Wandering Soul

It was a case of miscommunication with my server admin. A minor oversight in my mail that wiped out my entire website! There was nothing left on the server, nothing at all. No blog, no photoblog, no website.

I was in a state of shock when I checked my website. I could see months of work going down the drain. It was a disaster. I did not know where to start. There was no way I could get my blogs back… Or was there?

I started thinking. And then I got a brainwave. Google should have most of the blog in its cache. That was the key. I promptly checked Google Cache by typing cache:blog.kedarsule.com in the searchbox. Lo and behold, there it was. I started checking the cache for each of my category. I could not get posts which were deeper than third page for each category, but whatever, I could get most of them back. One thing I could not get back completely were the comments, but then I couldn’t help it. I decided to make the most of whatever I could retrieve, and copied it into a word file.

Now that I had to put my blog back together, I decided to spend some time on the design front. So what you are seeing is the new version of my old blog. I have also created new categories for writing my travelogues. I have treated my photoblog to some design treatment as well. I also went on a naming spree. My blog is now called Wandering Soul and the photoblog is called Shades of Light.

So here I am, recovered from a major disaster. There are two main learnings here:

1. Be very, very careful while communicating with your Server Admin. Don’t take things for granted.
2. If you are stupid like me and manage to get your website erased, use Google Cache to recover as much data as you can. But please keep in mind that this method will work only for a short time after your site goes down. Because, once the Google spider crawls your website, and finds nothing there, it will erase your website’s data from its database.

Let’s see what makes Wiki so popular. There are many factors in favour of Wiki, but one of the most important is its free nature of content.

The main reason for Wiki’s popularity is the free nature of its content. But it’s a business model, and a business model must bring home it’s two pence in order to survive. If we consider the rare case that it is not a business model, still it will have to generate revenue to pay for the servers, bandwidth, and other infrastructure.

Wiki’s revenue comes in the form of donations from users. They have a separate page where users can donate, even anonymously. And donate they do, generously, because we have seen Wikipedia grow exponentially since it’s launch in July 2002. So the free encyclopaedia runs on donations from users or non-users.

Wikipedia, free of advertisements, and running on donations, is the epitome of web 2.0 and is extremely popular today. As on 31st March 2006, Wikipedia had 1,055,239 articles, as opposed to Britannica’s 120,000 articles. The number of articles in Wikipedia excludes redirects, discussion pages, image description pages, user profile pages, templates, help pages, portals, articles without links to other articles, and pages about Wikipedia. Well, that’s what Wikipedia says.

Users have made 48,052,327 edits, an average of 12.70 per page, since July 2002. That’s a very high number of edits per page if you ask me! Considering the edits can be additions, corrections or outright deletions of facts, the dependability of information on Wikipedia suddenly comes spiralling down. I was a little unnerved by this fact, so I decided to look deeper into Wikipedia’s way of working. I checked out their ‘About Wikipedia‘ page, where I read the following bit:

This website is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia, simply by clicking the edit this page link (with a few minor exceptions such as protected articles).

Any Tom, Dick or Harry can change the articles as they deem fit?! What about accuracy? I decided to read further.

You do not need to fear accidentally damaging Wikipedia when you add or improve information, as other Wikipedeans are always around to advise or correct obvious errors if needed.

But how many out of the 1 million odd articles could be policed by users of Wiki, and further still, how many of these users would be authorities on the respective subjects, is what I want to ask. Fearing the worst, I decided to read on.

In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles may still contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this in order to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation which has been recently added and not yet removed.

Just as I thought! But there has to be a policy in place governing the changes in articles, and who can post these changes. There must be a closed group of people who makes these policies. So I hunted for the policy page of Wikipedia, and this is what I found:

This page is an official policy on the English Wikipedia. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. Feel free to edit the page as needed, but please make sure that changes you make to this policy reflect consensus before you make them.

Even the policy page is user generated. Any one can make changes to the policy of Wikipedia as he/she chooses.

