Google has launched a new browser service called "google sidewiki" which allows users to submit and see comments about any website in a sidebar - see:

http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html

Explanation of how it works here:

http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/googl...searchwiki.html


If this takes off, will it have any significant impact on wikipedia? In the sense that it gives individuals a quite visible right to reply that people will immediately see and wikipedia has no control over?

So if wikipedia has a page about Joe Blow and you go to the wikipedia page, the sidebar will show the comments of Joe Blow and an explanation of how the article misrepresents them?

(I couldn't see an existing thread on this, I think this forum is the right place?).

As it stands, hardly anybody, as a percentage of Wikipedia readers, even attempts to edit Wikipedia articles, even though the site tries to make it obvious that they can do so (unless they happen to be politically out of favor for some reason ). "Joe Blow" would almost certainly never edit his article, and if he did, probably no one would realize it was him and do anything about it, unless he made it outrageously obvious. My guess is that even fewer people would take advantage of the Google sidewiki ability...but if they did, then it would raise interesting questions about Wikipedia's glaring inability to recruit contributors (suggesting that it stems from something other than general apathy).

It looks like it requires the Google Toolbar, so... what's the market penetration of the Google Toolbar? I believe it's fairly high, but of course, people using the Yahoo!, Ask.com, or Microsoft Bing toolbars (among others) are going to feel horribly left out.

Now, if they could set it up so that Sidewiki entries could be called directly from websites, or even JavaScript code that could be stored as shortcuts and/or bookmark entries, that would allow for more universal access. Then again, that may not be such a good thing...

If it means fewer people wanting to use Wikipedia as a means of online attack, since the Sidewiki entries will presumably be more immediate and directed at specific non-WP content, then that woud be good for Wikipedia, at least. I doubt it will mean that, of course, but it's hard to predict. Either way, who's going to monitor these Sidewiki entries for what WP now calls "vandalism"? If most of the entries for any given URL consist of "STFU UR SO GHEY" and nobody is around to delete them, what use is it? (Other than as an "advance preview" for the future of Wikipedia, of course.)

The API is available so that this can be done (I think, I'm not a techie).

At the very least, people can add the "how this actually works" to pages like AN/I.


Edit: I see the main page already has been done.

Okay go here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Sanchez

Can you see my additional comment ?

No

Is this the dirty Sanchez I've heard tell about?

Evidently? You'd have to investigate the origin of that phrase. Of course, please do it on KNOL not on Wikipedia where it would be immediately subject to protection, deletion, and phone calls to your mother and so on.

As for the additional comment. I had to download the Google Toolbar addon called the sidewiki. You have to do that in order to see the extra comments. Did you do that?

Yes, I can, with my Google Toolbar installed and upgraded to show Sidewiki.

Note, your Google profile now contains a handy link to anything you ever Sidewiki. People's agendas will be fairly easy to suss out.

Sassy! I'd better go delete all my comments on goats, midgets and enhancement pills.
When are they coming out with Google Monitors which have a camera behind the screen to watch you constantly while you're watching me?

Maybe Google PeopleEarth, satellite cameras and tracking so precise it can actually from outer space, train it's camera eye to follow each person on their daily errands around town and report on everything they do, without permission ? Opt-in! Get a discount on your cable television!

That would be cool.

My immediate thought on sidewiki is boy, this will take defamation engines to a new height. I don't think Google has thought this through. Anybody with with a Tripod site, Facebook page, a Flickr image of their nine year old daughter or a PDF file containing a term paper on the web will be subject to the varieties of Web 2.0 social media. The algorithm will mean nothing when the only motivated poster is someone with grudge. Right now the deal on the web is that you get to choose the level of reply your content is subject to. People make choices between static content, blogs, forums and wikis relying on this control. Sidewiki will be highly disruptive of these expectations.

Now I can see the additional comment, so it seems there is a percolation time for these comments to work their way through.

Makes a nonsense of most Wikipedia policies as all those with an agenda can hang their editorialising off the article. And amazingly Google will out-defamation-machine the defamation-machine.

But will they be able to remotely match the defamation machine that is
(drum roll please)
the badbusinessbureau.com

Possibly. All depends on implementation. One of the mantras of web 2.0 is that everything is annotable by the reader. But who will annotate the annotators? So that it's not entirely vandalism and insults? And you're likely to see the interesting comments up top? Well, Google is not stupid:


This looks even more like flagged versions than anything WP has managed to put up, yet. Any reputation-based social media system ALSO needs a 2.0 reputation-based system which tracks back to reputations of an identified set of readers. And rather than kick vandals and idiots and one-meme POV-pusher SPAs OFF, as they do on WP, what will happen here is that they'll merely slide below the cuttoff line below which you don't read, due to poor poster reputation. Yes, there will be ways to game this system, but since the reputations on Google cannot be totally trashed at the behest of small-but-powerful social cartel (as on Wikipedia), it's HARDER to game.

