Wikipedia

Ocaasi

Joined 30 May 2010
(Redirected from User:Ocassi)



jorlowitz@gmail.com

Do research: The Wikipedia Library
Play to learn: The Wikipedia Adventure
COI editing: Plain and simple COI guide
Friendly help: The Teahouse
Grok policies: The Simplified Ruleset
Catch copyvios: Copy Patrol
Add a citation: #1Lib1Ref
Right great wrongs: Yes, RGW!

"Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism.
And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated,
joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
― Rebecca Solnit

Disclosure

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I run WikiBlueprint. We work with mission-aligned organizations and companies to help improve open knowledge, open access, public education, media literacy, and especially Wikipedia. We work at a high level of strategy, planning, coordination, training, research, and advice.

My current or past clients include:

Note: I occasionally am asked by companies to give them advice. Sometimes they pay me for this. I often tell them no, or what they cannot do. They do not always listen. I never edit or advocate on their behalf or use any tools from any account to advance their agenda.

Awards

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35,000+ This user has made over 35,000 contributions to Wikipedia.
 This user is an administrator on the English Wikipedia. (verify)
 This user is one of the 3000 most active English Wikipedians of all time.


  The Special Barnstar
Hi Jake, this is to say thank you for thinking of, creating, and building The Wikipedia Library, which we often take for granted, but before we had it, we were regularly lost without it. It was a big idea and a great idea, and we all have reason to be very grateful that you pursued it and made it happen. All the best, SarahSV (talk) 04:04, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
Barnometer™
                                                                              
noob involved been around veteran seen it all older than the Cabal itself where did my life go? oh, have to go check my watchlist...


Bio

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Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi) founded The Wikipedia Library (TWL) and ran it from 2011-2019. By the time he left the program at the Wikimedia Foundation, TWL had a half-million dollar budget and 6-person team on 4 continents. Through The Wikipedia Library, Jake developed partnerships with 70 leading scholarly publishers to provide free access to 100,000 scholarly journals and reference texts. ''All editors'' with 6-month old accounts and 500 edits now have access to those sources through the Wikipedia Library Card Platform.

Jake created the viral #1Lib1Ref (and #1Bib1Ref) citation campaigns, which now add 20 thousand new references each year from librarians around the world to Wikipedia. He started the Wikipedia Visiting Scholar program, the Books & Bytes newsletter, the Wikimedia + Libraries Facebook group, the Wikimedia and Libraries Usergroup, and the @WikiLibrary social media account.

Jake negotiated the collaboration with Turnitin to fix copyright violations on Wikipedia, started collaboration with Internet Archive to rescue 22 million dead citation links, integrated OCLC ISBN citation data into Wikipedia's reference autogeneration interface Citoid, and began the project to add Citoid to Wikidata. He developed the OAbot web app, and is a founding member of the Open Scholarship Initiative where he co-wrote "Information Overload" and "Institutional Repositories". He co-released a dataset of Wikipedia's most cited sources and the proportion of free-to-read sources on Wikipedia.

Jake created The Wikipedia Adventure interactive guided tutorial and facilitated the first-ever for-credit Wikipedia editing course at Stanford Medical School. He is an English Wikipedia Administrator. 2-time Wikimedia Foundation grantee, former Individual Engagement Grants Committee member, founding board member of Wiki Project Med Foundation, former Organizing Committee member for Wikicite, Linked Data 4 Libraries Program Committee member, and founder of the Wikimedia Foundation's Knowledge Integrity Program.

Jake has presented about Wikipedia, citations, and reliability at six Wikimanias, Stanford University, UCSF, Internet Librarian, the American Library Association, Coalition for Networked Information, Digital Library Federation, OpenCon, OCLC, and IFLA, and he convened academic library leaders in the first Wikipedia and ARL Summit.

