The Wall Street Journal (story here; subscription needed) reports that Wikipedia is losing editors faster than it is recruiting new ones. Since about the beginning of 2008, departures have exceeded arrivals in the corps of volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia and scour it for accuracy–or in some cases, opportunities for petty vandalism.

It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, and the Journal raises several possibilities without claiming it knows what is true. The original editors have been at it for almost a decade; perhaps they have burned out. Perhaps all the easy and interesting stories have been written; there isn’t much new to say about Crime and Punishment within Wikipedia’s stylistic strictures. (In fact if you check that entry’s history, it was modified only 10 days ago, but only to reverse some act of vandalism.) Can it be that from the standpoint of the totality of human knowledge, Wikipedia editing has now reached a state of diminishing returns? Also, perhaps, it is not so much fun as it used to be; there are more rules to follow, and more people checking on your edits, than there used to be.

It’s an important question. Wikipedia is one great success of crowdsourcing, of a useful artifact produced using the lunatic fringe of democratic participation. What if the model is unsustainable after awhile, because at some point there are more people who have their fun as trolls than there are as builders?

In New York, some clown started a blog called “Skanks in NYC” for the sole purpose of heaping verbal abuse on, well, whatever people he thought deserved that appellation. The blog was hosted by Blogger.com, a Google service. The site apparently was active for only a day, during which the clown posted five items, one of them referring to a model named Liskula Cohen as a “ho” and a few other things.

Ms Cohen wanted to know who was speaking ill of her, and asked Blogger to disclose that information so she could pursue a defamation suit. I pick up the story from CNN:

On Monday, New York Supreme Court Judge Joan Madden ruled that Google must hand over to Cohen any identifying information it possesses about the blog’s creator. ‚Ķ¬†”The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions,” the judge said ‚Ķ.

And Blogger did, under the court order, turn over to Cohen the IP and email addresses of the blogger. A Google attorney said the company was sensitive to both privacy and to cyberbullying, but a court order trumps any concerns of the company.

Now it turns out that the blogger clown is one Rosemary Port, a Fashion Institution of Technology student who, according to the Daily News, had been involved in some sort of personal quarrel with Cohen. Cohen has decided not to pursue the defamation suit. Port, however, says she will sue Google for $15 million for invasion of her privacy.

“Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my Web site: One from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it,” Port said. “That was before it became a spectacle. I feel my right to privacy has been violated.”

That’s an odd transition — she put it up on the Web where anybody in the world could see it. But only a couple of people did, so she claims a privacy invasion when so much attention got focused on it. Still, she didn’t think she was going to be unmasked. Port’s lawyer makes a knee-jerk appeal to the pseudonymously published Federalist Papers, which lobbied for adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

I doubt Port has a case. Google’s Privacy Policy states, “Google only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google in the following limited circumstances: ‚Ķ¬†We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request ‚Ķ.” Sounds like that covers it. Anyone who’s signed up for a Gmail account agreed to that. (Actually, just doing a Google search causes you to agree to these terms implicitly, but that’s another matter.)

Bloggers (and blog commenters) beware. You can use anonymity tools, such as Tor, if you are really worried about being discovered, but if you do something unlawful behind the veil of an anonymous blog, your cover may be blown.

(It’s a separate question whether calling someone a “ho” or a “skank” actually constitutes defamation. I have no opinion on that one.)

The state of Illinois has enacted a law prohibiting anyone classified as a sex offender from using any social networking site. The definition of the latter is quite complicated — it certainly covers more than Facebook and Myspace. Blogs may qualify as well. The language is hard to parse.

I understand the impulse, but this looks like another blunt instrument designed in a moment of panic, like the Child Online Protection Act we discuss in Chapter 7 of Blown to Bits.¬†¬†Andrew Moshirnia argues that it’s probably unconstitutional as other such laws have proved to be — it simply restricts too much speech that doesn’t need restriction in order to get at the subset that is actually objectionable. Moshirnia points out two other minor problems: it won’t work (it’s too easy to create a fake identity online) and sex offender registries are overbroad (read my other book, Excellence Without a Soul, if you’d like to see how one Harvard undergraduate earned his status on the list). Then there’s the fact, abundantly documented in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report, that the Internet is not the enabler of sex crimes that politicians love to pretend it is.

Go after the crimes, not the tools. The fact that some people can use their liberty for evil ends is no reason to restrict anyone’s liberty pointlessly.

The conviction of Lori Drew, the mother whose ¬†Myspace impersonation of a 13-year-old boy was followed by the suicide of Megan Meier, has been set aside by the judge in the case. ¬†There being no anti-cyberbullying statute ore anything else under which she could be charged in Missouri, where she and Meier lived only a few blocks apart, a federal prosecutor in California (where MySpace is located) charged her under a federal law meant to criminalize hacking into bank accounts and credit card sites. The prosecutor reasoned that lying to MySpace on its registration form was sort of the same thing. By that standard, as we noted on this blog, everybody would be a federal criminal — especially as most social networking sites reserve the right to change their terms of service without telling you. And that is exactly the reasoning Judge Wu used in dismissing the case, even though a jury had returned a guilty verdict. You can’t throw someone in jail under an interpretation of a statute so broad that pretty much everyone would be eligible for incarceration. It’s unconstitutional.

