This isn't dead-on wiki-related, but ficlets is a cool new collaborative writing site -- you can submit a microstory of up to 1024 characters, and other people can write prequels and sequels, building sprawling nonlinear (and commons-licenced) narratives. It's from AOL, of all companies, but it's so well thought-out that you'd think it and AOL would explode on contact like matter and antimatter. (I'm helping write a cyberpunk programming firefox fanfic about a mad scientist type.)

In other gadgetry, Wikia just launched what it calls Wiki magazines, which basically seem to be wikified versions of digg -- instead of pointing offsite, the voted-on links go to on-site stuff. Neat stuff.

Kelly martin notes approvingly that the inclusionists have been gaining ground, and proposes replacing "notability" with an interesting new standard: maintainability.

A record of my breakfast yesterday (for the record, two glazed Dunkin Donuts and a bottle of Aquafina) is unverifiable, and thus unmaintainable, and thus unfit for inclusion in Wikipedia. Verifiability isn't enough for maintainability, but it's definitely a minimum characteristic.

Something called Colony Collapse Disorder is killing off bees in huge numbers, and "Honey bees are responsible for approximately one third of the United States crop pollination".

Rotating tesseract

pediax is a Wikipepedia mirror all tricked out with ajax. It's fucking cool -- the front page is Google Maps, showing the most popular articles in the field of view spearheaded on their locations. I just scrolled from michigan to nyc, picking out stops along the way; it's pretty great. (The actual article pages are slow, glitchy, and generally misguided.)

'People in Sioux Lookout, Ont., expressed shock and outrage after reading derogatory comments about their town in a brochure distributed to local businesses.

The brochure, a type of business directory distributed to hotels in the community, said Sioux Lookout was "full of drunks" and "a dirty little town." It also suggested people living in the community should move.'

Stable versions, anyone? (Or maybe just read articles before you republish them, and disclose their source.)

Wikipedia and Conservapedia go head to head on the BBC (realaudio). It's an entertaining listen.

Human echolocation is the ability of humans to sense objects in their environment by hearing echos off those objects.

"Wikileaks.org is a site dedicated to the apparently untraceable leaking and analysis of documents from oppressive regimes." -via

Wikiblogplanet is an aggregator of blogs by wikipedians.

Nemo 33 is a recreational diving center in Uccle, Belgium near Brussels that is home to the world's deepest swimming pool.

The NYTimes recap says that the Essjay story 'shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process...allows readers to react to suspected fraud. ... By Saturday, the prevailing view was summarized in subject lines like Essjay Must Resign, and notes calling Mr. Jordan’s actions “plain and simple fraud.”' (Bonus: The fairest, pithiest conclusion yet. Someone had to do it.)

Andrew Lih says that when all is said and done, maybe the New Yorker should have checked their facts better (being, you know, the New Yorker).

Andrew Lih underscores the severity of the essjay case with his usual eloquence. Before pointing out that essjay may have defamed or libeled a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, he says:

This is now an internal crisis of confidence. What company does the community keep? What happens when after assuming good faith, we discover the depths of betrayal go this deep? The Wikipedia community is notoriously full of touchy-feely assume good faith WikiLove and quick to forgive.

Alright, folks. I've trawled the depths of the paraphilia section and dug up the articles that are funny and not gross.

Anesthesia fetishism is a very specialized sub-category of medical fetishism in which sexual arousal is induced by the idea of general anesthesia, and the various equipment and paraphernalia related to its use. Pyrophilia is a relatively uncommon paraphilia in which the patient derives gratification from fire and fire-starting activity. Robot fetishism is a fetishistic attraction to humanoid or non-humanoid robots; also to people acting like robots or people dressed in robot costumes. A less common fantasy involves transformation into a robot. Spectrophilia is the paraphilia involving sexual attraction to ghosts and spirits. Tamakeri is a sexual fetish and subgenre of pornography in Japan. In tamakeri pornography, a female kicks a man in the testicles.

