Voting has ended on the board elections. Results will appear here. I'd meant to offer endorsements, but man ... there were a lot of candidates to evaluate.

I voted for: Eloquence (Erik Möller), Frieda (Frieda Brioschi), Michael Snow, Mindspillage (Kathleen Walsh), Oscar (Oscar van Dillen).

A rather conventional ticket, but I'm of the opinion that the current board is a little like Bush Sr. -- his single greatest asset was not fucking anything up. The first gulf war was a success because the leadership didn't do wrong any of the million things they could have; the same (well, almost) is true for the fall of the USSR. Competent leadership is a tightrope, and the current president demonstrates how far down the ground is.

Make no mistake: the wrong board could completely kill the Wikimedia projects -- well, splinter them, set them back a few years. Danny's plan to dismantle the bottom-up board and replace it with "captains of industry and academia" would go a long way down that path, for example -- no surer ingredients for a board that will inadvertently discourage a healthy wiki community than one that has no idea how wiki editing works. (To be fair, Danny has plenty of other things to say that are pretty smart.)

In other news, I've added a chat widget to the sidebar. Experimental.

Snowclones are a type of formula-based cliché which uses an old idiom in a new context.

Chronologal snowclones. From An X doth not a Y make (A swallow doth not a summer make, 400 B.C.) to im in ur X, Y-ing your Z (im in ur base, killing ur d00dz, 2007).

Happy fourth.

Chess-related deaths

Gregor MacGregor (1786 – 1845) was a Scottish soldier, adventurer and colonizer who fought in the South American struggle for independence. Upon his return to England in 1820, he claimed to be cazique of Poyais. Poyais was a fictional Central American country that MacGregor had invented which, with his help, drew investors and eventually colonists.

9 Cool Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Wikipedia. Fun list.

Fantastic article by danah boyd. (The discussion at Britannica Blog gets sidetracked early. There's much more light and less heat in boyd's comment section - scroll down).