Aokigahara(青木ヶ原), also called the Sea of Trees, is a forest at the base of Mount Fuji. The caverns found in this forest are rocky and ice-covered, even during summertime. It is an old forest haunted by many legends of monsters, ghosts, and goblins, which add to its sinister reputation.

Creative Commons is being sued!

If you're not a geek, here's some background:

By default, anything anyone writes is copyrighted with All Rights Reserved to the author. If it weren't for alternative licenses that let authors release some rights back to the public, Wikipedia would be completely impossible (so would Linux).

This sounds boring, but Creative Commons is actually tremendously important because it writes and produces these licenses. Wikipedia predates Creative Commons and doesn't use its licenses. It uses the GFD License instead, which was originally intended for software documentation and is craptastic in several ways but impossible to get rid of at this point.

Alright, the geeks can start reading again.

Update, 2007-10-9: The rest of this post is a bit of a stretch -- which is to say, I've changed my mind about the conclusion. It's preserved below, but just for history.

---

You might have heard part of this story already, but to recap:

1. Virgin Australia found an an ordinary, charming snapshot on Flickr. The photo used a creative commons license that allowed commercial use.

2. Virgin cropped and colored that photo into a kind-of-insulting, borderline-racist cell phone advertisement.

3. Without ever contacting the 15-year-old girl in the snapshot, Virgin put the ad up on billboards across Australia.

4. ProfitGet sued!

Which is all well and good. But now the girl's family is suing Creative Commons, too, for "not adequately informing" people what "license this photo for commecrial use" means.

Aside from the sheer communitarian spirit involved in suing a cash-strapped nonprofit organization that has taken unparalleled pains to make legal language useful and comprehensible to ordinary people, there's also some small possibility that a negative ruling could affect Wikipedia—and, really, anyone else who's trying to fix our grungy copyright system by making an end-run around it.

So thank you, Virgin, for being such complete jackasses that you've possibly (though this is still unlikely) set back an entire global collaborative intellectual movement.

Nono, really—thank you. From all of us.

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

The Bloody Benders were a family of serial killers who owned a small general store and inn in Labette County, Kansas from 1872 to 1873.

The 8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries. Like most of the new stuff at Cracked magazine, this is pretty funny.

(Of course, being funny doesn't make it literally true. As usual, the comments sections are buzzing with people pissed off about articles being deleted.)

So how many continents are there, again?

The 7-continent model is usually taught in most English-speaking countries, China, and most of Europe. The 6-continent combined-Eurasia model is preferred by the geographic community, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Japan. The 6-continent combined-America model is taught in Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Iran, Greece and some other parts of Europe.

Dancing mania is a phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, in which groups of people would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth or speaking in tongues, until they collapsed from exhaustion.

Bumblebee myths

Thais use two systems for telling the time: the 24-hour clock and the traditional Thai six hour clock.

Hey, cool. I just found out that my city has a pretty active community wiki.

Sleepwalking murder

On September 17th, Jimmy Wales starts an article about a famous restaurant.

2 hours later, somebody tags the article -- not for deletion, but for speedy deletion, calling it spam.

The next revision removed the tag, and the current article looks good, but jesus. Speedy deletion is the quick guillotine intended for articles on which there can be no debate, articles that are unambiguously junk. If this is the type of treatment Jimmy Wales gets...

---

Addendum: it's healthy for wales not to be treated like a monarch. But he does get cut more slack than regular users.
Addendum 2: It looks like the story's more complex. Geoffrey Burling has the details.

List of incidents famously considered great blunders

Wanted poster for john wilkes booth

A day in the life of an article. And the followup:

I waited a few days for the deletion storm to pass and attention to wander, then as quickly as I could I restored the history and trimmed out the advertising speak myself. The article has sat completely unmolested since then, apparently a perfectly fine article on a perfectly fine subject. It took me _four minutes_ to fix it up nicely according to the timestamps. There must be umpteen thousands of such articles sitting in the deleted versions bin, probably never to be rescued. It's very disheartening.

Oh noes!

The mainstream media has beaten me to the punch -- the WaPo mentioned WikiDashboard, "a quick way to find the most active editors of an article". I knew about it! I swear! I just didn't post about it in time!

Here's a fuller explanation.

The Washington Post on Wikipedia's interplay with the 2008 presidential campaign. They've got the wikipedia culture down pretty well, too.

