Muhammad cartoons controversy (with interesting talkpage digression)

Euphemisms can eventually become taboo words themselves through a process called the euphemism treadmill

Hundertwasserhaus was built between 1983 and 1986 by architect Univ.-Prof. Joseph Krawina. It features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows.

Michael Malloy was a New York City vagrant in the early 20th century. He is known solely for his constitution, rivalled only by that of Rasputin. It is said that 30 attempts were made to murder him, all unsuccessful but the final one.

Check out this picture of Brazil. (It's amazing how much it looks like Simcity.)

An eponym is a person whose name has (or is thought to have) given rise to the name of a particular place, tribe, discovery or other item. (Scroll down for the list of lists. Eponymous adages is especially cool, despite being only a mediocre band name.)

"This IP has been blocked. It belongs to Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives and is responsible for a large amount of vandalism."

Spark that lit the news story. Digging through Congress's sorry edit history.

A slashdot poster puts it well: "What a funny reflection of the world (or at least the US) today; politicians meddle with something that belongs to the public, making it worse, using it to their own advantage, and the public has to kick them out."

Silver lining: the fact that it's news at all, that service providers will be contacted and, I hope, staffers fired or bitched out. Transparency breeding accountability. We'll see what happens as the election season draws closer.

Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced albin) was a name intended for a Swedish child who was born in 1991. It is one of many unusual personal names.

Culture Jamming -- does it make any sense?

Watch the K-Foundation Burn a Million Quid

The Louis Braille article before google linked a search for "lewis braille birthdate" from its logo. The article 24 hours later. (Wikipedia Signpost on the subject. And the current version of the article, for the hell of it.)

Good Village Voice article (on wikipedia, of course. No new info, really)

More wikiTourism: check out the pictures of Trondheim, Norway and Wyoming's Snake River.

Longyearbyen is the largest settlement on Svalbard.

Thanks to De Beers, diamonds may be a Veblen good (but they're not a Giffen Good). Via.

I'm writing from Mott Haven.

Good post about the media and wikipedia. (I should steal the disclaimer for this blog.) One highlight:

The point of registering users is not to make it easier to sue errant Wikipedia contributors. It will in fact have the opposite effect. Wikipedia tracks unregistered users' IP addresses — which, with a court order, can usually be traced back to a real-world identity — because it has no other way of telling if a slew of trash articles are coming from a single source. Wikipedia does not track the IP addresses of registered users because their pseudonyms serve the same purpose. So requiring people to log in will make them more anonymous, not less. But it will enable Wikipedia's reputation system to operate more effectively on new entries. And it will cut down on the ~5,000 new entries created every day, of which about 3,500 are obvious junk ("Asdfasdf" is a particularly popular entry) quickly weeded out by the Wikipedians who patrol the site.

Allowing unregistered users to edit existing articles plays into that reputation system. Says Jimmy: "Why do we allow anonymous users to edit existing articles when we know that the flow of edits from anonymous users is worse than from logged-in users? It implicitly self-selects trolls because we see the IP number but not the login name."

Jimmy thinks the the mainstream media misunderstood this story because they have a cognitive problem when it comes to anonymity and accountability:

"The thing that people always latch onto is that it has to do with anonymity. But it doesn't have to do with knowing who you are [in the real world] . We care about pseudo-identity, not identity. The fact that a certain user has a persistent pseudo-identity over time allows us to gauge the quality of that user without having any idea of who it really is."

I'll be in New York City this week. As befits a city that's practically it's own country (see the world-spanning New Yorker cover for an appropriate perspective), it has a crazy amount of wikipedia content. Start at the portal.

2006

Large numbers.

The Milgram experiment was one of many famous scientific experiments.

Journalism scandals

Wikipedia is not a cesspool of poison-penned libelists. It is not a tabloid. Should they chance upon vandalism, most people will be smart enough to figure out that "alex smith = gay!" isn't the fourth step of the Krebs cycle.

