Not wikipedia-related:

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

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

Autocompletion

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



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

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

Warning: not Wikipedia-related.

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

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

WikiXMLDB provides a way of querying Wikipedia with XQuery.

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

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

Cool.

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

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

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

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

* You pedants

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

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

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

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

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

via reddit

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

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

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

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

via kottke

Talk is cheap unless it's on the wiki

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

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

List of wars on concepts

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

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

Some random Wikipedia articles:

More randomness on Wikirandom - The Random Encyclopedia

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

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

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

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

Stunning journal article.

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

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

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

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

Moving Forward

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

Practical and creative. Good stuff.

Newscientist: Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban.

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

World Happiness Map

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

Wikipedia Brown (video)

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

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

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

Wikipedia traffic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three new Wikipedian blogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

List of countries without armed forces

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

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

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

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

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

Oldak Quill, on the mailing list:

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia, laptops leap their way into rural Africa

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

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

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

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

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

A Question for Danny Wool

Well, two.

1. What's your ultimate goal?

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

2. How do you feel about Wikipedia?

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

---

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

Wikipedia hit counter

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

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

More generally...

The wrong articles are getting deleted.

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

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

(Thanks, sage.)

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

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

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

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

...

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

I think the public is going to be pretty forgiving.

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

The Final Wikipedia Article

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

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

It starts with some reassuring financial news:

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

- No. I argue against that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

- No! No!

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

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

- Yes!

- You do? I actually don't.

- What else is there to write about?

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

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

- Alright; this is a virtual handshake.

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

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

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

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

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

- Quantity does not equal quality.

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

- -- precisely. Precisely.

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

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

- I agree.

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

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

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

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

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

- 42!

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

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

Wikileaks wins

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

Deletion Solution

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

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

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

Four things prevent it from happening, though:

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

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

2. There's nowhere else like wikipedia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveats:

• Needs firefox (duh).


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spurius Carvilius Ruga (fl. 230 BCE) was a freedman living in Rome who allegedly invented the letter G.

The petition about removing the pictures of Muhammad? It's up to 160 thousand signatures. That's not a significant proportion of the total population, but the worry is that the muslim street could flare up unpredictably due to network effects.

Here's a moderate muslim response (filled with useful links, too). "Wikipedia has refused to delete the pictures and has released a statement as to why they are not removing the pictures. This statement seems perfectly reasonable to me as a Muslim."

The guy who started the petition has opened an official petition blog.

Here's a list of his Wikipedia edits. On another blog, he writes: "I am proud to call myself a fundamentalist and even your government preach fundamentalism by opposing the gays in few of the states in US." (Update: that's not really a representative quote.)

Former foundation insider Danny Wool talks about the audit. Wool's new blog is worth reading if you're interested in internal goings-on -- he knows where his towel is.

The Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997. The source of the sound remains unknown.

The long-awaited financial audit is finally released.

The Talking Statues of Rome were a form of anonymous political expression in Rome begun in the 15th century and continuing until the advent of the modern media.

NYTimes on the muslim protest thing. Wikipedia comes off really well -- "polite but firm".

Also: "The site considered but rejected a compromise that would allow visitors to choose whether to view the page with images." When was this?

About 80,000 people have petitioned Wikipedia to remove its images of Muhammad. These run the gamut from polite, respectful requests to (a very small minority) crazy threats of violence.

It's possible it could have been nipped in the bud if the top of the Muhammad article linked to a version without images (instead of to a page telling people to edit their custom server-side javascript file. sigh.).

Also, here's the on-wiki censorship request page.

If you're going out to vote tomorrow, please support Obama. Choose the future.

Quick list of reasons:

• Obama's detailed technology platform is pretty much perfect.
• He is much stronger than Clinton against any republican challenger.
• His policies are phrased so that they don't terrify republicans but still provide the same benefits as Clinton's.
• He is capable of convincing people of things, not just tacking effectively toward the polls.
• He is capable of disarming powerful interests (in all senses of the word), not just warring with them.
• He is endorsed by Lessig, XKCD, and danah boyd.

Boyd:

When I was [at the World Economic Forum] in Davos, I expected everyone to be pro-Hillary and anti-Barack because of the whole "experience" thing. I was shocked to find that this was not the case at all.

