The Berkman Center just came out with a report on the public
discussions surrounding the SOPA-PIPA actions; drawing on the Media
Cloud work by Yochai Benkler and others.
It provides context for the discussions on the English Wikipedia, and
captures the differences between the grassroots and top-down decisions
by different organizations and media channels who took part in the
blackout.
An interactive time-visual shows how the conversation was driven at
different times by different communities:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/mediacloud/2013/mapping_sopa_pipa/#
SJ
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Publication Release: July 25
Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the
SOPA-PIPA Debate
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the
release of a new publication from the Media Cloud project, Social
Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA
Debate, authored by Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, Rob Faris, Alicia
Solow-Niederman, and Bruce Etling.
Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the
SOPA-PIPA Debate
>From the abstract: In this paper, we use a new set of online research
tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed
legislation in the United States that was designed to give prosecutors
and copyright holders new tools to pursue suspected online copyright
violations. Our study applies a mixed-methods approach by combining
text and link analysis with human coding and informal interviews to
map the evolution of the controversy over time and to analyze the
mobilization, roles, and interactions of various actors.
This novel, data-driven perspective on the dynamics of the networked
public sphere supports an optimistic view of the potential for
networked democratic participation, and offers a view of a vibrant,
diverse, and decentralized networked public sphere that exhibited
broad participation, leveraged topical expertise, and focused public
sentiment to shape national public policy.
We also offer an interactive visualization that maps the evolution of
a public controversy by collecting time slices of thousands of
sources, then using link analysis to assess the progress of the debate
over time. We used the Media Cloud platform to depict media sources
(“nodes”, which appear as circles on the map with different colors
denoting different media types). This visualization tracks media
sources and their linkages within discrete time slices and allows
users to zoom into the controversy to see which entities are present
in the debate during a given period as well as who is linking to whom
at any point in time.
The authors wish to thank the Ford Foundation and the Open Society
Foundation for their generous support of this research and of the
development of the Media Cloud platform.
About Media Cloud
Media Cloud, a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet &
Society at Harvard University and the Center for Civic Media at MIT,
is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to
answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the
content of online media. Using Media Cloud, academic researchers,
journalism critics, and interested citizens can examine what media
sources cover which stories, what language different media outlets use
in conjunction with different stories, and how stories spread from one
media outlet to another. We encourage interested readers to explore
Media Cloud.
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was
founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer
its development. For more information, visit
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/.
I have just had to deal with this - AGAIN - and would like to rail for a
moment, hoping to provoke discussion to promote change. I posit that this
is big enough to deserve a Foundation-wide venue for initial discussion so
am including Wikitech-L.
Most of us are probably familiar with the cycle:
Person A on en.wp (or, any project) uploads an image which is apparently
public domain or free use by any reasonable standard. It gets put on
article X. There is much rejoicing.
Person B later thinks "Oh, this is something other projects might use, and
it's 'free', so..." and uploads it to Commons. It then gets deleted at
en.wp by a helpful bot.
Person C on Commons later identifies that it fails to be an entirely free
piece under the much-stricter Commons rules, due to some factor that A and
B were unaware of. Person C nominates it for deletion there. Poof. Gone.
Now, we have NO image, for something that is sufficiently legal under our
rules and the law for use on en.wp (and likely, most of the rest of the
projects). A delinker bot helpfully comes along and nukes references to
the image off the pages that used to have it. Maintainers who miss the bot
edit fail to notice that it's gone. Many months or years go along and
finally someone notices, and either is an admin and restores the image on
en.wp or finds an admin who restores it on en.wp.
Now, for someone who sees images as an integral part of the total
READERSHIP value we present, in terms of helping people understand things
by drawing their attention and expressing ideas and history in a visual
manner, the long periods where we've lost all image are mind-numbingly
counter to our core mission. That we've evolved into this cycle due to
bureaucratic friction does not make it acceptable.
PROPOSED: This is not acceptable. Something must be done.
SUGGESTED FIX #1: Create a parallel "Uncommons" project, for shared images
which meet minimum project legal non-copyvio standards but do not meet the
threshold Commons is insisting on (or we have defined Commons to be). This
requires coding in the WMF to allow a parallel project as image source, and
would require that Commons' deletion process be modified such that
deletions for copyright niggles be a shift-to-Uncommons rather than an
outright delete.
SUGGESTED FIX #2: Stop deleting things from local projects when they're
uploaded to commons. This requires additional diskspace from the
Foundation (by some as-yet unknown amount). Ops team - Could you attempt
to determine if this would be significant, troublesome, small enough to not
be significant, etc?
These are not the only two possible solutions, but they come to mind
immediately (and have previously when I thought of this). Additional fix
concepts solicited and welcomed.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com
On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 12:54 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 August 2013 08:43, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 3:40 AM, Huib Laurens <sterkebak(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >> Suggestion 3: Restore the file on en.wiki if it gets deleted on
> Commons...
> >> No coding needed at all.
>
> > This right here. It should be trivial to just have an admin restore the
> > deleted file.
>
>
> Or, indeed, for the delinker bot to mark it for restoration.
>
...if the same filename was used in Commons as in the source wiki. That
does not solve the "now used on other wikis" problem, however, for those
other wikis.
That is quite possibly a least-effort trajectory however...
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com
On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 3:40 AM, Huib Laurens <sterkebak(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Suggestion 3: Restore the file on en.wiki if it gets deleted on
> Commons...
> > No coding needed at all.
> >
>
> This right here. It should be trivial to just have an admin restore the
> deleted file.
I am an admin, it took about five minutes to find the proper file name and
undelete it again.
HOWEVER - this was 16 months after it was deleted in the first place.
The imperfect nature of people catching such changes in watchlists is the
problem. This means that the delay until local restore can be arbitrarily
long on non-super-popular pages.
IF the Commons upload were to include the origin file / project and require
the deleter at commons to notify en.wp admins to restore it there, that
would solve the problem.
Or, alternately, we could require that the image be added to all the
constituent projects now using the file in article space upon commons
deletion (undelete on the origin, add it to the projects for other ones
that started using it). Put the onus on commons deleters to do that and
make it a policy requirement that they did.
I put wikien-l back in the cc list as these are non-technical proposals and
would require ... I guess, commons process. I don't know what the commons
list is, and am not on it to be able to post to it.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com