But Wikipedia does have a problem (well, a few) : while bushels of isolated facts stick to an article like bugs to flypaper, the regular wear and tear of wiki life (revert wars, adding detail, etc.) tends to atrophy an article's readability until, like beach footprints, it's reduced to a barely-differentiated indent. (Well, not an indent. I should stop being so metaphorical.)

Articles that have the most frequent edits are the ones most likely to suffer. (In a cruel twist of fate, these tend to be articles that are (or were) the best -- once an article passes a certain quality threshold, it draws visitors from all over.)

If you've been editing wikipedia long enough (and I have) it's a familiar feeling: you go through an article, nipping and tucking until it's brilliant and clear and readable, then you check back 3 months later and it's descended back into the fog.

So what to do?

Stable Pages

There's been a lot of talk about stable versions lately. They'll probably be implemented soon, which is a good thing. Here's how they work:

The very best wikipedia articles are doubled up: one version remains in the Standard Wikipedia, subject to immediate edits by whomever, and the other is preserved, temporarily, under glass, viewable but not editable. This preserved version is updated all at once, periodically.

As someone in the mailing list put it: as long as we're forever pushing the boulder up the hill, why not put a wedge behind it once in awhile?

One of the more important functions of a stable page will be serve as a label for the temporary high water mark -- instead of having to dive back into the history to see whether an article's gotten worse since being featured on the front page, you just have to compare the live and stable versions side-by-side. And there's a definite, well-defined goal for each page, a version number (as it were): Good changes can be periodically reincorporated en mass when the stable page is updated.

With enemies like this, who needs friends?

Disputed grammar!

A roundup of wikipedia tips and resources

Hilariously insulting article about a movie director.

Wikipedia-watch has kicked up a bit of a firestorm by tracking down and posting the names and addresses behind Wikipedia administrators' screennames. The mailing list reaction is predictably tinged with outrage and incomprehension (I share the former), but it's touched off a good discussion about wikipedian anonymity in general.

Steven Ericsson Zenith:

Hidden identity provides no basis for authority since the landscape of individuals is unknown and the changes to that landscape impossible to track. Such that, even if a group of anonymous admins is able to command respect for a period, there is no guarantee, no way to judge, that a group of admins have the same capacity in the future. Indeed, if the current group of admins do manage to establish public confidence then the public is immediately at risk since that group can be opaquely usurped.

Zenith is arguing on some rarified abstract plane, but more concretely: will accounts ever be covertly bought and sold? This seems unlikely -- wikipedia is too large and decentralized for something like that to stay secret (and who would do it? Paging Stalin's airbrushers and the Mossad.).

Fastfission argues that this whole line of thinking is moot from the get-go, that transparency is compatible with anonymity (and that seeing for yourself every edit an author's made on a project makes up for not knowing whether he's living in a bunker in Berlin):

Wikipedia is one of the most transparent enterprises on the entire internet -- it is easy to see in an instant everything a contributor has done, everything they have ever squabbled about, every time they change their mind and any place they might have been discussing a change before it was actually made. It is an easy task to show ever omission, every purposefully false addition, every bit of slander, as it went down, who did it, at what time, at what place.

A couple people add that anonymity is necessary, at least online:

What makes admins so special? A lot of them are mostly janitors. Non-admins do the majority of content edits, which is what Wikipedia's credibility is based on...There are a lot of wack jobs on the Internet that could use that information for nefarious purposes...as someone who is not yet secure in an academic career I would loathe if people could Google my real name and come up with results of me bickering with cranks online about any of the various subjects I end up bickering with cranks over.

The Doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the future lifetime of the human race given only an estimate of the total number of humans born so far. The argument predicts, with 95% confidence, that humanity will disappear within 9120 years.

An incredibly detailed history of aviation.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is an English phrase. (As is Can't sleep, clown will eat me.)

