The Guardian gets it half right

A recent article in the Guardian, reacting to the news that the English Wikipedia is about to hit 3 million articles, and the news that Wikipedia's growth appears to have fallen out of the logistic phase, made the mistake of, for all intents and purposes, listening to Aaron Swartz.  The first part of their piece, covering the statistical findings from PARC regarding Wikipedia's growth dropoff and increasingly hostile environment for casual editors, is all spot on, but the second part, in which they blather on about inclusionism and deletionism being a "significant battle" in Wikipedia, is significantly misinformed.  I suppose that's what they get for talking to Aaron, who has never been a significant player in Wikipedia's community.  I suppose they picked him as their "random Wikipedian" because he's something of a internet celebrity for reasons entirely unrelated to Wikipedia, and because he's got an ego larger than Montana.

The "struggle" between "inclusionists" and "deletionists" pales to irrelevance in comparison to the more serious struggles among all the pitched camps of ideologues in Wikipedia. Both "inclusionist" and "deletionist" are reasonable philosophical attitudes that one can take toward the activity of editing an encyclopedia. However, the ideologues do not fall reliably into either category, because they each individually favor including only that content that furthers their respective personal agendas, and favor deleting content that opposes those agendas.  The friction in Wikipedia's community comes largely from these ideological battles (which can be on nearly any topic, although perennial ones are the Middle East, animal rights, and Northern Ireland), not from any dispute over philosophical attitudes related to encyclopedic worth.  Wikipedia has never developed any meaningful way to resolve content disputes, so these matters usually end up being settled with one side goading the other into breaking enough of Wikipedia's polymorphic conduct rules badly enough to get themselves banned.

Unfortunately, there's no good statistics on how biased Wikipedia content is.  It's not easy to measure bias.  It's not even easy to define bias in any objective way.  At least the inclusionist/deletionist axis is simple to define and one can identify individual Wikipedians on that axis by examining their deletion votes (which, while tedious to do, presents no serious evaluatory challenge).  Given that, I suppose it's excusable that the Guardian fell for it when Aaron told them that this was actually an important division within Wikipedia and that the current factionalism of its community (which is very real) is somehow derived from that.  To be honest, Wikipedia would be a much better place if the inclusion question represented the most serious division within its community.

How The ITU Screwed Over Fiji and Swaziland

In the past I've written a bit about how amateur radio call signs (and call signs generally) are formed. Basically speaking, the ITU has allocated various prefixes to various nations, with some nations getting a lot (e.g. the US, which has all of W, N, and K, and AA through AL), and others just a few (such as Tonga, which just gets A3).

But there's two countries who really get the short end of the stick on this issue: Fiji and Swaziland, who have to share the 3D prefix between them. Technically, Swaziland has 3DA through 3DM and Fiji has 3DN through 3DZ. However, amateur radio call sign prefixes, according to the ITU's own standards, are at most two characters; a call sign that begins "3DA" is not compliant with § 30 of the ITU's standards. This puts Fiji and Swaziland into the difficult position of being unable to issue conformant callsigns to amateurs within their jurisdiction.

In practice, Fiji issues call signs with the prefix 3D2, while Swaziland has issued call signs prefixed 3D6 and (nonconformantly) 3DA0. Neither country has very many hams, but both are occasionally the target of DXpeditions, especially Fiji (due to being an island).

Still, it amuses me that Fiji and Swaziland have to share a prefix, while both the ICAO and the World Meterological Organization get whole prefixes to themselves (4Y and C7, respectively) despite not even being countries. I suppose they must have been late to acceed to the ITU treaty or something, to be singled out for such inauspicious treatment.

Are crowds really all that wise?

So I've been thinking a bit about why Wikipedia actually seems less trustworthy on so many issues than just picking random websites with a Google Search. And last night, it came to me, while arguing with someone on IRC over why I don't trust Wikipedia for most topics.

Most websites put up by most people are put up by people who are trying to tell you the truth, at least as they believe it to be. That is, they're not deliberately trying to lie to you. Now, there are some sites that are actual hoaxes, but not many, and they're often obvious, but not always. And of course there are sites that are put up by honestly misguided fools, but these are also often obvious, but not always. And there are outright propaganda sites that are deliberately lying to you (to some extent or another), and these too are often obvious, but not always.

