Another "expert review" of wikipedia articles -- of south african articles, this time.

NPR's Talk of the Nation: "Wikipedia, Open Soure, and the Future of the Web"

Defunct amusement parks

In the mailing list, Daniel P. B. Smith has an interesting take on the Guardian's panel-of-experts wikipedia analysis.

Crappy prose isn't the main "quality" problem.

The quality problem in our articles isn't "crappy prose." Sure, a sentence like

"Implicit order means a system has hidden information which is not apparent based solely on direct observation."

makes me wince.

But improving the quality of an article is more than just rewriting crappy prose. Or checking facts. Or adding references. Or fixing typos. Or removing inaccuracies.

As the -paedia root implies, a good encyclopedia article should teach. That means it should go beyond Gradgrind, facts, facts, facts. It should convey not data, not information, but knowledge. It should integrate and synthesize; it should be comprehensible to a wide range of readers, for example by having a progressive structure that gives the basics quickly without sacrificing detail later. It should be well balanced, giving suitably proportioned weight to all aspects of its subject. It should be analytical.

It takes a _lot_ of work to do that.

If you look at the Guardian criticisms, Mike Barnes complains that some of the writing in an article is "unhelpful." He thinks encyclopedia articles should be helpful.

Alexandra Shulman complains that an article "inaccurate and unclear" and that "every value judgment it makes is wrong." She thinks encyclopedia articles should be not only accurate but clear, and that they _should present value judgements--sound ones._

Mark Kurlansky complains of some factual details. No comment on the prose.

Anthony Julius complains that an article is "purely factual and not in any way analytical." He thinks encyclopedia articles should be analytical.

Claire Tomalin complains of minor accuracies, complains more about major _omissions_, and by the failure of the article to comment on the literary merit of Pepy's diary. She thinks an encyclopedia should provide balanced coverage of a topic. Like Shulman, she thinks it should present sound value judgements.

Derek Barker indeed complains of prose style.

Robert McHenry complains that an article shows "no understanding of the cultural and historical contexts involved. In other words, it is a school essay, sketchy and poorly balanced."

Most complain of inaccuracies, but characterize them as minor.

Only one complains of bad prose.

The others complain of articles that fail to be helpful; clear; present sound value judgements; be analytical; and provide balanced coverage of their subject.

The backlash has begun.

There's a rising tide (or at least a tide) of "Wikipdia Sucks!" around (and insofaras I was perhaps too much of a cheerleader a couple months ago, I played some small part).

First: A nice (and widely-circulated) blog post taking Web2.0 evangelists to task for their rapturous language. Some good points, but an inadvertant straw man: I don't think many people see wikipedia as the proto hive mind. (Maybe the proto proto hive mind, but that can be said about regular books, too.)

Second: The register picks up the idea and runs with it: a scathing editorial ostensibly about wikipedia's founder's response to the blog's criticisms of some W'pedia articles. At risk of sounding like I'm Worshipping The Quotes of the Leader, here's Wales's message in its entirety:

I don't agree with much of this critique, and I certainly do not share the attitude that Wikipedia is better than Britannica merely because it is free. It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better quality, period, free or non-free. We should strive to be the best.

But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.

Why? What can we do about it?

--Jimbo

Wikipedia has a structural contradiction (or perhaps a fine line to walk). In order for people to care enough to put in high quality edits, they have to feel like they're contributing to a grand encyclopedic project; but it's helpful if readers don't think of the site as an exact equivalent of paper encyclopedias -- they have to critically examine articles, figure out possible reasons they read the way they do.

This is one reason it's so important for there to be more (and better) software interfaces to wikipedia: there's a sea of information to sift through that helps you figure out what's really going on, how much you can trust an article. At a glance, I want to know how long individual phrases have lasted on the page, the frequency and intensity of edits, what else that page's editors have said elsewhere, etc.

Rocket mail is the delivery of mail by rocket or missile.

Upon witnessing the missile's landing, Summerfield stated, "This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation." Summerfield proclaimed the event to be "of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world", and predicted that "before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."

I've created a new category: Famous transit stations.

Also, Pirates. More pirates.

Might as well be polite: I have, for the moment, lost interest in updating this blog. Sorry, to whomever reads or checks regularly. I might post more in the future. Update: Hi. Nevermind.

Wikisnips of the day: List of Titles and Honours of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. Elizabeth II is Queen of Australia, Queen of New Zealand, Queen of Canada, an Honorary Brigadier, and a Freeman in the Worshipful Company of Drapers.

