Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy (NYTimes, 6/17/06)

June 17, 2006
Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy
By KATIE HAFNER
Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera.
Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.
At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.
Those measures can put some entries outside of the "anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days. (See a List of Protected Entries)
While these measures may appear to undermine the site's democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-language site.
"Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia," Mr. Wales said. "What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation."
From the start, Mr. Wales gave the site a clear mission: to offer free knowledge to everybody on the planet. At the same time, he put in place a set of rules and policies that he continues to promote, like the need to present information with a neutral point of view.
The system seems to be working. Wikipedia is now the Web's third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen NetRatings.
The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.
"A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence," Mr. Wales said. "But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community."
The administrators are all volunteers, most of them in their 20's. They are in constant communication — in real-time online chats, on "talk" pages connected to each entry and via Internet mailing lists. The volunteers share the job of watching for vandalism, or what Mr. Wales called "drive-by nonsense." Customized software — written by volunteers — also monitors changes to articles.
Mr. Wales calls vandalism to the encyclopedia "a minimal problem, a dull roar in the background." Yet early this year, amid heightened publicity about false information on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-protection of some articles. The four-day waiting period is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers.
Once the assaults have died down, the semi-protected page is often reset to "anyone can edit" mode. An entry on Bill Gates was semi-protected for just a few days in January, but some entries, like the article on President Bush, stay that way indefinitely. Other semi-protected subjects as of yesterday were Opus Dei, Tony Blair and sex.
To some critics, protection policies make a mockery of the "anyone can edit" notion.
"As Wikipedia has tried to improve its quality, it's beginning to look more and more like an editorial structure," said Nicholas Carr, a technology writer who recently criticized Wikipedia on his blog. "To say that great work can be created by an army of amateurs with very little control is a distortion of what Wikipedia really is."
But Mr. Wales dismissed such criticism, saying there had always been protections and filters on the site.
Wikipedia's defenders say it usually takes just a few days for all but the most determined vandals to retreat.
"A cooling-off period is a wonderful mediative technique," said Ross Mayfield, chief executive of a company called Socialtext that is based on the same editing technology that Wikipedia uses.
Full protection often results from a "revert war," in which users madly change the wording back and forth. In such cases, an administrator usually steps in and freezes the page until the warring parties can settle their differences in another venue, usually the talk page for the entry. The Christina Aguilera entry was frozen this week after after fans of the singer fought back against one user's efforts to streamline it.
Much discussion of Wikipedia has focused on its accuracy. Last year, an article in the journal Nature concluded that the incidence of errors in Wikipedia was only slightly higher than in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Officials at Britannica angrily disputed the findings.
"To be able to do an encyclopedia without having the ability to differentiate between experts and the general public is very, very difficult," said Jorge Cauz, the president of Britannica, whose subscription-based online version receives a small fraction of the traffic that Wikipedia gets.
Intentional mischief can go undetected for long periods. In the article about John Seigenthaler Sr., who served in the Kennedy administration, a suggestion that he was involved in the assassinations of both John F. and Robert Kennedy was on the site for more than four months before Mr. Seigenthaler discovered it. He wrote an op-ed article in USA Today about the incident, calling Wikipedia "a flawed and irresponsible research tool."
Yet Wikipedians say that in general the accuracy of an article grows organically. At first, said Wayne Saewyc, a Wikipedia volunteer in Vancouver, British Columbia, "everything is edited mercilessly by idiots who do stupid and weird things to it." But as the article grows, and citations slowly accumulate, Mr. Saewyc said, the article becomes increasingly accurate.
Wikipedians often speak of how powerfully liberating their first contribution felt. Kathleen Walsh, 23, a recent college graduate who majored in music, recalled the first time she added to an article on the contrabassoon.
"I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was," recalled Ms. Walsh. "You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly."
Ms. Walsh is an administrator, a post that others nominated her for in recognition of her contributions to the site. She monitors a list of newly created pages, half of which, she said, end up being good candidates for deletion. Many are "nonsense pages created by kids, like 'Michael is a big dork,' " she said.
Ms. Walsh also serves on the 14-member arbitration committee, which she describes as "the last resort" for disputes on Wikipedia.
Like so many Web-based successes, Wikipedia started more or less by accident.
Six years ago, Mr. Wales, who built up a comfortable nest egg in a brief career as an options trader, started an online encyclopedia called Nupedia.com, with content to be written by experts. But after attracting only a few dozen articles, Mr. Wales started Wikipedia on the side. It grew exponentially.