Wikipedia can be more like trying to become a best-selling author by kneecapping or murdering your competition (or the editors you don't like at your publishing house). It's a lot more gentle to let your reading audience decide if they want to read a book of yours which (say) contains nothing but texting insults.

Remember that Wikipedia, too, has a version of this which is used by insiders. If you're going to read a new article, many of us now don't pull up the TOP version, but go to the history and see if there's a username version by somebody we recognize, or something stable by a frequent contributor. Then we do a diff between that and the TOP to see if the differences are obvious fuckups. If so, we read the last-good one. If the differences look reasonable, we read the top. That's the poor man's flagged version already. Google is going to come closer to an automatic version of this than WP has up to now. I told you this was coming. WP will be playing catch-up quite soon, and won't the Warlords hate it when they can no longer control poster rep with threats of banishment.

WARNING: rest of message contains late night musings about generalizations of these problems. tl;dr if you don't like metaphors.

It turns out that not only WP and Google have to deal with vandals and idiots ("noise") but it's a common problem to all information processing systems. The question is what to do with it.

Digital computers don't handle it well, and single flipped bit can crash an airplane. In the space shuttle they had to have 4 or 5 computers and take a vote between them, and lock-out a locked-up or suddenly-looney one. And that was for computers which had previously passed all tests and had good reputations going in!

In the real world, we can't afford to get rid of, or eliminate, all sources of noise. Or react to them. If you're trying to listen to the speaker in an auditorium, and have to shoot or remove all toonless whistlers or knuckepopers in the background, you'll soon land in jail or go crazy. They play those games on WP, but you can't in real life.

So what do you do? Find some way to ignore the noise, or else reduce it at YOUR end. The "ignore part" actually is done by your brain to some extent, and it's even done in your ear (there are afferent nerves sending signals OUT to your cochlea-- guess what they do?).

Mechanically, it would be possible to get a set of hearing aids that have a squelch feature, then put earmuffs over them. The background hiss low-db noise doesn't make it though this combo-filter, but louder stuff comes through more or less unchanged after being first softened then amplified back to normal. This is the poor man's Dolby system. It works a bit like the Google page-rank (and now commentor-rank) system will. The background noise gets squelched automatically, so long as it's not so loud it overwhelms everything.

Now, it turns out your brain has already invented all these systems for every neuron, for power-saving reasons (your brain runs on less wattage than your computer microprocessor uses: even a mobile Pentium 4-M is 35 watts, which is more than your brain's 25 watts.) Transistors which have to have low error rates, burn power tremendously. In a neuron, every gate is almost at the thermal noise level, already, making 10% of the signals spurious. Your other neurons are set to Dolby-ignore the noise, and thus you can run your 100 trillion synapse computer without frying.

Interestingly, this also means that most neurons are sitting there with earmuffs and a big squelch, and it takes the equivalent of a shotgun to startle them and make them fire off. Then the neuron down the line takes THAT into account, and so on. So most neurons really ARE sitting there not firing, and indeed doing "nothing." That saves power also. "They also serve who only stand and wait," saith Milton. You say all these levels of ranking inputs and voting on them, and things that do nothing unless vastly stimulated-- won't work as a system? They DO work. They got you that thought. And got me mine. So run that through your processors and see if it's noise to you.

What would such a system look like, if fully implemented on WP? We've talked about having editor-ranks. That happens now when you have lots of experience on WP and know many editors, and look at the history of an article before reading it. In a sense, that makes any WP article "fuzzy." It doesn't exist only in the TOP version, but many others beside, which you can compare. You can only do this through a glass darkly at the moment, as a series of history entries with sign offs by usernames and edit summaries, and a manual diff. But much of that could be automated. With, say, a compuuuuter.

They're getting faster and faster, so they say.

Milton

I'm estimating that the portion of people who are going to make "consumer" use of the Google Sidewiki will be relatively small.

Let's suppose that 20% of Internet browsers have Google Toolbar installed. Then, maybe only 20% become aware of the Sidewiki feature. Only 20% might actively use it more than a couple of times, and only 20% of them will really consciously look for Sidewiki content on a regular basis.

We're talking about maybe 1 or 2 million regular Sidewiki users, based on my silly assessment.

