high payout threshold. We will continue with our $20 payouts for this program.

We are all in it together. Let’s make a great site!

24 Dec, 2014

New features

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Christmas_Presents_wrappedOver the past few months we have done a lot of work to Newslines. Some of it is unseen: we upgraded the core of Newslines to make it faster and more stable. But today we are proud to release several new front-end features. These features make it easier for our readers to search, sort and filter our newslines. They are part of our core belief that users should be able to control the page.

Event Filters

Filters allow readers to instantly filter each newsline according to event types such as Life, Appearances, Interviews, Legal plus around 50 sub categories. You can combine filters to give you different views of the page, so you can see all of a subject’s Life and Legal issues. For an example try George Clooney’s page and click on the funnel icon in the top menu bar.

Newslines filters draw a bright line between our pages and those of other biography sites, especially Wikipedia, which use long-form-text articles as the way to tell a story about a topic. Many Wikipedia pages run to thousands of words of text, and it is often very difficult for readers to be able to extract just the information they want. By splitting the topic’s history into news events Newslines give readers the ability to to sort and filter the events, putting you in control of what you want to see. We think this is not only more useful, but more fun.

The next stage for filtering is to let users save and share their searches for reference. We are also working on a “super filter” which will allow you to cross-reference events on multiple newslines, so you can find all of the people named George who have won an Oscar and have been arrested. The Event types are also the core of a new Achievements system that we hope to launch in mid-February.

It’s going to take a little time for us to tidy up all the event categories and make sure everything is tagged correctly. If you’d like to help work on this please let me know.

Headline view

You can now view newslines in headline-only view by clicking the Headlines icon in the top page menu. This is handy for small screens and to get a quick overview of topics that have a lot of news items

Improved Search

The search page is much improved, and now gives links to categories and posts. For example, a search on “Geo” gives these results.

Mary and I would like to wish all of our writers and readers a Merry Christmas. Thank you for being part of Newslines!

16 Dec, 2014

Google’s popular searches highlight its failure

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Google just released its list of the most popular searches of 2014.

  1. Robin Williams
  2. World Cup
  3. Ebola
  4. Malaysia Airlines
  5. Flappy Bird
  6. ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
  7. ISIS
  8. Ferguson
  9. Frozen
  10. Ukraine

Notice anything interesting about the list? Apart from Flappy Bird (and possibly Frozen), all of the items are news related. In effect people are using Google as a news search. However, Google is not built for news. A Google search for Robin Williams (actually an implied search for “news about Robin Williams’ death”) doesn’t return news about Williams, but a list of links, with a smattering of data scraped from Wikipedia, and a couple of semi-random news stories.

In my last blog post (Google’s Black Hole) I describe how Google’s “knowledge graph” exposes a deep flaw in the way Google presents its results. This is because Google doesn’t actually know the question, and, to hide its confusion, attempts to give a little bit of everything. People  searching for “Robin Williams” are not searching for a list of links about Williams, but for news about the circumstances of his death. They are looking for the story of Williams.

However, the situation is actually worse for Google. As 36.4% of people who go to Google click the top link, almost all of those people are going to Wikipedia. So are they really going to Google at all? What is the point of Google when at least 40% of the people using it could just go to Wikipedia directly? [pullquote]What is the point of Google when at least 40% of the people using it could just go to Wikipedia directly?[/pullquote]

Of course, when they get to Wikipedia most people don’t read much past the summary. Very few people are going to read the entire 3000-word biography. People searching for information about William’s death will have to scroll to the bottom of the page, and see what information relevant to William’s death Wikipedia editors have deemed as notable enough for inclusion. That’s not much, and I don’t think what they really had in mind in the first place.

In my post (Wikipedia’s 13 Deadly Sins) I point out that Wikipedia’s 10-year-old software is not built for news. There is no way to sort or filter the information on the page, and of course the reference-based link system does not work the way the web should (Google’s Broken Links). It’s an encyclopedia that is not built for news.

Ok, so I hear you say, “But, but… Google News!” But Google News doesn’t curate news well. It has no archive and readers are still left to sort through thousands of stories to get the news. There’s no flow. No story of how events unfold.

To summarize: Google doesn’t show news for its most popular searches, it drops readers off at Wikipedia, but Wikipedia doesn’t present news well. So why are these inferior products at the top of news-based searches? I will go into this more in a later post, but there is a co-dependency between Google and Wikipedia that works for both organizations, but shuts out other competitors while giving inferior content to the reader. These emperors have no clothes.

For reference here’s Newslines page about Williams. We are currently building our filtering system and it will be ready around Christmas.

 


Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines, a new crowdsourced news search engine. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

4 Dec, 2014

Stop giving Wikipedia money

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Jimmy Wales - No donationsOn a routine visit to Wikipedia today I was greeted with a huge fundraising banner that covered half of the page. Really, click the link to see how huge that thing was.

DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS: This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence, we’ll never run ads. We survive on donations averaging about $15. Now is the time we ask. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. Yep, that’s about the price of buying a programmer a coffee. We’re a small non-profit with costs of a top website: servers, staff and programs. Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to think and learn. If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year. Thank you.

Let’s go through this line by line:

DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS: This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence, we’ll never run ads.

What is the point of a site saying they don’t want to show ads, then covering up 50% of the screen with a request for money? At least this year’s fundraising banners don’t have Jimmy Wales staring out at the reader like Big Brother. Now, I respect Wikipedia’s non-ad stance. They can’t very well make money on a site that was created through the free labor of its contributors, but for God’s sake show some decorum.

