Judd Bagley’s Trailerpark Rave

World of Wikipediacraft

Sometimes, a cultural phenomenon grows so undeniably overwhelming as to compel one to start paying attention; often for no other reason than to finally understand what the big deal is. It was in this spirit that I finally broke down and read The Da Vinci Code, saw the first Harry Potter movie, and registered to play the multi-player online game World of Warcraft.

Having experienced each of them, I concluded that what these three memes have in common – and indeed what likely accounts for their unusual degree of cultural penetration – are story lines set around challenges which, once overcome, promise to illuminate ancient mythologies and in so doing, bring final resolution to ancient conflicts.

However meaningful, that is where the similarities uniting the three end, as books and movies are discrete works that can only be experienced from the standpoint of an observer, and are unlikely to fill more of a person’s life than is required to consume them once or twice. On the other hand, the storylines of games like World of Warcraft are unfolding continuously and give players the impression that they’re part of, and even helping to direct, the story – and thus history – itself, resulting in an unusual level of fanaticism among the most advanced online role-playing gamers.

I created my first World of Warcraft account (as the brave human warrior WillyWheels) not long after creating my first account on Wikipedia (as the frustrated human editor WordBomb). Almost immediately, I noticed the striking similarities between high-level online gamers and high-level Wikipedia editors that I intend to examine here.

Us vs. Them
The undercurrent theme of World of Warcraft deals with an endless conflict between two factions – the Alliance and the Horde – who just can’t seem to coexist.

In reality, the actual people whose characters comprise the Alliance and the Horde are almost certainly indistinguishable one from another. And yet, to hear the most fanatical players refer to the opposing faction, it’s clear that each regards the other side as filled with a fundamentally distinct type of person, whose very presence in the game somehow detracts from their enjoyment of it . This leads to a belief that, by concerted effort, ‘we’ must overcome the unworthy ‘them’.

The most advanced Wikipedia editors are also overwhelmingly affiliated with specific factions, usually defined by the position each takes with respect to issues such as intelligent design, Scientology, Israel, Lyndon LaRouche, global warming, 9-11, Ayn Rand, various sexual fetishes, and the like. The members of each faction typically view their counterparts as flawed advocates of a similarly flawed point of view that deserves to be suppressed. This, in turn, becomes a major motivating and organizing factor among Wikipedia editors.

Advancement
According to Nick Yee, the foremost researcher of online role-playing gamers, one of the most powerful motivators for high-level players is the thrill of attaining – and wielding – the abilities that attend leadership and advancement within the system. According to Yee, this phenomenon is enhanced among players who feel less empowered in the real world, the result of which sees a disproportionate number of high-level players and group leaders who are either very young or find it difficult to relate to others in the physical world.

In Wikipedia, the phenomena of judgment-impaired teenagers and maladjusted adult administrators is axiomatic.

Addiction
The addictive quality of online role-playing games is very well-established, and has resulted in multiple instances of players dying at their keyboards following dozens of hours spent playing non-stop. According to Yee, 40% of online role-playing gamers consider themselves addicted, a condition marked by excessive playing and intermittent, unsuccessful attempts to quit.

The addictive quality of Wikipedia editing is also widely recognized, though less studied. However, the patterns typical of gaming addition have been observed time and again among high-level Wikipedia editors, with several editors’ unsuccessful attempts to quit editing being the classic hallmark.

Combat
Online role-players of the same faction frequently further differentiate themselves by joining so-called ‘guilds’, which tend to encourage yet more obsessive playing through the addition of a social component to the game. Guilds also serve as a means of organizing players intent on engaging in combat against similarly organized groups from the opposing faction. These combat groups are based around players’ abilities. For example, some characters are created to fight, while others are created to heal the fighters. Among fighters and healers, some might have the ability to wield a powerful weapon or cast a spell, but only once per hour, for example. The group is more likely to include a player with the best abilities ready to use than one whose abilities are recharging.

The process of making substantial changes to the most factionalized articles on Wikipedia is often compared to combat. Among the more important abilities available to any editor is the full revert of an article to a prior state, with each editor limited to three reverts per article, every 24 hours. Simple math makes it obvious that, in its most basic and brutal form, the group of editor-combatants with the most reverts at their disposal will see their point of view outlast the opposition’s.

And just as having high-level players in one’s group always proves particularly useful when engaging in multi-player combat, the same is also true on Wikipedia, where the well-timed intervention of an administrator or other established contributor will usually end an impasse.

This sort of organization was suspected for some time, but was finally confirmed in December 2007 thanks to notoriously factionalist Jayjg, who inadvertently published to an entire public mailing list what was intended to be a private message to three well-known, fellow “guild” members:

Someone has conveniently deleted all the criticism from the lead, in violation of [[WP:LEAD]].
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Messianic_Judaism&diff=175803950&oldid=175525305
I’m planning to go in tonight and do some re-adding and tagging. Will you be able to watch my back?

