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Head to the new URL: www.enotes.com/blogs/wikipedia

Over at the new blog...

5 Mistakes Google Made with Knol

Google jumps into social search

They're testing a service where users can promote and demote search results, and leave comments -- all right inside the google interface.

Here's the techcrunch video:



You don't have to be William Gibson to get a looking-at-the-future quiver. But this is very bad news for Wikia, the startup run by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. They've spent the last year or so trying to build exactly what google just rolled out.

Wikia search had a noble goal -- to open-source bloody websearch, which is central to just about everything -- but they never had a chance against Google; they would have had to hire every PhD, ever. (I've said before that Wikia should concentrate on building communities, which they're great at, not building search engines.)

It's also bad news for Yahoo. It looks like Google is buying Digg -- which is social search in a very general way -- and unlike yahoo, they're willing to integrate their websites with each other.

Is Wikipedia Nuking the Fridge?

The short answer

No.

The medium answer

Not if you want an encyclopedia, but maybe if you want a kaleidoscopic window into the world.

The long answer

About Nuking the Fridge, Newsweek says:

Early in the new "Indiana Jones" sequel, our creaky, 65-year-old hero stumbles onto a nuclear test site, and the warning siren is blaring. Panicked, surrounded by Potemkin houses, he folds himself inside the lead-lined cavity of a refrigerator. Kaboom: the blast sends Indy hurtling across the New Mexico desert, a mushroom cloud rising behind him. He lands and, logic be damned, tumbles out unscathed. The franchise, though, will never recover.

[...]

The phrase was born on May 24—two days after the film opened—and it went viral on movie message boards. In barely a month, it has blown through several Web. 2.0 benchmarks: YouTube tributes, "fridge" haikus, merch-hawking Web sites, "Word of the Day" status on UrbanDictionary.com. "You're expecting [the movie] to be as great as you remembered it," says Beth Russell, creator of nukingthefridge.com, "and after the fridge scene, it was like, 'Oooo-K'." A new legend is born, for all the wrong reasons.

What say Wikipedia?

Well ... nothing.

The Nuking the Fridge article was actually deleted twice -- the meme was so powerful that someone who didn't know about the first deletion created the page again almost immediately. But this type of re-creation is actually against the rules -- instead, you have to propose re-creation at "deletion review" (even though, for the uninitiated, there are no hints that the blank page being edited was ever home to an article in the past). So it was deleted again immediately, without discussion.

How many people weighed in on that first deletion? One. It was "speedy deleted" after a single vote. ("Presumption is this was made up by the author and/or their friends (see author's username).")

One of many ironies here is that "Nuking the Fridge" is still a requested article -- which is to say that sometime after it was deleted, someone saw that the article didn't exist and added it to the collaborative to-do list.

This type of thing happens all the time. On one of my periodic safaris into deletion land, I saw that List of planets in Futurama had just gone under the axe, and I had an admin put a copy of it in my user space.

A couple days later, someone found my copy through the global search engine and wrote me a note:

I noticed you have a very nice article writen about the planets in futurama; would you consider adding it to the futurama articles, either split up as separate articles for each planet or as one big article? I made the "list of planets", which was missing from the link in the Futurama Portal (it was red).

I showed him the deletion vote. He said,

I dont understand -- if so many people voted keep, why did it get deleted? Now a list of planets is in the list of tasks for the Futurama Project. Seems like this is one of those situations where the right hand dosn't know what the left is doing.

Stability is good. Instability is bad.

Feeling like the words you type into wikipedia could be read in 100 years -- that's great. Knowing that an article you write might be deleted even if another wikipedian has specifically requested that article: bad. Rewriting an article without knowing that it's already been written and expunged? Terrible.

Feeling like you have to constantly push back against the deletion tide ... well, that kills kittens (where by kittens, I mean "the stuff that powers wikipedia").

Is there a solution?

I'm working on one, but it's a secret. In the meantime, Wikipedia's newest board member, Ting Chen, seems to be concerned about correcting this problem -- his wikimania talk was called "Keep the Community Open while Wikipedia matures".

Wikipedia Weekly had this to say about the talk:

These things that make wikipedia great, not just in english but in the other languages that he's fluent in, german and chinese -- it was interesting talking about how the "quality drives" that we have are driving us against this kind of open model, and driving us towards saying "well, really, if we're going to have stable versions, we want a highly vetted version we need someone with a phd to do that."

The foundation is also talking about making page-view statistics available for every article. WWeekly, again:

What Eric's talking about, using stats long-term, is not just to think of them as some numbers that you go to the website and pull out, but actually thinking about, longer-term, integrating them into the editing process.

That sounds awesome, and it means, among other things, that people will be confronted with the fact that they're deleting articles that get viewed hundreds of times a week.

---

For the record, I kind of liked the new movie. Indiana Jones was never realistic, and always had indy escaping in ridiculous ways. You just don't realize 'cause you saw the first movies when you were a kid.

Picture: the "Criticism of Windows Vista" article is slightly longer than the "God" article. See also.

Gut-wrenching Scream And Fall Into Distance (titled "Screams 3; Man, Gut-wrenching Scream And Fall Into Distance" on the compilation Hollywood Edge Premiere Edition, volume 13) is an often-used sound effect.

Like the Wilhelm Scream, it is an inside joke among sound engineers.

The Wilhelm Scream's revival came from Star Wars series sound designer Ben Burtt, who tracked down the original recording (which he found as a studio reel labeled "Man being eaten by alligator").

A Super-Earth is an extrasolar terrestrial planet that is more massive than the Earth, but less than 10 times as massive.

2 more NYTimes dispatches from Wikimania.

First, A Book With 90,000 Authors, about the German Wikipedia's printed edition.

The Wikipedian, Mathias Schindler, said the credits page runs 27 pages “in a dense layout -– it’s a page full of names, separated by commas.” “I was able to spot my name within half a minute,” Mr. Schindler said. “And I was able to read it without any auxiliary devices.”

Second, A Wikipedian Challenge: Convincing Arabic Speakers to Write in Arabic. There are some interesting comments on this one; scroll to the bottom.

NYTimes on stable versions, and change in the air

NYT: Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Reduce Vandalism on Pages

Wikipedia is considering a basic change to its editing philosophy to cut down on vandalism. In the process, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit would add a layer of hierarchy and eliminate some of the spontaneity that has made the site, at times, an informal source of news.

It well could bring some law and order to the creative anarchy that has made the site a runaway success but also made it a target for familiar criticism.

