Transcripts For CSPAN Wikipedia And Congress 20140823

[captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] issue spotlight with in depth look at Veterans Health care Student Loan Debt and campus sexual assault. Includes fighting Infectious Disease and food the. Find our tv schedule one week in advance at cspan. Org. Let us know what you think about the programs you are watching. College that 2026063200. Join the conversation. A look at congressional transparency using wikipedia followed by a joint town hall anding with Nancy Pelosi Jared huffman. Later a discussion about u. S. Relations with northeast asia. The Cato Institute hosted a discussion about the potential for increasing congressional transparency using wikipedia. The speakers included people who post and edit wikipedia information. This is one hour. Welcome. Im the jerk are Congressional Affairs at the Cato Institute. He likes to point out that there are hits about bills in congress. The whole i wikipedia say that people that work with members and are largely not editing the website that a large segment of the American Population used to get information about congress. What we have here is a huge manner in which government can deliver transparency. There is little history and legislation. This works and issues such as privacy, and telik indications, transparency, security. He was the jerk during of information on the he was the director of from racial policy. She is a legislative researcher at the Cato Institute. Additionally, she is editing wikipedia since august 2012. Just. 300 articles, most of which are legislation. Finally we have jim hayes. He is a graduate for george mason in diversity. Now over to jim. Im very pleased to be here and to have you all here as well as the cspan audience. We can do a lot to advance the ball on transparency in congress. The issues are very interesting. Wikipedia editing for Congressional Staff. There is an aversion to editing wikipedia and a mistrust within the community for edits coming from congress. We can improve the information that is available to any American People about what happens here. I want to open by doing a brief history, the sort of modern history of the transparency issue and the work we have been doing at cato, before i turn it over to michelle and then jim. Michelle obviously has the numbers to prove that she can make a talented and capable wikipedia and we want to make others as good as michelle at producing information for people together to get insight into what people are into what is happening inside congress. What is going on within transparency . Ive been working on it longer. Since 2000, i run a website called washingtonwatch. Com. It has had a lot of traffic. 200,000 comments on a single bill for example. Really impressive stuff. But really, the transparency project has never taken off like it could. That is basically because the data is not available. I was excited when president obama was first elected with the promises of transparency that he made. Goodfaith promises, and i think a goodfaith effort was made within the first couple of years of the Obama Administration to deliver on transparency. But a basic problem existed, and that is people did not really know how to deliver transparency. How does it deliver on the oversight that we want for the public today . I have seen a slowdown in the transparency efforts during the Current Administration also and i wrote a couple of pieces that are available on the desk outside. What do you have to do with the ask on the transparency side . What we want them to be doing to provide transparent data . We need the authority. It has to be available from an authoritative voice, so people know where to get it. Availability and completeness. That is, you want all of the relevant data in a given area. You want it to be up all the time come and to stay in one place of there can be a consistent datastream and website apps and Information Services can be built on a datastream that is reliable. Of course, the machine for searching is important. Google and other crawlers need to be able to find the data and deliver it to people. The most important part is machine readability. Structuring the data so that it is usable. A subsequent publication is grading the governments information availability practices. Grading the legislative process, the budget and appropriations process. The grades are generally fairly poor. There have been steps taken in the congress and in the a new lawtion recently passed called the data act that may well improve those great those grades quite a bit. In a study we are about to commence, again, regrading the availability of data, the numbers will still be fairly poor. Actual data about what is going on in congress is not readily available. Actual data about the budgeting is not readily available. But over the years, we have set to work at cato trying to make some of that data available. You can follow our work on these bills on twitter. Cato. Org Resources Data is where the data is downloadable in bulk, or through the api. What we do is gather xml versions of the bill from the Government Printing office, and then the using highly customized software, we add xml that indicates when there is a reference to an existing law in all of the ways that reference might exist. When it is referencing a bureau, we add the data automatically available for those who want to parse and find it. We have a bill when we have a bill that contained spending, or an authorization of appropriations, or an appropriation, we also make that available as data. The publishing of these bills and making them available for anyone to use, and the data that we are starting to see, for example, the Washington Examiner has a page called appropriate appropriations. They are displaying to their users the existence of the bill bills that propose to spend money. A few months ago when this came out, this was the first time anyone could systematically find what bills in Congress Proposed to spend taxpayer dollars. It is surprising and fascinating that there was no systematic way of learning when congress was proposing spending. But the appropriate appropriations page on the