There are legal questions here that I am sure are going to be analyzed. Would jury nullification have been a possibility here, had some juror spoken up to say that the statute was ridiculous if this is what it implied? If not that, what should the jury have done?

But the scary part is the prosecutor’s explanation for what he acknowledges was a “risky’ strategy. He heard a cry “for someone to do something,” and he responded. In other words, he thinks there are parallel universes, the universe of law and the universe of justice. His job is to figure out what’s just and to find a law that can be stretched to fit the facts. That is a really scary attitude on the part ¬†of a federal prosecutor. Lori Drew perhaps should fry in hell, but that is not the business of the temporal sphere. Missouri should perhaps rewrite its laws to make it easier to prosecute the next cyberbully, and the legislature has in fact done that. But if it were the job of the state’s attorneys to decide what is right and wrong independent of the laws, we wouldn’t need the laws at all, we could just rely on their judgment of good and evil. ¬†That’s not how democracies work.

A couple of weeks ago there was minor epidemic of news about a report out of Ohio State University claiming that students who used Facebook get lower grades. Even the earliest reporting of this story drew skeptical comments (here is one from April 15 in the Ohio State U’s student newspaper). OK, so students would always be skeptical about anti-student news; but on April 21, the Wall Street Journal expressed its skepticism too. No matter; it was the story a lot of people wanted to hear, and it spread faster than the Swine Flu. Another reason to fear and hate the Internet.

Now Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern U and the Berkman Center, working together with two colleagues, has re-done the study with a large database of students and found … no relation at all between Facebook use and grades. Or maybe a small POSITIVE correlation.

Bet this story won’t go viral.

Things change so fast.

People use Twitter to broadcast short text messages about what they are doing. Pretty vain, but it does have its uses — as David Pogue notes, if you’ve got a question that is hard to Google but has a simple answer, thousands of human beings may be out there, waiting to tell you the answer.

Then people started losing track of the fact that other people were actually reading what they were writing, maybe people who aren’t nice. A US Congressman forgot that his diplomatic mission to Baghdad was supposed to be secret, and that guys with guns and bombs might like to follow his movements.

Now we have people who, having splattered their 140-character-max tweets all over the place, want to assert copyright in what they’ve written. There are only 27^140 possible tweets, can I just copyright them all and then sue anybody who uses Twitter?

Seriously, I can’t think of a reason why these claims of copyright in tweets wouldn’t be valid. But who would worry if somebody passed along his or her tweet to somebody else? Isn’t twittering psychologically in the same space as opening a cage of doves, freeing them to the world?

Or hawks maybe. People are also filing libel lawsuits because they’ve been called dirty names in other people’s twittering. Hmm — certainly could be false and damaging, and certainly is communicated to third parties. Sounds like that claim could hold water too.

Jury trials are a carefully managed game of information control. The jurors are screened to try to weed out people who know too much ahead of time. Only certain kinds of information are admissible, and whatever is presented by one side can be challenged by the other. The jurors are supposed to isolate themselves from other sources of information — when they go home to their families at night, they are supposed not to talk about the ongoing events or to try to find our more about them. In extreme cases, when it is just too likely that information will assault them by accident, they may be sequestered.

The digital explosion makes such information quarantine an unnatural condition at best, and perhaps an impossible one. And indeed, the New York Times reports today that jurors are routinely using search engines to find out more about the events they are adjudicating. (As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials are Popping Up) In a recent trial, a judge at first hoped that only a single juror had been using Google to check things out — in that case, he could throw the juror off the jury and continue the trial.

But then the judge found that eight other jurors had done the same thing — conducting Google searches on the lawyers and the defendant, looking up news articles about the case, checking definitions on Wikipedia and searching for evidence that had been specifically excluded by the judge. One juror, asked by the judge about the research, said, “Well, I was curious,” according to Mr. Raben.

Mistrial. But the impulse is so easy to imagine. I myself was once on a jury trial in a reckless driving case, in which the defendant was charged with careening down residential streets at high speeds. A crucial piece of evidence was a hubcap coming off as he screeched around a sharp corner. The jury deliberations lasted overnight. Were the trial taking place today, I could use Google Street View after I got home to see what that corner looks like.

Did anyone see this coming? Not the attorneys in the case, apparently.

“We were stunned,” said a defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he had been on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.”

Hit over the head by the force of the digital explosion. One minute you have a stable, reliable social institution that is the descendant of centuries of experience, as good and as fair a system as democratic societies know how to create. A minute later, you have to wonder if it can survive at all, since it is premised on conditions that no longer exist.

