Photo: Flickr user lifeontheedge

Friday, September 21, 2007

Thais use two systems for telling the time: the 24-hour clock and the traditional Thai six hour clock.

Hey, cool. I just found out that my city has a pretty active community wiki.

Sleepwalking murder

Thursday, September 20, 2007

On September 17th, Jimmy Wales starts an article about a famous restaurant.

2 hours later, somebody tags the article -- not for deletion, but for speedy deletion, calling it spam.

The next revision removed the tag, and the current article looks good, but jesus. Speedy deletion is the quick guillotine intended for articles on which there can be no debate, articles that are unambiguously junk. If this is the type of treatment Jimmy Wales gets...



Addendum: it's healthy for wales not to be treated like a monarch. But he does get cut more slack than regular users.
Addendum 2: It looks like the story's more complex. Geoffrey Burling has the details.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

A day in the life of an article. And the followup:

I waited a few days for the deletion storm to pass and attention to wander, then as quickly as I could I restored the history and trimmed out the advertising speak myself. The article has sat completely unmolested since then, apparently a perfectly fine article on a perfectly fine subject. It took me _four minutes_ to fix it up nicely according to the timestamps. There must be umpteen thousands of such articles sitting in the deleted versions bin, probably never to be rescued. It's very disheartening.

Oh noes!

The mainstream media has beaten me to the punch -- the WaPo mentioned WikiDashboard, "a quick way to find the most active editors of an article". I knew about it! I swear! I just didn't post about it in time!

Here's a fuller explanation.

The Washington Post on Wikipedia's interplay with the 2008 presidential campaign. They've got the wikipedia culture down pretty well, too.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

What with the Ignore all Rules explanation and the Editors matter essay, it looks like there's momentum in the right direction.