A quick handful of (tastefully monochrome) street photography from Edinburgh:
Rude though I am about the Fringe sometimes (okay, most of the time), it can’t be denied it’s good material for photography.
Back in June, I wrote about the then-almost-implemented pending changes system on Wikipedia. What’s it like two months on?
On the whole, I’m more than happy with its effects, and the feared imminent catastrophes haven’t materialised yet. Lag time to approve edits is pretty low; I haven’t dug up the turnaround times, but the page listing unchecked edits regularly changes completely in the few minutes between my first loading it and my remembering the tab is there and refreshing it. Indeed, it’s not uncommon to see the page empty entirely, and I’ve only rarely seen it listing more than half-a-dozen pages (out of a pool of ~2000). The lack of “pending pending changes” at any given moment also meant that spotting them via the watchlist, or casual browsing, was unlikely; to be aware of them, you usually needed to go to the central page. “Review conflicts” are quite common – perhaps a result of the noticeable slowness of the system on larger pages – but, then, so are rollback conflicts. This could definitely improve from speeding the page loading times up, I suspect; less time with the page pending is less time to have someone else come in.
The biggest problem I’ve found so far is, if anything, one of overenthusiasm. Whereas before we’d have a degree of “masterly inactivity” practiced on a lot of edits – someone would look at it, decide they don’t know enough to determine if it’s good or bad, and leave it be – the new system seems to have the effect of making people feel they ought to say one way or the other. Net result: more suboptimal approvals or rejections (ie, reverts), by people unfamiliar with what they’re dealing with, than we had before.
Why? Well, we have the central page, blinking at us, telling us there were four pages needing checked – four, just four! – and that there was a timer somewhere to note how long they took, and so on and so forth. There’s an impulse there, even if an unconscious one, to just do something so as to drive down the backlog.
Interestingly, this may be a problem that disappears as the system settles down, and becomes familiar and less excitingly novel. While there’s a small backlog – especially for a flagship new system – people will always feel the urge to just wipe the board clean, to keep it resolved, to have the satisfaction of having sorted it out. Once that backlog grows to a constant buffer of maybe twenty or fifty edits, the impulse to knock them all off while you make a cup of tea is sharply reduced, and so the likelihood of them being done for the sake of it is lowered; it becomes more likely that the edits will be picked up by someone who is intentionally watching the page, which is a good first approximation to “someone who knows what’s good”.
Assuming we have a fixed number of articles – protecting pages for the sake of protecting them is a bit odd – then the number of edits coming in will be constant; growing the buffer implies growing turnaround times, which is not the best thing. On the other hand, it’s probably inevitable – as the novelty wears off, and we stop thinking of it as an Important New Thing That Must Be Perfect, people are going to patrol the central page a bit less. It could well be that this inevitable decrease in responsiveness will actually have the unexpected benefit of improving the quality of reviewing.
From Alan Harding’s A Social History of English Law, 1966:
The chancellors of those days were busy administrators who would stand no academic nonsense: Lord Chancellor Ellesmere in the reign of James I ordered that the Warden of the Fleet should lay hold on an equity pleader who had drawn a replication of 120 pages where 16 would have done, “and shall bring him unto Westminister Hall … and there and then shall cut a hole in the middle of the same engrossed replication … and put the said Richard’s head through the same hole … and shall show him at the bar of every of the three courts within the Hall.”
Here’s a nice little piece of software: dynamic travel-time maps for the Tube, redrawn to show the system, adjusted for time, splayed out around your preferred location.
So, for example, we can see that Brixton, Ealing and Hampstead are all equidistant (20min) from Paddington. Clicking around a little also tells us the longest single journey, not counting interchange times – Upminster to Chesham, 108 minutes – and the temporal centre of the network, which is approximately in the Oxford Circus-Baker Street area, 55 minutes from the edges.
Earlier this year, I finally bit the bullet and bought a smartphone. (Thanks to a bit of fiddling, and an up-front purchase, it is costing me less over a two-year period than my old phone contract was. No, I don’t understand that either.)
It is marginally more powerful, computationally speaking, than my old laptop was. Given it seems to be able to tell me where I am as well as what time it is and what meeting I forgot to go to this morning, it may indeed be smarter than I am as well.*
* I actually went back to work a day early this year because I misread the calendar. I did wonder why it seemed so quiet. Er.
Oh, well. I for one welcome our new robot overlords, etc. It has so far usurped the roles of my phone, mp3 player (at which it is showing surprising competence), portable radio, compact camera and calendar; a little hackery with gmail and it absorbed my address book. It’s also surprisingly useful for shopping lists. A couple of quick notes:
The feature which did faintly surprise me – but worked well – was using it as an ebook reader; whilst iterating around Europe I managed to read a novel on it, using WordPlayer, without any particular discomfort or inconvenience. The screen is small for this, but not ludicrously so. For entering text rather than reading it, the internal keyboard (and predictive text) is excellent under normal conditions – I was expecting to hate it – but sometimes a bit tricky to use when in a moving vehicle, because it’s very easy to slip to adjacent keys.
