BioJack: A Wiki To Be Wary Of

filed under Social Netware · 2 comments in the original

I came across Judith Meskill's recent post about BioJack, a new Wiki for biographical information. I've got to say I like the underlying principles but the implementation scares the heck out of me. Also, in terms of full disclosure, I'm building something that is in the same space though fundamentally different. First, here's how the site describes itself:

...For the past couple of years, social networks like Friendster, LinkedIn and Orkut have been in the limelight of media attention as it draws Netizens into an evolving model of the World Wide Web as a network of people. Using these services, any Netizen can create a profile containing personal information and share it with friends and the public.

While the adoption of these services have been rapid, with some achieving a million users within a few months, consolidation of user profiles and networks is a growing concern. An individual’s information is scattered around in siloes, stored in locked profiles in various social networks, while others are recorded in blogs. Attempts to unify these siloed information have brought about the birth of standards such as FOAF, but the adoption of such standards by the major services have been slow.

So far, I can't agree more. I've dedicated many a post here that discusses the failures of SNS 1.0 in creating a lasting imprint of the humanity of people and their relationships. I'll certainly agree that there are too many silos of information that not only overlap but also impede the portrayal of my digital self.

Then the premise of BioJack, in my opinion, takes a turn for the worst:

The intention to create a central database of personal data has led to the creation of Biojack, a Wiki for biographical information. Built on top of MediaWiki, the same engine that runs Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia on the Net, Biojack allows any Netizen to add or edit biographical entries of themselves or other individuals, such as history figures, contemporary newsmakers or celebrities.

Biojack’s founder, Jason Banico, believes that wiki is the best model for indexing the social web. No standard profile format can capture the richness of an individual. The flexibility of a wiki can allow one to write biographical articles in prose, a list of profile entries, a collection of links to blogs, social network profiles, FOAF files, genealogy site entries, photo albums and many others. Its flexibility will also allow it to be equally useful to a researcher in need of biographical information or to a blogger who would like to have a personal repository of profile links.

Leaving aside my general dislike for Wiki as an end-user content management model, I think this is the last place I want my information. Let's look at some of the key issues I see at play here:

It's Public - If the complaint about Friendster and other sites was that they were too public, then a wiki-based version is probably the most extreme perversion of that. Most social networking services have a level of authentication that's MANDATED. The more secure ones have controls for locking the general community out of a viewing pool. Wiki does not natively afford us this (at least none that I have ever seen).
It's Insecure - Hanging on the tail of that last point. There's not a great sense of ownership. Since anyone can come and create my page for me, add whatever content they want to provide, and at the same time possibly slander the hell out of me. I call this social graffiti.
It's Not Granular - I've complained many a time that SNS 1.0 fails because of its inherent needs to index us. I think a free-form text dump fails in the other direction. Keyword searching seems to become the main method for finding people. I'll not that, however, for the purpose of serving as a "biography" this is not such an issue.
It's Doubly A Burden - Having to manage an online identity across an ever-growing array of sites is certainly annoying and only serves to get worst over time. On some level, I am sure the notion is that with a wiki identity, anyone can update your records so you don't have to (hence saving time). Of course, these aren't facts we're necessarily updating now are they. If people have personal space, then our identities have personal valences. These various valence levels serve to protect our often fragile egos from attack and ridicule. In English, we don't want everyone to know everything right away and, when we do want to share, we almost always prefer to have control of that presentation. Now I have to police my profiles and my biography.
It's Not Scalable - So "pages" are people in a Wiki. This means that this page is mine, that is until the other Gregory Narain's come along and want their space. Or, consider the worst case, where someone adds to my profile thinking I am someone they know -- but I am not that person. So how is this mediated? Who knows.

Well those are just my gripes off the top of my head :). I still admire the project, but I wouldn't want my info in it. I think it makes sense from the point of view of "encyclopedia" but since the creator brought Friendster and the like into the use case, I felt it important to discuss it from that point of view.

That being said, it will take me about an hour to generate a BioJack page for any user of the SparkCard if there was a demand for such a thing. One more hour, and I can import your BioJack profile into the SparkCard where you can regain control of things and secure your identity.

After this review, though, I doubt Jason Banico is gonna want to have much to do with me (though I hope he can address my concerns). Oh well, what can I do. I can't tell a lie (on this blog anyway).