We survive on donations averaging about $15. Now is the time we ask. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour.

Money is not an issue of survival for Wikipedia. According to its latest annual report, The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the charity that controls Wikipedia, has $51 million in cash reserves ($28 million) and investments ($23 million). No-one can seriously claim that an organization that has $51 million in the bank is in “survival” mode.

Yep, that’s about the price of buying a programmer a coffee.

Note the focus on programmers. But programmers don’t make Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s core software is essentially unchanged since 2001 when the project started. Since then Wikipedia’s programming efforts have been a disaster. The Visual Editor (a tool that would allow WYSYWIG editing) was a failure. Editors still edit using tags and arcane code to create their edits. The recently introduced Media Viewer is universally hated. The people who really make Wikipedia are the unpaid volunteers, but hey get nothing from donations. Nothing, while programmers who don’t have a clue get paid. Is that really where your money should go?

We’re a small non-profit

This is a flat-out lie. The WMF is not a small non-profit. It raised $46 million in donations last year and has 215 staff, over 130 of whom work in the Engineering and Product Development department. Yet all of the money spent on programmer salaries has produced no measurable change to the site’s quality. These programmers take up a huge amount of the foundation’s $20 million spent on salaries, salary payments that rose $4 million since 2103.

The closest WMF gets to creating content is the almost $6 million was spent last year on awards and grants — mostly funding international and regional staff and workshops to celebrate Wikipedia, such as Wikimania. These grants have been described as “corrupt” by the WMF’s ex-director Sue Gardner. who said, “I believe the FDC [Funds Dissemination Committee] process, dominated by fund-seekers, does not as currently constructed offer sufficient protection against log-rollingself-dealing, and other corrupt practices.” Oh dear.

with costs of a top website: servers, staff and programs.

The same KPMG report says that Wikipedia spent $2.5 million of its budget on hosting, almost unchanged since 2013. A closer look at the reports line items shows that the WMF spent almost $684,000 on furniture. That’s almost $3200 per employee. Your donations are going to golden chairs.

Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to think and learn.

I guess parks and libraries would be a lot less popular if you had panhandlers at the doors. Especially panhandlers who have more in the bank than you.

If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year. Thank you.

More weasel words. Wikipedia is already useful without the extra donations, and even if donations stopped tomorrow it would still be able to stay online, continue on cash reserves for years (with some salary cuts).

Just don’t

Don’t donate to Wikipedia. It doesn’t need the money, and anything you donate will not go to the people who actually created the pages that you like. It doesn’t even go to the admins who help check the content. It doesn’t go to content creation at all.

Your money goes to a group of incompetent programmers and a management team that jets around the world for “outreach”. When they are not jetting around they sit in their golden chairs, wondering why they only made less than 1%  return on the $51 million they have in the bank. That’s right, they can’t even invest the money properly.

The WMF’s bloated staff of do-nothings want to be rewarded for the value that they did not create. They are laughing all the way to the bank, while they try to guilt you into giving more so they can do even less. If you really want to help the WMF, give it less money so that it is forced to do more with less.

Whatever…

If you don’t want to read about how Newslines compares, stop reading here.

Here at Newslines we don’t have break your experience to beg you for money we don’t need to give to people who don’t deserve it. Our tiny engineering team (me and three part-time subcontractors around the world) have created a modern, multimedia content creation system. It wasn’t that difficult or expensive. The core WordPress software is created by a great team of committed open-source developers. Our contributors don’t have to use arcane tags, they don’t have to go through a post approval process that Beelzebub would have been proud to invent. Our writers are the people who drive this project forward and should have tools that make their lives easier.

And one of the best ways to show respect is not to give out some crappy badges and pats on the back, but to give them money. Having previously paid out over $25,000 to hundreds of content creators for creating and verifying news on thousands of topics we are getting close to our relaunch as an open blockchain platform that lets writers and editors generate ongoing revenues from adding and verifying news, giving real money back to the people who deserve it. That’s only fair.

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22 Nov, 2014

Google’s Black Hole

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Google Black HoleIn December 2012 Google added extra information in a sidebar on its main search results pages. This information, known as “Knowledge Graph” is compiled from different web sources such as Wikipedia, CIA World Factbook and other databases. In August 2014 Google said it had expanded the concept, creating a database of 1.6 billion facts into the Knowledge Vault, which were compiled from the pages stored on its system. For example, when users type in “Director of Citizen Kane” the system will come up with “Orson Wells” above the standard search results. There should probably be some discussion about where Goole is getting these search results, particularly if it is scraping copyrighted sites.

However, rather than improving users’ search experience the Knowledge Graph actually exposes a black hole in how Google, and other algorithmic search engine, deals with searches. This is not an Interstellar-style friendly black hole, but one that undermines the entire basis for search, with the potential to suck out the most profitable part of Google’s business.

Faith-based search

Google’s search results for Ariana Grande are a good example. Google tells us that there are 144,000,000 million results for the Problem singer. But how do we know these results exist? Has anyone ever looked through the millions of results for each topic? More importantly, does anyone care?