Washington Examiner uses that data within these bills to make that available to the public, positioning for better oversight of the congress. The New York Times is a better user of this data. You do tracking of legislation, votes, and such. On pages about legislation there, there is a section in the lower right called mentions. They use the references that we had to agencies and bureaus to show what agencies are mentioning what bills. If you are interested in what is happening at the department of labor, or the Environmental Protection agency, the data we produce allows you to see all of the bills that affect these agencies. And i mentioned that references to existing law is another thing we mark up in all the ways that congress refers to them. The Legal Institute at cornell has begun using this data to let their visitors know that when they are visiting a page of the u. S. Code, that code is subject to amendment by the u. S. Congress. It is a link that brings people really important information. We have relatively sophisticated people going onto the cornell law website and many of you familiar with that and many people out of the land are familiar with that. It is usually the top searchers when you are searching for u. S. Code. When you are on one of those pages and the section of code you are looking for is up for amendment in congress, they are giving you a link to that. You can go to congress. Gov and look at the bill must find out who authored it, and where it is in the process. Look at the bill, find out who authored it, and where it is in the process. That will be important democratic links for those who are looking for the code and the legislation that is pending. They may be able to offer educated opinions on what congress is doing and improve democratic processes. We at cato are also using the data on wikipedia. I come now to the subject of todays topic. We take the data that is produced in deep bills and we produce info boxes that we use on legislative pages. Youre probably familiar with the info boxes on wikipedia that might summarize an individual or movie star, political actor, what their party is, what their career has been, so on and so forth. Wikipedia info boxes can show in a discrete way what is going on with a particular bill. Those are produced with deep bill data as well. And to sort of highlight what is going on with wikipedia now, we have created a twitter bot that is a riff on the congress at its bot. Ngress edits Twitter Congress recently came out with a great deal of interest in this. It tracks anonymous edits coming from capitol hill. That is interesting information. There has been a little bit of backandforth and forth between one or more anonymous editors, and the community at large because the Community Seems to , be trolling the edits that they do. It is interesting stuff. Someone edited them i believe, the Cato Institute page on wikipedia anonymously on the hill about this event happening. It was kind of meta and we saw our minds exploding when that happened. It tracks all edits, not just those coming from the hill. You can see the bot at wiki bills. You can see what legislation is being edited. You can take a look at what people are doing with bills and find those there. Many of the edits are coming from michelle, who does so much work. We are trying to make government more legible. We are trying to make it more available. Editing wikipedia is a way of doing that. Getting the notable bills up there, getting them written about, so people when they are doing a search to find out what is going on in congress can go to that resource, which is so valuable for so many things. And at least start their investigation there. As john mentioned, there has been reticence on the congressional side to wikipedia, to edits wikipedia, and that has to do with history early on. There was controversy, because people from the hill, people from Congressional Offices were going in and editing the pages of the members of congress that they work for. There would be back and forth and there were conflicts of interest in doing that. Generally, there is. There is a version to wikipedia editing on the hill. There is suspicion of wikipedia editing from the hill on the part of the wikipedia community. But we think that suspicion can be abated, if not gotten rid of them entirely. But it will be hard. There are customs and rules on wikipedia against rules against conflict of interest, for example, but i think have to be navigated very carefully. Michelle is going to talk about this culture. She is very highly decorated within wikipedia. Im very pleased with her work. Her experience of the culture is an experience that others have had. Theres a lot of controversy that goes into these bills. We will have more discussion around what the rules are and how to navigate the process. We very much like to see Congressional Offices flipped from aversion to embrace wikipedia. After a sort of initial phase of concern and worry and suspicion, i think things will change dramatically and wikipedians will come to expect that the members of congress are sharing with the public in the best possible way ways to introduce congressional legislation. The question is, which will which Congressional Office will step up and start editing wikipedia first . I dont know if michelle will talk about that, but shes here to talk about her experience. Thank you for coming. In the last year and a half i have written 330 nine original wikipedia articles, most of which were about congressional legislation. In march, 2013, we had a meet up with wikipedians and the transparency activists within d. C. And sat down to talk about how we can use the deep bills data that jim just described in a way to make the wikipedia boxes on wikipedia better. And include more information. One of the things we discussed that day was how we determine if a piece of legislation is notable. Obviously, the person who introduces it hopes that it is notable. They put it there for a reason. But with 10,000 pieces of legislation in a congress, we cannot really do wikipedia articles on all 10,000. One of the lines that we decided on at this meeting and have held to is that pieces of legislation