Wikipedia's content, like the rest of the web, is no different in general character: most of its content is contributed by people who believe it to be true (although quite often they're wrong), but mixed in with that is some quantity of deliberately false information, mainly hoaxes and propaganda. It's my argument that Wikipedia is a magnet for hoaxes and propaganda, and thus that Wikipedia quite likely contains more hoax and propaganda content than the Web on average, and that Wikipedia's format makes it harder to spot hoax and propaganda content.

Suppose, for a moment, that you're someone interested in spreading hoax or propaganda content on the web. Now, you could just create a website and put your content on it. But that approach isn't going to be all that effective by itself: nobody is going to have much of an incentive to go to your website. Now, you could launch your site and then run an aggressive marketing campaign to try to draw people to your site, but even then you have the problem that your hoax or propaganda content is going to be in a context that isn't necessarily going to convince people to believe it. You might get lots of visitors (which, if you're just after pageviews, may be all you want), but you aren't likely to get many believers.

A more effective way to convince people to fall for your hoax or propaganda is to try to insert it into Wikipedia. People are already going to Wikipedia, so you don't have to drive traffic there, so no marketing campaign required. And people are inclined to believe Wikipedia because it presents itself as an encyclopedia, and people (stupidly) assume that that means some reasonable effort to maintain accuracy is made. Of course, you have to keep Wikipedia's content police from removing your hoax or propaganda, but experience has shown that this actually isn't that hard to do, especially if you can find some difficult-to-check citations to back up your claims (few Wikipedians will bother to check off-web or pay-for-view citations, for example). Unless the place where you choose to insert your hoax or propaganda material is already being closely watched by a powerful Wikipedian, odds are your content will stand for quite some time. And if you take the time to inveigle yourself into Wikipedia's "community" first (which isn't really all that hard), it might last even longer.

The difference between a random site on the Internet, and Wikipedia, however, is that for content on a random site you can evaluate that content in the context of the rest of the site; that may tend to give you an idea as to whether you can trust the author(s) of that site for reliability. Wikipedia makes this harder to do, because articles may have dozens of authors and examining each of the contributions of an individual author can be extremely timeconsuming and tedious. Most people coming across a website asserting something vaguely incredible where there was just the one page on that site and no other context in which to evaluate it, would probably reject the assertion. But come across the same assertion on Wikipedia, and most people are going to be more willing to accept it, even if that assertion is that author's only contribution to WIkipedia, because of Wikipedia's "cachet" as an encyclopedia and because of the difficulty in evaluating the trustworthiness of individual article authors in Wikipedia's context.

So, it seems to me that if your motivation for publishing on the Internet is to change people's minds on some issue, there's a real incentive for you to do so by trying to edit your viewpoint into Wikipedia instead of publishing on your own site. I'm sure I'm not the only person to think of this, and so we must assume that this is actively going on at Wikipedia, and that therefore Wikipedia content is at least as likely to contain hoaxes and propaganda as the rest of the Internet. If anything, Wikipedia should contain more such content, because it is an "attractive nuisance" in that regard: the relative ease of inserting such content into Wikipedia and getting it to stick relative to creating one's own website makes the Wikipedia option more practical, and so Wikipedia should actually be less reliable than the Internet as a whole.

Wikipedia is a great source for popular culture trivia, but it falls down on topics that involve any degree of controversy (because of the ease of using the platform for advocacy) or that require advance knowledge to effectively evaluate (because Wikipedia's content police, who are generally mostly ignorant of most issues, cannot evaluate the merits of individual contributions). Combine that with the attractive nuisance aspect for hoaxers, propagandists, and revenge-seekers, and it's no small wonder that the discerning choice when searching for information on the Internet is "-site:wikipedia.org".

"Unlimited" means "limited" at Skype

Some of the local hams have been talking about Skype a lot lately, presumably because someone introduced it to them and it is kinda neat at first and it is free in its basic incarnation. Now I used to use Skype because of a few Wikipedia-related things that made use of it, but I haven't for quite a while now.