Research shows 36.4% of search queries result in a click to the top result, with a further 12.5% and 9.5% going to the second and third, respectively. The top three results are clicked 58.5% of the time. A stunning 94% of queries stay on the front page. So why then are millions of pages necessary? For the huge majority of searches only the top search results are are ever used. The only time most people ever look through multiple pages of search results is probably to find mentions of their own name. Combined with the fact that most searches on Google are for popular culture topics it’s easy to see that most search engine users are searching for a few topics and clicking on just a few results.

Who is in control? Not you.

No-one knows how Google orders its results. The Company says secrecy is required to stop spammers gaming the system, but its secrecy also stops legitimate companies from proper representation. A whole industry of dubious “Search Engine Optimization” practices has been built to game Google’s results.

Recently the issue of user control over the display of data has heated up. Facebook changed its newsfeed to favor advertisers, and Twitter is doing the same. Every reader implicitly knows that these changes are motivated by greed. But no-one seems to care that Google does exactly the same thing. Google tells you want they think is relevant, and that’s it. You have no choice. They can, and do, change the algorithm at any time, and as a reader you are expected to believe that they are doing it for your own good.

Examining Search Results

Ariana checks her Google results

Ariana checks her Google results

Let’s look more closely at Ariana’s search results. Click here and check the left-hand side of her results. Google’s algorithm brings back a list of sites from the 144 million, in 0.38 seconds. Readers are told by Google that these are the most relevant to their search term. For the vast majority of topics, especially those on popular culture, the top search results results fall into the following groups: The home site of the topic; the Wikipedia entry; News about the topic; Twitter and social media accounts; Fans sites or blogs related to the topic; and YouTube videos. Apart from the top three the rest appear to be in random order.

  • Home page – Ariana’s home page. Made by her PR team and any negative information will be censored.
  • Wikipedia – An extremely detailed 3500 word essay about the singer in back-to-the 90s textbook design with has no videos or audio and a references section that is bigger than the article. A separate discography racks up thousands more words. It’s too much information.
  • News – Unsorted, random news that doesn’t tell the reader much.
  • Twitter and social media accounts – unfiltered streams of consciousness.
  • YouTube links. Random YouTube links. Readers have no idea why those particular links are chosen.
  • Long-form articles – If readers wanted to read long articles they would have searched for “Ariana Grande articles.”

In the end, readers end up trying to assemble pieces of information from the various sites in the list, which is a lot of work. The search result may have come back in 0.38 seconds, but it’s going to take them much longer to sort and filter that data. Even Google knows that the search engine results are a problem, that’s why they introduced the Graph. But does the Graph give readers enough?

Examining Graph Results

Now check the right-hand side of Ariana’s page, which holds the “graph” data. You’ll see:

  • Google Images – Images that have all been scanned from other Company’s websites.
  • Ads for music services — But readers already know that Ariana’s songs are available on YouTube (a Google company) for free. This is very close to bait and switch.
  • Knowledge Graph data — In this case readers see Grande’s height and sibling information. Not very relevant.
  • Wikipedia snippet — Not only is this a duplication of the Wikipedia link in the search listing, the snippet contains Wikipedia’s unreliable data. There are numerous cases where vandalized Wikipedia information has shown up on the Knowledge Graph. For example, Margaret Thatcher’s Knowledge Graph said she has received an award for “Bastard of the Year“.
  • Song list — Links lead to another Google page with the YouTube video on the top. To view all of her songs readers must click on every link individually, which may be good for Google’s ad revenue, but it’s not good for the reader.

Millions of semi-random sites on one side,  a dab of dubious data on the other. There’s nothing in between. This missing information is the black hole in the middle of every Google search page.

The most important question

The first questions any media should ask itself itself are: who are the readers? and what question they need answered? Readers don’t want a list of semi-random results that they have to wade through to find information, and they don’t want a useless snippet that doesn’t tell them anything. In fact, readers want to know the answer to a simple question: Who is Ariana Grande?

They want to see a quick history, some of her songs and performances, and find out if she’s been involved in a scandal or some newsworthy event. They want her story to be presented in a way that allows them to control the results, not based on popularity of external sites, but based on what she actually has done that is interesting to readers. They want to be able to filter the results so they can see all her work, her life events, her interviews and awards all from one place.

Being presented with a list of websites about her is way, way down the list, if it is of any interest at all. In the old days of paper libraries directories and encyclopedias were kept at the back in a separate reference section, they weren’t the first thing you’d reach for. Google (and Wikipedia) have managed to convince us that the web is about references, when it’s really about stories.

Google fails in its answer because it doesn’t, and cannot, understand the question.To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, Google is a system that knows the meaning of everything and the value of nothing.

  • Do readers need a hundred million search results: No
  • Do readers use a hundred million search results: No
  • Do readers want a hidden search algorithm? No
  • Do readers want a list of web pages? Not really
  • Are readers in control of the results? No
  • Are readers getting the information they need? No

All hail Gwookipedia!

More sense than Gwookiepedia

Makes more sense than Gwookiepedia

Because Google can’t answer the question it puts Wikipedia at the top. Google thinks Wikipedia is the answer to the question, and Google’s ranking system is built to promote high “authority” sites like Wikipedia. But, there are many problems with Wikipedia. It is not the best fit for many questions, and its size distorts the playing field. One example we find is the extension of Wikipedia into news — as soon as a Wikipeida page is made about some minor person that page instantly goes to the top of the search rankings whether or not the page is any good. So because Google can’t answer the question it promotes Wikipedia. Google doesn’t answer the question and gives up as its main result a site that also doesn’t answer the question. This monster is called Gwookipedia (No relation to Han Solo’s pal).