are notable if they come up for a floor vote in the house and senate. That is several hundred bills so far in this congress. And we have articles about 350 of them. Obviously, there are many more that we do not have articles about. One of the things ive noticed as i do this, is that you can track to hit count an article gets, and you can track exactly who the editors are of an article. I can tell you that when we write an article, post it out there, put it in the article people read it. Especially bills like immigration bill, farm bill, those get attention. If you search for the bill name, your article is up on the first page of the google hit. People can find it and they use wikipedia as a source of information. They will go there and read the article. The problem is, once you put the article up there, there are some hardcore wikipedians they come by and do some maintenance on the article. Very little Additional Information gets added. That is what we would like to see people on the hill do. You guys know more about these pieces of legislation than anyone does. You have personal and professional interest in their thing correct information for the general public in the bill and why the information is good or bad or terrible and how it can be improved. Who have both the information and sort of an incentive to add to these articles. What wikipedia can provide is, one, a knowledge of the rules, and the culture of wikipedia. How to maintain neutrality in an article. How to ethically address conflicts of interest situations. How to spruce up the article by adding images and maps that show the vote counts for which states or which District Voted for or against a piece of legislation, and how to make cool info boxes. That is something wikipedians can add, but we still need people from the hillside, experts and policy, experts to add to the comments side. We had a situation where bill was passed. There was no accurate total of, you know, bob voted yes, john voted no. You can make a map of visually who voted yes and no. But there was a guy who just cap kept putting a map on there. It turns out he was using data from a vote taken on a bill by the same name, but from the 112th congress. And he did not notice the difference. That is something where we need people who are experts, like yourselves, to do and help us out with. That is also a thing that can come up with multiple versions of the same bill with different titles, but have completely different contents. That is something wikipedians dont necessarily understand, but staffers would. Staffers would understand a legislative vehicle they go straight over the head of wikipedians. I think its a very valuable project. If you think about a piece of legislation, even if you can pull a summary of it from someplace like the Congressional Research servers, it will not necessarily make sense to a layperson who does not have deep knowledge of that issue. And the great part about wikipedia is that you can make a link to all of the concepts and agencies and organizations and locations and places that are in the summary. They are studying up on their congressperson to decide if theyre going to vote for that guy again. He can go in and look at the legislation and say, i dont know what a hydropower dam is, but i can click on this link in wikipedia and read about what that is. I would love to see more people edit wikipedia. I think there are good reasons to. Hopefully, jim will be able to tell you some about wikimedia d. C. , which is a group that knows wikipedia really well and would love to partner with you guys to help staffers and people with knowledge to edit in a strong and knowledgeable way. Helpful way. Jim . Thanks for coming. Thanks, cato. We really enjoyed our editathon with you. We look forward to more collaboration in the future. By way of background, wikipedia i mean, it seems ubiquitous, and that is where everyones page hits go. But keep in mind that the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit and they run the servers and software and are based out of san francisco, but all the content is written by volunteers. We have a local chapter of volunteers called wikimedia, d. C. We are very active trying to have local funds for itathons with local organizations including through , the Cato Institute, and we have worked with the smithsonian and international archives. Conflict of interest has a long history on wikipedia. There is an article you can read about it that gives you all the gory details. Conflict of interest on editing on wikipedia. In 2006 and congress was part of that. There were some good takeaways from that and some good examples. There was an article about congressman joe wilson that was a precursor to some of the conflict of interest rules where staffers put content on the top page, and then it was incorporated in the article and the article was relatively good quality after that. That is on your handout, some of the concepts about neutral point of view and conflict of interest. Things have become more formalized over time. Now, there is a nice, long, written policy about conflict of interest. The idea is to give you some best practices of how to do fax fact correction in articles, if you find something that is not correct them even if you have a conflict. The idea is to register your account, declare your potential conflicts of interest on the user page, and then make the comments on the talk page. And also, if you need help editing, there are some good suggestions on your handout. We would also suggest there is a forum on wikipedia called the teahouse. That is a nice place to go for some semirealtime help. Friendly people will help you out if you have concerns. And also, if you want more hands on help, come to our some some of our local events. New tonight backstage pass you get a nice backstage pass. There are many social media people there and we can help you with your concerns about editing. A lot of this conflict of interest is also tied into some pr controversies that have occurred on wikipedia. There are certain Public Relations firms and there is kind of a spectrum there and some bad actors who are creating a bad atmosphere on wikipedia. Some