Facebook has announced that it will be creating "community" pages which will be linked from users' profiles. The content for these pages will initially be filled from WP (and the image in the announcement shows a "Wikipedia" tab).

So, if you have a Facebook account and you say you like "Mzoli's Meat", what used to be just text will soon be automatically linked to the "community page" for Mzoli's, which will initially be a copy of the WP article. In theory, that content will be "edited" by the Facebook users to make it better (or something). Why Facebook is doing this is a whole other discussion, but what it means is that Facebook users will have their "real" name associated with WP articles that they may never have seen before.

Facebook has been in the news for removing images of breastfeeding (too great outcry). I wonder what will happen when they are faced with the image content of WP?

If I read this correctly, they will import over Wikipedia material then have its own mirror that is edited and will be different? So, basically, it is just Wikipedia but not at Wikipedia? Hmm.

I guess if it goes off then you could compare to two in, say, 5 years, and see which one was more successful.

From Facebook Help center:

I guess they can always change their name to Faceboob.

And not the good kind …

Jon

I think you read it correctly, and Fakebook is clearly trying to eat the smaller fishes on the web.

The Foundation will never care about the obvious problems this association could cause, because as long as people edit (no matter the quality of the edits) Jim and company will be able to get paid.

Connect to Fakebook to go here, connect to Fakebook to go there, to do this, to do that. Play Mafia Wars on Fakebook, talk to your friends on Fakebook, tag photos on Fakebook. Are you going out? Yes? Well, use the application for your mobile phone to access Fakebook!

Stupid invasive crap.

Meanwhile, does Gerard Meijssen suffer from some sort of mental retardation?

I mean, if my neighbor puts up a poster of a picture of a brick of pure uranium in his den, will I be able to detect that on a Geiger counter in my bedroom?

This is a long-established fact.

I actually met him in Boston in 2006. God, what an annoying prat.

No. But with a picture of a Geiger counter, possibly.

A wonderful troll question, tho.

This is obviously a bad move by Facebook - they should look at the example of eMusic, which has integrated Wikipedia articles into its artist pages for almost two years and gotten nothing but complaints. The WP content takes too long to load, and most of the time it's simply the wrong page. For example, if you're checking out a band called "Albatross," the Wikipedia tab is going to display - at best - a disambiguation page, and more likely, a page about the bird, not the band. They don't correct these, because they don't trust their users to choose the correct WP page (since the users would probably choose the Goatse article or something instead), and they simply don't have the manpower to work this out for 250,000 recording artists - less than a tenth of whom actually have WP articles.

I know for a fact that Facebook doesn't have the manpower to correctly link every single person, organization, and whatever-the-heck on Wikipedia to its appropriate Facebook page, much less vice-versa, and while they can probably more readily rely on their users to do it than eMusic can, that would still be an extremely dicey proposition.

This is also a horrible idea as far as Wikipedia users are concerned (as opposed to Wikimedia management, who don't really care about the long-term implications of their actions as long as participation levels are maintained). It's going to mean literally tens of thousands of attempts to create articles about "notable Facebook groups" and the activities around which they form which are, in fact, either of no significance whatsoever, or are only significant within the limited context of Facebook itself. Inveterate Facebook users (who are legion) will eventually begin to insist on setting up special "Facebook user group notability requirements" based almost entirely on how many Facebook users are in the group. And as everyone knows, Facebook itself doesn't have "notability requirements" at all.

And this is coming at a time when it's fairly clear that the Maintenance Phase™ on WP is already losing steam, at least 3-4 years before it should. A massive influx of crap articles at a time like this is one of the worst things Wikipedia could do to itself, but if they don't allow for it at least to some extent, the Facebook community - at least 60 times larger than Wikipedia's in terms of active members - is going to declare war on Wikipedia's community, and possibly overwhelm it completely by virtue of sheer numbers.

As for the privacy invasion, I doubt this will make things significantly worse than they are already - in fact, if Wikipedia adopts the Facebook API as an authentication scheme (even as an optional one), that would probably be an improvement, though that's not saying much really.

Hoi! That's definitely not in the top ten worst (or best, depending on your viewpoint) GerardM posts.

There is something going on at Facebook that reminds me of Wikipedia in 2005, when SlimVirgin started a bio on me without asking me or informing me.