I will discuss Sergey Brin’s $500,000 bribe donation to Wikipedia in my next post.

The search engine is dead. Long live Story Search

The current dysfunctional search engine model gives us answers to questions we are not asking, links us to sites that are not useful, obscures reasoning with secret processes, and is paid for by ads that are not relevant, and that expose us to intrusive data mining.

For the vast majority of topics — the vast majority of profitable topics — a single-page design that tells the story about a topic in the most effective and efficient way possible, using all elements of the modern web, would give much more reader satisfaction than current offerings. The knowledge graph doesn’t enhance experience, but instead exposes that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

Can Google improve the graph? Maybe, but it will still not be what people want. Google, like Wikipedia, is stuck in a 10-year-old model of how the web works. There may be a time when computer algorithms can create stories but in the meantime we are working to create human-powered pages that give humans control over the results.

Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

14 Nov, 2014

Wikipedia’s 13 Deadly Sins

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Wikipedia-devil-logoThe “encyclopedia anyone can edit” gets a bad rap for reliability, vandalism, and a toxic editor environment, but have you ever thought why these problems happen? Most Wikipedia criticism revolves around well-publicized vandalism or hoaxes, while many journalists (who should know better) gush about how Wikipedia is the new model for politics/ society/ technology/ raising llamas or whatever. There is very little discussion, even in the tech community, about Wikipedia’s software and policy choices.

As a former-Wikipedia editor and the founder of Newslines, the only direct crowdsourced competitor to Wikipedia’s news and biography-based pages, I have a unique insight into Wikipedia and what it will take to fix it (hint: it can’t be fixed). Feel free to leave comments.

1. It’s not an encyclopedia

Let’s get something straight first: Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia, it’s a breaking news source, a news archive, a medical reference, a movie and music guide and a biography site, to name a few of its functions. The problem is that the site’s one-size-fits-all software does not work effectively for all those different functions. A biography site not only has a different market than an encyclopedia, but has different data, editing and presentation needs. This is a particularly dangerous problem in the medical field where Wikipedia has many articles that are dangerously imprecise, or wrong. This “mission creep” is because the encyclopedia part is done. There’s really not that much more to say about dinosaurs, so the site’s editors scramble, like elfs on meth, to add the latest news, Pokemon characters, porn stars, and other non-encyclopedic information, irrespective of whether that content is suitable or not.

There are many better sites than Wikipedia for this non-encyclopedic information, but they are all squeezed out by Wikipedia’s size, and its domination of Google’s search results (an unholy alliance I will go into in a future post). The end result is that readers across the web get poorer quality information than they should.

2. But it looks like an encyclopedia

Skeumorphism is when real-life interfaces are replicated in technology. Until recently, Apple’s calendar app looked like a real-life diary, complete with leather stitching (apparently based on the leather in Steve Jobs’ Gulfstream jet). Apple dropped this look because, while it provides some users comfort, it limits the diary’s functionality to think of it as though it were paper. The beauty of the web is that it isn’t restricted to paper and the data can be re-imagined to better suit the new media. Form follows function.

Wikipedia is what happens when a real-life encyclopedia is replicated on the web — it continues to act like a book, even though the web gives so many more possibilities than paper. Wikipedia does have two main features that distinguish it from a book, but both are implemented poorly. The first is that web pages have more space than paper pages, but that has resulted in incredibly long text-heavy articles, as well as raging debates between “inclusionists” (“Let’s make Wikipedia the sum of all human knowledge!”) and “deletionists” (It’s an encyclopedia, dammit!”). The other web feature that was a delight in Wikipedia’s early days was interlinking between articles, but Wikipedia’s links are implemented poorly (see below). There are very few Web 2.0 features. Social features are primitive: readers cannot make an easy list of their favorites, nor can they share to Facebook or Twitter with a single click. It’s as if the past ten years of progress had never happened.

3. And real-world Encyclopedias have pages

A great deal of the problems of Wikipedia are due to the site being organized around page-based articles. There are the obvious display problems: Wikipedia pages look like a dull grey textbook. Almost every page is an over-long stream of text with hardly any video or even images. Pages about movies don’t even have trailers. This has big implications for kids brought up using visual media like Instagram and YouTube who are not interested in getting information about their favorite movies, musicians and celebrities from a textbook. Check Taylor Swift – the page has thousands of words, but not a single video or music clip. As the quote goes: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

4. Readers can’t filter, sort or cross-reference pages

Because each Wikipedia page is structured as an article, there is no way to sort or filter the information on the page. What if I wanted to see Taylor Swift’s latest news first? Where is it on the page? What if I only want to see her video releases? In fact, her video releases are there, but in a separate table at the bottom of the page (which is inconsistent across all artists). By contrast, at Newslines, our writers add each news event as a separate post that can be sorted and filtered (using the filter icon at the top of the page) to create different views of the page. News events sorted by newest to oldest give a timeline of Swift’s latest news, while sorting from oldest to newest gives a biography view. We have now completed our project to allow filtering of the news events so that readers can quickly see an actors films, or awards, or wives, with a single button click. Wikipedia doesn’t let the reader control anything, just like a book.

5. Footnotes

There are 518 (!) footnotes in Taylor Swift’s page, taking up a huge amount of space at the bottom of the page. But the web doesn’t need footnotes because you can link directly to the source. I write about this at length in Wikipedia’s Broken Links. We solved this problem at Newslines by placing links that connect each newsline outside the post’s text, and creating links to sources on the verbs in the text, so they don’t conflict with proper names.