local folks have gotten together with a donovan house agreement with a lot of Public Relations firms and there is a statement on wikipedia on from participating firms and that is something we might consider among staffs and have a statement for people to sign on to. It is reaffirming the existing policy. It helps to foster a sense of cooperation, and perhaps do some cultural management there among wikipedians. Also, conflict of interest has been incorporated within the terms of use. The foundation is in charge of the servers. They have started formalizing conflicts in the terms of use. It is giving you more tools to deal with bad actors, and part of the editing practice would be to differentiate your edits from what bad actors might do. Also, one thing that our chapter does in the spring is we do wiki loves capitol hill. We have been having some conversations with the staff of the ip subcommittees. However, if you are interested in talking with us in the spring, we would be happy to talk to about that. I am looking forward to questions and i would be happy to expand if you have general concerns. Thanks. Before john gets up and takes over as master of ceremonies, im curious to know among people in the room, who among you feel you are experienced wikipedians and you edit fairly regularly. Ok, we have five or six. And the rest of you, you know what wikipedia is, i take it, but not regular editors. Good to know. Thanks. Actually, of those who raise hand, who here is a hill staffer . That is interesting. For those who did not see, only two. That raises a good point. We have plenty of time for questions if anyone has any. I will just say i will take moderators privilege and take preference and take the first question. I was on a hill not too long ago, and even though i might be open to the idea of editing wikipedia, lets say my boss is ok with it and all of that, wikipedia still has a sort of stigma to it where you would not cite it on a college paper. It may not be accurate. It may not be the best place for a source. Have you had hill staffers come to you with that concern . How do you address that . I know for sure there are hill staffers that edit wikipedia. A couple of them commented on a discussion i was having with them people what we are planning this event, that they were very interested in knowing about the event. The twitter bot that captures edits from anonymous edits from the house and ip addresses and senate ip addresses prove there are people from the house editing wikipedia. I think anyone who looks down on wikipedia needs to reconsider their mindset. Wikipedia is one of the six most heavily trafficked websites in the world. And your constituents use it. Its ok if your College Professor doesnt want to cite the article. Your College Professor is not really your audience when you are editing wikipedia. You are editing it to speak to people who will go to your town hall and ask you questions about the legislation you voted for. And they are the people who are going to donate to your campaign, and to help you out and who you are supposed to be helping in turn. It is ordinary people who read wikipedia, and most of the world is full of ordinary, normal people. We are the people who care about wikipedia. The other thing i would point to is wikipedias rules regarding citations have improved over time, and people are much more vigilant about properly citing information i goes into wikipedia than they used to. I that is something i would encourage any of you as staffers or anyone at all editing wikipedia, cite your sources. Cite your sources. Cite your sources. If you use proper citations, which there is a little button. You pick the button and tell it whether you want to cite a book, website, or newspaper, and then you fill in the blanks and it does all of the citation for you. If you do that, people cannot accuse you of making things up. They have a hard time deleting information that you have added, because you have shown where it came from. I think that adds to the legitimacy as well. Sure, you dont cite wikipedia in your college paper, but you do look there first and you find all the citations and use those as information. On that subject, i will share a story from some years back. Understanding the value of wiki editing, or wiki style editing, it is quite a while back now i added to washingtonwatch. Com. Wiki editing capability. It is not wikipedia, but a capability still exists today on the site. I went around on the hill and talked to some friends and said, you know, hey, this is a chance for you to put on Public Record a really good description of your bill. Your bill can access a lot more people this way. And you will be able to give them the story directly. How does congress to indicate with the public now . Communicate with the public now . You are still very much intermediated by the press. You have someone in the press. You reach out to them to try to get a story written. You try to get it favorably done. It is completely summary information. Andtimes it is highquality sometimes lowquality. You have people come to your individual member website, yes, but the flow of information out to the public about legislation is rather poor. On the other side, you have a lot of people who are highly suspicious, because the flow is so poor. The information they have is widely varied and not very reliable sources in many cases. There is a lot of distrust. The instinct on the hill has been not to want to actually engage. I had a friend it was in jest, but a friend said, o, the last thing we want is for the public to actually know what we are doing up here. It was in jest, but it was based on the fact that often, the loudest of the members of the public are the most distrustful. There is an and cystic antagonistic relationship between congress and the public at large. But that can be flipped. And i think straightforward, meritorious information about the hills can be communicated to the public. Likewise accurate counterarguments can be communicated to the public through wikipedia. You have to really work at it. The community of editors and authors will sometimes joust with one another on how to get characterize given issues