New Rome

So I haven't updated in awhile. I'm working on the whole financial independence thing.

I'm also doing a lot of stuff for the foundation -- trying to revamp the cafepress store. And I've realized Blog may not be the best medium for wikisnips, so there's something developing on that front, too.

In the meantime, check out the Think Free campaign:

In one California case, a pizza delivery was used as a ploy to lure a murder victim out of her house. Tanya Holzmayer was then murdered by a man she had fired recently, scientist Guyang Matthew Huang, who had been lying in wait. Huang then shot himself. Domino's promptly sent another driver to retrieve and deliver the remaining pizzas.

Harriet (c. 1830–June 23, 2006).
Tu'i Malila (c. 1777–May 19, 1965).
Adwaita.

A cool alternative to Wikipedia's front page.

Interesting NYTimes article about the culture of the Chinese-language Wikipedia (though frustratingly little is said about the actual construction of the articles -- did the reporter wade through the history or just skim the top layer of the onion? Underscores the need for a good wikipedia client that makes history-swimming easy.)

Talk: Rock, Paper, Scissors (via reddit)

Wikipedia just got its 1,500,000th article, which is about an endangered species of snail. (The 1,000,000th was about a Scottish railway station and the 500,000ths was about Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.)

Wikipedia "is producing the world’s least biased accounts of the world’s most polarizing conflict...Two peoples at war can learn to live in peace with the help of what historians have called a “bridging narrative,” a shared understanding of history that takes into account the grievances of both sides. After five regional wars, two intifadas, and endless skirmishes and political confrontations, if any two groups of people on Earth need such a narrative, it’s Israelis and Arabs. By creating an editing environment in which political partisans from the different sides are induced to hash out their disagreements, Wikipedia is showing how a bridging narrative might be created, and what it might look like."

Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala. Trust me, it's good.

The Chinese government has effectively stopped blocking Wikipedia. Nevermind.

Category:Lists of fictional animals

Calling shotgun
via kottke

"Sadly, many Wikipedia users still have a sense of humour and, what is worse, use it deliberately. This is why I recently set up the Wikipedia Fun Police, to help eliminate this problem once and for all. "

Via via via via

Another wikipedia blog: WikiDumper is "The Official Appreciation Page for the Best of the Wikipedia Rejects". (I like this one.)

Interesting blog post with a digg-ready title: Wikipedia and the Death of Archaeology: "Since Wikipedia exists in many non-identical, language-based independent editions, each of which is constantly changing, all of the editions taken together provide a real-time record of not only how our perception of ourselves morphs over time, but how that perception differs culturally around the world as well."

On a non-wikipedia-related note, my old band The Allusions finished recording some songs (my keyboard and synths are in the first three). It's impossible to judge a band you've been in objectively, but I think they sound pretty damn good. Check out their shows if you're in michigan.

Google buys Jotspot. (JotSpot is an enterprise-wiki -slash-web-app platform. It looks kind of cool.)

There's a minor war [signpost overview] raging in the blogosphere after Jason Calcamis, CEO of Weblogs Inc., said it was unconcionable for Wikipedia not to run advertising.

Of course, Wikipedia's adlessness is one of the things that makes it work -- it's community-powered, and rather utopian -- but you already knew that. Wikipedians have been talking about this issue for years, and the idea that there are millions of dollars at stake is not new.

What's telling about this exchange is that almost everyone in the wider blogging world has come to the same conclusion the wikipedians did. (Calacanis has taken a lot of abuse, not all of it deserved.)

Speaking of which. I'm on the fundraising committee, and we should be rolling out some exciting new stuff over the next month -- none of it ad-related. The difference between Wikipedia's model and Weblog Inc.'s typifies the difference between blogging and wikis generally, I think.

There's a new podcast: Wikipedia Weekly. (They've got a Jimmy Wales interview this week.) Here's the mp3 feed, and here's the iTunes link.

Florence Devouard is the new chair of the Wikimedia board. Jimbo will become Chairman Emeritus.

Communist Mutants from Space!

0.999...

The NYTimes has a comprehensive article on China's partial unblock.

List of Six Feet Under deaths. (Because episode guides are for pussies.)

From Jimbo, on the list:

Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?

Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can't accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

If you've got ideas, add them.

The Austrailian: Editing wikipedia is a civic duty

Reporters Without Borders has the scoop on China's partial unblock.

Sure, there's Eastcoast / Westcoast hiphop. But for completists...

Report from the mailing list: Wikipedia is now only partially blocked in China. (Better that the chinese government censor wikipedia than the foundation. Though I think the spectre of partial blocks will keep editors on pins and needles.)

Despite urban legend, Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet. However, Crapper put in much effort to popularise it and did come up with some related inventions.

Funny NYTimes piece on Articles for Deletion. (Diane Farrell's been restored, though.)

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz!

(Not to be confused with Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft.)

List of comic book superpowers

List of historical elephants

Man, I used to love going on Spaceship Earth when I was a kid.

(See also: terrifyingly detailed coverage of Epcot. "EPCOT is also regarded today as the quintessential park of the 1980s. Many feel the park is severely outdated; a common insult is to call the park "the future as seen by Republicans." On the other hand, there are many who enjoy the nostalgia as there has been a growing trend toward interest in 1980s culture. To showcase this growing trend, EPCOT has a performance troupe in the Future World area perform many New Wave hits from the '80s on synthesizer instruments. The troupe dresses in Duran Duran and A Flock Of Seagulls-esque clothing and also peforms many Disney songs.")

Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word". It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.

Saudade is a Portuguese word for a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return. Few other languages in the world have a word with such meaning, making saudade a distinct mark of Portuguese culture.

Angel of the North

Category:Hoaxes

Professional farter

Hey, another wikipedia client for mac! (Called Pathway. Small but interesting featureset. Still no history-swimming.)

Corante has a good discussion about why experts stay at wikipedia, and why they leave.

Erik Möller won the board election. (He's supremely qualified and seems like a good guy.)

Lawrence Lessig's wikimania keynote was about making sure free culture wasn't divided into isolated islands. To that end, FlickrLickr grabs free-licenced Flickr photos for use on wikimedia projects.

The Tree of Ténéré was a solitary acacia that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth — the only one within more than 400 km. It was knocked down by an allegedly drunk Libyan truck driver in 1973. On November 8, 1973 the dead tree was relocated to the Niger National Museum in the capital Niamey. It has been replaced by a simple metal sculpture representing a tree.

List of famous trees

Pedia bills itself as a wikipedia client for mac, but it's really just a stripped-down web browser, not even as full-featured as Gollum. (It's free-licenced, so it'll improve. Maybe I'll finish learning Cocoa and do it myself.)