6. Page ownership

Because Wikipedia pages are structured as long-form articles, any editor on the entire system has veto power on any new information that is added. Let’s say I want to add new information to a page. Wikipedia will alert anyone who has the page on their watchlist, and the fighting will begin. It is much easier for an editor to click a button to revert an edit than it is to craft a new sentence, and recraft it multiple times until it is accepted. Wikipedia’s defenders will say that stops vandalism, but it also stops new or contrary information from updating pages. Once the main fighting is over, then the page calcifies, and updates become less frequent. What also has text that can’t be updated easily? A book.

7. Harassment

Expect a world of hurt if you want to get some text onto a Wikipedia page. Back in 2007 I tried to add a sentence on Richard Gere’s page about an ad Gere and Cindy Crawford placed in the Times of London saying their marriage was strong (they divorced a few months later). One editor removed my edit saying it was not “sensitive” to the subject. I found this absurd – Gere and Crawford had placed the ad in the newspaper themselves – they wanted the information to be known. I was forced into a process to find “consensus”. The editor pulled in his friends and outnumbered me. Weeks of debate followed, leading to me checking the Biographies for Living Persons policy, where I found the definition of “sensitivity” to be ambiguous and overly broad. When I suggested a minor change (a single comma). I was told in no uncertain terms to back off by the administrator who helped write the policy. She didn’t forget me. Several months later on an entirely unrelated page, and after the various editors on the page had actually reached a consensus, she swooped in and banned me. The information about Gere and Crawford is still not on Gere’s page.

8. Censorship & Bias

Does it matter is the information about Gere and Crawford’s marriage troubles is not on Wikipedia? Well, imagine my story multiplied by the millions of other Wikipedia pages and you will understand how much censorship and bias takes place on the site. A prime example is William Connolley, an English Global Warming researcher, who took control of Wikipedia’s global warming pages and moulded them to suit the agenda of the climate scientists he worked with. I tangled with Mr Connolly about the lack of any mention of the now discredited “Hockey Stick Graph” (which it turned out was deliberately removed by him), but was shot down time and time again. After thousands of edits deleting and massaging the pages, as well as deleting over 500 pages he did not agree with, he was exposed in the ClimateGate scandal and given a six-month ban on editing climate-related pages. Six months! How many people, including politicians, journalists and activists, were misinformed by his propaganda over the years? It should also be noted that the National Post articles criticizing Mr Connolly’s behavior are nowhere to be seen on his Wikipedia biography. The hive looks after its own.

9. Arbitrary rules, arbitrarily applied

During my time as an editor I encountered a great deal of Wikilawyering, a term used to describe being harassed by other editors who use Wikipedia’s extensive rulebook to beat you into submission. The number one thing I learned about Wikipedia is that there are few fixed rules. In fact one of the Five Pillars of Wikipedia is that “Wikipedia has no firm rules”. This naturally gives power to those who understand the rules, and to the administrators who apply them, the only real rule being that all rules can be broken if you are sufficiently connected. I was ostensibly banned for a “conflict of interest” (citing an article written in a magazine I published), yet many of the site’s administrators continue to contribute to articles despite blatant conflicts of interest, such as Mr Connolly.

Sock puppets (extra accounts made by users to hide their identity) are also a big no-no on Wikipedia, but I was specifically targeted by a sockpuppet user called “HeatedIssuePuppet,” and yet when I complained I was told that some users could have these extra anonymous accounts to keep their main account clean. Arbitrary rules allow wide discretion for admins to punish those who disagree with them while turning a blind eye to friends who break the rules. When someone says they want government to run like Wikipedia, you should run a mile. What they are saying is “My friends and I want to give the impression that there are rules, but actually we will apply them as we see fit, and we will exclude you with no recourse when you don’t agree with them”.

10. Gender and racial bias

Talking of exclusion leads us to Wikipedia’s infamous Gender Gap. Wikipedia editors are 90% young, educated, white males. Very few minorities and hardly any women. There have been many reasons put forward for why there are so few women: Women are not interested in adding knowledge, they are too busy, they have kids, they don’t understand technology, and other condescensions. All of these reasons are false. At Newslines we have 80% women and minority contributors. How can two crowdsourcing systems, making similar content have such difference in the people creating the content? There are two main reasons: we pay our writers and we have created systems where people can contribute without harassment.

When we first started I wanted to attract Wikipedia editors but got little interest. Wikipedia editors are interested in glory. They want to show off their knowledge (real or imagined) on one of the world’s biggest sites. They are not interested in small sites, even if they are being paid to post. By contrast, our writers were happy to make a dollar for writing each post. One of our writers told me she was saving for her Christmas fund. In fact, many of our writers have earned thousands of dollars. They see it as fun work for money, not free work for glory.

Wikipedia editors talking about gender bias is like lions at the watering hole wondering why the zebras are not thirsty. They blame women for not contributing, when they are the ones doing the exclusion. Wikipedia’s wiki-based software is perfect for young, educated, white men who want to fight each other to show who knows more. But the intensity of the fighting alienates other groups (as well as distorting the content to reflect young, white, male interests). This exclusion can never be fixed because the primary feature of wiki-editing is conflict.