Most foreign diplomats and companies thought that Barack would be much better at negotiating with foreign powers than Hillary. They all knew that the candidates would have huge advisory teams that would help them understand what was going on. Even though Hillary knew more people already, they felt as though Barack would be more effective. (And most were extremely worried about how Bill would overshadow anything with Hillary... another sad reality.)

Before Bush II, the U.S. had only once -- in its entire history -- seen the son of a former president elected himself: John Quincy Adams, in 1824, and there were 3 intervening presidents between him and his father.

Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would be without any precedent at all, and you can rest assured that the dynastic pattern is not a coincidence. Looking objectively at other countries, a dynastic government seems -- even when democratically elected -- to indicate weak institutions, unsophisticated voters, and a cloistered and ossifying inner circle.

The people who brought you the 10,000-year clock are excited about Wikipedia's potential as a canonical "Futurepedia".

Think about articles like 2020 -- "If expanded greatly the official future timeline might prove to be a useful document of what we expect."

I hate to be the one to break it to them, but there's no way that's going to happen within Wikipedia proper. It's not verifiable. It doesn't cite authoritative sources. It's not encyclopedic. Basically, it breaks all the rules, and it'll get slapped down before it gains any steam. Wikipedia's incredible realized potential lives side by side with a lot of squandered potential.

You're not going to win this one by fighting it out in the AfD trenches -- anyway, 1head-to-head combat isn't the wiki way. Wikipedia desperately needs to be nested inside some broader, more permissive architecture.

Florence: Wikipedia will have stable versions, wiki-to-print, and collaborative video editing.

F.D.: First of all, improvements to the software. This is something that's been under discussion for two and a half years: stable versions. The idea is to be able to identify which versions have been validated, and to enable users to see both the current version and the last version that was accepted as being more or less correct.

The second innovation, which I hope will become available in spring, is to give people the chance to put together a small personalised pdf file or paper version containing a selection of articles. Suppose, for example, that I want to know all about the Davos forum. I put things in a basket, just as on Amazon: the article on Davos, articles about the various personalities attending, global warming or the economic crisis. I compile my own little book which I can buy and have sent to me. That is Wiki to Print.

The third innovation, probably in autumn 2008 will be the possibility of adding videos to Wikipedia and editing them collaboratively, like a wiki text. That should be really, really good!

Wiki-to-print has been around for awhile as pediapress, but there were all sorts of problems with the implementation. Now that I check their site, it looks like they've "entered a long term partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation". Sweet. Here's the press release from a month ago; it looks like this slipped completely under the radar.

"Project Chanology" began as an Internet-based protest against the controversial Church of Scientology by "Anonymous", a group described as "a disparate collection of hackers and activists".

Picture of the year. (Damn, I liked the others better.)

The worst usability disaster you've ever heard about. (It involves mediawiki.)

It's the last day to vote for commons picture of the year.

Here are the finalists -- they all have that super-clear naturalistic wikipedian quality.

Shipping container architecture is an uncommon form of architecture that involves the use of steel shipping containers as the basis for housing and other functional buildings.

By the way, let me know if the new layout has problems or if the ads piss you off.

Hundreds and hundreds of coats of arms, vectorized.

Check this one out (SVG link). This too, actually. And this.

(Thanks, adam.)

The Great Hacker War was a 1990–1991 conflict between the Masters of Deception (MOD) and a faction of the older guard hacker group Legion of Doom (LOD).

Wikipedia on the iPhone

Wikipedia:ZEN

Eigengrau (German: "intrinsic gray"), also called eigenlicht ("intrinsic light"), dark light, or brain gray, is the color seen by the eye in perfect darkness. Even in the absence of light, some action potentials are still sent along the optic nerve, causing the sensation of a uniform dark gray color.

(If you can't see the poll above -- or even if you can, and you just want to look at spiffy results map -- then follow this link.)

Websites personified (Wikipedia is at 2:55, though the best one is Facebook, at 1:50)

Really funny. The actual title is "The Internet Party: What Happens When Google's Parents Leave Town for the Weekend?" see also

Geoff:

For many Wikipedians -- if not most -- contributing to it is probably the most important influence they will have on the greater world.