Clay Shirky on why Citizendium won't work. I'm inclined to think these problems might be solvable (not least because Citizendium content can be recycled to wikipedia -- Citizendium just needs to be a tide pool, a set of nooks and crannies where an alternate rulebook elides problems that crop up in some corners of wikipedia), but the snippiness of Sanger's response is a bit concerning.

Wikipedia blog endorses Aaron Swartz. Check out his essays, and go vote for him in the Wikimedia board elections (which end in a couple days).

From Code, and Other Laws of Wikipedia:

The page design the site uses encourages specific actions by making some links clear and prominent. Software functions like categories make certain kinds of features possible. The formatting codes used for things like infoboxes and links determine how easy it is for newcomers to edit those pieces of the site.

All of these things are political choices, not technical ones. It's not like there's a right answer that's obvious to any intelligent programmer. And these choices can have huge effects on the community. That's why it's essential the community be involved in making these decisions.

The current team of Wikipedia programmers is a volunteer group (although a couple of them were recently hired by the Wikimedia Foundation so they could live a little more comfortably) working much like a standard free software community, discussing things on mailing lists and IRC channels. They got together in person in the days before Wikimania to discuss some of the current hot topics in the software.

One presentation was by a usability expert who told us about a study done on how hard people found it to add a photo to a Wikipedia page. The discussion after the presentation turned into a debate over whether Wikipedia should be easy to to use. Some suggested that confused users should just add their contributions in the wrong way and a more experienced users would come along to clean their contributions up. Others questioned whether confused users should be allowed to edit the site at all -- were their contributions even valuable?

As a programmer, I have a great deal of respect for the members of my trade. But with all due respect, are these really decisions that the programmers should be making?

Meanwhile, Jimbo Wales also has a for-profit company, Wikia, which recently received $4 million in venture capital funding. Wales has said, including in his keynote speech at Wikimania, that one of the things he hopes to spend it on is hiring programmers to improve the Wikipedia software.

This is the kind of thing that seems like a thoughtful gesture if you think of the software as neutral -- after all, improvements are improvements -- but becomes rather more problematic if technical choices have political effects. Should executives and venture capitalists be calling the shots on some of these issues?

The Wikipedia community is enormously vibrant and I have no doubt that the site will manage to survive many software changes. But if we're concerned about more than mere survival, about how to make Wikipedia the best that it can be, we need to start thinking about software design as much as we think about the rest of our policy choices.

From Making more Wikipedias:

Wikipedia's real innovation was much more than simply starting a community to build an encyclopedia or using wiki software to do it. Wikipedia's real innovation was the idea of radical collaboration. Instead of having a small group of people work together, it invited the entire world to take part. Instead of assigning tasks, it let anyone work on whatever they wanted, whenever they felt like it. Instead of having someone be in charge, it let people sort things out for themselves. And yet it did all this towards creating a very specific product.

Even now, it's hard to think of anything else quite like it. Books have been co-authored, but usually only by two people. Large groups have written encyclopedias, but usually only by being assigned tasks. Software has been written by communities, but typically someone is in charge.

But if we take this definition, rather than wiki software, as the core of Wikipedia, then we see that other types of software are also forms of radical collaboration. Reddit, for example, is radical collaboration to build a news site: anyone can add or edit, nobody is in charge, and yet an interesting news site results. Freed from the notion that Wikipedia is simply about wiki software, one can even imagine new kinds of sites. What about a "debate wiki", where people argue about a question, but the outcome is a carefully-constructed discussion for others to read later, rather than a morass of bickering messages.

If we take radical collaboration as our core, then it becomes clear that extending Wikipedia's success doesn't simply mean installing more copies of wiki software for different tasks. It means figuring out the key principles that make radical collaboration work. What kinds of projects is it good for? How do you get them started? How do you keep them growing? What rules do you put in place? What software do you use?

These questions can't be answered from the armchair, of course. They require experimentation and study. And that, in turn, requires building a community around strong collaboration itself. It doesn't help us much if each person goes off and tries to start a wiki on their own. To learn what works and what doesn't, we need to share our experiences and be willing to test new things -- new goals, new social structures, new software.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (See also)

Omnipelagos is like 6 degrees of wikipedia but much better. (You can actaully play 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon with it.)

"...if you want to have authority on the Web, you have to show up on the Web. And those who ought to enjoy more authority than Wikipedia aren’t. Let me make the point by example

...

Cast your eyes back across those web addresses. What are your chances of guessing them? Of remembering them? Of writing them down accurately? If you bookmark them, how confident are you that they’ll be there after the next site re-org?

So if the public-sector community decided to standardize their URIs, or adopt a principle that every front page should have a FAQ link, or make some sort of concerted intelligent attempt to show up on the Web, they might grab some authority back. But they’re not. And I don’t see any signs of interest.

So Wikipedia is going to win. Do you see any other plausible outcome?"

Find wikipedia's links to a particular site. (For example, Here are links to this blog.)

Wikipedia is Written by the Public has a correllary: Process is Dangerous.

In physics, Planck units are physical units of measurement defined exclusively in terms of five universal physical constants, in such a manner that all of these physical constants take on the numerical value of one when expressed in terms of these units. Planck units elegantly simplify particular algebraic expressions appearing in physical law.

Jimmy: 'One of the points that I'm trying to push is that if there's a small town in China that has a wonderful local tradition, that won't make its way into Wikipedia because the people of China are not allowed to share their knowledge with the world. I think that's an ironic side-effect and something the people in the censorship department need to have a much bigger awareness of: you're not just preventing information about Falun Gong or whatever you're upset about getting into China, you're preventing the Chinese people speaking to the world.'

Interesting blog post.

Then there's a distinct second group of people who argue fiercely against what they perceive as 'mob rule'; people who can't fathom the thought of open, participatory systems that actually work. Typically these are people from Academia or political institutions, both of which are groups that are deeply characterized by their thresholds of entry. (I'm not joking here. That's anecdotal evidence, true, but happened too often to be a coincidence.)

And these are the people we need to have discussions with. Because they're the gateways to making changes on a large scale, to changing the system from within. If we can't persuade them we at least must [reduce] their fear of these systems. We must demonstrate that what we're proposing is not Anarchy.

Hitler Has Only Got One Ball

Wikipedia:No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man
via

Wikipedia really is written by the public -- if this tremendously important bit of research is independently confirmed, it upsets conventional thinking.

Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that's not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account.

To investigate more formally, I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version. Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article.

If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales's methods, you get Wales's results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.

But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit -- this one! With the more reasonable metric -- indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study -- the result completely reverses.

I don't have the resources to run this calculation across all of Wikipedia (there are over 60 billion edits!), but I ran it on several more randomly-selected articles and the results were much the same. For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all deleting things and moving things around).

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.