Jimmy Wales has diminished the weirdness of the Essjay scandal:

I have been for several days in a remote part of India with little or no Internet access. I only learned this morning that EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes. I [previously] understood this to be primarily the matter of a pseudonymous identity (something very mild and completely understandable given the personal dangers possible on the Internet) and not a matter of violation of people's trust (...)

I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the community (...)

Wikipedia is built on (among other things) twin pillars of trust and tolerance. The integrity of the project depends on the core community being passionate about quality and integrity, so that we can trust each other. The harmony of our work depends on human understanding and forgiveness of errors.

Oy. There's a complicated, messy scandal unfolding.

Update: Wales has asked Essjay to resign his positions at Wikipedia. Wales was in rural India when the scandal broke and didn't have reliable internet access.

Essjay, one of the most powerful admins on Wikipedia, presented himself for years as a 40-something "tenured professor of religion at a private university with a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law" (on his user page and to the New Yorker magazine -- scroll to the bottom for their correction)

In fact Essjay is a 24-year-old from Kentucky. At first this story seems like a standard case of con-artistry, and I wasn't going to cover it because it looked like someone self-destructing. But I don't think that's what's going on. Let's count the unexpectednesses:

1. Essjay outed himself.
2. He outed himself quietly * on his Wikia profile page after Wikia hired him. (Wikia is Jimmy Wales' wiki-community startup.)
3. Talking to the New Yorker, Jimmy apparently stood behind Essjay: 'Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it."' **

To paraphrase Neal Stephenson, this story is fractally weird: each microscopic part of it is just as weird as the whole thing.

So what gives? Essjay says he invented the persona to protect himself from "trolls, stalkers, and psychopaths who wander around Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects looking for people to harass, stalk, and otherwise ruin the lives of" -- wikipedia-watch's Daniel Brandt (who claims to have dug up the story, though as far as I can tell he just found the Wikia profile and contacted the New Yorker) seems crazy enough *** for me to sort of believe it. After years deep in the Wikipedia trenches, conducting the sort of business that has to be conducted (like banning spammers and neonazis) maybe you're exposed to lots of dangerous characters. You don't have to look hard for people who've gotten death threats.

But with some perspective: this is a big deal. Essjay's apparently used his fake credentials to influence wiki content, for one. I don't know who can read this without feeling a twinge of betrayal, even if Essjay did donate thousands of hours of his time to Wikipedia and is by all accounts a really cool guy.

The whole thing plays into the worst generalizations about Wikipedia and scares off the real academics it needs to attract. Wikipedia is self-reinforcing: it works best when its contributors take it seriously. Thankfully, they do. Cyde Weys sez:

...for every page I mentioned here, there was an active talk page full of people arguing that I didn’t link. So double the number of pages devoted to this one incident.

Wikipedians aren’t taking this one lying down. They’ve already written over a megabyte of text on the incident. Wikipedians are, if nothing else, creators of voluminous amounts of text. They also realize the importance of what Essjay did and how bad it makes Wikipedia look, and most of them want some action taken to rectify the situation.

* Essjays says most of the Wikipedians he knows well already knew he wasn't a professor. But (charitably) he obviously got carried enough away with his persona to pass himself off to a New Yorker editor. (This story hurts them, too: "It only took the magazine's vaunted fact-checking department seven months to discover that Essjay is actually a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan who has never taught anything and holds no advanced degrees.")

** Wales was in India when he talked to the New Yorker, and perhaps not adequately informed.

*** Brandt devotes himself to exposing the real-world identities of Wikipedia admins. An understandable goal, I guess, but "abrasive and paranoid" doesn't begin to describe him. I haven't been following his hijinks closely, but I get the feeling that a lot of people spend a lot of energy trying not to interact with him.

---

Bonus: A commenter at Freakonomics points out that in academic arenas, words sometimes speak louder than actions:

One of the major contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary only corresponded by letter (and did so for free, I believe). He had plenty of time to write up his letters, because he was locked up in one of England’s Asylums for the Criminally Insane. The guy running the project didn’t know this for quite some time, and it doesn’t change that even while mad, he contributed something valuable. (Check out http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary/dp/0606306978 which seems to be a book on it for confirmation) I’d be worried much more about the pretentious mediocrities than the simply lying, criminal, or crazy types.