Wow. That's a factor of 100 more than I was going to guess.
I wonder if there will be a way to see the "most sidewikied pages in order of comments".

There are people who think it's a hoot to read bathroom walls.
When I first discovered that there was a website where people getting divorced or accusing each other of sleeping with someone else, could just fling mud back and forth, in postings, I was addicted for at least 3 or 4 hours.

The Main page already has a dozen sidewiki comments.

I just added one.

There was a company called Sidetalk that came out of the MIT Media Lab in 1999 that did this, but of course on a custom platform. In that case, the key to it (you can't say "key to its success", because it flamed out pretty quickly) was choosing who to listen to and who not to. Annotations of websites from like-minded individuals is great, anything else is graffiti. I haven't loaded it up yet, it will be interesting to see how they handle that.

I installed it. There is a "report abuse" link for each comment, in case this does get used for defamation (not that this does anything to make up for the fact that the person commented on may not be aware.)

There doesn't seem to be a way to search sidewiki comments.

It prompts for a first and last name before you can write an entry (but I could find nothing in their content policy or terms of service to say it must be your real name, only that you cannot impersonate someone else), but does not require this to report abuse.

A small strip pops up at the left if a page you browse to a page that has sidewiki comments (pro: you don't have to click to check if a page has one. con: this means every page you browse to is sent to google, for those of you who care about that sort of thing)

Links to comments (like the one posted above) can be viewed by non-toolbar users.

I installed it just to see what it was like, and found it unimpressive. Most of what people are saying, including about Wikipedia, seems to be pretty mindless. There's also a problem with all such systems that there's a tremendous advantage to being one of the first people to say something. On Wikipedia-style wikis, the first move advantage is much less pronounced, which in my opinion is a very good thing.

Me too.

Click on each comment and you can vote it up or down. I find that pretty interesting.

Above the remark is made that the first adapter has an advantage, but wouldn't this voting system negate that advantage? I sure hope they don't go the completely *lame ass* way of archive.org and allow sites to opt-out.

archive.org's opt-out thing isn't so bad. The real problem is if someone else acquires the domain, it lets them opt out _for_ the original content (that they don't own).

I don't like opt-out because they originally stated or claimed or made the grand promise that they were going to "archive the internet".

Well it turns out the opt-out swings both ways but I'm going to have to start a new thread on that. I'll post it back here to tie it together.

So I'm back buckos. Here is what happens when you let the registration on your web site protecting your suppressed pages... expire.

An intelligent conversation about Google Sidewiki was started by Jeff Jarvis over here.

Ironic that Jarvis is even forced to weigh in on the commentary via Sidewiki on his blog about Sidewiki.

Zoiks!

You could have said "you lie!" or something topically relevant.

What caught my eye in the "sidewiki" comments for Jeff Jarvis's blog was this by a random commentator:



Jeff Jarvis wrote the book "What Would Google do" where he presumably ranted against top down "control" like the best of them. Now, having seen the fruits of his philosophy actually impact on him on this new sidewiki, he now writes:



Looks like Jeff got what he asked for!

That's the raison d'être here amiright? Maybe we can haz WR toolbar...

Then instead of trying to find a particular thread, it will find us (reading WP pages relevant to it).

I have been conducting an experiment with Google Sidewiki, and while my mentioning this here is surely spoiling the unbiased nature of the experiment, I have already come to the conclusion that fewer than 1 in 5,000 Internet users is actively using the Sidewiki application.

Either that, or fewer than 1 in 5,000 Internet users would accept a $10 gift with no strings, no obligations.

I'd like to think fewer than 1 in 5,000 would click on an something that is obviously too good to be true, but this is probably too optimistic. Dancing pigs, you know...

That is to say... I would have weighed the likelihood that it is some kind of scam, and refrained from clicking on anything like that, cf. free iPod, ring-tones, etc.

No clicking required. Just sending me an e-mail, with my nice, friendly face to back up the authenticity of the message.

Here's what my Sidewiki notes were essentially saying:



Messages like these were placed on eight different Wikipedia pages, one day after the next, on pages that received increasingly more traffic. Page one gets about 35 page views per day; Page two gets about 70 page views per day, Page three gets about 125 page views per day; Page four gets about 200 page views per day, and so on, up until the point about four days ago, where I placed the Sidewiki ad on a page that gets about 1,100 page views per day.

You cannot tell me "fear of clicking" is a better explanation than the fact that hardly anybody in the "real world" has installed and is actively using Sidewiki.

In fact, the mere evidence that popular Wikipedia pages like "United Nations", "Michael Jackson", and "Joe Biden" each utterly lack ANY Sidewiki commentary, tells me that this is another failed Google application.