On the other hand, everyone has a bunch of obscure things that, for one reason or another, they've come to know well. So they share them, clicking the edit link and adding a paragraph or two to Wikipedia. At the same time, a small number of people have become particularly involved in Wikipedia itself, learning its policies and special syntax, and spending their time tweaking the contributions of everybody else.

Other encyclopedias work similarly, just on a much smaller scale: a large group of people write articles on topics they know well, while a small staff formats them into a single work. This second group is clearly very important -- it's thanks to them encyclopedias have a consistent look and tone -- but it's a severe exaggeration to say that they wrote the encyclopedia. One imagines the people running Britannica worry more about their contributors than their formatters.

And Wikipedia should too. Even if all the formatters quit the project tomorrow, Wikipedia would still be immensely valuable. For the most part, people read Wikipedia because it has the information they need, not because it has a consistent look. It certainly wouldn't be as nice without one, but the people who (like me) care about such things would probably step up to take the place of those who had left. The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around.

Flickr's added geotagging and there are already millions of photos on the map. 2 thoughts spring immediately to mind:

1. Someone needs to mash this up with Wikimapia. (It can be done; there's an API.)

2. The hill ahead of Digital Universe keeps getting steeper.

Extraterrestrial skies

David Gerard, on the mailing list: "I'm somewhat annoyed the screenshots are real ..."

Five-second rule

The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect first used in 1951 for the movie Distant Drums. It has been featured in dozens of movies since.

WikiCharts tracks the most popular wikipedia articles. As usual, people are interested in sex and space travel. (The tool counts pageviews, not searches from the wikipedia mainpage, so google's probably playing a big role. And it's only 2 days running, so expect big fluctuations.)

No soap radio.

A head transplant is a hypothetical surgical operation involving the replacement of an organism's head with a replacement head. It should not be confused with another hypothetical surgical operation, the brain transplant.

Wikipedia Showdown! (Good filter.)

Fictional characters by occupation

User:Superman

List of computer and video games considered the worst ever.

(For example, Big Rigs -- "It is even possible, after several minutes of acceleration in this manner, for the speedometer to reach many thousands of times the speed of light. However, as soon as the reverse key is released, no matter what speed the truck is travelling at, it will halt instantly." And E.T. -- "Hundreds of thousands of excess cartridges were dumped in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.")

New planets! (Update: nevermind.)

The Neutrality of this Article is Disputed: Inside Wikimania 2006

From Reason magazine. It's pretty good.

The Silver Arrow is a ghost train that (according to an urban legend) haunts the Stockholm Metro.

The Ryugyong is a towering, empty concrete shell that was once intended for use as a hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Frank Chu (March 24, 1960 — ) is one of San Francisco's best-known eccentrics.

See also: The Emperor of the United States and, less interstingly, Daniel Pratt (eccentric)

People in this category are either current or past buskers.

Here are some buskers in Tokyo.

Picadilly, then and now.

I'm on Wikibreak.

Whoa: Apple's going to put out a wiki engine. (If I was writing wikiwyg fanfiction, this is what it would be about.) Luckily for wikia, socialtext, and pretty much everybody else, it looks like it'll only run on apple servers, and who the hell has an apple server?

NYTimes article on Wikimania, though not by the reporter I ran into.

In other news: A chinese wikipedia-style site was forced to shut down. (Sidenote: the chinese wikipedians I encountered at Wikimania were endearingly thrilled to be there. There has to be a way for an uncensored wikipedia to coexist with the PRC governmnet.)

I'm posting from Bedford-Stuyvesant (which I only recently learned how to pronounce.

The Wikimania archives are mostly complete by now -- audio and video from the sessions.

What's Happening to Knowledge? was great, but I walked in the the middle so I won't summarize.

I'm at Can Visualization help?, probably the session I was looking forward to the most. It's headed by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, who've done some brilliant and badly needed work on Wikipedia visualizations, and Ben Shneiderman, expert in the field.

Fernanda Viégas: Live demo of history flow! Revert wars look like zigzags.

There's a new version that lets you zoom. And they're going to make it possible to use history flow with new wikipedia data (which hasn't been possible for awhile).

Martin Wattenberg: How can you get a picture of what a wikipedian works on? His visualization looks at all the edits of a particular user. These are beautiful snapshots of personalities, a little like poking through someone's bedroom. (For that reason, there are questions about whether tools like these should be released publicly. I hope they are, because they're utterly awesome.)

Ben Shneiderman's talk is about the field of visualization in general (and is targetted at businesspeople who aren't as computer-savvy as this audience -- one gets the feeling it's a presentation he's given before). Anticlimatic after Viégas and Wattenberg. But his intro is good: Using vision to think. "Visual bandwidth is enormous: Once you train your eye and your mind you begin to see it there quite naturally."

Viegas, relatedly: "People felt like they actually got it after they saw these visualizations. People who had never looked at wikipedia before could pick up on those patterns as well...From experience, the impact of showing this to people is just amazing."

The state of the Wikimedia Union

I'm at the Foundation Board panel. Big auditorium, sea of laptops (mine among them).

Summary

For creating content, Wikimedia has a decentralized model -- but maybe Wikimedia should be governed under a centralzied model (or maybe not -- the board should decide).

Wikipedia is blocked in China. Jimmy's going to the Chinese wikimedia conference to meet people and try to start solving things.

Jimmy: Choose your board members wisely! Although they won't get involved in community issues, they're responsible for the organization's strategic and legal future. They make the trains run on time.

Wikipedia in africa:
Jimmy: In the old days, the fundraising was about a desperate need to buy more servers so the site wouldn't break. But our fundraising has gotten more successful. What can we do to fulfil our organizational mission of providing knowledge to everyone in the world? We need to move conservatively, talk to people on the ground there, find out what they need and how we can help.

Questioner: Are we going to pay board members? For example, the next world social forum; it costs money to travel this much, give up this much of your time.)

Angela (who is (somewhat infamously) quitting the board): the foundation's decision-making process has become flawed. We now vote on a wiki instead of having discussions.

(Combination of direct quote and paraphrase from another board member.) "The world looks to this organization as a flagbearer of this century. This kind of thing has never been done before."

Wales: The conflict between accuracy and openness is an illusion. For example, stable versions will almost eliminate semiprotection. The details of finding the best path will be left up to the individual communities. Some things do make sense globally; those practices will spread, but it's not the board's duty to micromanage.

Wales: NPOV is potentially flexible: it is a term of art that is endowed with meaning by the community.

Questioner: Money is the most powerful force in the world. Will social sharing ever become more powerful than money? Board: No, people are the most powerful force.

