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.)

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.