Ten Wikipedia hacks (A broad definition of "hack" -- these are more like tips. Still, useful stuff.)

Koro is ... uh ... probably not safe for work.

Another instance of wikipedia-as-character-assasin (talk) Followup. Great NYTimes article.

Monopoly. With linked gameboards (pointing, for example, to Pennsylvania Avenue or Community Chest).

Wikipedia is getting a new interface

Wales (according to some guy with a hiptop) says that wikipedia (and the rest of wikimedia) will be moving to a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface -- specifically, they'll be using Wikiwyg.

Minor scandal involving former MTV VJ Adam Curry and wikipdedia's podcasting article.

This metafilter thread views the articles with the most revisions as topics with the greatest cultural tension surrounding them.

George "Spiderman" Willig, Dan "Spidey Dan" Goodwin, and (most impressively) Alain "Spiderman" Robert. (Harry "Human Fly" Gardiner was the original.)

NYC Portal

A documentary about wikipedia will air in a few months on PBS.
A rough cut is available (the download link is in the left column) -- it's pretty good, but aimed at a mainstream audience, so mostly familiar. The stuff that isn't (cultural differences between wikipedias of different languages, for example) is the most interesting.

The raw footage is here. I'll see if I can go through it over the next week or so and ferret out the coolness. (Meta:Wikimentary)

List of Fictional Diseases

"Parkour is said to be L'art du Deplacement, or the Art of Displacement, consisting of uninterrupted forward motion over, under, around and through obstacles (both man-made and natural) in one's environment."

Wikizine aims to help tame communications problems in the sprawling wikimedia adhocracy. It's mostly intended for higher-ups, but is calling for info: "I will try to discover all the news that there is about Wikimedia and report the most relevant news in Wikizine. But I will fail to discover all the news. Wikizine needs to receive reports of things that are going on somewhere in a strange, far away wiki. Especially from the projects and languages from who you never hear."

Wikizine joins the quarterly Quarto in delivering meta-wikipedia news; it joins the Signpost delivering weekly wikipedia news.

The Signpost has a roundup of internal and external article evaluations.

In Singapore, being gay is punishable with up to life in prison (update: this law appears not to be widely enforced). Some gay singaporians seem to have taken refuge on wikipedia.

List of sexually active popes.

MP3s of lectures about wikipedia:

Mitch Kapor, "Thirteen Ways to Look at the Wikipedia".

There's really a Zen koan aspect to it; when you're given a paradox to wrestle with you can either go down with it -- because it's insoluble on its own terms -- or you can transcend the paradox because you find out you've had some limiting assumptions that you didn't know you had and it's only an apparent paradox. So, this talk is my effort to recount how I've wrestled with some of the paradoxes of Wikipedia and share that with you.

Jimmy Wales (Untitled, as far as I can tell).

I think, partly because of the personality types who become programmers... I don't know what it is exactly... a lot of programmers, seem to me to think that the whole point of social software is to replace the social with the software. Which is not really what you want to do, right? Social Software should exist to empower us to be human... to interact... in all the normal ways that humans do.

The Free Music article could do with some expansion.

Wikipedia foe Daniel Brandt makes some interesting points (counterarguments here) -- though his tendancy toward condescension ("Keep in mind that the teenagers who think Wikipedia is cool tend to be the same teenagers who think Google is cool.") might explain why his encounters with wikipedia have been negative.

Gollum is an alternate interface to wikipedia. As of this writing, it's only documented in german, though it works with the english-language wiki.

I'm still looking forward to a good client-side wikipedia browser. I want to edit the articles directly on the page (Word-esque, that is -- though I'm not sure I want everyone else to have that ability), watch snappy dataviews, etc.

New rating system

There's a lot of talk in the mailing list about rating/voting on articles (as an interface selection, not a purely wiki-social process). I'd expect to see it rolled out within the next month (update, Dec. 4: Wales told the NYTimes it'll be rolled out, most likely, in January), once a good implementation gets worked out.

A good article can become a bit of a mess with just a couple of misguided edits (which, hopefully, get reverted); it'll be interesting to see how the voting system deals with rapidly changing articles.

Pros:

• Most users don't take time to edit, but many of them would click a vote box.


• Seeing simple numeric ratings at a glance could make deciding how much to trust an article easier, and browsing more fun as you direct your attention away from the chaff.


• A software-compiled list of low rated articles could provide a focus for editors' attention.

Con:
Rating articles this way could undermine the social nature of wikipedia. Artifically-created rating systems aren't subject to the caveats and nuance of thought and discussion, nor the incredibly complex and somewhat effortless interplay of human social interaction.