For the first year or so, Mr. Wales paid the expenses out of his own pocket. Now the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia, is financed primarily through donations, most in the $50 to $100 range.
As the donations have risen, so have the costs. The foundation's annual budget doubled in the last year, to $1.5 million, and traffic has grown sharply. Search engines like Google, which often turn up Wikipedia entries at the top of their results, are a big contributor to the site's traffic, but it is increasingly a first stop for knowledge seekers.
Mr. Wales shares the work of running Wikipedia with the administrators and four paid employees of the foundation. Although many decisions are made by consensus within the community, Mr. Wales steps in when an issue is especially contentious. "It's not always obvious when something becomes policy," he said. "One way is when I say it is."
Mr. Wales is a true believer in the power of wiki page-editing technology, which predates Wikipedia. In late 2004, Mr. Wales started Wikia, a commercial start-up financed by venture capital that lets people build Web sites based around a community of interest. Wiki 24, for instance, is an unofficial encyclopedia for the television show "24." Unlike Wikipedia, the site carries advertising.
Mr. Wales, 39, lives with his wife and daughter in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the foundation is based. But Mr. Wales's main habitat these days, he said, is the inside of airplanes. He travels constantly, giving speeches to reverential audiences and visiting Wikipedians around the world.
Wikipedia has inspired its share of imitators. A group of scientists has started the peer-reviewed Encyclopedia of Earth, and Congresspedia is a new encyclopedia with an article about each member of Congress.
But beyond the world of reference works, Wikipedia has become a symbol of the potential of the Web.
"It can tell us a lot about the future of knowledge creation, which will depend much less on individual heroism and more on collaboration," said Mitchell Kapor, a computer industry pioneer who is president of the Open Source Applications Foundation.
Zephyr Teachout, a lawyer in Burlington, Vt., who is involved with Congresspedia, said Wikipedia was reminiscent of old-fashioned civic groups like the Grange, whose members took individual responsibility for the organization's livelihood.
"It blows open what's possible," said Ms. Teachout. "What I hope is that these kinds of things lead to thousands of other experiments like this encyclopedia, which we never imagined could be produced in this way."

Studies Portray Tropical Arctic in Distant Past(NYTimes, 6/1/06)

June 1, 2006
Studies Portray Tropical Arctic in Distant Past
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Correction Appended
The first detailed analysis of an extraordinary climatic and biological record from the seabed near the North Pole shows that 55 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was much warmer than scientists imagined — a Floridian year-round average of 74 degrees.
The findings, published today in three papers in the journal Nature, fill in a blank spot in scientists' understanding of climate history. And while they show that much remains to be learned about climate change, they suggest that scientists have greatly underestimated the power of heat-trapping gases to warm the Arctic.
Previous computer simulations, done without the benefit of seabed sampling, did not suggest an ancient Arctic that was nearly so warm, the authors said. So the simulations must have missed elements that lead to greater warming.
"Something extra happens when you push the world into a warmer world, and we just don't understand what it is," said one lead author, Henk Brinkhuis, an expert on ancient Arctic ecology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
The studies draw on the work of a pioneering 2004 expedition that defied the Arctic Ocean ice and pulled the first significant samples from the ancient layered seabed 150 miles from the North Pole: 1,400 feet of slender shafts of muck, fossils of ancient organisms and rock representing a climate history that dates back 56 million years.
While there is ample fossil evidence around the edges of the Arctic Ocean showing great past swings in climate, until now the sediment samples from the undersea depths had gone back less than 400,000 years.
The new analysis confirms that the Arctic Ocean warmed remarkably 55 million years ago, which is when many scientists say the extraordinary planetwide warm-up called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum must have been caused by an enormous outburst of heat-trapping, or greenhouse, gases like methane and carbon dioxide. But no one has found a clear cause for the gas discharge. Almost all climate experts agree that the present-day gas buildup is predominantly a result of emissions from smokestacks, tailpipes and burning forests.
The samples also chronicle the subsequent cooling, with many ups and downs, that the researchers say began about 45 million years ago and led to the cycles of ice ages and brief warm spells of the last several million years.
Experts not connected with the studies say they support the idea that heat-trapping gases — not slight variations in Earth's orbit — largely determine warming and cooling.
"The new research provides additional important evidence that greenhouse-gas changes controlled much of climate history, which strengthens the argument that greenhouse-gas changes are likely to control much of the climate future," said one such expert, Richard B. Alley, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University.