And here's an interesting comment from digg, of all places:

The demand for knowledge is being catered by wikipedia and as usual demand fuels supply thus the only way forward is for authoritative academics move on to the virtual world and take advantage of the medium. Maybe citizendum might fill in gaps however, wikipedia should always exist as a glorified sandbox. The bottom line is this is no big deal. Jimmy Wales did the right thing.. a 24 year old spent a major part of his life building up knowledge. i understand him.. i hope you too

Also be sure to read Kelly Martin's commentary (one, two, three), which is much less forgiving than mine.

Finally, Andew Lih has the clearest summation I've seen.

The journal Nature: "...the Wiki community has mutated since 2001 from an oligarchy to a democracy. The percentage of edits made by the Wikipedia 'élite' of administrators increased steadily up to 2004, when it reached around 50%. But since then it has steadily declined, and is now just 10% (and falling)."

Truth In Numbers is a documentary about Wikipedia (currently in production). Here's the first trailer:



It looks like it's going to be really good -- the crew is crisscrossing asia right now (you can follow their progress here), which is where the real Wikipedia esprit de corps is.

The Walking City was an idea proposed by British architect Ron Herron in 1964. In an article in avant-garde architecture journal Archigram, Ron Herron proposed building massive mobile robotic structures, with their own intelligence, that could freely roam the world, moving to wherever their resources or manufacturing abilities were needed. Various walking cities could interconnect with each other to form larger 'walking metropolises' when needed, and then disperse when their concentrated power was no longer necessary.

Slate magazine: "Wikipedia's notability policy resembles U.S. immigration policy before 9/11: stringent rules, spotty enforcement."

Same topic: Scott McCloud, patron saint of webcomics (and comics in general) is "fed up with Wikipedia".

There's a lot to be said about notability guidelines, but it's all been said so many times. (Google inclusionist deletionist.) It's clear, at this point, that something should be done. But that's like writing "americans shouldn't vote for republicans" -- easier said than done. Wikipedia is now a complex society and culture, with its own internal dynamics and inertia.

Too, there's a balance to be walked, and nobody knows quite how to walk it. How do you keep major webcomics in, but still make sure Flat-Earthers and guru-come-con-artists can't finesse their way into exuberant coverage?

Good quote from the Slate article:

When people go to this much trouble to maintain a distinction rendered irrelevant by technological change, the search for an explanation usually leads to Thorstein Veblen's 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. This extended sociological essay argues that the pursuit of status based on outmoded social codes takes precedence over, and frequently undermines, the rational pursuit of wealth and, more broadly, common sense. Hierarchical distinctions among people and things remain in force not because they retain practical value, but because they have become pleasurable in themselves. Wikipedia's stubborn enforcement of its notability standard suggests Veblen was right. We limit entry to the club not because we need to, but because we want to.

I'm cherrypicking wiki-related posts from my reader -- check the left sidebar (or this page, if you want all of them).

A gravity train is a theoretical means of transportation intended to go between two points on the surface of a sphere, following a straight tunnel that goes directly from one point to the other through the interior of the sphere.

Hello Wiki

I came up with this while working on merchandise for the store -- it's a parody of Hello Kitty, obviously, and technically fair use but way too risky to sell (I thought it was funny enough to post here as a Private Citizen, thought).

What will Wikipedia be like in 5 years? Great blog post.
via

I'm pretty sure all this stuff will come true -- if it doesn't happen on the main site, it'll happen via greasemonkey-style mashups. Interesting digression:

In general, scientists (especially in the "harder" fields) and mathematicians have shown a great deal more enthusiasm than humanists, with social scientists somewhere between. (I find this ironic, because humanities fields have so much more to gain from an integrated and cross-linked ecology of knowledge; despite constant flux and discipline genesis at the borders and the current rhetorical vogue of "interdisciplinary" research, science topics are relatively self-contained compared to humanities topics.)