Google Maps is a useful navigational tool, but relies on an internet connection – abroad, this is an expensive habit to have – and so an offline map program is an excellent thing to have. In this case, MapDroyd, which is a simple map display – no navigation – but runs off preloaded caches of OpenStreetMap data, so there’s no connectivity issues and no delays in displaying different areas. The only problem here is the size of that lump of data – as the phone has a decent onboard memory, it doesn’t limit things too much, but actually getting it on there can be tricky. (Thank goodness for wifi.)
Now, the downsides. Three months in, and a couple of problems are becoming apparent:
…in approximately ascending order of irritation.
The SD card – supplied with the phone, in an internal mount – regularly (every few days, at least once a week) fails to be recognised by the phone. (Usually, this manifests as the MP3 player getting confused and skipping over all its tracks claiming it can’t find them.) I have not yet figured out the cause of this, but so far it’s always been solved by a reboot; it may perhaps have something to do with prolonged uptime? I originally pegged it as a side-effect of having connected the phone to the PC (which mounts the card as a drive), but this doesn’t seem to be the case; it can turn up without it.
So far, it’s not a problem at all – it just means I need to remember to reboot the phone every couple of days to avoid it. We shall see if it turns into something worse. A cursory search suggests it’s a widespread problem, but with no obvious origins – “dodgy SD cards” is a popular theory, but it doesn’t really make sense when it’s reported as occurring with other cards as well.
The battery life is low – charging in the evening, leaving overnight, then moderate usage tends to be running quite dry after 24 hours. I was used to going three days before – but then, the old phone did much less to use up power.
The real problem, though, is that since at least early June (I got the phone at the end of April) it’s been rejecting calls for no apparent reason; the phone remains connected to the network, and will happily receive text messages – usually the ones saying “I tried to call you but your phone was off, will try tomorrow”. This is, to say the least, exceptionally annoying – I’ve usually no record they’ve tried to call, and no obvious reason the call couldn’t be connected. Earlier in the month it briefly developed a different issue with text messages; any outbound text would stall unsent, continually reporting failed transmission; some actually got through, whilst some didn’t.
(The two combined, at one point, just after I arrived in Copenhagen. We had the marvellously convoluted situation where Iona could text me to say she was stuck in Munich airport, and I could call her back, but she couldn’t call me and I couldn’t text her…)
I suspect this might be a network problem rather than phone-specific; I’m tempted to switch the sim card out into the old phone and work with that for a few days to see what happens. Either way, it’s not good; I’ll be talking to them about it, I think.
On the whole, though – connection issues aside – I’m quite pleased with it. For daily internet use (reading mail, etc) it’s excellent; less functional than a laptop, but far more useful than carrying a netbook around and hoping for a wireless connection.
This article in the Guardian, on Obama’s firing of McChrystal in Afghanistan, mentions past firings of military officials by US presidents, including MacArthur in 1951. That case was a pretty close match to this one – a field commander had publicly criticised the political direction of an ongoing war. and after a bit of back-and-forth he eventually got sacked.
It seems a good moment to drag out one of my favourite comments by Truman, his retrospective summary of that situation:
I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.
(Incidentally, the comment at the bottom of the page is interesting – one of Truman’s last acts as President was to destroy embarrassing material in Eisenhower’s personnel file. Would you get that now, you wonder?)
So, in under an hour, flagged revisions will go live on the English Wikipedia. Wait – flagged protection. No, that’s it, pending changes. It seems to change its name once a week at the moment – my small victory was getting rid of the word “revisions” in its current form. (We take our lasting moments when we can)
What is it? Surprisingly little, all told, for all the ink that has been spilled. I feel the need to write something simply because of all the misinformation I’ve seen floating around over the last week or so…
It’s a tool which will see a small number of pages – at the moment, hard-limited to a cap of 2,000, and in practice not more than a few dozen for the first few days – placed under a new form of editing protection. They’ll be either pages which were already protected or already liable for protection under the general rules for that – high levels of vandalism, repeated fights over content, or just ludicrously tempting targets.
(A quick recap – pages subject to protection are either “full protected” – only users with administrator privileges, about 1,500 people, can edit them – or “semi protected” – most logged-in users can edit them, but new users or passing contributors can’t.)
The new system works by allowing anyone to edit, but adding a simple form of pre-screening – at any given moment, the version of the article displayed to readers will not always be the same as the most recent version of the article. Any qualified user will be able to look at the edits and flag the most recent as “acceptable” – “not terrible” might be a more pragmatic standard, I suppose – making it the version displayed by default, until a few more edits down the line a new one is approved, etc. The aim is that there will be a few thousand of such qualified “reviewers”, certainly enough to scale to the likely task.