More swear words than you can shake a stick at.

In Africa and indigenous Mexican communities, whistled language is used only by men.

Perverse Incentives:

• "Three-strikes laws", under which a third felony conviction yields life imprisonment, are intended to deter repeat offenders. However, they may encourage repeat criminals to kill witnesses — since the sentence for murder is no worse than the sentence for a lesser third offense.


• In India, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead it led to the farming of rats.


• Paying the executives of corporations proportionately to the size of their corporation is intended to encourage them to grow their companies by growing the bottom line (and not their earnings per share). However, it may cause them to pursue mergers to grow their companies, to the detriment of their shareholders' interest.
  

The Long Tail weblog has some interesting things to say about wikipedia and other stuff (and scroll down to the comments for a good discussion).

...these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.
...
When professionals--editors, academics, journalists--are running the show, we at least know that it's someone's job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we're depending more and more on systems where nobody's in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren't perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They're designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.
...
Probability-based systems are, to use Kevin Kelly's term, "out of control". His seminal book by that name looks at example after example, from democracy to bird-flocking, where order arises from what appears to be chaos, seemingly reversing entropy's arrow.

Yet another chapter in the embarrassing war for "I Invented Wikipedia!" credit between Wales and Sanger. I tend to side with Sanger, mostly because managers often take credit where it's not due, but it's impossible to know what really happened (nor does it particularly matter).

Gunslinger is a name given to men in the American Old West who had gained a reputation as being dangerous with a gun.

Jesters typically wore brightly colored clothing in a motley pattern. Their hats were especially distinctive; made of cloth, they were floppy with three points (liliripes), each of which had a jingle bell at the end. The three points of the hat represent the asses' ears and tail worn by jesters in earlier times.

A rake is a stock character, a man who wastes his (usually inherited) fortune on "wine, women, and song," incurring lavish debts in the process.

A redshirt is a stock character whose sole purpose is to die violently soon after being introduced.

Nasreddin was a populist philosopher and wise man, remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes. He often appears as a whimsical character of a large Persian, Arab, and Turkish folk tradition of vignettes, not entirely different from zen koans.

Looking for a new desktop background?

Toilet-related injury

A solid Globe editorial with a nice closing line:

The Seigenthaler affair is a reminder that the age of the casual reader, if it ever in fact took place, is rapidly passing away. Most readers may not fancy themselves encyclopedists, authors, or journalists-manqués, but they can no longer assume that what passes for fact is unimpeachable. The ecology of information turns them into editors and reviewers perforce. The effect of this revelation may in time prove healthy-if we wake up to our responsibilities as readers.

Unintended consequences and unusual deaths.

"Thus, a straightforward phenomenon such as the probability of finding a raisin in a slice of cake growing with the portion-size does not generally require a theory of emergence to explain. It may, however, be profitable to consider the "emergence" of the texture of the cake as a relatively complex result of the baking process and the mixture of ingredients."

Bubble Wrap was created by two engineers, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, in 1957. Like many innovations, it was accidental: The two were trying to create a textured plastic wallpaper with paper backing that could be easily cleaned.

Cardboard was first invented in China some time in the 15th century.

A great rant about wikipedia, academia, and Seigenthaler

Penny Arcade sends up Wikipedia

English words with uncommon properties

Nature to scientsts: edit Wikipedia!

So can Wikipedia move up a gear and match the quality of rival reference works? Imagine the result if it did: a comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date reference work that can be accessed free from Manhattan to rural Mongolia. To achieve this, Wikipedia's administrators will have to tackle everything from future funding problems — the site is maintained by public donations [note from Wikipedia blog: Wikimedia's running a fund drive until January 8th] — to doubts about whether enough new contributors can be found to increase the quality of the mushrooming number of entries. That latter point is critical, and here scientists can make a difference.