Rumors of Wikimedia's Death Greatly Exaggerated

Did I mention that I like Wikiworld? It's exactly like this blog, only a comic.

MSNBC Poll: Is it ok to pay people to post or edit Wikipedia content?

S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897.

I just recorded a spoken version.

Chikyu Hakken, Japanese for "Earth Discovery", is a half-billion dollar project that aims to be the first to drill seven kilometers beneath the seabed and into the Earth's mantle, three times deeper than ever drilled before.

There's a new policy: outgoing links from Wikipedia will be marked as "nofollow" for search engines. Kottke has some interesting commentary.

Microsoft tried to pay people to slant Wikipedia articles in their favor. (This story speaks more to MS's keystone cops style marketing than their evilness. Any truly evil corporation would be competent enough to make sure the story didn't leak.)

Dude. That bee is soooo wasted.

Category:Fictional barbers and hairdressers

Eponymous hairstyles

Q: How many members of a (given demographic group) does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: 'N+1 (where N is a positive whole number)' — one to hold the lightbulb and N to behave in a fashion generally associated with a negative stereotype of that group.

Current scientific theories about nutrition and generally accepted common sense both indicate that a person who follows Breatharianism in the long term would die of starvation or dehydration.

New Rome

So I haven't updated in awhile. I'm working on the whole financial independence thing.

I'm also doing a lot of stuff for the foundation -- trying to revamp the cafepress store. And I've realized Blog may not be the best medium for wikisnips, so there's something developing on that front, too.

In the meantime, check out the Think Free campaign:

In one California case, a pizza delivery was used as a ploy to lure a murder victim out of her house. Tanya Holzmayer was then murdered by a man she had fired recently, scientist Guyang Matthew Huang, who had been lying in wait. Huang then shot himself. Domino's promptly sent another driver to retrieve and deliver the remaining pizzas.

Harriet (c. 1830–June 23, 2006).
Tu'i Malila (c. 1777–May 19, 1965).
Adwaita.

A cool alternative to Wikipedia's front page.

Interesting NYTimes article about the culture of the Chinese-language Wikipedia (though frustratingly little is said about the actual construction of the articles -- did the reporter wade through the history or just skim the top layer of the onion? Underscores the need for a good wikipedia client that makes history-swimming easy.)

Talk: Rock, Paper, Scissors (via reddit)

Wikipedia just got its 1,500,000th article, which is about an endangered species of snail. (The 1,000,000th was about a Scottish railway station and the 500,000ths was about Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.)

Wikipedia "is producing the world’s least biased accounts of the world’s most polarizing conflict...Two peoples at war can learn to live in peace with the help of what historians have called a “bridging narrative,” a shared understanding of history that takes into account the grievances of both sides. After five regional wars, two intifadas, and endless skirmishes and political confrontations, if any two groups of people on Earth need such a narrative, it’s Israelis and Arabs. By creating an editing environment in which political partisans from the different sides are induced to hash out their disagreements, Wikipedia is showing how a bridging narrative might be created, and what it might look like."

Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala. Trust me, it's good.

The Chinese government has effectively stopped blocking Wikipedia. Nevermind.

Category:Lists of fictional animals

Calling shotgun
via kottke

"Sadly, many Wikipedia users still have a sense of humour and, what is worse, use it deliberately. This is why I recently set up the Wikipedia Fun Police, to help eliminate this problem once and for all. "

Via via via via

Another wikipedia blog: WikiDumper is "The Official Appreciation Page for the Best of the Wikipedia Rejects". (I like this one.)

Interesting blog post with a digg-ready title: Wikipedia and the Death of Archaeology: "Since Wikipedia exists in many non-identical, language-based independent editions, each of which is constantly changing, all of the editions taken together provide a real-time record of not only how our perception of ourselves morphs over time, but how that perception differs culturally around the world as well."

