Minh’s Notes

Friday night (San Francisco time), northern Vietnam’s wiki addicts got together to discuss – what else? – wikis at the inaugural Wiki Day in Hanoi.

Inside the inaugural Wiki Day. Courtesy: Trần Xuân Trường, Nguyễn Phan Kiên, NHHP.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it: at the last minute, my professor caught wind of my plans to take a plane to Vietnam instead of taking a midterm. :^P So instead of being able to finally meet my co-conspirators in the wiki revolution face to face, I settled for writing a talk for an attendee to read. In between studying for a midterm and completing a problem set, I managed to crank out what sounded (on paper) like a coherent essay on Wikipedia’s principles, how we foster a community, and what we do about vandals. Hopefully it wasn’t too awkward. Word has it that the meetup overall was a success.

I hadn’t realized how big a deal wikis have become in Vietnam, but apparently the event has received coverage in the country’s major newspapers, and a few national TV networks were on-scene as well. If I knew the mainstream press was coming, I would’ve probably switched into car salesman mode and pushed Wikipedia’s benefits more than discussing the challenges ahead of us as a community. But it’s not like we have anything to hide, what with an Edit button atop every page.

The Vietnamese Wikipedia community doesn’t have official recognition with a Wikimedia Foundation chapter of its own, and it has yet to really spread to other Wikimedia projects like Wiktionary and Wikibooks. We haven’t won any awards like the Italian community or put on a Wikimania conference like the Taiwanese. But still, it’s awesome how far things have progressed since late 2003, when we were just a ragtag group of geeks starting into computer screens, developing carpal tunnel by writing too much.

Along the way, I learned a new language – I only knew a few words of Vietnamese before joining Wikipedia – we’ve written on topics that’ve never been written about in our language; and we’ve changed the way people think about learning. You can, on your own time, enrich your understanding of the world around you. At least for those with Internet access, the excuse of not having the money or patience is gone. (Reaching those without Internet access is an open problem.)

What makes Wikipedia (and any other wiki) is that we’re not just a community. We’re a community making something useful: in our case, a website synonymous these days with “encyclopedia”. In making decisions at Wikipedia – such as determining how strict we enforce a rule on notability – the overriding challenge is balancing the needs of the community versus the needs of the encyclopedia.

I’m pretty sure what kept me contributing to Wikipedia all these years, even as the offline world called, was the knowledge that the project depends on each individual to keep it afloat. Especially when there weren’t many administrators and other dedicated contributors around, others would have to shoulder more work if I simply packed up and left. I wouldn’t’ve particularly cared, except that I’d already built up a good working relationship with so many in the community. Meetups, like the one on Friday, ensure that “the community” isn’t just a nebulous group of someone-or-others, but rather your friends.

In treating everyone as equals – with mostly the same editing rights, but more importantly with equal authority in arguments – we the wiki community think of everyone as trusted friends. That’s a really great statement about humanity.

Entry №2054, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 12:15 AM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Vietnamese, Wikipedia | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I often hear from people who didn’t realize that each Wikipedia article maintains a comprehensive list of everyone who’s ever edited it, along with every version of the article. The button to display this list is displayed as the History “tab”, sitting prominently above the page contents. It’s so obvious, yet even experienced computer users miss it and cite its absence as their main beef with the site. A similar situation exists for the ever-important Edit tab, which many experienced users never notice.

But in this case, the problem doesn’t lie between the keyboard and the chair. Rather than fault the user, I find issue with MonoBook, the default skin for sites that run on MediaWiki, notably Wikipedia. MonoBook relegates the important history and edit links to a tiny, non-descript row of tabs at top, whose labels are all lowercase. At the time, it seemed like a neat way to deal with the sea of links that had been crammed into the Standard skin’s left sidebar, but MonoBook ended up being so minimalistic that everything but the current article text and the unnecessarily prominent list of translations got marginalized.

Speaking of minimalism, I tolerate Facebook for two reasons: it provides me with an audience and it has a really clean, efficient interface compared to comparable sites. (And it’s blue. I like blue.) Now the second reason is about to go away, as Facebook looks to reorganize its profile pages. They’re going the way of Wikipedia and adding tabs to separate the profiles into three sections: Wall, About, and Photos. Near as I can tell, these tabs will be utterly easy for newcomers to ignore, and the rest of us will notice them only because we’ve grown accustomed to our friends’s half-hearted attempts at being photogenic and writing witty “About Me”s.

