Thursday, November 5, 2009

Personal Privacy

My friend voted for Bush and I came to know that he also likes Hitler. That's correct I have stopped talking with him and I have deleted him from my friends list!

In plain old times people had their own passions and hobbies and nowadays they can share it over the internet and they are developing them by other's help. It is the information era and IT has developed so much that nobody is aloof nowadays. This has increased accessibility to knowledge and can get answers to complex questions within minutes. The forums and social networking has made people across continents develop companionship and share their ideas.

Professionals get suggestion from all over world and this could be the starting point of universal brotherhood.

But what happened to our creativity. Man is a social animal and he has to change his likings and disliking according to the society. This has affected the social networking site also. You can trace the person's interest very fast through any social networking site and get to know about him. The people's choices and their belief are no longer private. In this information exchange era everyone is forced to follow the banal choices of the herd and which will inhibit creativity.

The haiku poems in Japan were started in tea houses, where the samurai and peasants would come taking pen names. This practice led to creation of haiku poems that are today most famous in literature.

Many people do not know that Henry Ford was a sympathizer of Hitler and that's why he helped Porsche to build Volkswagen. If it would have happened in the 21st century then Ford would have joined the Hitler fan club and this is against the common practice. His organization would have lost popularity.

So it is difficult to hide the sensitive details that affect us socially nowadays. The people's passion and nature are determined by their profiles and employers also look in to them. If there are strings attached to such networking sites then the originality of the members are affected and this would affect the creativity overall. Privacy is one of the key factors of creativity. There should be a way such that private details of the members should not be shared with people of no common interest. If shared then only the common details of the members should be shared. These make the members to be secure and must not feel threatened by his interests.

So there is a need for some kind of privacy policies set between members in social networking such that they are not open to everybody.


 


 


Wikipedia and Vandalism

 Wikipedia is one of the initiatives that try to make people to access all knowledge from a single source. The Wikipedia's information is contribution of people all around the world and it also has the capability of the publishing day to day news. It is one of the constantly updated content portals. It is also the easiest place to access information.
There are many wiki pages that share information on the internet for their users. Some of the wikis are owned by enterprises and accesses to the pages are provided by the organization based on their qualification. But Wikipedia offers editorial rights even to users who can create their account in Wikipedia, So a normal internet user with an interest can contribute or edit information in Wikipedia. Even though Wikipedia have administrator to validate the information that they receive from many users, these administrators need not be expert in those topics and their qualifications as admin is set by their active contributions to wiki.

The standard is set by quantity and not by the quality. The expert in the topic might be a mere user of the Wikipedia and chances are there that his views can be neglected by an administrator purposely.

The next threat is from vandalism, it is not uniform and it is erratic. Mostly new contributors are involved in such activities.

So there is need for validating content because the wrong information is spread over the internet by a nonprofit organization. More of this type of problems would decrease the credibility of the organization.


 

The above two problems can be controlled by setting restriction to new users, involving experts opinion and introducing credibility points.

Wikipedia should identify experts from all over the world in the respective categories and should set up a "close" network in between them. There should be an expert- to-expert interaction between them and if they reach to a consensus the output article will be error free. Expert should feel free to access the other person's work or share their views over the network freely.

New users who reads an article and wants them to be changed or edited should not be allowed or their change should be reviewed before they are published, this restriction can be relaxed for a repeating contributor. Finally users credibility points should be maintained such a way that it increases as the user provides with actual information and decreases as he provides baseless or wrong content. Providing wrong content may not be intentional but this method will certainly decrease the volume of wrong contents in the site.

Peer to peer rating can be published online in the site according to the credibility points. Details of the percentage of error free documents from the location where it is uploaded to average error rate or percentile of the error rate can be displayed to increase peer pressure that will make user to think before they upload.  For e.g

Chicago's Score: 80%

National Average: 83%

World Average: 78%    <or> Percentile of Illinois : 86