What with the Ignore all Rules explanation and the Editors matter essay, it looks like there's momentum in the right direction.

Globus Cassus is a utopian project for the transformation of Planet Earth into a much bigger, hollow, artificial world with an ecosphere on its inner surface.

The first programmable robot and drum machine, circa 1206 a.d.

Via Timeline of the most important human inventions. (Spoiler: everything before the 16th century was invented in china or n. africa.)

War Plan Red was a military document outlining a hypothetical war between the United States and the British Empire (the "Red" forces). It was developed by the United States Army during the mid 1920s, and was officially withdrawn in 1939, when it and others like it were replaced by the five "Rainbow" plans created to deal with the Axis threat.

The war was intended to be a continental war, waged primarily on North American territory between the United States and the British Empire. The assumption was that Canada would represent the ideal geographic forum through which the British could wage war against the United States.

Defence Scheme No. 1 was a plan created by Canadian Director of Military Operations and Intelligence Col. James "Buster" Sutherland Brown, for a Canadian counter-invasion of the United States.

Spider webs in space

The glass harmonica is a type of musical instrument that uses a series of glass bowls or goblets graduated in size to produce musical tones by means of friction, making it a crystallophone. Note that despite being played with wet fingers, the sound is produced by the glass, so the glass harmonica is not a hydraulophone even if played completely submerged in water.

David Phillips (pudding)

2 millionth wikipedia article

Apparently, it's El Hormiguero

The mailing list says:

Apparently, the 2,000,000th article in en-wp is El Hormiguero, on a Spanish comedy and science TV show. (This is not yet officially confirmed by WMF, and seems to be under a bit of bickering.)

We should get them to do a skit about Wikipedia for one of their shows, and then release it under a free license permitting reuse and derivative works... then we can set up a kiosk with a television monitor playing that show in a continuous loop (with English subtitles) along with other Wikipedia/Wikimedia stuff (like a speech by Jimbo), and put it in the Jordanhill railway station, thus combining the 1,000,000th and 2,000,000th topics in a place that Wikipedians can make pilgrimages to.

A premature obituary occurs when someone's death is reported while they are still alive. List of premature obituaries.

Mods and Rockers

MIT news: "Residents of Italy's capital will glimpse the future of urban mapmaking next month with the launch of "Wiki City Rome," a project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city's pulse in real time."

Wikigroaning is funny and/or embarrassing depending on your outlook, but is it a problem? I agree that the serious articles should be better, but in these comparisons there seems to be an implicit theory that the fan topics are somehow sucking the life out of the serious ones.

But really, do we want somebody obsessed about [[Optimus Prime]] to spend a lot of time on [[Prime number]]? And even if we wanted them to, would they do it and do it well? I don't think so.

From what I've seen, the fan stuff is not a particularly big maintenance burden. Maybe I've missed it, but I don't see a lot of vandalism, a lot of dispute resolution, or a lot of AN/I requests over the stuff. So it seems like the net cost of keeping it is relatively small. And I see two big benefits that come from it.

First is that the more editors we have involved in Wikipedia, the better. People identify with things they've contributed to. That gives us all sorts of positive effects, including less vandalism, more donations, more person-to-person promotion, and more public support.

–William Pietri, on the mailing list

6 secret languages

A cryptolect is a secret language used only by members of a group, often used to conceal the meaning from those outside the group.

Here's the SIX SECRETIST LANGUAGES! (Kidding. I figured lists are good for traffic.)

1. Thieves' cant was a secret language which was formerly used by thieves, beggars and hustlers of various kinds in Great Britain and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries. The classic, colourful argot is now mostly obsolete, and is largely relegated to the realm of literature and fantasy role-playing, although individual terms continue to be used in the criminal subcultures of both Britain and the U.S.

2. Shelta is a language spoken by parts of the Irish Traveller people. It has been suggested that the word "Shelta" itself derives from the Irish word "siúlta", meaning "of walking". This refers to the nomadic lifestyle of the Travellers, and the fact that they were commonly called "the Walking People".

3. Carny. Note: Though these terms are traditionally part of Carnival jargon, it is an ever changing form of communication and in large part designed to be impossible to understand by an outsider. Thus, as words are assimilated into the culture at large, they lose their function and are replaced by other more obscure or insular terms.