On a non-wikipedia-related note, my old band The Allusions finished recording some songs (my keyboard and synths are in the first three). It's impossible to judge a band you've been in objectively, but I think they sound pretty damn good. Check out their shows if you're in michigan.

Google buys Jotspot. (JotSpot is an enterprise-wiki -slash-web-app platform. It looks kind of cool.)

There's a minor war [signpost overview] raging in the blogosphere after Jason Calcamis, CEO of Weblogs Inc., said it was unconcionable for Wikipedia not to run advertising.

Of course, Wikipedia's adlessness is one of the things that makes it work -- it's community-powered, and rather utopian -- but you already knew that. Wikipedians have been talking about this issue for years, and the idea that there are millions of dollars at stake is not new.

What's telling about this exchange is that almost everyone in the wider blogging world has come to the same conclusion the wikipedians did. (Calacanis has taken a lot of abuse, not all of it deserved.)

Speaking of which. I'm on the fundraising committee, and we should be rolling out some exciting new stuff over the next month -- none of it ad-related. The difference between Wikipedia's model and Weblog Inc.'s typifies the difference between blogging and wikis generally, I think.

There's a new podcast: Wikipedia Weekly. (They've got a Jimmy Wales interview this week.) Here's the mp3 feed, and here's the iTunes link.

Florence Devouard is the new chair of the Wikimedia board. Jimbo will become Chairman Emeritus.

Communist Mutants from Space!

0.999...

The NYTimes has a comprehensive article on China's partial unblock.

List of Six Feet Under deaths. (Because episode guides are for pussies.)

From Jimbo, on the list:

Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

If you've got ideas, add them.

The Austrailian: Editing wikipedia is a civic duty

Reporters Without Borders has the scoop on China's partial unblock.

Sure, there's Eastcoast / Westcoast hiphop. But for completists...

Report from the mailing list: Wikipedia is now only partially blocked in China. (Better that the chinese government censor wikipedia than the foundation. Though I think the spectre of partial blocks will keep editors on pins and needles.)

Despite urban legend, Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet. However, Crapper put in much effort to popularise it and did come up with some related inventions.

Funny NYTimes piece on Articles for Deletion. (Diane Farrell's been restored, though.)

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz!

(Not to be confused with Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft.)

List of comic book superpowers

List of historical elephants

Man, I used to love going on Spaceship Earth when I was a kid.

(See also: terrifyingly detailed coverage of Epcot. "EPCOT is also regarded today as the quintessential park of the 1980s. Many feel the park is severely outdated; a common insult is to call the park "the future as seen by Republicans." On the other hand, there are many who enjoy the nostalgia as there has been a growing trend toward interest in 1980s culture. To showcase this growing trend, EPCOT has a performance troupe in the Future World area perform many New Wave hits from the '80s on synthesizer instruments. The troupe dresses in Duran Duran and A Flock Of Seagulls-esque clothing and also peforms many Disney songs.")

Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word". It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.

Saudade is a Portuguese word for a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return. Few other languages in the world have a word with such meaning, making saudade a distinct mark of Portuguese culture.

Angel of the North

Category:Hoaxes

Professional farter

Hey, another wikipedia client for mac! (Called Pathway. Small but interesting featureset. Still no history-swimming.)

Corante has a good discussion about why experts stay at wikipedia, and why they leave.

Erik Möller won the board election. (He's supremely qualified and seems like a good guy.)

Lawrence Lessig's wikimania keynote was about making sure free culture wasn't divided into isolated islands. To that end, FlickrLickr grabs free-licenced Flickr photos for use on wikimedia projects.

The Tree of Ténéré was a solitary acacia that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth — the only one within more than 400 km. It was knocked down by an allegedly drunk Libyan truck driver in 1973. On November 8, 1973 the dead tree was relocated to the Niger National Museum in the capital Niamey. It has been replaced by a simple metal sculpture representing a tree.

List of famous trees

Pedia bills itself as a wikipedia client for mac, but it's really just a stripped-down web browser, not even as full-featured as Gollum. (It's free-licenced, so it'll improve. Maybe I'll finish learning Cocoa and do it myself.)