In my own case, while I am not some 15-year-old fanboy living in my parents' basement writing articles about videogames or anime characters, this is true. I could stop contributing today & devote my energy to something (so to speak) more socially acceptible -- catch up on my yardwork, tutor children in a local school, volunteer for a political campaign -- yet nothing else will have the same persuasive effect on so many people as contributing to Wikipedia.

Much the same thing happened after World War II in the United States: a lot of books were published about the war because there were a lot of veterans (& parents, sisters, & brothers of veterans) who wanted to read about what they had been part of.

Fortunately I defined my life long before Wikipedia came around, so while I know its importance, I can tear myself away from it & devote myself to other things, most of which are more important than whether an article on Charles Darwin should include the fact tha the was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln. (Or whoever those 2 people were that led to a silly edit war a few years back.) However, there are many people who have not done this, & their numbers can only increase. ("Wow, anyone can edit this? My words will be read by millions? This is way cooler than the drudgery of my daytime job.")

One could describe them as having encountered sunlight after dwelling underground for a long time; they are blinded by Wikipedia's importance, & have no way to put things into a healthy proportion. (And maybe the rest of the Platonic allegory applies in this case.) These members fight over every dispute viciously for an immediate solution because they cannot envision why allowing Wikipedia content to develop & mature could be a good thing.

Facepalm

Simo Häyhä (December 17, 1905 – April 1, 2002), nicknamed "White Death" by the Soviet army, was a Finnish soldier, and is widely considered to be the most successful sniper in history.

Okay, we need to start selling this sticker

Wikback is a new Wikipedia-related discussion forum.

NYTimes: Did proto-science-fiction writer J. Borges predict Wikipedia? (He did, after all, spend his life in a library.)

THEN [1940] “What person, or people, invented Tlön? People, I suppose, for sure, since the idea of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously rejected. It's thought that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a cabal of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, ... guided and directed by some shadowy genius. There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination — fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal.” Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

NOW Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia project that began in 2001, now has a total of more than nine million articles in more 250 languages. There are more than 75,000 “active contributors,” many of whom remain anonymous. As it grows and becomes ever more influential, its operating logic remains a mystery. A favored saying among Wikipedia’s contributors is: “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”

Reading Borges quotes you can feel a unity of life and wiki:

• If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.
  
• The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.
  
• No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
  
• The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.
  
• A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
  
• I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.
  
• Life itself is a quotation.

(By the way, anyone who likes Borges should check out Greg Egan.)

The galactic year is the duration of time required for the solar system to orbit once around the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

It invites comparisons to the year (the duration of time it takes the Earth to orbit once about the Sun) and the month (traditionally the duration of time it take the moon to complete one orbit around the Earth). It also provides a conveniently "graspable" unit for thinking about cosmic and geological time periods

Warning: not Wikipedia related.

My band (the Afternoon Round) is playing our first show tomorrow night -- which is to say, 7 p.m. saturday at the BLUEStage Club. If you're near Jackson michigan, you should come see us; we're pretty fucking good. Alt-country/rock. All original material.

No soup for you!

Wikipedia administrator Andrew Lih, a former media professor who is writing a book about the six-year-old venture, has accused it of developing a "soup Nazi culture," referring to the fierce gatekeeper on the television program Seinfeld who tosses out customers if they don't comply with the arbitrary rules at his soup stand.

"The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow."

Wow, I just found Urban Dictionary's wikipedia swarm.

My favorites are wikipause (During a phone call or office conversation, a pregnant moment of silence while someone queries Wikipedia, before announcing a previously-unknown piece of information) and wikipedance (The force that resists the importation of knowledge into a wiki, with especial reference to Wikipedia).

There are also terms for intellectual pwnage (wikifuck, wiki-front) and Wikipedia-inspired offline uses (wikifitti).

Plus, of course, the usual outpouring of anger about article deletion that happens anytime wikipedia is discussed in public (wikinazi, wiki nazi, wikifascist, wikibitch).

The "Christmas truce" is a term used to describe several brief unofficial cessations of hostilities that occurred between German and British or French troops in World War I.

The truce began on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1914, when German troops began decorating the area around their trenches in the region of Ypres, Belgium, for Christmas. They began by placing candles on trees, then continued the celebration by singing Christmas carols, most notably Stille Nacht (Silent Night). The British troops in the trenches across from them responded by singing English carols.