4. Barallete is employed by the traditional knife-sharpeners and umbrella holders (afiadores e paragüeiros) of the Galician province of Ourense. (Yes, those words are real.)

5. Klezmer-loshn (Yiddish: Musician's Tongue) is an extinct derivative of the Yiddish language. It was used by travelling Jewish musicians, known as klezmorim (klezmers), in Eastern Europe prior to the 20th Century.

6. Leet (written as 31337, 1337, and l33t), is used primarily on the Internet, but becoming increasingly common in many online video games. It uses various combinations of alphanumerics to replace proper letters.

Wikirage lists the Wikipedia articles with the most edits per unique editor over various periods of time.

Apparently,

enwp.org/whatever

redirects to

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/whatever

. Good to know.

Reconstructed image of a neanderthal child.

The colonization of Venus, Earth's nearest planetary neighbour, has been a subject of much speculation and many works of science fiction since before and after the dawn of spaceflight. With the discovery of Venus' hostile surface environment, attention has largely shifted towards the colonization of the Moon and the colonization of Mars. Recently, however, papers have surfaced on the feasibility of colonizing Venus beginning from the less hostile cloud-tops, making surface exploration in the beginning unnecessary.

Landis has proposed aerostat habitats followed by floating cities, based on the concept that breathable air (21:79 Oxygen-Nitrogen mixture) is a lifting gas in the dense Venusian atmosphere, with about half the lifting power that helium has on Earth. This would allow breathable air domes to lift a colony in addition to their own weight. Alternatively two-part domes could contain a lifting gas like hydrogen or helium (extractable from the atmosphere) to allow a higher mass density.

The Jedi census phenomenon was a grassroots movement in 2001 for citizens in a few English-speaking countries to record their religion as "Jedi" or "Jedi Knight" on the national census.

If wikipedia were printed out, this is how big it would be. (Though I don't think the size of the binding is accounted for.) see also

While we're at it, Colbert's Wikiscanner commentary blows Olbermann's out of the water.

The wikiscanner coverage is still flowing fast. Keith Olbermann had a misguided take, for example:



It's not his fault.* The media coverage around this has been deeply mediocre. With the exception, as usual, of the NYTimes piece (and here's their Wikipedia feed), nobody reported two essential facts:

1. Contentious wikipedia articles are edited every hour of the day. Anonymous edits are always suspect. Any edit that looks unproductive (like deleting an entire section without comment) gets reverted immediately -- as, indeed, these edits were.
   
   This side of the story would have required some actual reporting (digging to see how the edits influenced the later article), and reporting means boots on the ground, which means payroll.


2. "Anonymous" wikipedia contributors are actually the only editors that aren't allowed to be anonymous. As soon as you choose a WP username, your IP address stops being shown.

Sure, those aren't the most important elements of the story. But not including them anywhere in the article? Pull up your socks.

* Note to Olbermann: Edward R. Murrow was a journalist, not an anchor.

A cat piano or Katzenklavier (German) is a hypothetical musical instrument consisting of a line of cats fixed in place with their tails stretched out underneath a keyboard. Nails would be placed under the keys, causing the cats to cry out in pain when a key was pressed. The cats would be arranged according to the natural tone of their voices.

The instrument was described by German physician Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813) for the purpose of treating patients who had lost the ability to focus their attention. Reil believed that if they were forced to see and listen to this instrument, it would inevitably capture their attention and they would be cured (Richards, 1998).

The Onion: Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not

"It's not really black hat..."

No, it's not. You're clever, but the black hats are laughing at you, as am I.

Jeanne Louise Calment (February 21, 1875 – August 4, 1997) reached the longest confirmed lifespan in history at 122 years and 164 days. Her husband died in 1942, after he ate a dessert prepared with spoiled cherries.

In 1965, aged 90, with no living heirs, Jeanne Calment signed a deal, common in France, to sell her condominium apartment en viager to lawyer François Raffray. Raffray, then aged 47, agreed to pay a monthly sum until she died, an agreement sometimes called a "reverse mortgage". At the time of the deal the value of the apartment was equal to ten years of payments. Unfortunately for Raffray, not only did Calment survive more than thirty years, but Raffray died of cancer in December 1995, at the age of 77, leaving his widow to continue the payments.

She said that at age 14, she met Vincent van Gogh in her father's shop, later describing him as "dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable." She also reported attending the 1885 funeral of Victor Hugo.