Clay Shirky on why Citizendium won't work. I'm inclined to think these problems might be solvable (not least because Citizendium content can be recycled to wikipedia -- Citizendium just needs to be a tide pool, a set of nooks and crannies where an alternate rulebook elides problems that crop up in some corners of wikipedia), but the snippiness of Sanger's response is a bit concerning.

Wikipedia blog endorses Aaron Swartz. Check out his essays, and go vote for him in the Wikimedia board elections (which end in a couple days).

From Code, and Other Laws of Wikipedia:

The page design the site uses encourages specific actions by making some links clear and prominent. Software functions like categories make certain kinds of features possible. The formatting codes used for things like infoboxes and links determine how easy it is for newcomers to edit those pieces of the site.

All of these things are political choices, not technical ones. It's not like there's a right answer that's obvious to any intelligent programmer. And these choices can have huge effects on the community. That's why it's essential the community be involved in making these decisions.

The current team of Wikipedia programmers is a volunteer group (although a couple of them were recently hired by the Wikimedia Foundation so they could live a little more comfortably) working much like a standard free software community, discussing things on mailing lists and IRC channels. They got together in person in the days before Wikimania to discuss some of the current hot topics in the software.

One presentation was by a usability expert who told us about a study done on how hard people found it to add a photo to a Wikipedia page. The discussion after the presentation turned into a debate over whether Wikipedia should be easy to to use. Some suggested that confused users should just add their contributions in the wrong way and a more experienced users would come along to clean their contributions up. Others questioned whether confused users should be allowed to edit the site at all -- were their contributions even valuable?

As a programmer, I have a great deal of respect for the members of my trade. But with all due respect, are these really decisions that the programmers should be making?

Meanwhile, Jimbo Wales also has a for-profit company, Wikia, which recently received $4 million in venture capital funding. Wales has said, including in his keynote speech at Wikimania, that one of the things he hopes to spend it on is hiring programmers to improve the Wikipedia software.

This is the kind of thing that seems like a thoughtful gesture if you think of the software as neutral -- after all, improvements are improvements -- but becomes rather more problematic if technical choices have political effects. Should executives and venture capitalists be calling the shots on some of these issues?

The Wikipedia community is enormously vibrant and I have no doubt that the site will manage to survive many software changes. But if we're concerned about more than mere survival, about how to make Wikipedia the best that it can be, we need to start thinking about software design as much as we think about the rest of our policy choices.

From Making more Wikipedias:

Wikipedia's real innovation was much more than simply starting a community to build an encyclopedia or using wiki software to do it. Wikipedia's real innovation was the idea of radical collaboration. Instead of having a small group of people work together, it invited the entire world to take part. Instead of assigning tasks, it let anyone work on whatever they wanted, whenever they felt like it. Instead of having someone be in charge, it let people sort things out for themselves. And yet it did all this towards creating a very specific product.

Even now, it's hard to think of anything else quite like it. Books have been co-authored, but usually only by two people. Large groups have written encyclopedias, but usually only by being assigned tasks. Software has been written by communities, but typically someone is in charge.

But if we take this definition, rather than wiki software, as the core of Wikipedia, then we see that other types of software are also forms of radical collaboration. Reddit, for example, is radical collaboration to build a news site: anyone can add or edit, nobody is in charge, and yet an interesting news site results. Freed from the notion that Wikipedia is simply about wiki software, one can even imagine new kinds of sites. What about a "debate wiki", where people argue about a question, but the outcome is a carefully-constructed discussion for others to read later, rather than a morass of bickering messages.

If we take radical collaboration as our core, then it becomes clear that extending Wikipedia's success doesn't simply mean installing more copies of wiki software for different tasks. It means figuring out the key principles that make radical collaboration work. What kinds of projects is it good for? How do you get them started? How do you keep them growing? What rules do you put in place? What software do you use?

