How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It

The Wikipedia is impossible, but here it is. It is one of those things impossible in theory, but possible in practice.

I couldn’t agree more: the scope of Wikipedia’s success is stupefying to me. The project can teach us many things about how we can utilise small inputs from many to create something grand.

Ayers, Matthews and Yates have written How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It and made it a free cultural work by licensing it under the GNU Free Documentation License. The complete book is freely available online at http://howwikipediaworks.com/.

They have managed to truly deliver on both meanings of the title. The book gives an in-depth explanation of how Wikipedia literally works (i.e. the syntax, the software, categories, templates and more) and how it can work as a community based collaborative effort (through philosophies, guidelines, processes and policies).

After reading it, I now have a much better understanding of the project as a whole, including the other Wikimedia projects, while also understanding that there is much more to learn about the five pillars of Wikipedia which summarise Wikipedia as a website, a mission and a community:

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (not anything else).
Wikipedia has a neutral point of view.
Wikipedia is free content that anyone may edit. (All Wikipedia content is freely licensed and free of charge, and content is freely editable.)
Wikipedia had a code of conduct. (Editors should behave civilly toward each other, this includes my favourite: Assume good faith)
Wikipedia does not have firm rules. (The editing community can change the rules, this is also known as Ignore all rules).

The book is very valuable for educators. One of the best chapters outlines how to evaluate the quality of an article. By using different techniques, including looking at the history of a page, checking the backlinks to an article, taking account of the warning messages and verifying the sources, you can quickly judge the value of the information (for more on this see Researching with Wikipedia). Teaching students how to do this could push the discussion about allowing students to use Wikipedia as a source for research to another level. Even more interesting is make working on Wikipedia an assignment for your students. If I was teaching in tertiary education right now, I would be sure to do this. It will teach students more valuable skills than an essay only written for the professor’s eyes could ever do. There is group of Wikipedians happy to help and set up these kind of projects.

In short: read this book!

Finally two random (but Wikipedia related) links that I enjoyed and want to share with you:

Pediapress. A print on demand service for selections of Wikipedia articles. Create your own books by picking the articles you like to have in it and have it shipped to you for a very reasonable price. Selections by others are available through their catalogue. Try Educational Technology for example.
An interesting essay, found through the book, about avoiding instructional creep:

The fundamental fallacy of instruction creep is thinking that people read extremely long, detailed instructions. What’s more, many bureaucracies also arise with the deliberate intent to be alternatives to regulations; this is almost always noticed by the other side, and tends to antagonize.

Something to always stay aware of!

Does Shock Therapy Work When Teaching about Safety?

Not too ago I participated in a course on how to drive a forklift truck. Part of the course was a classroom session in which the facilitator seemed to enjoy nothing more than telling anecdotes about terrible forklift accidents. Those anecdotes left a deep impression on me and they have made me much more careful whenever I am driving a forklift truck. However they also paralysed my partner (who owns the business that uses the forklift), making her completely nervous when she has to drive it.

I was reminded of this course when I chanced upon the following safety video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6srFWdsovio]
(actually the video that I saw had even more gore, but has now been removed)

In the Netherlands we have had a campaign for years that warns people not to be careless when dealing with fireworks. The slogan is “Je bent een rund als je met vuurwerk stunt” (meaning something like: “You are an idiot when you play around with fireworks”). The initial campaigns were very shocking with posters and videos of damaged limbs. I couldn’t find any of the original materials, but did find this photo from a news article:

Slogan on the poster in the background: "...Stuffed 30 firecrackers in a football..."

and this TV ad::

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sxq7zfS9Ms]
“Old year’s eve, we are ready for it. You too?”

The campaign has now lost its shocking edge and tries to make its point by alluding to what can happen to your virility when you have an accident:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfvyMi2Isl4]
“Gentlemen, never keep fireworks in your pockets”

Talking about virility is now an oft-used trick in trying to stop people from doing things. It is used in this UK anti-smoking ad for example:

These last two campaigns are obviously geared towards men (so was the forklift course by the way: the facilitator could not stop making offensive sexist jokes) and I wouldn’t be surprised if men in general need a different campaign than women when they need to be scared into (not) doing something.

I would be very interested to hear about any research that has been done into teaching about safety. It would be great if people have tried to answer questions like:

Is is possible to change people’s work behaviour by scaring or shocking them with graphic examples?
If yes, does this change in behaviour last and does it make them more careful or too careful (to the point of paralysis).
Are there relevant cultural and gender differences when trying to teach about safety?

Does anybody have some pointers or opinions?