The idea, which is called “flagged revisions,” has only been possible in the last few months because of a new extension to the software that runs Wikipedia. It is sure to be a hot topic here at Wikimania 2008, in Alexandria, Egypt, because it promises to enact a goal for “stable versions” of articles that has long been championed by Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales.

An administrator at the German Wikipedia, where the first large-scale experiment is happening, will give a talk Friday on how it’s going.

Was anyone there? How did it go?

Here's an interesting comment from the Times post:

Wikipedia seems to want to pretend that it is some sort of old school Encyclopedia. However Wikipedia is not an old school Encyclopedia, its better than that. It’s a forum where ideas compete in the full light of public scrutiny in the best traditions of free speech.

This culture shift has been underway for a couple years. Wikipedia is trying to change from a set of town squares (hey heavy metal fans, let's all gather at Heavy Metal!), each with its own idiosyncrasies, to a more formal and static reference work.

This isn't surprising -- if you call yourself an encyclopedia, you're going to attract people who want to weed out the "unencyclopedic". But it could have unintended side effects -- at worst, it could undermine the enthusiasm that makes wikipedia tick.

(Here's another Times dispatch from the conference.)

Streaming Video from Wikimania sessions doesn't work!

Hurrah!

I think this is the first wikimania to have the video up and running, though it's been promised every time before.

Nevermind. For some reason, the library of alexandria has eschewed any of the hundreds of cross-compatible methods of posting video, and has chosen a method that requires Windows Media Player.

And not just any windows media player. The site requires windows media player version 11, the only one that's impossible to run on mac. Thanks.

New Blog Address, same RSS feed

Okay, kids; the changeover is happening sometime soon.

If you're subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/WikipediaBlog, cool. It'll switch over automatically and you won't have to do anything.

If you're subscribed to some feed beginning with blogspot, you should switch to the feedburner version.

List of fictional films portrayed on the sitcom Seinfeld.

Wikipedians hold a conference in the Great Library of Alexandria

How's that for a headline? Papyrus meets wiki, old meets new, east meets west.

I'm in Michigan, where the weather is hot. But the Wikipedia Weekly just recorded a show direct from the Mediterranean coast.

Here are the best parts, transcribed and remixed. If you like it, go thank the podcasters.

On the Library itself

The location this year for Wikimania is more important than for probably any other Wikimania because of the historic nature of the Library of Alexandria, and the creation of a modern, new library.

Even though the surrounding neighborhood's a little bit run down, the library itself is quite stunning.

Literally, the Alexandria library is right on the water. It's a spectacular view. There's beaches tens of meters away.

In a country of dust-colored buildings, this one round, clearly modern building stands out quite hugely. It looks like a big coin tipped 45 degrees and sunk in the ground. And it has a little lake around it as well, a little fountain lake.

Then when you actually go into the library, it's just amazing, because most of the library is actually underneath the ground. There's seven levels above ground and another seven below ground in a tiered, stepped fashion. The tiering is north-south, so everyone is looking towards the ceiling (as it were) which faces towards the mediterranean.

So the sun comes in through the roof all day, and it's filtered, but it makes a wonderful reading light. It's this huge open space for about four thousand readers. Apparently it's the world's largest individual reading room.

One of the spectacular things about the reading room is that it's actually pretty ecofriendly. All the light in that space is natural, through these gigantic skylights that just pour down several levels. (They actually have a kind of visitor's viewing area with glass in front; you can take pictures and you can see what people are doing there.)

The only electric lights are little standard lights on the individual desks, and little lights within the bookshelves themselves, which light up the spines of the books.

On the library's contents

Unfortunately it hasn't got many books yet because it's quite a new library and it's got a huge capacity. But it's got internet terminals, it's got a little display of the history of printing and a couple of permanent exhibitions.

And it has in there the only mirror of the internet archive in the world. (The original's in california.) There's a 1.5-petabyte rack of computers siting there humming away, storing the internet (and also thousands of hours of american and egyptian television, apparently).

They've also got another thing in there, which I haven't heard of before, which I think is really cool. It's called the cappuccino printer espresso book machine -- I assume because it's single-use; you make one cappuccino at a time. This is a printer that prints books on demand, and it's not just a normal printer, like a photocopier. This binds them; it puts color binding on the top and black and white pieces of paper in the middle. If you have a digital file -- I think you can't bring your own, you have to choose from their selection -- you can choose "that book" and "that size" and it prints it in twenty minutes.

There's only three ten of those in the world, apparently. I can see how, when the technology gets better, in ten, twenty years time, a bookstore will just be this machine, and you say "I want the Great Gatsby" and it prints. It's a really interesting possibility.

One of the Cappuccino examples they've got there lying in the display case is the Wikitravel Cairo and Alexandria booklet, which I'm sure Evan Prodromou would be interested in. (He couldn't make it to this conference, but they were advertising that Wikitravel was going to be featured there.)

On Cultural Melting Pots, 1

It's pretty hot inland but by the water here it's entirely Mediterranean in terms of feel. It's a real difference from Cairo, not just in terms of heat, but the culture as well.

Whilst Egypt is obviously very ancient and has its own very strong culture, ancient and modern, it looks very much towards the Middle East and towards Arabia in its contemporary society, not towards the south, not towards Africa. And Alexandria, here on the coast, looks toward europe to a certain degree as well. So whilst instanbul, for example, is your asia-meets-europe city, cairo seems to be sort of the last bastion of the middle east towards africa. And the country has definitely turned its back upon africa and looks toward the middle east. Alexandria has a bag with a little bit of greek thrown in.

What's fascinating to me about egypt is just the real mix of some greek antiquity with some egyptian antiquity. It's really kind of a blend of all of those things; you see that especially around us here in alexandria.

On Driving in Egypt

The driving is one of the most interesting about here.

I am not from china and therefore am not used to the weaving system they have here, but it's quite civilized weaving. It's not like you're aggressive masochistic weaving that comes from france or italy, and it's not your to hell with it, I'm going to come back again in the next life that you get in india.

It's quite orderly; you can get a flow to it and you can cross the road by just walking steadily and surely. And there's the usual honking of horns, but not aggressively in the I'm coming up behind you, look out where I am way.

On cultural melting pots, 2

I ran into a mongolian IT developer on the plane from China over to Cairo. And after I told him about Wikimania he goes, "Oh, I use wikipedia! what are you guys doing there?"

And I said "There's a conference going on in Alexandria", and he said "Oh, really? Then maybe I'll stop by!" So I might have recruited a mongolian wikipedia on the plane.