Judging by a survey of Nature authors, conducted in parallel with the accuracy investigation, only a small percentage of scientists currently contribute to Wikipedia. Yet when they do, they can make a significant difference. Wikipedia's non-expert contributors are, by and large, dedicated to getting things right on the site. But scientists can bring a critical eye to entries on subjects they study, often highlighting errors and misunderstandings that others have unintentionally introduced. They can also start entries on topics that other users may not want to tackle. It is no surprise, for example, that the entry on 'spin density wave' was originated by a physicist."

The article also tackles wikipedia protocol -- how to get your edits to stick.

Editing pages is not always straightforward, as some users may disagree with changes. In politically sensitive areas such as climate change, researchers have had to do battle with sceptics pushing an editorial line that is out of kilter with mainstream scientific thinking. But this usually requires no more than a little patience. Wikipedia's users are generally interested in the reasoning behind proposed changes to articles. Backing up a claim with a peer-reviewed reference, for example, makes a world of difference.

Nature would like to encourage its readers to help. The idea is not to seek a replacement for established sources such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve. Select a topic close to your work and look it up on Wikipedia. If the entry contains errors or important omissions, dive in and help fix them. It need not take too long. And imagine the pay-off: you could be one of the people who helped turn an apparently stupid idea into a free, high-quality global resource.

(Thanks to the readers who told me about this article.)

Nature magazine: Wikipedia's scientific accuracy comes close to Britannica's, 1 in 10 Nature authors are wikipedians.

Wales: More expert wikipedians still needed; some articles will eventually have both static and dynamic versions.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

Considering how Wikipedia articles are written, that result might seem surprising. A solar physicist could, for example, work on the entry on the Sun, but would have the same status as a contributor without an academic background. Disputes about content are usually resolved by discussion among users.

...

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

...

Several Nature reviewers agreed with Panelas' point on readability, commenting that the Wikipedia article they reviewed was poorly structured and confusing. This criticism is common among information scientists, who also point to other problems with article quality, such as undue prominence given to controversial scientific theories. But Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that Wikipedia's strongest suit is the speed at which it can updated, a factor not considered by Nature's reviewers.

"People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica," Twidale adds. "Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one."

The most error-strewn article, that on Dmitry Mendeleev, co-creator of the periodic table, illustrates this. Michael Gordin, a science historian at Princeton University who wrote a 2004 book on Mendeleev, identified 19 errors in Wikipedia and 8 in Britannica. These range from minor mistakes, such as describing Mendeleev as the 14th child in his family when he was the 13th, to more significant inaccuracies. Wikipedia, for example, incorrectly describes how Mendeleev's work relates to that of British chemist John Dalton. "Who wrote this stuff?" asked another reviewer. "Do they bother to check with experts?"

But to improve Wikipedia, Wales is not so much interested in checking articles with experts as getting them to write the articles in the first place.

As well as comparing the two encyclopaedias, Nature surveyed more than 1,000 Nature authors and found that although more than 70% had heard of Wikipedia and 17% of those consulted it on a weekly basis, less than 10% help to update it. The steady trickle of scientists who have contributed to articles describe the experience as rewarding, if occasionally frustrating (see 'Challenges of being a Wikipedian').

Greater involvement by scientists would lead to a "multiplier effect", says Wales. Most entries are edited by enthusiasts, and the addition of a researcher can boost article quality hugely. "Experts can help write specifics in a nuanced way," he says.

Wales also plans to introduce a 'stable' version of each entry. Once an article reaches a specific quality threshold it will be tagged as stable. Further edits will be made to a separate 'live' version that would replace the stable version when deemed to be a significant improvement. One method for determining that threshold, where users rate article quality, will be trialled early next year.

The guy who wrote the false wikipedia entry on John Seigenthaler has confessed. He wasn't a conspiracy nut, just someone who (he says) thought of wikipedia as a joke site.