11. The wiki is the problem

Every Wikipedia problem can be traced to the wiki software. The wiki software is responsible for the great success of the site, but also for its impending demise. The wiki system had great benefits on the upside — it allowed for fast content creation, but the conflict-driven editing has led to biased and incomplete content, lack of innovation, and many community problems. In 13 years the software has barely been updated to adapt to the needs of its users, or its readers.

It’s important to realize that Wikipedia was never designed from the ground up as a content creation system. Larry Sanger and Wales took off-the-shelf-wiki software and put it to work as an encyclopedia. Consider this exchange between Wales and the inventor of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, in Jan 2001.

My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? — JimboWales

Yes, but in the end it wouldn’t be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. — WardCunningham

What is the social cost of all this conflict? Many Wikipedia editors have slaved for months, if not years to try to get information added to the site. Time and emotional costs are never considered because there was a seemingly endless group of people willing to experience that pain to satisfy their ego. I suspect that creating documents using wiki software is one of the least efficient methods of content creation. When you have an infinite amount of monkeys anything is possible, but what happens when the monkeys would rather just fling poo?

12. Wikitopianism

None of these faults matter to the Wiki-believers. In their world the wiki software is perfect and that everything else — especially people — is responsible for Wikipedia’s problems. Gender bias – women’s fault. Toxic user environment – the fault of toxic editors (always other editors, not them of course). Too many rules – we need those rules so to control those pesky people. Paid editors – how dare they even add correct information! They are so caught up in Wikimania they don’t understand that it is the wiki itself that causes all of the site’s problems by creating a playing ground where only certain kinds of people survive, and where excessive rules are necessary to counter the flaws in the system.

This Wikitopianism infects much of Wikipedia’s community, with Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation the worst offenders. They are completely blind to the failings of the site, but continue to boost it as though it is the solution to all mankind’s problems. But there is no excuse for outsiders to believe this. I have lost count of the number of articles that gush praise about the site by journalists who have never looked under the hood. It’s time to treat Wikipedia like any other software product in the marketplace. It has no magical right to exist beyond its usefulness just because it is Wikipedia. It’s been a great run, but it  to survive in the future it must deliver better information than the alternatives. It can’t rely on a software model that has not been updated for 13 years.

trabant

Like Wikipedia

Wikipedia is in many ways like Communism. Even while people were lining up for a loaf of bread the Soviet Union’s leaders proclaimed their system to be the best in the world. Wikipedia is the Trabant of content, built by a group of party faithful swearing allegiance to a Dear Leader, using far too many resources to create an inferior product that is hopelessly outdated, underpowered and liable to collapse into a rusting heap at any moment.

Don’t think it will happen? Wikipedia is dying. The number of active administrators is falling. New users are not joining up. Pages are not being updated. Women and minorities shun the site. The Foundation that runs the site pulled in $50 million in donations last year, but can’t even organize the simplest software improvements. They have frittered away the money on useless projects that are hated by the community, such as the Visual Editor. However, the community itself is its own worst enemy and is resistant to change: What chance does the site have when the users don’t want change and the people at the top are incompetent and don’t care?

The 13th sin, apathy, is the greatest sin of them all.

There is a better way

Content doesn’t have to be built through conflict. It doesn’t have to exclude minorities and women, and it doesn’t have to have vandalism, errors, and inconsistencies. It doesn’t have to have the worst editing interface on the planet. Content creation should be fun. Over the past few months Newslines writers have added over 22,000 posts without a single edit war or controversy. Compare our pages with Wikipedia and you’ll see how we use the web as it should be used, not as a competitor to Encyclopedia Britannica, but purpose-built for the web with embedded YouTube and Soundcloud clips that help you understand the story of things.

Good software design reflects how people act, it doesn’t shoehorn them into inflexible and inhumane ways of working, even if the goal is noble. I hope you will follow us on our journey as we grow.

8 Nov, 2014

An apology to giraffes and Hacker News

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Dear Hacker News admins,

I have just noticed that my posts are not appearing on Hacker News. After a short investigation, I have surmised that this is to do with recent heavy downvoting on a recent post about giraffes. I am sad to say that in response to a post about society’s understanding of giraffes I replied:

Giraffes are heartless creatures.

This was based on this well-known image:

giraffes

At the time I thought that this was an amusing response that was relevant to the topic. But I watched in horror as I was relentlessly downvoted, and in fact lost over 100 karma points in a matter of an hour. How could I have been so blind?

This error caused me serious distress because over the past few years, I had been writing many deeply insightful replies to Hacker News posts that did not concern giraffes at all. I had been curating karma points like a beggar collects old beer cans. When those cans were kicked away, years of work were destroyed in an instant, and worst of all, I knew it was my own fault. I had kicked away the cans myself!

I had totally failed to account for the deep love of giraffes on Hacker News. This reaction was quite a surprise to me, as, like most people, I had believed that nerds are not animal lovers, preferring the companionship of robots, virtual pets, and bacon. Who would have thought their love for giraffes was so deep?

I have to say at this point that I also love giraffes, and that I don’t actually believe that a mommy and daddy giraffe would fail to feed their offspring. What a cruel world that would be! I believe the humor in the image is because such a situation would be intolerable. In fact, giraffes are not heartless creatures at all.

Also, my wife says that I made a “big mistake” in criticizing giraffes. And she is never wrong. So here I must make my apology and ask for forgiveness.

I give you my solemn word that I will never again criticize giraffes on Hacker News and ask that the posting privileges be restored on my account.