On their front page Skype is advertising, in big letters, that you get "unlimited" calls to cell phones, mobiles, and land lines with its subscription service. But the careful reader that I am notices that there's a suspicious looking asterisk on "unlimited" and notes that there's a Marketing Qualification on that "unlimited": a "fair use policy" applies to your "unlimited use", and in fact you're only allowed 10,000 minutes a month, six hours a day, and not more than 50 distinct numbers a day.

To be fair, there are only about 40,000 minutes in a month, so in order to exceed this "fair use policy" you'd have to be on the phone six hours a day, every day, but still, that's a limit. "Unlimited" means "no limits", not "a high limit that you're unlikely to reach".

What Skype doesn't say explicitly, but is clearly intending to do, is prohibit the use of their service for commercial purposes, more specifically for telemarketing. Which is reasonable. I'm just peeved at the idea that "unlimited" has defined, fixed limits.

Still, it beats Comcast's notion of "unlimited", which is "unlimited unless we decide you're using too much according to no defined standard, in which case we'll suspend your account without warning". At least Skype sets forth a standard and tells you the consequences for exceeding them up front.

Closed repeaters: to ban or not to ban

This morning (well, by now yesterday morning), while cruising the Internet (as I am wont to do in the mornings), I noticed a link to a site called the Rain Report at which, according to Bob, had something about a petition to outlaw "closed repeaters". Getting there I didn't find a whole lot of detail except for an audio file which I was not about to take the time to listen to, and a call sign: K3BEQ, who turns out to be Murray Green. A bit more digging found not the current petition, but instead an older petition from K3BEQ on a completely unrelated topic (extending the time between required identifications to thirty minutes, which was denied by the FCC) as well as a much older proposal by WB4RTP which does have something to do with closed repeaters, and an current online petition also seeking a change in the regulations related to closed repeaters.

None of the sites I found, though, detailed Mr. Green's specific proposal, nor could I find it at the FCC or at the GPO site. Fortunately, I lucked out and found an old ARRL news article that gave Mr. Green's email address. A quick email to him and he was gracious enough to send me a copy of his petition. Calling it a "ban on closed repeaters" is perhaps a bit overstating it, but let's set some background first.

I've written a bit on this before, arguing (somewhat in passing) that closed repeaters should be refused coordination. A "closed repeater" is a repeater, set up by some group, the use of which is only available to members of that group (and invited guests), and not available for the general use of any amateur. This may be enforced by the use of selective calling methods (such as CTCSS or MDC) or merely be a matter of custom enforced by social controls, and when necessary legal threats. The principle behind this is that the repeater is the property of its owner, and its owner has the legal right to control who can use it and how, pretty much without limitation.

Most repeaters are available for the use of any amateur; if there is a CTCSS tone in use (as there often is to mitigate interference and reduce inadvertent retransmissions), it is published and widely known, and any amateur with the technical ability to transmit on the repeater's input is welcome to use the repeater as long as they do so "in accordance with good engineering and good amateur practice". However, nonsubscribing amateurs are typically not permitted to use a closed repeater, and may face the risk of civil lawsuits, criminal prosecution, and suspension or termination of their licenses, if they should use a closed repeater without permission. Closed repeaters are relatively rare in most parts of the country, but in some of the more densely populated areas (Southern California and the Potomac River Valley are two that come to mind) there are quite a lot of them; so many, in fact, that it may not be possible to get a coordinated frequency pair for a new repeater in any of the commonly used repeater bands. There's a few of them here in the Chicago area.

Mr. Green clearly believes that the situation has gone too far. (It should be noted that he lives in the Potomac River Valley, one of the most ham-dense areas of the country.) His petition asks the FCC to amend the regulations to remove the language in §205(e) to remove the language that explicitly permits a repeater operator to restrict access to the repeater and replace it with language that would prohibit anyone from "limiting the use of frequencies used by repeaters". His main argument is that the current rule is inconsistent with §101(b) (which states that no frequency will be assigned to the exclusive use of any station), and that it also results in poor utilization of amateur radio frequencies. In further support of his position, he argues that closed repeaters are intimidating to newly licensed amateurs, and may create a negative atmosphere within the community and harm the public perception of amateur radio. Unfortunately for his proposal, he provides no evidence in support of any of these claims.