This happened a few months after it was revealed that an organization known as the Hasbara Fellowships was actively recruiting college students to join “a team of Wikipedians” organized to help counter opposing factions whose “authors have systematically yet subtly rewritten key passages of thousands of Wikipedia entries.”

History
I believe the above appeal by the Hasbara Fellowships captures the essence of what makes Wikipedia, not World of Warcraft, the world’s largest multi-player online role-playing game: the sense shared by hardcore participants in each that their efforts are bringing final resolution to ancient conflicts, while helping to direct the history that will eventually be written of them.

This scenario becomes particularly disturbing when one considers that Wikipedia’s influence makes it all too likely that the history of events referenced daily by untold millions is indeed being written by anonymous editors whom, I can confidently state, we might eagerly trust to fight and defeat a Level 58 Plague Monstrosity, but not to compose an actual encyclopedia.

The inevitability of Web 2.0

In 2004, I had two ideas that seemed capable of greatly changing the publishing industry.

The first sought to take advantage of the versatility and platform-independence of the internet to create software that could permit the remote, collaborative authoring of niche, non-fiction works with subscribers editing using only their web browsers.

The second sought to take advantage of increased efficiency in automated book perfect binding in order to create a print-on-demand publishing house capable of finding the margin in single book printing runs.

In the case of the first idea, I quickly discovered the existence of the open source MediaWiki project, which had already developed my envisioned software, and was giving it away for free. As an aside, this encounter shortly led to my first experience with Wikipedia, where a robust collaboration on non-fiction (as well as a bit of fiction) works was already under way.

It was while researching the second idea that I discovered something so impactful as to make me forget all about the second idea.

It happened while trying to figure out how big the market for non-best sellers – specifically, books that sell fewer than 10,000 copies – really is.

What I found is that we have almost no way of knowing exactly how many copies of non-best sellers are sold, because publishers keep that information to themselves.

Sornette found the “Power Law” manifest in book sales.

My next step was to attempt to extrapolate an approximation of the number through a study of Amazon.com’s daily book sales rankings.

Along the way, I bumped into the work of UCLA professor Didier Sornette and his 2003 study, Endogenous Versus Exogenous Shocks in Complex Networks, which demonstrated that, in response to advertising (an exogenous shock) or word of mouth (an endogenous shock), a book’s Amazon.com sales ranking will spike and then recede in a manner predicted by the “power law” equation of y=1/x, where y=sales per day, and x=time.

Even more significant is the fact that such power law relationships are seen over and over again in nature, including seismology, which is why Sornette, himself a seismologist and author of books listed on Amazon.com, first noticed the familiar pattern.

As the study states,

“For something that may seem as random and unpredictable as book sales, we find that a simple generic model can give a very good prediction as to how customers will behave.”

The realization that book sales are subject to a specific law of nature was a revelation, and got me thinking about what else might be.

Pre-Web 2.0 economies artificially truncated the shape of consumer demand.

What I found is that everything relating to consumer choice manifests itself through power laws. But, in the case of media, limits on choice imposed by the economic barriers of production, distribution and inventory have long saddled mankind with a rudely truncated version of the curve.

What Sornette could not have known was that within days of publishing his paper, the maturation of the web and increased availability of bandwidth would combine with humanity’s demand for niche media options in seismic ways: resulting in the birth of Web 2.0.

At the same time I was figuring this stuff out, so was Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson, who would go on to publish his book describing this phenomenon, appropriately called The Long Tail, about 18 months later.

Web 2.0 technologies open media up on the far end of the tail.

The speed with which Web 2.0 came into full-blown existence is in large part the reason this latest consumer-focused media revolution has come into being free of the expected restraining forces – normally offered by order-injecting referee institutions. Hence, not only must Web 2.0 content be largely user-generated, so too the means of protecting truth and reputations.

Hence, just as certainly as tomorrow the sun will rise in the east, what we know about the power law suggests consumers will inevitably continue to leave mainstream sources of media for more social, long tail alternatives. Meanwhile, what we know about human nature suggests some small portion of long-tail content creators will abuse their media.

So far the only thing that appears less than inevitable is the emergence of an institutionalized means of holding abusers to account.

Espionage 2.0

North Korea is likely the most technologically backward, economically isolated and generally secretive nation on earth – which would make North Korea altogether unremarkable but for the fact that the country’s Stalinist regime has nonetheless managed to develop the capacity to build and deliver nuclear weapons.