Jeanne Calment's remarkable health presaged her later record. At age 85, she took up fencing. At 100, she was still riding a bicycle.

I'm trying my hand at a wikipedia videoblog.



(Or here , if it doesn't show in the feed.)

The sailing stones are a geological phenomenon found in Racetrack Playa, Death Valley. The stones slowly move across the surface of the playa, leaving a track as they go, without human or animal intervention.

Car-eating troll

The Right Way To Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles.

Wikipedia Scanner "offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses." (Of course, it only shows edits by users without accounts.)

Via Wired, who also have a page where you can vote on the most egregious wikipedia spin/fraud.

The brave new world of social fundraising.

The Ulam Spiral is a simple method of graphing the prime numbers that reveals a pattern which has never been fully explained. It was discovered by the mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963, while doodling on scratch paper at a scientific meeting.

The NYTimes seems to be making a leap into blogging. Here's their Wikipedia-tagged posts, for future reference.

Nick has posted some more wikimania summaries

Why wikipedia should bother with the semantic web (pdf)

Yet another NYTimes piece from wikimania. (These are all by columnist Noam Cohen.)

NYTimes on Wikimania, Chinese censorship, and other things. The collapse of mainland chinese wikipedia participation is pretty depressing. At Boston wikimania, there was nobody more enthusiastic than the handful of mainland chinese people; they were absolutely thrilled to be there.

Ancient world maps.

The De Virga world map was made around 1411. (And re-discovered in a second-hand bookshop in 1911. And stolen during an auction in 1932, and never recovered.)

It gives a fairly accurate shape of Africa, at a time when the continent had not yet been rounded by European explorers. The source of such cartographic information is unknown, although it could be Muslim traders, or possibly Chinese cartographers under Admiral Zheng He.

Zheng He was a Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat, fleet admiral, and eunuch who from 1405 to 1433 made voyages across the Indian ocean and to the coast of Africa. His voyages and the subsequent possible abandonment (as some have argued) of maritime exploration by the Chinese emperors have become symbolic in the space advocacy community of the success and cancellation of the Apollo Program.

Chinese exploration.

llywrch: "Keep in mind that one goal of every committed Wikipedian is the desire to recruit more knowledgable and productive members. I believe that lot of the apparently minor edits Admins make are to further this goal."

Another wikimania dispatch from the NYTimes. When is the times going to start tagging its articles, not just its "blog posts"?

Dunbar's number, which is 150, represents a theoretical maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship.

The Great Stink was a time in the summer of 1858 during which the smell of untreated sewage almost overwhelmed people in central London.

Wikipedia needs a better API. If there's one reason you should give the foundation your money, this is it.

Who adds real content to Wikipedia, not just correcting typos and wikification?

Answer:

Only 12% of edits create fresh content. Of these 12%...

• 0% were made by admins


• 69% were registered users.


• 31% were created by anon users, or non-logged in users.

...and only 52% were by people who had a user page.

For great wikimania coverage, get thee to Wikipedia Weekly.

NYTimes dispatch from Wikimania

The Taipei Times is pumping out wiki coverage. Here's something interesting:

The sharp divide between producers and consumers of knowledge began only about 300 years ago, when book printers secured royal protection for their trade in the face of piracy in a rapidly expanding literary market. The legacy of their success, copyright law, continues to impede attempts to render cyberspace a free marketplace of ideas. Before, there were fewer readers and writers, but they were the same people, and had relatively direct access to each other's work.

Indeed, a much smaller, slower and more fragmented version of the Wikipedia community came into existence with the rise of universities in 12th and 13th century Europe.

The large ornamental codices of the early Middle Ages gave way to portable "handbooks" designed for the lighter touch of a quill pen. However, the pages of these books continued to be made of animal hide, which could easily be written over. This often made it difficult to attribute authorship, because a text might consist of a copied lecture in which the copyist's comments were inserted and then perhaps altered as the book passed to other hands.

Wikipedia has remedied many of those technical problems. Any change to an entry automatically generates a historical trace, so entries can be read as what medieval scholars call a "palimpsest," a text that has been successively overwritten. Moreover, "talk pages" provide ample opportunity to discuss actual and possible changes. While Wikipedians do not need to pass around copies of their text -- everyone owns a virtual copy -- Wikipedia 's content policy remains deeply medieval in spirit.

