Wikisnips of the day.

The Situationist movement culminated in the French protests of May, 1968. "Some philosophers and historians have argued that the rebellion was the single most important revolutionary event of the Twentieth Century because of the fact that it wasn't participated in by a lone demographic, such as workers or racial minorities, but was rather a purely popular uprising, superseding ethnic, cultural, age and class boundaries."

It also produced some incredibly kick-ass graffiti.

• Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
  
• Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.
  
• I am a Groucho Marxist.
  
• Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, "We will breathe later." And most of them don't die because they are already dead.
  
• Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!
  
• Art is dead, don‘t consume its corpse.
  
• Arise, ye wretched of the university.
  
• If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.
  
• SEX: It‘s okay, says Mao, as long as you don‘t do it too often.
  
• Comrades, people are making love in the Poli Sci classrooms, not only in the fields.

Cool wikipedia search engine.

Wikisnips of the Day

Programming languages.

There are several languages whose code looks like english phrases. Beatnik uses scrabble scores to convert words to numbers to operators. Each program in Chef is a recipe. Each program in Shakespeare is a full-formatted several-act play. Sample:

Juliet:
Speak YOUR mind! You are as bad as Hamlet! You are as small as the difference between the square of the difference between my little pony and your big hairy hound and the cube of your sorry little codpiece. Speak your mind!

That was Juliet printing another character (variable) and assigning him values.

Whitespace ignores everything but spaces, tabs, and carriage returns. Ook is designed for Chimpanzees. (Sample line: "Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook.") Programs in Piet are bitmap images that look a little like abstract art. Choon produces musical notes as its only output. var'aq is modeled on Klingon. TMMLPTEALPAITAFNFAL stands for "The Multi-Million Language Project To End All Language Projects And Isn't That A Fine Name For A Language". It changes every day.

Haykinson on his involvement with the L.A. Times' wikitorials project. Great post, detailing lots of non-obvious mistakes the LAT made, and some good advice.

A new API; Chinese gov. draws on Wikipedia

2 interesting news items.

1. There's going to be a generalized webservice API for wikipedia (awesome! and about bloody time) -- this is buried in a less important news story about new integration between Wikipedia and KDE, a desktop environment for Linux.

2. China's state-run Xinhua news agency (wikipedia article) is reporting on a new project that will "allow the public to input and edit all the historical documents dating from ancient times through 1911 when the Republic of China was founded."

"'The operation will be similar to the Wikipedia,' a popular Web-based free content encyclopedia written by volunteers, said organizer Lu Jun, president of the China Culture Research Society."

Hard to tell exactly what's going on here -- the documents already exist, and are presumably of historical significance; why should they be publicly edited? Are people just going to be cleaning up after the scanning process? Or will the documents (perhaps they're old histories themselves) be starting points for a more thoughrough, modern analysis, like public domain documents form the foundation of some wikipdedia entries? Or will there be a lack of public editing, or forced "volenteers", and the Chinese gov. is just using "wikipedia" as a buzzword? (It's worth mentioning that there's already a Chinese-language wikipedia with over 10,000 articles.)

Slashdot on the LA Times on Slashdot

An anonymous user edits the beginning of the Music article:

Music was invented in 1961 by mick jagger, who came up with the idea of putting sounds together to make what he called "tunes", "chords" and eventually, he invented "songs" music was great to start with, bob dylan joined in a year later, he was pretty cool, the beatles kind of fucked it up a little bit, but that didn't matter, because in 1965, the velvet underground formed, soon followed by jethro tull and led zeppelin, music peaked in 1969-1971, and basically, everyone's been tying to outdo led zeppelin III and Stand up by Tull, but that's obviously impossible. The sex pistols and the clash fucked it right up in 1977-78, but it was inevitable, the last nail in music's coffin was "MTV", a cruel implement of propaganda made by capitalists, satan and the man, music crawled to a halt, and then some twisted psychopath invented techno music and pop-punk hybrids like greenday. Music officially ended in 1984 when "frankie goes to hollywood" released "relax", music hasn't been made for 21 years now, and we can only listen to old zeppelin albums, wear flowers in our hair, make blue jeans into flares with big triangular patches of red fabric, walk around barefoot, pretend it's 1969 and hope that some day music will return, but there is no sign of this happening just yet.