It’s important to remember that all edits are sequential and not parallel; it’s not a matter of allowing several versions of an article to develop and then picking one, but rather an edit not approved will still be incorporated into subsequent edits, unless it’s independently edited back out.
The net result will primarily be to
a) comes from allowing anyone to edit, rather than turning them away by locking the page; b) comes from adding the post-edit sanity-check screening.
The counterarguments are that it will:
I honestly don’t think any of these are likely to be the case unless the implementation is fouled up. Let’s look at the simplest one first: c). The system will allow people to contribute – in a limited way – where previously they could not contribute at all. It’s possible that the existence of limited or conditional contributions will prove to be something of a deterrent over “normal” contributions, but will it really be a deterrent over a complete pre-emptive rejection? We have some evidence from the rollout of a much broader version of this on the German wikipedia that implementing it did decrease the proportion of edits by IPs – people other than logged-in users – but it’s clearly part of an overall long-term trend:
b) implies that by having these edits, people will have to spend time looking at them and deciding whether to validate or reject. But we have that already – every edit that is made, in theory, gets glanced over by someone who decides whether or not to remove it. The problem is that whilst removal is obvious, there is no way to say “I have looked at this edit and choose to validate it”; every valid-but-potentially-dubious edit will thus be looked at by a number of people who – effectively – have no way of signalling to each other that the work’s been done. Allowing it to be marked as “acceptable” thus should tend to reduce the overall effort – the first person needs to make slightly more effort than they would otherwise have done, but ten others are saved assessing it.
a) is the most complicated. To a degree, this is a pretty visceral thing; I’ve debated this two or three times over the past few days and never seen anyone alter their position (either way) on it. But fundamentally, it’s a variant on c) – more people get to edit, there is more chance of more voices being heard. Yes, people can be “screened” by not having their edits prominently shown to passing readers – but if their edits were viewed as undesirable for whatever reason, under the old system they would have been reverted pretty quickly anyway. A page that is put under protection should not be there in order to ensure that one perspective is presented and another legitimate perspective is locked out; if that is the case, the fundamental problem lies with the decision to protect, not the mechanism used to protect. I’m firmly of the opinion that “conventional” protection is a mechanism with fundamentally more potential for censorship and suppression than this approach.
On the whole, I’m pretty positive about it. It’s not a panacea; it won’t solve everything, and it probably won’t have an overwhelmingly drastic effect on the areas it’s dealing with. But it will make some things better, it probably won’t have noticeable knock-on effects, and… well, we never pretended the old way was perfect. Why be afraid to experiment?
(For those of you wanting to read more: the help page; the official announcement; and a 2009 article on the long history of the proposal.)
I have been ludicrously busy over the past month or so. In lieu of anything original, have a scattering of links:
Actual content hopefully to follow sometime this week. Aha. Yeah, I’ve been an optomist for years.
From the Telegraph:
Britain’s biggest building society issued a veiled warning to the coalition government that its plans to raise capital gains tax (CGT) may put the partial recovery in house prices at risk.
Buy to let and other landlords now own more than one in seven British homes or 15 per cent of the property in the private sector, according to Nationwide. Government plans to double the CGT landlords pay from its current fixed rate of 18 per cent to “closer” to 40 per cent, could cause many to sell and force prices down.
You know, in a more sensible world we’d be reading that as a two-for-one bonus, not as a terrible death-knell side effect. Buy-to-let speculative investment is distorting the housing market; anything which calms it down is all to the good.
We don’t expect government policies to make the price of used cars depreciate less drastically. We don’t expect government intervention to stabilise the antiques market, or tax policies carefully tailored to make unit trusts continue to burgeon. We are happy to see industrial or commercial property firms humbled by the shifting economic vagaries of the market. But put your money in residential property, and it seems the safety of your investment is the concern of every economist in the country.
There’s something a bit weird there.
A recent post in Charlie Stross’s series on misconceptions about publishing (more on which anon, hopefully), has an interesting side-note:
Interestingly, the researchers went on to calculate a Gini coefficient for authors’ incomes … The Gini coefficient among writers in the UK in 2004-05 was a whopping great 0.74.
I felt you could make a dramatic comparison from that, so I went to check the figures. The surprising thing is, though, Gini coefficients that high just don’t usually exist on a national level – there’s only one or two countries where we have the data to reasonably conclude it’s as high as 0.7. (Namibia, if you’re wondering). The reason for this is that rural hinterlands tend to reduce the effect of the inequalities of the cities (which are, obviously, where you find both the urban shantytowns and the wealthy metropolitan elite).
Are there, then, specific cities where it’s this bad? Yes. Again, just. The worst cities in the world, by inequality, are the major metropolises of South Africa; even there, it peaks at about 0.75. So, visualise it that way for a second: the population of people in the UK who are paid to write, full-time or part-time, has a level of economic inequality on a par with that of the population of Johannesburg.
It’s quite a staggering image, really. You realise it’s a very sharp differential, but you don’t realise it’s that steep!