Wikimania (the yearly wiki conference) is starting today in Taiwan. Google it for the main page -- but for the flavor of what it's really like, try the photos. (Wikipedia weekly has good audio coverage, too.)

So there's England. And Britain, and Great Britain, and the United Kingdom. And the British Isles. And what's the difference between all these, again?

When the Going turns Surreal, only Criminals will own Librarians

When I had encountered this story long ago, the allegation was far less exotic: that "Slim Virgin" was the screen name of one Linda Mack, an eccentric college student who lost someone close to her (either a family member or a friend) on the Lockaby air plane crash, and volunteered a lot of her time and energy into finding the people responsible.

If that is in fact true, then it explains a lot about why she wants to remain anonymous, and why other people are willing to stifle discussion on the topic: she's been put through more than enough shit already.

Besides, so what if she is a female version of James Bond? As long as she doesn't resort to some black ops tactics to resolve disputes (even if that is the only way to settle them), is it a problem? Maybe she can draw on that experience to improve some articles.

However, as Kelly Martin and others have pointed out, the way this has been handled has only made things worse: removing material from article histories only creates more controversy, not less. A simple denial is all that is needed to handle this surreal rumor. ... I don't agree with Tlogmer that requiring Administrators to furnish (or use) their real names would solve problems like this. For example, I happen to share the same name as a car dealer in Australia.

Bonus: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Abir is an ancient Israelite martial art. Scroll down for pictures of bearded guys with swords.

Being jewish (but, I hasten to add, not in favor of Israel's policies or any sort of secret agent), I think this is pretty cool. There's really nothing like finding out that your ethnicity has its own kung-fu.

Admins should not be anonymous

SlimVirgin update. I feel like I should be typing this kind of post in a darkened new york apartment with furious clicks and dings, chainsmoking, and sending out a telegram -- yes ! a telegram ! -- to my editor before the morning presses start.

So, Dear Reader, on the Q.T....

Kelly Martin smells a rat.

The exact details of the rumors that are spreading like wildfire now may not be accurate, but I'd be totally unsurprised to find out that SlimVirgin is somehow connected to the the Flight 103 bombings. Why else would she have all of her edits to such topics disappeared?...SlimVirgin, a little advice: the only way out of this situation is to abandon your account. This drama will surround you indefinitely; the only way for it to end is for you to start completely fresh with a new one. You won't be able to suppress all discussion of this indefinitely, and the more you try the more people will be convinced of the truth of the allegations. You've made this bed; now you must sleep in it.

And J.W. (Wales, that is) has commented on the lists:

In this particular case, due to some really spectacular nonsense, this is being treated as evidence that a private person who has been badly harassed by stalkers and lunatics is... a former spy? Please.

Many editors at Wikipedia have been involved in dealing with extraordinarily crazy people. Some of these people are dangerous in real life. Some of them have made direct physical threats. Others have made phone calls to people's employers. Others have done some homemade self-styled "investigative journalism" that any rational and kind person would see as being what it really is: abusive stalking.

I fully support the right of the Wikipedia community to protect itself from those kinds of lunatics by giving support to those who need to maintain their privacy.

I'm going to come out and say that Wikipedia administrators should not be anonymous. Editors, sure. Admins? Absolutely not. Their real names should be listed. Not admins on the Chinese language Wikipedia, of course, or anywhere there's politcal repression. But elsewhere, the police can protect you from crazy people. My name, phone number and address have been online for 5 years, and (to my disappointment) I've yet to attract a stalker.

Admins have tremendous influence within Wikipedia. They were originally intended to be enlightened, ideologically neutral "janitors" whose powers were used only to conduct tasks too tedious for ordinary editors. But where software endows power, no man can take it away. Or, rather more specifically, when the deletion process is a "consensus", not a vote, and admins are the only people who get to decide when a consensus has been reached and push the big red button, guess who has disproportionate sway?

There's been a lot of fuss about Slimvirgin's identity. (Israeli spy! Secret covert operative!) Milos Rancic injects a much-needed dose of reality.

But how do you know if it's accurate?

Alright, this is the most awesome thing I have seen in a very long time.

People have been talking for years (at least, I have) about color-coding words in Wikipedia articles based on how long they've survived unchanged. You could see at a glance what had lasted hundreds of revisions, and what had just been added.