This whole affair will have been good for wikipedia, I think. Readers will take articles with a grain of salt, and potential vandals will think twice before posting false information (the linked story of the noose slowly closing around the vandal's neck was satasfying to read and will probably provide good disincentives).

More than a century after his death, some people claim that Norton was, in actuality, the Emperor of the United States.

World War III (detailed)
World War IV (not so much)

At the outset of the first Gulf War in 1991, a Washington, DC pizzeria was one of the first to know something was happening, as the event was marked by a flurry of pizza deliveries to The Pentagon.

Wales and Seigenthaler were on NPR, too.

CNN debate between Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) and John Seigenthaler Sr. (Wikipedia libelled)
(transcript)

No anonymous article creation

I haven't commented on this before because, to be honest, I don't think it'll make much difference to most Wikipedia users. Whether it will help prevent libel and vandalism remains to be seen.

A great idea combining wikipedia's anthole/beesnest/collectiveIntelligence philosophy with an expert-based topdown approach:

If I were a reference publisher, a library association, a university, a media company, or a foundation, I’d take Wikipedia as raw material and vet entries, perhaps even charging for the service: On demand or on the basis of traffic and links, I’d go in and vet already-written pieces and bless that version of it. Then maybe I’d publish a book from it. Subsequent changes would be unvetted until and unless I chose to or the audience asked me to review them.

It would be nice to see information flow the other way, too -- blessed Wikipedia pages could be tagged to that effect.

Also worth pointing out: this is where the "commercial use is OK" clause of the Wpedia content licence is essential. The first ones on the boat were link farmers, but monetizing wikipedia like this is going to be very big and very useful (and, thanks to Wpedia's nonprofit status, it won't skew or bias wikipedia itself).

(A Venture Capitalist calls this Red Hat Wikipedia, but that's a little misleading (if incredibly pithy) -- a single organization could only review the tiniest fraction of wikipedia's entries.)

Category:Monday

A message board devoted solely to airing negative critiques of wikipedia

I was born 23 years ago today (December 4, 1982), which makes me exactly the same age as China's constitution. I share a birthday with Samuel Butler, Francisco Franco, and Tyra Banks.

Ten Wikipedia hacks (A broad definition of "hack" -- these are more like tips. Still, useful stuff.)

Koro is ... uh ... probably not safe for work.

Another instance of wikipedia-as-character-assasin (talk) Followup. Great NYTimes article.

Monopoly. With linked gameboards (pointing, for example, to Pennsylvania Avenue or Community Chest).

Wikipedia is getting a new interface

Wales (according to some guy with a hiptop) says that wikipedia (and the rest of wikimedia) will be moving to a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface -- specifically, they'll be using Wikiwyg.

Minor scandal involving former MTV VJ Adam Curry and wikipdedia's podcasting article.

This metafilter thread views the articles with the most revisions as topics with the greatest cultural tension surrounding them.

George "Spiderman" Willig, Dan "Spidey Dan" Goodwin, and (most impressively) Alain "Spiderman" Robert. (Harry "Human Fly" Gardiner was the original.)

NYC Portal

A documentary about wikipedia will air in a few months on PBS.
A rough cut is available (the download link is in the left column) -- it's pretty good, but aimed at a mainstream audience, so mostly familiar. The stuff that isn't (cultural differences between wikipedias of different languages, for example) is the most interesting.

The raw footage is here. I'll see if I can go through it over the next week or so and ferret out the coolness. (Meta:Wikimentary)

List of Fictional Diseases

"Parkour is said to be L'art du Deplacement, or the Art of Displacement, consisting of uninterrupted forward motion over, under, around and through obstacles (both man-made and natural) in one's environment."

Wikizine aims to help tame communications problems in the sprawling wikimedia adhocracy. It's mostly intended for higher-ups, but is calling for info: "I will try to discover all the news that there is about Wikimedia and report the most relevant news in Wikizine. But I will fail to discover all the news. Wikizine needs to receive reports of things that are going on somewhere in a strange, far away wiki. Especially from the projects and languages from who you never hear."