Dutch Moodlemoot in Amsterdam 27-05-2009

The Dutch Moodle users group (Ned-Moove) organised the fifth Dutch language Moodlemoot in Amsterdam last Wednesday. It was a successful event with nearly a hundred people attending and two excellent keynote speakers: Helen Foster and Martín Langhoff. Helen is Moodle’s community manager and Martín is an important core Moodle developer and currently architect of the school server in the OLPC project.

The programme of speakers was better than in any earlier Dutch moot, with tracks about education, business, digital pedagogy and sysadmin/development tracks. Nowadays events like this leave digital tracks and can be relived in a way through the Twitter messages, blog posts and shared slides. My ex-colleague and friend Marcel de Leeuwe wrote an interesting (Dutch) blog post about his experiences at the moot that includes his slides and my co-Ned-moove-board-member and friend Arjen Vrielink did a conceptual talk about Moodle networking. Many of the other speakers have put their slides online at the Moodlemoot 2009 website.

Moodle in the Netherlands finally seems to be taking of outside of secondary education. About half of the visitors did not come from the educational sector:

Sectors/Visitors at the Dutch Moodlemoot

My own presentation was less about Moodle and more about learning this time. I talked about instructional principles that can be used to make sure you deliver top quality blended learning. The slides and audio are in Dutch and can be downloaded as a 5.3MB PDF file or viewed here:

[slideshare id=1513758&doc=090527willitblendslideshare-090531151216-phpapp01]

All in all a great event. I am looking forward to next year, it will most probably be in Belgium.

Where is IMDB’s API?

I really like the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). It is the largest freely available database of movie related data. I use it mainly for two things:

Whenever I see an actor or actress in a movie and cannot remember in which movie I have seen that person before. IMDB list all the actors/actresses in the movie and allows you to click on the name of each person. On the page of the person it will then show you all the movies in which they played a role.
Whenever I am in video store and need to know whether the movie that I am about to rent is any good. IMDB has a ratings systems that can give you a good general idea of the quality of the movie.

This post will be about the second use case. In the video store I use the Internet connection of my mobile phone. This is a tedious and often infuriating process, especially when you want to look up multiple titles. IMDB’s pages are huge (they have many images and ads), and this makes them load very slowly. In case of an ambiguous title two pages need to load before you can see the rating. Let’s look at an example. If I search for “pulp fiction” I get the following page:

I then have to click on the “Pulp Fiction” link to see the IMDB page which has the rating:

After another angry session at the video store, I decided to do something about it. First I looked for a mobile version of the IMDB website. There are some available options (see here and here), but they are geared towards iPhones and don’t really work well.

Next I decided to write my own small web application and tried to find the IMDB API. It doesn’t exist! Unfortunately there is no way to easily use and re-purpose IMDB’s data. I don’t understand why some web companies (in this case Amazon) still don’t realise that this actually inhibits the building of their brands.

Luckily there is always one last option: screen scraping. I was actually willing to try and write my own parser for this (would be great practise), but found Izzysoft‘s IMDBPHP class which makes this easy work. This class allows you to get a lot of data about each movie.

After about two hours of programming I now have the following result. I call it Rent it?:

I tried to design it to be as fast as possible and made it fit for purpose using the following design considerations:

I used a big input field at the top of the screen, with a big button underneath. This input field is also shown on the results pages, so that it is always easy to start a new query. The field gets automatic focus as soon as the page finishes loading.
Only relevant information about each movie is shown: rating, title, year, director, run time in minutes and a user generated plot outline. The title links to the original IMDB page which will open in a new window.
The standard IMDB score is converted to a percentage and gets a background colour on the basis of the height of the rating. Red has a rating of less than 60% (not worth watching), whereas movies with green ratings are above 70% and could be interesting.
The pages are very light: no ads or images. All the processing is done on the server. If a search has many results, then this processing can still take a while. That is why the number of results are capped at five and results are cached for a week (also on the server to benefit everybody).

I hope you are willing to try it out and look forward to any of your feedback!

Try “Rent it?“

Rent it? is also accessible through my mobile start page.

Moodle Presentation at the Institute of Social Studies

Last week I had the pleasure of giving a talk at one of the Institute of Social Studies‘ educational lunch sessions. In one and a half hours I talked about free software in general, about the things that make Moodle a great project (in this case mainly its philosophy and its license) and about how Moodle can be utilised best in tertiary education.

The slides and audio are available on SlideShare (or as a 4.8MB PDF file) and embedded below:

[slideshare id=1469310&doc=090520moodleisspresentation-090521070937-phpapp02]

If you already know about free software and Moodle and are only interested in practical ways of using Moodle in your courses, start at slide 52.

Feedback is more than welcome as always!