So Wikipedia obviously has its own share of troubles. There’s obviously a question of accuracy, but on second thought its not so critical. Why is that? There are two types of users coming to Wiipedia. One is a casual information hunter, and the other is a researcher. The articles browsed by the casual visitor would typically be general information, policed by a high volume of users, and would tend to be more accurate. On the other hand, topics browsed by researchers would be highly technical, not policed by many users. But then these kind of topics would be posted only by users who are quite knowledgeable in those fields.

Hmmm… so lets wait and see what Britannica does to counter the threat from Wikipedia. Will Britannica offer its contents free of cost to everyone, and generate revenue from ads and donations instead? Will Wikipedia impose restrictions on posting and editing of articles, to improve accuracy of information? Only time will tell. The battle of the encylopaedias is just starting…

There’s an old saying that knowledge increases by sharing. How true! But whether the sharing is free or paid, depends on how you choose to interpret. We are used to the old school of thought where you pay to acquire knowledge, the amount paid being directly proportional to the quality of knowledge (sometimes with a high multiplying factor). We have paid fees for school and colleges, paid for tuitions and paid for books.

I remember the day when a salesman came to our house to sell the Encyclopaedia Britannica, possibly the best single source of information and knowledge at the household level. I was small then, in the fifth grade, but yet was in awe of the loads of information contained in those volumes. The guy quoted an exorbitant price (Rs 25k) and was politely but promptly thrown out of the house. Since that day, I always wanted to lay my hands on this repository of information, and my joy knew no bounds when I discovered this encylopaedia in our secondary school library.

But a print product has its limitation, which I found out in the eleventh grade while working on a project. The information contained in Britannica was outdated as compared with the international science magazines. But this problem wasn’t incurable. The articles could be made relevant if updated regularly, and the solution was provided by the Internet.

Today the Encylopaedia Britannica is probably the most well established one on the Internet. You can subscribe to it for an annual fee of $70 (~ Rs 3k). Well that’s not such a high price to pay for relevant information.

But wait a second! Why should I pay for this information, when I can get it free of cost? After all, the Internet is continuously evolving into a user-generated free content model. The best example being Wikipedia, the free online Encyclopaedia, where users contribute articles and information, and in many languages, not just English. It recently announced the completion of 1 million articles in English, and is now fast emerging as the No 1 rival of Britannica.

User generated content is a new concept, and is far removed from the old school of thought. But here the question of accuracy of the information arises. Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wiki, maintains that the site’s accuracy is ensured through self-policing by its readers and contributors. On the other hand, Britannica taps subject matter experts to produce articles in a closed editorial system, and maintains that the accuracy and quality of these articles justify the fees.

High cost implies high quality. I know a lot of people who will agree to disagree on this statement. Nature Journal recently tallied errors in both these encyclopaedias, and came up with startling results. The experts who reviewed comparable entries found 162 factual errors, omissions or misleading statements for Wikipedia, compared with 123 for Brittanica. The article was widely seen as a validation of Wikipedia’s content and methods. The Internet, meanwhile, has made the Encyclopedia Britannica an endangered species.

Now Britannica has hit back with a 20 page rebuttal with accusations that Nature sent out re-edited, rearranged and truncated versions of Britannica entries to reviewers and included samples that were not even from its encyclopedia texts. It has even asked Nature for a public retraction of the article.

In an online world, it’s the word of the so-called experts versus the common users. Are the common users wrong? Are the experts always right? I see this as a never ending debate.

Wikipedia in itself is an interesting case. Would you believe everything that you read on Wikipedia? If you ask me, even my answer would be, “I don’t know!” Wikipedia’s credibility has been very publicly called into question. Most notably, it was under attack for an entry on John Siegenthaler that erroneously linked the journalist and former Washington insider to a pair of assassinations. But as of today, Wikipedia is gaining in popularity. Even if the content on Wiki can be generated by any Tom, Dick or Harry who has an Internet connection, and free time on his hands. Its tagline says, “The free encylcopaedia that anyone can edit.” I am a tad bit uncomfortale with the ‘anyone’ that is present in the tagline.

It calls for a closer examination of Wiki viz-a-viz Britannica which I will do in my next post. So come back soon.