The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were calls for visits across the "No Man's Land" where small gifts were exchanged — whisky, jam, cigars, chocolate, and the like. The artillery in the region fell silent that night. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently-fallen soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties. Proper burials took place as soldiers from both sides mourned the dead together and paid their respects. At one funeral in No Man's Land, soldiers from both sides gathered and read a passage from the 23rd Psalm.

The truce spread to other areas of the lines, and there are many stories of football matches between the opposing forces. The film Joyeux Noël suggests that letters sent home from both British and German soldiers related that the score was 3-2 in favour of the Germans.

In case you haven't been following it, here's the story on Jimmy Wales's wiki startup, Wikia:

1. Wikia was founded as a Wiki farm where people could start wikis on any topic. The tagline: "building communities". Good stuff. Wikipedia gurus were recruited into the ranks, people who knew how to nurture the fragile wiki stalks into fullgrown gardens.

2. This year Wikia's been attempting to build "human-powered search". Wikia search is apparently launching soon.

Maybe it's my rust belt location talking, but step #2 seems like bubble fever. Wikia is thinking much too big. Like, several orders of magnitude too big. Where's the business sense? This commenter says it well:

Google could add a human factor into pagerank in like 5 seconds. They’ve already started with ratings.

Wikia’s success rests on Wikipedia and the reputation only. They are technically inferior to Google by several orders of magnitude, and this is closed source. The collective knoledge that made mediawiki great is not included.

Of course, Wikia is great at building communities, which Google is terrible at. (Hence my low expectations for Knol.) How much less would it have cost to hire away Mahalo's graphic designer?

Offshore radio refers to the practice of radio broadcasting from ships or fixed maritime structures, usually in international waters.

It's not flawless, but check out this fantastic radio piece from the Globe and Mail:

So wikipedia is less of a digital book and more of an electronic river, always changing around you even as you stand in one spot. The Wikipedia I step in is not the Wikipedia I stand in, to paraphrase the words of a poet who was, at the time, emphatically not writing about Wikipedia.

It's all pretty wonderful, but it's not on a path to perfection...the things that matter most to it in its world are the things that make it happiest -- its wikipedia creature comforts. Things like what it watched on TV last night, its favorite hockey players, the act of pointing out every word in the language that's a portmanteau, or seeing to it that no family guy reference goes undocumented.

...

Let's face it: If anyone ever did create a website that contained the single definitive entry on every topic on earth, wouldn't it be the tiniest bit fascist? I don't think people would like that site at all. As soon as someone put up a site the size of wikipedia that really did have a claim to real authority, the first thing that people would want to do would be subvert it, replace it or change it, and then you'd have wikipedia all over again.

And that's the thing: the holes, omissions, errors, distortions, excesses, absurdities, and lies are the reason wikipedia works, not the things that keep it from working. They'll never get rid of them. But as a result, the rest of us will just keep looking at wikipedia as a shrub that, for some reason, hasn't blossomed into a maple tree yet.

...when you're writing commentary, it always helps to have someone to kick around. Wikipedia really is the perfect target. It's nameless and faceless and hard to offend; it's powerful and ridiculous at the same time; and everyone knows what it is.

But in the spirit of the season, let me say this: we should accept wikipedia for the gigantic, magnificent, mighty shrub that it is.

Because I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way. I read it all the time, and I love it just the way it is. It's a stupendous achievement and a cultural icon.

Merry Christmas, Wikipedia. I look forward to making even more fun of you come the new year.

Flux capacitor

So apparently Carolyn Doran, the Wikimedia Foundation's chief operating officer from january to june, is a felon.

"Doran's criminal record includes four convictions for driving under the influence, two of check fraud and petty larceny, one hit and run with fatality, and one charge of unlawful wounding for shooting former boyfriend Philip L. Brown in the chest in 1990"

Geoff has more.

There had better be a big fucking shakeup in the next board election.

I know, I know -- the board is overworked. Tough shit. This is beyond unacceptable. Quick question: is it worse for Wikipedia to rake in millions of dollars by running text ads on its search pages, enough money to hire some real administrative help (nevermind programmers), or for the board to be ideologically pure and untainted by the evils of adsense (because god knows google's money has just killed firefox) but so sleep-deprived that they appoint crooks to high positions?

It's becoming increasingly apparent that things cannot go on as they have. More in the next post.