I remain at your mercy,

Mark Devlin
Hacker News ID: sparkzilla

——————————–

November 9, 2014

Mark

Your comments were getting killed because your account’s karma had plummeted. I restored it to the baseline and unkilled your last several comments.

There used to be restrictions to prevent karma slaughter by downvote avalanches, but we turned them off several months ago as an emergency measure to counteract the toxic comments that had been plaguing HN. Sort of like unleashing the white blood cells. That has been working on those; unfortunately, it also leads to collateral giraffe damage. We try to make amends when we see those, or when people email us. If you want to do the arithmetic of figuring out how many karma points you’d still have if your account had only lost -4 for each anti-giraffe slur, we’ll put it back.

I’d add some homily about making only substantive comments in the future but since the giraffes have already roughed you up pretty bad, that seems unnecessary.

Daniel

21 Jun, 2014

Wikipedia’s broken links

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[alert]This article is part three in a series about Wikipedia’s problems. See here for the others.[/alert]

Free ClicksIn this article I discuss how the way Wikipedia’s links to sources breaks usability and results in many unnecessary clicks. I also offer a simple solution and discuss how the design metaphor hobbles the site’s presentation and functionality.

There are three types of link on a Wikipedia page: internal, external, and sources. Internal links link to other pages on Wikipedia and are created by adding double square brackets around the word you want to link. For example, the text [[Barack Obama]] will link from the page you are editing to Barack Obama’s page.

Then there are external links to other sites. These are made by using single square brackets. For example, [Newslines| https://newslines.org] will create a link to Newslines. These are rare now, and have generally been replaced by links from numbers that are added after the text to a Reference section at the bottom of each page.

Get your extra clicks here!

Let’s say you want to check a source: Here are the steps:

  1. Go to the Early Life section on Tom Hanks Wikipedia page and find the text “while two of Hanks’ paternal great-grandparents immigrated from Britain[5][6][7]”
  2. Click on the [5] footnote marker after the text.
  3. That takes you to the References section at the bottom of the page, which says ” Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, January 2008 on YouTube”
  4. Then click on the YouTube
  5. Click to see the video

Notes:

  1. The reference link in step 3 adds to the confusion. Some readers will surely click the YouTube link, expecting to see the video  but will end up on Wikipedia’s YouTube page.
  2. Even if the end source is not a video it still requires two clicks (one on the source number [6] and then one on the link in the reference section)

Why are three clicks required to play a YouTube video? Let’s reduce it to one.

A link to the past

In 2012, during the run up to the Presidential Election I created a site called WeCheck that aimed to be a collaborative fact check. The site used MediaWiki, the same software that Wikipedia uses. The site wasn’t a big success, but, as a way to understanding the facts better, it got me creating news-based timelines, which then became Newslines.

I soon realized that MediaWiki would not allow me to sort or filter the information on the page. The timelines I created could only run one way. This is because MediaWiki (and Wikpedia) works on a page metaphor: Uses create entire pages that cannot be split into events, while timelines are based on individual events. I needed to find a system that could manage smaller pieces of data that could be combined into a page.

Over a period of four months I investigated various content management solutions. I spent a lot of time on Drupal, but it was too inflexible, then Joomla, which didn’t have enough of a community, then settled on WordPress. I copied the individual events, which were in a long text list on MediaWiki pages over into separate posts on WordPress. Now I could sort and filter the inidual events. But what about the links?

Open your mind, forget the Wiki way

To create internal links I used one of many SEO plugins that automatically generates internal links between posts and categories. So if there’s a Newslines category for Barack Obama, wherever the text Barack Obama appears in a post it will link automatically to the newsline — the writer doesn’t need to do anything.

As for the references to sources, I was so used to the footnotes style of Wikipedia that I replicated it in WordPress. I used a plugin called FD footnotes, which allowed me to add references in the text, that looked like this: [1. New York Times htp://nyt.com/restofurl.html] (you will see the reference at the bottom of the page). There are still some old posts that have this format, see an example here, and we continue to use footnotes for offline references.

Because I was so ingrained into the Wiki way of doing things, it took me a few months to realize that it wasn’t necessary to create footnotes at all — I could simply add links to the post in the same way any link is added. But there was a problem: How could I stop the links to sources conflicting with the internal links?

Let’s say you have a source that says Barack Obama signed an executive order and the text is:

Barack Obama signs Minimum Wage executive order

The standard way to create the link to the source from that text is to link the entire text.

Barack Obama signs Minimum Wage executive order

But that long link conflicts with the internal link for Barack Obama. The solution: Link the source from the verb, in this case, on the word “signs”.

Barack Obama signs Minimum Wage executive order

Now there is no conflict. If someone wants to see the source they click “signs,” the verb, and if they want to see the internal page for Barack Obama they click the noun.

This is the format we use on Newslines, and in over 2000 posts there has been no conflict. If the reader wants to know the name of the source before they click it, they can mouse over it and it will be seen on the status bar.

