A documentary about wikipedia will air in a few months on PBS.
A rough cut is available (the download link is in the left column) -- it's pretty good, but aimed at a mainstream audience, so mostly familiar. The stuff that isn't (cultural differences between wikipedias of different languages, for example) is the most interesting.

The raw footage is here. I'll see if I can go through it over the next week or so and ferret out the coolness. (Meta:Wikimentary)

List of Fictional Diseases

"Parkour is said to be L'art du Deplacement, or the Art of Displacement, consisting of uninterrupted forward motion over, under, around and through obstacles (both man-made and natural) in one's environment."

Wikizine aims to help tame communications problems in the sprawling wikimedia adhocracy. It's mostly intended for higher-ups, but is calling for info: "I will try to discover all the news that there is about Wikimedia and report the most relevant news in Wikizine. But I will fail to discover all the news. Wikizine needs to receive reports of things that are going on somewhere in a strange, far away wiki. Especially from the projects and languages from who you never hear."

Wikizine joins the quarterly Quarto in delivering meta-wikipedia news; it joins the Signpost delivering weekly wikipedia news.

The Signpost has a roundup of internal and external article evaluations.

In Singapore, being gay is punishable with up to life in prison (update: this law appears not to be widely enforced). Some gay singaporians seem to have taken refuge on wikipedia.

List of sexually active popes.

MP3s of lectures about wikipedia:

Mitch Kapor, "Thirteen Ways to Look at the Wikipedia".

There's really a Zen koan aspect to it; when you're given a paradox to wrestle with you can either go down with it -- because it's insoluble on its own terms -- or you can transcend the paradox because you find out you've had some limiting assumptions that you didn't know you had and it's only an apparent paradox. So, this talk is my effort to recount how I've wrestled with some of the paradoxes of Wikipedia and share that with you.

Jimmy Wales (Untitled, as far as I can tell).

I think, partly because of the personality types who become programmers... I don't know what it is exactly... a lot of programmers, seem to me to think that the whole point of social software is to replace the social with the software. Which is not really what you want to do, right? Social Software should exist to empower us to be human... to interact... in all the normal ways that humans do.

The Free Music article could do with some expansion.

Wikipedia foe Daniel Brandt makes some interesting points (counterarguments here) -- though his tendancy toward condescension ("Keep in mind that the teenagers who think Wikipedia is cool tend to be the same teenagers who think Google is cool.") might explain why his encounters with wikipedia have been negative.

Gollum is an alternate interface to wikipedia. As of this writing, it's only documented in german, though it works with the english-language wiki.

I'm still looking forward to a good client-side wikipedia browser. I want to edit the articles directly on the page (Word-esque, that is -- though I'm not sure I want everyone else to have that ability), watch snappy dataviews, etc.

New rating system

There's a lot of talk in the mailing list about rating/voting on articles (as an interface selection, not a purely wiki-social process). I'd expect to see it rolled out within the next month (update, Dec. 4: Wales told the NYTimes it'll be rolled out, most likely, in January), once a good implementation gets worked out.

A good article can become a bit of a mess with just a couple of misguided edits (which, hopefully, get reverted); it'll be interesting to see how the voting system deals with rapidly changing articles.

Pros:

• Most users don't take time to edit, but many of them would click a vote box.


• Seeing simple numeric ratings at a glance could make deciding how much to trust an article easier, and browsing more fun as you direct your attention away from the chaff.


• A software-compiled list of low rated articles could provide a focus for editors' attention.

Con:
Rating articles this way could undermine the social nature of wikipedia. Artifically-created rating systems aren't subject to the caveats and nuance of thought and discussion, nor the incredibly complex and somewhat effortless interplay of human social interaction.

Another "expert review" of wikipedia articles -- of south african articles, this time.

NPR's Talk of the Nation: "Wikipedia, Open Soure, and the Future of the Web"

Defunct amusement parks

In the mailing list, Daniel P. B. Smith has an interesting take on the Guardian's panel-of-experts wikipedia analysis.

Crappy prose isn't the main "quality" problem.

The quality problem in our articles isn't "crappy prose." Sure, a sentence like

"Implicit order means a system has hidden information which is not apparent based solely on direct observation."

makes me wince.