Financial situation is good. For the first time, over the past six months, we've gotten steady donations every day. We have a buffer now. Wikimania will spend the money, at first, on additional hardware. The public is using our service; for every person in this auditorium, there are thousands of other interested people around the world.

In the future, there will be more donations from foundations and corporations, so we might get away from the pass-the-hat model. We'd always been just barely be able to keep up with traffic -- but now we can ask, what could we do if we had more money?

"I think what disturbs me is that it is reasonable to believe that in about five to ten years, I’ll be in the “new inside”. As I’m walking around at wikimania, I’m seeing new power structures form, and if one is not careful, new power structures develop the pathologies of the old power structures."

Part of twofish's opinionated and insightful coverage.

NPR interview with Lih about Wikimania.

Recordings of sessions. (Boingboing summarizes Jimmy's plenary. In the outside world: Cogent summary of the Colbert thing.)

Too tired to go to the Web 1.0 party (and it was at MIT, too. hmph.). I will say this about Cambridge: good street musicians during the day, terrible ones at night. It seems like a city that loves and understands acoustic folk, but is interested in other styles mostly as academic curiosities. (Or maybe I'm being an asshole for judging a city on the kids trying to make an easy saturday buck. I remember russian clubbers in detroit for whom anything with a melody, or chords, or filters, or slower than 160 bpm, is crap.)

(Dr. Thompsen's Wikimania 2006 Journal. Detailed.)

Preemptive critique of the times story: it's possible that one angle that might pop up is "wikipedia takes a relative approach to truth: wikiality: truth is whatever the mob says."

But NPOV and concensus (and a hands-off approach toward differing cultural norms) are not academic philosophies of knowledge, they're practical approaches to the process of collaborative writing, imperfect but workable solutions that allow wikipedia to (dare I say) thrive.

Wikimania feature in tomorrow's NYTimes week in review the NYTimes at some point

(Update: Here it is.)

I'm at Language and cultural barriers and challenges to Wikipedia. Upstairs, small room. All the cool foreign kids.
There's a New York Times reporter here who says he's writing about us for Week in Review. (I got out of there fast after he unmasked himself (well, and after the session ended). I'm waaay too sleep-deprived to be anywhere near a times reporter.)

Update: I misread that exchange -- the reporter was saying he had an article not about Wikimania, but about language. The wikimania article is yet to be written.

The session

Should we aim for an ur-wikipedia that every language version feeds into, with every perspective? (Well, no.) How independent should each language version be? (The question becomes more complex when you look at areas in which multilinguism is common -- see africa segment below.) ("If you attempt to combine languages, some of the knowledge actually disappears." But there's not necessarily a conflict here: multimodal translation directions, etc.)

(In other news, I think I said "dutch" when I meant to say "danish". I blame the public schools.)

The Swahili wikipedia is exapanding: >1000 articles. The guy next to me, from Tanzania, is talking about using social networks and students to help it grow.* "If you want to convince people in the developing world to do something like this, that's new, you have to be very persistent. Extremely persistent." (Swahili is not an african lingua franca, contrary to stereotype. However, it doesn't belong to any particular ethnic group, so it carries less baggage. There is tension because ethnic languages are being lost as Swahili becomes more common.)

How big is the overlap between wikipedias? How many polish-language articles don't exist in the english version?

What about nations in which the cultural makeup of the bilingual crowd is different from that of those who only speak the native language. What about bilingual people who choose to write in english because they can reach a wider audience? See also.

*He's also working on a project to rewrite Tanzania's constitution using wikis.

I almost forgot:

The group is forming a new mailing list to continue the discussion and make recommendations to the board.

Man, I was tired (up all night 'till the late afternoon). Archived media -- though the videos aren't up yet.

Jimbo: Wikiwyg yet to come.

Unsurprisingly, Lawrence Lessig gives a fucking great presentation. video feed

We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code. --Clark

Update: Clicknoise has some interesting commentary.

I'm at Identity, Anonymity and the Wiki. (Video feed (rm))

Update: Great question about articles for deletion, and ensuring consistency: should there be case studies, like in law? Would people refer to the 2006 GNAA precident for reference? Could these be automatically generated, as in google news? (It seems like that last would be difficult.)

As I type this, I'm in Cambridge, listening to Jimmy Wales talk about talking to Jimmy Carter. (here's a live video feed

There's a generalized Wikimania blog (not by me).

I'm one of the judges for the Wikimania awards -- I'm judging on-wiki, though, so you can follow along as I pick through cool photos.

Update: CNet's picted it up.

Wikimania Hacking Days - Day 1
Originally uploaded by fuzheado.

David Weinberger (the guy behind Small Pieces Loosely Joined) blogs about about how nervous he is about his Wikimania keynote.

In other news, there are -- At This Very Moment -- people doing what I presume are brilliant, consequential things at Hacking Days (and I'd be there if I was more geeky -- I'm at about the trough of the asymptotic geekiness distribution curve, just far enough up to realize how stupid I am compared to the real geeks).

This New Yorker article nails Wikipedia's appeal.

Apparently, no traditional encyclopedia has ever suspected that someone might wonder about Sudoku or about Prostitution in China. Or, for that matter, about Capgras delusion (the unnerving sensation that an impostor is sitting in for a close relative), the Boston molasses disaster, the Rhinoceros Party of Canada, Bill Gates’s house, the forty-five-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War, or Islam in Iceland. Wikipedia includes fine entries on Kafka and the War of the Spanish Succession, and also a complete guide to the ships of the U.S. Navy, a definition of Philadelphia cheesesteak, a masterly page on Scrabble, a list of historical cats (celebrity cats, a cat millionaire, the first feline to circumnavigate Australia), a survey of invented expletives in fiction (“bippie,” “cakesniffer,” “furgle”), instructions for curing hiccups, and an article that describes, with schematic diagrams, how to build a stove from a discarded soda can.

That's the bloggiest part, but it's a great article all around:

Wattenberg and Viégas, of I.B.M., note that the vast majority of Wikipedia edits consist of deletions and additions rather than of attempts to reorder paragraphs or to shape an entry as a whole, and they believe that Wikipedia's twenty-five-line editing window deserves some of the blame. It is difficult to craft an article in its entirety when reading it piecemeal, and, given Wikipedians’ obsession with racking up edits, simple fixes often take priority over more complex edits. Wattenberg and Viégas have also identified a “first-mover advantage”: the initial contributor to an article often sets the tone, and that person is rarely a Macaulay or a Johnson. The over-all effect is jittery, the textual equivalent of a film shot with a handheld camera.

What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? When I showed the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. "Obviously, this was the work of experts," he said. In the nineteen-sixties, William F. Buckley, Jr., said that he would sooner “live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” On Wikipedia, he might finally have his wish. How was his page? Essentially on target, he said. All the same, Buckley added, he would prefer that those anonymous two thousand souls govern, and leave the encyclopedia writing to the experts.