Holding a conference that's dedicated to free knowledge under a government that's not

Today there was a release of the leak of the most recently written draft legislation to change the telecommunication laws in Egypt.

One of the problems when this conference was decided to be in Alexandria was that people were saying "Well, shouldn't we be going to countries that are (A) easy to access for the majority of Wikipedians and (B) represent the values that Wikimedia stands for -- openness, freedom of information, digital society, with no criminalization of fredom of information."

Unfortunately, this is the opposite direction that Egypt might be taking. These new laws have been drafted and leaked, saying that apparently Facebook chats, SMS's, and blog posts -- all kinds of new media -- not just old media on tv broadcast and satellite channels, though they're definitely affected as well -- that all of those things can be censored and you could be arrested for producing any kind of information that "undermines the harmony of the state".

That is a very flexible definition. "Harmony of the state" could be defined by the government. The government has been in power here for a long time. They've had the same prime minister president, Ehud Olmert Hosni Mubarak, for a couple of decades at least, and whilst Egypt is one of the more western-facing and open arabic countries, it's definitely not sweden in terms of that.

It's a scary possibility. Of course, this is why it was leaked in the first place.

On Mistaken Identity

Around 8 or 9 in the morning, a few of us came over to the library and were poking around, and just happened to ask some of the guards "We're looking for the Wikimania folks".

And the guards pointed a bunch of us, about eight of us, to this back staff entrance, saying "Oh, please, go in in there." We kind of looked at each other and said, "Okay, we'll go in there."

We walked through the bowels of the staff area, which was nice, and we went through a security check that they just waved us through, and we took an elevator up and we said, wow, this is a pretty posh reception we're getting here.

And we walk down the hall and they show us to a room, and what do we see? We see Jimmy Wales sitting there in a room by himself with this gigantic conference table.

And Jimmy looks at us (and he knows almost all of us from past Wikimanias) and he goes "Hi, guys -- what are you doing here?"

And we said, "We're not sure."

And we saw all these name plaques on the table, which were of board members of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Jimmy says, "Yeah, I'm waiting here for the board to show up for a nine thirty meeting." And we realized that these guards thought we were board members and showed us to where Jimmy was.

Wikimania

Wikipedia's yearly conference starts tomorrow in Alexandria (yes, that Alexandria).

Wikimania is when editors actually get to meet each other face to face. (It's also a more general tech conference, and therefore a magnet for the digital overclass -- I think I saw Cory Doctorow walking around at Boston Wikimania.) But Egypt is far away, so there are fewer English-speakers attending.

I'm not going because I hate conferences. But if you're hungry for coverage:

• Wikipedia Weekly will be churning podcasts and interviews
• Attendees will be tweeting from their phones
• There's a chatroom
• In theory, video will be streamed straight from the sessions. I'll believe it when I see it.

The Paris Meridian is a meridian line running through the Paris Observatory in Paris, France -- now longitude 2°20′14.025″ east. It was a long-standing rival to Greenwich as the prime meridian of the world, as was the Antwerp meridian in Flanders.

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

Writing your first wikipedia article. (How-to guide.)

The oldest living organisms.

Brilliant article about how the internet changes us (ignore the silly title).

Powerset is another wikipedia-specific search engine an alternate interface for viewing and searching wikipedia (and for filtering it in rudimentary ways). Mea culpa.

Great article about Jimmy Wales in the Economist. (Wales co-founded Wikipedia.)

“I think that reality exists and that it’s knowable,” he says, adding that Wikipedia aims not for truth with a capital T but for consensus. “You go meta,” he says, meaning “beyond” the disputes and to the underlying facts. For instance, when deciding how to describe abortion, “I may not agree that it’s a sin, but I can certainly agree that the pope thinks it’s a sin.” Despite their disagreements, people on both sides of a debate can in many cases reach a consensus on the nature of their dispute, at least. Through this process, says Mr Wales, Wikipedia articles eventually reach a fairly steady state called the “neutral point of view”, or NPOV.

“Wikipedia resolves the postmodern dilemma of truth by ultimately relying on process,” says Gene Koo of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society. “Its process is both open and transparent. The levers of power are not destroyed—Foucault taught us that this is impossible—but simply visible.” To which Mr Wales responds, more simply, that NPOV is a way of saying: “Thanks, but, um, please let’s get back to work.”

NYT: Obama's Wiki Style

We wrote the book on Wikipedia

How Wikipedia Works is being published in August! My co-authors are:

• A dashing librarian named Phoebe Ayers.
• A mysterious mathematician and Go champion who calls himself Charles Matthews.

And me? I'm a technical writer & demagogue and also good with Illustrator.



Phoebe has a better understanding of wikipedia's nuts and bolts than anyone, Charles has knowledge of the broad forces inside and outside the project, and I have the ability to work Acoustic Kitty into any screenshot. Between us, we've been with Wikipedia for 47 years and made over five hundred million edits.

I'll be posting information all summer.

But if you pre-order it, you will not only be

1. receiving an utterly awesome and informative book in the mail — a physical book that you can
   • hold in your two hands,
   • take away from the monitor,
   • read in the bath,
   • tuck into your backpack to impress cute foreign exchange students, but! you will also!...
2. be supporting Wikipedia Blog, and
3. making me less broke.

Basically, I'm saying you should buy the book or I will shoot this puppy:



Cheers,

Ben


P.S. I won't actually shoot the puppy.

See also. Why are so many monasteries built on cliffs?

Wikipedia API for ruby. I stupidly learned ruby instead of python, so this might come in handy.

Pediaphon is a web app that turns wikipedia articles into mp3s.

Simulated reality is the proposition that reality could be simulated—often computer simulated—to a degree indistinguishable from "true" reality.

The invention of the cat flap is frequently attributed to Isaac Newton.

However, author Charles R. Gibson, writing about the life of Newton in 1921, recorded that "To this day students at Cambridge are told how there were two holes cut in the door of Newton's chamber: one hole, much larger than the other, for the use of his cat, the smaller one for the convenience of the kitten", but states that this goes in the face of "...a letter written by Newton's assistant [who] gives us the following information, which is direct evidence and not mere hearsay. `He kept neither dog nor cat in his chamber...'"

Epiphany

I was talking to someone about Wikipedia today in person, which I rarely do. And I realized:

I love wikipedia and am constantly intrigued by it. But I really don't give a shit about the Wikimedia Foundation. They only have a limited impact on the nuts and bolts, anyway.