or given provisions of given bills. But out of that jousting, the competition, youll get very good information. Wikipedia handles some of the most controversial debates. People work very hard to choose words carefully, to choose the structure of articles very carefully, so the debate is accurately represented on wikipedia. You cannot go to wikipedia and use it to win debates. You just accurately represent the debate, and from that challenge comes good information for the public to use. It presents an opportunity for a seachange in transparency about what the hill is doing. A sea change in Public Attitudes about what the government is doing. As john stated at the beginning, and i believe this as well, this help position the public to the congress of what they want. They will be able to communicate accurately, communicate about specifics rather than phone banks coming from the home district. You will get people calling saying, hey, i understand that hr 1234 does x, y, and z, and its up for Committee Vote next week. Here is what i think about it. How much better would that be than those wonderful phone banks ,here people call up and say ive been told to tell you etc. , etc. It is an opportunity. Any other questions . What is the gap that cato has filled about what congress is doing and its relationship with what wikipedia is doing . Im sorry, could you repeat the question . The gap in information between congress gap between what congress is doing and what the public knows is going on. Michelle, how many pages do you have up on wikipedia from this project . Congress not very , many. Those that existed were repeat multiple congresses. Since i had an article the violence against women act had an article. The original bill had an article. A few it is not very many. There is one for equal Employment Rights for gay people. The employment nondiscrimination act. Yes. There are about 10 or so. They preexisted us adding. Bills that have come up yearoveryear, they had articles. And sometimes, they would accurately represent one congress and the next bill in the next congress, and so on and so forth. But as for systematic reporting on major legislation from congress, virtually none. A bill would go by without any article at all on wikipedia. Now we are getting them there. And as michelle said, we need to get those articles fleshed out so there is more Information Available to the public. Or take the National Defense authorization act. There is one of those every year, as i recall. They have articles on many of those, but one particular year, the article will be 5000 words. You know, fairly lengthy. And the Previous Year it will be three sentences long. I think most of us would consider each year to have equal weight and equal importance to our country. Just getting more information and making sure that we write a more robust article every year is something that is important. Yeah, but i would say the gap is summary style of what is going on on the hill. You are well aware of the specialized media that is around tracking things, but i dont think its getting to the web in an easy to digest or find method for the average person. Theyre obviously googling trying to find out about bills, but how do we mediate between that search to lead them to the more specialized references . That is the gap we are filling in. The problem is, a lot of this ends up being event driven. You have a relatively good editor that writes about this one year and then does not come back the next year to do the same thing. One thing that is important is the conflict of interest. How you might handle it. You work in a Congressional Office. I dont want to talk about editing members pages. That is an issue that has been hashed over. It is probably a bad idea to edit members pages. But you could. How about legislation . You work for a member of congress. Your member of congress had legislation introduced. You know a lot about it. And you could provide a lot of information. But on the other hand, there may be a conflict of interest with the page. What is your thinking on whether there is a conflict of interest and what to do about it . Of the conflict of interest rules is that your Mindset Matters as much as your actual technical conflict. If you are just editing your site and going to remove all counter arguments, all information from your opponent. You will act like 100 of the world is behind this bill, that would be a conflict of interest. You are not treating the topic ethically or fairly. I would say, your first step if youre going to edit a piece of legislation, or any article, really, is you should join and become a user. You dont even have to give the website and email address. Just a username and a password. This is good because it gives you accountability. If you are logged in, every edit you make is tracked to that account. I mean this not confused with edits made by other people. You can establish, yes, i am a Good Community member, and even though i am editing from this same building as this jerk over here, his edits are different. That can keep others from saying, you did this good at it here, and here, but you did these terrible ones, so we are blocking you. Having your own user account is important. Another thing you can do is write on your own user page. It is kind of like your profile, and you can write on that just like any other profile about yourself will serve you can write who you are on this page. You can say, i am bob, i work for congressman such and such, and im interested in these fields. You can say what your credentials are. Like, i have a bachelors degree in Agricultural Economics will economics. That is interesting information for anyone who read your edits, because they can say, oh, they studied this in school. They know a lot about it. You can give you credentials. Establishing editor accounts also improves other peoples perceptions of you, because you show more commitment to the website. People take you more seriously. They can also reward you by giving you these things called barn stars, or cookies. That can be good. It also allows you to build relationships with people. By doing that, you establish that you want to join this community