Wikisnips of the Day:

• A List of Subcultures. From Aristasia to Mod to Zazou.


• 59-kilobyte list of sexual slang.

Fortune Magazine: '"Wikipedia clearly makes the world better off," says Cook, an enthusiast of this new tendency towards volunteerism. "But economists measure dollars. People generally assume that GDP and quality of life go up together. Maybe a chunk of the economy is going underground."'

Wikisnip of the day: "The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. ''Force Publique'' soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency."

(Those years were the subject of Heart of Darkness (full text at wikisource), which inspired Apocalypse Now.)

WikiSign lets you send MySQL queries to Wikipedia. Simon Willison has (unrelatedly) fallen in WikiLove.

Wikisnips of the day:

• "A common breaching experiment is to stand, in an elevator, facing the wall rather than door."
• "In humans, it is usual to have five digits (four fingers and one thumb) on each hand, and five digits (toes) on each foot. Polydactyls have six or maybe even more digits on either their hands or feet, or both."

(Ego dept.: I got a mention in the Signpost's roundup of theoretical wikipedia discussion.)

Wikisnips of the day: Hypothetical planets, Obsolete scientific theories, and Discredited substances.

Salon's critique: Wikipedia is like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "Like the Guide's lengthy entries on drinking, Wikipedia mirrors the interests of its writers rather than its readers." (The author notes that criticising wikipedia is almost as dangerous as criticising scientology, but he's found the perfect method. You can say anything about someone if you make them feel like Ford Prefect while doing it.)

Wikisnips of the day: Manhole covers and their frequent theft. (Street signs get stolen, too.)

The avatar versus the journalist: Making meaning, finding truth.: the best article about wikipedia I've read in ... well, ever. Rohit Gupta totally gets it.

"Dig down into why there's a debate, and you see the care with which Wikipedia and its community have set up policies to ensure entries are useful and accurate." Damn straight.

Lawrence Lessig also has an interesting post (and subsequent discussion) about Wikipedia and economic systems.

Wikisnips of the day:

• List of School Pranks. Including 11 types of wedgie.


• An exhaustive list of words having different meanings in British and American English.

Wikisnip of the day: Amazingly detailed article on the swastica -- it predates Nazi germany by several thousand years and is still a religious symbol in Asia. (There's also a Swastica, Ontario, whose name has less benign origins. God, it would suck to live there.)

Wikisnip of the day: List of films ordered by uses of the word Fuck.

Wikisnip of the day: List of recurring characters from the Simpsons

Wikipedia vs. Google

Here's an interesting article concieving wikipedia as an open-source attack on Google.

Wikipedia is an open source search engine that lets anyone implicitly modify the search algorithm because it lets anyone modify the results of the search.

On that note. Yes, Google's pagerank algorithm amounts to a sort of democracy in which each incoming link gets a vote -- but wikipedia democracy may be better, long-term, partly because it sets the bar higher and lower in useful ways.

Higher:

You can't just make a link and expect to become part of something like Google's huge semihierarchical ecosystem of ranked pages: you have to write something useful and clear if you want it to survive in the wiki for long. Parasites (spammers, PR people) can't come into wikipedia and programmatically put in lots of braindead but link-rich text; wikipedia's antibodies are too strong. (Profits aside, Google's search hasn't improved much in the last few years -- deadlock with link farmers.)

Lower:

(1) You need more tech expertise to set up a website (or even a centrally-hosted blog) than to change a few words in an article. (Tap to the digerati's shoulder: most people don't know how to make links. That doesn't mean they don't have anything to say.)

(2) Google's methods are secret and proprietary, open only to employees. Wikipedia is totally open source: you can fork the project, make a complete mirror if you want (though the only people who've done this so far are advertising scum), change any part of the way things are done.


On the other hand, this way of thinking gives short shrift to Google's sophistication -- by employing geniuses, it's developed awesomely effective ways of getting good information to float to the top. Wikipedia's done the same thing, but without the army of salaried Nobel lauriates -- just the right framework, and enough volenteeers who, when it was built, came. Much more impressive.

Wikipedia as a teaching tool

Andy Carvin has a good idea about using Wikipedia as a teaching tool. There are really only two snips I'd say differently:

Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups, with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic. Dolphins, horses, hockey, you name it.

Not any topic -- dolphins and horses are giant articles: 15 and 40 kilobytes, respectively. Hockey is smaller, at 3.3 KB, but it might be better to concentrate on a fringe issue that everyone knows about: a local issue, in other words. Only 20 or so Michigan high schools have articles so far -- what about all the others? (Ah, Community High. I still wish my name had been pulled from the hat.)

Update: I've changed my mind. Pages about schools are often never looked at by non-students, and so there may be no moderating influence on ... er, juvenile behavior, even if only a minority of students use the page as a platform for jokes, etc. Instead, have the students edit pages about books, movies, tv shows, or celebrities.

Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates a Wikipedia login for the class.

Bad idea -- it undercuts the dual collaborate-but-be-responsible-for-your-work Wikipedia ethos: all the articles are jointly written, but by specific, individual authors. Give each student their own login, instead.

The London Underground has been bombed; about 30 people are dead so far. Wikipedia has current info.

Wapipedia is a slimmed-down version of wikipedia designed for WAP2 mobile phones. Explanation here.

Wikisnips of the day.

The Situationist movement culminated in the French protests of May, 1968. "Some philosophers and historians have argued that the rebellion was the single most important revolutionary event of the Twentieth Century because of the fact that it wasn't participated in by a lone demographic, such as workers or racial minorities, but was rather a purely popular uprising, superseding ethnic, cultural, age and class boundaries."

It also produced some incredibly kick-ass graffiti.

• Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
  
• Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.
  
• I am a Groucho Marxist.
  
• Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, "We will breathe later." And most of them don't die because they are already dead.
  
• Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!
  
• Art is dead, don‘t consume its corpse.
  
• Arise, ye wretched of the university.
  
• If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.
  
• SEX: It‘s okay, says Mao, as long as you don‘t do it too often.
  
• Comrades, people are making love in the Poli Sci classrooms, not only in the fields.

Cool wikipedia search engine.

Wikisnips of the Day

Programming languages.

There are several languages whose code looks like english phrases. Beatnik uses scrabble scores to convert words to numbers to operators. Each program in Chef is a recipe. Each program in Shakespeare is a full-formatted several-act play. Sample:

Juliet:
Speak YOUR mind! You are as bad as Hamlet! You are as small as the difference between the square of the difference between my little pony and your big hairy hound and the cube of your sorry little codpiece. Speak your mind!

That was Juliet printing another character (variable) and assigning him values.

Whitespace ignores everything but spaces, tabs, and carriage returns. Ook is designed for Chimpanzees. (Sample line: "Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.") Programs in Piet are bitmap images that look a little like abstract art. Choon produces musical notes as its only output. var'aq is modeled on Klingon. TMMLPTEALPAITAFNFAL stands for "The Multi-Million Language Project To End All Language Projects And Isn't That A Fine Name For A Language". It changes every day.