Other people have been talking for years about some sort of reputation system -- you could vote on whether an article was reliable, or whether a user was. There are all sorts of problems with this kind of thinking, but I won't get into them because they've just been made moot: *

We present a content-driven reputation system for Wikipedia authors. In our system, authors gain reputation when the edits they perform to Wikipedia articles are preserved by subsequent authors, and they lose reputation when their edits are rolled back or undone in short order. Thus, author reputation is computed solely on the basis of content evolution; user-to-user comments or ratings are not used. The author reputation we compute could be used to flag new contributions from low-reputation authors, or it could be used to allow only authors with high reputation to contribute to controversial or critical pages. A reputation system for the Wikipedia could also provide an incentive for high-quality contributions.

We have implemented the proposed system, and we have used it to analyze the entire Italian and French Wikipedias, consisting of a total of 691,551 pages and 5,587,523 revisions. Our results show that our notion of reputation has good predictive value: changes performed by low-reputation authors have a significantly larger than average probability of having poor quality, as judged by human observers, and of being later undone, as measured by our algorithms.

And I haven't even gotten to the good part.

The same people developed a color-coding system based on their new trust metric. Text contributed by authors with a high content-driven reputation looks normal (black on white); text contributed by authors with a low reputation has an orange background (of varying shades).

Here's the demo.

Be sure to click "random page" a few times and page through the article histories.

(Damn. Now I want to go to Wikimania. Anyone want to buy me a ticket to Taipei?)

A note to the UCSC Wiki Team, who created this: even if your proposal doesn't get implemented on the Wikipedia servers (because of community opposition, or lack of resources), you can still implement it yourself (on wikipedia content, yes) via greasemonkey, or a firefox extention, or a web-based mashup, or whatever.

---

* Update: Well, not completely moot. Any automated reputation system can be gamed, and here are a few cantankerous side effects this one might have. That's one reason it may be a better idea to roll it out as an add-on than on the Wikipedia servers themselves.

This is a fan-made video, of course, not a real advertisement, as evidenced by the fact that it got the URL wrong. And by pretty much everything else about it.

The Snowball Earth hypothesis proposes that the Earth was entirely covered by ice in part of the Cryogenian period of the Proterozoic eon, and perhaps at other times in the history of Earth.

Cuteness is a kind of attractive beauty commonly associated with youth, innocence and helplessness. See also.

How to Make a Grilled Cheese Sandwich With an Iron.

That's from wikiHow, which has improved about a million-fold since I last checked it out. Let's count the ways:

1. The interface no longer looks like it was created by an engineering student circa 1974. If you've got a good adblocker (a big if), it's nicer on the eyes than Wikipedia itself.

2. At the bottom of the page, there's a list of the page's authors and a link that lets you write them a thank-you note.

3. Likewise, there's a visitor count on each page. I wish wikipedia had that hadn't turned that off; I'd love to know how many hits the article I started in 2003 has gotten.

Basically, wikiHow is showing signs that it actually understands how to run a wiki (unlike, say, Wetpaint).

Mathias Rust (born 1968) is a German man known for his illegal landing near the Red Square in Moscow in 1987. As an amateur aviator, he flew from Finland to Moscow, eluding the Soviet air defences and landing on Vasilevski Spusk next to the Red Square near the Kremlin in the capital of the former USSR.

Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honeybee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar or pollen, or both, and to water sources.

See also: Bee learning and communication

Whale song

All Ball was the pet cat of Koko, the famous gorilla living in Woodside, California, who communicates through sign language.

Antarctica is claimed by a bunch of different countries.

Crossing Out, for Emphasis: Interseting NYTimes article traces version control from Dickens to Wikipedia and Subversion.

Awhile back, I wanted to make a digg-style collaborative filter for wikipedia articles. Still haven't done it. But Thoof is basically the inverse of that idea: it's a generalized digg clone with that's also (sort of) a wiki.

Here's the screencast. There are lots of smart features, but so much friction built into the process that I don't think it'll ever take off the wiki aspect is a little cumbersome. You can submit anonymously, though, which makes the process easier. (Bonus: saying the name of the site out loud makes you sound developmentally disabled.)

Barf (soap)

Turritopsis nutricula is a jellyfish with a life cycle in which it reverts back to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known animal capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature stage after having reached sexual maturity. It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. This cycle then repeats, rendering it effectively immortal.