I'm disappointed... like Knol, I thought it had potential.

What Google seems to not understand is that they may have 30-person teams of propeller heads developing these gizmos, but they can't expect to roll them out and expect them to succeed without having at least a staff of 4 or 5 talented people to handle marketing, customer support, and governance/policy issues.

If you are interested in which 8 Wikipedia articles I attached the Sidewiki test notes, you may visit my Google Sidewiki profile.

So you really don't think some portion of your audience mistook this for a small-scale "Nigerian letter" solicitation? Seems naïve to rule out this possibility.

I don't use this product either but I really doubt the numbers are as low as you suggest.

Jon Awbrey just sent me a note. He contends that the English Wikipedia is no longer serving the Sidewiki application, at all. Hmm... That would explain things, too. Did anybody see any official notice of this or a developer discussion? Google does have a "Sidewiki Defeat" code that site owners can apply to their domain to block the Sidewiki application from their site.

I would ask about this on the WikiEN-l mailing list, but they don't publish my posts, and the moderators there will not even respond to me about why/whether a post has been rejected.



"Some portion"? Yes. All 5,000? No. I haven't ruled out any possibilities, Charlotte. I'm trying to apply good judgment as to which is the more likely explanation for the lack of response to my "message in a bottle". I think it's far more likely that very, very few people saw the bottle, than that many, many people saw the bottle but were afraid to pick it up.

It's good to see someone thinking about noise filtering; understanding the noise problem is essential to understanding the large-scale consensus problem. The human brain solved the problem, as to finding "consensus" among the collection of cells in the structure, long ago, before we were even human. It does it through a fractal structure, self-assembled, there is no central "boss." The technique is extremely powerful, what one person can accomplish routinely doesn't seem amazing to us because we are, of course, familiar with it.

Perhaps by coincidence, another post today relate to this: Wikitruth through Wikiorder in Meta Discussion, which refers to A post by Kato, which then refers to Durova's blog, which refers to The Wikipedia Signpost (Section title "Law scholars analyze Wikipedia's dispute resolution system"] Remarkably for the Signpost, this is the summary:
The paper itself has this in the abstract:
They noticed! I haven't read the actual paper, it would be interesting to see how naive they are about the reality. Piotrus, who is a sociologist who has written about Wikipedia, may be encountering the seamy side of that reality currently....

The paper seems to be downloadable, I'll read it later....

Hoffman's blog about the article.

I downloaded and read the paper. The authors incorrectly assert that Wikipedia's dispute resolution process ignores content, when in practice Wikipedia's dispute resolution process routinely pays close attention to content; it merely does so in a circumspect and indirect way. That is, editors who are favoring points of view popular with Wikipedia's community are given much broader leeway than editors who favor unpopular points of view. This not to say that supporting a popular point of view necessarily acts as carte blanche, but their claim that Wikipedia's dispute resolution process is independent of content amounts basically to willful ignorance.

The obvious method of crafting mutually agreed-upon social norms is to negotiate them in advance. That's called a Social Contract, and there is ample theory for the concept. Failing to establish them in advance leads to long-running conflict, which in the end can be concluded with a treaty. It makes more sense to craft the treaty at the outset than to waste all that blood, sweat, and tears in the conflict.

Unless, of course, the entertainment value of the conflict is what drives the enterprise (as is the case with Wikipedia).

Sidewiki is still too new to "fail", it was announced only about 3 weeks ago, so give it a few months.

Already plenty of criticism of it floating around.

That said, it does find some uses......

Anyone who took at least a few minutes to trial Google Sidewiki may be interested in seeing this discussion about it.

I find it especially interesting that Google admits that there is a "secret sauce" in place to suppress certain forms of Sidewiki commentary.

As I told Greg earlier, I uninstalled Wikicide a couple weeks ago. I was having a lot of eye-strain headaches and finally figured out it was due to the jerky way Wikicide shoved my browser frame to the right when it muscled its side-bar in on the left.

All in all, this was one of the bigger Wastes Of Time (WOT) I've seen since WP itself.

Here's my old Wikicide Profile if anyone is curious — and I know just how "curious" some of you are — about my side of the x-spearmint:

http://www.google.com/profiles/JonAwbrey

BTW, I'm wondering if we're all supposed to send off to TRW or some CyberDunSystem like that to find out what our "Google Rep" numbers are — or maybe that's some kinda "Secret Sauce" of the Al Gore Rhythm they won't let you take a Gander at ???

Ja Ja

Once again, I am smarter than Google. They are dismantling Google Sidewiki.