The New Aaron Swartz Documentary Looks Powerful. Here's the Trailer

Also- I would strongly encourage people to also look at Aaron's writing on making Wikipedia better (which has profound consequences for the internet) http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

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So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”

==== Curious and skeptical, I decided to investigate. ====

I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version.† Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article.

If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales’s methods, you get Wales’s results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.

But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit — this one! With the more reasonable metric — indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study — the result completely reverses.

I don’t have the resources to run this calculation across all of Wikipedia (there are over 60 million edits!), but I ran it on several more randomly-selected articles and the results were much the same. For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all deleting things and moving things around).

http://www.plainsite.org/asymptote/

http://www.recapthelaw.org

Like Richard Fernandez [1], I can say the appropriateness of her behavior is beyond my competence to comment on, but the context of her actions is pretty interesting.

Carmen was being groomed for a potential run for Governor. Before her witch hunt blew up in her face, she was getting glowing media exposure [2], describing her as the protege of high Democratic Party officials, helping cement her story in the minds of voters.

Sadly, in American politics it's all about the story you can tell. Oh, your parents were born in Puerto Rico, and you grew up in poor areas of NYC? Well, dear, with your rags-to-riches story and our headlines, we'll sell plenty of birdcage liner, we'll sell your story to the masses, and good luck on your election.

The story is what matters ... and the story of a US Attorney who grew up in a housing project while Hispanic and female makes a formidable political opponent. The "narrative" plays such an important part in public life these days that people can hardly go anywhere without it. From Lance Armstrong to Manti Te'o everybody seems to need an angle.

It seems to me like Carmen just needed a good scalp to hang on her wall, and if that meant charging Aaron to the moon and back (hoping for a plea deal to a tiny fraction of the charges) well you know what they say about eggs and omelets.

But ... Aaron was a human being. You can only push someone so far, before they behave in a way you don't expect. And how the mighty Carmen fell [3]:

Just days ago, speculation was rampant. Gov. Carmen Ortiz? U.S. Sen. Carmen Ortiz? Well, that’s all over now. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is done. Finished. Forever linked to bringing the full and frightening weight of the federal government down upon a 26-year-old computer genius — and a suicide risk.

So like I said, how does she feel? Another article in the Boston herald [4] mentioned she was terribly upset at Aaron's death ... but if you read carefully, the article says she was terribly upset at being blamed for Aaron's death. Now that's something different.

I know where I stand. I suspect for legal reasons the film doesn't even touch this question, which is maybe even reasonable, I guess ... give her the benefit of the doubt ... but at the same time it's rather sad, since she certainly didn't give that to Aaron.

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[1] http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/01/17/crime-story/

[2] http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/07/patrick-reported...

[3] http://bostonherald.com/comments/1062230411

[4] http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/01/...

[also] http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/01/17/ortiz-is-done...

aaron knew about the current laws. aaron decided to break the law, absolutely no grey area there. trespassed, hooked his machine physically up where it did not belong. aaron tried to be a hero, just like ghandi or mandela. when he faced similar consequences like those - his weakened state of mind kicked in and he ended his life.

a little bit like a little kid touching a hot plate and then being surprised about the massive consequences and overwhelming pain. where were all his friends and peers during those actions? did nobody notice he was playing with fire? nobody told him to back off?