Who is responsible for this?

Why have I never seen Larry Sanger's blog before?

Chicken sexing is the method of distinguishing the sex of chicken hatchlings, usually by a trained person called a chicken sexer.

It turned out that Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa by simply walking out the door with it hidden under his coat.

The theft was master-minded by a con-man who had commissioned a French art forger to make copies of the painting so he could sell them as the missing original. Because he didn't need the original for his con, he never contacted Peruggia again after the crime. After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to a Florence art dealer.

Distinguishing "blue" from "green"

Pediapress sells print-on-demand compendiums of wikipedia articles. Hopefully it's the first in a minor ecosystem of companies repurposing wikimedia content: that's what the GFD Licence specifically allows.

But wait! The name Wikimedia isn't free; it's trademarked. And the names of the subprojects, too (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, etc.). But repurposed copies have to use that name to show where the content's from. And how's Wikimedia going to prevent scam artists from using its name (for example) to sell articles peppered with implanted ads for real estate?

The GFDL and trademark law collided to produce this byzantine debate on the mailing list.

In semi-related news, the Library of Congress and Wikipedia might share content.

A paternoster is a doorless elevator which consists of a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping. Passengers who are agile enough can step on or off at any floor they like.

THE LONGEST ESCELATOR IN THE WORLD

(addendum: Hong Kong Island is dominated by steep, hilly terrain, which makes it the home of some rather unusual methods of transport up and down the slopes.)

The thagomizer is the arrangement of four to ten spikes on the tail of particular dinosaurs, like the famous Stegosaurus, in the clade Stegosauria. (See also: Horrendous Space Kablooie.)

The next version of Apple's word processor (iWork) is rumored to integrate with Wikipedia. It would be nice if it plopped wikipedia text into the document and encouraged people to use it (god, I wish people would unlearn the draconian copyright rules they're taught to refexively apply: you can use wikipedia text anywhere -- even tweak it for style and accuracy, and use it for profit -- as long as you say where it's from). But more likely it's just a search tool.

The Vermont Republic was a North American independent republic that lasted from 1777 to 1791

Yasunori Mitsuda (born January 21, 1972) is a Japanese composer and musician best known for his soundtracks for various video games.

Long interview about how wikipedia works. Some interesting stuff about differences between language versions.

A Hollow Earth theory posits that the planet Earth has a hollow interior and probably a habitable inner surface.

Wikimedia WYSIWYG interface by August 4th? (Update: nope. But it's coming.)

Apparently, Wikia (Wales's wiki company) is throwing a lot of money at getting a WYSIWYG interface into mediawiki, and they want to unveil a demo at the beginning of August, at Wikimania.

The "sort of" is tacked on because (1) it's just a demo and (2) I'm taking Ender's word.

(Just FYI: I'll be at Wikimania, which will be awesome. I have enough frequent flier miles accumulated from bi-annual childhood trips to my grandparents' in Melbourne to land a free ticket to Boston. I'll be blogging. Also, I designed the Wikimania logo. If you like it, tell Wikimania to get around to putting it in the bloody corner.)

If it's a crime for a man to love his country then I'm guilty of that. And if it's a crime to steal a trillion dollars, well, then I'm guilty of that, too! (See also: Fake denominations of United States currency.)

Jimmy Wales's open letter to the political blogosphere. "I am launching today a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent."

Amazing photo of MLK's march on washington.

Category Tree is a cool Thingy that lets you browse wikipedia categories hierarchically. For example: Military Conflicts (which contains Wars and Battles and Fictional WWI Characters, among other things), or Cheeses (which is a part of Dairy products which is a part of Foods which is a part of Food and drink which is a part of Personal life).

Fallen Astronaut is an 8.5 cm aluminum sculpture of an astronaut in a spacesuit. It is the only piece of art on the Moon.

The Tetris effect refers to the ability of any activity to which people devote sufficient time and attention to begin to dominate their thoughts, images, and dreams.

Dog monuments

Wikimapia is getting really cool. (Google maps + wiki -- you draw a square around something and tag it with a paragraph of text.) Are you listening, Digital Universe?

Space burial is a burial procedure in which a small sample of the cremated ashes of the deceased in a lipstick-sized capsule are launched into space using a rocket.

A white elephant is a valuable possession whose upkeep is excessively expensive, and may be useless apart from its value to the gifter and giftee. List.

Musical comebacks gone awry

The deadliest conflict since World War II

(Sidenote: I've made a grand total of $3 in the year I've had the google ads up (that's roughly $0.0002 per visitor), so I think I'll take them down. I was going to leave them until I had, at least symbolically, enough to replace the pack of cigs I smoked writing the Wikipedia/Linux article, but I should really quit.)

Text Mode demos are real-time calculated computer animations which make use of the native text graphic mode(s) common on the IBM PC. (See Demoscene)

Deadhead

Spells in Harry Potter (79 KB)

List of youth subcultures

Well. I respect historians more now. One of the them wrote a great article -- the first I've read that's almost uniformly ... right. It gives insight on the usual topics, and manages to ferret out the really important issues, like wikipedia's impact on the 3rd world. (And it succeeds in being porn for wikipedia culture junkies.)

Your freedom both to rewrite Wikipedia entries and to manipulate them for other purposes is thus arguably more profound than your ability to read them “for free.” It is why free-software advocates say that to understand the concept of free software, you should think of “free speech” more than “free beer.”

...

Why are so many of our scholarly journals locked away behind subscription gates? What about American National Biography Online—written by professional historians, sponsored by our scholarly societies, and supported by millions of dollars in foundation and government grants? Why is it available only to libraries that often pay thousands of dollars per year rather than to everyone on the Web as Wikipedia is? Shouldn’t professional historians join in the massive democratization of access to knowledge reflected by Wikipedia and the Web in general? American National Biography Online may be a significantly better historical resource than Wikipedia, but its impact is much smaller because it is available to so few people.

The limited audience for subscription-based historical resources such as American National Biography Online becomes an even larger issue when we move outside the borders of the United States and especially into poorer parts of the world, where such subscription fees pose major problems even for libraries. Moreover, in some of those places, where censorship of textbooks and other historical resources is common, the fact that Wikipedia’s freedom means both “free beer” and “free speech” has profound implications because it allows the circulation of alternative historical voices and narratives.

It also further confirms the gist of that infamous Nature editorial...

I judged 25 Wikipedia biographies against comparable entries in Encarta, Microsoft’s well-regarded online encyclopedia (one of the few commercial encyclopedias that survive from a once-crowded marketplace), and in American National Biography Online, a high-quality specialized reference work published by Oxford University Press for the American Council of Learned Societies, written largely by professional historians, and supported by major grants. The comparison is unfair—both publications have had multimillion-dollar budgets—but it is still illuminating, and it sheds some favorable light on Wikipedia.