He is a primary author of "The Plain and Simple Conflict of Interest Guide", "Conflict of Interest editing on Wikipedia", "Librarypedia: The future of Libraries, and Wikipedia", "The New Media Coalition Horizon Report for Libraries" from 2014-2017, "The Wikipedia Adventure: Field Evaluation", the Wikipedia and IFLA White Paper, "Writing an open access encyclopedia in a closed access world", ALA's "The Wikipedia Library: The world's largest encyclopedia needs a digital library, and we are building it", "You're a researcher without a library: what do you do?", the Wikipedia "Research Help" portal, "Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia", OSI reports on Information Overload and on Institutional Repositories, "The First 50 Mistakes of a Wikipedian", "The Crowdsourcing Fallacy", and the MIT Press Wikipedia @20 chapter "How Wikipedia Drove Professors Crazy, Made Me Sane, and Almost Saved the Internet."

He has been interviewed by California Institute of Integral Studies on "Inside Wikipedia", Publishers Weekly in "Discovery Happens Here", Tow Journalism School for "Public Record Under Threat", and was featured in the documentary "Paywall: The Business of Scholarship."

Since starting open knowledge Wikipedia consulting agency WikiBlueprint, Jake has been featured with Jimmy Wales on NPR's TED Radio Hour "The Public Commons". He hosted the Whose Knowledge? Decolonizing the Internet's Languages podcast ''Whose Voices?'' For the WayBack Machine, he helped change Wikimedia's Global Bot Policy to gain InternetArchiveBot Global Approval for expansion to over 300 language wikis. Jake oversaw the Anti-Defamation League's Wikipedia Election Democracy Project and led the rebrand from Open Access Button to OA.Works.

He supervised two Wikipedians in Residence at Annual Reviews, advised Harvard University on their Wikipedia Engagement, worked with the Linux Foundation to draft a key article on computer science, and taught the Wikipedian in Residence at Milton Public Library. Jake led impact and fundraising for Wiki Project Med Foundation, coordinated the Vaccine Safety WikiProject for Hacks/Hackers, and recruited and trained the Wikipedian in Residence for Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Jake oversaw the Wikipedian in Residence for Latino Culture and Community at Equis, launched Internet-In-A-Box into the Wikimedia Foundation store (and got it featured on BoingBoing), and appeared in the new book "Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online." He is the Vice Chair of the Smithsonian's working group for the Biodiversity Heritage Library and oversaw their Wikipedian in Residence program. He is also a member of the WikiConference North America Program Committee, and built the Citation Watchlist.

Jake is the author of two collections on mental health, Welcome to the Circle, and Welcome Back to the Circle. His forthcoming memoir is called You're Only as Sick as Your Secrets. He lives in Santa Cruz, CA with his wife, two kids, and two cats.


Highlights

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Quotes

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  • "I call this Revolution 2.0. Revolution 2.0 is, is - I say that our revolution is like Wikipedia, OK? Everyone is contributing content. You don't know the names of the people contributing the content ... This is exactly what happened... Everyone was contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this whole picture. We drew this whole picture of a revolution. And that picture - no one is the hero in that picture."

— Activist Wael Ghonim

  • "I'd like to say out loud that I really liked the atmosphere, that I enjoy more and more the simple fact that when we are together (chapters, WMF, affiliates, user groups, everyone) we feel like a movement, we act like a movement, we work and eat and drink and dance together and we argue much less than when we are online, typing in front of screens.

— Aubrey, President of Wikimedia Italia, on Wikimedia-l after the 2015 Wikimedia conference in Berlin

  • "And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren’t called “Wikipedia’s little helpers,” they were called “editors.” It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated. And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it having a wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen anywhere, a world wonder."

— The Charms of Wikipedia

  • "What are we going to do tonight, Brain? Same thing we do every night, Pinky, try and take over the world."

— Pinky and the Brain

  • "Silly is you in a natural state, and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again."

— Mike Myers

  • "You see, Wikipedia brings people together. It brought me together. It just takes some time for everyone to get their heads on straight, before they can see that their lives too have a mission, and an [edit] button."

