When this happens we can look forward to a new era of fiscal responsibility and visionary leadership for a state that is sadly overwhelmed by failed ideas and big government spending.  Here are some of the insanely great public policy innovations that we can expect from the brilliant engineers at Apple:

• California is re-branded iCal.  New logos and graphic look and feel standards are instituted.
• Apple introduces the iCar, the only vehicle to pass California’s tough new vehicle usability standards and thus, the only car available for sale in the state.
• A two year contract is now required for California citizenship.
• Apple launches iTunes Liquor Store.  The Liquor Control Board mandates that all alcoholic beverages must be purchased through iTunes.  Purchases are licensed to a single household, but can be shared with up to five other iTunes users.
• A slew of trademark violation suits are filed against companies using the name California^TM without permission.

Here is a fascinating presentation about traditional media vs user generated content; the “Cognitive Surplus” created by TV. Clay Shirky answers the question that a TV producer asked him about Wikipededia – “Where do they find the time?” Transcript is located here.

1. You can not extend this analysis by inference to characterize all of Wikipedia because it represents only the most popular 0.2% of the traffic of around 50 million visitors per month.
2. 48% of articles are purely popular culture. Top categories include Pokemon, Anime, Movies, TV, Music, but there are also
3. 14% of articles are biographies. Most of these are related to popular culture, including Princess Diana, Pop Singers, Pro Wrestlers
4. 11% of articles are voyeuristic. These include the articles on Sex, erotic art, etc.
5. In the month of June, Science, History and Politcs accounted for about 28% of the top 100, but that number dropped to 23% in July. Perhaps this is a reflection of how much Wikipedia is used for school work, since summer vacation starts somewhere in that time frame for many primary school kids.
6. I filtered out certain articles such as the home page from this analysis. After filtering, the top 100 articles in June accounted for only about .2% of the total US traffic to Wikipedia (1,636,000/816,000,000).
7. Overall about 70% of the top 100 articles are about popular culture (This certainly does not mean that 70% of all wikipedia articles or 70% of all wikipedia traffic is about popular culture).
8. For one sample, I stretched the analysis from the top 100 to the top 167. The % Voyeristic went from 4% to 2.4% and other categories also changed slightly. This indicates that an analysis of the top 10,000 articles may yield different results.

One note about the data: the total article counts for July 07 is sparse for some reason. I worked around this by checking the Top 100 on July 7, July 11 and July 31. The percentage breakdown for July was pretty much the same for all three readings.

Here’s a summary data table:

In the the life sciences, the “carrying capacity” of a species is the population that an environment can support without significant negative impacts to the given species and its environment. A common example is White Tailed Deer population in the United States. In wild areas, the normal predator-prey interaction keeps deer populations in balance. In areas where people have removed predators, the deer populations can exceed the capacity of the local environment to the point where deer starve. Conversely, when the population drops below a certain point, the population is unable to sustain itself and disappears. Of course, there’s more to it than that. Modeling populations of organisms is a popular and notoriously complex subject of systems theory.

Perhaps certain collaboration “environments” also have a carrying capacity for contributors. This seems especially applicable to collaborations like a Wikipedia article where many people are contributing to a finite set of tasks (as opposed to a social network where there are as many tasks as there are people). If this is so, then there is a threshold beyond which every contributor you add to an Article actually has a negative impact on the Article’s community. Likewise when the population of contributors drops below a certain threshold, the health of the Article’s community suffers. Just as with animal populations, modeling this effect would be a complex task, since the “population” of contributors is very dynamic as is the “environment” in which the contributors operate.

Here are some interesting factoids culled from Wikipedia contributor statistics.

Compare the population of world countries to the Wikipedia contributors. In the hierarchy of users the vast majority of visitors to Wikipedia, 48 million of them, are readers; for the most part they don’t edit articles. Next are the regular contributors who contribute between 5 and 100 times per month. There are about 77,000 of those. Finally, there are the 10,000 anchor contributers (I’ve borrowed this phrase from retail marketing) who contribute more than 100 times per month.

