User:JustinHall

Wikipedia

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Nick Gray made a Justin Hall page on Wikipedia in May 2005. Like Kevin Kelly, I'm thinking about issues of Vanity and Autobiography on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Autobio: Life between Links

Between 1994 and 2005, I wrote a few thousand web pages about my life. When Professor Peggy Weil proposed we compose an interactive media autobiographical piece for our Interactive Writing class, I initially thought to disperse that effort: to write on the web itself, not on a web page. Disappear from any central location; instead, inhabit the web as a sort of spirit. My personality, commentary, reflections, stories, notions popping up on other web sites.

I proposed Persona, a plug-in for the Firefox web browser, integrating the ideas presented by Will Wright at the March 2005 Game Developers Conference on intrusive historical presences in operating system environment. Persona was an effort to make an open platform for creating intrusive web surfing companion personalities.

Shortly after developing the initial design and mockups for Persona, I discovered a number of other projects that were approaching the same issues from a different perspective. These people were looking to annotate the web towards accuracy, corroboration, and reference.

One such project is Annotea - a standard for web annotations hosted on a remote server. The service is open for testing with multiple applications; I installed a FireFox annotation plug-in, Annozilla, and commenced highlighting a few test pages. Quickly, the software evinced a particular limitation: I could not change anything after I'd published it. This was a known bug, and it gave me pause long enough to consider my project. I had been planning to spend a week or two actively scribbling notes on the web pages I read most often; some details on the New York Times, a story about CNN, reflections on Boing Boing. Then some notes on friends' blogs as well. Then obscure Google results. And then tie it all together.

In the immediate present, before the assignment was due, I wanted to be able to write and rewrite, as I thought I might like to make links back and forth between these Annozilla annotations. The limitations made clear: web annotation was ready technology but it was still not firing my imagination.

Meanwhile, I had been steadily procrastinating on this assignment by editing pages in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that any reader on the web can change. It's a giant faith-based initiative, playing on the idea that humans can be trusted to collectively put forth useful information.

Some people I knew were listed (notably Joichi Ito and Lawrence Lessig). But there were other people I knew who hadn't yet warranted a Wikipedia page. Of course, you could imagine that someday, every person living or dead might have their own Wikipedia page. It makes sense; perhaps we can ask Mormons to do it. This kind of infinite editing task is immediately daunting; but fortunately I had already found some avenues to justify starting on the project of contributing my knowledge to the Wikipedia collective.

I started slow on Wikipedia in March of 2003; at that time, I was uncovering information that wasn't in the database as I was researching Japan's railway history for a freelance article. Poking around, I started a page about "moblogging." I added some useful external links to a page about Paul Robeson, Microsoft Bob and Aikido. The only self-promotion I did, early on, was to add some of my own writing links to a page about Akita Prefecture in Japan. All throughout my Wikipedia user name JustinHall stuck on the history of each page as a contributor.

Video games were the first real area of knowledge where I realized I could begin to contribute on a larger scale. I've become friends with a few veterans of Looking Glass Studios - there were some pages about this storied game studio on Wikipedia but I was able to use personal experience and MobyGames to supplement the information about the studio and the individuals involved.

Eleven years of oversharing on the web had conditioned me - I was more observant of personal boundaries. I didn't link people who were dating. I didn't mention someone's passion for pork noodle soup. These may be colorful details but I decided to err on the side of clinical fact and career for the encyclopedia form. Much of what I was writing were things I would have covered on my web site; for example, I added much information to a Wikipedia page about Howard Rheingold, my mentor of 10+ years, someone I'd written a bit about before. But it was formally structured and couched in measured phrases; promoting his place as a thinker and not as a good buddy.

The first somewhat extensive page I built from scratch was for Mizuko Ito. She was already listed as Joichi Ito's sister, but unlinked and unwritten about. Mimi was someone I knew from Japan and the United States - we'd worked on the Chanpon web site together and spent social time besides. I researched her history as an academic and made a formal Wikipedia page. Her husband is Scott Fisher, a virtual reality pioneer and head of the Interactive Media Division at USC where I'm a graduate student. He didn't have a page either, so I studied his CV and put together a few paragraphs, and added the Interactive Media division, linked from Scott's page. And I linked the IMD from the pages about Electronic Arts and USC - now I was altering the Wikipedia records of larger institutions. I made a stub page about Perry Hoberman as an experiment - each of the professors in the school could use some coverage but I didn't know much about them. But I listed their names so someday, someone might surprise me.

