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in which a person holds a delusional belief that an acquaintance, usually a spouse or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical looking impostor.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).