— Journey of a Wikipedian

  • "So, does all this mean Wikipedia is perfect? Heck, no! What I mean is that it’s an excellent place not just to soak up the sum of all human knowledge, but also to learn how to conduct oneself in a society riven with conflict and ambiguity, where might sometimes seems to make right and in the end all one can really be certain about having the power to safeguard is one’s own integrity. Maybe that’s a dim view of the world, but when you consider all the bad things that happen every day, you know, getting into (and out of) an edit war on Wikipedia is a relatively safe and surprisingly practical way to learn some key lessons about life."

— All I Really Needed to Know I Learned Editing Wikipedia

  • "The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side."

— Paulo Freire

  • "So there was this exhilarating sense of mission—of proving the greatness of the Internet through an unheard-of collaboration. Very smart people dropped other pursuits and spent days and weeks and sometimes years of their lives doing “stub dumps,” writing ancillary software, categorizing and linking topics, making and remaking and smoothing out articles—without getting any recognition except for the occasional congratulatory barnstar on their user page and the satisfaction of secret fame. Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism—a place for shy, learned people to deposit their trawls."

— The Charms of Wikipedia

  • "In fact what Wikipedia presages is a change in the nature of authority. Prior to Britannica, most encyclopaedias derived their authority from the author. Britannica came along and made the relatively radical assertion that you could vest authority in an institution. You trust Britannica, and then we in turn go out and get the people to write the articles. What Wikipedia suggests is that you can vest authority in a visible process. As long as you can see how Wikipedia's working, and can see that the results are acceptable, you can come over time to trust that. And that is a really profound challenge to our notions of what it means to be an institution, what it means to trust something, what it means to have authority in this society."

— Gauntlett, D. (2009). Case study: Wikipedia.

How to argue well

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  • You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
  • You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
  • You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
  • Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
-Daniel Dennett

A few thoughts to remember

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  1. We are a community of very real people with deep emotions and human complexities.
  2. We are deeply invested in our project, so much so it hurts us at times even if it is also a passion or refuge for many.
  3. You never know what someone has been through, or is going through.
  4. We all need help at some point. There is no shame in needing help, asking for help, or receiving help.
  5. If you are ever feeling completely hopeless: Wait. Things really can get better. Talk to someone about it.
  6. Mental health carries a powerful stigma. The more we are open about it, the less that weighs all of us down.
  7. If we listen, we can learn from each other.
  8. We need to be kind. This is a higher calling than civility, and entirely compatible with achieving our goals.
  9. Our movement depends on its people. We are our most valuable resource.
  10. We are not finished products. With time, space, support, and practice — people can, and do, grow and change.
-Ocaasi
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Links

Tools

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Tools

Understanding Wikipedia

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Understanding Wikipedia

"Wikipedia only works in practice. In theory, it could never work."


Understanding the vandal-fighting web

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Wikipedia works because of how many people participate in creating and checking its pages. All changes go through a virtual filter--a gauntlet--of intelligent computer and human review. Thousands of people are constantly scouring new changes, and millions of readers keep an eye out for anything that seems off.

Because of this process, research studies have shown that Wikipedia is just as accurate as traditional encyclopedias, but its errors get fixed faster. We are living proof of the coders' motto that "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". In other words, many hands make anything possible!

1. Edit filter (automatic pattern rejection)

2. CBNG (machine-learning artificial neural network bot)

3. Huggle, Igloo, Lupin's filtered list (human assisted regex/badwords)

4. STiki (cbng residual feed, missed vandalism, subtle vandalism--human assisted metadata and pattern based review)

5. Article watchlists, selective page and topic monitoring by users

6. Pending changes, live version delay, reviewed by autoconfirmed users

7. Semi-protection, prevents non-autoconfirmed users from editing

8. Full protection, prevents non-admins from editing

9. Official readers, journalists and subjects of articles who report mistakes in the news (not good!)

10. Random readers, millions of individuals who fix errors when they come upon them


 

Editor

 

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