These initial people were easy, because they had relatives in Wikipedia, or interests that coincided with the database as it existed. Early studies of Wikipedia speak of an imbalance of coverage, as it is slanted towards geek-friendly pursuits (see Wikipedia:WikiProject countering systemic bias). My experience aligns with the biases of the geeks who have driven Wikipedia - obsessive types who find themselves drawn to the potential for collective information archiving (very much like myself. I crudely proposed an online engine for collectively sharing human knowledge in 1996; I wasn't smart enough to think of the Wiki form).

Around this time (April 2005) I was talking to Seamus Blackley about helping him with a project. He had an entry in Wikipedia that dealt with a very specific part of his career; lending physics expertise to the development of a flight simulator. Nothing about pitching the Xbox to Bill Gates. Nothing about working to change financing models in the game industry. I dug up biographical information from him on Google and pieced together a career I may have been told about by him but had forgotten. I was definitely procrastinating on my annotation assignment; I justified it by saying I was researching my potential boss.

I realized I was writing in hypertext about people I know; this work was coalescing informally around my life. Fortunately my professor agreed and I was free to spend the rest of a sunny afternoon in my bathrobe, happily adding to the world's largest encyclopedia.

I decided to put some Wikipedia-energy into the independent game developers I knew. I made a page about the Indie Game Jam, a four-year-old event designed to spur innovation in game design. I'd participated and I knew many of the folks involved, so the IGJ page was in that way autobiographical. But it was more aspirational - reflecting the relationships and projects I admire and things I believe in. It wasn't about me, it was about people I've sought out and worked with.

I decided to write around myself, to make Wikipedia pages that could be seen to coalesce around me. I didn't have a Wikipedia page, but I was linked to people with Wikipedia pages. Did I want someone to make a page for me? Probably. I certainly felt it was somehow inappropriate to make one for myself; it's a sort of ego-gesture to offer yourself to the world's encyclopedia. Somehow writing thousands of webpages about myself on a personal site didn't seem too egoistic; it's a home page, not "who's who."

I wrote about game developers. People I had shared hotel rooms with, people I'd celebrated my birthday with, people I'd known for years. I made a page about my high school. I made a page about the charter school my mother helped start. I made a page about HotWired, the first commercial web page where I worked as an intern.

Did that qualify as history? Wasn't there a reason my high school wasn't on Wikipedia yet? Maybe HotWired didn't deserve its own page.

But Wikipedia gloriously affirms the permeability of historical record. It's a palimpsest - damn right. Wikipedia is the king palimpsest. It's constantly being rewritten. It's constantly being expanded. It will probably grow more than it will ever shrink. Maybe every once in a while someone goes through and tries to trim out some of the information. Maybe Wikipedia will be less interesting in a few years and it will start to show its age and inaccuracy. But just six hours after I added a page about my high school and my Mom's charter school, someone had gone through and added a " stub" definition to the pages, meaning someone thought these pages were too short and needed to be expanded.

I have created a personal historical record on my home page, Links.net. Particular experiences, like trips and events, were easy - fixed in time. The toughest parts were always the intersections with other people; when I tried to describe someone, to put a description of them up, as I saw them. The problem was that they lived, they continued to grow and change, and often they wished to see the web reflect that. If they wanted to see themselves online at all!

Wikipedia is a chance to describe people in somewhat more socially-approved format. History and encyclopedia, context of career - these give a legitimacy to the project of describing people. Writing for Wikipedia does drain much color from my prose. But in exchange I retain all the glory of linking. I can describe the relationships between fields, between projects, between people.

In between those links, I exist. I feel a bit coy almost, writing all these pages that could link to me, or that do link to me from their author-histories, without writing about myself.How much can I write about my life without writing about myself? It's a productive abnegation after years of solipsism.

True to Wikipedia form, I found many of those pages I made were edited and altered and amended and supplemented within hours of my contributing them. After years of working to reflect reality myself, and seeing the truths I described decay as I aged past those understandings, I'm eager to have some silent, distant collaborators, working with me to describe our shared history in real time, with links, online.