The enigmatic nature of North Korea has inspired a vibrant community of amateur researchers, intent on collaboratively building a more complete picture of that country’s economy through meticulous cross-referencing of updates to Google Earth satellite imagery with rare government-issued video clips and rarer-still in-country eyewitness accounts.

Much of this effort, dubbed North Korea Uncovered (NKU), is organized around economist and PhD candidate Curtis Melvin, who blogs about the project at North Korean Economy Watch.

Consistent with any good open-source project, the product of the community’s labors are made liberally available for others to review and augment, in the form of a wonderfully-limber .KML file.  This is the extension that Google Earth uses to document, organize and overlay changes observed in user-contributed geographic points of interest suggestive of the real-time situation in North Korea. These include critical elements of infrastructure, such as roads, power lines, mines, and dams; in addition to other indicators of the state of affairs in North Korea, such as prison camps (including, in one case, a building chillingly labeled ‘School for prisoner children under age 12’), “elite” housing and public execution sites.

The genesis of NKU was much less audacious, though no less significant. Melvin and others sought to document one of North Korea’s better-kept secrets: the emergence and quasi-official endorsement of open marketplaces, where North Koreans trade basic goods directly with one another. Apparently, these marketplaces are particularly easy to identify on Google Earth.

What’s most striking about NKU is how similar its finished product would seem to be to what full-time CIA analysts are likely attempting to churn out. But unlike the CIA, many members of the NKU community have been on the ground inside North Korea. Given that fact, it’s a sure bet that the intelligence community pays very close attention to what NKU produces.

In other words, even the business of espionage appears to be subject to the increased efficiencies and potential pitfalls of Web 2.0.

You can download the current iteration of North Korea Uncovered here (and, in case you don’t have it, you can download Google Earth here). Warning: don’t start looking at this stuff unless you have an hour or two to dedicate to the process. It’s deeply compelling.

False sense of security

Last year, while searching through the posting history of a specific Yahoo Finance message board user, I discovered something rather curious: a very small number of this user’s thousands of message summaries were italicized or underlined, in contrast with all the rest, which showed no special formatting.

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

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

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

This is odd for two reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making a moot point

(The following originally appeared at Akahele.org, another blog where I regularly contribute.)

The most commonly cited birth date of Web 2.0 is October 2004, which saw the opening of the first Web 2.0 Conference organized by Tim O’Reilly, who is also credited with coining the oft-used term.

But because the Web 2.0 Conference was organized as a response to something else, I feel it’s more accurate to regard October of 2004 as the date of Web 2.0’s christening, with the actual date of birth having occurred some months earlier.

One solid candidate for the blessed event: May 2004, with the publication of The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki — a book less about any particular new internet technology than the ability of the internet to aggregate the contributions of diverse members of groups which, when combined, might yield more value than the contributions of any single member. Surowiecki’s ideal was enormously influential on the ethos of the Silicon Valley digerati, and clearly shaped much of the thinking that ultimately created the social web.

But look beneath the surface of The Wisdom of Crowds and you’ll find an important shortcoming, which, as one might expect, has been faithfully reproduced within the philosophy of the movement it has so greatly informed.

Specifically, in his book, Surowiecki approaches crowds with the assumption that each member, however diverse, has one thing in common: a desire to “get it right” with respect to finding solutions to whatever challenges they jointly face.

But what happens when some members of the crowd want to get it wrong? Even worse, what happens when these happen to be hackers with too much time on their hands? Can the influence of a few outliers alter the apparent will of the masses?

The answer is yes, as demonstrated by the example of Time Magazine and the recently-closed crowd-sourced portion of its ranking of the 100 most influential people of 2009 (the Time 100).

By the time the more than 100 million votes were counted, President Obama was ranked 37th and former-President George W. Bush 75th, while the relatively unknown owner of web imageboard 4chan.com, identified only by the pseudonym “moot”, won the voting by an unprecedented landslide.

Not only that, but spots 2 through 21 were populated by a group of names which, while more recognizable than “moot”, hardly represent the world’s most influential.

Instead of crowd-sourced, you might say the Time 100 got crowd-scorched, as a relatively small number of loyal 4chan.com users developed and applied a “precision hack” to the voting process calculated not only to land moot firmly atop the list, but to also assign the following 20 spots to nominees whose first initials combined to spell “marblecake also the game,” a dual reference to a pair of 4chan.com’s many in-jokes.

For its part, Time.com made a few attempts at minimizing the vote hijacking, but the hackers adapted, won, and as a result, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr now likely think they’re much more influential here than our own recently-elected president (but not more popular than Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud).

Admittedly, the outcome of the 2009 Time 100 vote hack is of little consequence in the end. But it does serve to highlight what I regard as the Achilles heel of the internet in general and the social web in particular: anonymity, and the tendency of the anonymous to behave anti-socially, rendering the crowd much less “wise” in the process.