But even one link is too many. In the case of YouTube videos and Twitter posts we can reduce the number of clicks a user needs to make to get to the source to zero by simply embedding content into the post. Check our Google Glass page. There is no need to go to Twitter, Google Plus, or YouTube to see the content — it’s embedded directly into the posts. There is no embedding in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a book

Not that long ago my wife and partner, Mary, said that she hardly read Wikipedia because it is “like a book”. By this she meant the presentation was boring, flat, and uninteresting, but it is also functionally like a book:

  1. Text based
  2. Uses a page metaphor to hold content, which is unsuitable for sorting or filtering data
  3. Has a references /footnotes section on each page
  4. Uses non-standard linking to footnotes from the main content area
  5. Does not allow multimedia or social media embedding
  6. Has very little social media functions

Wikipedia’s link policy, and the lack of embedding, are examples of what happens when you design for the web using real-world style cues (known a skeumorphism). Apple stopped making its iPhone diary application look like a real-world diary because the fake leather look gets in the way of what diary data can be. When it looks like a page, you make the data behave like a page. When it looks like a book your writers, programmers and readers will treat it like a book.

The web has much more functionality and style than a book. It’s a pity — and an opportunity — that Wikipedia hasn’t caught up.

31 May, 2014

Why Quora joined Y Combinator

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Quora BubbleMany people thought it strange that Quora, the Q&A site that is sometimes touted as “the next Wikipedia” (it’s not) would join the internet startup accelerator Y Combinator, especially after receiving an $80 million financing led by Tiger Global in April 2014. That investment was “meant to spur its growth and protect its independence,” whatever that means. I thought the objective of an investment was to make money.

Why Y Combinator?

Over 2000 companies applied to Y Combinator this last session (Newslines was one of the ones that didn’t get chosen). Usually Y Combinator is for startups: A couple of guys (rarely girls) starting out with a great idea. If chosen. YC gives $120,000 in seed money for around 7% of the company, three months of mentoring, and most importantly access to venture capital. About 40 companies are chosen. The program has had several major successes: DropBox, AirBnb and Reddit all started on the program.

So why Quroa? CEO Adam D’Angelo told TechCrunch that YC invested an amount that was similar to their standard $120k, based on the valuation of their Tiger Investment-led round ($80 million invested at $900 million valuation) which amounted to only 0.013% of the company. D’Angelo explains:

It’s a pretty minor thing. We let YC put in a little bit of money. We’re not trying to pretend to be a small company. We just wanted to be part of the network.

And on Quora itself he said:

There are a bunch of reasons why it’s valuable for Quora to be a YC company:

  • We’ll have Sam and all the other partners to help us.
  • We get to be part of the YC community / alumni network of founders.
  • We get access to all the resources of YC.

We were raising money anyway, so there was no overhead in letting YC participate. And independent of the benefits to Quora, I think it will be fun personally to participate in some of the YC events. I hope my perspective can help some of the other companies.

I doubt very much it’s a “minor thing”. Everyone knows there is only one reason to join Y Combinator: To get access to investors. Why does a company that already has huge venture funding want to be part of a network? The answer lies in the content.

Quora’s Big Question: Is this monetizable?

The key to riches for content sites is to get the number one on Google search results. While Quora may have a lot of questions on its site, there simply isn’t much money in them. The problem with all Q&A sites is that they split the topic, so their search authority is lessened. A question such as: “How can I fix my Toyota Camry?” is much less valuable than the search term “Toyota”. The company that holds the search for “Toyota Camry” can easily add a Q&A section. The company that holds a bunch of questions about Toyota will never get that power.

When asked about how they were going to make money by TechCrunch D’Angelo said:

it’s very likely that we will have an ad-based revenue model. We’ll experiment but I think that’s the most likely outcome.”

Remember this is four years into the project. None of the $80 million raised in April was raised to to build an ads team, or to generate revenue. There is no mention of revenues in the statement on why Quora joined Y Combinator.

Show me the money

TechCrunch notes that Quora does not give out its usage statistics:

Quora has been cagey about its stats since forever, only talking in relative growth and vanity metrics rather than absolute user counts. For example, Quora says it grew 3X in all metrics from May 2012 to May 2013, and hit 500,000 topics in April 2014. This makes it tough to know exactly how popular it is, but the general consensus hovers around “known amongst Silicon Valley intellectuals” and “just not big enough”. Quora exec Marc Bodnick did tell me last month that public measurement services “significantly underestimate” Quora, and “are off by a factor of 5X to 15X.” An average of (sometimes inaccurate) comScore and Compete numbers for February multiplied out would put Quora somewhere between 5.5 million and 16.5 million monthly users, plus the 40 percent of its users it’s said are on mobile.

The average global CPM for Google AdSense is $1.60, and let’s say readers view 2.5 pages on average. This would mean a lower number of 13.75 million page views and an upper number of 41.25 million page views/month. So the company could be earning, right now, $22,000/month to $66,000/month. Annually that’s $2.64 million at the low end and $7.92 million at the top end. 

These are not good numbers for a company that is valued at almost a billion dollars. But even so, it begs the question: If you could earn almost $8 million just from putting AdSense on your site, why wouldn’t you?

Is this the real life?

It’s often said that it’s best not to show any advertising revenues to investors because it shows reality, when what you want to sell investors is the fantasy. Once investors have a baseline revenue to work from they extrapolate, reality sets in, and they get worried. Better not to give them any clues, sell them the dream, take their money and move on to the next guy (rarely girls). Sites like Quora are representative of Bubble thinking — let’s get to IPO and offload this before the whole thing collapses.

If Quora could be making money already they would be. I believe Quora’s founders and its existing investors already know that the site cannot perform as well as their investors want them to. That’s why they are so cagey about their stats and their revenue model. And it explains why they need Y Combinator — they need access to even more investors to make the scheme work.

People who invest in late-stage companies that have no revenue model are not investors, they’re idiots.