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

Responses to Lanier's "Digital Maoism" critique.

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

--Clay Shirky

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

--Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg

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

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

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

...

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

-- Cory Doctorow

Alternative spellings of "the"

Wikipedia gets a new interface. (Sort of.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wishlist

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

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

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


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

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

New Scientist on the Semantic Mediawiki.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some outside attention for Wikiproject: Countering Systemic Bias

List of North American cities by year of foundation

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

The Motherfuckers were never part of the Situationist International.

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

Corante has a good response.

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

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

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

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

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

Classification of demons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Vinni Pukh (1969)

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

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

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

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

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

Worrying Slashdot comment:

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

‽

¡Ay, caramba! Dig the ¡.

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

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

We Didn't Start the Fire, wikified.

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

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

Exhaustive article on bicycling as transportation.

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

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

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

The chicken or the egg?

It's wikipedia week at PBS's Mediashift.

More Cowbell.

A webcomic's hilarious Wiki storyline. Start here.

Wired News cribs from Wikitruth.

Wikipedia is mostly peaceful.

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

–Sam Wong

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

Beep-beep

Wile E. Coyote is an evil genius.

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

On being notable in Wikipedia.

Wales speech at the Long Now Foundation: ( ogg | mp3 ). Runs the gamut. Points, off the top of my sleep-deprived head:

• Wikipedia (and its volunteer network) is doing cool and interesting things in the third world.


• Structural changes take a long time to happen, but that's good for stability.


• Candidates for deletion should be routed to members of the relevant wikipedia projects.

Less Stephensonesque than Jason Scott's speech, of course, and therefore less exciting, but more believable.

In other news, Wikitruth is one of a relatively small number of anti-wikipedia (or criticising-wikipedia) websites that has a sense of humor. (Update. Ok, it's uneven.)

There are plently of Supertall designs out there, but none so cool-looking as The Illinois.

Blog post that frames wikipedia's success interestingly, touches on social science and the future of web browsing, with some wiki business analysis in between.

David Hahn (born October 1976) attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in 1994 in his backyard shed in Clinton Township, Michigan, at the age of 17.

Wiki gangsign

Wikipedia is highly trusted in Japan. It's not clear whether the respondents were thinking of the English or Japanese wikipedias, or both. Maybe the Japanese version has fewer mistakes than others because of cultural factors; I'd be interested to see similar surveys in other countries.

(Thanks to Ken for the link.)

"One of the main difficulties of the San Francisco burrito is the issue of structural integrity...During this time, some elements of the San Francisco burrito experience became politicized...These comments likely reflect a larger anxiety among San Francisco burrito fans of all ethnicities that economic and cultural changes in the Mission could destroy the soul not only of the neighborhood but of the burrito."

Absurdly large apartment building.

If you want to stow away on a train, Freighthopping offers the following advice: "while railroads have shifted away from boxcars as a means of transport, there are still many places to ride, such as gondolas, grainers, and unoccupied engines at the front or rear of the train."

Human mail is the transportation of a person through the postal system, usually as a stowaway.

The meaning of life (not to be confused with The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything)

Examples of hyperreality

• a sports drink of a flavour that doesn't exist ("wild ice zest berry")
  
• a plastic Christmas tree that looks better than a real Christmas tree ever could
  
• a magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer
  
• a well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal)
  
• Disney World, Las Vegas and Dubai (the first e.g. discussed by Boje, 1995)
  
• pornography ("sexier than sex itself")
  
• entertainment news programming and supermarket tabloids

The short, strange story of Burned Fur.

Cool maps showing laws on Abortion, Homosexuality, and the Death Penalty.

Britannica vs. Nature, round III

First, a recap.

1. Nature said: Wikipedia's science articles are surprisingly accurate -- only slightly less so than Britannica's. (And here are some errors in each; etc.)


2. All the Wikipedia errors were corrected within a month or two.


3. Britannica issued a salvo against the Nature article demanding a retraction.


4. Nature defended the article, saying that because the study was conducted blind, any problems with its criticisms of Britannica entries also apply to its criticisms of Wikipedia entries.

Now Britannica has taken out large ads in the New York Times and Times of London reiterating their previous arguments. Ars has a good summary. (The degree of Britannica's insultedness about being compared to Wikipedia is itself a little insulting to this Wikipedia editor.)

Onomatopoeia

Lists of people by cause of death

Shī Shì shí shī shǐ
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

List of tongue-twisters

The spacecraft experienced a remarkable and near-catastrophic return to Earth.

April 1, 2006

This Slate article's throwaway line about designers exstatic to be "in the same room with the guy who made Marble Madness" made me wonder: who did make Marble Madness? Turns out it was Mark Cerny (who also worked on Sonic the Hedgehog 2 -- which is actually a kind of similar game).

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Nature responds to britannica (with a PDF, unfortunately).

In one instance Britannica alleges that we provided a reviewer with material that was not from the Britannica website. We have checked and are confident that this was not the case.

Britannica objects that Nature did not check the assertions of its reviewers. This is true; nor did we claim to. We realised that in some cases our reviewers’ criticisms would be open to debate, and in some cases might be wrong. But this applied as much to criticisms of Wikipedia as of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Because the reviewers were blind to the source of the material they were evaluating, and material from both sources was treated the same way, there is absolutely no reason to think that any errors they made would have systematically altered the results of our inquiry.

We note that Britannica has taken issue with less than half the points our reviewers raised. Both encyclopaedias have made corrections to some of the relevant entries since our article was published.

We do not intend to retract our article.

The Erdős number, honouring the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific writers of mathematical papers, is a way of describing the "collaborative distance", in regard to mathematical papers, between an author and Erdős.

Britannica's pissed at Nature. Most of the meat of the issue is here. Nature probably messed up (I'll be interested in hearing their counter), but a few of Britannica's arguments are silly.

"...it's a big responsibility being the definition of gay."

Micronations and Pirate utopias.

Abramović had had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign infomed them) in any way that they chose. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip, and, most notoriously, a gun loaded with a single bullet. For six hours the artist sat immobile, allowing the audience members to entirely direct the action.

The Economist: "the “open-source” label can now apply more broadly to all sorts of endeavour that amalgamate the contributions of private individuals to create something that, in effect, becomes freely available to all. However, it is unclear how innovative and sustainable open source can ultimately be."

The best and worst U.S. presidents. (Though that survey is a couple years old...)

Conveyor belt sushi is a sushi restaurant where the plates with the sushi are placed on a rotating conveyor belt that winds through the restaurant and moves past every table and counter seat.

The Luther Burger is a bacon cheeseburger which employs a glazed donut (such as a Krispy Kreme) in place of a bun.

"This is unexposed film of Greenwich Village because nothing ever happens there ... "

-- Weegee's caption for a completely black photograph in 'Naked City'.

Chandigarh is regarded as one of the most beautiful cities in India.

List of idioms in the English language

Simple brain-computer interfaces already exist in the form of Neuroprosthetics

Sleepy lions

I voted against the proposed redesign of the main page. Clutter is what drives people to Gollum.

Sparse rumors: Google/Wikipedia partnership?

The story of a glowing rod and its travels (and how it killed 1980s Brazillians who didn't know better). (Category:Radioactive waste)

Unwiki displays recently deleted wikipedia articles.

List of people known as father or mother of something

List of paradoxes

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.)