It lasted 2 minutes.

Alright, another entry in the wikihistory animation contest -- not a greasemonkey script, but a javascript extention that works in IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc: BetterHistory

The others have seen major revisions and bugfixes, so I'll list them all together. (All can animate page changes; I'll touch on some other features.)

• Wikipedia Animate
  Greasemonkey. Fits nicely into the Wikipedia interface.


• WikiDiff
  Greasemonkey. Slick interface.


• Aniwiki
  Greasemonkey. Lots of features: a graphical timeline; data showing number of reverts, changes, contributing editors; highlighted changes in each animation frame; heavy customizability; etc. Runs a little slow on my (slow) mac mini.


• BetterHistory
  Javascript. Works in any modern browser, including IE.

I've got the flu, so updates might be a bit infrequent this week.

New entry in the wikipedia animation contest. Greasemonkey script. Lots of features, but slow on my machine. (Waxy'll announce a winner tomorrow.)

Pretty good Wikipedia article in Time Magazine.

Good Wired magazine article from March.

The L.A. times suspended the "wikitorials" project after it got flooded with obscenities. (Everyone was, it turns out, right.)

[Steve Outing, senior editor with the journalism think tank Poynter Institute] said Wikis "are most suited for factual information where the content can become accurate because of the power of the intelligence of the group."

"Trying to do that with an opinion piece doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense," Outing said. "People with competing views would just try to get their particular viewpoint published and someone would go in and change it."

Fair summation. There were plenty of other problems with the Wikitorials model, but I think that was the biggest one. (Ernest Miller points out how much the edited editorials sucked.)

One problem thus far unmentioned: the wikitorials page propogated as a short-term web meme, with a smaller ratio of first-time visitors to repeat-visitors. First time visitors are less invested in the site and thus more likely to goatse it -- it's not a coincidence that the obscene pictures started right after wikitorials got posted on Slashdot.

In fact, it's one of the chief challenges facing the best-known Wiki, Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia where any visitor can add, change and erase someone else's entry.

Some contributors have attempted to impose their personal viewpoints -- for instance, by replacing an article on abortion with the word "murder" written 143 times.

*Sigh.* It's true that the abortion article periodically gets replaced with "Murderers!" etc. It's happened twice in the last two days alone. But check the history and you'll find that the overwhelming majority of the time, the murder page has lasted less than two minutes before being replaced with the article again.

Wikipedia has challenges -- solvable challenges, mostly along the lines of libertarian political bias, reluctance of professors to participate, etc. -- but total article deletions aren't one of them: nobody wants their work deleted, and so vandals bring the weight of a thousand vigilantes against themselves.

Wikisnip of the day, that day being Saturday. The weekend.

As you may know, the weekend is a common time for a Party. If you've been invited to a Tea Party, keep in mind that it "is the only afternoon tea at which servants may remain present". If, on the other hand, you're going to a Rave (the origins of which can be traced beyond Manchester to Texas and Detroit), you may want to bring Parachute Pants. Makeout Parties seldom occur, and Foam Parties can damage the floor of the discotheque.

L.A. Times's beta Wikitorial has been up for a few hours now and, so far, really really sucks. The discussion page is pretty interesting, though.

More later; I have to sleep.

Wikipedia helps show the economic value of social interaction

Yale law prof. Yochai Benkler has written a shitload of interesting econ papers about commons systems like wikipedia. There's a good interview with him in Businessweek, where he talks about "commons-based peer production".

...the economic role of social behavior is increasing. It used to be that if you said, "Here, this is interesting, why don't you read this?" it was primarily social. When you take the exact same behavior and plug it into Google's Page Rank algorithm, you actually get a discrete economic output that increases welfare in the economy overall -- even though you continue to have a certain social interaction there as well.

The net changes everything, and all that. But I think economists have historically underestimated the power of social behavior -- to put it another way, I'm not sure how useful it is to abstract "social" and "economic" into two separate boxes.

The difference between today and 10 years ago, of course, is measurability -- something quite clear (if known only to Google employees) happens when links are tallied into pagerank and used to sell ads; the economic benefit to mankind from a teacher helping underprivileged kids is linked to no such running tally (even though that teacher's thinking style is as amiable to distribution as any clever web system, persisting in those kids and going on to influence other people through them). We just never saw anything like this unfold on a screen before, so it was easier to economists to ignore it.