The $12.5 million Arctic Coring Expedition, run by a consortium called the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, was the first to drill deep into the layers of sediment deposited over millions of years in the Arctic. The samples were gathered late in the summer of 2004 as two icebreakers shattered huge drifting floes so that a third ship could hold its position and bore for core samples.
Estimates of the prevailing temperatures in the different eras represented by the sediments were made in part by tracking the comings and goings of certain algae called dinoflagellates that typically indicate subtropical or tropical conditions.
Because the samples lacked remains of shell-bearing plankton that are usually relied on to provide temperature records, the researchers used a newer method for approximating past temperatures: gauging changes in the chemical composition of the remains of a primitive phylum of microbes called Crenarchaeota.
Some scientists familiar with the research said that while there were still questions about the precision of this method at temperatures like those in the ancient Arctic Ocean, it was clear that the area was warm.
The temperatures recorded in the samples, right through the peak of warming 55 million years ago, were consistently about 18 degrees higher than those projected by computer models trying to "backcast" what the Arctic was like at the time, according to one of the papers.
Another significant discovery came in layers from 49 million years ago, where conditions suddenly fostered the summertime growth of vast mats of an ancient cousin of the Azolla duckweed that now cloaks suburban ponds. The researchers propose that this occurred when straits closed between the Arctic Ocean and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
The flow of water from precipitation and rivers created a great pool of fresh water, but about 800,000 years after the blossoming of duckweed began, it ended with a sudden warming of a few additional degrees. The researchers suggest that this signaled when shifting land formations reconnected the Arctic with the Atlantic, allowing salty, warmer water to flow in, killing off the weed.
The researchers said the sediments held hints that Earth's long slide to colder conditions, and the recent cycle of ice ages and brief thaws, began quite soon after the hothouse conditions 50 million years ago. A centerpiece of their argument is a single pebble, about the size of a chickpea, found in a layer created 45 million years ago.
The stone could have been deposited on the raised undersea ridge only if it had been carried overhead in ice, said Kathryn Moran, a chief scientist on the drilling project, who teaches at the University of Rhode Island.
The stone was probably embedded in an iceberg or perhaps a plate of sea ice that tore free from a gravelly shore. It sank as the ice melted or broke apart, Dr. Moran proposed. Such "dropstones" have long been used to date when an oceanic region has been ice covered or ice free.
The amount of ice-carried debris in the sediment layers began to increase about 14 million years ago, the scientists said. That is also about when the great ice sheet that now weighs down eastern Antarctica originated, Dr. Moran noted. In general, the results from the Arctic drilling project suggest that the cooling and ice buildup at both poles happened in relative lockstep.
This simultaneity tends to support the idea that the cooling was caused by a drop in concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, which mix uniformly in the global atmosphere, said Dr. Moran and other members of the team.
Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts, an expert in past Arctic climates who was not connected with the new studies, cautioned against giving too much significance to the single sample, and particularly the single stone from 45 million years ago.
Dr. Brigham-Grette said it was vital to try to mesh the new core results with data gathered around Arctic coasts, where there is plenty of evidence for warm conditions in at least some places as recently as 2.4 million years ago.
Despite her doubts, she said, the project was a stunning achievement.
"It's all very, very exciting to me, because now we can start to rewrite the history of the Arctic," Dr. Brigham-Grette said. "It's like working a giant landscape puzzle of 500 pieces. For a while we only had 100 pieces. Now we have 100 more, and the picture is getting clearer."
Correction: June 2, 2006
A front-page article yesterday about new studies on the Arctic Ocean climate misstated part of the name of a program that sponsored an expedition to the ocean in 2004. It is the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, not International.

Human Flu Transfers May Exceed Reports(NYTimes, 6/4/06)

June 4, 2006
Human Flu Transfers May Exceed Reports
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
In the wake of a cluster of avian flu cases that killed seven members of a rural Indonesian family, it appears likely that there have been many more human-to-human infections than the authorities have previously acknowledged.
The numbers are still relatively small, and they do not mean that the virus has mutated to pass easily between people — a change that could touch off a worldwide epidemic. All the clusters of cases have been among relatives or in nurses who were in long, close contact with patients.
But the clusters — in Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Vietnam — paint a grimmer picture of the virus's potential to pass from human to human than is normally described by public health officials, who usually say such cases are "rare."
Until recently, World Health Organization representatives have said there were only two or three such cases. On May 24 Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, estimated that there had been "at least three." Then, last Tuesday, Maria Cheng, a W.H.O. spokeswoman, said there were "probably about half a dozen." She added, "I don't think anybody's got a solid number."
