Outside Innovation

Public Outcry and Wikipedia Stopped Legislation!

Wikipedia's Blackout

I agree with San Francisco Chronicle’s James Temple that the SOPA/PIPA Blackout on January 18 marked the Web’s political coming of age. The fact that Wikipedia consulted with its community of supporters and blacked out its site in protest of the proposed Internet censorship legislation was what turned the tide. As soon as it became apparent to senators and congresspeople that Wikipedia was going to shut down in protest and that other major web sites would join in the protest, they realized that the tide of public opinion was against the entertainment-industry-sponsored legislation. Both proposed bills were seriously flawed, since they originally planned to block the URLs of web sites that were accused of copyright infringements without due recourse. The bills’ sponsors began to address critics’ concerns by changing the implementation of the anti-piracy provisions, but the Wikipedia community and other Internet champions felt that they needed to take a very public stand. It worked! The current legislation is now dead.

Wikipedia Evolves Its Policies

Wikipedia has a new "flagged revisions" editing policy for certain submissions. I think it makes sense. Under the new policy, your edits to Wikipedia will not be published until they have been approved. The approval is not by a subject matter expert, per se, but by an "experienced volunteer." That's a person who has been editing on Wikipedia for some time and who has not been blocked. The presumption is that these experienced volunteers understand the Wikipedia ethos best. There is no guarantee about how long the approval may take.

What I like about this approach is that it WILL deter the needless vandalism that is so annoying and will therefore improve the quality of Wikipedia articles. Waiting to have one's edits approved is no different than waiting to have a comment on a blog post approved. It's something most of us have gotten used to.

This approval process is designed to reduce the amount of vandalism and misinformation that has been appearing, particularly on the articles about famous people (e.g., Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Britney Spears, etc.). In fact, according to the article, Wikipedia Changes Editing Policy in PC World, this edit approval policy will now apply to all articles about living people.

Tagging the Physical World

When I was a young French teacher, I used to put big signs on all the objects in our classroom (which was actually an old farmhouse) with their French names—la table, le cahier, la chaise, le mur, la peinture, le chat (the cat didn’t like it very much!). I was reminded of this practice when I stumbled upon a similar real-world tagging phenomenon that is cropping up in odd places around the world. It’s a form of mobile tagging, using Semapedia and QR Codes. Semapedia is a research site that lets people create two-dimensional bar codes for physical objects, paste a label with the code on the objects, and link those objects to a Wikipedia article. QR codes (which stands for Quick Response) are the specific 2D bar codes that people seem to have gravitated towards. A QR Code is a matrix code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. While the patent is held by Denso-Wave, the company encourages broad usage. QR codes were originally used in Japan for tracking automobile parts. But they soon began to be used by advertisers who placed them on posters and products in order to provide a quick link to a specific promotion via customers’ mobile phones.

Citizen-Tagging for Fun and Edification

Now, all over the world, people are pasting labels with 2-dimensional bar codes on them onto buildings and objects of all kinds. The purpose of these tags is to provide a link to a relevant Wikipedia article. It’s a citizen-led, guerrilla approach to linking objects in the physical world to useful context and information in the virtual world.

These tags are turning up on stores, museums, paintings, ATM machines, bridges, street corners, parks, records, books, and other types of merchandise. (I found a tag on a carton of San Pelligrino bottled water and another tag on a shelf with Perrier.) If you have a mobile phone with the right software installed, you can point your phone’s camera at the bar code, and the code will be converted into a mobile-URL link to the Wikipedia article about that object. If you take a photograph of the object and upload it to Flickr and add your geographic coordinates, it will also appear on a map which is maintained at Semapedia.org.