Someone (I have no idea who) started a Facebook page on Using Scroogle. I am not on Facebook, and I only found out about it because Facebook headquarters is now sending me unsolicited weekly reports on new friends and page views to my Scroogle email address. This is one of those "please do not reply" emails. Apparently the person who started the page entered the Scroogle email address somewhere.

How do I find out who dunnit? How do I correct bad information on that Facebook page about Scroogle? How do I get the page taken down entirely if I don't want the exposure?

For that matter, how do I correct bad information concerning me or my sites on Cpedia.com, another recent example of shameless scraping of the deep web because doing so is "cool" and "innovative" (and profitable)?

Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing is bad enough. When this devolves into rampant scraping by big companies that want more ad dollars, it gets much worse. Allowing victims to correct the record is not scalable, which means these companies don't allow for this in their software designs. They cannot be bothered. Victims be damned, we want our click-throughs!

You do realize that by placing such a link in a forum, you probably increased its PageRank in Google?
...and by quoting you, I did so as well?

I'm afraid having information about you on the Internet, searchable and of doubtful accuracy may be...

inevitable.

In answer to the third question, see here. They do not accept third-party claims, or I would have offered to do it for you.


You really don't have any idea who you're talking to, do you?

You might be able to type in the email address and when it asks for a password, screw it up until it gives you the option to send a new password. That way, you could get into the account (which is listed by the password I assume) and take down anything that way.

Now, if they allow you to add random addresses that way without it being linked through an official account, that would be weird. There is a "report" function on Facebook so if it is just linked in a post and not part of an account, you might be able to use that.

Thank you. I filed a complaint; we'll see what happens. This is what I entered in the two big important boxes on the complaint form:
I think the fact that whoever started the page used the scroogle email address without permission is probably the strongest argument I have for getting it deleted. When you create a page, there is a checkbox where you click to indicate this: "I'm the official representative of this person, business, band or product and have permission to create this Page." I assume that whoever created that Scroogle page had to lie and check this box in order for the page to be accepted.

Just a bit of free advice: Facebook is notorious for ignoring requests like yours.

I could just go on and on and on about Facebook's founder. Funny, that his product is such a massive success, and yet he himself is widely despised.....

(There's even a Facebook for that. )

And people give that little bastard their personal details. Amazing.

I just thought of something...

"Moses" is nearly an anagram of "Somey".

Whatever the case, that Moses guy rules.

And the full user ID, "Moses Ure," is an anagram of "Some User"!


I dunno... Do you think he really looks like that? He should get a haircut, at the very least. And what's the deal with the penguin? Does the cat want him to use the hammer to hurt the penguin? I know cats don't like penguins, but that seems a little harsh to me.

Does Wikipedia confirm this fact somewhere? If not, I would like it to.

Moses Ure ... ah, yes ... according to the Wiki, he was the lead singer in 'Orthodoxvox' and co-writer of "Do they know its Hanukkah?"

This one's going out to the guy at the Consulate of Israel in New York who was funding Wikipedia editors and all you Zionist editors ... if you are back from the party on Fire Island yet.


Sorry for that but I was not exactly going to get very far with a parody of "Albatross Lyrics", and there was a far strong factual reality to this one.

A new blog post expresses disappointment in the new Community Pages of Facebook.

Tangentially related to this. These four young programmers seem to be aware of peoples concerns about how to control their own personal information on the internetz and seem to be working on something that does something about it.

" What is the project about?

We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today's centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network. Diaspora will be easy to use, and it will be centered on you instead of a faceless hub."

" Why are we building it?

This February, Eben Moglen, Columbia law professor and author of the latest GPL, gave a talk on Internet privacy. As more and more of our lives and identities become digitized, Moglen explains, the convenience of putting all of our information in the hands of companies on “the cloud” is training us to casually sacrifice our privacy and fragment our online identities.

But why is centralization so much more convenient, even in an age where relatively powerful computers are ubiquitous? Why is there no good alternative to centralized services that, as Moglen pointed out, comes with "spying for free?” Why do we keep our personal data in a thousand places? We have the technology, someone just needs to take the time to figure out how we can communicate smoothly and intuitively, without the hidden costs of “the cloud”. As good programmers, when we noticed that the application we need doesn't exist, we set out to fill the hole in our digital lives."

Will it get off the ground? Will it take off once it's off the ground? Who knows, these things are very hard to predict. I've punted $5 on it anyway just because the idea seems interesting.