And Dr. Angus Nicoll, chief of flu activities at the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, acknowledged that "we are probably underestimating the extent of person-to-person transmission."
The handful of cases usually cited, he said, are "just the open-and-shut ones," like the infections of nurses in the 1997 Hong Kong outbreak and of a Bangkok office worker who died in 2004 after tending her daughter who fell sick on an aunt's farm.
Most clusters are hard to investigate, he said, because they may not even be noticed until a victim is hospitalized, and are often in remote villages where people fear talking. Also, he said, by the time doctors from Geneva arrive to take samples, local authorities "have often killed all the chickens and covered everything with lime."
The W.H.O. is generally conservative in its announcements and, as a United Nations agency, is sometimes limited by member states in what it is permitted to say about them.
Still, several scientists have noted that there are many clusters in which human-to-human infection may be a more logical explanation than the idea that relatives who fell sick days apart got the virus from the same dying bird.
For example, in a letter published last November in Emerging Infectious Diseases analyzing 15 family clusters from 2003 through mid-2005 in Southeast Asia, scientists from the disease control centers, the W.H.O. and several Asian health ministries noted that four clusters had gaps of more than seven days between the time family members got sick. They questioned conventional wisdom that only one, the Bangkok office worker, was "likely" human-to-human.
In one Vietnam cluster, not only did a young man, his teenage sister and 80-year-old grandfather test positive for A(H5N1) avian flu, but two nurses tending them developed severe pneumonia, and one tested positive.
In another questionable case, the Vietnamese government's assertion that a man developed the flu 16 days after eating raw duck-blood pudding was publicly ridiculed by a prominent flu specialist at Hong Kong University, who said it was more likely that he got it from his sick brother.
Dr. Henry L. Niman, a biochemist in Pittsburgh who has become a hero to many Internet flu watchers and a gadfly to public health authorities, has argued for weeks that there have been 20 to 30 human-to-human infections.
Dr. Niman says the authors of the Emerging Infectious Diseases article were too conservative: even though the dates in it were fragmentary, it was possible to infer that in about 10 of the 15 cases, there was a gap in onset dates of at least five days, which would fit with the flu's incubation time of two to five days.
And in a study published just last month about a village in Azerbaijan, scientists from the W.H.O. and the United States Navy said human-to-human transmission was possible. That conclusion essentially agreed with what Dr. Niman had been arguing since early March — that it was unlikely that seven infections among six relatives and a neighbor, with onset dates stretching from Feb. 15 to March 4, had all been picked up from dying wild swans that the family had plucked for feathers in a nearby swamp in early February.
While Dr. Niman is an irritant to public health officials, his digging sometimes pushes them to change conclusions, as it did in the recent Indonesia case. The W.H.O. at first said an undercooked pig might have infected the whole family, but Dr. Niman discovered that the hostess of the barbecue was sick two days before the barbecue and the last relative was infected two weeks after it.
His prodding, picked up by journalists, eventually led the W.H.O. to concede that no pig was to blame and that the virus probably had jumped from human to human to human.
The health organization's periodic updates on the number of avian flu cases and the death toll concentrate on cases confirmed by laboratories. The updates use no names and are often cleared by the affected country's health minister.
Dr. Niman, by contrast, trolls local press and radio reports and uses Google software to translate them — sometimes hilariously — looking for family names, onset dates and death dates.
For example, a May 15 report quotes a village midwife named Spoilt describing the death of a woman in Kubu Sembilang, Indonesia and the hospitalization of one of her sons:
"Praise br Ginting experienced was sick to last April 27 2006, with the sign of the continuous high fever to the temperature of his body reached 390 C was accompanied by coughs... Added Spoilt, second casualties Roy Karo-Karo that also the son of the uterus from Praise br. Gintin after his mother died last May 3, also fell ill, afterwards was reconciled to RSU Kabanjahe."
Dr. Niman contends that the largest human-to-human cluster so far was not in Indonesia, but in Dogubayazit, Turkey, in January. W.H.O. updates recorded 12 infected in three clusters, and quoted the Turkish Health Ministry blaming chickens and ducks. Dr. Niman counted 30 hospitalized with symptoms and said the three clusters were all cousins with the last names of Kocyigit and Ozcan, and that most fell sick after a big family party on Dec. 24 that was attended by a teenager who fell sick on Dec. 18 and died Jan. 1.
