Photo: Flickr user lifeontheedge

Friday, February 01, 2008

The people who brought you the 10,000-year clock are excited about Wikipedia's potential as a canonical "Futurepedia".

Think about articles like 2020 -- "If expanded greatly the official future timeline might prove to be a useful document of what we expect."

I hate to be the one to break it to them, but there's no way that's going to happen within Wikipedia proper. It's not verifiable. It doesn't cite authoritative sources. It's not encyclopedic. Basically, it breaks all the rules, and it'll get slapped down before it gains any steam. Wikipedia's incredible realized potential lives side by side with a lot of squandered potential.

You're not going to win this one by fighting it out in the AfD trenches -- anyway, 1head-to-head combat isn't the wiki way. Wikipedia desperately needs to be nested inside some broader, more permissive architecture.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Florence: Wikipedia will have stable versions, wiki-to-print, and collaborative video editing.

F.D.: First of all, improvements to the software. This is something that's been under discussion for two and a half years: stable versions. The idea is to be able to identify which versions have been validated, and to enable users to see both the current version and the last version that was accepted as being more or less correct.

The second innovation, which I hope will become available in spring, is to give people the chance to put together a small personalised pdf file or paper version containing a selection of articles. Suppose, for example, that I want to know all about the Davos forum. I put things in a basket, just as on Amazon: the article on Davos, articles about the various personalities attending, global warming or the economic crisis. I compile my own little book which I can buy and have sent to me. That is Wiki to Print.

The third innovation, probably in autumn 2008 will be the possibility of adding videos to Wikipedia and editing them collaboratively, like a wiki text. That should be really, really good!


Wiki-to-print has been around for awhile as pediapress, but there were all sorts of problems with the implementation. Now that I check their site, it looks like they've "entered a long term partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation". Sweet. Here's the press release from a month ago; it looks like this slipped completely under the radar.

"Project Chanology" began as an Internet-based protest against the controversial Church of Scientology by "Anonymous", a group described as "a disparate collection of hackers and activists".

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Picture of the year. (Damn, I liked the others better.)