But come on. Most of our brains are devoted to social interaction, which is one of the reasons we're so much worse at readily-deconstructed reasoning (math, logic) than computers are. It's silly to have ever thought the straightforward rules of Adam Smith could be a complete description, as silly as thinking, in the '50s, that if a computer was ever capable of chess it would be capable of thought.

And of course, most of people's lives are spent interacting socially. I suppose the catch is that the most academically productive people spend the least time doing anything but writing papers -- perhaps that's why social interaction has been neglected in economics.

Big pundits fume, but small newspapers are citing wikipedia.

Techdirt has a roundup of anti-wikipedia articles in mainstream papers. (This editiorial, in the New York Times (counterpoint), is particularly cringe-inducing, and not just because it's penned by a Pulitzer winner: the author attempts to tie wikipedia to apathy about whether anything is true -- the old Moral Relativism card, played by an ostensible liberal writing in a conservative medium. It reads like a mixture of Andy Rooney and Ayn Rand.)

But I think journalists are starting to come around; wikipedia might be an encyclopedia, but it has the immediacy and level-headedness print journalists like. And it's possible that, culture aside, journalists might just be impressed with wikipedia's increasing quality.

Local newspapers are even beginning to quote and cite wikipedia in their articles -- here are several from the very top of the Google stack, published in the last 2 days:

• The Asheville Citizen-Times (NC): "Soldiers who fought for the North were referred to as "Billy Yanks." Those who fought for the South were called "Johnny Rebs," according to the online encyclopedia wikipedia.org."


• Jamesville Gazette (WI): "According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, E-Democracy is defined as using electronic media such as the Internet to enhance the democratic process."


• Newport News-Times (OR): "'In Polynesian mythology, specifically Maori, Tiki is the first man, created by either Tu Matauenga or Tane. He found the first woman, Marikoriko, in a pond. She seduced him and he became the father of Hine-Kau-Ataata.' - Wikipedia online encyclopedia"

Wikisnip of the day.

• The Exploding Whale article is pretty widely known. But wikipedia also has an entire Exploding Animals category, containing articles on exploding bats, birds, chickens, cows, dogs, hamsters, humans, rats, sheep, and toads (a surprising number of which were attempts at weaponry).


• This ask.metafilter post links to an wide array of fun wikipedia entries.

$150 of Flash

Waxy and others are offering a cash reward for anyone who can come up with a useful graphical/animation tool for viewing wikipedia article histories.

This is really, really good. Wikipedia should transcend the web, to put it pretentiously, the way Greasemonkey does. It could use a good client-side browser (or, hey, a server-side one); researching histories is currently a bottleneck in the revision process.

And Java/C/Ruby wizards aren't necessary. This is an ideal place for Flash -- it's best at visualizing data, not building interfaces or running silly loading screens. Maybe it's the 5 a.m. talking, but I want a future where I'm swimming through easy visualizations of the wikipedia flow, watching as groups push and pull the knowledge, nudge phrases into place, propogate thinking styles across an encyclopedia-habitat.

Hi. This is a blog about Wikipedia, which, as you probably know, is an open-source encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Wikipedia is becoming increasingly relevant. Its model seems batshit insane, but works well -- I think this can tell us some things about systems, people, software, conflict resolution, etc. And there are always fun Wikipedia entries to link to.

Wikisnip of the day. The Megastructures category focuses on huge awesome science-fictiony (but occasionally believable) structures.

• Check out the granddaddy of megastructures, the Dyson Shere, a giant shell around a star (in one variant).
• Or, if your tastes run to the remotely concievable, try the Ringworld, which is exactly what it sounds like: a world shaped like a planetary orbit, a cosmic hoola hoop. (MIT majors were holding up signs saying "The Ringworld is Unstable!" in the 1970s.)
• An O'Neill cylinder is like a much smaller, enclosed ringworld that orbits a star rather than being centered around it -- it's stable, and we could probably build one if we wanted to piss away enough money.
• Oh. And if you ever wondered if there was a name for a planetary computer like the one in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there is: Jupiter Brain.