and be in good standing. The next thing you could do is if you are really unsure and you really dont want to make any mistakes, because you could edit on the talk page instead of on the main page. Behind every wikipedia article is a page called a talk page. That is for people, editors to write about the article without writing the article. They can say, hey, i found this paragraph in here and it is total junk and its a bunch of lies by our filthy appointment opponent, and we want it taken out. And the editor would say, well, you shouldnt say filthy, but i think youre right. Or they can have this whole huge battle. You can be more cautious right on the talk page. If youre ready to go anything you have good information and you will contribute well and are comfortable with doing it, you can just edit the main page and make sure you cite your sources. Wikipedia, and i think i listed this on the worksheet, has very clear guidelines for what good and bad sources are. Anything from the Mainstream Media premuch counts as a good pretty much counts as a good source, and from books and journals, things like that. If you cite your sources, use neutral phrasing, and say, this is such and such group or persons opinion instead of saying this is true, then you have been helpful. Most have a watch feature. You can if you are logged in as a user, you can watch a page. Which means if you go to your watch list, you can go to the most recent edits from the last three to seven days that are on your watch list. People can watch the page you did, and if they agree with your edits, they will let it go. If they hate your edits, they can change them immediately. That is one of the best parts about wikipedia. It is a selfgoverning society, and it protects you and your opponents, and cuts down on some of the political fighting because people are viewing what youre doing, and they can undo your work if you are not behaving appropriately. Yeah, i would say, if its a bill that you have an ax to grind, you definitely have a conflict there. It is important to try to maintain a neutral point of view, which is another policy. Yes, top ages, people dont know that they are there, but yes, please, lets use them. There is a process we are supposed to follow called edit, revert, talk. If someone reverts your edits, please dont unrevert. Then you are edit warring. Please go to the talk page and try to engage in a discussion about what your issues are. The idea is that we are supposed to be writing an encyclopedia that is based on facts. And we are going to now have a metadiscussion about what the facts are, and then try to mediate with the best references to make an argument about what the facts are. I think the panel did a good job of talking about how people who are knowledgeable can become more engaged, and improve public and government, essentially. I think what is on most staffers minds im not really being paid to engage in public debate. I am being paid to promote my bosss work. May come across as a conflict of interest. What benefits are there to Congressional Staffers, and maybe can clarify with some bills that are being attacked in the media . Could you elaborate on war tangible benefits that would encourage a staffer to go out and become more engaged . I think the battle over legislation, and i think most people know this, it is largely fought and built on a terrain that is built out of talking points. It is a contest of talking points, a contest of getting favorable constituencies or authorities to weigh in on your side. It is really not as high a quality debate as we all would like to have. I think wikipedia allows you to provide information and allows for the public, the actual constituents, to access information and make up his or her own mind. I think quality articles about bills will convince or dissuade people on the merits, and all of them will be happier with the opportunity to do that than they are now where there opportunity is to choose what team they are on, or what ideology is theirs. There are facts about what is happening in congress. There are facts that can be gathered and arguments that can be organized so people can carefully consider what is happening. There doesnt seem to be a lot of opportunity for a lot of again, theuse consensus out there is actually anger and discomfort. And to indicating with the people in the land is actually what often brings back that discomfort or anger. But i think you will find people are motivated and concerned about wanting what is best for the country, and they are more willing to work toward consensus than they would fight. Most of what happens in this debate is about fighting. It is very attractive to fight for some people. But theres a great mass of people out there who want what is best for the country and they want a way to productively work toward that. I think, informing them through wikipedia would facilitate that kind of democratic deliberation. Yes . There have been some questions around the twitter bot. And since then and the last month or so, week and a half, there have been questions about edits in the house, ip addresses being blocked. Do you think this is a good thing for transparency, or does this discourage people from editing because congress edited x, y, and z, or does it encourage people to edit wikipedia more . On the whole, i think its good to Congress Edits twitter its a good thing, the Congress Edits twitter bot, because it spurs discussion. The discussion is profitable and worth having. On the other hand, it is not a full win, because there are anonymous edits that are not as good, and certainly not as well trusted as edits by users who are logged in. Anonymous edits coming from the hill, they are immediately cast with the likelihood that there are low quality edits and inappropriate edits that have to be reversed. I dont know the intentions of the designer of the bot, but perhaps it was to show that congress is monkeying around with wikipedia. There is another way to do things, and that is why we created wiki bill. Its in the same spirit. I dont think Congress Edits are all bad. But wiki bills, our bot, is just meant to show edits happening to legislation. It doesnt matter