Wikisnip of the day: If you ever run into holocaust deniers, the Holocaust Denial Examined page has plenty of well-thought counterarguments.

Wikisnips of the Day

• 'Hachikō, sometimes known in Japanese as 忠犬ハチ公 (chūken hachikō, lit. 'faithful dog Hachiko'), was an Akita dog born in November, 1923, in the city of Odate, Akita Prefecture. In 1924, he was brought to Tokyo by his owner, Eisaburo Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo. During his owner's life, Hachiko saw him off from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. Even after Ueno's death in May, 1925, Hachiko returned every day to the station to wait for him, and did so for the next eleven years.'


• Like Hachikō, Greyfriars Bobby is a dog with a statue.


• Other famous dogs.


• Fictional dogs.

Good BBC article

Public Domain and Wikipedia is a mini-documentary shot at wikimania.

Wikisnips of the day:

Bigfoot gets 57 Kb and its own 7-article category. But it's only one of innumerable Cryptids. ("Cryptids are animals for whose existence there is no confirmation.")

Other legendary creatures -- Zombies, sea monsters (and lake monsters, like the Loch Ness), etc.

Fictional national animals include the Qilin, Wild Haggis, the Fur-brearing Trout.

Some pictures from Wikimania (and a slideshow) but not much information posted yet.

Usually live-blogging is something you do when the conference has a low signal/noise ratio or has plenty of "dead" time. Wikimania had neither, because everyone knew each other online in some way, and the communal space made it easy to engage in long discussions and for folks to demo things to each other on laptops. It was an amazing experience, and multimedia content will follow.

– Andrew Lih, on the wikipedia mailing list.

Fast Company has a decent roundup of Wikimania events.

The Wikipedia Signpost is shutting down. A damn shame (though I don't blame the editor; it was too much work for one person, and no coincidence that he stopped around wikimania -- how are you supposed to cover something like that properly without an editorial team (and a plane ticket)?). As you may have noticed, this blog hasn't exactly been a paper of record the past few days (what with actually finding a job and all), and there's no other semi-central source for wikipedia news, unless you count the Quarto (and I don't).

No New Rules
There was a widely-covered story that wikipedia was about to tighten rules, freeze a bunch of entries, etc. False. (I'm relieved. Articles are, of course, never "finished' -- the world keeps going.)

Wikisnip of the day: 'Astrochicken, Dyson explained, is a one-kilogram spacecraft that is unlike any other. Astrochicken would be a creation of the intersection of biology, artificial intelligence and modern microelectronics—a symbiosis of plant and animal and electronic components.' (There's also an Astro Chicken from Space Quest.)

Wales: 10 things will be free.

Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales is guest blogging for Lawrence Lessig. Theme: Ten things that will be free. ("...the point of naming the list "will be free" rather than "should be free" or "must be free" is that I am making concrete predictions rather than listing a pie in the sky list of things I wish to see.")

1. The encyclopedia. (Of course.) Wales charts a plan to get wikipedia into the developing world, where the vast majority of people are.

Third, while it is important to provide our work in important global or "colonial" languages, we also think it is extremely important to provide our work in languages that people speak natively, at home. (Swahili, Hindi, etc.)

I will define a reasonable degree of success as follows, while recognizing that it does leave out a handful of people around the world who only speak rare languages: this problem will be solved when Wikipedia versions with at least 250,000 articles exists in every language which has at least 1,000,000 speakers and significant efforts exist for even very small languages. There are many local languages which are spoken by people who also speak a more common international language -- both facts are relevant.

I predict this will be completed in 15 years. With a 250,000-article cutoff, English and German are both past the threshold. Japanese and French will be there in a year. Several other languages will be there in two years.

2. School curricula, from kindergarten to college. "...this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer ... An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with.

(Update: Here's the full list.)

Wikisnip of the day

Quantum suicide is a thought experiment that attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the many-worlds interpretation (though there are other interpretations, too). The experiment essentially involves participating in the Schrödinger's cat experiment as the cat. (See also: Quantum Immortality.)

Wikimania starts wednesday.

There are presentations on wiki conflict resolution, creativity, getting wikipedia into africa, cool metadata schemes, a timeline with all of human history on it, the intersect of art and science.



Man, I wish I was in Germany.

Analysis of conflicting philosophies about Wikipedia