Partly because of the name of this blog, I'd always sort of felt obligated to cover the internal politics -- I wanted it to at least be theoretically possible for someone to get all their w'pedia information from right here (yessir).

Well, screw that. The politics is boring and depressing. It's all the unpleasantness of real life socializing without any of the warm fuzziness.

Remember that study showing that people were more likely to misinterpret email messages, and more likely to ascribe negative emotions to the authors? Something happens with text communication -- the mirror neurons get turned off; the natural social instincts get muted. And when that effect happens at every node of the community web, when a whole bunch of hyperverbal encyclopedists are only connected to each other via letters on screens, things get unmoored. (How else to explain the rise of wikipedia review?)

Anyway. I'm done covering the foundation. My next post will be about generating rock album covers that never existed.

No real PR problems

Tony Sidaway says:

Actually I run a small rss news aggregator that focuses on news about Wikipedia. In my experience our press is overwhelmingly positive. [Emphasis added -- and yeah, tony's right. I've been reading the google news alerts for a couple years. -Ben] Even the gossipier stuff seems to make a much bigger splash within the community and on its peripheries than it does outside--exactly the reverse of my expectations.

Most of the debate outside Wikipedia circles, in the mainstream press, focuses on the reliability of Wikipedia and its appropriateness for various uses. Those are very appropriate topics for debate and we should take it as a huge compliment that a project built completely by untrained volunteers is regarded as comparable in any way to the works of highly educated specialists. We shouldn't lose sight of that utterly remarkable and unexpected achievement.

The fact that we're criticised (and often rightly so) isn't surprising. The fact that we receive so little criticism and have had so few problems, given the open parameters and huge scope of the project, is one of the most amazing facts of Wikipedia's existence. Wikipedia doesn't have any significant PR problems at present.

---

All the ins and outs of the wikinews/moller thing -- about fifty kilobytes so far. That's the mailing list I know :P

Mike Godwin: "The Foundation has no interest in preventing Wikinews from publishing a story critical of WMF. If you are under the impression the stories were censored because they were critical of WMF, then you have your facts wrong."

So, the idea is that this was a run-of-the-mill libelous article removed* like other libelous articles have been, and for the same reason -- fear of being sued.

But in this case, the person doing the suing would have to be foundation employee Erik Moller, right? I find it unlikely that he'd sue the foundation for failing to hush up wikinews. I freely admit not understanding how lawyers think, though.

* With some ambiguous degree of community involvement. And hey, as long as we're running with this broad a definition, isn't it libel to accuse the article's authors of libel?

You don't fuck with wikinews

Score one for information wants to be free.

Basically, the foundation swatted down Wikinews' editorial independence, killing a story about a foundation bigwig's attitudes toward porn. (This isn't going to endear them to the press.)

(Update: It may be more complex than that. Here's the wikinews discussion; decide for yourself.)

You haven't heard of Wikinews, but they take themselves seriously -- they've interviewed heads of state, etc. Godwin should have known better.

That said, I don't want to take too much joy in wikinews's oldstyle prickliness, just because it sort of sucks to have this kind of infighting between wikiorgans. To be honest, I miss Jimmy having a bigger role; he'd have been able to smooth this over.

(Is the foundation trying to push erik out quietly? I'd sort of hoped they were. If they're not...seriously, guys. Your loyalty is admirable as a personal trait. But erik — forget what I think about him — is a millstone around the foundation's neck. His presence makes it a million times harder to address ways to make wikipedia kid-friendly, ways to get it in classrooms, etc. To address anything, really. Wikipedia runs on good vibes. They're its fuel. That's why Jimmy has been an effective leader, and why Moller throws a spanner in the works.)

Whoa.

This year's Wikimania conference is in Egypt (Alexandria, chosen for the poetic symmetry between Wikipedia and the Great Library). The less poetically inclined were worried about muslim extremism, and the foundation bought a custom security analysis.

The results are in. (Paging past the terrifying stock photography...) Aha. The actual findings:

1. Don't worry too much; Alexandria is a very safe city. "Holding a conference there should not pose any significant threat to Wikimedia Foundation members attending the conference."
2. But keep a low profile (i.e. don't rent a Benz?) because Wikimania will draw international attention.
3. And stay out of the Sinai.

Sounds alright.

Marketing, damnit!

The ideas behind the open source movement are very powerful.

How powerful?

So powerful that if a competent marketing team -- people who ordinarily churn out boring beer commercials -- are asked instead to create a commercial for Linux or Wikipedia, they can make something mindblowingly inspiring without breaking stride.

That doesn't happen very often because open source projects are broke. But when it does happen, you get stuff like this 2003 ad:



link, if you can't see the embed

After watching that, I want to marry the open source movement and have its children. This is the kind of power your typical corporation has to shape public perception; usually it's spent trying to get you to increase your detergent consumption.

Now some Texas design students have created a mock ad campaign for Wikipedia, complete with magazine ads, a T-shirt, posters, etc. It so utterly fucking rocks.



The artistic vision:

"Many people tend to view Wikipedia as an unreliable source of information because anyone can edit entries on the website.

Our concept was to present an everyday person as an "expert" on a specific subject in order to show that whether the information comes from a university professor or from an avid gamer, it is still reliable.

Each piece shows a straight view of each persona and a mind map of their thought process. We felt this approach humanizes the experience of Wikipedia."

via

Ohio Country

Hypergraphia, Pyromania, Pyrophilia, Trichotillomania. (Chorus! ♬We didn't start the fire... ♫)

Via this category, via whoever reached this blog by searching for "Pyrophilia wiki". They probably just wanted to find the wikipedia article, but I'd really prefer to believe they were looking for a pyrophilia-themed wiki.

Best name for a logical fallacy ever.

Concharto is a geographic wiki for documenting historical events -- think wikimapia times ten.

It also has a pretty noble goal:

When Leo Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” in the 1860’s, he sprinkled it with whole chapters of rants against the historians of the day. His complaint was that they viewed history solely as a progression of major events precipitated by “great men”. Instead, he argued, history is a much more complicated progression of cause and effect driven by small events. In one of his more philosophical moments, he proposed applying the scientific method to history, asserting that a complete understanding of an event could be obtained by slicing that event into smaller and smaller pieces, in exactly the same way that a math student performs integral calculus.

While not actually creating a calculus of history, Concharto does attempt to slice history into smaller pieces.

But the interface is confusing and cumbersome in the extreme. It's built on top of google maps, and inherits its interface elements in all of their general-purpose bulk. No, no, no, no, no. You want something that looks like this.