Wikizine joins the quarterly Quarto in delivering meta-wikipedia news; it joins the Signpost delivering weekly wikipedia news.

The Signpost has a roundup of internal and external article evaluations.

In Singapore, being gay is punishable with up to life in prison (update: this law appears not to be widely enforced). Some gay singaporians seem to have taken refuge on wikipedia.

List of sexually active popes.

MP3s of lectures about wikipedia:

Mitch Kapor, "Thirteen Ways to Look at the Wikipedia".

There's really a Zen koan aspect to it; when you're given a paradox to wrestle with you can either go down with it -- because it's insoluble on its own terms -- or you can transcend the paradox because you find out you've had some limiting assumptions that you didn't know you had and it's only an apparent paradox. So, this talk is my effort to recount how I've wrestled with some of the paradoxes of Wikipedia and share that with you.

Jimmy Wales (Untitled, as far as I can tell).

I think, partly because of the personality types who become programmers... I don't know what it is exactly... a lot of programmers, seem to me to think that the whole point of social software is to replace the social with the software. Which is not really what you want to do, right? Social Software should exist to empower us to be human... to interact... in all the normal ways that humans do.

The Free Music article could do with some expansion.

Wikipedia foe Daniel Brandt makes some interesting points (counterarguments here) -- though his tendancy toward condescension ("Keep in mind that the teenagers who think Wikipedia is cool tend to be the same teenagers who think Google is cool.") might explain why his encounters with wikipedia have been negative.

Gollum is an alternate interface to wikipedia. As of this writing, it's only documented in german, though it works with the english-language wiki.

I'm still looking forward to a good client-side wikipedia browser. I want to edit the articles directly on the page (Word-esque, that is -- though I'm not sure I want everyone else to have that ability), watch snappy dataviews, etc.

New rating system

There's a lot of talk in the mailing list about rating/voting on articles (as an interface selection, not a purely wiki-social process). I'd expect to see it rolled out within the next month (update, Dec. 4: Wales told the NYTimes it'll be rolled out, most likely, in January), once a good implementation gets worked out.

A good article can become a bit of a mess with just a couple of misguided edits (which, hopefully, get reverted); it'll be interesting to see how the voting system deals with rapidly changing articles.

Pros:

• Most users don't take time to edit, but many of them would click a vote box.


• Seeing simple numeric ratings at a glance could make deciding how much to trust an article easier, and browsing more fun as you direct your attention away from the chaff.


• A software-compiled list of low rated articles could provide a focus for editors' attention.

Con:
Rating articles this way could undermine the social nature of wikipedia. Artifically-created rating systems aren't subject to the caveats and nuance of thought and discussion, nor the incredibly complex and somewhat effortless interplay of human social interaction.

Another "expert review" of wikipedia articles -- of south african articles, this time.

NPR's Talk of the Nation: "Wikipedia, Open Soure, and the Future of the Web"

Defunct amusement parks

In the mailing list, Daniel P. B. Smith has an interesting take on the Guardian's panel-of-experts wikipedia analysis.

Crappy prose isn't the main "quality" problem.

The quality problem in our articles isn't "crappy prose." Sure, a sentence like

"Implicit order means a system has hidden information which is not apparent based solely on direct observation."

makes me wince.

But improving the quality of an article is more than just rewriting crappy prose. Or checking facts. Or adding references. Or fixing typos. Or removing inaccuracies.

As the -paedia root implies, a good encyclopedia article should teach. That means it should go beyond Gradgrind, facts, facts, facts. It should convey not data, not information, but knowledge. It should integrate and synthesize; it should be comprehensible to a wide range of readers, for example by having a progressive structure that gives the basics quickly without sacrificing detail later. It should be well balanced, giving suitably proportioned weight to all aspects of its subject. It should be analytical.