Wikipedia is often held up as the pinnacle of crowd-generated wisdom, and frequently compared to vibrant open source software movements. In theory, that comparison is valid, but in practice, it frequently is not.

In order for one’s contribution to an open source software community to be integrated into the larger project, it must be objectively reviewed, tested, and shown to represent an improvement. Because open source coders almost always submit under their real names, they are further motivated to do good work based on the impact it will have on their real-world reputations.

On the other hand, the key to an enduring acceptance of one’s contributions to Wikipedia – where many editors prize anonymity above almost all else – is often as simple as exhibiting a genuine indifference to the opinions and feelings of other editors. This is the exact opposite of what leads to success in the identity-mediated real world, and antithetical the ideal of wise crowds.

Simply put, in order for the social web to reach its full potential, a solution to the anonymity problem must be found. Until then, the wisdom of crowds is always at risk of being usurped by a czardom of clods.

25 random things about Judd Bagley

I started this blog in 2005 and kept at it for around a year, until circumstances (primarily an acute lack of time coupled with a webhost meltdown) conspired to put Trailerpark Rave on hold until…today.

Prior to that unceremonious hiatus, one of my final posts was a list of random facts about me. A couple of months ago, in response to the then-popular “25 random things about me” Facebook meme, I published my own such list, building largely from a few updated elements taken from that blog post.

And so, hoping to bring it all full-circle, today I re-launch Trailerpark Rave with this new-and-improved list of me-centric randomness:

1. I own six laptop computers, but probably only need three of them.
2. I have the great American novel in progress, with chapters saved across the various hard drives of my six laptop computers.
3. I am a passive advocate of conversion to the metric system.
4. When remodeling my basement a few years ago, I special-ordered my tape measure from Canada (because it was in metric units).
5. I spent a year studying Latin on my own. At the time it just seemed like the right thing to do, but looking back, I think it was really because I was feeling very insecure about my public education.
6. I feel apostrophes should be taken seriously but wonder at times if I’m the only one.
7. I might have written the longest pun in the English language. But I have no idea where to go for verification. I seriously think I more than doubled the theoretical pun barrier.
8. I suspect you think that last one is not true, but it is.
9. There is literally no human on this earth that I trust more than my wife, Kristen.
10. It’s been 17 years since I returned from my two year church mission in Chile, but I still frequently dream in Spanish, and when I do, I’m often delighted to hear Kristen speaking perfect Spanish, as well.
11. In addition to Chile, I’ve lived for extended periods of time in Utah, Florida, and Alaska. I’ve never set foot in either of the Dakotas, but wouldn’t object to it.
12. People tell me I’m the funniest person they know. I tell them I’m the funniest person I know as well, and then usually lie and say they’re the second funniest.
13. I’m 37 years old, but I still refer to those I knew in high school as “kids.”
14. Except for my lungs, I would give one of any organ that I have two of in order to write like JD Salinger.
15. A few years ago, I heard about plans to shoot a film based on Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye. I immediately decided to do whatever necessary to at least audition for the role of Holden Caulfield, because I really understand and relate to him. Then I remembered: I was 34.
16. All three of my children are left-handed.
17. Things I was taught while young I tend to do with my right hand, but things I learned — on my own — later in life I often do with my left. As it turns out, in roller-hockey I’m a mean weak-side shooter, and I’m convinced I’d be a better golfer had I learned on left-handed clubs.
18. When I was single, the list of things I’d gladly die for was fairly long. Now, that list is quite short, while the list of hardships I’d gladly endure for my family keeps getting longer.
19. Ironically, the darkest period of my professional career was working as a wacky side-kick on a FM radio morning show. My primary responsibility was to laugh at everything the host said. That was the last time I dreaded going to work some days.
20. A couple of years ago, I realized I had entirely lost my sense of smell. I keep waiting for one of my other four senses to compensate by becoming super keen, but so far, nothing.
21. When I find a new song I love, I’ll often play it 300 times in a row before feeling I can move on, and when I do, I may never listen to it again.
22. Just like some people think food tastes better served on fine china, I think music sounds better played live by a talented and hungry indie band nobody has ever heard of.
23. Everybody talks about the musical genius of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and John Coltrane, but I just don’t get it.
24. A few years ago I discovered that my destiny was not to accomplish something important, but to help someone else accomplish something really important. That was a little tough to accept at first, but now I’m more than fine with it, especially since I now think I know what that thing is.
25. In high school, I was once mistaken for somebody on America’s Most Wanted.  I talked to the FBI and everything. It seriously wasn’t me. (It was this guy):