As things stand, the interface imposes so much cognitive drag that the application (which should be awesome, and has plenty of functionality) isn't very fun at all. Here's hoping it improves over time.

(hat tip for the russia map)

Erik Moeller is the Wikimedia Foundation's deputy director and possibly its most powerful member (alongside Sue Gardner, the grownup in residence).

Wikipedia Weekly talked to him last week, but Erik is a fastidiously thorough politician, which makes him a rather boring interview subject. I sat through the whole 40 minutes so you don't have to.

The takeaway: the Foundation seems to be finding its legs. It's paying cheap-ish rent in San Fran, reaching out to the general public (insofar as that exists in silicon valley), and hoping eventually to be known as the Red Cross of information. I'm actually impressed with the way things seem to be going, organizationally. Now get us a stats machine.

Origin of water on Earth

I was wondering why Clay Shirky's talk about Wikipedia -- among other things -- has been blowing up the blogosphere. (Because it's fucking brilliant, that's why. Though I don't buy all of it.)

Not wikipedia-related:

If you're curious about the controversies surrounding China -- if you're chinese and think the western public is gullible and uninformed, or vice versa, here's a good article.

Wikipedia takes manhattan: a photographic scavenger hunt for places around our city needing photos for their Wikipedia articles. Looks like it went pretty well.

Autocompletion

Is anyone else seeing predictive autocompletion in the Wikipedia search field?



Update: head techie Brion Vibber has the scoop. This is pretty big news -- most people have no idea how vast wikipedia is, and now the dropdown is a little window into that.

So, what are we going to do tonight, Brain?

Warning: not Wikipedia-related.

My band, the Afternoon Round, at one of our first shows.

The recording levels are way off, but I think it rocks pretty hard. We're playing at the Heidelburg in Ann Arbor on thursday. There's some more melodic stuff on the myspace.

WikiXMLDB provides a way of querying Wikipedia with XQuery.

With all the benefits that Wikipedia promises, it is not easy to use it off-the-shelf in applications. While Wikipedia is available for download in an XML format, individual articles are formatted in a proprietary wiki format. So the most interesting uses of Wikipedia in applications are still locked behind the access troubles.

Here is where WikiXMLDB comes to the rescue. We have parsed the entire English Wikipedia content into XML representation (its total size is about 21GB), loaded it into Sedna and provided a query interface to it. Now you can dissect individual articles, rip out abstracts, sections, links, infoboxes and other components. Or you can combine pieces of existing documents into new XML documents and convert them to web pages with XSLT for example. And you can do it all using the standard W3C XQuery Language. So finally you can start enriching your content with data from Wikipedia and unlock its power for your applications.

Cool.

Was Tolkien's wizard Gandalf based on Gundulf of Rochester? "In 1078 King William used Gundulf's skill in the construction of the White Tower: the keep of the Tower of London."

Tea culture is defined by the way tea is made and consumed, by the way the people interact with tea, and by the aesthetics surrounding tea drinking.

List of ethnic groups in China. (Don't miss the map.)

English America* has "John Doe". What are informal names for unknown or unspecified persons in other countries/regions?

* You pedants

Lieutenant-General Sir Manley Power (1773 – July 7, 1826)

Wiki FM Lets You Listen to Bands on Last.fm While Reading their Bios on Wikipedia

Hey, now there's an official wikipedia-related blog -- the Wikimedia blog, run by the foundation itself (and not affiliated with this blog, which is unofficial).

Unsheathing the sword revealed an untarnished blade, despite the tomb being soaked in underground water for over two thousand years. A simple test conducted by the archaeologists showed that the blade could still easily cut a stack of twenty pieces of paper.

The bathing machine was a device, popular in the 19th century, which was intended to allow people to wade in the ocean at beaches without violating Victorian notions of modesty. Bathing machines were in the form of roofed and walled wooden carts which would be rolled into the sea. Some had solid wooden walls; others had canvas walls over a wooden frame.

via reddit

Wikimedia receives 3-year, $3,000,000 grant. That's a large fraction of the budget (and it's from the alfred p sloan foundation, in case you're worried).

Some tech kids from the university of edinburgh sent me a link to wiki-answers, their wikipedia search engine.

There's a lot of exciting stuff going down at open wikiblogplanet (an aggregator for blogs about wikipedia).

A solar furnace is a structure used to harness the rays of the sun in order to produce high temperatures. This is achieved by using a curved mirror (or an array of mirrors) acting as a parabolic reflector to concentrate light (Insolation) on to a focal point. The temperature at the focal point may reach up to 3,000 degrees Celsius, and this heat can be used to generate electricity, melt steel or make hydrogen fuel.

via kottke

Talk is cheap unless it's on the wiki

I've made a sort of nonprofit ad banner for the site -- you can see it if your screen's wide enough; otherwise, here it is:

People currently in outer space (yes, at this exact moment).

List of wars on concepts

Wikirandom is a website that (naturally) grabs random wikipedia articles. The obvious question is so what?

I'll tell you what: interface. It's all ajaxy and cool, and it even lets you embed a random-wiki-article-getting widget in an external site. That looks like this:

Some random Wikipedia articles:

More randomness on Wikirandom - The Random Encyclopedia

(Edit: hm. That doesn't work, does it? Blogger strips line breaks; it might be that.)

Absurd Entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (from someone who read it cover-to-cover).

I am afraid that as the edit of the OED continues, these bits of absurdity will be excised, along with any outright errors that the editors find. It will obviously be an improvement, at least in terms of improving the clarity of these definitions. Yet the whimsical anthropomorphizer in me is sad to see that murinoid has had its definition changed from ‘Resembling the mouse or its allies’ to ‘Resembling a mouse; (Zool.) of or belonging to the subfamily Murinae…

The Codebreakers (full video) is a BBC documentary about how poor countries use open source software. (I haven't watched it yet, but it looks good.)

Stunning journal article.

Two NYT articles this weekend. The first is about the slow death of print encyclopedias, and includes this funny chart.

The second is about Jimmy, mostly, and Wikipedia's growth pains. It's good -- it manages to draw together a lot of issues.

Wikipedians will be most interested in the second half, which talks about how a member of a VC firm arranged big donations to Wikimedia (and mentions selling logo rights to a board game, which might be cool).

Sue and Florence come off as cautious and principled, and the comments section is full of people who like wikipedia. The ship is not sinking.

Moving Forward

This brilliant bit of code siphons newbie-baffling wikiprogramming off into separate parts of the on-screen interface without breaking up the "real" article fulltext.