It takes a _lot_ of work to do that.

If you look at the Guardian criticisms, Mike Barnes complains that some of the writing in an article is "unhelpful." He thinks encyclopedia articles should be helpful.

Alexandra Shulman complains that an article "inaccurate and unclear" and that "every value judgment it makes is wrong." She thinks encyclopedia articles should be not only accurate but clear, and that they _should present value judgements--sound ones._

Mark Kurlansky complains of some factual details. No comment on the prose.

Anthony Julius complains that an article is "purely factual and not in any way analytical." He thinks encyclopedia articles should be analytical.

Claire Tomalin complains of minor accuracies, complains more about major _omissions_, and by the failure of the article to comment on the literary merit of Pepy's diary. She thinks an encyclopedia should provide balanced coverage of a topic. Like Shulman, she thinks it should present sound value judgements.

Derek Barker indeed complains of prose style.

Robert McHenry complains that an article shows "no understanding of the cultural and historical contexts involved. In other words, it is a school essay, sketchy and poorly balanced."

Most complain of inaccuracies, but characterize them as minor.

Only one complains of bad prose.

The others complain of articles that fail to be helpful; clear; present sound value judgements; be analytical; and provide balanced coverage of their subject.

The backlash has begun.

There's a rising tide (or at least a tide) of "Wikipdia Sucks!" around (and insofaras I was perhaps too much of a cheerleader a couple months ago, I played some small part).

First: A nice (and widely-circulated) blog post taking Web2.0 evangelists to task for their rapturous language. Some good points, but an inadvertant straw man: I don't think many people see wikipedia as the proto hive mind. (Maybe the proto proto hive mind, but that can be said about regular books, too.)

Second: The register picks up the idea and runs with it: a scathing editorial ostensibly about wikipedia's founder's response to the blog's criticisms of some W'pedia articles. At risk of sounding like I'm Worshipping The Quotes of the Leader, here's Wales's message in its entirety:

I don't agree with much of this critique, and I certainly do not share the attitude that Wikipedia is better than Britannica merely because it is free. It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better quality, period, free or non-free. We should strive to be the best.

But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.

Why? What can we do about it?

--Jimbo

Wikipedia has a structural contradiction (or perhaps a fine line to walk). In order for people to care enough to put in high quality edits, they have to feel like they're contributing to a grand encyclopedic project; but it's helpful if readers don't think of the site as an exact equivalent of paper encyclopedias -- they have to critically examine articles, figure out possible reasons they read the way they do.

This is one reason it's so important for there to be more (and better) software interfaces to wikipedia: there's a sea of information to sift through that helps you figure out what's really going on, how much you can trust an article. At a glance, I want to know how long individual phrases have lasted on the page, the frequency and intensity of edits, what else that page's editors have said elsewhere, etc.

Rocket mail is the delivery of mail by rocket or missile.

Upon witnessing the missile's landing, Summerfield stated, "This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation." Summerfield proclaimed the event to be "of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world", and predicted that "before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."

I've created a new category: Famous transit stations.

Also, Pirates. More pirates.

Might as well be polite: I have, for the moment, lost interest in updating this blog. Sorry, to whomever reads or checks regularly. I might post more in the future. Update: Hi. Nevermind.

Wikisnips of the day: List of Titles and Honours of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. Elizabeth II is Queen of Australia, Queen of New Zealand, Queen of Canada, an Honorary Brigadier, and a Freeman in the Worshipful Company of Drapers.

Wikisnip of the day: If you ever run into holocaust deniers, the Holocaust Denial Examined page has plenty of well-thought counterarguments.

Wikisnips of the Day

• 'Hachikō, sometimes known in Japanese as 忠犬ハチ公 (chūken hachikō, lit. 'faithful dog Hachiko'), was an Akita dog born in November, 1923, in the city of Odate, Akita Prefecture. In 1924, he was brought to Tokyo by his owner, Eisaburo Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo. During his owner's life, Hachiko saw him off from the front door and greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. Even after Ueno's death in May, 1925, Hachiko returned every day to the station to wait for him, and did so for the next eleven years.'


