Mods and Rockers

MIT news: "Residents of Italy's capital will glimpse the future of urban mapmaking next month with the launch of "Wiki City Rome," a project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city's pulse in real time."

Wikigroaning is funny and/or embarrassing depending on your outlook, but is it a problem? I agree that the serious articles should be better, but in these comparisons there seems to be an implicit theory that the fan topics are somehow sucking the life out of the serious ones.

But really, do we want somebody obsessed about [[Optimus Prime]] to spend a lot of time on [[Prime number]]? And even if we wanted them to, would they do it and do it well? I don't think so.

From what I've seen, the fan stuff is not a particularly big maintenance burden. Maybe I've missed it, but I don't see a lot of vandalism, a lot of dispute resolution, or a lot of AN/I requests over the stuff. So it seems like the net cost of keeping it is relatively small. And I see two big benefits that come from it.

First is that the more editors we have involved in Wikipedia, the better. People identify with things they've contributed to. That gives us all sorts of positive effects, including less vandalism, more donations, more person-to-person promotion, and more public support.

–William Pietri, on the mailing list

6 secret languages

A cryptolect is a secret language used only by members of a group, often used to conceal the meaning from those outside the group.

Here's the SIX SECRETIST LANGUAGES! (Kidding. I figured lists are good for traffic.)

1. Thieves' cant was a secret language which was formerly used by thieves, beggars and hustlers of various kinds in Great Britain and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries. The classic, colourful argot is now mostly obsolete, and is largely relegated to the realm of literature and fantasy role-playing, although individual terms continue to be used in the criminal subcultures of both Britain and the U.S.

2. Shelta is a language spoken by parts of the Irish Traveller people. It has been suggested that the word "Shelta" itself derives from the Irish word "siúlta", meaning "of walking". This refers to the nomadic lifestyle of the Travellers, and the fact that they were commonly called "the Walking People".

3. Carny. Note: Though these terms are traditionally part of Carnival jargon, it is an ever changing form of communication and in large part designed to be impossible to understand by an outsider. Thus, as words are assimilated into the culture at large, they lose their function and are replaced by other more obscure or insular terms.

4. Barallete is employed by the traditional knife-sharpeners and umbrella holders (afiadores e paragüeiros) of the Galician province of Ourense. (Yes, those words are real.)

5. Klezmer-loshn (Yiddish: Musician's Tongue) is an extinct derivative of the Yiddish language. It was used by travelling Jewish musicians, known as klezmorim (klezmers), in Eastern Europe prior to the 20th Century.

6. Leet (written as 31337, 1337, and l33t), is used primarily on the Internet, but becoming increasingly common in many online video games. It uses various combinations of alphanumerics to replace proper letters.

Wikirage lists the Wikipedia articles with the most edits per unique editor over various periods of time.

Apparently,

enwp.org/whatever

redirects to

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/whatever

. Good to know.

Reconstructed image of a neanderthal child.

The colonization of Venus, Earth's nearest planetary neighbour, has been a subject of much speculation and many works of science fiction since before and after the dawn of spaceflight. With the discovery of Venus' hostile surface environment, attention has largely shifted towards the colonization of the Moon and the colonization of Mars. Recently, however, papers have surfaced on the feasibility of colonizing Venus beginning from the less hostile cloud-tops, making surface exploration in the beginning unnecessary.

Landis has proposed aerostat habitats followed by floating cities, based on the concept that breathable air (21:79 Oxygen-Nitrogen mixture) is a lifting gas in the dense Venusian atmosphere, with about half the lifting power that helium has on Earth. This would allow breathable air domes to lift a colony in addition to their own weight. Alternatively two-part domes could contain a lifting gas like hydrogen or helium (extractable from the atmosphere) to allow a higher mass density.

The Jedi census phenomenon was a grassroots movement in 2001 for citizens in a few English-speaking countries to record their religion as "Jedi" or "Jedi Knight" on the national census.

If wikipedia were printed out, this is how big it would be. (Though I don't think the size of the binding is accounted for.) see also

While we're at it, Colbert's Wikiscanner commentary blows Olbermann's out of the water.

The wikiscanner coverage is still flowing fast. Keith Olbermann had a misguided take, for example:



It's not his fault.* The media coverage around this has been deeply mediocre. With the exception, as usual, of the NYTimes piece (and here's their Wikipedia feed), nobody reported two essential facts:

1. Contentious wikipedia articles are edited every hour of the day. Anonymous edits are always suspect. Any edit that looks unproductive (like deleting an entire section without comment) gets reverted immediately -- as, indeed, these edits were.
   
   This side of the story would have required some actual reporting (digging to see how the edits influenced the later article), and reporting means boots on the ground, which means payroll.


2. "Anonymous" wikipedia contributors are actually the only editors that aren't allowed to be anonymous. As soon as you choose a WP username, your IP address stops being shown.

Sure, those aren't the most important elements of the story. But not including them anywhere in the article? Pull up your socks.

* Note to Olbermann: Edward R. Murrow was a journalist, not an anchor.

A cat piano or Katzenklavier (German) is a hypothetical musical instrument consisting of a line of cats fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard. Nails would be placed under the keys, causing the cats to cry out in pain when a key was pressed. The cats would be arranged according to the natural tone of their voices.

The instrument was described by German physician Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813) for the purpose of treating patients who had lost the ability to focus their attention. Reil believed that if they were forced to see and listen to this instrument, it would inevitably capture their attention and they would be cured (Richards, 1998).

The Onion: Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not

"It's not really black hat..."

No, it's not. You're clever, but the black hats are laughing at you, as am I.

Jeanne Louise Calment (February 21, 1875 – August 4, 1997) reached the longest confirmed lifespan in history at 122 years and 164 days. Her husband died in 1942, after he ate a dessert prepared with spoiled cherries.

In 1965, aged 90, with no living heirs, Jeanne Calment signed a deal, common in France, to sell her condominium apartment en viager to lawyer François Raffray. Raffray, then aged 47, agreed to pay a monthly sum until she died, an agreement sometimes called a "reverse mortgage". At the time of the deal the value of the apartment was equal to ten years of payments. Unfortunately for Raffray, not only did Calment survive more than thirty years, but Raffray died of cancer in December 1995, at the age of 77, leaving his widow to continue the payments.

She said that at age 14, she met Vincent van Gogh in her father's shop, later describing him as "dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable." She also reported attending the 1885 funeral of Victor Hugo.

Jeanne Calment's remarkable health presaged her later record. At age 85, she took up fencing. At 100, she was still riding a bicycle.

I'm trying my hand at a wikipedia videoblog.



(Or here , if it doesn't show in the feed.)

The sailing stones are a geological phenomenon found in Racetrack Playa, Death Valley. The stones slowly move across the surface of the playa, leaving a track as they go, without human or animal intervention.

Car-eating troll

The Right Way To Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles.