Wikipedia is the world’s most successful model of citizen engagement and collaboration. It began ten years ago as an experiment in information that challenged the top down approach to developing encyclopedias and now boasts millions of active users with 400 million visits a month. Its staggering popularity ultimately proved the power and wisdom of the crowd in developing online resources well beyond simply creating an encyclopedia.

From the very beginning of the Sunlight Foundation, we were impressed by the philosophical ideals of Wikipedia and sought that kind of access and collaboration to government information. This shared ethos brought Jimmy Wales, the founder and public face of Wikipedia, to our advisory board and soon after our founding we pursued a wiki model for Congressionally oriented research.

The first project the Sunlight Foundation launched in April 2006 was Congresspedia, a collaborative wiki project with the Center for Media and Democracy that was designed to shine more light on the workings of the U.S. Congress. It was an explicit homage to Wikipedia and operated on the belief that a healthy democracy is built on a public informed about the inner-workings and connections of government and its officials. The Congresspedia project followed relevant public figures and tracked special interests in the wiki collaborative writing format that Wikipedia popularized ten years ago. That project eventually became part of Open Congress (which Sunlight proudly supports as its core funder) where the Transparency Hub page is a great collection of resources coordinated by Sunlight’s policy director John Wonderlich and our policy counsel Daniel Schuman.

Happy 10th birthday Wikipedia!

Anthony Mattox, a very talented student at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), recently released some processing code called WikiWeb to visualize the connections between pages at Wikipedia.

I read about the project and thought, "I wonder if that would work with OpenCongress's wiki?" I grabbed the open sourced creative commons code, changed a few URLs to point to OpenCongress's Wiki and voilà.

It is running in the browser as a Java applet, so you will need to "trust" it before it will "work." Don't worry, it doesn't do anything nefarious. It just needs your trust before it can go to OpenCongress and fetch pages from the wiki.

Once it loads, you'll want to click the dot in the middle "Main Page" and select the first option on the left of the menu which will "load links" and then you're off. Any dot (which represents a page of the wiki) can be expanded to show the other pages it links to.

Just something fun to demonstrate the value of open source, Creative Commons and of course Processing. Thanks to Anthony for making the code available!

As I noted yesterday, happily, the Transition team announced over the weekend they have now adopted the most open Creative Commons license.

As that was unfolding, a group of open government colleagues and allies put our heads together to encourage the Transition team to take even more steps to open up the transition. Along with a number of some very distinguished colleagues in this field, Sunlight signed onto a letter outlining steps we believe they should take to foster free use of its content on the Internet. The signers include Larry Lessig who spearheaded the effort, Tim O'Reilly, senior people at Mozilla, and Wikipedia, MoveOn.org and American Solutions.  Ben Smith at Politico as more details. (Here's a full list of the signatories.)

Here's the web site that also includes a short PowerPoint narrated by Lessig explaining the recommendations.

In sum we have endorsed three principles:

1. No Legal Barrier to Sharing 2. No Technological Barrier to Sharing 3. Free competition

We're excited at the prospect that the Obama team will continue to follow these principles once they occupy the White House after Inauguration Day. We think that this is all common sense,  good policy.

File this under unintended consequences. It involves a bizarre case out of Germany over the weekend where a politician sued Germany's Wikipedia over certain items that had been added to his biography. The politician is a member of the German parliament, and he argued that his Wikipedia bio included items he said were "false and slanderous." He sued and a judge ordered the closure of the German portal for the Wikipedia, wikipedia.de, which was down for two days. It's now back online.

The Wikipedia entry stated that the politician was formerly employed by the East German secret police. But this is not what he found objectionable, since that appears to be true and without question. What he found objectionable were items involving online pornography, questions about the status of his college degree and claims that he sent threatening text messages to an ex-partner.

AP reports the politician now says it was not his intention that the site to be forced to go dark, but only that the items on his bio he objected to be stricken. He withdrew his suit after the items were removed. Even though the version of the site housed in Germany was down, it was available to users who accessed another German-language version housed on U.S. servers.

I'm left wondering why the politician didn't just edit his own pages and remove the inaccurate and offending material.