But improving the quality of an article is more than just rewriting crappy prose. Or checking facts. Or adding references. Or fixing typos. Or removing inaccuracies.

As the -paedia root implies, a good encyclopedia article should teach. That means it should go beyond Gradgrind, facts, facts, facts. It should convey not data, not information, but knowledge. It should integrate and synthesize; it should be comprehensible to a wide range of readers, for example by having a progressive structure that gives the basics quickly without sacrificing detail later. It should be well balanced, giving suitably proportioned weight to all aspects of its subject. It should be analytical.

It takes a _lot_ of work to do that.

If you look at the Guardian criticisms, Mike Barnes complains that some of the writing in an article is "unhelpful." He thinks encyclopedia articles should be helpful.

Alexandra Shulman complains that an article "inaccurate and unclear" and that "every value judgment it makes is wrong." She thinks encyclopedia articles should be not only accurate but clear, and that they _should present value judgements--sound ones._

Mark Kurlansky complains of some factual details. No comment on the prose.

Anthony Julius complains that an article is "purely factual and not in any way analytical." He thinks encyclopedia articles should be analytical.

Claire Tomalin complains of minor accuracies, complains more about major _omissions_, and by the failure of the article to comment on the literary merit of Pepy's diary. She thinks an encyclopedia should provide balanced coverage of a topic. Like Shulman, she thinks it should present sound value judgements.

Derek Barker indeed complains of prose style.

Robert McHenry complains that an article shows "no understanding of the cultural and historical contexts involved. In other words, it is a school essay, sketchy and poorly balanced."

Most complain of inaccuracies, but characterize them as minor.

Only one complains of bad prose.

The others complain of articles that fail to be helpful; clear; present sound value judgements; be analytical; and provide balanced coverage of their subject.

The backlash has begun.

There's a rising tide (or at least a tide) of "Wikipdia Sucks!" around (and insofaras I was perhaps too much of a cheerleader a couple months ago, I played some small part).

First: A nice (and widely-circulated) blog post taking Web2.0 evangelists to task for their rapturous language. Some good points, but an inadvertant straw man: I don't think many people see wikipedia as the proto hive mind. (Maybe the proto proto hive mind, but that can be said about regular books, too.)

Second: The register picks up the idea and runs with it: a scathing editorial ostensibly about wikipedia's founder's response to the blog's criticisms of some W'pedia articles. At risk of sounding like I'm Worshipping The Quotes of the Leader, here's Wales's message in its entirety:

I don't agree with much of this critique, and I certainly do not share the attitude that Wikipedia is better than Britannica merely because it is free. It is my intention that we aim at Britannica-or-better quality, period, free or non-free. We should strive to be the best.

But the two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarassment. [[Bill Gates]] and [[Jane Fonda]] are nearly unreadable crap.

Why? What can we do about it?

--Jimbo

Wikipedia has a structural contradiction (or perhaps a fine line to walk). In order for people to care enough to put in high quality edits, they have to feel like they're contributing to a grand encyclopedic project; but it's helpful if readers don't think of the site as an exact equivalent of paper encyclopedias -- they have to critically examine articles, figure out possible reasons they read the way they do.

This is one reason it's so important for there to be more (and better) software interfaces to wikipedia: there's a sea of information to sift through that helps you figure out what's really going on, how much you can trust an article. At a glance, I want to know how long individual phrases have lasted on the page, the frequency and intensity of edits, what else that page's editors have said elsewhere, etc.

Rocket mail is the delivery of mail by rocket or missile.

Upon witnessing the missile's landing, Summerfield stated, "This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation." Summerfield proclaimed the event to be "of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world", and predicted that "before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."

I've created a new category: Famous transit stations.

Also, Pirates. More pirates.

Might as well be polite: I have, for the moment, lost interest in updating this blog. Sorry, to whomever reads or checks regularly. I might post more in the future. Update: Hi. Nevermind.

Wikisnips of the day: List of Titles and Honours of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. Elizabeth II is Queen of Australia, Queen of New Zealand, Queen of Canada, an Honorary Brigadier, and a Freeman in the Worshipful Company of Drapers.

Wikisnip of the day: If you ever run into holocaust deniers, the Holocaust Denial Examined page has plenty of well-thought counterarguments.