I got a response to my complaint about the "Using Scroogle" group page from someone who identified herself only as "Daisy" at User Operations, Facebook:

I responded:

She responded:

But I don't have an account at Facebook under my name and I don't want one. How am I supposed to write on the Wall of that page? I logged into Facebook under a fake name and clicked around, but I don't see any info about who started that page. Remember, this person used my Scroogle email address without authorization.

Catch-22. It may as well have been an anonymous Wikipediot who started that page, for all the options I have to get rid of it. Any of you who want to write on that Wall and refer to this thread, feel free.

Close the iPod eBay door, HAL …

My mind … is going … I can feel it …

Daisy, Daisy, tell me your answer true …

Maybe you'd get more respect if you used a name with some gravy-tas —

Colonel Sanders, maybe …

Jon

I struggle with your ultra-nationalism (Japanese) but still have come to see you as someone who really is trying to piece together a serious critique of Wikipedia not just here to move his POV pushing to WR. I also share your concern about Palestine (this makes us a minority even around here) and don't doubt there is an organized effort to insert anti-Palestinian bias on Wikipedia. But I have to say that injecting a Jewish cultural theme (Hanukkah) as the refrain in your poem makes it appear antisemitic and not just supportive of the Palestinian people/editors or against Zionist POV pushng . "Jews control Wikipedia" is not a very good way a understanding the nature of the POV pushing. I won't remove it (although some other mod/staff might) but I think it deserves this comment.

This is already happening, apparently - this literally within hours of the feature implementation:

http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/04/the-pro.../#comment-64206

Apparently, new FB user groups are forming around the new "Community" pages, which have simply been automatically copied from Wikipedia in the sort of slapdash fashion one might expect, and these new groups are competing with the established ones on the same subjects:

So there are now Facebook users who think Wikipedia is trying to take them over - this despite Facebook's active-user base being at least 60 to 100 times larger! I wonder what the reaction is going to be - gosh, maybe retaliation?


So Facebook is basically inviting a mostly-hostile group of competing group members over to Wikipedia to "improve" WP articles so that they look more like Facebook user-group "walls" and similar pages.

I dunno, but I think this could be an even bigger disaster than I'd initially expected!


True, maybe we should at least split this part of it out and put it somewhere "safe"...

I just hope he wasn't assuming I don't know who Midge Ure is. Hell, I even owned the Rich Kids album at one point, since Glen Matlock was involved... "Vienna" wasn't bad, but I vaguely recall using the first Visage album as a Frisbee™, or maybe a skeet-shooting target. (Now there's something you can't do with iTunes downloads!)

Daniel, see this: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Using-Scroog...7190&ref=search

If necessary, click on the "Review" tab.

Daniel, see Facebook Pages Terms:

Try pointing them to term number 2 and see what happens. If they try to tell you it's a "group" point out that it says "pages" right in the group's url and ask where the terms for "groups" are. Good luck.

Thanks, excellent idea. I also registered the name facebook-watch.org just in case. (Not that I would ever start a "watch" site just because some monster mega-site started a page about me or mine and won't take it down...)

I'm just beginning to learn about the differences between a Facebook group and a Facebook page. This was helpful:

Another key fact about Facebook pages is that all search engines get to crawl all pages; it's completely open to the web and even the admin of that page is unable to restrict this.

I don't see how Facebook can avoid taking it down. That "Daisy" who gave me the run-around was mistaken, it seems to me.

You could easily defame some "entity" if Facebook is too lazy to verify the authenticity of a page after receiving a complaint. Dozens of fake people on Facebook could plant nasty stuff on that page. I imagine Facebook ranks fairly well on the engines.

(Sounds a bit like Wikipedia, doesn't it?)

I don't understand what's happening with the Facebook community pages and Wikipedia content, which is why carbuncle started this thread. Is Facebook allowing self-appointed user/admins to grab Wikipedia content? How will it be displayed on Facebook? If Facebook scrapes it, does that mean it won't get updated if and when Wikipedia updates? What about vandalism on Wikipedia? Will that be stickier on Facebook than it is on Wikipedia?

You have a lot of questions for a guy from Texas …

Jon

The only related info I found on Facebook was here. Facebook's URL system sucks (as you can see from that link).

I also fond this:

From here.

It's like I'm talking, but no sound is coming out.