Practical and creative. Good stuff.

Newscientist: Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban.

If I'm reading between the lines right, "GFDL" is becoming synonymous with "Wikipedia-compatible".

World Happiness Map

The Sentience Quotient concept was introduced by Robert A. Freitas Jr. in the late 1970s. It defines sentience as the relationship between the information processing rate (bit/s) of each individual processing unit (neuron), the weight/size of a single unit and the total number of processing units (expressed as mass).

Wikipedia Brown (video)

The sound quality's mediocre. But it's so, so worth it. Link, for feed readers.

"With all the energy expended on uppercase vs. lowercase, the debate over whether to prominently mention lang's sexual orientation and animal-rights activism barely heats up at all. Some issues are just more important."

Read all the way through; most of the 12 entries are funny.

Wikipedia traffic

Sage has some interesting analysis: the long tail is also wide, and quirky unexpected articles do well on the main page.

Similarly, Kelly's taking apart the writing style of the most popular articles.

Wikipedia begins to interlock with physical reality (think phones, and GPS).

If you read one thing about Wikipedia this year, you're a better man than I
it's probably that list of porn stars you found on google
you're reading it right now! stop!

Ahem. If you read one thing about Wikipedia this year, make it this article in the New York Review of Books. It totally captures how Wikipedia works, and also the excitement of stumbling across it for the first time.

Plus, it's the best defense of inclusionism ever. The author, Nicholson Baker, even joined the Article Rescue Squadron. *blush*. On-wiki, he's user:Wageless.

Actually, it might even be the best general-media article about Wikipedia ever, taking the torch from 2005's The avatar versus the journalist.

Three new Wikipedian blogs

Infoholics Anonymous, NonNotable Natterings, Wiki-Observations. Good luck, kids.

There's also a new podcast: "NotTheWikipediaWeekly is a grassroots and utterly 'unofficial' attempt to build on the fine work of the good people over at Wikipedia Weekly." Cool.

Wikipedia:Drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass. See also

Former chief scientist at Novell claims Jimmy Wales traded Wiki edits for donations.

When it rains, it pours. Jeff Merkey, the scientist, has been involved in several lawsuits -- he sued slashdot, for example. So this may not be credible, though it's getting press attention.

Wikipedia's tin-cup approach wears thin. Timely LA Times article.

Wikipedia, the "encyclopedia anyone can edit," is stuck in a weird Internet time warp, part grass-roots labor of love, part runaway success.

A global democracy beloved by high school term paper writers and run largely by volunteers, the site is controlled for now by people who seem to view revenue with suspicion and worry that too much money -- maybe even just a little money -- would defile and possibly ruin the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the written word.

[...]

How about selling advertising space like most big-time websites do? Don't go there unless you want to start a Wikipedian riot. Some members of the foundation's board of trustees and most of the site's editors and contributing writers zealously oppose advertising. [Are you reading this, Danny?]

After a staff member in 2002 raised the possibility in the Wikipedia community, a facet of the Spanish-language branch quit and created the forever ad-free Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español. Its founders said that advertising "implied the existence of a commercialization of the selfless work of volunteers."

[...]

As Wikimedia adds features to its pages, such as videos, costs will rise. "Without financial stability and strong planning, the foundation runs the risk of needing to take drastic steps at some point in the next couple years," said Nathan Awrich, a 26-year-old Wikipedia editor from Vermont who supports advertising.

Outsiders find it hard to see how the site can avoid selling ad space.

"They either have to charge people or run ads, or both," said Greg Sterling, an analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, which specializes in consumer behavior online.

[...]

Wales said that the free culture movement, as it's called, has to think creatively if it wants to keep spreading information to computers around the world.

"There are some real problems with a nonprofit structure," he said. "One of the basic problems is funding: We can get enough money to survive but don't really have the funding to push forward or innovate."

List of countries without armed forces

Sue Gardner (wikimedia executive director) defends jimmy wales on CNET TV:

We don't want to get into a long back-and-forth on somebody's blog [danny wool's]. The foundation -- I don't know if you know this -- we have 12 employees. So if we have one person sort of duking it out on a blog with people, then that's 11 people doing the actual work. We have important work to do.

I don't know if you know Jimmy -- have you met him? He's a good guy; he's a really good guy. I'm feeling sorry for him. He's a modest guy, he's a frugal guy. Jimmy has never done anything wrong.

So, I've been with the foundation since june -- so, for 6, 7 months. And in that period of time I think jimmy's expensed a total of eleven hundred dollars worth of stuff. He took one trip to new york for us to do some media related to our fundraiser just before christmas. And that's it.

He doesn't "live well" -- he doesn't live a lavish lifestyle. And to the extent that he does live whatever lifestyle he does, it's not out of Wikimedia's coffers.

Oldak Quill, on the mailing list:

I'm no fan of Pokemon, but the deletion of well-written Pokemon articles demonstrate the motives of "deletionists". Pokemon characters have lots of media and sources associated with them, have a lot of fans who would be interested in reading these articles and editing them, and are "notable". They're also a great way to get people involved in Wikipedia: they come to the site, see how good our coverage of that subject is, and begin contributing/getting interested in the project.

So, Pokemon characters are "notable", verifiable, have the potential to become FAs, have a lot of users to support them, and may get people interested in Wikipedia. The only reason to oppose articles on Pokemon characters is that a traditional encyclopedia wouldn't have these articles (more succinctly: elitism).

This kind of deletion for no purpose but to appease some editors' notions of what is encyclopedic isn't helping anyone. It's driving away potential editors, it is driving away new editors, and it is driving away experienced editors.

The Battle for Wikipedia's Soul. A top-notch inclusionism/deletionism article in the Economist magazine.

Wikipedia, laptops leap their way into rural Africa

Africa has demonstrated the "leapfrog effect" before, most notably in its adoption of mobile phones even before landlines. With luck, maybe someday a collaborative network of dedicated programmers in third-world countries will build software that can actually help alleviate the ever-unsatisfied need for textbooks and teachers, carrying out an equally significant "leap."

Update: this was over-the-top. I jumped way too fast at the symmetry of two wikipioneers at odds and didn't stop to think whether I was grossly inflating a very minor third-hand remark. Mea culpa, I'm stupid.

