Wikipedia Blog goes pro!

I'm getting paid to blog! (No, seriously.)

Wikipedia blog itself won't change at all, except that now it's about SEO! Just kidding.

The one thing that will change is the address, which will be www.enotes.com/blogs/wikipedia/. (You can go there now, but it's full of scaffolding and drywall and I'm not sure the toilet works.)

I'm really excited, and not quite sure what to say, so I recorded a video.



The details

Okay. A Seattle company called enotes is hiring a bunch of bloggers to fill out their content. I got an email a couple weeks ago from their development director, Alex Bloomingdale, we hashed out the details, and lo (insert here however many exclamation points you want) : paid blogging.

I get to keep creative control. Enotes' take is that they don't want to kill the goose (and Alex was talking about spreading knowledge as a public service).

But first: thank you to anyone who has ever read this. And especially to phoebe for bringing me onto her book, and Noam Cohen for listening to me rant.

(And to Geoff, who writes great comments, and blogs at Original Research.)

And also, everything on the blog -- all past posts, too -- is now licensed cc attribution 3, which means you can do whatever you want with it.

We're still setting up the new interface, so I'll cross-post to both places for the next few days, but early next week I'll throw the switch, wikip.blogspot will go dark (inactive), and enotes.com/blogs/wikipedia/ will go live.

Man, this is a disorganized little post. As I said, I'm excited.

There are soooo many possibilities. I'm not getting full-time pay, but I am getting now-I-have-an-excuse-to-follow-through-on-all-these-projects pay. Potential directions:

• Finding ways to spread information beyond the concentric circles of super-informed insiders that define wikipedia.
• Posting on a schedule -- video tutorials each friday, or interviews on monday.
• Splitting out the wikisnips into a sideblog.
• Doing cool visualizations, writing software ineptly, and carrying the inclusionist banner.

But! I really want to keep the spirit of the blog intact. At the risk of taking myself too seriously, I think of blogging as a little like running a cafe -- an exciting, comfortable cocoon with its own character. This is where we move down the street.

Hy-Brazil is a phantom island which features in many Irish myths. It was said to be cloaked in mist, except for one day each seven years, when it became visible but could still not be reached.

Expeditions left Bristol in 1480 and 1481 to search for it, and a letter written shortly after the return of John Cabot from his expedition in 1497 reports that land found by Cabot had been "discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found Brasil".

Others claimed to have seen the island, or even landed on it, the last supposed sighting being in 1872. Roderick O’Flaherty in A Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught (1684) tells us "There is now living, Morogh O'Ley, who immagins he was himself personally on O'Brasil for two days, and saw out of it the iles of Aran, Golamhead, Irrosbeghill, and other places of the west continent he was acquainted with."

On maps, the island was shown as being circular, soon with a central strait or river running east-west across its diameter. Despite the failure of attempts to find it, it appeared regularly on maps lying south west of Galway Bay from 1325 until 1865, by which time it was called Brazil Rock.

Category:Phantom islands

Popular culture in popular culture.

Lists of northernmost and southernmost things on earth.

By the way, what's with the brightly colored houses in greenland? It's like that in svalbard, too. Is it the same reason people like colorful scarves and winterhats (that is, because bright colors make you feel warmer)?

XKCD on the discovery channel commercial

(This commercial, which I love, and could just as easily be an ad for wikipedia.)

Not only is the comic hilarious, it actually matches the syllables.

James Holman (October 15, 1786 – July 29, 1857), known as the "Blind Traveler," was a British adventurer, author and social observer, best known for his writings on his extensive travels. Not only completely blind but suffering from debilitating pain and limited mobility, he undertook a series of solo journeys that were unprecedented both in their extent of geography and method of "human echolocation".

Reading Wikipedia on a Mobile phone

If you've got internet access on your cellphone, head to en.wap.wikipedia.org.

If you'd prefer to download all of Wikipedia at once. Pocket Wikipedia is "the widest array of material you can fit into 175 MB", packaged up for Windows Mobile (and Linux). "The articles are hand-picked...and the interface is condensed to offer quick searching and indexing on mobile devices."

You can also download "enyclopedia", which is like "Pocket" but several times as large. Handbag Wikipedia, if you will.

But geopedia is by far the coolest option. It actually sniffs out your iPhone's physical location and displays wikipedia articles related to stuff nearby. (I don't know if it works on the newest iPhones.)

(And there are more options.)

List of world's most expensive single objects.

1966 Soviet postage stamp commemorating "ten years of antarctic exploration":



There were all sorts of little competitive space-race style projects.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole (KSDB) was the result of a scientific drilling project of the former USSR. The project attempted to drill as deep as possible into the Earth's crust.

The Westinghouse Time Capsules were created for 1939 & 1964 World's Fairs. Both are buried 50 feet below New York's Flushing Meadows Park, the site of both world's fairs, the 1965 capsule 10 feet north of the 1938 one.

Both are to be opened at the same time in 6939 AD, five thousand years after the first capsule was sealed. Check out the messages from Einstein et al.

The Pornocracy or Rule of the Harlots was a period in the history of the Papacy during the first half of the tenth century.

Warning: not wikipedia-related.

My band (The Afternoon Round) is playing the crossroads festival in ypsilanti this friday (2 p.m.). If you're in the area, you should come see us.

You know, sarcasm is just really helpful.

:p Or should I say, ؟

Dion McGregor (1922–1994) was a New York City-born songwriter, whose main claim to fame is that he was a voluble dreamer, or somniloquist.

Hostile media effect

Escaping the tech ghetto

More about the foundation's experiment in turning middle-aged and elderly people into wikipedians.

Even if some of us were long-time Wikipedia contributors we learned a lot about Wikipedia within the first week:

• the longer Wikipedians contribute to Wikipedia the more they forget that Wikipedia is a very complex system. Newcomers are overwhelmed by this complexity and often don't know where to start.
• Wikipedia's help pages are confusing. The printed brochure "Das kleine Wikipedia-Einmaleins" we distributed at the opening (see the picture on the right hand; click on the picture to download the PDF) was much more useful as older people prefer printed material to online material.

I think this is a good time to plug my book, How Wikipedia Works

An older generation of Wikipedians?

The foundation is starting a program to turn senior citizens into "trainers" who will be able to run their own Wikipedia workshops.

The course will last six weeks. During the first weeks the participants will learn the basics of how to edit Wikipedia articles. In a second phase the participants will collaboratively develop a concept for Wikipedia courses for senior citizens. Subsequently, the participants should be able to act as Wikipedia evangelists and motivate other people of their age to contribute to Wikipedia.

This is a great idea; it's easy to forget how big the gap is between techies and the general public (McCain doesn't know how to use a computer, for example; Peter Jennings submitted his stories on a typewriter until the day he died).

I just hope Wikipedia itself will be welcoming when the seniors actually hit the water. Has anyone tried showing Wikipedia to people over 60? How did they react?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area of marine debris in the central North Pacific Ocean. Size estimates vary from an area equivalent to the state of Texas to double that of the continental United States.

Good god, people.

Okay, here's what happened: Someone tried to start a discussion about "all the good things Wikipedia has done for you. Think of all the good times you have had on Wikipedia. Share with us the best memory you have from Wikipedia. Don't be shy!"

It lasted a couple hours before it was deleted for violating the what wikipedia is not ruleset.

Honest to god, fun is what makes the encyclopedia tick. If you're trying to turn contributors into automations, you're cutting wikipedia's feet from under it.

via danny