whether it is coming from the hill, anonymous, or not. Theres a fair amount of editing happening, but not enough. The more people follow wiki bills, the more they will be aware of what is happening and inclined to participate on the hill and off. It is a net positive because its for discussion and inspired our own wiki bills. The starting point is that the editing from congress is a negative. I think that could be reversed. We can have high quality, careful editing of wikipedia that would be a very good thing for transparency. The twitter bot made a lot of news, because its easy and its automated. But again, you had the same problem in 2006 with ip editing. The story could have been written anyway, even without the bot. Yes, part of this, too, is volunteer administrators who ips. Network after all, they blocked the d. C. Public library, too. Its not like they are picking on capitol hill. Its that they see a problem and they want to use their block tool. Could you both discuss the policy called dont bite the newbie . Maybe that will encourage people to edit. This is another policy that im afraid all of the older wikipedians have forgotten about. I keep fighting this battle myself, trying to get people to be more friendly to new editors. And there are a lot of issues, and initiatives such as the , tea house, and we do a lot of this at our local events. Keep in mind, this is a cultural thing going on among average wikipedians, that they will tend to view new editors as spammers and whatnot. You will have to build up some rapport to prove yourself, which is unfortunate. There is a guideline dont be a jerk to someone just starting out. Hopefully, you would not be a jerk if you were there for a long time, too. But wikipedia was having some trouble recruiting new editors, and part of that was because they would calm, make an edit or and they would not do that great two, because they did not do well with the editing tools or the secret code that goes on behind the scenes, and they would get yelled at or have all of their edits reverted, and they would never come back to the site. The tea house that he mentioned is a message board to be friendly to new people. I also encourage signing up as a user. Get your own username because then you can write on your talk page that says hi, i knew, and i am new and i would like , advice and help. And if you have a problem with one of my edits, please talk to me about it and we can have a discussion. I found this very much to be true. I was being persecuted or hunted by this particular user who renamed every article that i started because he didnt like the naming convention that i was following. We had it out after about six months of him editing every single one of my pages every day. That was eventually resolved. But if you do join, i guess dont let a handful of crazy , people on the internet keep you from joining and being helpful and joining in with the community. D. C. ,g to wikimedia talking to myself, talking to other editors. Talking to the people in the community, talking to myself, talking to the editors. There are people who want to help you. I dont know if it is done, but you could almost create a taxonomy of wikipedians. There are some who have a technical specialty, fixing a certain element of every article. And they are indifferent to what the article is. It is some convention and they will fix it to where all the articles are polished to some particular convention. Thethere seem to be wikipedians that feel a certain ownership about a certain issue. We had some folks with a certain ownership because they had been the only ones there and they were doing good work and contributing positively or productively. But one or two people can only do an incomplete job of this. My characterization would be when michelle came and started working there she had edited before, obviously, but the new kid on the block treatment was what she got. Oh, you will not be around for that long. Here is how we do it. But her persistence and care in addressing forthrightly what the issues are, and encouraging and inviting conversation on talk pages rather than going to battle, she established herself, michelle, as an experienced and known editor. If people dont like an edit, they can go and look and see who this person is. She has a lot more credit with the community now. It is the kind of thing where you build experience. You build a history on wikipedia, and you will be a stronger editor. Your first day or two on the job will probably not be very comfortable. Public policy tends to have a lot of high temperatures around it, some people will be very suspicious about it in the early going. But stay with it and building build a history and you will establish a reputation on wikipedia for honesty. I will help you. Michelle will help you. You were saying that they kept going back and changing what you had to say. Is there a specific group that has this ability to go and review what you are about to publish before he goes online . It goes online . How does the process work . When you get your user account, you get different user privileges. Theres a small group of about 1000 people who are administrators. They can block users for violations of policy. Usually, if someone is being a vandal, just going in and editing articles to include curse words, deleting an entire article, or just general mischief, there is a series of warnings that you post to their user page, and after a certain number of warnings, they are blocked for a certain length of time. Often, with congress peoples pages, if there is an edit war going on there, or someone has been adding very demeaning material that is incorrect and does not belong in a biography, they can put a block on a page to stop inexperienced editors from editing the page for a time frame, like two weeks or months or Something Like that. If you are personally having a problem with someone chasing you down or harassing you, or if there is a situation where it needs to be blocked, there are ways to bring that sort of visit that sort of situation to an administrator and they can deal with it. Yeah, blocks are different from reversions. Typically, any editor can revert any edit. In general. But then there are exceptions. Typically, if an editor is interested in the same topic matter, you will find yourself editing a lot of the same articles. There are dispute resolution processes to follow. And then yes, if a certain article is a subject of dispute, and it is not being resolved on the talk page, then yes, certain and ministers will come by and, perhaps put locks on, and maybe even sanctions if people act out too much. There are whole levels of things that happen to people. In general, lets say, someone adds one sentence to the article. You want to say this bill passed the house today in a vote of x to y. Citation. All you would have to do is go to the page, whether you are logged in or not. If you log in, the edit will be credited to you. If you do not login, it will be edited to the ip address. Credited to the ip address. You scroll down, add the content cite button and it adds your citation. And then there is the boxed with the updated vote tally. Then you hit save, and is done. That is the simplest way to edit. Like the edits go live as soon as you save them. The edits go live as soon as you save them. There was some discussion about having a preview of changes by administrators, but that is not on english wikipedia. Other languages do other things. So german wikipedia has done some of that. They call it pending changes. Right now, if you want to edit, typically, you can change things on the fly, or live. How will you ensure people understand the credibility of the page you are reading . I use you are creating. I use wikipedia every day, but i never edit anything. I never knew about conflict of interest or that kind of thing. I do make sure casual users understand how the pages are being maintained . That is an interesting question. One thing the community does is if there is dispute about the neutrality of the article, at the top of the article someone will have added a template that gives you an alert notice that says that the neutrality of this article is under dispute. Page, and ite talk has a link to that. To a certain degree it is reader beware. All of the citations are in the footnotes of the text if they want to know a citation is true they can find the footnote. Occasionally there is a way, if another editor reads it and says im not sure that this fact is true, they can add a this needs citation notation. Readers will be able to see that and realize that somebody has a question about that. Beyond that, it is just a reader beware system. It is a problem that the average reader does not understand what is all behind the backend. And yes, a lot of the editor culture tends to be toward the other editors. There are initiatives and there is tagging that those on. Part of what we do is deal with local cultural institutions and now educational foundations. So, in college and whatnot. But, yeah it is a long and big , problem Going Forward for wikipedia. Although there have been some studies done comparing the reliability and accuracy of wikipedia to other formally written by advanced degree holder scholars encyclopedias. I think they found that wikipedia was just as reliable as other encyclopedias. I think there is a list somewhere of Scholarly Research done on wikipedia. It is more accurate than you may fear. And we do have some nice outreach brochures and things on how to evaluating quality of articles. There is semipeer review. Again, the average reader tends to not get that. We are trying to explain it as we go along. Your question is another reason it is important to have people in this audience. You have expertise and you should share that with this world. Said but we have time for one we have time for one more question. Can you tell you write neutrally about a bill . When there is often debate about what the bill will actually do . Do you present both sides . When i write a piece of legislation, we have a skeleton that we use that includes the box we want tofo put in which is info, just dates and people. A background section, a provisions section, th Congressional Budget Office section report. The procedural history, and then the debate section. Really the debate section is probably the most controversial section and the most nonneutral place that you could have problems. For the provisions, whenever available i just use the Congressional Research summary. I wiki link all of the nouns, fleeces, organizations, things like that, counting on crs to be neutral for me. The Congressional Budget Office, e ise their stuff, and cit used these governmental institutions with responsibilities to write about this legislation. Procedural history is just a list of this happened on this day and then this happened and this happened. With the debate, that is one of the places i would like to see more editing happened. Because so often, it is easy to find what one side is saying about the bill, and not to find with the other side is saying. Especially with bills that pass under suspension. , who gote who won their bill passed, are very proud and pleased to announce it and say look at this great thing we did. It is easy to find what they say. It is harder to find the organization who has some great objection to it and see what they say. In terms of being neutral, i try to cite who said it, so you know youre getting this persons up persons opinion rather than presenting the opinion as true facts. Other than that, people read the article, and sometimes they will not like how i phrased something so, they will change it and that is great. That is how it is opposed to work. In a lot of respects the article skeletons are the beginning of reporting. You say who said what on both sides. People can follow those links if you say who said what on both sides. People can follow those links if they want to. Part of the goal of this event, and our push to get Congressional Staff and other interested people to edit is to get further into the debate of who said what on each side. Here are the current social, economic facts. Here is what the bill would do, and that is also contestable. It is something that the article could flesh out and handle. The result would be an improvement in the state of affairs in the country, on one