Don’t get me wrong: I love tabs. Tabs make Web browsing bearable these days, and it makes using Internet Explorer 6 nothing less than torturous. But other than the occasional 300-pixel tabbed box, tabs belong in full-fledged desktop applications, like Web browsers, not in websites. It’s far too easy for visitors to ignore tabs in websites, because they’re not really discoverable unless they’re accompanied by ’90s-style rainbow-swirling effects as you hover over them, and by then you’ve been scared away.

Though I usually find his brand of usability unnecessarily strict and bland, usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s guidelines for tabs are worth taking a look at. If the tabs are right above the small content box that is affected by them, they’re quite discoverable. But place them at the top of a webpage, and the visitor’s eyes will immediately drift down to the heart of the page, the content.

Not all of Facebook’s redesign is so problematic: I like the idea of combining the wall with the poorly-named “Mini-Feed”, because you’ll often get wall posts in response to changing your profile picture or status, actions that are currently displayed out of context. But I still don’t know about continuing to call it the “Wall”. It was a Wall when you could devowel every Wall post that your friend had ever received. (The old version was kept around in the “History” section, of course.) It was a neat concession to Facebook’s otherwise orderly site. Now it’s just a corkboard: all your changes have to be fully contained within, basically, a boring little sticky-note.

As for replacing Wikipedia’s tabs, I don’t have a solid answer. I would however suggest adding an “Action box” to – of all places – the bottom of each page. Given a generous amount of space there, the action box would list in large font a few key ways for users to interact with the article: edit the article, discuss it, view its authors and history, and cite it. Any other actions, like renaming the article, can be listed below that in smaller text. As it is right now, a visitor is likely to see the article’s title up top, think that’ the beginning, and read down from there. A list of what to do next makes sense at the end of an article. After all, do you tell your friends to comment on your latest adventure before you even tell them the story?

Yes, I’m making a big deal out of a trifle, but it bugs me when websites are more tedious to use than they have to be.

Entry №1172, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 6:30 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Computing, Wikipedia | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been asked what I think about Essay’s fall from grace. (If you’re too tired to follow that link, basically a really high-ranking Wikipedian who claimed to be a “tenured professor” was exposed as a fake.)

Well, if it ever comes to me having to verify that I “attend Stanford University in California, where I’m majoring in computer science,” I guess I can point them to the CS Department’s directory. :^)

More to the point, though, from the English Wikipedia community’s standpoint, Essjay’s real credentials shouldn’t matter at all, since the community is supposed to judge you on what you’ve done for the site and what sources you can dig up, not what you’ve done (or not) for academia. So the problem was more that it was inappropriate for Essay to boast credentials at all. Whenever he used his fake credentials as a means of winning arguments or swaying opinions, whether in the community or in his short-lived role as press contact, he hurt the project in the long run.

Obviously, faking credentials is immoral and unethical. However, if he had left his “degrees” at his user page and never brought them out in a factual discussion, it might’ve just been viewed as someone’s fancy, and no one would’ve cared. (Except of course the vandals, whom he says he was trying to hide his real identity from.) Similarly, it’s one thing to don a police officer’s uniform at a costume party, but quite another to lure a child into your car using your unauthorized uniform and badge, even though both are acts of impersonation.

Though I’m not entirely certain about some of this story’s details – neither is anyone else, apparently – Essjay should’ve come clean about his identity or at least removed the claims to professorship when he assumed an official position. (In this case, I regard an official position as one that is either paid or which represents Wikipedia in the outside world.) Given, doing so is only damage control, as it doesn’t negate the problem with having claimed these credentials in the first place, but at least Essay could say that he voluntarily revealed himself before someone forced him to. To some extent, he did, but he still held onto the notion that he could protect his identity from vandals by using a fake identity while holding an official position. You can’t have your cake, eat it, and then look like you’re starving. Hm, bad analogy.

I can tell you that, at least at the Vietnamese Wikipedia, someone trying to win an argument based on their credentials is probably going to be ignored. Maybe that’s because its (unofficial) press contact is an undergrad, and merely saying you’re a coterm is enough to one-up him. :^)

Entry №1100, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 12:04 PM | Edit | Permalink
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