Amazon's Mechanical Turk is failing for the same reason that Wikipedia is succeeding.

The Feynman Point is the sequence of six 9s which begins at the 762nd decimal place of π. It is named after physicist Richard Feynman, who once stated during a lecture he would like to memorize the digits of π until that point, so he could recite them and quip "nine nine nine nine nine nine and so on."

Wikifuturology

"I write these words in April 2007. If my prediction holds true then by the end of next year major news organizations will have research staffers who spend their working days reading Wikipedia edit histories. In a couple of years ordinary people won't just peruse your biography or your company's current Wikipedia entry when they decide whether to do business with you, they'll be clicking on alternate Google returns to see whether you've been in an arbitration case. Blogs and forking sites will chronicle ideological and corporate attempts to manipulate Wikipedia."

Light rail can carry as many passengers as a 16-lane freeway in the space of a two lane roadway. (Check out the pictures.)

If you want to know how to drive a streetcar ...

Also, a trolleybus is an electric bus powered by two overhead wires. And this is a cool picture.

The origin of the finger (gesture) is highly speculative, but is quite possibly thousands of years old. It is identified as the digitus impudicus ("impudent finger") in Ancient Roman writings[1] and reference is made to using the finger in the Ancient Greek comedy The Clouds by Aristophanes.

Humor roundup

Wikipedia vs. Google

A rough guide to the state of the internet

Why wiki works (because it's a MMORPG?)

What Wikiepdia is not (outtakes)

And finally, the Encyclopedia of Stupid joins what is fast becoming a crowded field.

The Irony mark (؟) (French: point d’ironie).

"This mark was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm at the end of the 19th century. It was in turn taken by Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l’oiseau (1966), in which the author proposes several other innovative punctuation marks, such as the doubt (), certainty (), acclamation (), authority (), indignation () and love () marks."

So much better than smilies. See also: Sarcasm mark. "Although a sarcasm mark exists in the Ethiopic languages it is not a standard form of punctuation in English."

Imperial Life in the Emerald Wiki

I just finished reading "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," all about how the U.S. bungled the Iraq reconstruction by becoming ensconsed in the Green Zone and debating endlessly.

In real life you meet all sorts of people at school, or the gas station, or walking around. Online, everything's a room with a bouncer; there are all sorts of opportunities for closed circles, and sometimes I worry about getting too caught up in wikipolitical minutia.

Don't get me wrong -- if Wikipedia was anything at all like the U.S. Bagdhad presence I'd be off storming St. Petersburg or something. Er ... the St. Petersburg with palms, not the one with statues of Lenin. But there are all sorts of real-world wiki issues that aren't given enough attention -- "stupid user stories" are usually bad design stories.

This California newsman thought that "there's no way to tell who wrote the [Wikipedia] entry or how many people contributed to it" until one of his readers corrected him -- and he works for the media! How many regular people know how to check an article's contributors?

Put yourself in your parents' shoes: you're reading a page about Thailand that you found through Google, and you see a square that says "history". You click the square expecting to read about the history of Thailand and suddenly you're faced with a long, mysterious list of nonsensical words and numbers. You click the back button.

People are not born knowing how Wikipedia works, or what IANAL stands for, or the intended purpose of a program called Gimp.

The "history" problem could have been solved years ago by picking a better name for the tab -- even "article history" would be an improvement, and I thought of that in 5 seconds. "Previous versions of this article"? It would be a simple change, uncontroversial, easy to implement. But it would affect the experience of ordinary Wikipedia users way more than Merging Two of the Official Rules would, and how many megabytes of text were devoted to debating that?

The U.S. presence in Bagdhad had almost no Araibic-fluent staff, and they had no idea what was going on around them. We web-savy folk don't understand how ordinary people see the internet: the only way to really know is to show people the site, sit back, and see what they do.

I've watched web-designer friends click on the wrong edit-this-section link. The only wikipedia usability study that I know of identified the problem in Feb. 2006 and found that new users would often do the same thing -- and then they'd be so confused that they'd delete all the text in the section because it looked nonsensical to them. (How's that for vandalism?) It took a year to move the links a quarter-inch and fix the problem.

Right now there's not much mediawiki usability testing going on (Wikia's doing some, but it takes a long time to trickle back up), and not many people care. This is a problem.

Awesome map of the internet

Wikipedia in 2003: "If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the Wiki, then ignore them and go about your business."

...and Today: "If the rules prevent you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore them."