...and the purpose of this blog:

One noticeable difference [between Wikipedia and standard historical writing] is the affection for surprising, amusing, or curious details—something that Wikipedia shares with other forms of popular historical writing such as articles in American Heritage magazine. Consider some details that Wikipedians include in their Lincoln biography that do not make their way into McPherson’s profile: Lincoln’s sharing a birthday with Charles Darwin; his nicknames (the Rail Splitter is mentioned twice); his edict making Thanksgiving a national holiday; and the end of his bloodline with the death of Robert Beckwith in 1985. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia devotes five times as much space to Lincoln’s assassination as the longer American National Biography Online profile does. The same predilection for colorful details marks other portraits. We learn from the Harding biography that the socialist Norman Thomas was a paper boy for the Marion Daily Star (which Harding owned), that Harding reached the sublime degree as a Master Mason, and that Al Jolson and Mary Pickford came to Marion, Ohio, during the 1920 campaign for photo ops. It devotes two paragraphs to speculation about whether Harding had “Negro blood” and five paragraphs to his extramarital affairs. Meanwhile, key topics—domestic and foreign policies, the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921, immigration restriction, and naval treaties—are ignored or hurried over. We similarly learn that Woodrow Wilson belonged to Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and wrote his initials on the underside of a table in the Johns Hopkins University history department, but not about his law practice or his intellectual development at Princeton University.

Type I - A civilization that is able to harness all of the power available on a single planet.

1. Yet another reference to Wikipedia that calls it simply "Wiki". This is why Wetpaint didn't put the word 'Wiki' in their name: the battle for wikipedia != wiki is probably lost.

2. And yet another blogger (Fred Wilson, who coined the term "red hat wikipedia" 6 months ago) is nonplussed: "If I am not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia, so be it. But I do think that the one Fred Wilson they include is hardly notable, particularly when compared to the artist, the chessmaster, the rockband, and me (probably in that order)."

Lukasz (a Seattle-ite) sent me an interesting email about why he's starting his own wiki about hiking trails (Hikipedia) -- and why he spent late nights rolling his own wiki software, using Python/Zope: Hikipedia has all sorts of metadata (stuff that only applies to hiking, like the length of the hiking season at a particular trail, or the ranger station address) built right into the editing interface.

I'm reminded of Clay Shirky's old point: making something completely generalized can be limiting. (But the difference between wikis and other web apps (discussion forums, say) is that all users of a wiki share the same collective space, and content in that space endures; it never gets pushed off the page simply for being old. So having a large userbase can enrich the collective space -- all of it. Trade-offs.)

A sixth sense (and a 7th).

Jimbo sums up the NYTimes thing.

(o_O)

Techcrunch article: Wetpaint just launched (so that's why I hadn't heard of it). It's a wiki host and wiki framework rolled into one.

The interface battle is on: check out the awesome functionality on this history page -- each edit is programmatically summarized, for example ("4 words added, 2 words deleted"). (I'm jealous. Someone make me an OS X wikipedia client.)

Wetpaint is going to be pretty big. Bigger than Wikia, I think.

It's hard to overstate the importance of usability testing, which Wetpaint has obviously been through and wikipedia/mediawiki obviously hasn't. Not that the Wetpaint interface is ideal -- it's apparent the let's-maximize-revenue folks won out over the let's-make-the-perfect-zen-website folks -- but Wetpaint gets an important part right: in one fell swoop, thanks to ajax-powered editing, the mechancs of the site are manifest in its appearence: This Page Is Put Together By A Bunch Of People Like You. And a bunch of smaller confusions are nipped in the bud (users are called writers, not editors, for exmaple). (Meanwhile, I've watched web-designer friends click on the wrong edit-this-section link on wikipedia. A few developer-hours improving the link placement could save thousands of community-hours reverting edits by confused newbies.)

We geeks don't realize it, but wikis, unless specifically designed, are hard for most people (excluding teenagers, tech writers, etc.).

Sidenote: the story brought out a great comment -- on Digg, of all places -- analyzing why established wikis are less vulnerable:

I believe (and see it since I spend a lot of time on wikipedia for school) that most articles are "crystalized out" on wikipedia. I'm not saying wiki has stopped growing, but most pages on significant articles are finished, and remain untouched by ídiots [vandals] because there is no reason to edit it. You can expect that an article about Bush will be incorrectly edited a lot of course.

I think you can compare it to graffititags: people spray their logos only on walls, almost never on windows, doors, or higways. Why not? because they have a "usable" function.

That is why Wiki[pedia] works. it has its weaknesses, but it still is one of the strongest inventions on the web.

Wetpaint is a wiki hosting service that provides a dead-simple ajax-y WYSIWYG interface. (I wish wikipedia/mediawiki had something similar.) Sandbox.

The List of World's Largest Roadside Attractions needs more pictures.

"Student, justify why you have come to class wearing pants of our most probable military opponent!" (here the teacher means jeans made in USA) The right answer, as mentioned sometimes, is: "Because they are a probable war trophy."

As the faulty New York Times article trickles into dozens of smaller outlets, a few news sources get it right.

Deleted Articles with Freaky Titles

The List of problems solved by MacGyver has grown to immense proportions.

Lifehacker: How to contribute to wikipedia

Black ski masks and puppies. (I have no love for the ALF, but occasionally they're understandable.)

Mark Pilgrim has a great essay about why he's leaving Apple -- specifically, on the advantages free software has over proprietary software: in this case, the short-term profit drive of private companies created problems with data migration that linux doesn't have.

Is there an analogy to free vs. proprietary content?

Forlorn hope is a military term that comes from the Dutch verloren hoop, which should be translated as "lost troop" although in Dutch it can also mean "lost hope". In the days of muzzle-loading muskets it was most frequently used to refer to the first wave of soldiers attacking a breach in defences during a siege. (See Cannon Fodder.)

In The Oregon Trail, characters with more money are generally considered easier to play. This can be considered historically unrealistic, as many professionals (like those in the Donner party) could not aptly adapt to the wilderness surroundings.

Orange County, China

"Dashanzi Art District" is the informal name of a part of Beijing that houses a thriving artist community, among 50-year old decomissioned military factory buildings of unique architectural style. It is often compared with New York's Greenwich Village or SoHo, but faces impending destruction from the forces driving Beijing's urban sprawl.

"Oversight" -- a new user class with only a handful of members -- allows page revisions to be erased without a developer having to dig around in the metaphorical wires.

