Andrew Lih on "The Wikipedia Revolution"

Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution, appeared on C-Span2 Book TV on March 25, 2009. The broadcast was of a recent public conversation at Harvard University.

Lih created the new media program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he served as adjunct professor and director of technology for their Center for New Media.

This book took two years of research in the social and technical dynamics of collaborative communities. It has made Lih the most widely recognized expert on the Wikipedia project, one of the largest collaborative reference works on the Internet.

Lih is an administrator on the Wikipedia English edition, and has served as proceedings editor for the annual Wikimania conferences. He hosts the Wikipedia Weekly roundtable audio podcast, discussing issues related to Wikipedia, free culture, peer production and crowdsourcing.

I've added his blog to my Ideas and Inspiration list at the left, and will be tuning in regularly to listen and learn as journalism rides the wave of the new media transformation. (I've also found another book I want to give to my son Jack as a high school graduation gift.)

This fascinating discussion, at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with host David Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous) explored these and other topics:

• Governance of the creative commons: the difference between inclusionists and deletionists.
• Distinctions between English-language and the more tightly controlled German-language
versions of Wikipedia.
• The different natures of the growth community that created Wikipedia, and the maintenance
community it now requires (having at this point over 2 million entries).
• Issues of editorial oversight, technical expertise, and administrative control.
• The eventual merging of information from Wikipedias from various countries.
• Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authenticity (as in the notorious case of "SJ", a contributor
exposed as someone who had created a fraudulent identity).

Lih used a phrase I like: "Sunshine is the best disinfectant." It's a reworking of an earlier theme on this blog: "Transparency is not for the squeamish." Okay, so I now have a reliable new media guide: very cool. Check out Lih on the topic of Kindle DX and newspapers.

Twitter at the Top: The Chatty Classes

Given my current disinclination to Twitter, I found myself intrigued by this article by Matt Bai in last week's Sunday magazine of The New York Times: "The Chatty Classes: Why Twitter is the Last Thing D.C. Needs." This paragraph, especially, stood out:

Made it to DC, next stop baggage claim,” Craig Fugate, Obama’s choice to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency, tweeted upon arriving in Washington last month. A half-hour later, he reported, “No bag — great start in DC, the future of things to come?” Fugate’s luggage finally arrived the next morning, about an hour before he dashed off this mini-haiku: “Alice in Wonderland, getting morning star bucks.” Which kind of makes you wonder: if the head of FEMA feels that disoriented buying a latte near the White House, what’s going to happen during a tornado?

Indeed. Bai says: "However current it may be technologically, Twitter seems somehow out of step in its political sensibility — that is, in the promise of false intimacy between politicians and voters." He suggests that "in this new age of reckoning for all that we’ve failed to accomplish, voters seem to have tired of what pollsters call the 'understands people like me' question. Now, it seems, they want politicians to stop sharing and just govern like adults."

And whatever else Americans may be craving in our politics these days, brevity and immediacy aren’t among them. Politics today is already too simplistic and binary, its news cycle more comically truncated and ephemeral than at any time in our history; in the age of e-mail, blogs and smartphones, we seem to react to everything with a kind of frantic, predictable impulse (Tax all the bonuses! Kill all the pirates!) rather than with a longer-term consideration of benefits and consequences. The last thing Washington needs right now is politicians who seek to convey the moment in even shorter slogans and commentators who feel the need to offer their wisdom with even more frequency and glib abandon than they already do on blogs and cable TV.

I'm hoping that it is in fact true that Americans do want more substance from their leaders. Twitter at the top may communicate a fleeting impression of intimacy – a sense of "transparency" in government – that serves as a corrective to magical thinking about omnipotent politicians. It sends out short telegrams about individual limitations, the inability of anyone to be in control of even the unintended consequences of their own most commonplace observations. (I bet Fugate had a morning choke over his coffee when he found his tweets recontextualized, with a critical assessment, in the Sunday mag.)

Lasting change of our own devising? It's a more complex thing, one that may not benefit much from the background noise – the static – of periodic false intimacy with policy makers.

That's a photo of Matt above: notice the absence (in this image, anyway) of a handheld device.

Poet Sheryl Noethe

Poet Sheryl Noethe, winner of the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award, has a new book, As Is, coming from Lost Horse Press. (The book is so recent it's not yet listed on the publisher's website: follow the link above to inquire.)

Here is a bio of this remarkable, under-read, ever-emerging and enduring writer:

Sheryl Noethe is both Artistic Director and a writer-in-residence for the Missoula Writing Collaborative. She is co-author of the teaching text Poetry Everywhere, reviewed in Kliatt and English Journal as an informative and tremendously valuable resource for teaching poetry, now in its third printing. A recipient of a Montana Arts Council Fellowship, she also has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the CutBank Hugo Prize in Poetry, the Emerging Voices Award from New Rivers Press, a McKnight Prize for Literature, and an American Academy of Poetry Award, as well as an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of a 2004 Cultural Achievement Award from the Missoula Cultural Council for her work in Missoula schools. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, and she has published two collections of poetry, The Descent of Heaven Over the Lake (New Rivers Press, 1984) and Ghost Openings (Grace Court Press, 2000), which won a Northwest Publisher's Best Book Award. Her latest collection, As Is, will be published by Lost Horse Press in 2009. She teaches at Hellgate Middle School for the Missoula Writing Collaborative.

I knew Sheryl years ago, when she and I gave our first poetry reading (with writer Mary Karr) at the Weyerhauser Chapel at the campus of Macalester College. I remember creating a broadside with a drawing I made of 3 women pouring water from a jug out a window. While I eventually stopped trying to make my way through the world as a poet, Sheryl continued on that arduous path: transparency – and a life in poetry – is not for the squeamish.

Lyle Daggett has written a thoughtful, very insightful tribute to Sheryl, talking about the impact of her work on his own, at his blog A Burning Patience. I am not surprised that Sheryl continues to inspire children and others to write poetry: she has a spectacular gift for that. She has co-authored a book with Jack Collum called Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry in School and Community. She says "Writing is a grip on existence, an empowerment, and a way to listen to the inner truth of the self. " It's a way to pour water out of a jar, out of a window, into the road, to see where those rivulets go..

Lyle's piece, "The weight of dreams", takes you to a few of Sheryl's fluid, incandescent poems. (They mention water, too, it turns out.)

Transparency is Not for the Squeamish

Transparency, implying openness, communication, and full disclosure, is the current metaphorical benchmark for integrity and information sharing. It's the contemporary standard by which we hope to hold policy makers, public officials, and ourselves accountable.

"Transparency" as a theme represents a flashpoint of frustration in Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' meetings with the press. It makes an appearance as the concluding observation in this recent piece in the New York Times, "Sharper Downturn Clouds Obama Spending Plans": "As the gruesome data accumulates, this much is already clear: Transparency is not for the squeamish."

I'd love to see an interpretation of that sentence by printmaker Amos Kennedy, Jr, who is so brilliant at piling on layers of color, word, and image.