The inventor of the wiki (Ward Cunningham) is apparently not too fond of Jimmy Wales. One of Cunningham's co-workers says:

Putting the utter stupidity of discussing Jimbo's sex life at all aside, I will say that this episode rings true for me in one important sense. As an employee of a for-profit wiki [AboutUs], I've had the *entire* 20+ person staff agree unanimously that they love Wikipedia despite Jimmy Wales, emphasis on the "despite". Part of me recognizes that all this hullabaloo is a product of the media's inane focus on the cult of celebrity, but still -- wouldn't we just be better off without him? My moral compass swings to a resounding Yes.

...one of [those staff members] is Ward Cunningham.

A Question for Danny Wool

Well, two.

1. What's your ultimate goal?

As in, what's the outcome that would make you most satisfied when all the stones have been turned over? Jimmy getting kicked out of the foundation, denounced, and generally losing his status as Wikipedia's banner-carrier? Do you realize that any process leading to that unlikely outcome would have to be incredibly long and painful?

2. How do you feel about Wikipedia?

Don't pull any punches: are you only disillusioned with Wikipedia's leadership, or with the project as a whole?

---

Update: Danny answered question 2 -- he says he's trying to help wikipedia through a difficult adolescence.

Wikipedia hit counter

This is a little revolutionary. Stats.grok.se shows how much traffic every wikipedia article gets (page views, not edits). We've pretty much been driving in the dark until now.

Note: The graph shows one month at a time (the current month by default). The month selector is the baffling-looking second dropdown -- 200801 is January, 200802 is February, etc.

More generally...

The wrong articles are getting deleted.

There's hemming and hawing about whether to wipe out an article about a restaurant, which was viewed only once last month.

But not so much concern about deleting sleaze rock and mafioso rap, which each get 7000 pageviews a month.

(Thanks, sage.)

Well, Jimmy's troubles have hit the associated press, and trickled from there into places like BusinessWeek.

Erik Moller, Wikimedia's Deputy Director, defends Wales:

When he talks about bringing education to those who cannot afford it, he’s not just trying to impress. Anyone who spends 5 minutes with him will understand that this is his personal life goal.

He’s helped us connect with philanthropists here in the Bay Area — donations like the recent 500,000 dollars from the last fundraiser were only possible because of his outreach efforts. His international network of contacts has helped us to build our Advisory Board, really smart people who have supported us on many occasions.

...

Jimmy not only created an extraordinary project — he decided to base it on the principles of the open source / free software movement, and turned it over to a non-profit organization. This was, by no means, the obvious thing to do: Had events played out a little differently, Wikipedia would today be a dot-com with ads, probably a subsidiary of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.

I think the public is going to be pretty forgiving.

(By the way, Erik brings up advertising revenue and blog incentives. Since I'm not making any money off the google ads -- damn you, non-clicking tech-savvy audience -- I'm going to take them down.)

The Final Wikipedia Article

Wikipedia Weekly is a podcast. (iTunes) It is also the single best source for Wikipedia commentary.

This week's episode is actually the first in several months, but boy is it worth it.

It starts with some reassuring financial news:

The foundation is now audited properly; I think it's doing quite well. They're running around San Francisco drumming up support, drumming up big donors ... it's being run more professionally ... There is enough goodwill out there, there are enough rich people who are willing to fund us if we ask. And the foundation is now going about doing that.

But the really awesome part is this discussion around the 40-minute mark. It was so good I transcribed it:

---

- There's only so many articles you can actually make -- a lot of people see wikipedia as being "finished", in a way. Once you conquer everything, what is left to conquer?

- "All the virgin areas have at least been addressed", right? In terms of the knowledge of humanity. And you're kind of replenishing things on top of it that are current events, and you might be shoring up some parts of it, but the major work has been done. So how does the project survive when most of the work has been done?

- I'll quote that back to you in 20 years, fuzzy, when wikipedia is -- you know, owns its own mountain. Like that famous guy who closed down the patent office in like 1890 and said "oh, there's nothing left to invent; it's just a classification scheme from now on".

- I understand that sentiment, but you have to admit that with 2 million-some articles, most of the sum of human knowledge has been put down on virtual paper in Wikipedia. Right? You can't argue against that. That is a fact!

- No. I argue against that.

- The sister projects also have a big reach that they have to cover -- wikispecies, wikiquotes, wikiversity.

- But I think that's one of the fallacies of the wikiprojects -- that you can suddenly turn to these people who are interested in writing about Pokemon and sex acts and cartoons and Naruto and say "now, take the time that you had, and start making a taxonomy of human life". No -- you just can't do that, because they're not interested in it. Or "come in and write definitions".

- It's because those people who were interested in those things were the first to arrive, the first adopters of Wikipedia. But millions of people out there -- think of the academics in religious studies. They haven't caught on to this yet, they haven't come to this. When the baby boomers all start retiring and have the time to actually edit Wikipedia, and they know it and they're used to the idea, they'll fill out all their stuff. There are whole areas that aren't nearly as covered as Naruto and molecular biology, and we're all aware of that. It doesn't mean that we're nearly finished, and we don't need to take those people who were on Naruto and divert them onto this new topic. There's lots more to be done.

- Well, I think there's more to be done. I'm not sure there's lots more to be done, that's the thing.

- There's heaps more -- we've just scratched the surface.

- No, I think we're 80% done with the surface (laughs). The sum of human knowledge is a finite thing, right? It's growing, but it's finite.

- No! No!

- What about the articles that'll happen about future events, crazy kids who have parties and get themselves arrested and stuff like that?

- But then that becomes current events, keeping up with the headlines. And that's my passion, I love writing articles about current events as a role in history of what's going on, but if we have 2-point-some million articles now, do you see it being 20 million articles in five years?

- Yes!

- You do? I actually don't.

- What else is there to write about?

- We're seeing the top of the S-curve already, Liam! We've already done podcasts about this. We're hitting the top of the S-curve, you can see that in the statistics. You can't make it to 20 million in five years given the curve we see now.

- Tell me in five years. Tell me the same thing in five years.

- Alright; this is a virtual handshake.

- You can't be the patent office man and say, "i know what's going to happen in the future". I can't tell you which articles haven't been made, because they haven't been made yet.

- The difference is that with patents, with creating inventions, that's synthesis. It's creating new things out of elements that you have right now. If you're talking about the sum of all human knowledge, that's a very different enterprise. You're documenting what is known in the known world. It's finite, but it's growing -- but it's not growing at the exponential rate all the time, it's not infinitely growing in exponential ways.

- But you're assuming that the only way wikipedia would grow is by adding new articles.

- Well, it has to, unless you think that the cat article should grow from five pages to ten pages to 20 pages to fifty pages.

- Or we get more loose with our standards and we allow every single thing ever to become an article.