It's probably necessary (for legal reasons and to protect admins from real-world nuisances), which is a shame; I'm a little worried about the long-term effects of giving anyone that much power. (Short-term, no worries: even assuming the 16 users with oversight were inclined to abuse their power -- a strange assumption -- they're swamped with more minute issues.)

Nonsense verse is a form of poetry, normally composed for humorous effect, which is intentionally and overtly paradoxical, silly, witty, whimsical or just plain strange.

(Bonus: How do you translate the Jabberwocky poem?

List of leading shopping streets and districts by city. (Check out the pictures.)

Responses to Lanier's "Digital Maoism" critique.

Neither proponents nor detractors of hive mind rhetoric have much interesting to say about Wikipedia itself, because both groups ignore the details. As Fernanda Viegas's work shows, Wikipedia isn't an experiment in anonymous collectivist creation; it is a specific form of production, with its own bureaucratic logic and processes for maintaining editorial control.

--Clay Shirky

There's no doubt that online aggregators such as Digg, Reddit, and popurls can seem faceless to the point of being soulless. However, the irony of his critique is that Wikipedia is very much the opposite of these aggregator sites. Instead of algorithmically aggregating content, Wikipedia depends on writers settling their differences on an individual level. Nothing is created or posted automatically — and it shows...Take the talk page for "denotational semantics". In a textbook this recondite computer science concept may sound set in stone, but it comes to life when you read a sharp argument between an MIT professor and other experts over exactly what should be in the article.

--Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg

Making a million-entry encyclopedia out of photons, philosophy and peer-pressure would be impossible before the Internet's "collectivism." Wikipedia is a noble experiment in defining a protocol for organizing the individual efforts of disparate authors with conflicting agendas. Even better, it has a meta-framework — its GNU copyright license — that allows anyone else to take all that stuff and use part or all of Wikipedia to seed different approaches to the problem.

Wikipedia's voice is by no means bland, either. If you suffice yourself with the actual Wikipedia entries, they can be a little papery, sure. But that's like reading a mailing-list by examining nothing but the headers. Wikipedia entries are nothing but the emergent effect of all the angry thrashing going on below the surface.

No, if you want to really navigate the truth via Wikipedia, you have to dig into those "history" and "discuss" pages hanging off of every entry.

...

True, reading Wikipedia is a media literacy exercise. You need to acquire new skill-sets to parse out the palimpsest. That's what makes is genuinely novel.

-- Cory Doctorow

Alternative spellings of "the"

Wikipedia gets a new interface. (Sort of.)

Googlepedia is a firefox extention that displays wikipedia articles on google search result pages.

I know -- been there, done that. But googlepedia is both a useful tool and a herald of exciting stuff to come. It's a new animal -- a true mashup -- for two reasons:

1. It gracefully resolves the differences between wikipedia and google queries (for example, "pictures of trees" returns google results, but not wikipedia results) by using the "feeling lucky" function (and some code that I haven't looked into).

2. It doesn't just display a wikipedia article on the google search results page -- it changes the links in that sidebar article so that instead of pointing to "wikipedia proper" (that is, the frame for Wikipedia content that is en.wikipedia.org), those links now create new google searches (which, of course, display new wikipedia articles).

A point so important I'll say it again: wikipedia.org, the page with arial text and a white background, is just a frame, a container, an interface. What's important are the words that make up the encyclopedia, and because the project is open source*, those words are Libre in the old cool cyberhacker "information wants to be free!" sense: they can be filtered, tweaked, nudged through various contexts, used in uncountable ways.

Googlepedia was concieved as an addon to google, but -- the way it really works -- it's also a completely new interface to wikipedia, adding (as the 2.0 cats say) rich new functionality.

Wishlist

Some stuff I want to see in the next couple years:

1. A similarly well-implemented mashup of Wikipedia and Everything2, with some version of softlinks built in (add new softlinks the the bottom of the wikipedia article?). It would be great to, alongside a detailed WPedia subway summary, see some off-the-cuff Subway wit, or to find Eating something other than the Sun's energy for the first time affixed below the Nuclear power article. (Might revive E2, too.)

2. An independently-run flash WPedia interface (with the works -- color-coding to indicate stable and unstable phrases; animations; etc.). But that's for another post.


* More specifically, because the purpose of the wikimedia foundation isn't to increase pageviews/ad revenue at wikipedia.org.

Really interesting comparison of the cultural differences between the English and German wikipedias.

New Scientist on the Semantic Mediawiki.

(I've been on a bit of a break from blogging; I'll be sporadic for the next week or so.)

User:Citynoise has done a cool series of maps. (Boswash, for example.) (Citynoise runs Radicalcartography.net)

Compare the Bill Clinton articles at Wikipedia and the new Congresspedia.

Congresspedia's is mediocre -- and will likely continue to be, because the site's allowed only logged-in users to edit pages. That might work once the site's past a certain level of quality, but it won't get there under this system becauase (and the circle is complete) nobody wants to register for a mediocre site. (Update, June 9th: I'm not so sure about this anymore: Clinton is not, after all, a congressman, so he's outside congresspedia's mission. The site might fill a useful niche. I still stand by the following paragraph, though.)

There needs to be more innovation in the wikipedia-clone area -- don't just start a parallel project: instead, code some greasemonkey, snatch a database mirror, and build a plugin that makes wikipedia itself more dynamic.

Pundling is an activity common to all domestic cats whereby, when in a state of contentment, they knead the surface on which they reside with their front paws. This may have an origin going back to their wild ancestors who would have had to tread down grass or foliage to make a temporary nest in which to rest.Wikisnips_

In "Digital Maosim", at Edge (a really good website, by the way), Jason Lanier writes:

In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.

Twice in the past several weeks, reporters have asked me about my filmmaking career. The fantasies of the goblins have entered that portion of the world that is attempting to remain real. I know I've gotten off easy. The errors in my Wikipedia bio have been (at least prior to the publication of this article) charming and even flattering.

Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet old Mondo 2000 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas that are important to this one particular small subculture are immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay that much attention and do all that work?

The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It's been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that's actually interesting information.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

. . .

The collective isn't always stupid. In some special cases the collective can be brilliant. For instance, there's a demonstrative ritual often presented to incoming students at business schools. In one version of the ritual, a large jar of jellybeans is placed in the front of a classroom. Each student guesses how many beans there are. While the guesses vary widely, the average is usually accurate to an uncanny degree.

This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the "Wisdom of Crowds," though I think the word "wisdom" is misleading. It is part of what makes Adam Smith's Invisible Hand clever, and is connected to the reasons Google's page rank algorithms work. It was long ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.

But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.

The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.

I disagree with Lanier — in particular, he treats the concepts of "individual" and "collective" as binary and opposite, when the reality's much more complex — but ... er ... who doesn't disagree with him? He's still worth reading.

