Wikisnip of the day, that day being Saturday. The weekend.

As you may know, the weekend is a common time for a Party. If you've been invited to a Tea Party, keep in mind that it "is the only afternoon tea at which servants may remain present". If, on the other hand, you're going to a Rave (the origins of which can be traced beyond Manchester to Texas and Detroit), you may want to bring Parachute Pants. Makeout Parties seldom occur, and Foam Parties can damage the floor of the discotheque.

L.A. Times's beta Wikitorial has been up for a few hours now and, so far, really really sucks. The discussion page is pretty interesting, though.

More later; I have to sleep.

Wikipedia helps show the economic value of social interaction

Yale law prof. Yochai Benkler has written a shitload of interesting econ papers about commons systems like wikipedia. There's a good interview with him in Businessweek, where he talks about "commons-based peer production".

...the economic role of social behavior is increasing. It used to be that if you said, "Here, this is interesting, why don't you read this?" it was primarily social. When you take the exact same behavior and plug it into Google's Page Rank algorithm, you actually get a discrete economic output that increases welfare in the economy overall -- even though you continue to have a certain social interaction there as well.

The net changes everything, and all that. But I think economists have historically underestimated the power of social behavior -- to put it another way, I'm not sure how useful it is to abstract "social" and "economic" into two separate boxes.

The difference between today and 10 years ago, of course, is measurability -- something quite clear (if known only to Google employees) happens when links are tallied into pagerank and used to sell ads; the economic benefit to mankind from a teacher helping underprivileged kids is linked to no such running tally (even though that teacher's thinking style is as amiable to distribution as any clever web system, persisting in those kids and going on to influence other people through them). We just never saw anything like this unfold on a screen before, so it was easier to economists to ignore it.

But come on. Most of our brains are devoted to social interaction, which is one of the reasons we're so much worse at readily-deconstructed reasoning (math, logic) than computers are. It's silly to have ever thought the straightforward rules of Adam Smith could be a complete description, as silly as thinking, in the '50s, that if a computer was ever capable of chess it would be capable of thought.

And of course, most of people's lives are spent interacting socially. I suppose the catch is that the most academically productive people spend the least time doing anything but writing papers -- perhaps that's why social interaction has been neglected in economics.

Big pundits fume, but small newspapers are citing wikipedia.

Techdirt has a roundup of anti-wikipedia articles in mainstream papers. (This editiorial, in the New York Times (counterpoint), is particularly cringe-inducing, and not just because it's penned by a Pulitzer winner: the author attempts to tie wikipedia to apathy about whether anything is true -- the old Moral Relativism card, played by an ostensible liberal writing in a conservative medium. It reads like a mixture of Andy Rooney and Ayn Rand.)

But I think journalists are starting to come around; wikipedia might be an encyclopedia, but it has the immediacy and level-headedness print journalists like. And it's possible that, culture aside, journalists might just be impressed with wikipedia's increasing quality.

Local newspapers are even beginning to quote and cite wikipedia in their articles -- here are several from the very top of the Google stack, published in the last 2 days:

• The Asheville Citizen-Times (NC): "Soldiers who fought for the North were referred to as "Billy Yanks." Those who fought for the South were called "Johnny Rebs," according to the online encyclopedia wikipedia.org."


• Jamesville Gazette (WI): "According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, E-Democracy is defined as using electronic media such as the Internet to enhance the democratic process."


• Newport News-Times (OR): "'In Polynesian mythology, specifically Maori, Tiki is the first man, created by either Tu Matauenga or Tane. He found the first woman, Marikoriko, in a pond. She seduced him and he became the father of Hine-Kau-Ataata.' - Wikipedia online encyclopedia"

Wikisnip of the day.

• The Exploding Whale article is pretty widely known. But wikipedia also has an entire Exploding Animals category, containing articles on exploding bats, birds, chickens, cows, dogs, hamsters, humans, rats, sheep, and toads (a surprising number of which were attempts at weaponry).


• This ask.metafilter post links to an wide array of fun wikipedia entries.

$150 of Flash

Waxy and others are offering a cash reward for anyone who can come up with a useful graphical/animation tool for viewing wikipedia article histories.

This is really, really good. Wikipedia should transcend the web, to put it pretentiously, the way Greasemonkey does. It could use a good client-side browser (or, hey, a server-side one); researching histories is currently a bottleneck in the revision process.

And Java/C/Ruby wizards aren't necessary. This is an ideal place for Flash -- it's best at visualizing data, not building interfaces or running silly loading screens. Maybe it's the 5 a.m. talking, but I want a future where I'm swimming through easy visualizations of the wikipedia flow, watching as groups push and pull the knowledge, nudge phrases into place, propogate thinking styles across an encyclopedia-habitat.

Hi. This is a blog about Wikipedia, which, as you probably know, is an open-source encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Wikipedia is becoming increasingly relevant. Its model seems batshit insane, but works well -- I think this can tell us some things about systems, people, software, conflict resolution, etc. And there are always fun Wikipedia entries to link to.

Wikisnip of the day. The Megastructures category focuses on huge awesome science-fictiony (but occasionally believable) structures.

• Check out the granddaddy of megastructures, the Dyson Shere, a giant shell around a star (in one variant).
• Or, if your tastes run to the remotely concievable, try the Ringworld, which is exactly what it sounds like: a world shaped like a planetary orbit, a cosmic hoola hoop. (MIT majors were holding up signs saying "The Ringworld is Unstable!" in the 1970s.)
• An O'Neill cylinder is like a much smaller, enclosed ringworld that orbits a star rather than being centered around it -- it's stable, and we could probably build one if we wanted to piss away enough money.
• Oh. And if you ever wondered if there was a name for a planetary computer like the one in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there is: Jupiter Brain.