I often blog about Wikipedia, but I have recently started to contribute to Wikinews. One thing that immediately struck me was that Wikinews’ community was much warmer than Wikipedia’s, but naturally it is much smaller.

As communities grow larger, generally more disputes arise. As more disputes arise, ways in which to resolve them must develop.

With thousands of active (and highly vocal) editors, Wikipedia finds itself with a plethora of arguments.

Wikipedia’s dispute resolution process can be described as notoriously bureaucratic. There’s requests for comments, third opinions, a mediation cabal, a mediation committee and an arbitration committee. Complex, don’t you think? The arbitration committee is the highest source of authority on Wikipedia (bar Jimbo Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation Board, who barely ever give an opinion). They are currently dealing with 14 cases I believe, and remember these are only the most severe/important disputes on the entire encyclopedia.

Wikinews, a community with only 50 admins, also has an Arbitration Committee with a similar role. They, however, have only fully dealt with 2 cases since 2006. In fact, the last case they had to decide whether or not they would take on was back in 2008, when they made a proposal to abolish the committee. One editor described it as ‘nothing but bureaucracy… with exactly zero point’, as there’s so few disputes.

So, bigger communities argue more. Smaller communities like Wikinews seem to have no major feuds inside them and all of their users are working towards a common goal, whilst in Wikipedia I feel that different editors want different things out of the project.

Working in a small community is much more rewarding than working in a large community with a lot of in-fighting. Things are also done quicker; I know Wikipedia can take several years to tidy up articles whilst on Wikinews, they’re fixed in hours.

I stumbled across an interesting open letter on Wikipedia today, in which Larry Sanger claimed that Jimbo Wales co-founded Wikipedia with him, rather than being the sole founder. n.b. this letter may no longer appear on the current version of the page, as there are several editors constantly removing it. Larry Sanger has mirrored it on his project’s blog.

The argument is very long and complex, and requires a lot of explanation and opinion, but I am often puzzled as to why Jimbo Wales receives so much credit for Wikipedia.

What is the cause of my puzzlement? Is it Larry Sanger’s disputed role in its foundation? No, it is not. The reason that I am often puzzled is that Jimbo Wales is not really the person we should be thanking for this amazing resource, instead we should be thanking the thousands of editors who voluntarily spend their time maintaining, expanding, correcting and check it.

Jimbo Wales has made a total of 4429 edits to date from when Wikipedia was formed. Editors like me have made more edits (although mine were often very minor) and, to be honest, most active editors will have. Perhaps the idea of a wiki encyclopedia was his, or Larry Sanger’s, but the work has not mainly been put in by them. Still, they are the ones with whom the media are interested.

ReadWriteWeb suggested editors should get paid. I, and most editors, would disagree. We, just like Larry Sanger, want credit. The benevolent dictator is not the only person who warrants it.

Mac users have the benefit of being easily able to back-up their files with Time Machine, but it can even prove a chore for us to connect our Mac to an external hard disk. Time Capsule provides an alternative, as users can back their files up by WiFi, but this is an expensive product.

Online back-up services hold a number of advantages over backing up files locally. For example, data is safer with them, as an external hard disk could easily be destroyed. It also allows portability; laptop users can effectively back up their data anywhere as they don’t have to carry around a spare hard disk!

Several online back-up services exist, but the two largest are Carbonite and Mozy. I recently bought a year’s subscription to Carbonite and in this article I shall review it.

Carbonite is an incremental remote back-up solution, available for Windows and OS X. Basically, after an initial back-up, any new or modified data is uploaded to their servers and backed up. This means only data that must be uploaded is, instead of all data being uploaded again.

Carbonite allow you to back-up any files, except Applications. Free trial users can’t back up their music or movie library, but paid customers can back photos, films, documents and music up. At the moment, I have backed up everything except my music library, because that will take some time to upload.

Users can upload an unlimited amount of data to their servers, where it is encrypted.

It takes quite some time to upload your files. I had to leave my computer on over a few nights to upload 5GiB of data, but I expect this is due to my Internet connection rather than Carbonite. I did experience a few problems though: it doesn’t automatically configure my firewall or ports. The lack of documentation resulted in my having to speak to their customer service, who readily provided me with a solution. They were slightly abrupt but got to the root of the problem.

I will share a few of these solutions for Mac users:

1. Allow ‘/Library/Application Support/Carbonite/CarboniteDaemon.app’ to receive incoming connections (the log is in the same folder)
2. Forward ports 25, 53, 80 and 443 to your machine
3. Ensure no folders which are constantly being written to, like cache folders, are included in the back-up

Users control Carbonite through a prefpane in OS X. This preference pane allows users to see how much data is left to be backed up, allows them to exclude data from the back up and allows them to restore files. I would like there to be a few more options in this pane, such as the ability to see the file currently being uploaded and access the log. The icons of the Mac folders are also outdated.

An interesting features of Carbonite is that users can access their uploaded files anywhere, such as their office or at family’s. This effectively allows Carbonite to act as Remote Access.

Restoring files is as simple as simply selecting the file and the location to which you would like it restored.

So, down to the details. Carbonite is $55 a year, however Subscription.com (who provided the software for me to review) offer a Carbonite offer code for a 20% discount. This is remarkably simple to apply: one simply has to go to Carbonite through their website, it is simply one extra click to save $11! I have gone through this process and it is remarkably simple. Subscription.com also offer codes or similar click-throughs to offer discounts on everything from antivirus software to newspapers to magazines!

On small blogs such as this, comments generally remain related to the blog post. A humorous video by Barely Political strengthened my view, though, that on social networking sites like YouTube, they often end up being completed unrelated to the topic of the video.

I hate YouTube comments. Find me one decent one. They are generally a series of curse words in an incoherent sentence, resembling ‘you suck’. If not that, they’ll just be about the number of views (‘how does a laughing baby get 79 mill views?’). On a blog, people would not go to the hassle of writing comments which have no meaning.

Otherwise, comments erupt into an irrelevant political debate, as they often did in the run-up to the 2008 American presidential elections. If not that, they will become racist. I admit on occasion I respond to ones I strongly disagree with, but only if my political views are antithetical to someone elses and only if the video is about the issue.

It’s too easy to write a meaningless sentence and then to submit it. The result is people post things without thinking their argument through or even proof-reading what they’ve written. If voting held a more important role on the site, completely useless and idiotic comments would never be have to be seen again. There’s another explanation, which is quite cynical but quite likely to be true: I suspect that many people leave pointless YouTube comments in a pathetic attempt to drive people to their profiles.

I am a big fan of Wikipedia and for some reason, I chuckle everytime I read the media report about it. The old media appear to often have a negative bias towards the Internet, seeing it as a threat and a corrupter of morals. However, coverage of Wikipedia is always particularly negative.

Amazingly, The Observer deemed it newsworthy to report that Wikipedia had been edited to show Robert Kilroy-Silk (a controversial British MEP) was a member of the Monster Raving Loony Party. Whilst libel is definitely an issue and is wrong, most instances of blatant vandalism like this are fixed in minutes, if not seconds! That, though, doesn’t make a captivating headline or read!

Reporting on Wikipedia’s inaccuracies, libel and vandalism is old news. By now, the public should have realised that ‘WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY’ (to quote their disclaimer). It’s perfectly easy for any journalist to find lies or vandalism on Wikipedia articles through purely clicking on the ‘history’ link on the article and seeing which edits have been reverted.

I found everything from local newspapers to major national news stories criticising Wikipedia (or information within it).

I hope the media begin to move away from blaming Wikipedia and begin to blame the editors who make the misleading edits. People, children and adults, still find it amusing to vandalise articles and it seems to even be considered acceptable amongst the populace.

The beauty of the whole matter is that despite the fact the media criticise Wikipedia’s reliability, they use it for quick research and occasionally even quote it as some sort of definitive resource!