Two things jump out:

1. The human touch is fading a little.

2. IAR was originally intended to keep people from quitting or collapsing underneath the beaurocracy (I know there's a Once Upon a Mattress reference in there somewhere), not to enable decisive leadership, or whatever. I don't know if the change is wholly a bad thing, but it's notable.

via

Wikipedia vs. Citizendium

Citizendium is not Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not Citizendium.

So far, both of those articles adhere to their stereotypes: Citizendium's is tight and well-written but full of straw men; Wikipedia's is more neutral, comprehensive, and messy.

Wikipedia sings in a few areas:

• Specific topics where enthusiasts congregate (from Peerage to Talib Kweli)
• Controversial issues with lots of nooks and crannies that get hammered out and disinfected by the sunlight of coverage (Muhammad cartoons, for example)
• Lists, where the huge userbase is harnessed best. (Anyone can just add a line-item.)
• Entries that are just incredibly fun, get linked all over the place, grow of their own accord.
• And finally, documentation of porn. (You know it's true.)

And of course, Citizendium doesn't have a horde of OCD ants scurrying to erect the greatest taxonomic and organizational frameworks ever created by man. On Wikipedia, you can go through history year by year -- or shuffle through sequential sumerian emperors, or flights of the pacific, or chart-topping albums.

But Wikipedia is a little weaker when it comes to topics that require a broad sweep and an incisive summary --sketching Mt. Fuji, as it were, with one or two strokes of the pen. All-you-can-eat is great, but once in awhile it's nice to have everything laid out for you, to go on the Epcot Center ride. (Compare the WP and CZ articles on Music.)

I should probably finish with something incisive, but it's late. I'll just say that Citizendium isn't 100th as useful as Wikipedia yet, but it could get there -- I hope so; there's room for both.

(Postscript. Citizendium apparently doesn't 'use the neologisms "NPOV" and "POV"; we use the old-fashioned English words "neutral" and "biased."' Yay! Acronymic gobbledigook is a scourge on Wikipedia, which is supposed to be all about tearing down barriers to entry.)

MADNESS? THIS IS WIKIPEDIA!!

Wales as a constitutional monarch:

Jimbo's role looks like a horrible, poorly-defined mess, but looking at this through a constitutional history perspective, it seems fairly straightforward. Jimbo once exercised many functions, which are defined essentially by use: the functions that he had, such as arbitration, were the ones he exercised. These functions are now exercised by other functionaries, governed by their own policies, although Jimbo still has a potential to exercise them. Jimbo retains what are essentially reserve powers, to be used in extraordinary circumstances, while the day to day exercise of power is governed by the equivalent of a constitution (the arbitration policy, for example). Pressure from the community will serve well enough to force constitutional conventions on Jimbo's use of authority. As long as the conventions are not breached, everything's peachy.

If Wales is Betty, maybe Sanger was Diana? Or maybe Wales is the first Elizabeth, so Sanger's Oliver Cromwell. That would make Tim Berners-Lee Charlemagne and Lessig Churchill. Or maybe Wales is Churchill with war powers, Conservapedia is Tokugawa (see? that joke could have been a lot worse) and Disinfopedia is the swiss. Encyclopedia Dramatica gets to be Mussolini.

I think someone british needs to do this.

(Counterpoint: Wales is an emergent auctorial/paramount leader. I should probably also point that 300 sucks.)

Real-life superheros

Wikivid is mediawiki-based video-sharing thingy. A lot of good instructional videos about software (Flash, Illustrator, RoR, Logic, Maya, etc.), but the editing interface is clumsy. The just-the-facts approach makes seem like the creators wanted to make something "like wikipedia, but with video!" but that won't happen until you can actually edit the videos collaboratively online (I give it 5 years).

The overview of Conflicting Wikipedia philosophies is fleshing out and getting more attention.

The Capgras delusion is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that an acquaintance, usually a spouse or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical looking impostor.

The Fregoli delusion is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise.

The syndrome of subjective doubles is a rare delusional misidentification syndrome in which a person suffers from the delusion that he or she has a double or doppelgänger with the same appearance, but usually with different character traits and leading a life of its own.

The Cotard delusion is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost his/her blood or internal organs.

Mirrored self-misidentification is the delusional belief that one's reflection in a mirror is some other person (often believed to be someone who is following them around).

Reduplicative paramnesia is the delusional belief that a place or location has been duplicated, existing in two or more places simultaneously, or that it has been 'relocated' to another site.

Indextube is basically a wiki frontend to youtube and other video sites.

Spik is a delicious word, meaning variously the innards of a monkey, the part of a hat that touches the top of your head, or a kind of flammabble elk, wiped out by deforestation.

Essjay coda.

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.)