These questions can't be answered from the armchair, of course. They require experimentation and study. And that, in turn, requires building a community around strong collaboration itself. It doesn't help us much if each person goes off and tries to start a wiki on their own. To learn what works and what doesn't, we need to share our experiences and be willing to test new things -- new goals, new social structures, new software.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (See also)

Omnipelagos is like 6 degrees of wikipedia but much better. (You can actaully play 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon with it.)

"...if you want to have authority on the Web, you have to show up on the Web. And those who ought to enjoy more authority than Wikipedia aren’t. Let me make the point by example

...

Cast your eyes back across those web addresses. What are your chances of guessing them? Of remembering them? Of writing them down accurately? If you bookmark them, how confident are you that they’ll be there after the next site re-org?

So if the public-sector community decided to standardize their URIs, or adopt a principle that every front page should have a FAQ link, or make some sort of concerted intelligent attempt to show up on the Web, they might grab some authority back. But they’re not. And I don’t see any signs of interest.

So Wikipedia is going to win. Do you see any other plausible outcome?"

Find wikipedia's links to a particular site. (For example, Here are links to this blog.)

Wikipedia is Written by the Public has a correllary: Process is Dangerous.

In physics, Planck units are physical units of measurement defined exclusively in terms of five universal physical constants, in such a manner that all of these physical constants take on the numerical value of one when expressed in terms of these units. Planck units elegantly simplify particular algebraic expressions appearing in physical law.

Jimmy: 'One of the points that I'm trying to push is that if there's a small town in China that has a wonderful local tradition, that won't make its way into Wikipedia because the people of China are not allowed to share their knowledge with the world. I think that's an ironic side-effect and something the people in the censorship department need to have a much bigger awareness of: you're not just preventing information about Falun Gong or whatever you're upset about getting into China, you're preventing the Chinese people speaking to the world.'

Interesting blog post.

Then there's a distinct second group of people who argue fiercely against what they perceive as 'mob rule'; people who can't fathom the thought of open, participatory systems that actually work. Typically these are people from Academia or political institutions, both of which are groups that are deeply characterized by their thresholds of entry. (I'm not joking here. That's anecdotal evidence, true, but happened too often to be a coincidence.)

And these are the people we need to have discussions with. Because they're the gateways to making changes on a large scale, to changing the system from within. If we can't persuade them we at least must [reduce] their fear of these systems. We must demonstrate that what we're proposing is not Anarchy.

Hitler Has Only Got One Ball

Wikipedia:No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man
via

Wikipedia really is written by the public -- if this tremendously important bit of research is independently confirmed, it upsets conventional thinking.

Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that's not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account.

To investigate more formally, 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 billion 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).

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they've come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.

Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much smaller scale: a large group of people write articles on topics they know well, while a small staff formats them into a single work. This second group is clearly very important -- it's thanks to them encyclopedias have a consistent look and tone -- but it's a severe exaggeration to say that they wrote the encyclopedia. One imagines the people running Britannica worry more about their contributors than their formatters.

And Wikipedia should too. Even if all the formatters quit the project tomorrow, Wikipedia would still be immensely valuable. For the most part, people read Wikipedia because it has the information they need, not because it has a consistent look. It certainly wouldn't be as nice without one, but the people who (like me) care about such things would probably step up to take the place of those who had left. The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around.

Flickr's added geotagging and there are already millions of photos on the map. 2 thoughts spring immediately to mind:

1. Someone needs to mash this up with Wikimapia. (It can be done; there's an API.)

2. The hill ahead of Digital Universe keeps getting steeper.

Extraterrestrial skies

David Gerard, on the mailing list: "I'm somewhat annoyed the screenshots are real ..."

Five-second rule

The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect first used in 1951 for the movie Distant Drums. It has been featured in dozens of movies since.

WikiCharts tracks the most popular wikipedia articles. As usual, people are interested in sex and space travel. (The tool counts pageviews, not searches from the wikipedia mainpage, so google's probably playing a big role. And it's only 2 days running, so expect big fluctuations.)