There’s a terrific colloquy between Google and Geoff Nunberg in response to Geoff’s critique of Google’s handling of the metadata attached to the books Google is digitizing (which I blogged about here). It’s fascinating for its content, but also very cool as a conversation between a company and its market. Of course, it would have been even better if Google had initiated this conversation when it started its digitization project.

[Tags: metadata books google_books libraries everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Terry Jones has an excellent post that lists the problems introduced by maintaining a hard distinction between metadata and data.

Terry cites Everything Is Miscellaneous (thanks, Terry), which argues that the distinction, which is hard-coded in the Age of Databases, becomes a merely functional difference in the Age of Messy Links: Metadata is what you know and data is what you’re looking for. For example, the year of a CD is metadata about the CD if you know the year a Bob Dylan CD came out but you don’t remember the title, and the title can be metadata if you know the title but want to find the year. And in both cases, it could all be metadata in your search for lyrics.

This is all very squishy and messy because the distinction is, as Terry says, artificial. It comes from thinking about experience as content that gets processed, as if we worked the way computers do. More exactly, it comes from thinking about experience as a set of Experience Atoms that then have to be assembled; metadata are the labels that tell you that Atom A goes into Atom Z. But experience is far more like language than like particle physics or Ikea assembly instructions. And that’s for a very good reason: linguistic creatures’ experience cannot be understood apart from language. Language doesn’t neatly separate into content and meta-content. It all comes together and it’s all intertwingled. Language is so very non-atomic that it makes atoms realize how lonely they’ve been.

That doesn’t mean that computer software that separates metadata from data is useless. Lord knows I love a good database. But it also means that computer software that can treat anything as metadata depending on what we’re trying to do opens up some interesting possibilities…

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous fluiddb metadata databases language ]

Ben Fry posts an amazing visualization of the changes in the six editions of Darwin’s Origin of Species, based on meticulous work done by Dr. John van Wyhe and others. From Ben’s introductory text:

The second edition, for instance, adds a notable “by the Creator” to the closing paragraph, giving greater attribution to a higher power. In another example, the phrase “survival of the fittest” — usually considered central to the theory and often attributed to Darwin — instead came from British philosopher Herbert Spencer, and didn’t appear until the fifth edition of the text.

[Tags: darwin evolution drafts everything_is_miscellaneous transparency ]

The latest Radio Berkman episode has me interviewing Steve Schultze about his RECAP project that posts public domain legal records that otherwise you’d have to pay to access. And the federal courts are not all that happy about it.

[Tags: law public_domain pacer recap copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Geoff Nunberg has a fantastic post warning about the poor quality of the metadata attached to the books Google is scanning into its soon to be dominant-to-the-point-of-monopoly digital library. Apparently, the attempt to gather metadata automatically from the scans has resulted in the introduction of legions of errors. But the real problems are, as Geoff points out, that Google seems not to have a plan for dealing with this problem and that it has not opened up the metadata design process.

[Tags: google_books libraries metadata worldcat everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Billy Barnes explains what’s really going on with Wikipedia’s new process for editing the biographies of living people.

What the media reported: In response to vandalism of bios, Wikipedia is not allowing any edits to bios of living people to be posted before they have been reviewed by trusted editors. (Implication: Wikipedia has failed at its mission of completely open, ungoverned editing [which of course isn’t Wikipedia’s mission].)

What actually is happening: Wikipedia has a two month trial of a “patrolled revisions” system that lets a reviewer (and I’m not sure who is in that class) set a flag on a bio of a living person to indicate that that particular version is vandalism free. According to the Wikipedia page describing this: “Currently, the number of edits to BLPs [biographies of living people] is so large that we don’t have the power to check all of them. This system allows us to monitor changes to BLPs by reducing the number of diffs to check by comparing new edits to previously patrolled revision.”

Does this mean that if you make a change to a living bio, it first has to be marked as approved before it will be posted? Not as far as I can tell: ” Patrolling does not affect the revision viewed by unregistered users by default, it’s always the latest one (unless the article is flag protected).” In fact, Jimmy Wales has said (on an email list I’m on) that the aim of this change is to use more efficient patrolling to enable some pages that have been locked to once again be editable by any user. That’s more or less the opposite of what the media coverage said. And, I hasten to add, what slashdot and, um, I said about it. (And I hope I’m getting it right this time…)

[Tags: wikipedia ]

Tucows is participating in the Canadian copyright consultation process. Rather than submitting a comment written in the usual lawyerly prose, Elliot Noss, Tucow’s CEO, asked me to write up something about copyright in my usual imprecise and incoherent prose. I like Elliot a lot, and I care about copyright, so I wrote about the argument that without strong copyright protection, creators won’t have an incentive to create. The piece is now posted…

[Tags: copyleft copyright culture canada everything_is_miscellaneous ]

The Encyclopedia of Life is encouraging citizen contributions to its experts-vetted pages, so far with what seem like excellent results. There’s a good article about this at Science Daily. After two years, they’ve got 150,000 species pages underway, with 1.4 million stubs awaiting drafting.

[Tags: crowdsourcing everything_is_miscellaneous science biology taxonomy ]

The Encyclopedia of Life is encouraging citizen contributions to its experts-vetted pages, so far with what seem like excellent results. There’s a good article about this at Science Daily. After two years, they’ve got 150,000 species pages underway, with 1.4 million stubs awaiting drafting.

[Tags: crowdsourcing everything_is_miscellaneous science biology taxonomy ]

At the English language version of Wikipedia now, changes to articles about living people won’t be posted until a Wikipedian has reviewed it. Those articles are now moderated. (See Slashdot for details and discussion.)

I am surprised by the media being surprised by this. Wikipedia has a complex set of rules, processes, and roles in place in order to help it achieve its goal of becoming a great encyclopedia. (See Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution‘, and How Wikipedia Works by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yatesfor book-length explanations.) This new change, which seems to me to be a reasonable approach worth a try, is just one more process, not a signal that Wikipedia has failed in its original intent to be completely open and democratic. In effect, edits to this class of articles are simply being reviewed before being posted rather than after.

The new policy is only surprising if you insist on thinking that Wikipedia has failed if it isn’t completely open and free. No, Wikipedia fails if it doesn’t become a great encyclopedia. In my view, Wikipedia has in many of the most important ways succeeded already.

PS: If you think I’ve gotten this wrong, please please let me know, in the comments or at selfevident.com, since I’ll be on KCBS at 2:20pm EDT to be interviewed about this for four minutes.

[Tags: wikipedia ]