Wikipedia – only too clearly a work in progress

This is an interesting Wikipedia page, so much so a work in progress, that it illustrates the shortcomings of Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asadullah_Khalid

I picked it because I know the official concerned, but also because the more obvious Afghan topics — such as Mullah Omar, Hamid Karzai, Kabul — appear fully informed and well-sourced.

It is an entry is about the Afghan minister of tribal affairs, Asadullah Khalid, and remains incomplete. It is almost incoherent to the average reader in parts, and does not give a rounded responsible biography of the man.

It suffers from a lack of contributors, which is possibly an indication that comparatively few Afghans have access to internet and have an interest or knowledge that they can contribute to Wikipedia. But it also probably suffers from the fact that there is little published material on someone who is a less well known Afghan official, and who generally avoids on-the-record interviews.

After ten years of American operations in Afghanistan, there are hundreds, even thousands of computer-literate people who could contribute knowledgeably to this entry, yet they have not.

The introduction is not incorrect but lacks dates and has not been updated with his latest appointment a few months ago. This is important since he is now the Afghan government’s senior official in southern Afghanistan, taking the place of President Karzai’s assassinated brother.  There is a good photo illustrating the page.

The biography is not incorrect but very light on detail, indicating a paucity of knowledgeable contributors of this subject. Afghans who are knowledgeable perhaps do not know how or do not have the means to contribute. Foreign reporters or western officials who may know the details are perhaps the types not inclined to contribute to Wikipedia.

The most interesting part is the second part of the biography which is clearly a contribution from a local Afghan reporter, giving an eye-witness account of Mr Khalid at the scene of bombing by American forces of Afghan civilians.  He quotes the governor criticizing the American action, and saying that there were no Taliban in the village and NATO bombs killed nine people and wounded eleven, among them women and children.

The first reference, which gives the source of this reporting, is a dead link. The reporting appears genuine, if not very clearly written, and almost certainly by an Afghan reporter who was at the scene. The difficulty is it is first hand reporting and without a published source will be considered unreliable. This is a shortcoming of Wikipedia for subjects that are new and news events unfolding, such as in Afghanistan.

There is a note, presumably from Wikipedia, that comments on this passage:

“This article contains weasel words: vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (September 2011)”

It may be interesting to watch what happens.

Further down there is a slight section on torture allegations, citing two articles by the Canadian Broadcasting Company which alleged that Mr Khalid was involved in the torture of detainees and the bombing of a United Nations vehicle.  The reports are slight and there is little context to explain the Canadian role in southern Afghanistan.

Overall the Wikipedia entry on Asadullah Khalid is inadequate, and as it stands it is an unfair biography of the man and his achievements. In fact, beyond a few bare facts, there is very little information on his work of the last ten years in the Karzai government.

But the entry also uncovers one possible problem with Wikipedia. The torture allegations carry more weight because they appeared in the western media than the first hand reporting by an Afghan eyewitness reporter which is deemed unreliable because it is unpublished, or the link to its published version does not work.

Wikipedia relies on published sources for its credibility and so may come under the same accusations that the Western media experiences, that of Western bias in deciding what is notable, what is important and what is accurate.

Finally, I could write an accurate and fair biography of this man from my own knowledge, but I would probably find it hard to find published sources to confirm the details.

end

 

 

Are the Clouds the Limit?

“In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes our Lives,” by Steven Levy is a detailed inside view of the company whose name is now synonymous with information search. The author tracks it from its start-up in a garage in California in 1998 by a pair of Stanford PhD students to the billion dollar search and advertising phenomenon that it is today.

The success of Google, and the personalities of its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, make good, if long, reading. The creation of the search engine, the construction and refining of the algorithms that are the basis of information retrieval, and the calculations that led to the groundbreaking success of Adwords, the small man’s adverts which have made Google astoundingly profitable, provide an important lesson in how the internet works and how it makes money. By trawling documents Google works out what the customer wants, what the reader likes, and what the Internet user clicks on.

And before you know it, you have become a geek yourself reading this book, laughing in recognition of Google phrases. When a computer engineer says: “’Files are so 1990,” … “I don’t think we need files anymore.”