A patriarch, Dr. Niman said, told local papers that the two branches had had dinner together six days after the 14-year-old, Mehmet Ali Kocyigit, had shown mild symptoms. He died on Jan. 1, and several other young members of the two families died shortly after, with other relatives showing symptoms until Jan. 16. No scientific study of that outbreak has been released.
Dr. Niman also said clusters were becoming more frequent, especially in Indonesia. Just last week two more emerged there, one including a nurse whose infection has not yet been confirmed. With 36 deaths, Indonesia is expected to eclipse Vietnam soon as the world's worst-hit country.
Dr. David Nabarro, chief pandemic flu coordinator for the United Nations, said that even if some unexplained cases were human-to-human, it does not yet mean that the pandemic alert system, now at Level 3, "No or very limited human-human transmission," should be raised to Level 4, "Increased human-human transmission."
Level 4 means the virus has mutated until it moves between some people who have been only in brief contact, as a cold does. Right now, Dr. Nabarro said, any human transmission is "very inefficient."
Level 6, meaning a pandemic has begun, is defined as "efficient and sustained" human transmission.
Ms. Cheng of the W.H.O. said that even if there were more clusters, the alert would remain at Level 3 as long as the virus dies out by itself.
"A lot of this is subjective, a judgment on how efficiently the virus is infecting people," she said. "If it becomes more common, we'd convene a task force to raise the alert level."

Internet Phones: Please Wait for the Next Available Opportunity(NYTimes,6/4/06)

June 4, 2006
Digital Domain
Internet Phones: Please Wait for the Next Available Opportunity
By RANDALL STROSS
THE telephone and the PC are ubiquitous desk mates, separated by a few inches and about a century.
How soon we can use our home phones to exploit the efficiencies of the Internet, where calling costs are too small to be worth metering, is a question of no small import for every telecommunications provider — and for every household with a phone.
The prospect of modernizing the telephone seems close because broadband services have solved the so-called last-mile problem, bringing relatively fast Internet connections from local switching centers and cable offices into customers' homes. But connecting home phones to the Internet — spanning the last foot and a half — remains a problem, unless one subscribes to one of the new Internet phone services offered by cable companies here and there.
Ideally, we will not end up so dependent upon the cable guy. When eBay decided nine months ago to acquire Skype Technologies, the Luxembourg-based wunderkind that offers free Internet calls around the world, it seemed that free or nearly free Internet telephony would soon reach every American den, and no one would have to sign up for a separate phone service with the cable company. The happy day of free calls will not arrive, however, until existing phones are replaced or adapted to plug into the Internet.
Skype is a service that enables long-distance conversations without phones: one Skype user, sitting at a PC with a headset, can talk to any other Skype user sitting at another PC. Soon after announcing the Skype acquisition, eBay's chief executive, Meg Whitman, said she thought that Skype could "turbocharge" eBay and PayPal — and that eBay and PayPal could likewise "turbocharge" Skype. "One plus one plus one should equal four or five," she said.
She and her eBay colleagues were so eager to complete the Skype deal that they offered rich terms for a company with a mere $60 million in revenue last year: eBay paid $2.6 billion in cash and stock with an additional $1.5 billion to follow if performance targets are met. Figured most conservatively, the $2.6 billion price was 43 times revenue, a valuation so far above industry norms that it might as well have been determined by a Magic 8 Ball.
Any PC, equipped with Skype's free software and a headset, or with a microphone and speakers, can place a free phone call to a similarly equipped PC anywhere in the world — and without bankrupting Skype. The arrangement places no burden upon Skype's servers: messages go directly from calling PC to receiving PC, peer to peer.
These PC-to-PC calls avoid charges because they do not tie up the lines of proprietary telephone company networks. Voice sounds are digitized, compressed, popped into data packets and sent on their way into the shared space of the Internet. The quality of these digitized Internet calls can be as good as or better than conventional calls.
Skype's revenue comes principally from its SkypeOut service, for calls that originate on a PC and connect to a conventional phone number. The sound quality is not as good as it is with its PC-to-PC calls, but Skype's international calls are cheap — as cheap as those offered by no-name, prepaid calling cards — undercutting the rates of traditional telephone companies.
Verizon, for example, has a plan with monthly fees that entitle customers to call China for as little as 15 cents a minute — or $5.23 a minute for the basic rate if you aren't on a plan. At Skype, the call-anytime, no-monthly-fee flat rate is about 2 cents a minute.