• Like Hachikō, Greyfriars Bobby is a dog with a statue.


• Other famous dogs.


• Fictional dogs.

Good BBC article

Public Domain and Wikipedia is a mini-documentary shot at wikimania.

Wikisnips of the day:

Bigfoot gets 57 Kb and its own 7-article category. But it's only one of innumerable Cryptids. ("Cryptids are animals for whose existence there is no confirmation.")

Other legendary creatures -- Zombies, sea monsters (and lake monsters, like the Loch Ness), etc.

Fictional national animals include the Qilin, Wild Haggis, the Fur-brearing Trout.

Some pictures from Wikimania (and a slideshow) but not much information posted yet.

Usually live-blogging is something you do when the conference has a low signal/noise ratio or has plenty of "dead" time. Wikimania had neither, because everyone knew each other online in some way, and the communal space made it easy to engage in long discussions and for folks to demo things to each other on laptops. It was an amazing experience, and multimedia content will follow.

– Andrew Lih, on the wikipedia mailing list.

Fast Company has a decent roundup of Wikimania events.

The Wikipedia Signpost is shutting down. A damn shame (though I don't blame the editor; it was too much work for one person, and no coincidence that he stopped around wikimania -- how are you supposed to cover something like that properly without an editorial team (and a plane ticket)?). As you may have noticed, this blog hasn't exactly been a paper of record the past few days (what with actually finding a job and all), and there's no other semi-central source for wikipedia news, unless you count the Quarto (and I don't).

No New Rules
There was a widely-covered story that wikipedia was about to tighten rules, freeze a bunch of entries, etc. False. (I'm relieved. Articles are, of course, never "finished' -- the world keeps going.)

Wikisnip of the day: 'Astrochicken, Dyson explained, is a one-kilogram spacecraft that is unlike any other. Astrochicken would be a creation of the intersection of biology, artificial intelligence and modern microelectronics—a symbiosis of plant and animal and electronic components.' (There's also an Astro Chicken from Space Quest.)

Wales: 10 things will be free.

Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales is guest blogging for Lawrence Lessig. Theme: Ten things that will be free. ("...the point of naming the list "will be free" rather than "should be free" or "must be free" is that I am making concrete predictions rather than listing a pie in the sky list of things I wish to see.")

1. The encyclopedia. (Of course.) Wales charts a plan to get wikipedia into the developing world, where the vast majority of people are.

Third, while it is important to provide our work in important global or "colonial" languages, we also think it is extremely important to provide our work in languages that people speak natively, at home. (Swahili, Hindi, etc.)

I will define a reasonable degree of success as follows, while recognizing that it does leave out a handful of people around the world who only speak rare languages: this problem will be solved when Wikipedia versions with at least 250,000 articles exists in every language which has at least 1,000,000 speakers and significant efforts exist for even very small languages. There are many local languages which are spoken by people who also speak a more common international language -- both facts are relevant.

I predict this will be completed in 15 years. With a 250,000-article cutoff, English and German are both past the threshold. Japanese and French will be there in a year. Several other languages will be there in two years.

2. School curricula, from kindergarten to college. "...this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer ... An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with.

(Update: Here's the full list.)

Wikisnip of the day

Quantum suicide is a thought experiment that attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the many-worlds interpretation (though there are other interpretations, too). The experiment essentially involves participating in the Schrödinger's cat experiment as the cat. (See also: Quantum Immortality.)

Wikimania starts wednesday.

There are presentations on wiki conflict resolution, creativity, getting wikipedia into africa, cool metadata schemes, a timeline with all of human history on it, the intersect of art and science.



Man, I wish I was in Germany.

Analysis of conflicting philosophies about Wikipedia