In British English, the term mockney has come to be used to describe those who present themselves as Cockneys (or, by extension, other working-class groups) with the intention of gaining popular credibility.

William John Cavendish Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland (September 12, 1800–December 6, 1879), was a British aristocratic eccentric who preferred to live in seclusion. He had an underground maze excavated underneath his estate.

Geoff's wikifying Ethiopia.

And about the blogger code of conduct:

The key to Star Wars is that Luke SkyWalker did not defeat Darth Vader by fighting him. Fighting the darkside only gives it power! The lesson for Luke was to appeal to Vader’s better nature. This is how civility works on Wikipedia, and the only way it can work on the internet.

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Wikipedia has the potential to be one of the most contentious places on the internet. And yet it has developed a culture that can mediate any debate.

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Web 2.0 started by reinventing Usenet badly, now they’re reinventing netiquette badly.

Category:Extreme points of the world

List of places blurred out on Google Maps

List of films by gory death scene

Ogg Vorbis -- no future?

All of wikipedia's audio is in the open Ogg Vorbis format, which doesn't play on iPods (or a lot of other players). John Gruber warns that Ogg may never see wide use.

With regard to Ogg Vorbis, or the idea of “free” codecs in general, the consensus seems to be that this is an ugly patent lawsuit waiting to happen. Yes, the creators of Ogg Vorbis have released the format (and source code for encoding and playback) openly, but the holders of the patents behind MP3 (and other patented codecs) very likely consider part of Ogg Vorbis to violate their patents. If Apple, or any other company with a serious amount of money behind it, were to use Ogg Vorbis in a mainstream widely-used product, it could lead to an expensive lawsuit.

Do software patents suck? Yes. Is it possible that Ogg Vorbis does not actually infringe on anyone’s patent, but that some patent holder could sue and win even though they shouldn’t? Yes. The point is, Ogg Vorbis is intended to be free, and it would be great if it were free, but no one with deep pockets has yet tested the water to see whether it really is. Worse, there are some experts who do believe that Ogg violates at least one significant patent.

Planning for a wikipocalypse

Lightsaber Combat via

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.)