- Quantity does not equal quality.

- I agree with you somewhat and I think there's going to be a new type of article. You already have articles about africa, then you have articles about the economics of africa; and then you're going to have comparisons of african economics to blah blah blah, or "the evolution of african economics through history". So you're going to have some "analysis" articles that are growing --

- -- precisely. Precisely.

- Those type of things might grow, but those are tougher to write. And that's why I think the growth will be somewhat limited.

- They'll be tougher to write and they'll be slower to write, but they're just as important!

- I agree.

- If not more important. We've got the article on africa, and we've got the article on cat, but we haven't got the article on all types of variants in the history of the cat, or the economy of africa, or whatever.

- We'll have a special gambling episode where we all bet on how much we think it's going to grow in the future. There used to be a pool on wikipedia that predicted when we're going to hit 1 million, 5 million, etc. I think it's still around, and we should take a look at that.

- And not just there was a page called the "millionth article pool", which was not just when it was but what that article would be entitled. (laughter)

- There's also the final article pool. (laughter)

- The final article pool. What is the last article in wikipedia going to be about?

- 42!

Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner: "Jimmy has never used Wikimedia money to subsidize his personal expenditures."

Danny Wool: "This questionable use of Foundation funds stopped in 2006, largely because Jimbeau's credit card was taken away. I do not believe, nor do I have any reason to believe, that it is continuing. If Jimbeau is still living the vida loca--and as you can imagine, he hardly keeps me posted--I have no reason to believe that it is at the Foundation's expense."

Wikileaks wins

Danny Wool's blog has been great lately -- he analyzes wikipedia by scholarly metrics of empire decline, evaluates wikimania in alexandria, etc.

Deletion Solution

Okay, I've been railing on for awhile about how bad it is when articles get deleted. It doesn't focus energy on more "serious" articles; instead, it frustrates people, drives them away, and has a chilling effect on the whole project.

The irony, of course, is that "deletion" is the wrong word -- the article's just hidden.

The obvious solution is to move the "deleted" article somewhere off-wiki. It's a shiny happy utopian obama-like solution because it resurrects the thousand-flowers-bloom spirit wikipedia once had, where every action seemed somewhat focused on building an awesome body of work that anyone could enjoy.

Four things prevent it from happening, though:

1. Inclusionists fear wikipedia will lose even more articles because they won't be able to argue "if you delete this, nobody will see it".

This is a bad strategy! It forces people to choose between two opposites (delete or keep); "delete" will eventually win, and that will be that. Plus, it's wrong on principle because it impoverishes the conceptual space and constrains what's possible.

2. There's nowhere else like wikipedia.

Telling someone to move from Wikipedia to Everything2 is like kicking your friend off your living room couch because "I think there's a pillow or something in that alley".

This will only be solved when other places get more vibrant. The more articles are moved, the faster that happens.

3. The interface between wikipedia and the rest of the web is really bad. To put it another way:

(a) There's no easy or automatic way to move an article off-wiki because you've got to move its whole history to preserve the authorship record.

(b) Once the article's been moved, it leaves no trace. The deleted wikipedia article is an ordinary blank page, with no indication that the content is still there, potentially a click away.

4. Over-caution. The best place to move things is Wikia, which is a commercial wiki farm that for all sorts of reasons (taxes, culture, brandt) can't be seen as an appendage of the non-profit wikipedia; it has to be walled off, like the church and state. This adds some friction to the export process and generally makes people shy away from working on it.

The fix is obvious enough: always provide a bunch of different links (to wikia, bluwiki, and wherever else). It would help if other wiki providers knew their shit as well as wikia.

Anyway, the main point is that all of these problems are solvable. There aren't any insurmountable obstacles.

Wikipedia undelete is a script for greasemonkey/firefox. Every time you visit a deleted article, a bunch of links appear showing versions of the page that are cached on archive.org. (Like this one.)

Caveats:

• Needs firefox (duh).


• Only works (for me) when visiting w'pedia as a logged-out user.


• The links only show up when visiting one particular "not found" page -- for example, on /wiki/List_of_fictional_expletives, which is where incoming links will take you, but not /wiki/Special:Search?search=List+of+fictional+expletives&go=Go or /w/index.php?title=List_of_fictional_expletives&action=edit, where internal links and the search field lead.


• Doesn't clearly indicate what content is added by the script and what content was already there, so you're sort of in your own web-browsing universe. This is a common greasemonkey problem.


• The author of the script didn't know that every "deleted" wikipedia article is actually still on the server. If he did, he might have arranged a better system whereby people collaboratively request that deleted pages be moved to their userspace; the script's links would point there (or somewhere else the articles can be edited), instead of archive.org.

A slidewalk is a fictional moving sidewalk structurally sound enough to support buildings and large populations of travelers. Adjacent slidewalks moving at different rates could let travelers accelerate to great speeds.

The act known as Eskimo kissing in modern western culture is loosely based on a traditional Inuit greeting called a kunik.

A kunik is a form of expressing affection, usually between family members and loved ones, that involves pressing the nose and upper lip against the skin (commonly the cheeks or forehead) and breathing in, causing the loved one's skin or hair to be suctioned against the nose and upper lip.

About Wikileaks. This article indicates that Julius Baer bank is now kind of fucked, and reveals a funny detail: the court ordered that its ruling be emailed to Wikileaks -- but since it had just abolished the wikileaks domain name, no email could have gotten through.

The New York Times has a good article on this Wikileaks business (and editorial) ; the Register has some interesting technical details.

Mother Jones states the obvious: Shutting Down Wikileaks Will Backfire.

Wikileaks is a site that allows whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents. It's broken several important stories and survived censorship attempts by the Chinese and Thai govs.

But now if you try to visit wikileaks.org, you'll get an error message.

That's because Wikileaks had posted documents from a former vice president of the Swiss bank Julius Baer alleging that the company engaged in "stalking, corruption and coercion...according to Elmer he and his family are subject to observation by private investigators working for Julius Baer, to an extent that his 6 year old daughter needs psychological treatment and his life is overall suffering from it."

Since the site posted that information, a fire occurred in their datacenter and Julius Baer successfully convinced a California judge to pull the entire Wikileaks.org domain name off the net! Obviously, any Swiss court cases aren't under California's jurisdiction, so this is a blatant abuse of the legal system.

Thankfully, you can still access the site at its ip address: http://88.80.13.160/

More good coverage at the BBC (though their technical language isn't quite right) at Kos, and at Wikileaks itself (one, two, three)