So if Wikipedia readers are like China, then the regular contributors are like Macedonia and the anchor contributors are like the Barbados. To extend this analogy to absurd extremes, Barbados and Macedonia do all of the work, have the highest GDP and provide humanitarian aid to China!

[Update 7-16-07: Here's the spreasheet I used to calculate this data. The inspiration to make this map came from the Strangemaps blog. ]

Michael quotes from Rudyard Kipling:

I Keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who.

The rest of the article is devoted Google’s vision of “Where”. But I think there is also a hidden meaning in that particular analogy. The poem is from Just So Stories, The Elephant’s Child which is an allegorical children’s tale about the dangers and rewards of ’satiable curiosity (Kipling’s words). Here’s the full text:

I Keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five.
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men:
But different folk have different views:
I know a person small —
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!
She sends ‘em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes —
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!

The person small in this case was Rudyard Kiplings daughter, but we could easily substitute “company large and ambitious” in its place. Perhaps ’satiable curiosity is at the heart of Google’s success.

NPOV policy is summarized as: “All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing views fairly, proportionately and without bias.”

The reasoning behind the policy is beautifully written and thoroughly reasoned. Here or some of my favorite passages:

…A solution is that we accept, for the purposes of working on Wikipedia, that “human knowledge” includes all different significant theories on all different topics. We are committed to the goal of representing human knowledge in that sense, surely a well-established meaning of the word “knowledge”. What is “known” changes constantly with the passage of time, and so when we use the word “know,” we often enclose it in so-called scare quotes. Europeans in the Middle Ages “knew” that demons caused diseases; we now “know” otherwise….

…There is another reason to commit ourselves to this policy, that when it is clear to readers that we do not expect them to adopt any particular opinion, this leaves them free to make up their minds for themselves, thus encouraging intellectual independence. Totalitarian governments and dogmatic institutions everywhere might find reason to oppose Wikipedia, if we succeed in adhering to our non-bias policy: the presentation of many competing theories on a wide variety of subjects suggests that we, the editors of Wikipedia, trust readers to form their own opinions. Texts that present multiple viewpoints fairly, without demanding that the reader accept any particular one of them, are liberating. Neutrality subverts dogmatism. Nearly everyone working on Wikipedia can agree this is a good thing…

Gorman, redux: The Siren Song of the Internet

Knowledge access as a public good

and received the “CINEMA 4D WIN NON CG STUDENT/PROFESSOR” instead of the “CINEMA 4D MAC NON CG STUDENT/PROFESSOR.” In case you missed it, the kids use a Macintosh (a sweet Mac Pro – the quietest computer I’ve ever owned) but I bought the Windows version by accident. I didn’t notice the difference so I opened the box. Even though the software installs fine on the Macintosh, the serial number in the box won’t work. I found out from the Academic Superstore, the reseller, and Maxon, the manufacturer, that they won’t take a return on an open box but I can pay a $100 fine to switch the license from Windows to Macintosh. I must also sign a document promising not to use my Windows serial number. I tried to persuade them to cut me some slack for being honest but careless, but no dice. Luckily, after much groveling on my part, the reseller agreed to take back the open box for only 15% plus shipping. I am proud that I’m only paying a $55 stupidity tax instead of $100!

Obviously Maxon is concerned about software piracy but it is amazing to me that they haven’t been able to think of a better strategy than this. Software companies have more options than ever for creative distribution of their products, yet they seem to be stuck in the 1990’s. It reminds me of the Recording Industry Association of America’s battles over online music, which I hope will end badly for RIAA.

Cinema 4D is an awesome tool that is used to make movies and TV productions. Here’s one of Jonathan’s latest creations.

If this idea is correct, I think that under some circumstances, you may still view Alexa as a predictor for success since much of the growth in the population of internet users is coming from Asia.

Here’s the latest data on my Wikia watch:

According to Alexa, Wikia’s rankings were

Yesterday: 849
1 Wk Avg: 1102
3 Mo Avg: 1456