Simpsons obsession can sometimes be taken too far, but this isn't one of those times.

A protologism is a word that is created and used in the hope that it will become widely used and an accepted part of the language. (Check out the wiktionary list.)

Grok. Spime. Goomba. Björk.

Any key. (Category: Computer keys.)

An alternate reality game deliberately blurs the line between the in-game and out-of-game experiences, often being used as a marketing tool for a product or service.

Gadsby is a novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, written around 1939. It is famous for not containing the letter 'e'.

List of problems solved by MacGyver

Mono no aware (物の哀れ) makes me wonder whether Closing Time was a hit in Japan.
(Category:Time)

Religious absolutism vs. wiki pragmatism. (Or: Al-Jazeerah writer vs. wikipedia admin. Skim to the bottom for the reply, unless you're interested in theology.)

One million articles. It's a bit of a silly metric, and there was some talk in the mailing list about noting that in the press release, but PR won out.

The 1000000th article itself. People got excited and took pictures. =)

(Hola to everyone from Microservios. Thanks for the link!)

Scientology really does seem like an RPG.

Wikipedia on your iPod. (Wow; text is really small, bytewise.) Mine's broken, so I can't report on the user interface; it seems like searching for articles might be cumbersome.

Compentant but unspectacular USA Today article about Wikipedia. (The focus is on the wiki-addicted editors at the top of the distribution curve. Wikipedia must be climbing a distribution curve of its own to have gotten noticed by the paper.)
Decent but unspectacular Wikipedia article about USA Today.

Speaking of newspapers. Remember the Muhammad cartoons? The article on the newspaper that first published them is now a brilliant and incredibly detailed history stretching back 120 years. (I wonder what the Danish spelling reform of 1948 was. Ah.) Sunlight is the best disinfectant; controversy creates great wikipedia articles (usually. And if you give it some time.).

As Dr. Westen said, "None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged... Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want... Everyone... may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret 'the facts.'"

Americans use pauses such as "um" or "uh," the British say "er," Mandarin speakers use something like "er," the French use something like "euh," the German say "äh" (pronounced eh or er), Japanese use "ahh", and Hebrew, Spanish speakers use something like "ehhh", and "este" in Mexico. Other languages have their own syllables for these pauses.

Unsolved Problems.

Japanese toilet

Anti-patterns are classes of commonly-reinvented bad solutions to problems.

The comedian who created the "In Soviet Russia" joke structure. (Surprisingly interesting article.)

Fan Death (S. Korea). The legend states that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death of those inside. This belief also extends to air conditioners and the fans in cars...Fans manufactured and sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on...The legend is remarkably resilient, and is accepted even by many Korean medical professionals.

The Clock of the Long Now is a mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years.

List of strange units of measurement

Yahoo is cool. (Apart from that whole jailing political activists thing.)

Louis Wain drew lots of cats, and eventually became schizophrenic.

The article on Charles Ponzi is listed in three categories: Pyramid and Ponzi schemes, Fraudsters, and Italian criminals.

Signpost interview with Jimbo. Plenty of new information.

Interesting project for making Wikipedia more machine-readable. (PDF, abstract in HTML)

A $100 Hamburger is aviation slang for a private general aviation flight for the sole purpose of dining at a non-local airport.

(Speaking of which, I'm hungry.)

How was the japanese/european/american economy doing in 1 A.D.?

Free classical music
Spoken Articles (Wikipedia audiobooks, as it were)

It's in Ogg Vorbis format, which can be annoying if you use iTunes or have an iPod. If the former, get thee to Xiph and install the quicktime components: you'll be able to play Ogg files in iTunes, but not yet on your iPod. For that, you'll have use iTunes's converter to make the Oggs into mp3s or AACs, which is a shame because converting lossy to lossy really cuts down the sound quality. (Sign the petition to Apple.)

Plain language is good. The Transportation section of the "Gaza Strip" article gives a better gestalt of the situation there, and the wider conflict, than many other things I've read.

Wikipedize any text. (Capitalize words or phrase that you want made into links.)

The Smurfs and Communism

WACK-a-Pedia! is a blog very similar to this one. (I should figure out how to add tags.)

Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast people reading streams of numbers, words, or letters (often using a phonetic alphabet). It is not known where these signals originate or what purpose they serve.

Birthday attack

The smallest park in the world.

Indie music (from independent) is any of a number of genres, scenes, subcultures and stylistic and cultural attributes, characterised by (real or perceived) independence from commercial pop music and mainstream culture

A proverb says that "all roads lead to Rome". Roman roads were designed that way to prevent provinces from organising resistance against the Empire.

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.)