Twitter is the the new hip tool with which you can blast all your friends with quick updates on what you are doing. The messages must be short and only text, but type a few characters and hit the button and there they go, onto the screens of a hundred of your closest friends. The standard use is to invite people into your daily life: What are you doing RIGHT NOW?

Different folks may have different views about the social thrill of learning that their friends are eating donuts in Walla Walla or are enjoying the view of the Grand Canyon (except they aren’t watching at all since they are thumb-typing instead). But sometimes you really, really shouldn’t twitter, no matter how excited you are to share with a few special friends the wonderful news about what’s happening to you.

Like for example if you are a US Congressman on a top-secret diplomatic tour of Baghdad. No, bad idea to twitter then. You see, when you twitter, what you say isn’t secret. In fact, do I really need to explain that the reason for twittering is to tell lots of things to lots of people, which then pretty much inevitably become not secrets? You can read the rest of the story, including the tweets of Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI),¬†here. He even announced the time he would be entering the Green Zone. A big help to the soldiers charged with keeping this genius safe on his trip.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that the Republicans are having more trouble than the Dems, but it’s less than a 1 in 4 chance that both Congressmen involved in spilling the beans via Twitter today are members of the GOP. Jeff Frederick of Virginia announced in an elated tweet that State Senator Ralph Northam was switching from Democrat to Republican. Except that, oops, the tweet fell into Democratic hands, and Northam’s colleagues waterboarded him until he changed his mind about changing parties. (OK, that last part about the waterboarding was just a metaphor, but the rest is true.)

Guys, tweets are public. Don’t get carried away by the metaphor that because it’s so easy and quiet it’s a neat way to share secrets. You aren’t whispering into the ear of a trusted confidante, you are screaming it from the mountaintop! Or to put it more succinctly: Grow up.

Thanks to MIT student Xiao Xiao and to Hal Abelson for these pointers.

Facebook has lowered the standards it uses to decide what kinds of advertisements to accept. Thanks to Valleyway for this list of “services” ¬†it used to ban but now allows:

* “Work-at-Home” Scams
* “Free Trial” Diet Products that bill your credit card well before the trial period ends, then refuse to let you cancel
* “Free Federal Grant Money” rackets where you pay get a list of ‘secret’ free grant programs (no such thing as a free lunch)
* “Free Ringtone” subscription services (The Florida Attorney General’s Office had a field day with this one)
* “Free IQ Surveys” that feed you a bunch of easily answered questions before you are required to pay to see the results.
* “Cash4Gold” Programs encouraging you to shove your jewelery in an envelope and mail it in for a third of its actual value

And some “make-money-with-Google” schemes that were totally bogus, even according to Google.

Facebook has had a bad run of privacy issues, so bad that they can’t be excused simply as misjudgments by the overgrown adolescents who work at the company. (See¬†Your Facebook Data Belongs to Facebook ‚Äî Now and Forever, for example.)

But this one feels different. It looks like a desperate and unsustainable move to increase short-term revenues. This is the sort of thing a company might do to make its balance sheet look good for a potential investor. Or maybe it has just woken up to the fact that it doesn’t have a business model and is developing one by trial and error. Please, guys, talk to your users before you try stuff like this.

Oh yes. And Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, is running for the office of Attorney General of California. Perhaps the anyway-sparse adult supervision at Facebook is even scantier these days.

It’s always sobering to read those “I agree” documents you have to click on to register for a Web service. Almost no one ever does.

Facebook’s has always given it blanket rights to do what it wishes with the stuff you post on your Facebook page, including

to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

There’s more, about how Facebook can transfer those rights, and so on. What’s new today is that the agreement used to say that you could take back ownership of the data if you closed your account. No more. Now they own it forever, even if you decide you want to take it back.

So if you are, say, a college student foolish enough to post a stupid picture of yourself drunk or half-naked, and then you think better of it, and in fact think better of the whole Facebook idea and close your account, and in ten years you are running for Congress, Facebook will be perfectly within its rights to scan its records of dead accounts and sell the rights to that photo to the Associated Press, or People Magazine.

Would they do that? No way to be sure. Rationally we might choose to think that would be a stupid thing to do from a business standpoint, as it would discourage others from using the site. But such decisions are not always made rationally. And why would they be changing their policy now if they don’t anticipate doing exactly this in the future?

Added 8:30 PM 2/16: Mark Zuckerberg has blogged about this. He defends Facebook’s “philosophy” and what it would do “in reality” (as opposed, I guess, to what it has the legal right to do):

In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.

Indeed, in reality, Facebook would probably realize what a losing long-term business proposition it would be to sell your drunken photos of yourself to the media.

Which is why, when Facebook did “in reality” launch Beacon and shared information in a way many Facebook users did NOT want, it quickly did an about-face. There seems to be push-back assembling again, though in the case of this change, no one can right now detect any difference.

Is there really no way to draft the legal language so it matches the reality of Facebook’s presumably good intentions?