It's worth paying another visit to Unwiki, which displays recently deleted articles pretty much as they are deleted. It's striking that the articles are no longer pure crap, as they once were, just majority-crap.

Two new search tools:

Woogle bills itself as "Wikipedia search that doesn't suck", which is a fair description. It's pretty much just a Google frontend (and its incredible superiority to w'pedia's intrinsic search underscores how the wikimedia's foundation's commitment to total independence occasionally bites it in the ass).

Mayflower search is a similarly kick-ass search tool for Commons images.

List of United States territories that failed to become states

Astrosociobiology is the speculative scientific study of extraterrestrial civilizations and their possible social characteristics and developmental tendencies.

The article rescue squadron made the Signpost. Cool.

This is not exactly Wikipedia-related, but a zillion people are talking about a plainclothes political protest (formal attire only) and I've started a wiki to organize it. I could use some help making sure there's no vandalism or anything while it finds its legs.

Software developers talk about the "patterns" a particular programming language makes possible. What about Wiki patterns? (Focused mostly on business wikis.)

An individual's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number — which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős — and one's Bacon number — which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon.

Congress should use a Wiki to edit bills. Bonus, from the comments:

"Many in Congress wouldn't want version control. But the point [in the long term] is to make it a cultural norm, by making it a technical norm. It's a lot harder to object to something when to object means to deviate from the expected behavior."

And that, kids, is why you should do your math homework.

Interesting discussion about the nature of Wikipedia's hierarchy.

I've started the Article Rescue Squadron to prevent misguided deletions. Sign up if you're interested.

Unthinking deletion is becoming a serious problem. This isn't your run-of-the-mill "should we include individual TV episodes?" stuff; it's deletion of major public figures and important companies.

Andrew Lih: "How did we raise a new generation of folks who want to wipe out so much, who would shoot first, and not ask questions whatsoever?" Lih, by the way, used to be known as a deletionist. His positions haven't changed; the admin mainstream has.

Couple more points:

* It is easier to delete articles than to create them. Even if most admins keep, deleters will have a huge impact. (This bot tells people when an article they've worked on might get deleted. Only functions for a small subset of articles, but it's a step in the right direction. Systemic solution to a systemic problem.)

* If you work hard to write something, and then it's deleted, that really really sucks. It's a terrible user experience, if you want to think of it in business terms, and an asshole move if you want to think of it in social terms. Someone who goes through that experience is less likely to keep contributing.

A day in the life.

"I’m the chairwoman of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charity that manages Wikipedia. I don’t need much equipment — I have a five-year-old iBook laptop in the sitting room and a phone. The desk in the sitting room is my space. The sun streams in and I can see the Puy-de-Dôme volcano in the distance. Thomas is free to crawl around...It’s possible one day I’ll be more proud of Wikipedia than of the kids. Wikipedia’s become a kind of child to me too."

And the election results are ... Oscar is out; Frieda is in. Sounds fine to me.

Winners

1. Eloquence (Erik Möller) 1671 votes
2. Mindspillage (Kathleen Walsh) 1427 votes
3. Frieda (Frieda Brioschi) 1254 votes

Nonwinners

4. Oscar (Oscar van Dillen) 1234 votes
5. Michael Snow 1229 votes
6. Danny (Danny Wool) 1217 votes
7. Yann (Yann Forget) 1153 votes
8. Kim Bruning 1124 votes
9. UninvitedCompany (Steve Dunlop) 1047 votes
10. Kate (River Tarnell) 889 votes
11. Kingboyk (Stephen Kennedy) 864 votes
12. Ausir (Pawel Dembowski) 693 votes
13. ^demon (Michael "Chad" Horohoe) 672 votes
14. WarX (Artur Jan Fijalkowski) 571 votes
15. DragonFire1024 (Jason Safoutin) 495 votes

I think this calls for a chart. Unfortunately, my mac's in the shop; here's the best I can do in Excel (it still kind of sucks).



For those who don't know, this was approval voting -- people can vote for as many candidates as they want.

Eloquence and Mindspillage -- both incumbents -- were the unsurprising standouts; among the other qualified candidates, the race was very close. Which is a good thing. It'll keep the board on its toes.

Godwin's law (the hitler thing) is named after Mike Godwin, who just got hired by the Foundation. Cool.