“It was a cloudlike thing to do… a Google thing to do,” the author writes.

Google is not just bringing us information at the click of a mouse, but enabling us to store everything in the ether and pluck it literally from the sky. The founders’ ambitions are vast, literally to read every document in the world and so read our brains.

Except there are limits.

The chapters on China are the most interesting since they open up the life and death dilemmas of the Internet age. To get a license to operate in China Google had to agree to China’s censorship laws and dutifully wrote in algorithms into its search program to block sites and issues deemed sensitive by the Chinese government.

Google, which had always prided itself on its motto of “Do no evil,” was criticized by human rights groups and some American senators for restricting freedom of information. Company executives said they believed they could still do more good providing a partial service to China than not working there at all.

Yet as it built up its business over five years, the level of censorship in China seemed only to increase. Then in 2009 Google was one of 40 high-tech American companies that where hacked by the Chinese government and had confidential code stolen. The hackers even reached into gmail accounts in the US. One of the founders, Sergey Brin, himself a Jewish émigré from the Soviet Union, drew the line.

It led Google to pull out, refusing any longer to accept Chinese government censorship, which meant that its license would not be renewed.

The episode raises the question whether suppressive governments will succeed in controlling the Internet revolution. The Chinese censors seem to have won that round.

Journalists, activists and dissidents all round the world know that the Internet is not secure and the most careful among us avoid use of computers, telephones and other electronic devices so they cannot be tracked. Internet companies should be just as careful in operating in countries that repress the use of information or they become accomplices. Google did the right thing to get out of China but I hope they go on to find a way to reach the Chinese public.

 

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Here comes everybody — Dangerous?

I just read Clay Shirky’s book, “Here Comes Everyone.” It describes the infinite dimensions of the social media revolution underway and tries to outline the enormous repercussions – if still largely incomprehensible — that are following in the political and media and corporate spheres.

In the newspaper world the web has created a new ecosystem, he tells us. Not just the means of communication and distribution have changed but the rules of the game have been completely inverted, with the customers supplying the goods, and making up the rules.

And he warns of the dangers, what he calls “the mass amateurization of publishing” which has advantages such as allowing people to skirt state censorship, as during the coup in Thailand, but also warps our existing systems such as diverting police time when thousands of people took up the case of a single stolen cellphone.

I take issue with his central warning, however. He compares the internet revolution to the invention of the printing press in the 15th Century and warns that the earlier revolution broke more things than it fixed, and caused political chaos for over 100 years.

But that is to overlook the far-reaching gains of the first printing explosion: from the expansion of literacy, the Reformation, and the creation of institutions which all allowed for the scientific and industrial revolutions: that is, the major human advancements of the last several hundred years. We are looking at a similar disruption now, yet it is not to be feared, but embraced.

Shirky’s focus on the medieval scribe and his disappearance is trivial in the grand scheme of things. The scribes went out of business but their importance was their education not their job. The spread of literacy in 15th century Europe, was not a process of mass amateurization, as Shirky writes, but an expansion of mass education and eventually mass professionalization, and something to be celebrated.

He rightly recognizes that the changes we are watching amount to a revolution that will alter not just the media business, but all businesses, and the way they do business. Wikipedia is the most astounding example of the new upside-down way of how things are operating now, an encyclopedia written, edited and monitored by its readers and users, who work piecemeal, part-time, free-of-charge, and as they wish.

Shirky gives repeated examples of how social media are being used by activists in pursuit of political change, and the results, whether defeating totalitarian regimes or ending poor customer service by airlines, benefit society.

But he keeps warning of dangers. There are losers in a revolution, he writes.

In fact Shirky’s examples of the dangers of the social media revolution are few, and do not go much beyond the economic difficulties of publishing and media companies – which are very real no doubt, but not necessarily dangerous for the future of mankind.

He points to the victims of criminality, pedophilia, or unhealthy social groups such as teenage anorexic girls. Yet it is a small price for a revolution, in my view.

There is no chance of stopping the revolution anyway, but a need for monitoring and reaction along the way, as Shirky concludes.