Paul Xavier Gleason (May 4, 1944 - May 27, 2006) was an American actor. Gleason is perhaps best remembered for his role as the gruff disciplinary principal named Richard Vernon in the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club. He reprised that character several times, including in an A*Teens music video, on the television show Boy Meets World (although he was a dean on BMW) and in the Not Another Teen Movie film.

Some outside attention for Wikiproject: Countering Systemic Bias

List of North American cities by year of foundation

Physics has experimental and theoretical wings. "Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing."

The Motherfuckers were never part of the Situationist International.

Nick Carr says Wikipedia is dead because these articles can only be edited by logged-in users. (Man, if I could troll like Carr this blog would be so popular...)

Corante has a good response.

The Nain Rouge (French for "red dwarf" or "red gnome") is a mythical creature that haunts Detroit.

A moonbow (also known as a lunar rainbow or white rainbow) is a rainbow that occurs at night.

One aspect that is usually unknown by visitors to Brasília is that it has attracted many members of offbeat religious sects and esoteric cults — sects that embrace reincarnation and universal oneness, academics and sci-fi enthusiasts who associate Brasília with ancient Egypt or the lost city of Atlantis. Land was given to almost any religous group that was legally constituted so many non-mainstream groups were able to built their temples or churches at low cost and exempt of taxes. Their dreams are fed by an alien-looking cityscape, a showcase for Modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer.

Wikipedia needs designers! (It won't necessarily be on spec -- see talk.)

Conventionally, time is divided into three distinct regions; the "past", the "present", and the "future". This model presents a number of difficult philosophical problems, and is difficult to reconcile with current accepted scientific theories. Block time.

Classification of demons

Baidu Baike (aka Baidupedia) just launched -- it's billed as a "Chinese Wikipedia" (though it's not actually a wiki -- users submit content and administrators must approve it). Censorship, of course, since it's a Chinese endevour: no mentions allowed of Tianammen Square, democracy, human rights, etc. The launch coincided with a crackdown on attempts to access Wikipedia from the Chinese mainland.

It's not all bad. Baidu Baike could act as an interesting testing ground: a highly publicized, widely used system somewhere (structurally) between Wikipedia and Everything2.

Wikipedia is more popular than Jesus (who is himself more popular than the Beatles).

Bōsōzoku were first seen in the 1950s as Japanese youth began to see more products of industry, such as cars and bikes. The first bōsozōku were known as kaminari-zoku or "Lightning Tribes".

Tame Silver Foxes are the results of an experiment to domesticate the silver fox, started many years ago in Russia. Notably, the foxes did not only became more tame, but more dog-like as well.

A 1997 conference of musicians and philosophers discussed the implications of his instruction to play the piece "as slow as possible", given that an organ imposes virtually no time limits. A project emerged to perform the piece so that it would take a total of 639 years to play. (There's a note change tomorrow.)

List of snowclones. (A snowclone is a a type of formula-based cliché that uses an old idiom in a new context.)

The Korean wave refers to the popularity of South Korean popular culture in other Asian countries; it has been likened to the British Invasion.

In the Soviet Union, three Winnie the Pooh stories were made into celebrated cartoons by Soyuzmultfilm. Quotes and songs from the films are still a staple of Russian society.


Vinni Pukh (1969)

The Führerbunker is a common name for a complex of subterranean rooms in Berlin, Germany where Adolf Hitler committed suicide...

In 2005 the location of the bunker was not marked in any way. The immediate area was occupied by a small Chinese restaurant and mini mall while the emergency exit point for the bunker (which had been in the Reichskanzlei gardens) was occupied by a car park.

Good email debate between Wales and a conservative commentator about neutrality, etc.

ROBERT COX [after arguing that people like his son could trust wikipedia too much]: I did ask my son whether he was aware of the editing feature of Wikipedia and, to my surprise, he said yes.

A lot of the angst about Wikipedia involves the expectation that people (especially students, who rely on it heavily) will take it as gospel. But as Cox found out, young people are more likely to understand how wikipedia works, not less, because they haven't spent decades with older editorial structures. (Third-worlders are another group who will likely rely on wikipedia disproportionately. They're used to distrusting what they hear from authorities.)

Worrying Slashdot comment:

As someone who runs a City Wiki, I always felt that what makes a reference wikis work is that there are more people interested in having a NPOV article than people who have a financial interest at stake. However as companies and politicians become more familiar with the wiki movement and the whole anonyminity of it, they are more likely to see how easily you can edit articles as another PR platform and seek to control it. With the resources and ability to dedicate even a full time team to making sure the Wikipedia article keeps them in a good light, I fear we're entering the age where people who are interested in a NPOV are outmanned by those with a profit interest. After all, for years spammers have nearly outmanned those whole try to filter it.

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¡Ay, caramba! Dig the ¡.

Shanawdithit (1801 – June 6, 1829) is believed to have been the last surviving member of the Beothuk people.

As the Beothuk are extinct and few written accounts of their language exist, little is known about it.

We Didn't Start the Fire, wikified.

Bonus: 'Although the song ranked #1 in the US, and #7 in the UK, Blender magazine ranked "We Didn't Start the Fire" on its list of the "50 Worst Songs Ever". "We Didn't Start the Fire" also appeared on VH1's 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever, a collaboration with Blender.'

Bah. It's a good history lesson, at least, because it juxtaposees pop and high culture, letting you get the gestalt.

Exhaustive article on bicycling as transportation.

Pickpocketing used to be punished by death, but the public hangings were considered prime targets for pickpockets.

Aristasia is a largely imaginary all-female society existing primarily in England. (via)

I'm playing around with a MicroKorg (someone else's). The best part is the vocoder.

The chicken or the egg?

It's wikipedia week at PBS's Mediashift.

More Cowbell.

A webcomic's hilarious Wiki storyline. Start here.

Wired News cribs from Wikitruth.

Wikipedia is mostly peaceful.

Rogers Cadenhead noted 156 articles proposed for deletion on December 21. By the end of the day, it reached 225 — but that’s out of 877,600 articles. You’re left with 877,375 articles where the editing is much more egalitarian ...Someone once described Wikipedia as the wild west: you hear stories of shootouts and Indian wars but most people are quietly herding cattle and plowing fields in the background.

–Sam Wong

"Adherents of evolutionary psychology have suggested that the humorous effect of cartoon physics is due to the interplay of intuitions between physics (objective) and psychology (self-perception). The physics module predicts that the cartoon character will fall over the cliff immediately, while the psychology module anthropomorphizes the force of gravity and thus see it as vulnerable to deception, as long as the actor is self-deceived"

Beep-beep

Wile E. Coyote is an evil genius.

An illegal prime is a prime number which contains information forbidden by law to possess or distribute.