It's becoming clearer to me that "Daisy" is a bot. Maybe it's a person who clicks on canned paragraphs in some sort of decision tree, but the competence level is such that either the decision tree is too minimal or the person doesn't read English well. I think it's a bot. Others have had the same impression.

I don't like having my time wasted by a bot. I'm thinking of constructing a one-page site for facebook-watch.org, my new domain. I can drive about 2,000 page views a day to facebook-watch.org by including a copy in the cartoon rotation on a gateway page at Scroogle.

The whole point is to get the attention of some human at Facebook who is in a position to take down their page. I'm open to suggestions about what to put on my watch-site page, as well as any suggestions for anti-Facebook images that would be appropriate.

Hit the keys harder.

Well, Facebook is definitely good for something. It looks like July 3rd should be a bit of a good time.

And what's very clear to me is that the gurlz who are in favor of this event look like they're a lot more fun than the ladies who will surely be opposed.

You could contact the guy who set that page up and ask him. (Although his site's in Danish, from the Facebook page I assume he speaks English.) I doubt it's even occurred to him that you'd object, given that his facebook page is just utterly bland "I like this product" posts, not any kind of discussion of you (Daniel) as opposed to the site; if you asked politely I suspect there's a good chance he'd take it down himself.

Thanks, he's been sent a message from a Facebook user that he should take down the page. I'm curious — while I confirmed that he started the page by looking at the 15 pages he started on his Facebook profile, how did you find this out by working backwards? That's a neat trick that might come in handy in the future.

I guessed; I looked at the "discussions" tab on that page, and figured that whoever had been the first person to post (that is, the person posting the "mission statement" for the group) must have been the founder.

By the way, the reason I want that Facebook Page down is because it damages Scroogle's reputation to tolerate a Facebook Page. Such Pages are prime targets for applications written by developers, they're completely open to the web, and Facebook itself intends to make more use of them to drive advertising.

Facebook has a huge problem with spam already. SEO types are buying and selling pages with thousands of fans for the purpose of shabby emarketing so that they can make money. Facebook tries to kill the "publishing rights" on these pages when they find them, but it's not clear to me whether they make any effort to take the Page itself down if it's functioning as a platform for ads.

None of my sites has ever had an ad, our organization is nonprofit and tax-exempt, we strip out all ads on Google's search results, and we depend on donations only. It would hurt our reputation if we made no effort to complain about a Facebook page that is a violation of Facebook's own terms of service, and a page that is already used as a platform for ads (there's only an occasional ad now, but it will get worse).

It looks like Facebook has taken down the "Vandalize Wikipedia Day" event, thanks to numerous Wikipediots and WMF stakeholders "reporting" the page as problematic.

Maybe that's the answer for Daniel Brandt -- get about 4 or 5 of us WR faithful with Facebook accounts to go to the page and nominate it as abusive.

The plot thickens:

I'm sure they alleged that it was encouraging criminal conduct. Vandalism is a crime, you know.

It looks like the Scroogle page is gone now, too.

I'm sure that was part of the reasoning. Vandalism usually is a crime of course. However on Wikipedia vandalism neither violates the ToS nor the Free License used by the preceding users whose content is being degraded. At most it goes against some user generated content that say you can't do it. But this user generated content is exactly of equal dignity to the vandalism itself.

I just got this email:

Surrender-Bot.

Wikipedia: about two years to get it deleted (after lots of effort)

Facebook: about two weeks to get it deleted (not too much effort)

The difference: Facebook expects those who register to use their real names, and Facebook has a "Statement of Rights & Responsibilities." The first expectation makes the second step possible. Wikipedia, on the other hand, believes in crowd-sourcing by anonymous teenage basement-dwellers.

I still don't like Facebook, and would never be active in such a silly social network. But from the perspective of someone on the receiving end of this sort of thing, I much prefer Facebook's approach.

Facebook operates a coupla notches above Wikimedia in terms of the Kohlberg-Gilligan Ladder of Moral and Ethical Maturity.

I am considering a new "Event" for Facebook. Please let me know how I might improve on this first draft... Note that I have not used the words "vandal", "vandalize", or "vandalism".

"We view Wikipedia as a dynamic social experiment, not as an authoritative encyclopedia."

I propose: "We view Wikipedia as a dynamic experiment in social drama, not as an authoritative encyclopedia."