Now, I'm a bit sympathetic to K3BEQ's position here, but I think there's no chance of the FCC adopting this proposal as it stands. While Murray does at least set forth an argument why the current regime creates harm, he provides no evidence of that harm, and my experience is that the FCC will generally not act on the assertion of harm without evidence to back it up. Also, he doesn't provide any clear explanation how his proposed change mitigates that harm. In addition, the language of his proposed replacement for the final sentence of §205(e), "Because repeaters and their coordinated frequencies are inseparable, and to make more effective use of amateur radio service repeater frequencies, limiting the use of frequencies used by repeaters, directly or indirectly is prohibited, except where a user blatantly violates the Commission Rules," goes much further than required to remedy the alleged harm. And, finally, there's the problem of the claim that "repeaters and their coordinated frequencies are inseparable", which is neither supported by evidence nor in fact even true.

If I were to contemplate sending a petition to the FCC on this issue, here's how I'd go about it. First, I'd get the coordination rosters for some of the more densely populated areas, such as southern California, DC metro, New York, Boston. Using those rosters, document that most or all of the available frequencies for repeaters within the repeater plans in use in those areas are currently allocated, breaking down what percentage of those allocations are to closed repeaters. Also document, by affadavit if by no other means, that many of these repeaters are silent most of the time (many of them in reality are barely more than "talking clocks"). Document, if possible, how long it takes for a new coordinated pair to become available in one of these regions. This would demonstrate a particular harm that the current system is creating, that being frequency exhaustion (a problem the FCC completely understands, since it is struggling with it constantly in the other services it regulates). Finally, document (by anecdote if by no other means) how closed repeaters conflict with the mission of the amateur radio service as set forth in §1; I know of at least one incident where a closed repeater's configuration prevented, at least for a time, the effective provision of public service communications (during a severe weather event) because of the technical measures used to restrict access to the repeater.

If the evidence thus collected does in fact show (as I expect it would) that closed repeaters are strangling frequency plans in at least some areas, preventing willing amateurs from setting up new open repeaters, and hampering the provision of public service and emergency communications, then the next step is to come up with a solution that would tend to mitigate these problems. The problem with K3BEQ's solution is that it doesn't reduce the number of "talking clock" machines taking up spectrum without actually utilizing it; it just means these people can't complain to the FCC when people use their machines (which would be a plus to the FCC, to be certain). If the data does tend to suggest that closed repeaters are more likely to be underutilized, then an argument could be made for altering the rules to prohibit a repeater station from enjoying the protection from interference granted by §205(c) unless that repeater is operated so that it is available for the use of any amateur whose is himself not violating the Commission's rules. That would then give frequency coordinators a reason to be less generous in coordinating, or to deny coordination entirely, to closed repeaters. You could still run one, but you'd be running barefoot.

Of course, another option is to petition one's local coordinating body to alter its rules so as to not coordinate closed repeaters, or to give preference to open repeaters over closed repeaters when granting coordinations (so that, e.g. a closed repeater might lose its coordination if an open repeater comes along and no other frequencies are available). However, most repeater coordinating bodies are going to be unlikely to agree to such a change, because the voting membership of these bodies is the operators of coordinated repeaters, including closed repeaters. In an area where closed repeaters dominate, such a proposal would be unlikely to gain a majority, for obvious reasons. Getting action from the FCC, as difficult and unlikely as that is, is probably easier than convincing some of the old boy clubs that are coordinating councils to change their minds on this issue.

The FCC denies virtually all petitions for rulemaking that come from amateurs, and I don't expect this one will be any different. It's still a pretty important issue, and I think one that is ripe for some attention, especially with the spectrum audit that is currently underway. We've got a large chunk of spectrum in 70 centimeters especially and there's plenty of people who'd love to grab a hunk of it.