News of Skype traveled swiftly, without need of advertising, after the company was founded in 2002. When eBay offered to buy it in September 2005, Skype said that it had 54 million members in 225 countries, and that it was adding 150,000 registrants a day. These numbers must have caused heart palpitations in eBay's executive suite. Skype's hypergrowth would help bolster eBay's slowing growth in its core auction business.
Skype users must use a PC to initiate a call, and eBay users are no less reliant on their PC's, so blending the two services by having eBay sellers offer a "Skype Me" button on their listings seemed a natural fit. With a click, someone interested in bidding would be connected directly to the seller, without having to wait for an exchange of e-mail messages. "Buyers will gain an easy way to talk to sellers quickly and get the information they need to buy," the company said when it announced the acquisition.
EBay has not been in a hurry, however, to roll out the Skype Me option to advertisers. EBay sellers in Belgium, the Netherlands and China can use the option, but not those in the United States. Chris Donlay, a spokesman for eBay, said that the delay in introducing it in the United States was a matter of careful testing and prudence. "We try not to throw something out there," he said.
Undoubtedly, eBay has noticed that stubborn last-foot-and-a-half problem. Paying little or nothing to place a long, unhurried call via Skype to a loved one halfway around the world is worth the minor inconvenience of putting on a headset. But using a headset for every call is a habit yet to be acquired by most people.
The handiest way to make a Skype call is by picking up a telephone. Skype, however, can use only Skype-certified phones, designed to be physically connected to a PC.
When will Skype phones become ubiquitous? Those amazing Skype registration numbers — in the first quarter, the number of users worldwide increased by 220,000 a day — are not having much of an impact on the telephone equipment market in the United States, even in Silicon Valley.
EBay made a great fuss last year when it struck a distribution deal with RadioShack to place Skype-certified phones in 3,500 RadioShack retail outlets. The only one that my local store had in stock, however, cost $120, a price that is not set to move a lot of product. I thought that a local electronics superstore chain might have far greater selection, but discovered that I was only half right: the store, Fry's Electronics, had a lot of phones — 237 models — but only one Skype phone in stock, on sale for $80.
Even after overcoming the equipment problems on the buyer's side, eBay faces another hurdle: most of its merchandise sellers, whether big or small, have good reason to resist offering a Skype Me option. Fielding telephone calls from prospective buyers one by one is labor intensive, which is to say expensive. Restricting communication to e-mail messages is far more efficient. EBay makes it easy for a seller to publicly post replies to queries so that the same questions need not be answered over and over.
While eBay dithers with its proprietary Skype Me plans, Google, Amazon, online newspapers and the rest of the Web are quickly embracing the Old New Thing in advertising: click-to-call, shorthand for "click to be called back," a technology that uses Internet telephony for calling customers back and is available to Web site designers from any number of vendors.
With a click on the button in a Web advertisement, like a Google text ad, a box pops up where you type in your phone number. If it works properly, your phone rings in a blink — with the local plumber or florist or bookseller at the other end of the line. Local merchants who have traditionally advertised in the Yellow Pages are showing particular interest in click-to-call. They, unlike most of eBay's merchandise sellers, are set up to field customers' questions anyhow. On the customer's side, there is no need for a headset or any special equipment. Everyone with a phone can use a click-to-call feature immediately.
For advertisers, click-to-call offers twin attractions: the efficient placing of ads linked to particular search terms, and a means of measuring results without worry about automated click fraud perpetrated by competitors. Peter M. Zollman, an analyst at Classified Intelligence, a consulting firm based in Altamonte Springs, Fla., said that in the future, "advertising — and I mean all advertising — will be performance-based."
"Click-to-call," he added, "is one more manifestation."
Mr. Zollman said he was pleasantly surprised recently when he was searching on the Web for last-minute deals on cruises and was offered a click-to-call button. He clicked, was called back instantly and got a price that he deemed a bargain.
STRICTLY speaking, click-to-call did not save appreciable time when dialing — punching an unfamiliar number into a telephone keypad cannot take much longer than tapping one's own phone number into the click-to-call box. But the process connected him instantly to a human being. Presumably, this level of service will be necessary: surely, no merchant would have the audacity to call you back only to put you on hold.
In an unexpected way, Skype, for all its peer-to-peer ingenuity, has yet to catch up with the plain old telephone system. "People want instant gratification," Mr. Zollman said. "Many do not have Skype, but everyone has a phone."
Randall Stross is a historian and author based in Silicon Valley. E-mail: ddomain@nytimes.com.